People, nation and state - Edward Mortimer

While conflicts of class, ideology and political system have receded in the post-Cold War world, divisions based on group identity - cultural, ethnic, religious, and national - have assumed new importance. From Bosnia to Belfast and Burundi, from California to Kazakhstan, the difficulty of defining and reconciling group identities, and of relating them to state structures, has become one of the central problems of the late-20th century.;Nations in the developed world are no less immune from these complex issues - whether they involve Scottish nationalism, the rival national identities of Northern Ireland, the uneasy integration of former GDR citizens into a united Germany, the perennial problems of Afro-Americans and Hispanics in the USA, not to mention the myriad factors raised by the disappearance of the Soviet Union.;This text attempts to illuminate the issues of ethnic and national identity which have emerged as central to world politics. The contributors examine such topics as the making and definitions of ethnicity; the relationship between nationhood and nationalism; sexual politics relating to nationalism and ethnicity; the problem of national identity in a multicultural society; and the problems of different kinds of nationalism.