It could indeed be demonstrated that World War II, though fought in the name of national values, brought an end to the nation as reality: it was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved only for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed. [...] Let us say that the chimera of economic homogeneity gave way to interdependence (when not submission to the economic superpowers), while historical tradition and linguistic unity were recast as a broader and deeper determinant: what might be called a symbolic denominator, defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography. [...] A new social ensemble superior to the nation has thus been constituted, within which the nation, far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange temporality, in a kind of "future perfect", where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive character to a logical and sociological distribution of the most modern type. For this memory or symbolic common denominator concerns the response that human groupings, united in space and time, have given not to the problems of the production of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, to those of reproduction, survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex, and symbol. If it is true, for example, that Europe is representative of such a sociocultural ensemble, it seems to me that its existence is based more on this "symbolic denominator", which its art, philosophy, and religions manifest, than on its specific economic profile, which is certainly interwoven with collective memory but whose traits change rather rapidly under pressure from its partners.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 13-14