This essay agues that the reduction in the cultural space occupied by the nation-state due to forces of globalization opens up hitherto less used spaces for expressions of solidarity and in ways that do not correspond to the old national mapping of the world. The new solidarities may be identified in terms of four central human values: i) interests (which give rise to material solidarities); ii) universality (which gives rise to humanist solidarities); ii) freedom (which gives rise to life-emancipatory solidarities); and iv) deep meaning (which gives rise to spiritual solidarities). The central argument is that, while nationalist ideology has daimed to provide for all such ales ente this tustin a comprehensio to the creation of social networks clustering around one or another of these central values. The paper begins by giving a brief synopsis of the historical trajectory of postnationalism in Europe, moves on to outline different possible political reactions to globalization that may impede the progress of postnationalism and then charts out fundamental differences between nationalism and postnationalism (the latter accepting conceptual fragmentation of values, not insisting on being coterminous with state ideology and is oriented toward acquired, rather than given, identity).
As recently as 2000, J. Nye Jr., a noted scholar of international relations, reiterated the well-known truism that Japan was Asia’s first ‘globalizer.’ Less known or less comprehensible is the actual nature of the Meiji state, which was culturally transformed into what some have described as a hybrid form combining contemporaneous Japanese and Western norms. Other historians, such as F. Braudel, have described the state in terms of the “duality of the traditional, awe-inspiring Emperor’s power and the modern.” The hybrid or dual form of the Meiji state was a ‘cultural construct’ fabricated on the basis of governmental and national/local interaction with the study missions sent to the West during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. These experiences may also be referred to as transnational/local interactions or, in the words of M. Bamyeh, as one of the “historical relatives of transnationalism” and perhaps the greatest such experiment in international history dealing with “culturally meaningful borders.” In this context, the paper attempts to analyze the processes involved in the cultural construction of the Meiji state by drawing upon the experiences of the Iwakura mission to America and Europe (1871-73), which had decisive consequences, both positive and negative, for Japan and its Asian neighbours.