Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 20

coming to the United States, Arabs, Turks, Yugoslavs,
Albanians entering Western Europe. As a result of modern communications and transportation, these migrants
have been able to remain part of their original culture and
community. Their identity is thus less that of migrants
than of diasporans, that is, members of a transnational,
trans-state cultural community. They both mix with
other peoples and huddle with their own. For the United
States, these developments mean the high levels of immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America

many elites to develop supranational identities and to
downgrade their national identities. Previously, mobile
individuals pursued their careers and fortunes within
a country by moving from farms to cities and from one
city to another. Now they increasingly move from one
country to another, and just as intracountry mobility
decreased their identity with any particular locale within that country, so their intercountry mobility decreases
their identity with any particular country. They become
binational, multinational, or cosmopolitan.

could have quite different consequences for assimilation
than previous waves of immigration.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalism was intensely promoted by intellectual, political,
and, on occasion, economic elites. These elites developed
sophisticated and emotionally charged appeals to generate among those whom they saw as their compatriots a
sense of national identity and to rally them for nationalist causes. The last decades of the twentieth century, on
the other hand, witnessed a growing denationalization
of elites in many countries, as well as the United States.
The emergence of a global economy and global corporations plus the ability to form transnational coalitions to
promote reforms on a global basis (women’s rights, the
environment, land mines, human rights, small arms) led

In the early stage of European nationalism, national
identity was often defined primarily in religious terms.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalist
ideologies became largely secular. Germans, British,
French, and others defined themselves increasingly
in terms of ancestry, language, or culture, rather than
religion, which often would have divided their societies.
In the twentieth century, people in Western countries (with the notable exception of the United States)
generally became secularized, and churches and religion
played decreasing roles in public, social, and private life.
The twenty-first century, however, is dawning as a
century of religion. Virtually everywhere, apart from
Western Europe, people are turning to religion for
comfort, guidance, solace, and identity. “La revanche

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November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW