Abstract

The assumption that human socializing instincts are restricted to the community of birth and upbringing was long accepted without question. But today’s modern states have passed from the nation-building stage into that of multicultural belonging, and fluidity of membership allied to perpetual population shifts is the norm. This article traces changing patterns of global migration: first, territoriality plus rooted identity plus ‘gardening’; second, emigration to supposedly ‘empty’ lands; third, interlocked diasporas. How may we now live with and in the right to difference? Identity formation is never fixed, never final, veering between the pole of freedom and that of security. It is an intertwining of continuity and discontinuity that may now hold society together.