There is another element to the communications revolution to which elites are blind. Elites, by definition, are often brilliant and attractive-looking people who, because of their own sophistication and social confidence, welcome cosmopolitanism in all its aspects. For they are never insecure in the midst of exotic environments. But most people in this world are not brilliant, not terribly attractive and therefore not confident. Their lives are full of struggle. So they naturally take refuge in family, community, religion or some form of solidarity group. And in an era when mass communication technologies foster a vulgarized assault on traditional values -- whether directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly -- the sense of alienation among the masses intensifies, leading them deeper into such exclusivist beliefs.
So it is not an accident that there is now a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Christianity in the United States, just as there is a resurgence of ideological Islam across the Greater Middle East. Whether it is trashy mass culture in America or relentless Westernization in the Muslim world, people require an ethical and a spiritual anchor against the forces of technological alienation. In Asia, perhaps the most technologically modernized region on the globe, nationalism helps to fill this void. For nationalism is modernism writ large. As people who do not retreat back into religion lose their literal faith in God and thus their belief in individual immortality, they take refuge in what the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a "collective immortality."
Europe is, after a fashion, a more severe example of this phenomenon because in Europe, we have a cosmopolitan global elite that actually runs an empire-of-sorts: the European Union. And so the rise of anti-EU, right-wing tendencies demonstrates not only a cultural, but also a direct political hostility to such elite rule. The EU leaders and bureaucracy long ago made the calculation that nationalism was dead and that the European masses, after two world wars, wanted nothing so much as a respite from divisive forces. But the masses may increasingly require an anchor in history, nationalism and religious identity that protects them against the bland universalism and increasing (albeit exaggerated) Islamization of the continent that the EU has thus far delivered.
Though, while globalization may have sparked a certain alienation that leads to a return of nationalism, that does not mean this new nationalism will be as intense and intoxicating as the kind that ravished Europe in previous centuries. Nationalism may return, but in a far more nuanced state -- a result of the very globalization that caused it in the first place. Indeed, there may currently be a rebalancing taking place in terms of personal and communal identities, for we are all not simply indistinguishable individuals bumping into each other in a global meeting hall. We have linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious attributes that are very much a part of who we are, and which set us apart from others.
So the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and between universalism and exclusivism, must continue. Soon after the Berlin Wall collapsed, anticipating a degree of global unity, Milosz observed, "our bond of being born in the same time, thus being contemporaries, is already stronger than that of being born in the same country." Will, in fact, the bond of time overcome the bond of blood or narrow belief? It is this question that towers above us all.
