ABSTRACT
Most polities look to a founding, a mythic point in history when the people came into being as a collectivity, from when it made sense to think in terms of “we.” As with individual humans, the circumstances of a polity’s birth are seen to influence the identity and career of its people. So Rome had Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf, and for centuries thereafter the Romans ranged the world. The Russians turned back the Teutons on the ice outside Novgorod, thereby beginning the violent half of the dialectic with Western Europe that would continue at Tannenberg, Moscow, Tannenberg again, and through the Cold War (and that would nurture not just Eisenstein and Solzhenitsyn, who treated these particular battles, but more broadly the Russian tradition of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, artists who sought a Russian identity vis-à-vis Europe). Although there has always been an England, the nation appears to have founded and lived its political life on the grass, from the meadows at Runnymede, to the playing fields of Eton, and more recently, Prime Minister Major’s evocation of shadows lengthening on village greens. Lawyerly gentlemen of independent means founded the United States through enlightened argument. Such are the myths that have informed lives in other polities.
