The emergence of European states was neither inevitable nor uniform nor irreversible. Their formation created a problematic relationship between state structures and national loyalties. These central themes have a significance far beyond Europe. Throughout the world the state-making process is still complex, uneven, and unfinished.

James J. Sheehan is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, emeritus, at Stanford University and a past president of the American Historical Association. He has written five books, mostly on German history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His most recent work is Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (2008).

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