The study of nationalism was profoundly reshaped by three publications that appeared independently of each other in 1983: Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson and The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. These books did not come out of the blue, of course. Gellner and Hobsbawm had been publishing on the subject since the 1960s, and some of their leading arguments had already been introduced earlier by other scholars – Karl Deutsch in the 1950s and Carlton Hayes as far back as the 1920s. Yet, thanks to their critical and commercial success the books marked a watershed and proved most influential for the boom of nationalism studies and the triumph of the modernist paradigm in the following decades.

Although the theoretical discourse on nations and nationalism has significantly broadened and diversified since then, these three works are still regarded as most representative of the modernist approach, followed by other classical studies, such as John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State and Eric Hobsbawm’s later lectures Nations and Nationalism since 1780. This is why they are to be put at the centre of any critique of the modernist approach. Interestingly enough the books differ strongly both in argument and in content.