Buddhist nationalism has emerged again as a topic of scholarly and media attention, driven primarily by campaigns of violence and expulsion against Muslims in Myanmar, but also by similar dynamics in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recent research on the intersections between Buddhism and nationalism not only follows the scholarly critique of methodological nationalism – resisting the urge to naturalize the nation and read it back anachronistically into history – it also questions assumptions of Buddhism as a unitary or even stable object of inquiry. “Buddhist nationalism,” where it exists, does not necessarily follow a set pattern; moreover, it is the conscious and largely intentional creation of actors with the relevant authority and stature to frame the two components as intrinsically connected. In doing so, they construct it through narratives and symbols of legitimation that are recognizably Buddhist and linked to particular cultural, ethnic, or political configurations.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

There is a rather obvious convergence point between the Cold War, decolonization, and nationhood. The end of formal European colonial rule across most of the globe in the mid-twentieth century precipitated new states, on old territory, which required a national identity for legitimacy. In colonies where colonial rule ended through violent armed struggle, that armed struggle required a particularly potent vision of what people were fighting for. Once independence came, the consolidation of the state also demanded an answer to the question: who are we as a people, what binds us together? The Cold War, founded on an assumed clash between ideas and cultures even if activated as military and strategic conflict, prompted the same questions. The Cold War demanded a statement of national identity in two respects. First, as an ideological conflict the Cold War influenced the language by which nations articulated the belief systems that supposedly bound them together and informed their relationship with others.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, rapid demographic and economic growth among the settler colonial population of British America drew the attention of competing European empires to the potential wealth of the continent. By the 1750s, large-scale imperial warfare had broken out, a contest for control of these future riches. Over the next six decades, this conflict would evolve into a multi-sided civil war, drawing the continent’s indigenous peoples and settler colonists into the struggle. At the revolution’s beginning, circa 1754, the resources of North America lay mainly in the hands of indigenous people, distributed across hundreds of polities, while three European empires held footholds of varying size and strength, mainly on the continent’s edges. At its end, circa 1814, a single confederated nation, created out of wars fought to control America’s resources, and led by the children of empire, was positioned to take the whole for itself. The transformation included a new form of government and political economy which concentrated power in the hands of American citizens under a constitution designed to promote endless economic growth. The revolution’s outcome set a path for the continent’s future and projected an implicit vision of a new form of global empire.

Originally a mere side-product of economic integration in the first decades of European integration, European Union (EU) environmental and climate policy has evolved towards a comprehensive and dense regulatory framework. A complex set of rules, standards and procedures to protect the environment is in force in all major subfields of environmental policy, including water and air pollution, nature conservation, chemicals and the fight against climate change. Moreover, in environmental and climate policy, the EU prides itself on being an international leader.

This essay examines the reciprocal contest of wills as mediated through the use of political violence from roughly 1773 to the end of the war in 1783. In other terms, it covers the escalating application of violence and how that led to outright war in April 1775, as well as the war itself. In both periods, violence was used to influence the will of one’s opponent and the political preferences of the undecided—but sometimes its political intent was exceeded, with escalatory effects. Three broad categories of violence are considered here. The first, “intimidative and catalytic” was primarily associated with the period from 1773 to 1776, in which violence was used by both sides, mostly publicly, to force political opponents to accede or step aside. Some of those efforts at intimidation catalyzed further violence, leading ultimately to armed military confrontation. Once the war had begun, the strong conventions associated with “war” shaped military behavior by both sides’ regular forces, although not always successfully, and always subject to logistical requirements. These behaviors form the second category of “Regular and Logistical.” The third category, “Retaliatory” was primarily associated with peripheral militia forces, which were much less restrained by the customs and usages of war, and often instead indulged in escalating retaliation.

Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank remind us that empires constitute a far older form of rule than the nation-state. As they note, the historical “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary and inevitable.” In settings including the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and British North America, they stress that the fight for rights began as struggles for reform within an imperial framework, before they reached a revolutionary tipping point.1 This complicates standard ways of thinking in which nations, born of the eighteenth century, simply replaced empires. This chapter examines the entangled relationship between different kinds of nationalism, on the one hand, and a nebulous and multitiered French Empire, on the other hand. It suggests both the endurance and unexpected influences of imperial structures and ideas, as well as the significance of paths not taken, such as federalist alternatives to nationalist frameworks.

The multilateral regional system built in post-war western Europe became the world’s most robust and integrated such system, both economically and politically. This chapter proposes that the birth, development and sustainability of European integration that occurred in the period spanning from the late 1940s to 1989 benefited from a synthesis of Christian, nationalist and liberal ideas, and that this synthesis underscored the emergence of European integration and legitimated its development in the four decades of the Cold War.

The synthesis describing Europe’s regime and historical evolution – termed here the ‘Catholic narrative’ – served as the analytical and prescriptive basis for the generation of Christian Democrats that played a crucial role in the reconstruction of the democratic order after the Second World War. To add to the understanding of the history of post-war Europe, this chapter describes the emergence of this synthesis in the early days of the Cold War, its consolidation in the four decades that followed, its demise after 1989 and the reconfiguration it has undergone since 2015. The specific religious origins of the post-war Catholic narrative are uncovered, and its functions in the context of the emerging bipolar system are established. In a historical moment when political actors were in dire need of innovative solutions to overcome Europe’s security dilemma, the Catholic Church set the ground for new avenues of action by using its narrative power to rally liberal, religious and nationalist identities to counter the communist threat.

The reinstallation of liberal constitutionalism in Spain in 1820 was the first major challenge to the conservative political system of the Restoration, with far-reaching effects on the European and American continents. Spanish liberals endeavored to continue a political program based on the constitution of Cádiz (1812), although they encountered many obstacles in the form of inner discord and, especially, a local robust counterrevolutionary movement which enjoyed external support. The Trieno Constitucional was a moment of rapid and intense politicization, which surpassed the social elites to reach into a wider public that included popular sectors. A vigorous public opinion was developed and elections with mass participation were held at various administrative levels. The reverberations of the Spanish revolution were felt abroad. Naples-Sicily, Portugal and Piedmont-Sardinia soon adopted the Cádiz constitution. Moreover, during the Triennium the American possessions of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies secured their independence, at a critical moment in which the Iberian metropoles were unable to delay the process anymore. Ultimately, the return of liberalism to Southern Europe was short-lived. The constitutional regimes fell after interventions accorded by the continental powers endorsed the local reactionary interests.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Revolutions sprang from a variety of causes rather than simply from Enlightenment. Iberia and Ibero-America absorbed whatever Enlightened ideas or practices responded to political, economic and social necessities. The Spanish and Portuguese governments sought thereby to tighten imperial control. Individual reformers, often independently of government, regarded the new ideas as instruments of amelioration. International conflicts and revolutionary movements in the United States and France, as well as internal tensions, introduced new factors and pressures. These accompanied the strains on both the Spanish and Portuguese governments during the war years between 1793 and 1808. The Portuguese government escaped the political collapse and crisis of legitimacy which befell Spain and its empire, and managed to reconstitute itself in Brazil. The Enlightenment had contributed greatly to the critique of Royal absolutism in both empires and of metropolitan dominance. A range of influential Enlightened figures emerged in each of the component territories of both monarchies. The roots of Iberian Liberalism may be traced to their ideas and actions. A counter-critique attacked Enlightened ideas along with Liberal constitutional forms. The ensuing polemic and its political manifestation, especially after 1814-15, blamed revolutionary activity on the influence of the Enlightenment.

The European Union (EU) and its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), have been economically organised around a market-oriented philosophy, which has been fed by a constant debate between two opposite poles: indicative planning and competition. This chapter will revisit the history of internal European economic policies, notably in the monetary, industrial and competition realms, by demonstrating that European institutions have usually carried on thanks to successive compromises between planning and competition and that, despite the latter’s rise since the 1990s, the contest is not yet over, especially since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.

More generally, the debate between planning and competition echoes the long-term controversy between the promoters of free trade and those who are willing to bend free-market rules.

In 1992, Eric Hobsbawm rejoiced in the fact that historians were making headway in the study of nationalism and that this, in turn, suggested that the phenomenon was “past its peak”: ‘The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.” Others, writing at that time, were less optimistic. The French essayist Alain Minc wrote of the resurgence of the nation and expressed his fears that Europe might soon become “entrapped, once again, in nationalistic reactions.” After half a century on the path toward internationalism, he argued, once again the nation would dominate the political horizon. A few years later, Anthony D. Smith even quipped that, if anything, we were experiencing the “high noon” of nationalism and the “owl of Minerva ha[d] not stirred.”1

Notions of shared collective identity or ethnos are ancient belief systems imbibed at an early age, codified in literature, and transmitted through learned or sacred texts and “common knowledge.” There may be elements of logic in such beliefs that become harder to uncover with the passage of centuries. For example, notions of collective identity often perpetuate the belief that the stranger brings danger and only “kin-culture communities” (to use Azar Gat’s term) can be trusted.1 Perhaps logical caution developed into custom and was perpetuated by political practice (i.e. the formation of states). The modern idea of race, which views human populations as fundamentally different from each other in measurable ways, can be linked most emphatically to colonial exploitation in the early modern and modern eras. In its assumption about nature, it is thus fundamentally different from earlier ideas about ethnos or collective identity.