With this you directly contradict your earlier claim that:

> Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?

Whether or not one agrees with your claim that pre-nation state forms of group loyalty or tribalism were equivalent to nationalism, you here yourself divorce the existence of traditions of local governance from your interpretation of nationalism ("The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.")

The point is that culture and governance are not implicitly linked, and did not used to be. Contrary to your implication in the quoted part that the lack of nationalism would be a treat to survival of local culture, on the contrary, the rise of modern nationalism has had a substantial effect in threatening many cultures. A lot of nation states have explicitly set out to eradicate alternative cultures. Witness the Turkish state long held insistence that there were no such thing as Kurds, for example - just "mountain Turks" - and the number of states that at various times have outlawed the teaching of minority languages (including, again, Turkey) or even mentioning the minority (I knew a Turkish journalist in Norway as an asylum seeker because he had received death threats from the Turkish government because he was writing about the plight of the Kurds).

In Norway too, since you bring up Scandinavia and I'm Norwegian, a lot of modern culture are constructs of modern nationalism: Our two official languages are both artificial and recent - one constructed as an amalgamation of dialects spoken around the country, and one constructed largely from Danish, and are increasingly pushing local dialects aside. Around Oslo, for example, many kids are not even aware that their speech has elements of old distinct dialects, and no effort is made to preserve them (note that I am not arguing that they should be preserved - I don't particular care about the preservation of such dialects).

Unlike in most English speaking languages, the government even dictates the vocabulary and the rules of the language.

Most of the mythos and trappings of the Norwegian national identify date from ~1800 onwards, especially as constructions of the Norwegian national romanticism movement from the 1840's onwards.

This modern Norwegian culture that arose as a result is largely the result of a local elite that stimulated and utilised this nationalism as a means of asserting power and/or making their local seats more prominent in the face of a government in Copenhagen that had for hundreds of years let Norway remain a under-developed backwater.

First in trying to gain independence in 1814 when Denmark-Norway was sufficiently weakened by having been on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and they managed to get recognition for our constitution, and then again to build popular support for full independence from Sweden after we were handed over to Sweden as a "price" to the Swedes for supporting the victors.

Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era.

The lyrics to our national anthem even is one long national romantic representation of a myth of some thousand year tradition of a unified Norwegian nation.

So not only is nationalism not a pre-requisite for protecting culture - it has been a major driver for steamrollering older local cultures over the last century in particular.

But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions