The Illusion of Cultural Identity

An examination of the fluidity of ideas of culture with relation to identity, state-builfing and political action. Does the West impose its own definition of human rights and democracy on the rest of the world? Does globalisation threaten British, French or other European identities? Was Confucianism really the motor of the Asian economic miracle? Is African culture compatible with multi-party politics? Is Islam an insurmountable obstacle to the integration of North Africans and Turks into Western Europe? There are so many uncertainties - or perhaps false certainties - which we meet all the time and which assume the permanence of culture. It is the very idea of culture that prevents us from grasping the cultural dimension of political action and economic development. For state formation brings into play aesthetic and moral concepts - just as it involves sexual practices, culinary traditions, clothes and hair-styles. After an ironical, and sometimes comical, journey through the political 'imaginaires' and passions of the contemporary world, this probing work invites the reader to reinvent the democratic concept in its entirety in order to confront those engaged in contemporary ident