 Habermas believed a nationalistic collective identity was no longer feasible in a globalized modern world and scorned ethnic cohesion as a part of nineteenth century nationalism irrelevant in a new age of international migration.His theory was therefore grounded in the idea that "the symbolic unity of the person that is produced and maintained through self-identification depends... on belonging to the symbolic reality of a group, on the possibility of localizing oneself in the world of this group.A group identity that transcends the life histories of individuals is thus a precondition of the identity of the individual."