ABSTRACT
Globalisation traps, balkanisation, class polarisation, the dominance of transnational companies and the subordination of transnational migrants are all part of the imaging broadcast over the global media, and they merge with experiences of fear and joy in the countdown to the next millennium. The globalisation of fragmentation consists in driving a class wedge through the ethnic groups themselves, leading to a whole new set of internal conflicts. Ascending areas within the global system were said to experience the inverse process, the suppression or ranking of cultural difference, national and regional integration. National identity has become increasingly ethnified in this period as well in parallel with the ethnification of immigrants. The decline of hegemony is also the decline in the unifying force of its mechanisms of identification. The high proportion of Polish labourers in German industrial development led to their eventual absorption into German national identity.
