Contemporary nationalism is the heir to two centuries of historic change. … [T]he legacies are truly Janus-headed. For the legators include not only San Martín and Garibaldi, but Uvarov and Macaulay… ‘[O]fficial nationalism’ was from the start a conscious, self-protective policy , intimately linked to the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests. But once ‘out there for all to see,’ it was as copyable as Prussia’s early-nineteenth-century military reforms, and by the same variety of political and social systems. The one persistent feature of this style of nationalism was, and is, that it is official – i.e. something emanating from the state, and serving the interests of the state first and foremost. —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities – Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2016 ed. , p. 159
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51