Abstract
The discipline of global studies is concerned with emergent identities and social groupings which may or may not transcend and thereby challenge current political categories. This discussion is concerned with exploring the relative durability of the nation as a source of individual identity. Through a comparative exploration of the nation-formation processes in post-revolutionary France and the modern Turkish Republic, processes which reify the nation in the minds of its citizens are identified. Certain practices are identified as contributing to this process which are then also observed in the activities of international government organizations, particularly the United Nations and the Education, Scientific, and Cultural agency (UNESCO) it oversees. Pointing to the key role of the national monument, and the UNESCO practice of monumentalizing heritage sites to posit a ‘world heritage’, this paper suggests that this process of monumentalization is one of the key processes by which the nation as the dominant source of national identity is being challenged in the contemporary world. This challenge to national identity is seen as key to understanding the process of so-called ‘globalization’ and provides a framework for understanding changing or emergent subjectivities at various scales, from the local to the global.