While acknowledging people's need for identity, and that different cultures necessarily produce differentiated identities, Professor Meyer argues that difference only leads to intolerance and violence when politically ambitious leaderships exploit it. Fundamentalism is therefore essentially a political phenomenon that has occured in all civilizations, particularly in contemporary Europe and North America. In the present age of globalization, Meyer suggests that social crisis grows out of an exclusionary dynamic that marginalizes growing numbers of people. Little wonder that the deepening of inequality between North and South has undermined popular confidence in secular leaders' vision of development and triggered a divisive fundamentalism that declares war on modernism and, ironically, on traditionalism too.

This argument contains real grounds for optimism. In seeking political strategies to defeat fundamentalism and the identity mania that accompanies it, the focus must be on developing economic and social structures that give all citizens a common interest in the operations of a socially responsible market economy, which delivers to all.

1. The birth of an ideology

2. Attempts at clarification

3. Unexpected strains of fundamentalism in Europe

4. Unwanted interactions: global scenarios for culture and politics

5. The language of empirical investigation: facts and research results

6. Prospects for the global community

7. Transculturality: a contemporary concept of culture

8. Opportunities in risk

Appendices