They can use their common sense to discount some signals and translate others into the vernacular of their daily lives. Nonetheless, there is potential for the disruption of identities. Identification with the national community has been essential for the constitution of modern societies and selves, correlated with the rights and responsibilities of modern citizenship and collective definitions of insiders and outsiders. These are not rarified issues. Democracies, or at least those few we have known historically, depend on correspondence between what citizens desire of governments and a deeper sense of national identity.
National interests derive from national identity.
The present situation requires both the capacity to govern and the identity necessary for social cohesion. This is not a plea for nationalism, but rather concern for an essential dimension of our democratic lives for which there is no clearly identified substitute. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen has pushed political discourse towards intolerance. Those who support J rg Haider in Austria, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Lega Nord in Italy and Pauline Hanson in Australia are doing the same. Thatcherism, the Canadian Reform Party - have also mobilised populist anxieties against cosmopolitan elites.