Do National Identities Persist in the Era of Globalisation?

Do national identities persist in the era of globalisation? National identity is defined as ‘a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language’ http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/national-identity. Globalisation, a buzz word in modern culture, has various definitions and connotations, however for the purposes of this essay I will use Xavier & Rosaldo’s definition of globalisation as: “the intensification of global interconnectedness, suggesting a world full of movement and mixture, contact and linkages, and persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (2002: 2). As Theodossopoulos (2009) explains, in a modern world, globalisation as a process is is viewed as a ‘reified entity’. It inhabits various metaphors, seen as an active force shaping the world around us. “The persons who make up the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers, and other moving groups and persons constitute and essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (Appadurai, 1997, p.192), and globalisation appears to be the biggest Socio-political transformative force in our world today. I will argue that national identities do indeed persist in the era of globalisation, primarily through the efnification of migrants into new national identities, and through Diasporas. Geographical borders still hold firm significance in the lives of many, helping them to rationalise and maintain enduring forms of national identity. The constant flow and human transactions, of immigration and emigration, mean there is greater mixing of people than ever before, couples from two separate identities starting family’s (not my any means a new phenomenon but certainly a growing one) means a new global generation of children born with dual-nationality, with both official, and cultural links to various national identities. Identity is increasingly self-defined and fluid in the west, as Appadurai (1991, p.205) explains “lives today are as much acts of projection and imagination as they are enactments of known scripts of predictable outcomes”. In the case of the United States, immigrants have the option to become legal citizens of the state, creating a new national identity or in the case of some minorities, a hybrid national identity. In other parts of the world a sense of national identity remains stronger than ever despite globalisation, with the power of religious and cultural identity too strong to be diluted by outside influences. The regions of Palestine and Israel, and their ongoing conflict for land based on perceived ideas based on religious dogma and an ethnic right to land demonstrates the persistence these national identities. Globalisation is far from a new phenomenon. Particularly in Europe (Wolf, 1982); colonisation, the slave trade, and mass resettlements in foreign lands led to the establishment of the spread of European national identities, long before the technical advances of the modern world which we often attribute as the driving force behind the globalisation process. A strong indicator of the persistence of national identities as a cultural aid can be found in the re-emergence of national parties, many of which have formed out of a response to a discontent with globalisation. The economic collapse in Greece led to increasing presence of Golden Dawn, an extreme far right political party who’s members have often been accused neo-Nazism. Friedman (1997, p.75) describes how “the combined internal and external threat to everyday shared experiences and fantasies of the nation leads to increasing racism and a general efnification of the nation-state: both in the nation-state: both in the national population among many immigrants (now transferred into ethnic communities), regions, and indigenous groups”. It has also been noted that in other parts of Europe, austerity has been a fuel for racism, which according to Friedman (1991) is form of national identity. Front National (FN) in France and the British National Party (BNP) in the UK have also grown in popularity in response to tensions regarding the perceived threat of immigrant groups to national economic security. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9243545/Far-right-on-the-march-as-austerity-fuels-racism-Europe-warns.html In this sense, far from weakening national identity, the emergence of immigrant populations can lead to a new found strength in national ideology. Globalisation has also contributed greatly to the uptake and greater global presence of Islam, associated with many resilient forms of national identity. Interestingly this emergence of Islam in Western countries has also led to a push for the re-emergence of old national identities by certain groups. The ethnification of immigrant populations, in this case alongside a minority collective religious belief, creates diasporas which lead to the general process of fragmentation within a given society, polarising individuals and breaking down a previous sense of national identity (Friedman, 1997). The English Defence League, a far right nationalist party, gained traction in response to anger with the presence radical Islamist groups. As Friedman (1997, p.72) describes, “cultural/social fragmentation is aided and abetted by grass roots gut feelings of increasing alienation”, leading to the weakening of national identities in many places. The Office for National Statistics published in 2012 that 1 in 8 UK residents was born outside of the region http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/population-by-country-of-birth-and-nationality/2012/sty-population-by-country-of-birth.html, with large cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester accommodating to the majority of new labour migrants. To take this concept a step further, the sense of nationalist identity and movement formed in opposition to immigrant populations could actually be argued to be an accelerator to the exact groups they wish to oppress. Werbner explains that racial discrimination solidifies national identities among British Pakistanis, “despite their urbanisation and sophistication, elite Pakistanis remain a transnational rather than a truly cosmopolitan diaspora” (1999, p.33). Polarised from the society around them, they have traditionally set up own their own networks and communities. Kinship ties within the British Pakistani community remain very important, and due to insular closeness many of the non-working women don’t speak English, further escalating racial tensions and so forth. A seeming discontent with globalisation has also contributed to the re-emergence of many national languages. Irish Gaelic for example, once used by Irish prisoners of war as an act of national defiance against the English state and its language, has seen a wider uptake in past years even amongst urban populations such as Dublin. Many parents still chose to send their children to the ‘Gaeltachts’ where they are instructed in the Irish language, despite the fact that the majority of people in the Republic of Ireland speak English on a daily basis. The number of people speaking Irish on a daily basis outside the education system increased by 5,037 persons since 2006, from 72,148 to 77,185 http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011pdr/Census%202011%20Highlights%20Part%201.pdf. Elsewhere, Strong national identity remains in countries where there has been successful “insulation” from the global imagination of the outside world (Appadurai, 1991), for example in North Korea. However propaganda and censorship mean that national identity is not so much a reality but a construct of the state itself. The diaspora of particular ethnic groups, the Irish and the Jewish populations being two prominent examples, provides a strong demonstration of how collective identity can survive and is often strengthened when ethnic groups re-locate. The term ‘Irish-American’ shows how individual ethnic identity is formed through a sense of attachment to a genealogical homeland. Many 3rd, 4th and even further generations of Irish immigrants still claim to be ‘Irish’ and the strong sense of identity can be found in its influences throughout American culture today. Similarly, many 1st generation Irish immigrants form new hybrid national identities, becoming American citizens but still celebrating their Irish national identity – a self-created dual citizenship. However as Friedman (1997, p.84) discusses, for the urban poor of mixed ethnic areas, they may miss out on the opportunity of this ‘hybrid identity’. Reinforcing the subjective experience of class Werbner (1999, p.23) describes how “working class cosmopolitanism – a knowledge of and openness to other cultures – while implying the same processual forms of hybridisation and creolisation, do not generate the same cultural hybrids as those evolved by elite cosmopolitans”. Although it has been argued by some that national borders no longer play a part in a ‘un-bounded’, ‘flat world’ (Ohmae, 1990), borders present a complex image of the connection between globalisation and national identity, particularly in the case of reterritorialisation. National borders in their physical sense play a profound role in shaping national identity. The physical boundaries and their visual representations in the form of maps, television images, signs and checkpoints provide a counter balance to the idea of “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983). In the case of nationally divided countries or landmasses, for example in the island of Cyprus, the geographical border is significant in maintaining opposing national identities ‘Greek Cypriot’ and ‘Turkish Cypriot’. In this discussion, viewpoints supporting the notion of a loss of national identity in the face of globalisation cannot be ignored. There appears to be in much of Europe an increasing focus on ethnicity and its fluidity, as opposed to nationality. “It is in this fertile ground of deterritorialisation, in which money, commodities, and persons unendingly chase each other around the world, the group imaginations of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart” (Appadurai, 1991, p.194) It cannot either be denied that there is an emergence of new identities formed out of the reactions to social unrest, failure of the nation state and lack of collective national identity, examples of how national identity can in some cases be replaced by other movements, fuelled by globalisation. In much of Central Asia, the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to new constructions of reality. Pelkmans (2009) describes how in post-soviet central Asia, the high conversion rates to evangelism and Pentecostalism stem from disillusion with the nation state and the attractiveness of the modern global networks attached to these movements. Similarly in South Africa, Camaroff & Camaroff (1999) document the movement of occult economies among the new generation, failed by the promises of modernity and the state. The young black youth had big hopes for life after apartheid, only to find themselves persistently restricted by the confines of poverty and inequality. The crisis was escalated by the new global platforms of globalisation, increasingly bombarded with images of wealth via media forums from which they were seemingly excluded. Mass media is a potential force for the breaking down of cultural and national identity, presenting a “rich, ever changing store of possible lives” (Appadurai, 1991, p.197). Tacchi (2009) shows how radio is a ‘soundscape’ through which lives interact and people create new identities in relation to a perceived connection with the outside world. The possibility for stretching the imagination of ‘the other’ via media means that “fantasy in now a social practice” (Appadurai, 1991, p. 198). Although this may broaden the global outlook with positive affect, Appadurai describes how this does not always benefit those in the worst off positions. A whole new arena is now open to people in the most remote corners of the earth and many living in areas of poverty now have access to media displaying a world of opportunities from which they are excluded. Ethnoscapes are “no longer tightly territorialised, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous” (Appadurai, 1991, p.191). The concept of national identity within the majority of Western Europe seems to be becoming largely privatised, in keeping with other forms of cultural identity such as religious practice which have similarly been taken out of the public display and into the private sphere of the home. It is not necessarily the various inhabitants of the UK do not feel a sense of national identity, but instead that it is less prominent for them in the face of diversity and cosmopolitanism. Personal realisms and individualistic worldviews mean that the boundaries between them are increasingly blurred and the question has been frequently posed as to whether there is even such a thing as British ethnicity anymore. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/06/there-any-such-thing-british-ethnicity The ethnification of immigrant populations creates diasporas which leads to the general process of fragmentation within a given society, polarising individuals and breaking down a previous sense of national identity (Friedman, 1997). To conclude, migration will continue to force global pathways “along which people, goods, places and ideas travel” (Werbner, 1999, p.25). National identities often follow patterns of decline and re-emergence along a trajectory of social change and it is fair to say that globalisation equally increases the opportunity for forming new national identities as well as degrading existing ones. Bibliography Appadurai, A., (1991) Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Fox, R.G., (1991) Recapturing anthropology: writing in the present. Pp. 191-210 Camaroff, J., Camaroff, J., (1999) Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South Africa postcolony in American Ethnologist. Vol 26. No.2. (May, 1999) pp.279-303. Friedman, J., (1997) Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an era of de-hegemonisation in Werbner, P., and Modood, T., Debating cultural hybridity: multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (1997) pp. 70-89 Pelkmans, M., (2009) Post Soviet space and the unexpected turns of religious life in Conversion after socialism. Tacchi, Jo A. (2009) Radio and affective rhythm in the everyday in The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 7(2). pp. 171-183. Theodossopoulos, D., Kirtsoglou, E., (2009) United in discontent: local responses to cosmopolitanism and globalisation, pp. 1-19 Werbner, P. (1999) Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds in Social Anthropology 7, 17-35. Wolf, Eric R. (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California, Print. Keira Henderson. Kh346 SE573: Ethnicity & Nationalism Essay 1 Word Count: 2,047