to band together with their neighbors as one (nation) to demand rights and sovereignty. At a time when kings and empires ruled the day, the nation was a new form of identity linking people who shared language, a home region and culture. This progressive, liberating nationalism laid the foundation for our modern democracies, most of which are in nation-states. Modern nationalism took two routes. One was the ethnic nation, infused with Romantic notions of seamless racial communities bound by blood, territory and destiny. In the world of ethnic nations, one nation is always superior and destined to rule over territory as well as other peoples. As intellectuals such as the British historian Eric Hobsbawm and German philosopher Hannah Arendt argued, the nativist ethnic nation was at the rootand peaceful, open to the free flow of goods, people and ideas. By interconnecting Europe’s nation-states through trade, cultural programs, economic policies, political priorities and the euro, individual European countries look altogether different from how they did in the first half of the 20th century. National sovereignty has become more diffuse, with a considerable proportion of policy being set by the EU as well as locally.

New regionalism