Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World

The year was 2001-the first year of a new millennium filled with the promise of progress and change. Automobile manufacturers were selling electric cars, private citizens were purchasing trips into outer space, and scientists were on the verge of solving the mysteries of the human genetic code. Russia was joining NATO; the pope was visiting Cuba, and Europe was counting down the days to a common currency. Global travel had reached an all-time high of 698.8 million international arrivals a year; and over 400 million people around the world had regular access to the Internet (Foreign Poolicy 2002). For many people, however, and certainly a majority of Americans, 2001 will be most remembered for the tragic day of September 11. At first glance, an unforeseen terrorist attack on the United States by Muslim fundamentalists seems not only impossible to predict, but strangely out of place in a high-tech, globally interconnected world. On second glance, what looks like a paradox reveals itself as a complex, contradictory, overlapping set of realities that entail both integration and disintegration, homogenization and fragmentation. This book focuses on the seeming contradiction and the interaction between global- 
ization on one hand, and the power and passion of cultural and political belonging on the other.