Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 97

This constantly increasing cultural exchange and communication has
strongly influenced the character and position of national cultures. Their role
in globalization processes has been largely discussed during the past about
�� years. The particular positions of specific cultures have been reflected in
their involvement “in the movement of specified objects, systems of meaning
and people across national/regional borders and continents” (Anheier and
Raj Isar ����:�). Specific cultures participate in globalization processes in
different ways; they either passively accept various globalization trends or
invest efforts to actively adapt and involve themselves in such processes. In
this way they initiate cultural transitions that enable their participation in
cultural globalization trends. Such participation is reflected in the constantly
growing cultural exchange and communication, which results in the change
of the structures, social positions and creative potentials of the national,
mostly European, cultures.
These national cultures display relatively basic structures. They originated
within the developing nation states in the ��th, ��th, and ��th centuries. The
cultural identification processes typical of national cultures were based on
the integration of various pre-national cultures, cultural values, and cultural
practices, and strongly linked to the newly established national language and
artistic practices. Today these processes have become increasingly dependent
on local cultures and their specificities, on the (re)interpretation of cultural
heritage, and on local cultural products and cultural industries (Potts ����).
They have been encouraged to adapt to global communication processes
and to cultural exchange through global markets. In order to be globally
exchangeable, they need to observe certain production and technological
standards so as to participate in less territorialized cultural production,
innovation, and creativity. While the increased economic exchange of cultural
values and goods again involves a certain standardization of production
processes and products, the state of cultural globalism that prompts local
responses tends to support individualized and de-standardized innovative
cultural products and to increase their variety and variability. The ensuing
cultural dynamics support innovation and generate the need to reinterpret
cultural originality and original cultural artifacts and values, leading to the
development of new, a-national cultures.
Cultures everywhere have always been diverse and increasingly diversified
through mutual contacts. However, for a certain period of time, national
cultures displayed relatively harmonized structures with an established and
observed hierarchy of values and types of sectorial cultural products which
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