Page 138 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

115 The Development of Normative Structures

state was more reliant than the state in tribal societies on the
loyalty and willingness to sacrifice of a population made eco-
nomically and socially mobile. The identity of world citizens
obviously is not strong enough to establish universal conscription.
A symptom of this can be seen in the double identity of the
citizen of the modern state—he is homme and citoyen in one.?"
This competition between two group identities was temporarily
silenced through membership in nations: the nation is the modern
identity formation that defused and made bearable the contra-
diction between the intrastate universalism of bourgeois law and
morality, on the one side, and the particularism of individual
states, on the other. Today there are a number of indications that
this historically significant solution is no longer stable. The Fed-
eral Republic of Germany has the first army expected by the
responsible minister to maintain fighting readiness without an
image of the enemy.”* Conflicts that are ignited below the thresh-
old of national identity are breaking out everywhere, in connec-
tion with questions of race, creed, language, regional differences,
and other subcultures.?°
One alternative to the presently disintegrating national identity
was the European working-class movement. Taking the bourgeois
philosophy of history as its point of departure, historical material-
ism projected a collective identity compatible with universalistic
ego structures. What the eighteenth century had thought of under
the rubric of cosmopolitanism was now conceived of as socialism;
but this identity was projected into the future and thus made a
task for political practice. This was the first example of an iden-
tity that had become reflective, of a collective identity no longer
tied retrospectively to specific doctrines and forms of life but
prospectively to programs and rules for bringing about something.
Until now identity formation of this type could be maintained
only in social movements; whether societies in a normal state
could develop such a fluid identity is questionable. It would have
to adjust itself to high mobility, not only in regard to productive
resources, but also in regard to processes of norm and value
formation. For the time being only China is experimenting with
such arrangements.
This sketch can at best suggest how to use the identity de-