f course, in many of these countries the ideology of the nation state with its homogenizing and aggrandizing propensities was an import from the West. Western history is littered with the devastation at home and abroad caused by the overbearing nation state. The memory of colonial oppression and defeat by the West and the longstanding reality of its international economic and military domination add fuel to the ultra-nationalism in Asia, both on the chauvinist right and the anti-imperialist left. The misdeeds and the ambiguity of a country’s own history do not deter the nationalist zeal and myth-making. As the 19th-century French philosopher, Ernst Renan, famously said, part of being a nation is to get its history wrong.