An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

The Vietnam antiwar movement moved along mutually supportive paths; one within the formal political system and one outside. Dissent within the government expanded over time. Distinct elements of the outsider movement exerted greater influence at different points. Liberal reformers dominated until 1967 and after mid-1971, and intermittently during election campaigns and the fall 1969 Moratorium. Leftists were most evident during major coalition events of 1967 through the May Day demonstrations of spring 1971. Massive student protests in both 1968 and 1970 were ideologically ambiguous. Drawing encouragement and political leverage from the “outsider” movement, federal and state legislators and officials in the executive branch played their most significant role in collaboration with the activist core after 1971.

As soon as Italy entered the war, mobilisation orders were issued, from which emigrants were not exempted. From May–December 1915, two-thirds of the 300,000 emigrant soldiers would depart from their adopted homelands. Their passage was paid by the Italian government, but transporting thousands of reservists across the Atlantic was a formidable logistical challenge. This chapter examines the initial mobilisation of the reservists, their motivations for enlisting and their journeys to Italy in 1915. Their decisions to depart rested on many factors, including country of emigration, family situation, economic considerations, the length of time a man had spent abroad, degree of adherence to a sense of Italian national identity and political beliefs. Youthful naivety and a desire for adventure were also common motivators and the dangers of submarine attack when crossing the Atlantic a significant deterrent. Despite the mobilisation orders to emigrants, the Italian government had limited power to compel them to return from abroad to serve. The main incentive was a negative one: if reservists did not respond to the draft, they would be subject to severe penalties at a later date if they were to return to Italy.

This chapter examines the motivation of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) soldiers as derived from their personal ephemera, in particular unpublished documents collected directly from the battlefield by US forces and their allies. These frontline accounts in the Vietnamese language uncover hidden memories and offer important clues to understanding the diversified enlistment, combat, and sustaining motivations of the Northern-born regulars. Such organic memories contribute an unvarnished immediacy that can clarify the North Vietnamese fighters perceptions and experiences during the war. Employing individual memory and associated narratives as both source and subject fits into a fairly small genre, representing a very new field without an operating paradigm to amplify understanding of and fill gaps in the PAVN histories. This chapter, in contrast to many Vietnam War studies, explores how the PAVN was not invincible and how it was also a conscript rather than a volunteer army of combatants who shared feelings similar to homesick draftees wearing the US and other uniforms.

From the outset, US military intervention in Vietnam provoked popular campaigns and mass rallies in support of the United States global anticommunist agenda. While these early initiatives were often orchestrated by rightwing activists long versed in the practices of populist anticommunism, the burgeoning of domestic opposition to the war intensified and greatly diversified prowar activism. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders rallied popular support in favor of total victory but later endorsed Richard Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” As the war dragged on, internal divisions eroded the confidence of prowar conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Rightwing activists still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement and wider social changes. In so doing, conservatives altered the nature and direction of their agenda, and furthered a new majoritarian political coalition. This chapter explores the origins and nature of these grassroots campaigns in support of the Vietnam War and demonstrates that the groundwork for a decades-long resurgence in populist rightwing patriotism was born amidst domestic strife over American purpose in Vietnam.

The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

Chapter 3 begins the conceptual history of the nation where our current vocabulary originates, in classical Greece and Rome. It examines the conception of cultural-linguistic communities in the context of the two principal alternatives to the nation-state – city-state and empire. The chapter moves from Greek conceptions of ethnicity as depicted in Herodotus’ Histories to Cicero’s reflections on the relationship between national and political communities in the Roman Empire and concludes with an examination of the idea of the nation in the Vulgate, the late fourth-century translation of the Bible. The analysis shows that ethnos, gens, and natio referred to communities defined by descent, language, and geographical homeland but were not understood in a political sense. Moreover, Roman thinkers were not only acutely aware of the twofold loyalties to nation and polity; they also sought practical arrangements for accommodating diverse national groups within a single political order. The chapter discusses Roman ideas on citizenship, administrative subsidiarity, and legal pluralism.

In 1918, Prague became one of the new capital cities that appeared on the map of postimperial Europe. This Introduction suggests that examining urban streetscapes can fruitfully reveal the transformations in daily life caused by war and the transition from Empire to nation-state. It situates the book within a renewed historiography of the First World War and engages with recent approaches to the history of the Habsburg Empire. It also provides the theoretical framework that underpins the work, the rationale for the chosen focus on space, and the people who inhabit that space rather than separate national communities, and a brief discussion of the body of sources used.

This chapter examines how Austrian patriotic culture came to pervade the city’s streets. It demonstrates that an Austrian mobilization did take place in the Bohemian lands and addresses the larger question of the wartime relationship between state and civil society in the Habsburg Empire. The patriotic discourse was not just imposed from above, it was also abundantly relayed by private associations and among the public through denunciations and public collections. The wartime patriotic culture became part of the urban landscape through the display of flags, processions in the streets, and the ban on pan-Slavic colors. Prague’s inhabitants contributed to collections for soldiers or widows and orphans, and were constantly expected to join in the common sacrifice. Volunteers raising money as well as ubiquitous posters urging them to give more for war victims were constant reminders of a conflict that became inescapable in everyday life.

The conclusion discusses the benefits of an examination of imperial collapse through streetscapes, highlighting the significance of the urban war experience in this process. In this light, the 1918 revolutionary moment acquires major significance as a complex movement revolving around issues of democratization and social justice, beyond Bolshevik or national revolutions. The everyday experiences of Prague citizens in the First World War and in the transition period nurtured disappointments and expectations that found repercussions in the struggles faced by the First Czechoslovak Republic at home in the interwar years.

Imagination was an essential component in the maintenance of morale. It was a coping mechanism, which drew men away from their present, and allowed them to access memories that helped them to feel connected to home and to England - its landscapes, peoples, and places. As subject, not citizen, soldiers their perceptions of England formed around parochial and meaningful visions, rather than abstract ideas like the state. Yet, regulars had a very particular impression of ‘home’, which drew on their military service and soldierly identities. On the other hand, reservists, volunteers, and later conscripts continued to feel embedded in their home communities, albeit mainly in their minds. These specific and personal relationships with the homeland were also nurtured by regimental culture, which, at least in infantry regiments, often preserved and celebrated attachments to a particular county or counties. The distance between men and their loved ones could leave them despondent, but the letters, parcels, and postcards that they received gave them joy and were often the substance of the imaginary worlds they created and fought for. Whilst soldiers did become increasingly embittered by perceived injustices, inefficiencies, and peace talk on the Home Front, it was their more parochial (and positive) visions of home that mattered most to them. Their imaginative realms were not just a source of motivation, they were also a cocoon to which they retreated when dreaming and daydreaming in trenches or behind the lines. They aided their endurance whilst also providing the greatest justification for their continued suffering.

Most interpreters who have taken an interest in Rousseau’s nationalism have looked beyond his Social Contract. This seems fitting, for Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Discourse on Political Economy explicitly discuss the role of nationality and the distinctiveness of national identity. By way of contrast, the Social Contract is often cited as a work of ideal theory, less concerned with the empirical, sociological contingencies of actual nations and more focused on normative questions about the best political community. This chapter suggests that this standard interpretation of the Social Contract discounts the significant role played by extant, prepolitical peoples. Rather than a purely abstract contract among previously unaffiliated individuals, as per Thomas Hobbes, a closer reading reveals the ontological and historical primacy of peoples in Rousseau’s political theory.

This chapter examines a range of 1916 Shakespearean appropriations from the German sphere of influence (the German Reich and Austria-Hungary). Many of them argued that Germany had thoroughly ‘naturalised’ Shakespeare and thus had as much, or more, right to ‘own’ him as Britain. They also used Shakespeare to criticise Britain's alleged iniquities. However, German responses to the Shakespeare Tercentenary did not present an entirely unified, patriotic front. Some of them, like the April 1916 issue of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, exposed significant blind spots in the propagandistic uses of Shakespeare. Chief among them was the uncomfortable contradiction inherent in the claim that Shakespeare was universal and above the hostilities of the war while, at the same time, constituting a uniquely German property. Moreover, it proved possible to use Shakespeare in radical ways which contradicted the official patriotic line, as evidenced in Karl Kraus’s subversive articles published in his magazine Die Fackel.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

While much of the literature on nationalism focuses on the formation or construction of national identities and nation-states, the story does not end with the creation of a polity claiming to embody a nation’s identity. Conceptions of nationhood continue to be contested and to change over time within the framework of national sovereignty, even as the breadth and depth of popular attachment to, and identification with, the nation-state wax and wane under changing conditions. This is just as true of long-established nation-states as it is of recently formed ones. Terminological usage may obscure this, insofar as nationalism is commonly used to describe movements or efforts directed at gaining a people’s independence or asserting its purported rights to contested territory or resources. Loyalty to a long-established country is more often referred to as patriotism – and by virtue of being consigned to this category, has been subject to less thorough analytical scrutiny in the theoretical and comparative literature on nationalism.

This chapter discusses three common criticisms of using foreign judges on domestic courts. First, that the foreign judge, ignorant of local laws, customs and circumstances, will reach decisions that are legally wrong, assertive of colonial values and principles, or simply unacceptable to members of the local community. Second, the foreign judge, not being a citizen or resident of the local jurisdiction, has divided patriotic ties rendering him or her ill-suited to consider questions of constitutional significance, national security or foreign affairs. Third, the expertise of the foreign judge is no longer needed as there is already abundant domestic legal expertise. The chapter responds and reflects upon these criticisms in the context of the evolving system of overseas non-permanent judges of Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal since 1997.

Chapter 3 examines the fighting over Shakespeare that takes place during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). This period of prolonged conflict is characterized by an obsessive interest in position-takings and labelling, such as revolutionary/loyalist and Jacobin/anti-Jacobin; but, as this chapter demonstrates, these wartime binaries are protean. By deploying them we are at risk of under-interpreting the conflict. The performance of Shakespeare at the major and minor theatres in London reveals this distinctive political malleability. The chapter begins by considering pressure points in the conflict when Shakespeare seems to have been loudly mobilized in support of the British war effort – such as the resumption of conflict in 1803 – but concentrates for the most part on the contested political valence of Shakespeare. It examines the opposing political sympathies and theatrical interests of John Philip Kemble and Richard Brinsley Sheridan who were both connected to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as the operations of the minor theatres that position Shakespeare within a battle over the democratization of culture and politics that strongly resonates with the period’s domestic and foreign conflicts. The chapter concludes by proposing that ‘conflicting Shakespeares’ become united through the vagaries of patriotism, a powerful and uncertain concept during this period and beyond.