Awed by the color, scale, discipline and lavishness of the show, the world saw China wants its parts, and its present, to be viewed: as a majestic civilization that owes little to the outsiders and has bestowed great gifts on the rest of the world.

Four years earlier Athens had done much the same, albeit on a less awe-inspiring scale. Greece presented itself both in terms of the indisputable gifts of its own civilization to the world — classical sculpture and, of course, the Games themselves — and its “national” history, from the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans to the reign of Alexander the Great, the creation of the city of Byzantium, the achievement of independence from the Turks and modern ironic popular culture.


We need to listen to people describing their own past in their own words. The passions, the emphases in what they choose to say — perhaps even the omissions — will speak volumes.


Some countries, such as Egypt and Greece, might be blessed — or cursed — with a glorious ancient history that the present can never equal. Others, Israel and Iran being prominent examples, may feel perpetually misunderstood by others and see that misunderstanding itself as a major source of difficulty in the modern world.


It introduced a military republican regime and established a police state that denied the freedom of the individual and made him a doormat for the authoritarian regime. The revolution destroyed the democracy that had prevailed under the monarchy, even though one of its principles had been to establish free democratic life; political parties were dissolved and human rights ignored. Throughout the 16 years of his solitary rule President Nasser constantly feared a new revolution by enemies lying in wait — or so he claimed in order to tighten the clench of his fist. He removed the Egyptian people from the political sphere: why should they concern themselves with politics while the inspired leader was thinking and working for them?


That defeat caused a deep fissure in the Egyptian, and Arab, personality, and its effect endures in the souls of the Egyptians today. The people were shocked that Nasser and the pillars of his regime, particularly the military, had failed to fulfill their responsibility to defend their nation. Severe depression engulfed a country that, until the 1952 July Revolution, had considered itself great.


His readiness to deal with Israel was a major factor in his assassination on 6 October 1981, carried out while he was celebrating the 8th anniversary of his major victory. This was one of the blackest days in Egypt’s history: how could anyone kill the Pharaoh, surrounded by his army, while he was celebrating his unprecedented victory?


Political Islam disturbed the rule of law in both the monarchic and republican eras. It also gave the rulers, particularly during the republican era, an excuse for not implementing true democracy: they argued that the Islamists would achieve power though the ballot box and then discard the democratic pretensions. One republican regime after another scared the West, in particular the US, about the Islamists’ possible arrival to power. The West, taking a “devil you know” approach, therefore tended to support the ruling party, which helped to keep dictatorial regimes in power for decades without real legitimacy; this in turn provoked Islamist hatred of the West.


For a country claiming a history of 5K years, there exist no known histories left to us by Indians for three-quarters of this period. Myths and fables, yes, but nothing that would be considered historically authentic.


Even the name India was invented by foreign invaders. The Persians and the Greeks, trying to define the people who lived along the River Sindhu, wrestled with this Sanskrit name. They corrupted it to “Indus” — the name of the great river of the Punjab — and then, in trying to define the inhabitants of the region around the River Indus, the Persian and Greek tongues diverged. The Persian word was aspirated and came out as “Hindu,” the Greek one was softly breathed and came out as “India.” So “India” is a convoluted way of denoting the subcontinent beyond the Indus bounded by the Himalayas, while “Hindu” is the word that defines the region of the people who inhabit the region.


Recent historians have focused on the fact that, before the British acquired the country, India was a world economic power. In 1750, China had a one-third share of the world manufacturing output, India a quarter and Great Britain less than 2 percent. By 1860, after just a century of British rule, Britain had 20 percent and India 8.6 percent. In 1900 the UK had 18.5 percent and India was down to 1.7 percent.


If Alberuni had brought historical writing to India then the British relied on British experts on India who had never visited the country themselves. James Mill write his History of British India — a standard work for generations of British students — without ever setting foot in India. John Maynard Keynes worked in the India Office, wrote books on how Indian finance should be organized and helped to create the Reserve Bank of India. But he, too, never visited India.


India is a land that has no problems creating history but great problem finding good native historians. Indeed, in ancient India poetry was considered of higher value than history. Indians are constantly trying to reclaim their history from the various accounts left to them by foreigners. The result is continuing controversy and turmoil.


Towards the end of the 18th century the Qajars founded a dynasty and brought relative peace to the country. But Iran then became subject to an acute Anglo-Russian rivalry for imperialist domination, subsequently dubbed “the Great Game,” which robbed the country of full sovereignty. This was the origin of modern Iranian conspiracy theories, which are still strongly held by those of virtually all shades of political opinion. Iranians developed the habit of attributing even the slightest political event in their country to the machinations of foreign powers, and saw themselves as helpless pawns in the chess game of outside players.


The intellectuals found the remedy in law, pointing out that, unlike in Europe, the state still exercised arbitrary power over society. The Constitutional Revolution of the early 20th century was intended to establish a government based on law as well as to modernize the country along European lines. But the fall of the arbitrary state resulted in chaos rather than democracy, as it had done throughout Iranian history.


Modern Iranian elites, deeply influenced by European nationalist ideologies, rediscovered and romanticized ancient Persia’s glorious Aryan past and blamed the contemporary country’s backwardness on Arabs and Islam: without the Muslim conquest, the believed, Iran would now have been on par with Western Europe. This became the state ideology under the Pahlavi dynasty.


Yet not only did describing Iranians in terms of a single pure race fly in the face of the facts, it also more importantly ignored the Iranians’ remarkable capacity to receive, absorb and adapt foreign cultures, from the Babylonian culture of the 6th century BCE to the American culture of the 20th century. Indeed, this is the secret of the richness and continuity of Iranian culture and civilization, in spite of historic interruptions and perennial revolutions.


When the Shah tried to loosen his grip slightly in response to the American president Jimmy Carter’s call for the extension of human rights throughout the world, the revolutionary movement, led by the charismatic and uncompromising Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew his rule in February 1979.

The ensuring Islamic Republic was ridden with conflict, but the power struggles eventually resulted in the triumph of the Islamic forces. When in November 1979 American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, relations with the US continued to deteriorate, and the West subsequently supported Saddam Hussein in his long war with Iran which ended in 1988.


The second, “Mythistorema,” written in 1935 by the Nobel prize-winner George Seferis, likens the poet’s feelings about Greece to those of someone waking up from a deep sleep, holding his hands an ancient marble head, having dreamed his entire life that he was inseparable from it; he does not know what to do with the head and he is tired of holding it.


But the Greeks have paid a heavy price for persuading themselves and others of aninterrupted Helleic history: they are often perceived to fall short when compared to their invented, but distant, ancestors.


A reference to the Balkans often brings to mind issues such as ethnic conflict, war, and even ethnic cleansing: this is considered to be a region where everyone fights against everyone else. However, there is hardly anything exceptional about the Balkans; no more blood has been shed in this region than in any other part of the world. The problems there stemmed from the coexistence of ethnic populations in the same territory.


There are neighborhoods in Athens where migrants outnumber locals. Xenophobic outbursts that Hellenic identity is in danger from immigration are frequent — ironic in a land in which people regard hospitality as an ancestral trait.


Because Confucianism was not in itself able to make China prosperous and strong, it retreated step by step from its paramount position in society.

Without the foundations of their own culture thus undermined, Chinese attitudes towards it underwent a dramatic transformation. Chinese people now came to view their culture as barbarous, occupying a marginal position in the world. By the early 20th century China had lost its centre of gravity.


In what has been regarded as a kind of historical poem, or tableau, the ceremony emphasized paper-making and the other technologies that make up the historical “four great inventions” (the others are the compass, gunpowder and printing). These inventions, which are now seen as representative of Chinese culture, were seldom the object of any attention a century ago, and have only in recent times been rediscovered and granted their new significance. They are undoubtedly a part of Chinese history, but science never occupied the central position in China that it did in the West. Thus what was on display in the opening ceremony can be described as Chinese history from a Western perspective.


Ironically the grateful determination of post-war British governments to extend the benefits of the Welfare State to the province in the form of investment in education, health, housing and industry served to undermine Unionist rule. Its political and social aspirations at once whetted by the promises of progress and frustrated by persistent Unionist discrimination, the Catholic minority in the latter 1960s grew militant in its demands for equality. Crude intimidation and repression provoked sectarian violence, a transformation in the fortunes and power of the (Provisional) IRA and a breakdown of law and order, and led to the suspension of self-government and the imposition of direct rule from Westminster in 1972.


Portugal brought Philip much-needed success. In 1581 he was able to annex the neighboring kingdom. Now the peninsula was a single dynastic entity and the first true world power, stretching from Italy to Flanders and from Mexico to the Philippines. Spaniards were so confident that they actually thought they could take over China as they had done with Mexico and Peru. Perhaps the greatest expression of the new Spanish “unipolar” system was the worldwide expansion of a new religion order, the Jesuits, which brought an intense missionary to the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation.


However, France has many achievements of which it is rightly proud — though far fewer than those of the Britain, whose accomplishments across the world are immense. In this respect, France is closer to countries such as Italy, which is legitimately proud of the art of its Renaissance; Germany and its scientific advances in the 19th century; and Spain with the literature of its golden age.


The ensuing inferiority complex underlies Russia’s national identity, and the country and its people have never been able to respond convincingly to it. It has generated the ambition not only to be like the West and Europe, but to surpass them. Hence the frequent themes in Russian history: Rus protected Europe from the Mongols in the 13th century, Russia rescued Europe from the yoke of Napoleon in the 19th century, the Soviet Union saved the world from fascism in the 20th century, and so on.

Profound uncertainty about national identity, which some tried to explain as Russia’s intermediate position between East and West, was in fact rooted in the contradictory efforts to become as Europe, to surpass Europe and to deny the values of Europe.


On a personal level this conflict became a source of dilemma and psychological conflict. The debauchery and scandals described in the novels of Dostoyevsky are evidence of such conflict — small acts of rebellion in which an individual disputes the values of culture and civilization. In this respect Dostoyevsky is a truly Russian writer.


This Russian image of the West as an embodiment of their expectations for a perfect society caused significant psychological discomfort. Russian Westerners of the early 1990s, tormented by political instability, economic crisis and consumer shortages, were anxious about their own imperfection as well as the imperfection of their everyday life. Idealization of the West therefore intensified the national inferiority complex, rather than helping Russians to reinforce their own identity which had been undermined by the collapse of the Soviet regime.


However, the West has not lost its crucial significance for Russian national self-consciousness. It remains a determining factor for the cultural anxiety and ideological concerns of the Russians — it is here, at the core of national identity, and it has to be denied and surpassed over and over again.


The historian Jan Kren see Czech history through a European lens, and places it in the wider framework of Central Europe. In doing so it becomes clear that the Bohemian lands were at a great disadvantage from the beginning, being far from the sea and from the leading centres of classical civilization. The country therefore got off to a late start in history compared to the rest of Europe and was forced to catch up. This was the most important feature of Czech history, although it was also the fate of much of Central Europe. Other important themes, such as the discontinuities of history, and the country’s perception of itself as a victim, are also not unique to the Czechs.


Even so, by 1989, when Communism was finally overthrown, Hungarians had developed diffidence as their second nature, and were lulled into political laziness by the little compromises required in return for modest comforts. Few were prepared for this new chance to establish democracy, this time as apparently unlimited masters of their fate and succeeding or failing entirely on their own account. Distance will help posterity to judge how well they have fared.


The immediate ancestors of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty that endured until 1922, came to Anatolia in the second of two great waves of Turkish migration from Central Asia, following the Mongolian expansion across that area in the early 13th century. The enterprise started quite modestly, with nothing to suggest its subsequent triumphs. A small tribe of 400 tents deployed in the fringes of Bithynia managed to take advantage of political disturbances in the region and establish itself as an autonomous entity. It was not the biggest or the noblest of the many other Turkish principalities of the time — the Seljuks, for instance, were considered the “family of the kings” — but the Ottomans succeeded in becoming the major power in the region.


The story of the Turkish people lies in the nation’s swift transformation from being the executioner of God’s vengeance fo the “sick man of Europe,” the “proud empire trying to maintain its dignity in frequently undignified circumstances.”

The 19th century proved to be the longest of the Ottoman Empire. Decline in the political arena and humiliations on the battlefield left permanent marks on the well-protected domains of the sultans. The physical map of the empire was not the only thing to change dramatically; the mental map of its people also altered as a result of financial and political setbacks. Throughout the centuries all ranks of Ottomans had believed in the invincibility of their imperial project.


Yet, in a few decades, references to Ottoman arrogance vanished. In literature the cliche of the lustful Turk who could command the vulnerable captives of his harem was reduced to impotence.


Brazil is the most comprehensive manifestation in Western history (both ancient and modern) of Aristotle’s notion of a society that regards slavery as natural. Slavery is such a given feature of this society that it goes as unnoticed as the harmony of the spheres.


The absence of a sense of social belonging leads to extreme individualism. Economic and political corruption is seen as normal and pervades society; it is under the skin of business and found at all levels of the executive, legislature and judiciary. The public is resigned to corruption scandals, and blatantly corrupt politicians are re-elected. Antisocial behavior is the norm. Major infrastructure investments are designed to line the pocket of the automotive industry rather than enhance collective transportation.


Nationalist intellectuals from extreme right to extreme left have been deployed to argue that the destruction of the forest is the price to be paid for economic growth, and that any attempt to hinder this process only serves the interests of the leading global economies, who not covet profits from “our” forests, having destroyed their own in the past.


Whereas during the 16th-century conquest Mexicans fought for the Spaniards, Mexico’s fight for independence — which was eventually achieved in 1821 — was orchestrated and organized by the Creoles. This apparent contradiction has characterized two important chapters of Mexican history.


“Give everyone what they are entitled to” was the motto of Porfirio Diaz when he took the presidency in 1876. Unfortunately his ideals were not to last, and he soon favored the elite, both Mexican and foreign.


On the other hand, water and the need for shared agency and continuous negotiation between man and nature have made Holland a matter-of-fact society: physical survival precedes the flourishing of the mind. In science, as in everyday life, Dutch people tend to think of practical initiatives, problem-solving and techniques, before developing abstract ideas, broad values and universal perspectives.


The result is a country in which the concepts of society and state are interchangeable. The values associated with this are better captured by foreign stereotypes than by the country’s own impressions of itself. The Swedes, for example, regard themself as shy and lagom, while foreigners stress Swedes’ individualism, especially in sexual matters. If we look below the surface, the Swedes are extreme in several respects. Swedish society is one of the most secularized in the world and Swedes place a very high priority on the development of individuality. Yet, in order to choose an education, career, spouse or home freely, and not be dependent on parents and family, these individuals need partners. Hence the wider paradox: Swedes need a strong state to guarantee the freedom of the individual.


National identity was moulded during war with France and Spain. In a period of a little over a hundred years, from the early 18th to early 19th century, there was declared war with the former no less than 7 times and undeclared war twice, with hostile relations existing at other times.

This was the context in which British identity was created and the empire expanded.


Victorian Britain displayed a sense of uniqueness, self-confidence and contempt for foreigners, especially Catholics. This xenophobia was not a matter of hostility towards foreignness itself, but rather towards what was seen as backward and illiberal. The latter were defined in accordance with British criteria, but these criteria were also considered to have wider applicability. Freedom of speech, a free press and — despite distrust of Catholics — religious tolerance were regarded as important.


“History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford famously proclaimed, “We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” The patriots who vindicated colonial American claims to independence and nationhood expressed the same sentiment, if more eloquently, asserting that this “new” self-created people owed nothing to the past — except, perhaps, for lessons of tyranny and despotism, the “long train of abuses and usurpations.”


In 1807 Jefferson underscored the great difference between the two worlds: “war and contentions, indeed, fill the pages of history with more matter” in Europe, “but more blest is that nation whose silent course of happiness furnishes nothing for history to say.” Pursuing happiness, as they had been enjoined by the Declaration of Independence, Americans escaped from history — “rivers of blood” would continue to flow on the far side of the Atlantic — into a republican millennium of peace and prosperity.


According to conventional wisdom, free peoples lost their liberty as power coalesced in fewer and fewer hands until despotic regimes toppled from their own dead weight; power was then broadly redistributed and the progress resumed. “Revolution” did not have its modern, progressive connotations, but suggested another turn in the inexorable rise and fall of regimes. Virtuous patriots sought to return to first principles and recover lost liberties, but the logic of history always worked against them, as a rising tide of luxury and corruption subverted the character of formerly free peoples.


The American Revolution constituted a fundamental rupture in historical consciousness as well as in what the Declaration of Independence calls “the course of human events.” A new cast of characters, the “people”, now crowded the stage. Previously the people — vulgar plebeians, the mobs — had been seen as only a lowly part of political society. Now the logic of radical republican ideas transformed their image, making them collectively the source of legitimate authority. Kings and aristocrats were driven into exile and excluded from the otherwise all-inclusive people.


As Americans have imagined themselves a “chosen people” beyond history, they have been acutely conscious of the dangers of falling back into history, losing sight of their destiny and rejoining the ranks of the damned. The fear has always been that their revolution would be reversed and the republican experiment would fail.


Would the reunited states show the way towards a better future for all humankind, or would Americans prove to be no different than other peoples, subject to the vagaries and accidents of history? If Americans themselves could not escape history, there was no hope for humankind.


Then in 1982, in the context of a worsening political situation, Argentina’s military dictators entered a conflict with Britain over the Falklands Islands. Defeated propelled the military from power and the terrorist apparatus of the state now became evident to thousands of citizens who had lived under it without knowing of its existence. The armed forces also lost all respect for their ability to defend the country from external threats.


Canadian diplomats often played the role of helpful fixers in a room of overinflated egos.


In 1972 popular talkshow host Peter Gzowski asked his listeners to create a Canadian counterpoint to the aphorism “as American as apple pie.” The winner of the contest suggested “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” Nearly 4 decades later, this still fits.


In the Protestant world, power was seen as emanating directly from God. Although this religion was to spawn absolutist ideals as well as constitutional theories, political power was seen as sacred and, even after its theological origins had been forgotten, a sense of respect for its institutions remained. Debates within Protestantism focused on which powers were created by God: those of the prince, the judge, or a sovereign people able to elect its representatives. Over time the sacred aura surrounding political power was internalized as a civic value. According to the Protestant view, all these forms of political power rested on divine intervention. Catholics developed entirely different political theories. For Catholics, God had no role in institutions created by humankind. God made us into social beings who had to create a government for ourselves. But free will meant that we could build whatever government we desired. Humans, though, are sinners and tend to produce imperfect institutions; so the Church was required to correct their actions and lead them to salvation.


Today it could be argued that in Italy religion is no longer particularly important in and of itself. But beneath the surface of an apparently secular society and state, four centuries of cohabitation between church and state have shaped politics and created a sense of justice that is dominated by this dualism. Indeed, Catholic countries around the world share this characteristic of institutions that are weakened by the existence of incompatible systems, with a proliferation of rules and laws. As a result they have rarely been able to create significant levels of consensus.

In Italy both the laws of the state and the moral teachings of religion are feeble. The state is widely seen as extraneous, an institution that everyone has the right (almost a duty) to defraud, and similar attitudes are held towards the Church. Over time these attitudes were internalized and then started to shape social behavior and political opinions, a problem which Italy has been unable to resolve.


This incurable illness has had many consequences. Weak institutions have sought to defend themselves by increasing regulation and at times enforcing an authoritarian transformation of the state as a last resort in the face of insecurity and disorder among the population. Every Catholic country experienced dictatorial forms of government in the 20th century.


The concept of “amoral familism” has often been used to describe the strong attachment to family, the over-protective role of the mother and the near-absence of the father. But these features are the consequence of a perverse tendency to take refuge in familial solidarity, clientelism, and informal and fragmentary institutions in the face of dysfunctional political and religious organizations. In this way an image of Italy has taken shape as a country that is free and anarchic, but also divided and unable to take collective decisions or to complete projects. It is viewed as a nation that combines individual initiative with bureaucratic paralysis, corruption and in-fighting. It is seen as a country that has lost interest in the beauty and culture with which it is filled in its desire to move towards a modernity without culture. This is accompanied by a tendency for Italians simply to get by, without any real lik to their past or coherent vision of the future: we live a good life and we let others be. We don’t expect thing to work but we are interested in how to adapt to their dysfunctional nature.


It is not difficult to govern Italians, just useless.


It is not surprising, therefore, that foreigners have such a stereotypical view of Italy’s past and present, and that their interpretation of our country is often confused. Historians from abroad have generally bene most interested in the republican city-state tradition of the medieval and Renaissance Italy. Few foreigners find the centuries after the Renaissance very interesting, partly because Italy took a very Catholic path towards the modern age.


Italians have a weak sense of national identity. Parish localism or, alternatively, the cosmopolitan Catholic world lie at the roots of a lack of pride in the nation. A strong sense of self-irony, moreover, leads to a preference for narratives focusing on our defects rather than our merits, which are often simply seen in terms of the advantages of one city against another, or in regional terms. In Italy, more than elsewhere, a strong sense of detachment from the past has evolved: it is viewed as principally comprising a series of mistakes rather than successes.


In 1929, when the Great Depression plunged the world into economic crisis, Japan derived strength from its traditions of authoritarianism. It adopted an aggressive policy of military force and chose fascism as a solution. Since the achievements of modernity had not managed to avert the crisis, the response was now to attempt to transcend the modern period. Due to its Western characteristics, the universalist model was rejected in favor of a return to the exceptionalist Japanese tradition.

This Japanese exceptionalism was now violently enforced and directed towards the mobilization of the population for war. Whereas Mount Fuji and cherry blossom had previously been symbols of Japan itself, they now acquired a specifically military significance as symbols of mobilization and national unity. The emperor, who represented 2,600 years of tradition, was portrayed as a being unlike any other in the world: he was God. Although few seriously believed in his divinity, it was taught rigorously in elementary schools. Japanese exceptionalism was ubiquitous during the war period and it produced a hugely destructive power.


The result was a deep crisis of the national paradigm. The formation of the first nation state in 1871 was not perceived as a historical mistake that brought nothing but instability and misery to Germans and Europeans alike. The lesson was clear: Germans would do best to abandon their search for a unified nation state and instead develop a post-national consciousness, accepting the existence of two separate nation states and the redrawing of Germans borders after WW2.


Most ordinary Germans now have little, if any, knowledge of medieval history. The heroes and legends that would have been familiar to every schoolchild in imperial Germany have faded into oblivion.


There is another myth about contemporary Germany, widely held outside Germany and shared, to some extent, by many Germans: the idea that they are peculiarly lacking in any nationalism, not to say anti-national, and that their enthusiasm for the EU is the direct result of such anti-nationalism. This perception is sometimes tied to the idea that post-nationalism is yet another German attempt to force their own intellectual predilections on other Europeans, who are perfectly happy with their national identities and histories. More malicious anti-German and anti-European commentators have even argued that the EU is, in fact, the latest German design to gain dominance over the European Continent. German economic power has meant that the ongoing debt crisis and enforced austerity measures in some weaker Eurozone countries are experienced as a new form of German domination.


Persecution down the centuries, beginning with that of the Church Fathers in the early centuries of the Christian era, brought it home to the Jews that they had to seek self-emancipation rather than await liberation by others. They reached this conclusion when they realized that the great hoped raised by the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment during the 18th century remained solely within the realm of theory. The advent of the caring nation state, the secularization of society and the proclamation of the progressive dawn of humanity had not brought the Jews joy.


Some 70 years after its bloody birth pangs, Israel is recognized as a success even in the Arab world. A quarter of its workforce possesses university degrees — the third highest proportion in the industrialized world. Israel is at the cutting edge of advanced technology.


It is difficult to imagine any great change in the immediate future. Italy has no founding myths, moments or episodes that can be used for effective nation-building. The key moment was the abolition of the temporal power of the popes through the dissolution in 1870 of the Papal States that had divided the country in two, geographically and in many other ways. Yet for a Catholic country to make its founding myth out of a war against the papacy is unthinkable.


Mussolini once said, “It is not difficult to govern Italians, just useless.” Outsiders also view us with irony and surprise, without understanding that this people with so little interest in political and religious rules has been created by a conflict between a weak state and a church that is always ready to forgive — as long as we accept the idea that we are all sinners, ready to be pardoned precisely because of this tragic inevitability.