Speech given at the “Nordic Festival / Nordiska Festivalen – 2008 ” Gothenburg, Sweden, Aug. 30, 2008
by
Dr. Tom Sunic
We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it. Our fathers and our grandparents never asked questions about their identity; they never worried about it. They took for granted their affiliation to a given religion and to a given tribe or a people. It is with the rising tide of globalization, along with the waning of the traditional nation-state, and with the rising tide of multiculturalism and multiracialism that we start asking a question about who we are. The minute we raise the question of identity we start thinking about national identity.
But is this still really so today? How do we define our modern identity? Let us propose a couple of modern definitions that are onerous to Europeans.