Guest Editor Introduction
Guest Editor Introduction

Summary/Abstract: As I write, Europe is again at war. The bloodlands of Eastern Europe burn with nationalist hatreds, ethnic struggles, and economic and political intrigue. This was not supposed to happen. We were supposed to have moved beyond this, thanks to international organizations like NATO, the United Nations, and, of course, the European Union. If we follow Goethe’s lead and take the beginning of nationalism to be the Battle of Valmy in September 1792, when a French army held back the assaults of a much superior Prussian army in the name of “vive la nation,” Europe was supposed to have learned its lesson. This should have come true especially by 1992 and the Treaty of Maastricht. Just as Europe had led in the development of the nation state and a new concept of nationalism in the eighteenth century, so by the end of the twentieth it was supposed to have shown the way forward to a time of a new international order, when borders, language, and culture gave way to the free movement of goods, people, and capital, all in the name of an international rights-based order, a new world order, superior to what it replaced. Europe was supposed to lead us into a multicultural, multilevel polity in which all prospered and none were treated as inferior.

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