The Country is a Foreign Past (Nationhood through the Lens of Alternate History)

National identity is the result of a personal and unstable alchemical mixing of history, myth, social conditioning, and imagined landscape. This is not some fixed point, but rather a disputed, illusory, and ever mutable interpretation of one’s relationship with the country they live in. Some people have a devotion to their country that can only be described as religious, as their beliefs seem…