This is a bold, interpretive history of Central and Northern Europe from the end of the fourth century AD to the present. Encompassing the entire region north of the Alps and Carpathian mountains and between the Rhine and the Dnieper rivers, it tells the story of a part of Europe that history has tended to overlook. The development of modern Europe has traditionally been the tale of the rise of centralised state/national power, usually linked to the theme of modernization. This has worked to a greater or lesser degree for Western European states, and for Russia, but the smaller states of Europe, those that tend to be found in Central and Northern Europe, provide a different version of events. This is the world of unions and confederal states, the Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden (1397-1523) through the Holy Roman Empire (800/911-1806) to the Polish Lithuanian Union and then Commonwealth (1385-1795/1815). Other composite states include the Habsburg monarchy, uniting Austria, Bohemia and Hungary 1526-1918. The region evolved as a series of decentralized, consensual politics where central power was relatively weak - or if, in places it was strong, as in Scandinavia - it was strong because of its consensual base. Robert Frost describes a Europe in which 'nations' and different ethnic and religious groups lived side-by-side in a pattern which, until the ethnic cleansing of the 20th century, defied attempts ot construct neat national boundaries, whether physical or cultural.

Many of the political states on the map of this region today are very recent inventions. The book explores the internal development of the region, its impact on the rest of Europe and the wider world, politically, economically, socially and culturally. And it raises uncomfortably questions about the contemporary world, demonstrating how experiments such as the formation of Yugoslavia (1929), designed by western powers on western models, were doomed to failure.