The Berger/Smith collection has chapters of uniformly high quality, which survey the individual countries in a scholarly and thorough way. The contributors focus on a common set of questions, spelled out in the editors’ preface, which ask them to show to what extent and by what means labour was integrated into the national community, how this process was affected by economic factors and by divisions within the working class, and also by the spread of popular national culture as a unifying force spanning class divisions. The contributors also take up the highly significant question of whether it is possible to make a clear distinction between a positive patriotism of the left and a xenophobic aggressive nationalism. The chapters on France and on the United States illustrate a nationalism of the left, which held out the vision of a more inclusive national community, and which, in the French case, at times claimed the nation and its emotional associations for the left against the attempt by the right to appropriate the nation for its own purposes. Roger Magraw, the author of the chapter on France, also gives weight to the potentially exclusionary implications of all forms of nationalism, and the danger of slippage from left-wing nationalism to more rebarbative versions of the national idea. What emerges from several chapters in this collection is a sense of the malleability and flexibility of the idea of the nation, which is not necessarily opposed to class identity and identification with the labour movement. The chapter on India (by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar) is also interesting in this respect: he points out the subordinate place often given by the nationalist movement in India to the working class and to socialism, quoting Nehru to the effect that ‘the National Congress is a large body comprising all manner of people’. Yet the Congress nationalist attack on the colonial state opened up a space for working-class organisations, even though this was not the result intended by the Congress Party leaders.

The reader of the Berger/Smith volume is given a good sense, in the various national contexts analysed in its individual chapters, of the diverse and complex ways in which national and class identities can intertwine, whether in mutually complementary ways or in antagonistic ones. Often sections of the working class, particularly unskilled workers, were attracted by ‘radical Right’ and xenophobic discourses of the nation, which appealed to workers’ fears that their jobs would be taken by immigrant workers. The chapter by Angel Smith on ‘Spaniards, Catalans and Basques’ suggests the further intricacy of the situation that arises when there exist competing national identities in a particular geographical area. It is perhaps unfortunate that there is no concluding chapter in this volume attempting to develop some general conclusions on the basis of the individual country studies.

The volume edited by Pasture and Verberckmoes also starts with a general agenda-setting survey by the editors on the historical dilemmas and current debates in Western Europe. This volume, too, shows the complexity of the issue of ‘class’ and ‘nation’, and the need to escape from a simplistic binary opposition. It does so by focusing on nations where national affiliations and class loyalties interact in complex ways, such as Belgium, where Pasture charts the divisions in the Belgian Christian Labour Movement caused by the national divisions of Walloons and Flemings. Like the more historical volume edited by Berger and Smith, the level of individual contributions is high, the amount of information provided is considerable, and again one can regret the absence of a concluding chapter attempting to pull together some of the threads of the country studies.