This work uses the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) as a case study of the community formation processes that occur across traditional national and state boundaries. Haas points to the ECSC as an example of an organization with the power to redirect the loyalties and expectations of political actors.

Far from being an inevitably aggressive and destructive force, nationalism is, for Ernst B. Haas, the primary means of bringing coherence to modernizing societies. In the second volume of his magisterial exploration of this topic, Haas emphasizes the benefits of liberal nationalism, which he deems more progressive than other nation-building formulas because it relies on reason to improve citizens' lives.The Dismal Fate of New Nations considers several societies that modernized relatively recently, many of them aroused to nationalism by the imperialism of the "old" nation-states. The book...