Du Tautinės Tapatybės Vektoriai, Arba Žvilgsnis Anapus Gimtosios Kalbos Ir Gimtojo Krašto
The Two Vectors of National Identity: A Glance beyond the Mother Tongue and the Father Land

Summary/Abstract: Today, we cannot pose questions about national identity in the manner in which they were posed by those who lived a few centuries or millenniums before us. Those societies were based on the principle of external difference – internal uniformity. In the present-day globalized and unified world, thus in Europe too, we are witnessing the emergence of the reverse principle of external uniformity – internal difference What has changed is the very fashion in which peoples and nations manifest themselves as peoples and nations. That is not to say that national identity has disappeared, vanished, or evaporated; no, but its forms of manifestation have indeed become more subtle, yet more variegated. A contemporary people first and foremost have a modal existence. It possesses things that most other peoples also own, but it possesses them in its own different, special way. This different mode of possession is the locus of the identity of the people, not some proprietary “substances” or “things” as in ancient times and civilizations. In defining national identity today, it is more prudent to move away from the fact of the same ubiquitous cultural content found in the countries of the world to the fact that this very content is possessed and applied by each people in very particular modal forms and ways. It is therefore important to realize that the material uniformity of peoples in the present-day world does not at all imply the demise of national identity. In the contemporary world and contemporary Europe, true national differences manifest themselves more and more in the modes and shapes of how we possess and control things, not in the things themselves.

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