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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 165

West under the designation of "political correctness." In this, and also in
the other three modifications, national identity fails.
Archaizations, all the way to ethnicity, are insufficient for the
maintenance of national identities for other reasons too. A contemporary
appeal to various fundamentalisms as archaic modes of retaining one's
national identity disallows the latter, since current fundamentalisms
transgress national and even cross some levels of cultural boundary. At
such levels they become incompatible, as is the case with modern
jurisprudence and any archaization appealing to divine or even naturalistic
laws. In turn, various nationalities, whose origins are distinct from the
origins of the fundamentalist texts, cannot claim to go back to their
archaic roots by appealing to such texts. Other grounds must, therefore,
be found for the constitution of nationality, specifically in the context of
modern globalization. It may be plausible for postmodern culture to
provide the resonances among various aspects of a nation, including the
archaic, modernizing, major mythologies, ethnic claims, and globalizing
requirements. Yet such resonances remain floating, exploratory, bereft of
a stabilizing capacity and reliable practical judgments. It must be borne
by something which allows it play-space. The task cannot be taken up by
modernistic culture of the West which is overly flat and possessing
homogeneous, formalistic, and rule bound instrumental and magical
rationality. Its technical achievements tend to subdue, dull, exhaust, and
level the identities of multi-faceted cultural designs. Genuine archaic
rituals are always provincial, stuck in the nebulous and mysterious
sacrality of ancient places and texts. Adherents of such texts and the
continuous repetition of one's own former greatness have only revenge
for those who intruded—if it only had not been for them. Thus we still
face the issue of national identity in the context of globalization that
tends to subsume cultural differences and ethnocentric and nationalistic
claims.

V. Nation and Culture

Can we say provisionally that nationalism is best qualified to resist the
globalization of modernity? First, it behooves us to differentiate nation
from ethnicity or the state. Gleaning from a variety of works analyzing
this question, it is possible to limit the view of nation to the following:
culturally, it cannot be homogeneous, but must be an imagined com-
munity with institutions that sanction not only a diversity of activities but