This book is divided into three main parts, dealing with historical narration, territory and language. Historical narrations have played a key role in ‘inventing’ national, gendered, ethnic and racial identities, and in presenting deterministic and essentialist conceptions of time and human action. The importance of (abstract and social) space in the production of history and the equal importance of the temporal dimension in the production of geography have been underlined by Doreen Massey. Her concept of ‘space/time’ abolishes the binary opposition of time and space and defines them as interrelated.This double process of spatial and temporal construction of identity is analysed here in a diachronic way from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, comprising the period traditionally considered as key to nation-building processes as well as current trends towards de-and renationalisation. The scale of this study is limited to discourse in Luxembourg and concerns the production of internal and external borders. Part One retraces the ‘genealogy’ of the master narrative from the early modern period and examines its absorption into public expressions of political self-identity after 1919. It then looks at the dissemination of the master narrative by means of textbooks, celebrations, literature and popular culture. Finally, it highlights the transformations of this narrative, the opening of fields of possibilities and new trends. Part Two examines how representations of space complement the master narrative by embedding past experiences in a certain territory and within certain defined borders. Territorial delimitations are projected back in time and legitimised by reference to the same bounded space in the past. Two different discursive strategies for the creation of ‘collective identity’ are distinguished: the centripetal and the centrifugal. The former characterises the national master narrative, while the latter has more of a supranational, Great Regional or European focus. Part Three traces the ...