Published in 1998, this book is an articulate and densely documented account of political, cultural and historical forces and tensions involved in contemporary European integration; most especially concerning Germany. In doing so it provides an effective fusion of a vast array of material from what are normally separate disciplines.

The book investigates contemporary resonances of identifications and conceptions of political boundaries that appeared in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. It argues that within a 'supranationalising' Europe, national identity and nationalism have not disappeared as cultural and political phenomena. Rather they persist and manifest themselves in variable forms at popular and elite levels. This is the basis for Europe's condition of far from completed unity, at the centre of which is now a reunited Germany, more sure of itself but less sure of the world around it.