The social sciences have always faced a fundamental problem. Their central concern is to understand modernity, yet, as the product of modernity itself, they could never achieve the critical distance to do this. In recent decades some scholars have sought a way out in the notion of postmodernity, the idea that we have entered a new era from which ‘modernity’ can be judged from the outside. However, since a central component of the postmodernist paradigm is the suspension or at least the relativisation of both epistemological and normative frameworks, it deprives itself of the very analytical tools it would need for the task. For a while, following the end of the Cold War, a hyper-modernist view enjoyed some prominence, according to which, far from being transcended, modernity was culminating in the dominance of a single social, economic and political model represented by the victorious United States.

Neither vision has triumphed, yet events since the late 1980s have continued to erode many of the certainties on which modern social science was based. Let us take just four key items. First, social science, emerging in the age of advances in the natural sciences, was tied closely to the idea of social progress. The world was getting better, even if progress was interrupted by unfortunate lapses into barbarism such as those experienced during the Second World War. Knowledge and rational analysis could be applied to social problems and issues of living together in order to improve the human condition. Second, there was a process of social integration in which pre-modern forms, often based on superstition and ignorance, would give way to larger social entities better fitted to the new conditions and necessarily more enlightened and efficacious. Third, universal values and modes of behaviour, representing the highest norms, would extend and cover all of humanity. Fourth, the sovereign state represented the highest and most natural form of political community, and was tied to the nation in the curious conjunction of ‘nation-state’. This was a culturally unified entity with a shared identity, sustaining social solidarity and democracy through representative and accountable institutions. It is not that these claims were regularly and explicitly articulated. On the contrary, their strength derived from the way in which they were assumed and built into the very framework of analysis, only occasionally asserted against fringe elements that challenged them and had to be returned to the garbage can of history. This was especially true of the nation-state as the framework for both social and political analysis, to the point that social scientists might even be seen as the organic intellectuals of the nation-state.

The transformations of the political order in recent years have put all these in doubt, but especially the foundational myth of the nation-state. States have not disappeared, of course, but they have lost competences upwards to international organisations, downwards to their component parts and laterally to the market. Social and political identities are too complex to be contained in a national identity itself defined by the borders of the state. Nationalism, which some had written off as either an atavistic reaction to modernity or the birth-pangs of modernity itself, has returned in new and varied forms. Markets, polities and societies no longer coincide in space and scope. Integration and rationality appear to give way to fragmentation and diversity. Judgement, previously securely based on a liberal state order, has lost its bearings, and one branch of social science has retreated into an ultimately self-defeating methodological individualism (notably in the form of rational choice theory).

Defeated in their explanatory schemes and utterly confounded in their ambitions to prediction, social scientists have given way, not to a newer form of analysis, but to a newly prominent historiography. This is not just a matter of providing better explanations and accounts. As Oliver Schmidtke notes in his contribution to the Eder and Spohn collection, ‘historians seem to have replaced philosophers and social scientists as those considered to hold ethical authority’ (p. 70). Historians have not only colonised intellectual ground previously held by the modernist sciences, but have also succeeded in communicating to a wider public and opinion-formers, even if ‘popular history’ is still regarded in some quarters as a professional death sentence. These books are not all by historians, but all do incorporate a historical understanding that avoids simplistic periodisation, refuses to separate the present rigidly from the past and pays due attention to the constant reinterpretation of the past in the light of present experience. At last, it seems, social science and history may be finding a proper accommodation. The five books are extremely diverse. Ascherson's is a series of musings about Scotland, partly biographical, partly cultural commentary, partly political analysis. Vogt presents an ethnographic study of the experiences of young people in transition countries. Llobera ranges across the classic debates in the study of nationalism, returning regularly to the case of Catalonia. Eder and Spohn present eleven essays on collective memory and European integration, covering Germany, Jewish experience, Poland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Czech republic and Kaliningrad. Lehti and Smith give us twelve contributions on the Baltic area, spanning Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Russia.

The post-communist revolutions of 1989–91 occurred in a world in which the idea of ineluctable progress was discredited, and by people who seemingly just wanted to achieve the consumer society already established in the West. Vogt asks whether a revolution can base itself on such banal ideas or whether it needs a utopia. Based on interviews with young people in Prague, East Berlin, Tartu and Tallinn, the book argues that this search for a normal democratic society is itself a utopia, but shows how it is interpreted in different ways by the various respondents.

One theme that runs through the contributions to these books is that of rethinking the nation. It can no longer unproblematically be identified with the state, nor can it be reduced to a folkloristic relic of the past, or a tourist attraction. We have here several contributions from the European or state peripheries where the nation has always been in question, its relation with the state constantly interrogated and re-interpreted. Llobera, from a Catalan perspective, discards both primordialist and instrumentalist approaches as not doing justice to the complexity of the topic. Social scientists, he insists, have in their search for rational and instrumental causes lost sight of the importance of sentiment. Like many small societies, Catalonia is a very complex case and has been widely used in recent years to illustrate the many-faceted nature of nationality and nationalism and its constant renegotiation in changed circumstances. The same is true of Scotland. Neal Ascherson is not an academic social scientist but is accurately described in the blurb of his book as ‘scholar-journalist’. He is familiar with Europe at both its eastern and western peripheries, with Scotland and Poland and Ukraine. He presents not a joined-up picture but a ‘fragmented awareness’ of Scotland, with a series of vignettes covering history, culture, landscape, politics and literature. There is no essential Scotland as there is no essential Catalonia, but this is not to say that neither exists as a nation. Rather the absence of an independent state has meant that they constantly need to examine the basis for their existence, its multiple and conflicting elements and its reconfiguration over time. From this perspective, they are no longer historical exceptions, nations that did not quite meet their historical destiny of statehood, but sites of universal questions of identity, society and political order. They are also where some of the most interesting questions about the European project are posed, since these nations historically have had to negotiate their place in broader transnational orders, bringing their ‘usable pasts’ to bear in the form of historical reinterpretation and revision.

The transition countries of central and eastern Europe also pose the question of the nation. As in nineteenth-century Europe, nationalism is tied to democratisation and liberalism, but also contains an exclusive and xenophobic element. Vogt notes the uses of nationalism in Estonia, and the way in which a golden-age myth has been created about the interwar state as the only historical example of an independent Estonia, this despite the lapse of that state into right-wing authoritarianism. More generally, the nation is asserted against Soviet domination, but only recently have historians been able to address the collaboration of Balts in Nazi war crimes.

The theme of Europe runs through the books, as it does through political debate. If Europe does not exist, then how can there be a European project and, without a European project, how can we avoid the wars of the past? Yet if Europe does exist, how can we define it? There seem to be no common features shared by all parts but not by non-European societies. We could, it is true, manufacture history and the present, like nineteenth-century social scientists and historians, to suit the project of the day, but as serious scholars we no longer feel able to do that. The only way out seems to be acceptance of the idea of multiple conceptions of Europe and to get away from the idea that it will ever look like the stylised concept of the nation-state created by previous generations of intellectuals. It might, on the other hand, look like real states of the past, if we take Spanish or British history seriously. Renan famously remarked that getting history wrong was essential for nation-builders. Klaus Eder suggests here that perhaps getting history right might be worth a try. Hartmut Kaelble, in the Eder and Spohn collection, gets back to the problem of modernity, itself defined by European standards. The newer idea of multiple modernities enables us to distinguish a distinct European lifestyle which is not quite the same as that of the United States and which might provide a basis for self-understanding.

Analysing Europe has been made more difficult by the various instrumental uses of the theme by polity-builders across the continent. This is perhaps no more so than in the new member states of the European Union that were previously part of the Soviet bloc or, in the case of the Baltic states, the Soviet Union itself. Europe in one sense is that of the sovereign nation-state of the Westphalian myth, something that they have experienced only sporadically in their history. In another sense, Europe is a project of transnational integration intended precisely to overcome this old model. It may be a step towards globalisation and cosmopolitanism, or an attempt to rebuild social and political boundaries along a more easily defensible line. Vogt shows how in Estonia a generalised public discourse in favour of Europe coexists with a suspicion and fear of its actual manifestations. Europe is the symbol of postwar prosperity and the consumer society but also a space of social solidarity, distinguishing itself from the United States precisely on this. It is a way of opening up borders and societies, yet at the same time it imposes its own borders at the periphery. New member states, lacking the opt-out clauses of the old ones, must adopt the Schengen regime of no internal borders, but hardened external ones. Europe is also an area of security, yet this is provided largely by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an alliance dominated by a non-European power at a time when European and US views of security are not always identical. The chapters in the Lehti and Smith book rehearse these themes.

Europe is an inclusive theme, overcoming old national divisions and opening up a new discursive space for new forms of shared and overlapping sovereignties. Yet it is also necessarily exclusive and divisive, since it needs its own borders. Several of the contributions identify the problem of the borders of Europe. This is a contemporary question, about the frontiers of the European Union and other transnational organisations, but argued often in a historic key. Does Europe historically confront Russia, the East, the Islamic world, or does it just fade out gradually to the east? The enlargement of the EU was a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War, ending one deep division. Yet if a new division is emerging with the ‘east’, on what should this be based: geopolitics, culture, history? Was the Cold War an aberration, dividing an old unity, or did it reflect more enduring divisions? Again, it is at the periphery that this question is most clearly posed.

There is a huge literature on European integration. Social sciences have been less successful (except in some descriptive studies) in dealing with other transnational spaces that have arisen alongside and within the European project. The Lehti and Smith book returns regularly to the different conceptions of transnational space available in the Baltic area, depending on whether the aim is to join Europe broadly, to secure links with the Nordic countries, or to embrace Russia and other post-Soviet states. The Hanseatic tradition has been rediscovered, but is not open to all and raises the problem that the Hanseatic League was a cartel rather than an open trading order. Older visions of pan-Nordic unity are tainted by their association with empire. The Cold War experience, with its multiple forms of compromise and collaboration, provides little inspiration, while the Second World War and its allegiances, the subject of much valuable historical revisionism, hardly provide a usable past for modernising democracies. The concept of the Baltic Sea area, inspired by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean world, has been suggested as a new reference. This has found its way into various official co-operation programmes. Another, vaguer, reference, is taken up in the Northern Dimension, an EU programme covering the Nordic and Baltic states but reaching into Russia. Similar problems bedevil efforts to resurrect the concept of Mitteleuropea (Ilaria Favretto in the Eder and Spohn book), whose geographical limits, never mind normative implications, remain disputed.

Identity has in recent years returned in the social sciences, often as a master-concept to replace the outmoded structural categories of nationality (defined by membership of a state) and class. Often this is linked to, and even identified with, culture. So, after the rationalist tendency in social sciences had more or less succeeded in banishing identity and culture, they have now come back with a vengeance. While primordialist and reductionist accounts of identity are largely discredited in the social sciences, they have often been succeeded by postmodern versions of hybridity and cosmopolitanism in which identities can be selected more or less like consumer goods in the age of mass retailing. The authors of these books avoid both extremes, seeking to rescue the idea of identity and something that is both cause and effect, something made and remade but using both old and new materials. They also show the way in which identity is negotiated on a daily basis, coexisting with new and rediscovered forms of individualism.

The various contributions surveyed here do not answer definitively the question of where or when to locate Europe. They do not tell us what the essential European identity is or how it relates to national identities. Rather they tell us that these are the wrong questions. Europe exists if we talk about it, argue about it and worry about its boundaries. It is not, in this respect, a historical exception, a leap from a modern world of certainty into a postmodern unknown. Rather it is an example of perennial human predicaments, of how we reconcile individualism with collective belonging and action; the past with the present; the present with the future. Social scientists, faced with the end of their old certainties, have tended to react by producing new concepts and have come up with multilevel governance, post-nationalism and postmodernity, to name but three. A return to history shows us that these are for the most part redundant. Political orders are always in flux and the modern era of the first half of the twentieth in western Europe and North America was the exception, not the normality towards which other countries were destined to evolve. Social sciences are starting to grasp these realities slowly. They can do so only if we break their separation into discrete disciplines, each privileging one part or aspect: society over politics or vice versa, the present over the past, the past over the future.