"A nation is a group of people united by a common misunderstanding about their origins"

"A nation is a group of people united by a common misunderstanding about their origins." (Ernest Renan).

The current misunderstanding held by the English does not relate to Hengist and Horsa, whom no Englishman I speak to has heard of, but to the mistaken idea that they were always an immigrant nation.


Similar misunderstandings apply to France, which had very few immigrants till the twentieth century and then mostly Latin Catholic ones for the first half of that, Germany and many other Western European countries.


I wonder if people in Sweden tell the Swedes that they were always an immigrant nation.