All big nation-states in Europe were and remain heterogeneous constructions. And they were all parts of empires, usually the core-areas of empires, being conceived, shaped and achieving some level of cultural and linguistic homogeneity in the context of imperial expansion and inter-imperial competition. Many regions in Europe had some state tradition and some potential for local nation-building. They were initially incorporated into the empires as periphery or borderland. But some of these regions had at times been included into a project of a bigger nation of the imperial core. Examples include
- Catalonia and the Basque country for Spain.
- Brittany and Provence for France.
- Bavaria for the German Reich.
- Slovakia for the Hungarian part of the Dual Habsburg Monarchy.
- Ukraine and Belarus for the Romanov empire.

As different strategies were employed in promoting competing projects of nation-building in the imperial core-areas and adjacent borderlands, the outcomes were also different. Moreover, different periods and contexts need to be distinguished. The Napoleonic conquest of Europe had profound implications on the self-understanding of both empires and nation across the continent. The impact of empires in the process of nation-building reached its heyday in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although empires continued to strengthen national consciousness in Britain and France in the early twentieth century. By contrast, Germany and Austria ceased to be an imperial nation in 1918. In Russia, imperial bonds still fuelled national identity, though in a different manner from before the Bolshevik revolution. These developments can be successfully analysed only in comparative perspective using a multi-factoral approach, in order to see
a) how the ideas of core nations in empires were spread and gained support of local elites,
b) how the politics of cultural and linguistic assimilation, including the ways of suppression or undermining claims for emancipation of local languages and cultures, were implemented,
c) how these developments were reflected in conflicting artistic representations of these regions as peripheries and as parts of the core nations.

An institutional approach will be necessary to analyse how imperial institutions took root and replaced traditional local institutions or coexisted with them. We will have to ask to what extent and how resources of the centre were made available for local communities, and to what extent local communities were able to negotiate with the centre about institutional solutions and availability of resources. Social and economic perspectives will address, for example, the impact of industrialisation in Wales or the Donbass area and related migrations. The conference will highlight the patterns of social mobility, including the ability of an imperial elite to incorporate regional elites. One should also address the issue from the perspective of the contested or non-contested borderlands. Were there competing influences from outside – as in the Catalan (French) or Ukranian (Polish and German) cases? Or was the imperial centre without rival, as, for instance, in Britanny or in Wales and Scotland? The successes and failures of the imperial development were also of paramount importance for the development of nation-building in the imperial core and adjacent areas. Thus, the case of Spain shows how much the project of building the Spanish nation was undermined by the loss of empire in the late 19th century, while the Russian nation-building was dramatically influenced by the defeat in WWI.

Bringing together regional studies, nationalism studies and ‘imperiology’ allows us to avoid some pitfalls, which are inherent to these perspectives when applied separately. The conference
- addresses the issues of hierarchical identifications and loyalties.
- highlights the entanglement of national, regional and imperial dimensions of European history in a diversity of contexts.
- emphasises the variety of outcomes of the processes of building big nations.