Post-Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Modernization of Values: Empirical Evidence from 85 Countries

At the start of the current phase of globalization, nationalism was supposed to become obsolete, with new means of communication opening new degrees of freedom for individuals worldwide and thus giving way to cosmopolitanism. Later it became apparent that the established significance of national identities and nation-states gave way not so much to new individualism and cosmopolitanism, but to new forms of collective identities and entities, including supranational unions like the EU, transnational corporations, and new international organizations, but also a revival of local ethnic identities. Moreover, instead of losing its emotional appeal, as was expected from the cosmopolitan turn, these new manifestations of post-nationalism opened a new debate on the meaning, origins and consequences of nationality and ethnicity, and sometimes in its rhetoric and actions closer resembled the prototypical nationalism, or even xenophobia, than cosmopolitanism. What is the relation between these two transformations of nationalism at the microlevel? What value orientations lie behind cosmopolitanism ad post-nationalism? What is to be expected from post-nationalism in the future? To answer these questions, we used the integrated database of the World Values Survey, including the third, fourth, and fifth waves – in 1995, 2000, and 2005 respectively. A series of multilevel regression models estimated on these data show that, contrary to what might be expected, the contemporary nationalism in most countries is not significantly related to xenophobia and, moreover, positively related to cosmopolitanism. Unlike in its structural dimension, the contemporary nationalism, as viewed from the cultural perspective, implies primarily not relocation of power, but a general quest for identity, which makes post-nationalism a sophisticated interplay of loyalties. For this emerging post-nationalism, modernization theories are revealed to have higher power than modernist theories aimed at explaining earlier forms of nationalism.