National identity and globalization

Almantas Samalavicius

The cultural critic Almantas Samalavicius discusses one of the most urgent problems surfacing in the intellectual discussions of today – the one of national identity. He distinguishes two radical concepts of national identity that are found in Lithuanian academic and popular writings. One concept insists on the idea that national identity is something fixed, ahistorical, never subjected to changes whereas the other concept claims that national identity is already lost and has to be reinvented in a European cultural context. The author argues that the former should be rejected as an outdated social construction and states the weakness of the latter. He concludes that national identity should be understood as shaped by the past and influenced by the contemporary realities of the globalized world.