Nation and National Identity: The European Experience in Perspective

In Part II, the recent experiences of a selected number of countries—Belgium, Austria, Germany, Croatia, and Israel—are presented to illustrate the great diversity of current challenges to national identities. Processes such as globalization and European integration have had an impact on all of them, but mobilization by regional movements, reunification of separate territorial parts, the differentiation of formerly homogeneous ethnic identities, the sequels of war, and the country-specific historical legacies, interact with these global processes to constitute many different challenges for national identities and nationhood. Finally, the two contributions in Part III show that the process of European integration gives rise to different images and fulfills different functions for the various nations involved, but it has not yet been able to shape a new European identity.