Interwar ideas and images of nation, class, and gender

Shaping and reshaping stereotypes including self-stereotypes played a crucial role in the construction of modern nations all over the world. These stereotypes created symbolic frameworks which helped to integrate the different social, ethnocultural, and territorial units that came to form the modern national communities, distinguishing them from neighboring and competing national projects. Southeastern European nation-builders also sought to prove the European credentials of their national project. They were confronted with a number of developmental models often lumped together as “Western,” despite evident differences and tensions between them, as shown by recurring conflicts among Anglophile, Francophile, and Germanophile models. Interwar radical nationalists often returned to the national revival of the nineteenth century, but they became increasingly suspicious of the possibility of the convergence of their national tradition with Western liberal modernity.