Imagine if two or three hundred years ago an enterprising and militaristic group of men set sail from Asia and landed in a remote part of Europe. Declaring the area so sparsely populated as to constitute “terra nullius", or land that didn’t really belong to anyone, the newcomers set up a state, to which they brought thousands more of their countrymen. The local Europeans, who were considered childlike savages with nothing that could be regarded as a proper legal system, were steadily deprived of their land, either by grossly unfair treaties or by outright denials that they ever had title to it in the first place. The new country had been “discovered", “settled" by superior Asians, whose mission was to bring civilisation to the poor, benighted barbarians, regardless of their wishes.

