Nations are pictured before they are born: an empire holding many groups that already claim to be nations is a container under pressure, and a small trigger is enough to release them. Ansary's ch. 27: "All of these empires had nascent nation-states growing inside them like tumors. Every empire was full of people claiming to be nations entitled to autonomous self-rule." Many "were gestating within the empires and stretching their seams and straining to be born." Then one assassination: "And that was all it took." After 1918 they "started to slough off imperial incrustations like snakes shedding skin." Against it in the same chapter, the victors also drew "a rather arbitrary assortment of Arab nation-states." Clay's step: people built the states they had already pictured themselves inside; the size of the trigger says little, the stored self-images say what follows, and where no self-image existed, the outsider's map filled the gap.

Evidence 6 passages

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The victorious Western powers dealt with Arab nationalism by carving out a rather arbitrary assortment of Arab nation-states, such as Jordan, Syria and Iraq.
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the nation-states growing inside them started to slough off imperial incrustations like snakes shedding skin.
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And that was all it took. The old empires exploded like rooms full of firecrackers, each outburst setting off others.
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Although only a few true nation-states existed yet, many more were gestating within the empires and stretching their seams and straining to be born.
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Every empire was full of people claiming to be nations entitled to autonomous self-rule.
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All of these empires had nascent nation-states growing inside them like tumors.

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