It is obviously very appropriate that this conference on Identities should be held in Hong Kong, a place where both private and public identities are today in a state of great uncertainty. What is Hong-Kong, and how do its inhabitants identify themselves? Is it British? Is it Chinese, or about to become Chinese? Or is it an island of Western capitalism stuck on the rear end of Asia, neither British nor Chinese, but deriving all or most of its identity from its dizzy economic prosperity?

I think this problem of identity breaks down into two parts, the personal and the national, operating respectively in the private and public spheres. I also believe that all of us have multiple identities. This becomes clearer when we look at any one individual's identity. We find that it is constructed of an amalgam of loyalties, affections, prejudices, and fears; and built up from the influences of gender, kinship, race, class, generation, education, religion, and culture.

In many cases, race is a crucially important factor in defining identity. Inhabitants of Island nations, which have experienced only minimal immigration over the centuries, like England or Japan, seem to have a very highly developed socially and culturally cohesive identity. Such a strong identity is almost impossible to impose upon the inhabitants of multiracial nations which have constantly been exposed to large-scale immigration of a diversity of ethnic groups from all over the world. The United States is the most striking example, where multiracial and multicultural pluralism is only barely being kept within acceptable channels without the society falling into chaos. The United States no longer possesses a single identity, and it is doubtful whether it ever did.

Man is a social animal and he lives and relates to others with whom he comes into close physical contact. In the past, say the medieval and the early modern periods, before the French Revolution created true nationalism, we historians can easily show that the center of loyalty and identity for the vast majority was no larger than one's own village or town. For example, we can see how English juries treated insiders and outsiders accused of felony for petty theft. If the accused belonged to the village, he or she was usually acquitted, the feeling being: "It's only poor old Joe. He is one of us, even if he is always stealing. Let's reduce the valuation of stolen goods so that the crime is reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor." But if the accused was from out of town, then the jury usually did not hesitate to convict and hang him. Identity, therefore, meant belonging to a small village or town community; everybody else was other.

The rise of the state in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries brought new and wider identity configurations, as efforts were made, not very successfully, to make people feel identity with all their fellow nationals. This bonding was, however, often totally impossible, since many of these states were merely properties thrown together at random by dynastic marriages, and widely dispersed across the map of Europe. The holdings of the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century are a classic example. They included populations with entirely different laws, customs, languages, and cultures.

But in the sixteenth century the nation states took advantage of the collapse of the unified medieval church and the rise of a plurality of Christian Churches to amalgamate two principal dimensions of identity, secular, and religious. Each Church was allied to a state and used that state apparatus to persecute its rivals. Secular rulers believed that no state could survive the establishment of multiple religious identities. For the century and a half, from 1520 to 1660, Europe was torn apart by wars of religion. A diversity of religious faiths--Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, or sectarian--tended to define public and even private identity. This in turn stimulated wars of extermination, resulting in enormous loss of life and the economic devastation of Germany. By 1660, however, although many national boundaries like those of Poland, were still in flux, the ideological temperature went down. Each nation state had its own state religion, and the core of personal identity was increasingly dependent on secular state formations. But let me stress again: nationalism was not widely spread as an ideology outside the elite. In England, the majority distrusted their neighbors in the next village, or town, or county, while they positively hated national enemies like the French or the Catholics.

Over the long term, however, things changed. There is little doubt that the stick of military force and the carrot of commerce were more powerful instruments for the forging of national identity in Europe than either ethnicity or language or religion. The great European nation states all had purely artificial frontiers and were held together above all by national war and fear and hatred of neighbors. Historically the question of national identity has always been at its most acute in marginal areas where two powerful cultural and political systems come into conflict, such as the Pyrenees and Alsace-Lorraine.

In the late eighteenth century, this national ideology was given specificity and immediacy by the mass call to arms during the French Revolution. But even then the hold of nationalism was weak, as proved by the general reluctance actually to fight. Draft laws allowed the rich to hire substitutes, which very many of them did. Armies were polyglot assemblies of the scum of Europe, as Wellington described his troops in Spain. The English before the nineteenth century mostly hired Germans like Hessians to man their armies, and Dutch and others to man their navies. Despite the heroic rhetoric of Shakespeare about the linkage of national identity to the soil, in practice nobody but the political elite cared very much about the nation, and the furious propaganda efforts of both sides-in the Napoleonic wars were not very successful. Never forget that a majority of the army Napoleon led into Russia were not French but volunteers from all over Europe.

Nationalism, therefore, as a form of public identity was weak until the nineteenth century. By then, and especially after World War II nations and nationalism grew together. Professor Hobsbawm has defined modern nationalism as an ideology based on a false myth of the past, and a vicious hatred of one's neighbors. These noxious ideological constructs were largely created by scholars in Government pay, who busied themselves with turning out jingoistic and xenophobic school text-books.

For the last couple of centuries the many identities that rattle about in the head and heart of any individual have been largely absorbed by loyalty to the sovereign nation state. This now looks like an odd and relatively ephemeral development since, as we are now finding in Russia and Yugoslavia, and even in Western states like Belgium, France, and Britain, the states turn out to be fragile umbrellas, sheltering subversive, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other tensions and loyalties and identities.

In the 1970s, the result of the end of the Cold War between two superpowers with the military capacity of mutually assured destruction has been to loosen the reins of identity in Western and Eastern Europe, and set whole populations from Edinburgh to Tashkent, from Spain to the Ukraine, free to invent and cultivate long-suppressed cultural identities, a process which looks as if it may threaten the very survival of many existing states. The archipelago of Great Britain has already split in two, with the independence of the Irish Republic, the most significant result of which has been to cause a long and bloody civil war in Northern Ireland fueled by poverty, nationalism, and religion. Demands for greater recognition of national identity, if not yet total separation, are on the rise in Scotland and even in Wales. The latter has its own TV station in the Welsh language, even though only a small minority of Welsh understand it any more. In America, massive immigration is reversing the effects of the Mexican War and creating a largely Latino society in the southwest of America. In Belgium, Walloons and Flemings are increasingly at odds, while in France the Bretons, the Basques, the Corsicans, and German-speaking Alsatians are reviving their own ethnic traditions and customs. In Spain, Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia are increasingly resentful of the central government in Madrid.

If the once-powerful Western nation-state is losing its monopoly of social identity and being eroded from within, it is also being obliged by economic needs to surrender parts of its sovereignty, and therefore identity, to a new entity called the European Union, run by bureaucrats in Brussels. Europe is thus both exploding and imploding at the same time, and some, like the Scots and the Catalans make no secret of their hopes that joining the European Union will open the way to a devolution of local powers and a recognition of the multiple identities hitherto compressed under the European state system.

What will happen next is a hotly debated subject. All the evidence from Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the remnants of the Russian Empire points to a revival of tribal identities and tribal warfare. Professor Huntingdon has suggested the future will see a power struggle between some seven to eight great civilizations, defined by their religious beliefs. He agrees that the nation-state is everywhere crumbling but is alone in thinking that religion will fill the gap. Others believe that Somalia and Bosnia provide a more likely model for what we have to look forward to, with identities focused on clans, led by brutal warlords, whose main object is looting. This does indeed seem likely, given the domination of the clan in Syria, Iraq, many African countries, and Russia, to name only a few around the world.

Let us now shift from the macro to the micro, from role of identity in the nation state or the village or the tribe and look at identity from the point of view of the individual. Let us take as an example the question, "Who am I?". I was born 74 years ago of English parents in south-eastern England, an area which during the twentieth century has seen its identity swallowed up by the vast sprawling suburbs of London. Like the state of New Jersey in America, where I now live, the county of Surrey has long been merely a commuter area, with which nobody identifies very much any more. My parents were agnostic, and so am I, so religion played no part in my identity. From the age of 12, I more or less left home, first to go to one of England's famous public schools, then to Oxford University, in both cases, of course, with the help of scholarships. During World War II, served for five years in the British Navy, ending up on board an aircraft carrier attached to the Nimitz fleet, which was providing air cover for the bombardment of Tokyo. I should add that after the Japanese surrender we were the first allied ship to enter Hong Kong harbor, therefore forestalling either Chiang Kai Check or the Americans, who might have given it back to him. Ever since 1945, I have lived as a scholar in Oxford, England, and in Princeton, USA. So what am I? My major loyalties are to the two great universities in which I have worked. I am also loyal to both America and England, and so I cannot claim to feel exclusive loyalty to any single nation state or civil institution. The question of my political identity is thus unanswerable. My cultural identity has been formed above all by the Enlightenment and the traditional cultural values of Western Europe, and yet the East Coast of America is the place where I live by preference. I suspect that this lack of an over-riding private and public identity has been common among many after the undermining of the clan and the kin in the sixteenth century, and before the rise of the xenophobic and aggressive nation state at the time of the French Revolution. The decline of that state and of religion have deprived more and more, especially intellectuals, of any single coherent identity. I do not feel any pain from the lack of one.