Influential literatures presume institutions forge territorial identities: decentralization is expected to build regional attachment, globalization to breed cosmopolitans and nationalist backlash. We test these premises with the joint EVS/WVS (92 countries), measuring identity from a five-item closeness battery (town, region, country, continent, world) and classifying each respondent into a typology: exclusively attached to one level (subcountry, country, or supracountry) multiple and nested, or unattached. Most people are multiple identifiers; exclusive cosmopolitans are rare and concentrated among immigrants, and exclusive nationalism reflects grievance, not tradition. The two institutional dimensions behave asymmetrically: globalization sharpens exclusive attachments and the educational divide across countries and, in formative years, strengthens national and plural rather than cosmopolitan attachment, whereas decentralization builds subcountry identity nowhere. Migration reshapes identity — toward the country in less-globalized destinations, beyond it in more-globalized ones, inherited by the second generation. We propose an interactive context–composition account.