There is a strand of continental European historiography that is much concerned with historical time or, more precisely, with the articulation of different ‘times’ in specific historical moments. The decision to hold a summer school entitled ‘National Fictions: Struggles over the Meaning of World War II’ emerged out of just such an articulation of temporalities. More specifically, that decision emerged from the coming together of two phenomena. Firstly, the process, extending over some years, whereby nationalism ceased to be a scare fetish of the Left and began to be addressed in its historical dimension, and, secondly, the altogether more brief paroxysm of the South Atlantic War of 1982, in which conceptions of nationality shaped by key generative moments of the national past loomed so large.

The process of the (British) Left's coming to terms with nationalism can be followed through at a theoretical level by reference to certain key texts. The central one of these (which was studied at the summer school) is Tom Nairn (1932–2023)'s The Break-Up of Britain, a work deeply shaped by Nairn's own situation as a Scot perceiving the forces at work in his own country in the seventies. Alongside that book's recognition of the historical necessity of nationalism, it also to some extent displays a continuing distaste for that same ideological phenomenon (and, indeed, this forms the basis of the critique of Nairn's position now emerging in Scotland). Succeeding important works seem progressively more sympathetic to nationalism. Ernesto Laclau's Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, along with the useful works responding to it, paved the way for the crucially important articulation of the idea of the ‘national-popular’ with the idea of ‘hegemony’ derived from Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). The figurative cleansing of nationalism within contemporary Left theoretical writing would appear to be complete in Benedict Anderson (1936–2015)'s Imagined Communities, which locates nationalism not within the armature of modern political -isms, but as secular heir to the great religious systems of previous epochs.

This ongoing debate, therefore, became articulated with the explosive event of the South Atlantic War, when the Left and liberal opinion more generally experienced what could only be described as a deep sense of shock at the massive resurgence of a regressive definition of British national identity.