There can be no doubt about the enduring significance and the immense historical impact of the national question, yet its economic dimension has been little examined. This volume deals with the national question in the light of economic change in the twentieth-century, and contains twenty studies by a team of distinguished authors on nations and nationalities spanning Europe from Ireland to Russia and from Greece to Estonia. The volume will aid our understanding of the modern national question against the changing economic, social and political background.

The authors in this collection of essays address the largely neglected but significant economic aspects of the national question in its historical context during the course of the twentieth century. There exists a large gap in our understanding of the historical relationship between the 'national question' and economic change. Above all, there is insufficient knowledge about the economic dimension of the historical experience with regard to the former multi-national states, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia; and equally too little is known about the economic component of national tensions and conflicts in bilingual Belgium or Finland, or the multilingual Spain or Switzerland. At the same time as emphasis is placed on the complex relationships between the economy and society in individual European countries, questions of state, identity, language, religion and racism as instruments of economic furtherance are at the centre of the contributors' attention.