National Culture

National culture is the set of norms, behaviors, beliefs and customs that exist within the population of a sovereign nation. Understanding of the national culture as well as the local culture can give people an advantage in understanding and developing intercultural knowledge and skills. It is also useful for achieving a successful life in this challenging global world. In order to understand a nation’s people it is important to understand their values and culture. National cultural values are learned early, held deeply and change slowly over the course of generations. This essay will argue on the transformation of the national culture and look at the development of the most influential impact factors that lead to culture transformation.

The emergence of a national culture, is of course a difficult process of certain norms and values that are shared across the individuals that live in a ‘national state or territory’ or associate themselves to a certain ‘national group’, a concept that in recent years has diminished in importance, particularly because of the decline of the nation state and the breakup of society in various subgroups, mobile social classes and various ethnic, religious and racial groups, that were less evident before. Each of those groups have, sometimes complimentary to or replacing of a set of cultural attributes in ‘competition’ to the ‘national culture’ per se. A critical point in the discussion of the individual, and its acquired attributes, and the culture it adheres to, is of course the idea of ‘imagined communities’. As Malcolm (1994) argues, there has not been a fixed, unified Serb or Croat identity since the middle ages that could be resurrected. However, the individuals behave as if there was, and develop a set of apparently national symbols and a national culture for this imagined community’.

We can identify the two main areas: the family and immediate social surroundings, and the social reality. Changes in these surroundings...