The past decade has seen a great outpouring of interest in the nature of collective identities of various kinds. Within the United States, both popular and academic interest in identities that divide the population have not only spawned heated debates but have also had substantial social consequences and public policy implications. Fueled in part by the legacy of racism and the still daunting problems of racial division, and nurtured as well by recent and ongoing waves of immigration, the issue is frequently framed in terms of “multiculturalism.” In this version, the American population is presumably divided into a fixed number of different “cultures,” each deserving of equal respect and some, perhaps, deserving of special aid.

Beyond the American shores, interest in issues of collective identities, their nature, and their consequences, is scarcely less acute. Nineteenth-century theorists of nationalism – riding the Europe-wide wave of state-creation according to principles of national identity – gave way in the twentieth century to theorists who predicted that such national identity would soon be supplanted by supranational allegiances. The European Union was, for some, viewed as the very embodiment of these processes. Yet events of the recent past have sent these evolutionary internationalists into retreat and ushered in a new concern for the continuing – some would say growing – strength of national and ethnic loyalties. Moreover, from the Balkans to central Africa, ethnic conflict and violence have been interpreted as evidence that people's collective identities do not necessarily match national borders.