Society: Is communal conflict the consequence of conflictual identities? Were Serbs at war with Kosovo Albanians, for example, because they were each locked in their tribal hatreds? Or was it the other way round - their tribalism was the result of their primeval quarrel?
Until recently - less than two decades ago - the common understanding was that quarrels arose and wars were fought, not over ideas and ideals but over material resources. Religion, language, or nationhood could be deployed as bonding agents on one side or the other, but the bottom line was material, not ideal.
Then, some time in the early 1990s, intellectual
fashion changed and identity politics emerged. The idea that each community has its own identity in some objective sense began to be applied to the analysis of conflict for the first time.
Today identity is everywhere, invoked as a catch-all term to explain the mysteries of communal discord. The end of the Cold War and the rapid unfreezing of Balkanised regions of hostility in eastern Europe and beyond, helped to promote the idea of identity as a fact, an object recently uncovered and now there to be discovered. Identity politics was born as the best approach to analysing it.
Amartya Sen will have none of it. We have multiple identities, overlapping allegiances, according to him, and we choose which is primary and which is secondary to our needs and preferences in different circumstances. The identity that matters to us at any period, the significant group to which we belong - these are not facts out there to be discovered. They are choices and, as such, they are subject to revision.
As high-caste Indian, feminist, academic, American citizen, former Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and Nobel Prize winner in economics, Sen has a more glittering array of options to choose from than most of us, but his point is clear: we are not just Hindu or American or Catholic or Kurd. In a global world a variety of communities claim our allegiance but none can demand it exclusively as a matter of established fact.
Sen's overriding concern in this collection of essays and lectures is to undermine the link between our social identity and our proclivity to communal conflict and violence, and to establish multiculturalism as an ideal which respects the empirical reality in which we live, and the moral imperative of communal inclusiveness.
When Sen was a student in Cambridge in 1953, his landlady openly worried that his Indian pigment might rub off on her bath. Since he has spent the rest of his life jostling with diverse cultures in England and America, he knows what he is talking about. As an academic, he is best known for his work on welfare economics and for his rejection of the traditional concept of "economic man" - the individual created by economists whose motivations for acting could be reduced to one's own narrow self-interest. As an empirical observation, and not just a moral exhortation, values matter.
Now in his 70s, this gentle scholar continues to walk on the left of social commentary, like Chomsky, whom he faintly resembles, but without the bitterness. The book could have done with some sharper editing to remove a degree of repetitiveness not uncommon in collections of essays.
Another set of reflections on the same theme of identity and community comes from the same publisher and from a distinguished academic who is also a lifelong émigré living in the United States. Kwame Anthony Appiah was born of an English mother and a Ghanaian father, raised in the Asante region of Ghana, educated at Cambridge University, and is now Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He too speaks of what he knows through experience. His book is an attempt to provide a practical, workable philosophy of what he calls "rooted cosmopolitanism" in place of the relativist morality in current vogue.
Cosmopolitanism, as opposed to communitarianism, is the view that we are essentially citizens of the world and have universal moral commitments to strangers no less than to the conventional circles of obligation like family, friends, and nation. The ethic, deriving from Confucius, Jesus, and Immanuel Kant, is simply stated: "what you wish done to yourself, do to others". But Appiah is clear that this ethic of universal love is impossible in practice. He proposes a compromise - an ethic rooted in practical reality - which he terms a "partial cosmopolitanism" against "the nationalist who abandons all foreigners", on the one hand, and "the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality".
His abandonment of the universal ideal and his preference for a middle way between narrow community and the wide landscape of humanity leaves the suspicion that it cannot inspire the individual to look up from his narrow vision and aim - however feebly - to embrace the strangers who are the subject of Appiah's concluding chapter.
Thus both authors share a common purpose, arising in part from a common life experience as multicultured, humane and sophisticated travellers through the interlocking communities that make up the global reality. (Not unexpectedly, they know each other and cite each other approvingly.) This raises a more fundamental question in relation to both. How are identities formed and how do we move from a narrow parochialism to a cosmopolitan - even partial cosmopolitan - vision? We are left with the impression that both authors feel it is just a matter of knowledge and goodwill. Neither author addresses the link between identity and wealth - a deficiency which has bedevilled identity studies since it became a fashionable topic of analysis.
Consider the impoverished and semiliterate villagers in their isolated dwellings in the Pakistani mountains, who died in their thousands in the earthquake last year. How can they ever acquire the resources to travel and experience other cultures on even the minimal level available to the urban poor in the West? And again the millions of near-destitute farm labourers and factory workers in other parts of the developing world - how can they ever extricate themselves from the social position to which they and their ancestors were born in order to view their own cultural and political inheritance as a choice among other options?
In the caste system in India and in the apartheid system in Africa we have dramatic examples of what might be called "rooted parochialism" - two peoples rooted for centuries in a cultural and economic degradation imposed on them by the civilised powers, who preserved their wealth through the sub-human identity transmitted to the natives by their colonial masters. Identity may be a choice for us and for our privileged authors, who can escape with Ryanair or private jet to a world of different beliefs and charming local practices. It is not much of a choice for the untouchables or shanty-dwellers.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny By Amartya Sen. Allen Lane, 215pp. £16.99
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers By Kwame Anthony Appiah. Allen Lane, 196pp. £16.99