Seeking the Common Ground

In Anthony Smith’s 1981 book The Ethnic Revival we find the following:

The dissolution of ethnicity. The transcendence of nationalism. The internationalisation of culture. These have been the dreams, and expectations, of liberals and rationalists in practically every country, and in practically every country they have been confounded and disappointed. Although in the latter half of the twentieth century the world has become more unified, and its states more interdependent, than at any previous period of history, the hopes of cosmopolitans everywhere seem farther than ever from being realised, and ethnic ties and national loyalties have become stronger and more deep-rooted than ever. ¹

The homogenising tendencies of advanced industrialisation, and the processes encapsulated in the term ‘globalisation’, could be expected to reduce ethnicity to the folkloristic margins of society in a situation where neither multinationals nor mass electronic communications have any regard for ethnic or national boundaries. ² Moreover, the needs of industrial capitalism have been seen as requiring homogeneity, while the mass media may convince humanity of its global interdependence. Additionally, over the past two hundred years a series of imperial powers – from the British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to what Michael Ignatieff refers to as the Soviet and American joint imperium after the Second World War ³ – have in the past imposed a more-or-less effective policing authority on many preexisting ethnicities.