National Identity in the Age of Global Networking - Essay Example

National Identity in the Age of Global Networking One cannot deny the perception that the world is changing rapidly during the last two or three decades and that someway or other the lives of people are getting hugely impacted by this change. The phenomenon of globalization is not new in the twentieth-first century but people’s idea of globalization are varied and confused. The economic ties of a country are the most visible representation of a globally shared network where no singular state is driven by its own law irrespective of the global directives, overtly stated or understood. A very simplistic explanation of this phenomenon can be given in this respect, although it is not sufficient for a complete understanding of the forces acting on the state and the world at large. This process of globalization is driven by two different, yet interrelated dynamics. One is the formation of certain world institutions like the global financial markets including World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, international crime tribunals presiding over issues like war and international terrorism (Taylor, 2005). These agencies and institutions operate through some organizational forms and practices and these practices contribute to what is perceived as changes in the global order. Another impelling force, which has an even greater impact on the livelihood of a nation and nation’s participation in the global order is the struggle of the state to flourish in compliance to the demands of globalization while at the same time keeping its national interest well intact. This struggle takes place within the national territory and institution, which are designed in terms of the requirements of nation. Thus the national projects are oriented towards the international system but their locus is situated within the nation. As a result, these projects are multisided, cross-domain and cross-border. Examples of authorities working on such localized struggles with covert or overt global agendas are human rights organizations and environmental organizations etc. Although this transformation is called globalization, it is operating within the nation in a far more degree than is usually recognized. It is within the discussion of national interest that the full meaning of the global is embedded. The reason is that the nation is the key enactor of the policies reflected in the global scale. Today the globalizing dynamics entail implications that have more effects on the national—that is the governments, firms, citizens or the state legal system. A detailed deconstruction of what is defined national interest can unfold the global orientation of the national policy. The deconstruction of the global dynamics is very specialized and obscure. When the global dynamic is deconstructed, its national becomes evident. This instantiation of the global is not always carried out through international policy system like the global financial market. They are operated particularly on national entities like the state legislature, national firms operating through the world, political projects, diasporic networks and the relationship between the state and its citizens. (Sassen, 2006; Negri and Hardt, 2001) Such decoding of the national frameworks and the international scales, allow one to doubt the existing national framework through which the economies and politics of a nation have operated till now. With the rise of globalization the connection between the state and the citizen faded significantly. The trend of the global market and the global policy was responsible for this. Saskia Sassen’s Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblage provides a profound study how nationality has been impacted by the globalizing trend. In the manner of a typical social historian, Sassen (2006) tries to give a historical study of how a social transformation takes place. She uses three investigative domains, which are ‘capabilities’, ‘tipping points’ and ‘organizing logics’. Capabilities refer to the collective productions or formations, which facilitates a social change to take place and develop. Tipping points are specific historical events that mark a transition in the society. Organizing logics are the logics used to assess and explain the changes that arising from the transformations. Sassen (2006) has used these three analytical domains in order to develop a thesis of the gradual transformation from imperialism to constitutional states to the inter-city transaction and the formation of global scale. With the arrival of liberal capitalism, the rivalry for territory through physical battle was overtaken with the newer and novel strategies to roll out policy for securing the national interest in the inter-state transaction. Simultaneously the imperial powers began to extend their focus from the vision of single-state colonization to transnational colonization. Following this came the civil rights movement for constitutional representation and demands for cultural assimilation. The public private relation underwent changes due to the increasing importance and free access to stock market, the privatization of the rates in exchange market and the relaxation of constraints on the flow of capital. The non-state private actors from corporations and federations replace the state as an actor in the public policy making. With the advance of time the lobby of the overseas financiers and the diasporic investors began to influence the public policy making to an even larger extent. This privatization drives lead to the denationalization of public welfare schemes, schools health care units. Even the notion of conscript army raised during the world war period is replaced with the voluntary and professional army. The consumer citizenship is the result of such denationalization drive, where the citizens rely more on the brands and firms of consumer durables than on a national advice. The loyalty of the citizens, which were earlier enjoyed by the state, is now harvested by the private organizations. (Sassen, 2006) Sassen (2006) observes that the nature of the citizenship has not much changed. What she wants to mean is that the citizenship has become a conglomeration of diverse elements that have been appropriated by the human beings throughout history. The theoretical ground from which she is arguing is “the embeddedness of citizenship and the national state, rather than their purely formal features” (Sassen, 2006, p.23). Reflecting on the present globalization trend, she points out, “some of the dynamics at work today are destabilizing these particular national bundlings and bringing to the fore the fact itself of that bundling and particularity” (Sassen, 2006, p.23). Negri and Hardt (2001) also affirm this umbrella implication of nationhood and sovereignty. They focus on the on Europe as it enters modernity. The construction of eurocentrism is also a result of this evolution pointed out by Sassen. Negri and Hardt assert, “Although modern sovereignty emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large part through Europe’s relationship with its outside, and particularly through its colonial projects and the resistance of the colonized” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.70). The idea of citizenship as forwarded by Hardt and Negri (2001) is not totally in contradiction with that of Sassen. Rather they think that the transformation from the notion of modern sovereignty to national sovereignty has entailed a shift of power from the clutch of sovereignty to the nation, where the nation takes an active role and this role is determined by the degree of mobilization of a community. The identity of a citizen comes from his participation in the national power play, the locus of which is situated in the territory. In order to demonstrate their standpoint, they have given elaborate study of the change in the power structure of the European sovereignty starting from the sixteenth century to the time of capitalist intervention and its usurpation of the market power, which characterizes the global financial market. According to them “the concept of nation in Europe developed in the terrain of patrimonial and absolutist state” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.93). Before the sixteenth century an absolutist and patrimonial form of state authority was necessary for the regulating the ‘feudal social relation and relation of production’ and the feudal property and its production was a part of the monarchic body. In the sixteenth century, amid the changing society the sovereignty, patrimonial authority still enjoyed the sway over peace and social order. At this time even the religion was subordinated to the sovereign’s power. Seventeenth century was the time when this power of the sovereignty came under threat of the capitalist forces and new politicization of the market so far determined and controlled by the sovereign. Negri and Hardt (2001) observe that until the time of English, French and French bourgeois revolution, there was hardly any other “alternative that could successfully oppose this model. The absolutist and patrimonial model survived in this period only with the support of a specific compromise of political forces, and its substance was eroding from the inside owing primarily to the emergence of new productive forces” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.94). That is how the writers describe the emergence of the new capitalist forces. This evolution of the sovereignty had given the nation a spiritual identity replacing the divine nature of the king’s body as it was conceived in the earlier period. “The modern concept of nation thus inherited the patrimonial body of the monarchic state and reinvented in a new form” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.95). With this came the idea of citizenship for the first time. The new capitalist productive processes and the new ‘network of absolute administration’ balanced the change in the concept and operation of the sovereign power. As the form of nation rather than sovereignty now became the expression of social structure, certain new components constituted the definition of nation. “The uneasy structural relationship was stabilized by the national identity: a cultural, integrating identity, founded on the biological continuity of blood relation, a spatial continuity of territory, and linguistic commonality” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.95). This transition in the social structure substituting the feudal subject with the national citizen made it clear that now the nation enjoyed an active role. Referring to the observation of Benedict Anderson, Negri aand Hardt, say, “the nation is often experienced as (or at least functions as it were) a collective imagining, an active creation of the community of citizens” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.95). The above writers also point out that the same totalizing and essentializing impulse of the sovereign nation was inherited by new modern sovereignty, but it attempted tom weed away the conflictual social forces that characterized the modern sovereignty. Thus nation became a surface expression with the underlying substance of ‘general will’ and composed of ‘community of needs’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.96). Sassen (2006) gives a more detailed account of the emergence of the state as an active player governing the changing economic and political power structure within the feudal order. In the Western European countries, the territorial state was already acting in the economic and political areas. Sassen describes the ‘political economy of the urban territoriality’ as ‘scattered territorialities’ (Sassen, 2006, p.54). According to her, cities in the Middle Ages were located in at least three forms of territoriality. Firsst, they were the ‘central place of a local economy’. Secondly, they were the nodal point of a ‘translocal network of cities and capital circulation’ and thirdly, they were ‘potentially subservient to a territorial state power’ (Sassen, 2006, p.54). The emergence of cities as the base of economic power was in part a result of the growing trade, especially long distance trade. The cause of this expansion was the result of the geographic expansion through colonization by the dominant economies within Europe. According to Sassen “this period of internal expansion and colonization of marginal areas also engendered a series of new mobilities of traders, workers, displaced peoples… and growing number of uprooted people of all sorts” (Sassen, 2006, p.54). This new form of long distance trade in turn gave birth to commercial towns and this kind of trade required specialization and large financial capabilities. The agriculture was commercialized when a number of cities engaged in cultivating cash crops and trade along the tributaries often transgressing hundreds of miles. “Commercial agriculture, in its turn, generally promoted the prosperity of merchants, richer peasants, and smaller landlords while reducing the ability of great landholders to dominate the people of their rural surroundings” (Sassen, 2006, p.56). In her chapter titled ‘Constructing national economies centered on imperial geographies’ Sassen points out that almost all the major powers in the sixteenth century Europe felt the need to extend their geographic horizon in order to build ‘national political economy’ to amass national wealth. According to the author, although the major powers went about this goal in differing ways, they shared two common features. First, the process had a national character. Another feature is that their particular capabilities involved in fulfilling their imperial aim was working towards a building a global scale. In this chapter, she also figures out that the inevitable object to accentuate distinct dynamics in ‘a context of shared imperial aims’ brought in the coexistence of globalizing and standardizing dynamics’ (Sassen, 2006, p.89). This tendency of the capitalist force has a strong resonance in the recent globalization dynamics. “From its first formation then, capitalism was both national and global, shaped by key actors both fro the private and the state sector” (Sassen, 2006, p.89). As declared earlier, certain features of the new globalizing trend are not new. They are rather a revival of some medieval administrative procedure as pointed out by Sassen. According to her in the medieval time the feudal form of governance tried to minimize the chance of territorial authority. For this purpose two tactics were resorted to. One was framing of laws on the basis of class rather than on territory so that the entire expansion of sovereignty could be ruled under a uniform regulation. Another tactic embraced to reinforce the former was to develop crisscrossing jurisdiction. As this system was centered on the rights and authority of sections of people distinguished by their class, rather than by territory, this system of governance can well be seen in the modern cross-regime bodies like World Trade Organization (Sassen, 2006, p.36). Sassen is shocked at this kind of universalism of certain forms of regulation at radically different periods of history. The same differentiating whim is noticeable in the liberal democracies and in the modern cross-border organizations exemplified above. Sassen notes that these organizations extend support to a particular class of people who are connected with professional movements related to WTO or specific cross-border trade agreements. On the other hand they with draw support from people like undocumented migrants who have lost many protection over the last decade and are often now constituted as semi-criminal subjects” (Sassen, 2006, p.36). This politics of difference was a well-known characteristic to the postmodernist thinkers who celebrated the plurality and multiplicity of culture that was always suppressed within the Eurocentric literature and philosophy. The theories of postmodernism sought to refute the binary opposite analysis pattern of the modernist thought. This new perspective was ushered by the democratization of education in part but largely by the nationalist movement across the world and the flurry of new flags marking political independence starting from India in 1947. But when talking about the globalizing trend, the economic inter-state relation and the idea of subject formation in this postmodern era, Negri and Hardt (2001), subjected the postmodernist rationalization to show that thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida have been comprador intellectuals, unconsciously complicit to the new form of political-economic imperialism by empire. This is a very important insight since the well-known postmodernist thinkers were surprisingly interested in the old form of power-acquiring struggle, attacking the totalitarian impulse of the Enlightenment philosophy that was intended to sustain the White supremacist belief. According to Negri and Hardt (2001), in the context of international relation, the postmodernist arguments have occluded the neo-imperialist dynamics of the major powers like The United States. “The resulting postmodernist analyses point towards the possibility of global politics of difference, a politics of deterritorialized flows across a smooth world, free of the rigid striations of state boundaries” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.142). The writes try to discount thee responsibility of the postmodernist thinkers in inadvertent support, by concluding, “they can not recognize clearly the forms of power that have today come to supplant it” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.142). The new structure of logic used in the contemporary world is unaffected by any libratory philosophy because “the Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and setting differences to play across boundaries” –the same difference that postmodernism upholds (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.142). Hardt and Negri (2001) took over the critique of postmodernism and thereafter Homi Bhaba to touch upon the concept of identity of national subjects. The prior discussion on the formation of state as an actor in the international relation has provided a good background to the analysis of relation between globalization and identity formation in an era when dispersion of community has strained the homogeneity and essentialization. Bhaba’s analysis unfolds “the dialectic that subsumes within a coherent totality the social identities that face each other in opposition” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.144). Homi Bhaba is not only struggling for the recognition of the multiple cultures that the totalizing attempt tries to subsume within the dominant cultural community. But he is pointing toward the dialectic that is continuing among not two but three forces: the essential subject, the essential object and the de-essentialized object. The identity of this de-essentialized object takes its root from the ‘colonoized’s mimicry of the colonozer’s discourse’ (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.144). A simple instance of this de-essentialized identity can be seen in the formation of pidgin that gives an identity, which is hybrid in nature to a community, with no linguistic commonality either with the colonizer or the native colonized group from which the person hailed. Needless to say language is one of the key parameters that confer identity. According to Negri and Hardt, the new community that is formed after the “totalizing structure of power have been fractured and displaced is not an isolated or fragmentary existence but a new form of community, a community of the ‘unhomely’, a new internationalism, a gathering of people in a diaspora” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.145). The possibility of an alternative community comes from the “close attention to the locality of culture, its hybridity” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.145). But this postcolonial theory is again blind to the new form of imperial rule in the contemporary world. Because difference has been successfully realized for cross-border political and economic domination. Negri and Hardt does something, which is indeed political overtly by borrowing from Edward Said: the tactics of the great empires [that is, the European imperialisms] which were dismantled after the First World War, are being replicated by the U.S.” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.145). The identity that are now most craved in terns of postmodern simulation, are never the real but they are rather determined by the forces of capitalist market and media in this era of globalization. These identities had no trace in experience. The proposition of the difference as an effective tool of cross-border domination is evident in the way the new market politics operate. Baudrillard’s Simulation (1983) can offer a substantial understanding of how the identity of a subject in the postmodern era is tampered by the popular media. This book provides an anti-essentialist and anti-foundational discourse that seeks to show how the market strategies influence our virtual, identity. Baudrillard’s description of the effect of representation, the four-phased development of the ‘hyperreal’ is not about positive representation, but carries a connotation of counterfeit and that is what is referred to as ‘simulcra’. According to Negri and Hardt, the new dynamics of globalization trend thrives on the difference celebrated by the postmodernist thinkers. Greater circulation and mobility, diversification and mixing, attempt to cater to an ethnically conglomerate community define the essence of new marketing strategies. This kind of business outlook is not only results in the advancement of investors in the global financial market, but in a way they are dissolving the specificity of cultural identity, consciously or unconsciously. “Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.150). The nation state as an actor in the economy discussed earlier is now considered to be an obstacle in the global, financial market. In this market, although the differences are paid equal attention for being a prospective consumer, they do not exercise their presence freely. Rather they are “regimented in global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structure” (Negri and Hardt, 2001, p.150). Negri and Hardt (2001) advocates the use of the suffix, ‘scape’ by Appadurai for using terms like, ethnoscape, technoscape and financescape because this suffix allows to refer to the fluidities of domains like culture, finance, and commodity, which no longer enjoy exclusive status and identity. The differences in the prospective consumers determine the possibility of different market strategies. A highly differentiated and hybrid population can show the possibility of more number of target markets that can be dealt with equally diversified market strategies. Since globalization has taken over the capital market along with the cultural discourse of the population, it is very important to know how the state and population respond to this global phenomenon. The social process that is mediating this super-imposed dynamic is not only resisting it but also on the other hand recreating its own appearance thereby donning new identity. The specific types of actors involved in constructing the national identity, the particular types of mechanism involved in the process and the various organizational settings they are located in, should be perused minutely in order to gain an understanding about how the national identity forms (Blum, 2007, p.3). Blum is also indebted to Arjun Appadurai in his analysis of the effects of globalization on the notion of culture. The democratization of popular media has made the flow of ideas across borders possible. This cross border flow of ideas has not only created a ‘supernatural attachment’ to the alien or other culture but also has cultural stability more frail. This globalization is not only characterized with interconnectedness among diverse cultures but a reflexive self-awareness of each responding culture is a part of this massive culture transmitting ideas. The issue of a national identity being formed or influenced owes its source in the sociopolitical structure, where the method of policy making takes into account the effects of encountering the globalizing dynamics. As proposed by Hardt and Negri (2001), the state plays an enormous role in determining and regulating the influence of foreign ideas on the state. But Blum has looked not only at the elites as the representative of the state as an actor, but also at the non-elites has having sufficient influence on the state policy. Thus the exploration of the linkage between the national identity and the effect of globalization promise a crucial understanding of the ‘changing nature of state-society relation’ (Blum, 2007, p.7). As observed by Blum “The final feature of hybridization consists of articulating a coherent national identity based on traditional elements intermingled with modern-global norms and institutions as a way of integrating society while simultaneously facilitating international integration” (Blum, 2007, p.26). From this above assertion it is clear that the role of the state is twofold: on the one hand the state tries to act as a repository of national tradition and tries to affirm the indigenous values. On the other, it necessitates the possible assimilation of the foreign influence. In this way the traditionalism and the cross-regime ideas are coalesced with a concern for social cohesion. The global media and the use of Internet allow the formation of a transnational community within a small city and furthermore a pattern of difference in the hybrid community can be noticed in city after city. A large number of culturally different people every encounter on the streets and as a result of this a micro transnationalism takes place right on the spot (Sassen, 2006, p.303). This technological advancement has enabled various groups and community to voice their dissatisfaction with the nation-state identity. In addition to this there are alternative notions of communal identity with the proliferation of international media networking services. The commonalities among these culturally dissimilar groups in terms of the shared beliefs and sometimes the sharing political agenda have challenged the age-old national identity of subjects. Citizenship is no longer defined by the location of a subject or his situatedness in certain state. The spread of cosmopolitanism and the new proliferation of transnationalism are the key factors responsible for the emergence of the postnational citizenship. The practices and the experiences generally associated with the idea of citizenship today traverse the nation state boundaries. The issues like the protection rights of a citizen are subsumed in the discourse of human rights making it a transnational issue. Sassen in her book distinguishes between the postnational citizenship and the denationalized citizenship. While the former takes into account the location of the citizenship as being outside the national, the later looks at then ‘transformation of the national, including the national in its condition as foundational for citizenship’ (Sassen, 2006, p.305). The global economy and the global institutions with their organizational structures can create certain policies that are to be implemented within the national through national organizations and this implementation have immense bearing on the idea of citizenship due to the transformation in the social structure necessitated by their adoption. Sassen’s theorization rests on the fact that if the nation id the predominating factor in defining nationality, then the change in the economic and political structure of a nation with the embedding of foreign policy is sure to have an effect on the notion of citizenship. The formal rights of citizens, their practices and their authority undergo changes ion such a circumstance. Sassen uses the national as a referent point to capture the transformation of a nation. She identifies three institutional lines through this transformation takes place. First one is the law. It is through law that many of the inclusions and institutions in terms of the practices of people have been instantiated. The expansion of legal rights to the citizen often harboring a vision of plural state has changed the idea of citizenship. Granting of double citizenship is one such instance. “All these have been interpreted as loosening the ‘national grip’ on citizen’s rights” (Sassen, 2006, p.307). Another element is the constitutional provision for the citizen to make claims against the state and this in turn leads to a distance between the state and its citizen. For instance, the erosion of the citizens’s privacy rights has triggered a rift between the two making the citizen ‘sue the government’ (Sassen, 2006, pp.307-8). The third factor at play is the conflict revolving the legitimacy of right of the foreign firms vis-à-vis the state actors. This type of inclusion and infiltration through the national plays a very crucial role regarding the framing of future policy of a state. After the dismantling of the sovereignty, then of nation, of territory as the key actor in the propagation of the rights of nation and citizens, now city has become the base of power play vis-à-vis globalization not only of the capital market but also of the citizenry. Among the subnational forces, cities are the first to assume the role of actor. Due to the legal complexities of the nation, its power and authority have been abridged to a great degree. Today the city has emerged as a terrain where number of globalization process tale place. This because the city houses organizational and ‘command side of global economy’. This is the plain on which the new types political and localized claims are formed and even materialized. Another aspect instrumental in the global economy is immigration that develops transnational economy within a small geographic space. Cities have become a backdrop of conflicts and contradiction because the larger concentration of global economic investment and the disadvantaged groups like immigrants, poor people, colored people, social activists have made it a potential platform of self-expression and assertion. Another reason behind the emergence of city as a strategic site is the high level of digitization. The shift from the nation and government as the chief actor in mass production to the city as the site of global capital concentration has destabilized the existing institutional assumptions in regulating measures effective on urban population. This digitization and capital flow have not only enabled the disadvantaged to engage in production but also to create a communication and therefore solidarity among them. As a result of this new types of political actors are participating in the operation of global dynamics. Quite surprisingly, the globalization as an institutional rearrangement is localized within the periphery of the city. Sassen observes, “it is the presence rather than power per se that generate operational and rhetorical openings” (Sassen, 2006, p.317). The local struggle of the newly empowered groups actually represents a larger conflict between the traditional trajectory of urban assumption and civil rights of the disadvantaged. Negri and Hardt (2001) look at the formation of the new domineering cultural and economic power, which he calls ‘Empire’, as a consequence of a struggle of the multitude. But according to the author, the production of the empire had been the opposite of what had been intended. The result of the revolution of the multitude has been unexpected because the new power is unable to construct a rule of right that can contain the ‘new reality of the globalization and of social and economic relation’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.394). It can be noted that while Sassen writes in a very empirical representative manner, Hardt and Negri are very fond using metaphors and building up patterns of relevant motifs. If this representational style overlooked, the facts dealt with in the two books are often identical. Hardt and Negri opine that when the multitude operates in the production process, they produce autonomously and create an alternative reality. Due to the new openings in operational and rhetorical arena, the new actors present themselves as singular in that they have not only channelized their interests but also framing a network of similar kind of communities. This singularity is established by hurling the existing ideological construct that all human beings share common, interchangeable needs and other social dimensions. In this way “the multitude promotes through its labor the biopolitical singularization of groups and sets of humanity, across each and every node of global interchange” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.395). This singularization is the “singular power of the new city” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p.395). The mobility of commodities has been coupled with the mobility of labor in this era of mass production. The capitalist inclusion has greatly helped to achieve this phase because of its emphasis on accumulation and acceleration of production, but this multitude with its labor force cannot be subjugated to any capitalist infrastructure. According to the authors this multitude has an autonomous movement. Because of outsourcing facility, the movement of the labor cannot be defined in state border relationship. Through mobilization the multitude has learnt to appropriate new spaces and residences. Hardt and Negri exemplify this phenomenon with US agriculture, which would come to a halt, if the Mexican labor were withdrawn. But as Negri and Hardt (2001) point out the agitation of the multitude is still under the constraints of empire that wants to monitor it to maintain their production. But the force of this multitude is continuously leaping the bounds in order to assume the status of an autonomous power. In this effort it is challenging the mechanism if the neo-imperialist powers. Not only the demand for the recognition of their productivity in the global scale but also the claim to global citizenship define the current movement of the mass (Hardt and Negri, 2001, p. 400). In cross-border operation on any domain, the utility of a singular form of media cannot undermine. It is the Use of Internet services. As noted earlier the Internet is an effective tool in international relation not only because of its processing speed but also it can enable thee workforce to keep in touch with the any authority under the nose of any regulating body. According to Sassen, it has the built-in capacity “to override existing relations of law to territory, notably the much noted fact that firms, individuals and NGOs can elude governmental control when operating in cyberspace” (Sassen, 2006, p.329). Thus the use of Internet can helps in the mobilization of the productive force of the city to manufacture for a market geographically situated in some place on the other side of the continent. It is also worth observing that in the hyper-reality a product is sold even before it is produced. The media, of which Internet is a part with advertisement, creates a demand for a product and then the product is manufactured to supply the demand. If the practices of a multitude are a determining factor in the notion of identity, then this kind of production strategy can surely challenge the predominant assumption about one’s identity. Apart from the analysis of economic factor as a constituent of identity, there are more general aspects of the Internet that have considerable impact on the idea of self. The Internet serves as a ground of cultural assimilation. Through the Internet chat rooms and other facilities like mailing and text messaging system, the exclusiveness of culture is just loosing its unadulterated entity. The cultural transmission with the Internet service is leading to the adoption of the properties of some alien culture, which has been noted by Baudrillad in his book Simulation. The virtual self has long been lost in the process of imitation. Even sexual impulse is today media induced through the use of this global networking engine. The individual has been give the choice to have “several characters within a community or to belong to several communities, at any one time” (Bell and Kennedy, 2007, p.649). This observation is at par with the postmodern theory of the multiplicity of character or the multiplicity of glossy surfaces. This changing of personality with the media influences has a delicate analogy in the “multiple memberships, social roles, and thus identities that individuals hold in modern society… is not as instantaneous as in cyberspace” (Bell and Kennedy, 2007, p.649). Such possibility accelerates the lizard-skills to transform the identity by putting on the garb of some other personality. Not only this, but this propensity can even affect one’s experiences and open newer avenues tom relate to the world in the desired style. The popular media has also conditioned in a way that the consumers are constantly in search of new experiences and inclination to different characters. It should remembered that the postmodern outlook does not differentiate between art and pop because of phobia of binary division. This kind of undifferentiating selection lays emphasis on the on “fluidity and choice of association in social space” (Bell and Kennedy, 2007, p.649). From the above analysis certain aspects of the identity crisis can be understood regarding how the dynamics of globalization has so far change the notion of national identity and citizenship. Although the paper was started with a detailed discussion of how the sovereignty and the state have regulated the national identity with their hold on the production and capital accumulation, a major part has focused on the transformation on the identity with the corresponding transformation in the role of the nation and its members as a prime determiner of production. The rapid mobilization of the workforce and the capitalist demand for uninterrupted growth in the rate of production, have empowered the territory first and then the disadvantaged mass. The mass media has had substantial role in this transformational process. The revolutions in the multitude in the recent two or three decades were instrumental in changing the political agenda over the periods. Aim The aim of the paper is to examine how the identity of a subject undergoes the transformations necessitated by the dynamics of globalization and eventually succeeds in operating maintaining its changing interests. Objectives I) To analyze why the national identity undergoes transformations ion the age of globalization and digitization. II) To analyze how it responds to the influences that destabilize the identity. III) To understand why a global identity is necessary in this age of rapid mobilization of the politics and economy and how Internet helps in achieving that identity. Hardt M. and A. Negri, (2001), Empire, Harvard University Press Sassen S. (2006), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press Taylor, P. (2005), International organization in the age of globalization, Continuum International Publishing Group Baudrillard J. (1983), Simulation, Semiotext(e), Inc. Blum D. W. (2007), National Identity and globalization: Youth, state and society in post-Soviet.., Cambridge University Press. Bell D. and B. M. Kennedy, (2007), The Cyberculture reader, UK, Routledge Read More