In his brilliant book, Imagined Communities, the historian Benedict Anderson explained how a nation is a socially constructed entity. It is a community in which no one can ever know everyone else, and so instead, shared institutions and national myths unite people. A sense of nationhood is constructed, sometimes artificially, sometimes organically, but always in a way that varies according to time and place.
For example, the House of Commons is an institution which creates the nation of the "United Kingdom", because everyone experiences the effects of the laws it passes. Equally, the Second World War is part of our national mythology – even though very few of us now alive fought in it, we think of it as "our war". We learn about it at school, watch The Great Escape on Boxing Day, see the concrete pill boxes on beaches on our holidays in Normandy.
Usually, the Second World War is the "good war", in contrast to the "pointless war" of 1914. The national memory of the First World War is plucky young men running into machine gun fire, as at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth. Our memory of the Second World War is the Blitz, D-Day, Dad's Army and Winston Churchill crying defiance on the airwaves.
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