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As world society develops and nations become embedded in it, cultural patterns that began as properties of Western modernity diffuse to other areas. Individualism has long been noted as a unique feature of American nationalism (Arieli, 1964; Greene, 1993; Lipset, 1963, 1996). But both the spread of democracy and the declining legitimacy of dictatorship and racism after WW II opened the gates for forms of egalitarianism and individualism to spread transnationally (see Elliott & Lemert, 2006; Gaddis, 2005, p. 164ff). This chapter considers the consequences of this transformation.

The social sciences have tended to see the globalization of the last half-century mainly in economic terms. Nations and states, in this view, respond to expanded external interdependence in various ways, but remain central units of analysis. More recently, analyses have come to emphasize the political character of world society, with its greatly expanded sets of international organizations, but the participating entities in these structures tend to remain nations and states. The cultural side of globalization has been at the center of popular attention and lay discourse, not academic analysis. In fact, the academic literature stresses the current and future need for cultural change toward a more global cosmopolitanism in the face of current crises, rather than analyzing such change on the empirical ground (e.g., Beck, 2006). There is, thus, a sense that cultural changes in identity and perception are not globalizing enough to enable human society to effectively deal with interdependencies that have in fact become supranational and global. Even in rapidly integrating Europe the main thrust of the discussion and analysis is that persons and groups principally retain a national or subnational identity, and only secondarily come to full terms with their larger continental society (see Haller, 2008, or for a more ambivalent review, Fligstein, 2008). The conventional view is always that Europe is on the edge of failure, precisely because globalization of identity and culture has not caught up with increased economic interdependence.

What drives this diffusion process? One neo-institutional answer to this question is that new models of nationhood, organization, and social identity exist in the larger world environment (Meyer, 2009, p. 36ff). Because they are external, these “identities” and models can be adopted without huge costs and without necessarily entailing the reorganization of society or actors’ personalities. Thus the models of modern society can spread quickly because they are relatively easy to assume and because they have high legitimacy in the international environment. Conformity produces instrumental rewards as well. And it also signals to significant “other” nations and international bodies that a nation has accepted modernity and its responsibilities (see Boli & Thomas's discussion, 1999). Thus, foreign aid, loans, and credit may flow quickly to those developing countries that enact modern institutional structures like mass education and democratic elections.

One of the factors that make the divination of public opinion compelling is the decline of party systems and the rise of “individuated politics” (Dalton, 2002a, 2002b, 2006). If individuals are now the major actors in politics and have volatile opinions, then finding out what opinions sectors of the public have, and attempting to shape them, becomes crucial. This circumstance makes the inspection and analysis of mass opinion compelling and significant (see Ginsberg, 1986; Ginsberg & Shefter, 1990; Herbst, 1993). It also makes “public opinion” a compelling abstraction and political force. Finding it and divining its meaning has spawned its own organizational structures and constituencies.

In this section I consider different models of nationhood, the diffusion of new multicultural models, and barriers to the spread of new models rooted in nations' pasts and the current fears of immigrants from the Middle East.

Education is the main training grounds for citizenship. With the decline of military conscription, it has the mission of instilling a sense of national civic consciousness (see Janowitz's, 1983, critique; also Merle, 2010). But it also inculcates world cognitive perspectives as well. Hence, “global citizens” emerge. They carry much larger macro frames of reference that go beyond the nation-state. This change adds another layer of complexity to national identity.