State and Identity in Europe and India: Comparative Dynamics

Abstract

Though the dynamics of globalization have been with us for centuries (Wallerstein 1974, Robertson 2003), in recent times social consciousness of the centrality of global forces — through exposure to communication technologies, global marketing channels, macro-institutional linkages and changing lifestyles — has been on the rise in most parts of the world. In Europe and India such global consciousness has risen as much as anywhere else. Within the overall welter of forces involved, the interplay of different dynamic aspects of globalization, institutional and cognitive, is here of particular importance and interest. Taking globalization as a set of pervasive forces — economic, cultural and political — transforming patterns of interaction between different collectivities, including ‘nation-states’, one point of special relevance concerns the institutional dynamics and their impacts on collective identities. These institutional dynamics include processes of state formation as well as of state restructuring, which in both cases entail recurrent formative processes, including the emergence of state-like institutions as in Europe or major restructuring of centre-periphery relations as in India. In turn the impacts of these processes in terms of socio-cultural identities may manifest themselves through shifting conceptions and expressions of self at individual as well as at collective levels, including that of the state, or through a hardening of communal identifications felt to have come under threat.