A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.”

The chapter outlines the impact of romantic philhellenic and Slavophile thought on the emerging grand narratives in southeastern Europe. Its focus is the formative phase in the national historiographical canons of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania during the nineteenth century and the interpretations of Byzantium intrinsic to these narratives. The Greek historiography devoured the empire and its cultural heritage wholesale, turning it into an integral part of national continuity and assimilating the canonical (and teleological) European division of history into classical, medieval and modern periods. For the Bulgarians, Byzantium, which they equated with contemporary Greeks, featured as the main adversary in confrontation with whom the Bulgarian national state and identity crystallised and were sustained. The Serbian historians foregrounded the significance of the medieval empire of Stefan Dušan as an actual heir and improved version of the Eastern Roman empire. Romania, the latecomer on the medieval political scene, reconfirmed its claims to represent the Latin West in the (post-)Byzantine East.

Comparing cultural developments in Ireland with European romanticism is problematic on a number of scores. The European periodisation of romanticism is broader than the English-derived start- and end-dates applied to Ireland; European surveys, in aggregating many exemplars from many different countries, create an unjustified impression of quantitative preponderance, against which background any small individual country would appear comparatively scant; and a proper European comparison should juxtapose Ireland with similar countries (imperial peripheries like Bohemia, Croatia, or Finland), rather than with imperial-metropolitan heartlands such as neighbouring France or England. This chapter attempts to correct these imbalances. Most importantly, it is argued that romanticism manifested itself, not only in the field of poetic production (to which its meaning is reduced nowadays), but also in the fields of cultural reflection and knowledge production; and it is in these fields that Irish developments are most closely analogous to European ones.