In The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians (James 1994) author Louis James writes: ‘When a Stone Age Austrian popped out of a glacier in Tyrol in 1991, he was claimed by the Italians as one of them. A learned commission established that maybe he was lying just over the border by a metre or two, and a television reporter inquired satirically why they didn't just look at his passport’ (1994, p. 11).

The moral of this story is that even after all those years in cold storage, the iceman (Ötzi) suffers from a certain confusion as to his identity, a trait he ostensibly shares with all other Austrians. Of course, this nationalist tug-of-war between Austria and Italy, to which James ironically refers, really tells us nothing about Ötzi's identity, for national(ist) ideas and sentiment did not emerge before the age of modernity, centuries after Ötzi's demise. Still, the attempts by both Austria and Italy to adorn their respective ‘national pasts’ with a historically highly significant archaeological find reveal a typical strategy, metaphorically described by Rudolf Burger (1996, p. 40) as the ‘nationalist dilation of time’. In this view, similar problems of identity seem to beset the English too. Past contingencies (in this case, a casual discovery) are appropriated by the contemporary nation by mythically expanding the nation into a transhistorical, and thus eternal, entity.

In a companion volume, The Xenophobe's Guide to the English, Antony Miall writes: [As far as] ‘the English are concerned, all of life's greatest problems can be summed up in one word – foreigners’. And he continues: ‘English views on foreigners are very simple. The further one travels from the capital in any direction, the more outlandish the people become’ (1993, pp. 5–6). It is obvious that the ego-, ethno- and nation-centric view described by Miall with respect to English people is not so much an English peculiarity as a general cross-cultural feature of ethnicist and nationalist patterns of perception of others.