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This chapter focuses on the role of the artist in the creation of myths of and for the nation in post-unification Italy. In this process, the artist is both legislator and product of his age: the celebration of the new common history creates at once the myth of the nation and that of the poeta vate — as the ‘poet laureate’ was called in Italy. In nineteenth-century Italy political unification was accompanied by the consequent task of nation-building; this process turned out to be far more complex than anticipated and involved politicians and intellectuals alike in the common task of producing myths, symbols, and historical narratives for the newborn nation. Italian historians have investigated the strategies used in nineteenth-century Italy to create a sense of belonging to the newborn Italian kingdom. While analysing the new approaches to Dante that emerged from the process of nation-building, the chapter challenges teleological interpretations of ‘ideological’ uses of Dante and leaves space for Italian intellectuals' more complex and individual approaches to his work.

Decisive fiscal squeeze might surprise observers of the German political system, insofar as party political dynamics, welfare state complexity, and intergovernmental financial arrangements are commonly said to inhibit decisive reforms. This chapter traces the fiscal squeeze carried out in post-unification Germany in the 1990s and 2000s and highlights how the politics of fiscal squeeze had damaging political consequences for the Social Democratic Party. Squeeze at the federal government level was largely about ‘natural wastage’ in staff numbers and targeted cutbacks. The welfare state witnessed considerable reform as a result of cumulating pressures resulting from unification, triggering significant political consequences. Finally, squeezing at the level of the intergovernmental fiscal transfers reflected attempts to contain fiscal pressures on local governments, and wider pressures within the system of German federalism, leading to the creation of a constitutional ‘debt brake’ on public budgets.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about youth patriotism in the GDR. It examines the relationship between young East(ern) Germans and two German states (the GDR and post-unification Germany) during a period of unique change and explores the extent to which each state has attempted to form a young generation loyal to its image and ideology, and how, in turn, young people have responded. It also investigates the loyalties of young people before and after unification in equal measure and considers the government's educational programmes to promote patriotism.

From the deep Europe-wide recession, triggered by the end of Germany’s post-unification boom through the Great Recession that followed the late-2000s financial meltdown, with monetary union's establishment in between, Europe’s social models have evolved in a tumultuous macroeconomic environment, calling for reconsideration of the issues in public controversies over their effects on employment and inequality, for which this chapter sets the stage. After explicating the idea of social models as the constellation of welfare state, industrial relations, and educational institutions that jointly structure the supply-side of labor markets, it identifies the contrasting views of the demand-side role in unemployment linked to alternative critiques of the social models, followed by a schematic review of those critiques and the changes they prescribe. It then reviews the two chains of development following German unification and Europe's embarkation on monetary union, culminating in the Eurozone crisis and overwhelming the social models’ employment and distributive effects.