Of Individual and International Identities: Notions of Nationalism and Nationhood.

"Globalization" is what everyone seems to be talking about as one millennium yields to the next. What does this elusive, variously defined concept represent in the context of an organization whose formal membership comprises 188 States and whose effective constituency transcends six billion human beings? The Chronicle hopes to offer ideas and perspectives in this regard over the coming year and, to initiate the debate, brings to its pages the thoughts of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in Norway, who is the author, among other works, of "Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives". He graciously contributed, at our invitation, his views on "Globalization and the Politics of Identity".

In a certain, important sense, the present world is more tightly integrated than at any earlier point in history. In the age of the jet plane, satellite dish, global capitalism, ubiquitous markets and global mass media, various commentators have claimed that the world is rapidly becoming a single place. Although this slightly exaggerated description has an important point to make, perhaps an even more striking aspect of the post-cold-war world is the emergence, seemingly everywhere, of identity politics, whose explicit aim is the restoration of rooted tradition, religious fervour and/or commitment to ethnic or national identities.

It is doubtless true that globalization is a pervasive tendency influencing the lives of people everywhere- from the Amazon rainforest to Japanese cities. The concept has recently become a fashionable one and, as a result, its meaning is becoming fuzzy. I would propose, therefore, a view of globalization as all the sociocultural processes that contribute to making distance irrelevant. It has important economic, political and cultural dimensions, as well as equally important ethical implications. Truly, global processes affect the conditions of people living in particular localities, creating new opportunities and new forms of vulnerability. Risks are globally shared in the age of the nuclear bomb and potential ecological disasters. On the same note, the economic conditions, in particular in localities, frequently (some would say always) depend on events taking place elsewhere in the global system.

Patterns of consumption also seem to merge in certain respects; people nearly everywhere desire similar goods, from cellular phones to ready-made garments. Naturally, a...