No doubt, but do not underestimate the power of manufactured cultural identities that people espouse and that have a quite hegemonic effect. I'm heavily inclined toward the Durkheimian position that individual is but a product of society and collective consciousness (not the other way around).
So if that collective consciousness is heavily infested with the things that we love to hate about populism (bigotry, religiosity, patriotism/nationalism/nativism, distrust toward public institutions, anti-intellectualism) the chances are that it defines individual consciousness of a great deal of the population.
>confident about slurring it and them? People have said nasty things
>about Poland, just to take a random example - would you object to
>those?
Perhaps not. I just returned from there - it is a scary place, where the noveau riche rule and set cultural standards, NATO membership props up falling national pride, the Left resembles a radish (red outside white/neoliberal inside), the Right espouses keynesian policies, and the only genuine opposition to the status quo comes from the fanatical christian nationalists. My openly expressed yearnings for central planning were not well received, to say the least. A small pissant nation is a dire need of a good whacking again - to paraphrase Tricky Dick.
But the bottom line is that in the glorious past, internationalism was represented by such respectable luminaries like Rosa Luxemburg (whose picture is prominently displayed in my office next to that of Karl Marx) or Leon Trotsky (whose "Results" are still an unsurpassed assessment of the Russian society, althouth his "Prospects" were waaaay to optimistic). Today, however, it is represeneted mainly by intellectual mediocrities of neoliberal persuasion. But despite that, it is still preferable to romantic populism, identity politics, and parochialism espoused by much of the so-called Left.
s novom godom
wojtek