It is so much around us in our everyday lives that we all assume that nationalism has been with us for eternity. This is not the case. Nationalism has arisen alongside the creation of the modern nation-state. Go back 300 or 400 years and there were no nation-states with recognised boundaries. There were Empires of varying kinds, kingdoms of varying size, sometimes the Kingdoms were part of an Empire and sometimes not.

Readers of these blogs will know that establishing world power has always required sophisticated ideology to justify action across the world. The centre of ideology in the hundreds of years after 1492, up to 1945 centred on race and racism; that European and then American invasions were by ‘superior’ peoples. Race was always a flexible tool and the exact variant varied over time determined by who were the perpetrators of the invasions and the moment in history.

The ideological story that followed 1945 would be determined by the USA. This blog discusses the new ideological tale told by the Americans and the old European colonial powers who had lost all their colonies as a consequence of the wars that ended in 1945.