Charismatic Nations

At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together telling examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of a culture inspired by the national interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and ‘unpolitical’ presence, nationalism can shape-shift between Romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Joep Leerssen was educated in the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland and Canada and held the chair of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2022. His award-winning works on the comparative history of cultural nationalism (National Thought in Europe and the Encyclopaedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe) are widely regarded as authoritative.