Introduction

Abstract

At the end of World War II the countries of Western Europe were thought of as nation-states. With the major exceptions of Great Britain, and later the German Federal Republic and Austria, their Jacobin model stemmed directly from the French Revolution and Napoleon — the centralized unitary state. Nationalism was freshly awake in formerly colonialized Asia and soon thereafter in Africa, but Western European nationalism seemed a thing of the past, the term even colored with the stain of the barbaric nationalism of Nazism. Today, in many regions of Western Europe, regional sub-nationalism has both undermined Jacobin centralism and in effect altered the British constitution. There is a conventional notion that the existing national state system (whether centralized or not) is the final historical form of political organization. Here I investigate whether this is true or, as Michael Keating has suggested, “an asymmetrical state will replace the old paradigm,” one not dissimilar to premodern systems.¹