Our contemporary political landscape is organised around the idea of the nation-state and, as Habermas (1998) (among many others) has argued, this idea is seen to have its origins in the system of sovereign states that came into being in Europe in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. The history of the modern nation-state is then understood to be further shaped by the American and French Revolutions in the late eighteenth century. Within Europe, there are seen to be two routes to modern statehood. The first was the evolution of nation-states ‘within the boundaries of existing territorial states’ (Habermas 1998: 397), as was the case for most North and Western European states. The second was in establishing a nation and then a state, as exemplified by the projects of Germany and Italy in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent formation of states in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth. These initial formations, he continues, were followed in the period of mass decolonisation in the mid- to late-twentieth century by the establishment of ‘postcolonial’ states. A final moment in the history of nation-states is then presented as the secession of states from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its collapse in the late twentieth century.