This timely book offers an in-depth exploration of state partitions and the history of nationalism in Europe from the Enlightenment onwards. Stefano Bianchini compares traditional national democratic development to the growing transnational demands of representation with a focus on transnational mobility and empathy versus national localism against the EU project. In an era of multilevel identity, global economic and asylum seeker crises, nationalism is becoming more liquid which in turn strengthen the attractiveness of “ethnic purity” and partitions, affects state stability, and the nature of national democracy in Europe. The result may be exposure to the risk of new wars, rather than enhanced guarantees of peace.

Included is a rare and insightful comparative assessment of the lessons not learned from the Yugoslav demise, the Czechoslovak partition, the Baltic trajectory from USSR incorporation to EU integration, and the impact of ethnicity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Beyond their peculiarities, these examples are used to critically assess the growing liquidity of national identities and their relationship with democracy. Those seeking a deeper understanding of the European partition experience will find this an immensely valuable resource.
Europe was, and still is affected by a wide range of aspirations for independence in connection with its cultural varieties of territories and populations. Partitions may occur for economic, religious, ethnic, linguistic reasons or power politics disputations. The recent history of Europe is full of examples in this sense, from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth partition to the Irish experience, from the collapse of the empires (Central European, Russian, Ottoman or Colonial ones) to the post-communist liquefaction of the socialist federations. Most recently similar trends are affecting the EU (with the Brexit), the United Kingdom, Spain, and Ukraine. The book, therefore, includes also 27 historical maps, with the aim to increase the dynamic perception of this political phenomenon.
What is surprising, in fact, is that the category of “state partition” is not popular, if not neglected by the European literature, while it is extensively elaborated in India, South-East Asia or among British scholars with Indian origin, who apply the category mainly to the post-colonial events in Asia. If looking the Universities’ syllabi of the courses that refer to “state partitions”, scholars will see how the focus is on Asia, while Europe is rarely mentioned. In the last two decades, the author of this book had the chance to make joint researches with colleagues and friends interested to scrutinize the concept with interdisciplinary approaches, but to a large extent these colleagues gave priority to Asian studies, with few exceptions that concerned the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia and, more recently, Scotland. For this reason, this book concentrates on Europe and bridges a crucial gap in the international literature.