If we cannot do away with borders, then they must remain out
of necessity. This necessity is discrimination. As Nairn rightly argues,
"cultures...depend upon conflicts unsustainable without borders".
Contrasts and distinctions are internal to any logic of identity, as Balibar
similarly suggests; "the very representation of the border is the
precondition for any definition". Once identity is philosophically
understood as differential and not self-sufficient, globalisation raises a very
modernist dilemma. How to make the very diversity (of choices, cultures, of the new) that modernisation and globalisation
make possible, resist the paralysing repetitive logic of what Walter
Benjamin terms the 'ever-same' (i.e. the temporality of the contemporary)?