"In a comparative European perspective, these workers carrying national flags seem exotic and are poorly understood. Well-known treatments, even of authors from Central Europe—like Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm—whittle down the specificity of the region’s nationalism beyond recognition as they shave off edges to fit it into a global definition of the term. Hobsbawm’s idea of the nation was to apply to every corner of the earth, but in this book, we have paid attention to what people in one corner meant by this word. In that corner, the coordinates of the global story as told in Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism are either irrelevant or secondary: for example, John Stuart Mills’s idea that a national state had to be “feasible,” or that nationalism required a particular threshold of size before it could be properly launched. Czechs or Slovenes knew nothing of such parameters and made their history without and against them. Hobsbawm’s idea that language and history were not decisive criteria would have struck virtually everyone in East Central Europe as nonsensical—though it may well apply to the phenomenon of nationalism as observed from a satellite high above the earth."