Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 19

NATIONAL IDENTITY

simultaneous appearance in the United States and so
many other countries suggests that common factors
are also likely to be at work. The more general causes
of these quests and questionings include the emergence
of a global economy, tremendous improvements in
communications and transportation, rising levels of
migration, the global expansion of democracy, and the
end both of the Cold War and of Soviet communism as
a viable economic and political system.
Modernization, economic development, urbanization, and globalization have led people to rethink
their identities and to redefine them in narrower, more
intimate, communal terms. Subnational cultural and
regional identities are taking precedence over broader national identities. People identify with those who
are most like themselves and with whom they share a
perceived common ethnicity, religion, traditions, and
myth of common descent and common history. In the
United States this fragmentation of identity manifested
itself in the rise of multiculturalism and racial, ethnic,
and gender consciousness. In other countries it takes
the more extreme form of communal movements
demanding political recognition, autonomy, or independence. These have included movements on behalf
of Quebecois, Scots, Flemings, Catalonians, Basques,
Lombards, Corsicans, Kurds, Kosovars, Berbers,
Chiapans, Chechens, Palestinians, Tibetans, Muslim
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2016

During part of a day-long celebration of the 125th anniversary of the
Statue of Liberty’s dedication, two babies sleep while holding American flags at a naturalization ceremony 28 October 2011 for 125 new
citizens on Liberty Island, New York. (Photo by Sgt. Randall. A. Clinton, U.S. Marine Corps)

Mindanaoans, Christian Sudanese, Abkhazians,
Tamils, Acehans, East Timorese, and others.
This narrowing of identities, however, has been
paralleled by a broadening of identity as people increasingly interact with other people of very different
cultures and civilizations and at the same time are
able through modern means of communication to
identify with people geographically distant but with
similar language, religion, or culture. The emergence
of a broader supranational identity has been most
obvious in Europe, and its emergence there reinforces the simultaneous narrowing of identities. Scots
increasingly think of themselves as Scottish rather
than British because they can also think of themselves
as European. Their Scottish identity is rooted in their
European identity. This is equally true for Lombards,
Catalonians, and others.
A related dialectic has been occurring between mixing
and huddling, the interaction and separation, of communal groups. Massive migrations, both temporary and
permanent, have increasingly intermingled peoples of
various races and cultures: Asians and Latin Americans
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