“Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history,” wrote the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1952. At that time, just seven years after the end of World War II, he and others were asking about the character of the nation that had risen to worldwide leadership. Niebuhr believed that nations were made of their histories, contrived or factual, and that “every nation has its own form of spiritual pride…. Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning.” Yet, he noted, “we are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears…which lie at the foundation of their political cohesion.” A total war among nations had made the idea of a nation more pertinent than ever. Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity.…