RUSSIA has long thought of itself as a singular power.
BlackBerry had long thought of itself as a company that provided mobile phone and wireless e-mail service.
NOT so long ago, the world of retailing thought of itself as more than just a series of transactions.
From its origins the church has thought of itself as the one and only worshipping community that could trace itself back to the group established by Jesus Christ.
"They became prophets of the Europe that thought of itself as the hegemony and then was superseded by the United States".
"No European country has voted for a multicultural society, or thought of itself as such, yet now we are all told we live in one".
Mr. Brooks writes: "Back in the dim recesses of my mind, I remember a party that thought of itself as a reform, or even a revolutionary, movement.
But with no segregationist laws, and widespread miscegenation, the country has long thought of itself as a racial democracy, free from the conflicts that characterise race-relations elsewhere, particularly the US.
The last time the United States self-consciously thought of itself as rich, in the early 1960's, discussions of how the wealth should be shared were under way even before real prosperity arrived.
In many respects, China's historical insularity means that it has largely lived homogeneously or thought of itself as doing so, writing off minorities like the Uighurs quarantined from the outside world.
But the anti-Iraq war insurgency created something new in modern politics — a kind of "movement liberalism" that thought of itself in the same scrappy, ideologically driven terms as the conservative movement, and that was determined to imitate conservatism's tactics, institutions and success.
