The sheer audacity of this Anglo-Protestant presumption proposes:

• National identity is bad because it breeds nationalism which is an impediment to their neo-colonial ambitions. Therefore, national sovereignty for non-White Christian nations is dispensable.

• Why make a big deal of national sovereignty and national identity given that the nation-state is even otherwise on the verge of disappearing.

• The collapse of the nation-state will not lead the world to anarchy because White Christian nations would have enforced their version of democracy, freedoms and rule of law in all parts of the world well in advance of this imminent collapse.

• This is to say that the nation will be deliberately eroded while the state will remain. In this utopia of Anglo-Protestant imagination, constitutions and rule of law will replace national soul and ethos.

• What all people of the world really crave for is good governance that respects individualism, pluralism, human rights, religious freedom and rule of law. People do not need ideology or exclusivist nationalism.

And so, nationalism is passé. So is national sovereignty and so is territorial integrity. This is the essence of American foreign policy for the ‘Third World’. Glib declarations that the era of nationstates is over and that the world is entering the post-nation-state phase in the evolution of world polity, the idea that nations must get used to sharing sovereignty, and dubbing nationalism as jingoism, xenophobia, tribalism and parochialism are intended only to pressurise de-nationalised elites to reduce their nations to client markets of the old colonial countries. Is it just a coincidence that no Western leader dared peddle such garbage in Europe after France and the Netherlands rejected the draft European Union Constitution?

The concept of the irrelevant nation-state is being peddled by Washington whose own growing military strength – and whose heightened fears of a truly borderless politico-religious entity called Islam – fails to live up to this assertion. It is interesting that countries attempting to build a coalition called the European Union, in order to counterbalance American economic and military might, have failed precisely because their citizens view the move as corrosive of national sovereignty and national identity. This is to say that they fear that the exercise of political power in their respective countries would fall into the hands of self-serving economic elite, with little accountability to the national citizenry in each country.