The author tells the story of people caught between our century and a traditional past. She shows how the high expectations of the new nations were dashed by a harsh conjunction of nature, desperate competition for trade, and the conflict between tradition and modern economic realities. She...

In this paper, we present the basic ideas, the design and some key results of an ongoing research project on the transformation of the national political space in Western Europe. We start from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationaliza-tion leads to the formation...