Today’s world is a world of nation-states; few have survived since the early modern period, some have existed for three hundred years, most came into being during the second part of the last century. Yet the equation between the state and the nation does not go back far in history, despite the prevailing tendency to view the state as closely linked to ethnicity. To challenge the latter this book attempts to examine statehood separately from the concept of ethnicity; it asks what is non-ethnic about statehood by looking at ‘statehood before and beyond ethnicity’. A non-ethnic statehood is analysed in two forms: as a historical phenomenon at the time of the emergence of the early modern state (Part One) and as a historical tradition which had been pursued by the nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Part Two). Instead of looking at great powers as traditional models of statehood, individual chapters focus on minor and less familiar states in Northern and Eastern Europe from the period c. 1600-2000, including Belgium, Bohemia, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Poland-Lithuania, Serbia and Montenegro, Sweden, Scotland and Transylvania.

The Editors: Linas Eriksonas, Ph.D., is Visiting Research Fellow at Södertörn University College, Sweden. Previously he was Project Co-ordinator for the European Science Foundation Programme ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe’. Leos Müller, Associate Professor, is Research Associate at the Baltic and East European Graduate School, Södertörn University College and is currently teaching in the Department of History, Uppsala University.

Contents: Linas Eriksonas/Leos Müller: Introduction – Miroslav Hroch: Questions of Ethnic and Civil Nationalism – Eric Kaufmann: ‘National Ethnicity’ and the Modern State – Mark L. Thompson: Jean Bodin’s and the Early Modern Nation – Vladimír Urbánek: The Idea of State and Nation in the Writings of Bohemian Exiles After 1620 – Alan R. MacDonald: Statehood, Nationhood and Treason in Early Modern Scotland – Johan Holm: King Gustav Adolf’s Death: The Birth of Early Modern Nationalism in Sweden – Anna Maria Forssberg: Nationalist Arguments as Instruments of War Propaganda in Sweden, 1655-80 – Gábor Kármán: Transylvania Between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires – Matt Schumann: International Rivalry and State Identity in the Seven Years War, 1755-63 – Asker Pelgrom: The Lombard League Traditions in Northern Italy – Johannes Remy: The Past of Poland-Lithuania in the Polish National Movement, 1830-64 – Jonathan Kwan: The Austrian State Idea and Bohemian State Rights: Contrasting Traditions in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1914 – Marius Turda: Nation-States and Irredentism in the Balkans, 1890-1920 – Effi Gazi: Constructing the National Majority and Ethnic/Religious Minorities in Greece: An Overview – Miodrag A. Jovanovi?: Serbia: From Ethnic Nationhood to Multicultural Citizenship – Marnix Beyen: Belgium: A Nation That Failed to Be Ethnic – Johan den Hertog: The Pillars of Nation Inside the Dutch State – Gabriella Elgenius: National Days and Nation-Building.