The outcomes of the critical junctures of history that were WWI and WWII created a social context where decolonization became a global phenomenon. As a consequence of the world wars, empires were uprooted as a dominant form of social organization to be replaced by a world organized as states, some of them considering themselves to be one people (a “nation”), others not. In this chapter, I focus on the making of political culture in two states that have emerged out of the decay of empires that vividly illustrate how the theory of collective remembering can be embedded within a broader approach to examining the flow of history and identity.