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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 167

ideology becomes identical with cultural expression and thus ceases to
animate an imaginatory continuity of a nation. Second, nations consisting
of diverse ethnicities will become fragmented by the ideological stifling
of free ethnic contributions to the nation. Third, the moment of presence
of a local community will be moved toward an arbitrary ideological
signification that does not even have a representational value to such a
community. Fourth, such a conflation might be seen by diverse ethnic
communities as an imposition of an alien ethnicity within a nation and
thus a rejection of the nation. Fifth, the resultant separatist ethnic
movements will call for their own "nations."
It seems, then, that nations function optimally in a democratic context
such that political ideologies are spread across groups with diverse
interests that allow each group to find opposing ideological connections
at diverse levels. The same distribution appears across most diverse
cultural orientations, disallowing a conflation of the political ideologies
and cultural designs, and preventing a pure division into homogeneous
majority and minority tendencies. The recent attempt at such conflation,
with claims to majoritarian morality, has been exhibited by the rhetoric
of Dan Quayle and the so-called Moral Majority.
In a current setting, nationalisms confront modernizations and
archaizations. During the last century in Germany and Eastern Europe,
and in the contemporary mid-East and the republics of the former Soviet
Union, nationaUsm tends toward archaic cultural identity. In contrast, the
American and French, and to a lesser extent British, have been culturally
modernizing.^ To repeat, the distinction between modernizing and archaic
nationalisms lies in the claims that nationality derives from individuals
having rights (modern) and individuals as bearers of the national spirit
of an original people.^^
Nationalisms turn to archaisms when the imagined nation is still in
its formative stage, arising fi*om ethnic or tribal units. This is the case in
various African efforts to form nations. One finds a difficult diversity
that forms an archaic-modernizing with conflicting tendencies in India.
This conflict appeared in various guises between Hindus and Muslims,
and in the heated controversy stemming, for example, from the television

" Yehoshua Arieli, Indhndualism and NationaUsm in American Ideology
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).
^^ Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1986).