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"In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political elites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors. Within this negotiation process, the authors focus on the important contribution of processes occurring at a local level. These can either generate entirely new memories, or bestow nationally forged sites of memory with innovative, sometimes subversive meanings. As many cases in this book attest, local memories can be at the same time eminently transnational: they can reflect the concrete--more or less harmonious--co-existence of several groups on the same territory, or the willingness to bring about reconciliation between nations at a site of common mourning"--

Narratives of democracy have played an important part in Belgium's self-understanding ever since the country gained its independence in the 1830–1831 revolution. In the more or less official historiography created by the Belgian political and intellectual élites, collective actors of lower and middle strata much rather than monarchs and aristocrats were presented as the forerunners of the Belgian nation. This situation stimulated a proliferation of alternative, and often dissident, democratic narratives among those who saw themselves as the true heirs of these collective actors. Left-wing Republicans and at a later stage Socialists used their narratives to criticize the oligarchic character of the existing political structures, but remained firmly within the Belgian framework. The democratic narratives fostered among Catholics in Flanders, on the contrary, were based on a more fundamental tension with the mainly Francophone and secular Belgian State. Since the First World War, this tension developed into a consistently anti-Belgian and anti-parliamentary narrative of democracy within the emerging Flemish Nationalist subculture and party. By analysing these divergent narratives, this essay thus shows how the initially democratic self-understanding of the Belgian state substantially mortgaged the creation in the long run of stable and unifying national discourses.

Rens Bod's optimism with regard to digital research tools also seems to bejustified for the field of political history. In particular, these tools will enable us to ask questions that were hitherto unthinkable, and try to answer them on an unenvisaged scale. Unlike that which Bod suggests, however, this development will not bring us closer to revealing some alleged universal patterns in history and therefore herald a new era of Positivism. On the contrary, the digital research tools will show us manifold differences, both diachronic and synchronic, in the way (groups of) political actors identified themselves and gave meaning to the world surrounding them. Moreover, they will enable us to relate these differences to a broad range of social variables. If we really want to test the validity of these relationships however, we will have to actually interpret the texts and read them hermeneutically in their precise historical contexts.

In the late nineteenth century, it became common to consider the Franks, the Frisians and the Saxons, three Gemanic tribes believed to have settled in the Netherlands during the Early Middle Ages, as the oldest ancestors of the Dutch people. The success of this historical theme was partly due to evolutions in the human sciences, which during that same period were stronglyinfluenced by a tribal paradigm. Being politically and geographically inclusive and leaving at the same time space for diversity, the theme also responded to the needs of Dutch nation-building and integration. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of the theme soon became apparent. Since it did not allow for strong external borders, while suggesting fairly clear-cut internalborders, the theme appeared, especially during the Second World War, to be an insufficient warrant against the dangers of regionalism and annexionism. When after the Second World War the tribal paradigm lost its grip on the human sciences, the 'three-tribes-theme' was also fundamentally questioned, and slowly faded away.