Identities: traditions and new communities

Abstract

Our societies are undergoing an identity revival which may not be thought of purely in terms of fundamentalism and intolerance. Rather, to a great extent this is a response to a globalization that is dissolving society as a community of meaning, intending to substitute for this a world comprised of markets, networks and flows of information. The resurgent identity processes - those of ethnicities, regions and gender - therefore respond to the excision of cultures from local space-time and bend to the logic of a global power that is taking refuge in a logic of communal power. However, in the face of the growing menace of particularism, we need to rethink how this is connected to universalism. Otherwise, we shall see ourselves obliged to choose either between the universalism inherited from the enlightenment, which excludes whole sections of the population or a tribal differentialism that asserts racist and xenophobic exclusion - an alternative that poses mortal dangers for democracy.