I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Miloševi? and Karadži? were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.
Author: Christopher Hitchens
