Nation, ethnicity, nationalism and religion are four distinct and determinative elements within European and world history. Not one of these can be safely marginalised by either the historian or the politician concerned to understand the shaping of modern society. These four are, moreover, so intimately linked that it is impossible, I would maintain, to write the history of any of them at all adequately without at least a fair amount of discussion of the other three. That is a central contention of this book and it stands in some disagreement with much modern writing both about nationalism and about religion. The aim of this first chapter is sixfold: to set out my own position, to provide a review of recent literature, to establish the sense of an emerging schism in this field between what we may call, for simplicity's sake, modernists and revisionists, to explore the history of the word ‘nation’ and to lead on from there, through an analysis of the relationship between language and society, to a larger discussion of the nature of both the nation and nationalism.

When I chose this subject I thought that in developing my theme I would be able to begin by largely adopting the viewpoint of recent studies of nationalism and go on from there to insert within it the somewhat neglected dimension of religion. In particular, I naturally intended to take as a starting point Eric Hobsbawm's Wiles Lectures of 1985 on Nations and Nationalism since 1780 as probably the most influential explicitly historical discussion of nationalism in recent years.