Multiple identities and global meso-communities

Social impacts associated with new telecommunication innovations greatly affect both globalisation and territorial identities. Apparently contradictory trends bring with them elements of rapid social change and political uncertainty. This chapter reflects on the conjunction of both dimensions of the local and the global, and carries out a prescription of the progressive consolidation of a new cosmopolitan localism. A theoretical review of the concept of multiple identities precedes a subsequent discussion on the effects of globalisation, the extension of market values, and the relative loss of power by the nation states. Subsequently, the focus is set on the growing role played by the global mesocommunities. These can be small nation-states within regional supranational blocks, stateless minority nations, sub-state regions and large conurbations, and seem to be better equipped to maximise developments related to global action and local identities. References made to the European Union context seek to illustrate how the interaction of the processes of bottom-up transnationalisation and top-down devolution of powers have made possible a more effective access of civil society to multi-level decision-making. The new cosmopolitan localism translates into a growing adjustment between the particular and the general in the gradual development of Europeanisation. Paper presented at the Fifth IPSA Symposium, ‘Globalisation, Nations and Multi-level Governance: Strategies and Challenges’, International Political Science Association, Montréal 24-26 October, 2002.