The Creation of National Identities

Book excerpt: There is nothing more international than the formation of national identities. From barbarian epics to ethnographic museums, from national languages to emblematic landscapes or typical costumes, this book retraces the cultural fabrication of the European nations, documenting how national identities are not facts of nature but constructions. The list of basic elements of a national identity is well known: ancestral founders, a history, heroes, a language, monuments, landscapes, and folklore. Compiling this list was the great enterprise carried out throughout Europe during the last two centuries. Patriotic militancy and the transnational exchanges of ideas and know-how created identities that are very specific, but similar precisely in their difference.