This article proposes a reconceptualisation of regionalism, nationalism and globalisation as simultaneous and causally connected phenomena, which rst peaked in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on gures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher and others active in the Deutscher Werkbund, it examines how competition in the global market inspired a search for modern yet uniquely national forms that derived their 'authenticity' from vernacular culture. Yet paradoxically, the visual vocabulary of Heimat was frequently inspired by English and American models. This article interprets the aesthetic and political translations which the peripatetics of localism entailed, and shows how consumer goods 'made in Germany' came to be invested with a sense of cultural mission.According to modernisation theory, for much of European history, ordinary people de ned their sense of belonging in terms of a locality or region. This changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when increased geographical and social mobility, as well as political uni cations in Germany and Italy, asserted the primacy of a unitary national identity over the particularist homeland. The political enfranchisement of the nation's citizens was a consequence -as was the emergence of populist nationalism and xenophobia. 1 Today, we no longer see nation building as the end of the modernisation process, but as a transitional stage. A few decades after the triumph of the nation state, its hegemony was challenged by a new trend: globalisation. In this ongoing process, the balance of power gradually shifted and shifts from national governments to supra-national political and legal institutions, multi-national corporations as well as global currency markets.To equate modernisation in politics, economics and culture with the move from the local, via the national, to the global naturally entails some risky historical abstractions. As with all abstractions, we can nd exceptions in the empirical data. Some nations modernised very gradually, others rapidly (and were thus 'belated'); some, like Switzerland, never fully centralised at all. It was not until relatively recently, however, that serious doubt was cast on the validity of the entire model beyond such peculiarities. These doubts were fed by topical political developments. The end of the twentieth century witnessed a powerful re-emergence of nationalism within Europe, notably in former Yugoslavia and in the Russian Federation. It seems implausible that these societies simply 'reverted' to a more primitive state. If half a century of state-sponsored supra-nationalism failed to stamp out nationalist sentiments in the Eastern block, and if this nationalism ares up again just as globalisation reaches new heights, then
