Gone With the Modern Wind? The National Identity, Democracy, and the University in the Global Age

Let us start with a very general statement: widely conceived processes of gloh alization bring about transformations of an unprecedented nature and scale. I hr world we have been thinking about in philosophy, sociology, political sciences 01 political economy that is to say, depending on the discipline: the modern world founded on reason and rationality, social communication and dreams of the social order, the world separated into national entities and closed in the formula ol tin "nation-state", the world of a social contract in which there is a strict conned ion between welfare state, capitalism, and democracy, finally, the world in which thru is a clear priority of politics to economy is disintegrating right before our eyes together with the gradual passage to the global age. Therefore today, the questions about democracy may require a deliberation in a different vocabulary: the vocabulary that would be able to break away from the lr and less socially appealing myth that was at the foundations of modern social si i ences, according to which we keep analyzing the world in which the primary point of reference is the territorially-bound nation-state. As Zygmunt Bauman, an eminent Polish and British sociologist, put it with reference to sociology: the model of postmodernity, unlike the models of modernity, cannot 1» grounded in the realities of the nation state, by now clearly not a framework Imp enough to accommodate the decisive factors in the conduct of interaction and tin dynamics of social life.1 It is an enormous challenge to social sciences to adapt themselves conceptually to the new world in which, perhaps, the nation-state may not play the decisive i ol« ascribed to it by modernity. Perhaps the globalizing world will require a brand m u * Marek Kwiek