The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
Should national identity be considered to be an outdated concept in this day and age? Have the adjectives “French,” “Italian,” “German,” and so on become meaningless terms over the last couple of decades? Both practical and theoretical developments may seem to suggest that this question should be answered in the affirmative. Processes of globalization, including increased mobility and migration, have made it unmistakably clear that the human world cannot be divided into discrete social units. In addition, much philosophical effort has been devoted to destabilizing notions like “community,” “sameness,” and “identity.”
