Page 163 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

2000). We see the same kinds of nationalistic struggles today in communist
Vietnam and North Korea.
On the other side of the world where the Internet was invented and attracts
a greater proportion of users than anywhere else, and where individual rights
are fundamental to national ideology, the latest challenge to nation comes from
another direction. Less worried about the communist menace and a nuclear
holocaust, debates in the United States today focus much more on internal
questions of loyalty and commitment to the nation implicit in discussions of
race, culture, and language. America’s national identity, some claim, is under
attack in the ‘multiculturalism’ movement, which brings our discussion of
nation back to the issue of world civilizations and the question of nation as a
viable cultural entity. As Samuel P. Huntington argues, ‘the multiculturalists . . .
wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not
belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no
country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society’ (Huntington
1996: 306).
The multiculturalism debate in the United States is closely linked to the
roles of immigration policy and language in the construction of collective
cultural unity. As the linguist David Crystal points out, ‘some analysts consider
the English language to have been an important factor in maintaining mutual
intelligibility and American unity in the face of the immigration explosion
which more than tripled the US population after 1900’ (Crystal 1997: 118).
The ‘English only’ and ‘English as the Official Language’ movements in the
United States attempt to insure the long-term viability of the nation and
national identity in the face of increasing cultural diversi fication.
Challenges to nation can be found all over the world. Often these challenges
reflect the same cultural stresses that characterize recent debates and disturb-
ances in the United States. The One Nation political party launched in
Australia in 1997, with its anti-Asian-immigration platform and perceived
anti-Aboriginal stance, is one example. European countries from Sweden and
Finland in the north to Greece and Spain in the south invoke nationalist rhet-
oric as the ‘immigrant problem’ grows. Political debates surrounding the dis-
mantling of the Nordic region’s welfare societies, which have been in place
since the early twentieth century and serve as a foundation of Nordic cultural
identity and politics, are debated in terms of nation and national identity.
Canadian and Québecois nationalism are deeply influenced by culture and
language. The Chilean presidential election in 2000 – made particularly com-
plex and emotional because of the Augusto Pinochet extradition struggle
going on at the same time – was framed rhetorically in terms of the possibility
for bringing the political right and left together to form some kind of
post-Pinochet consensual national identity.

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