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Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Children's Development of an Identity

For me, one of the most significant marks of the times we live in is the large number of break-away or independence movements that are surfacing in such parts of the world as French Canada, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Basque Spain, and Corsica, to mention only those close to my home base. There is probably nothing new about these current social movements, since similar campaigns for independence in the past have sliced the world up and made it into an enormous and fascinating checkerboard of nation-states. But even today we really know very little about the sentiments that underlie movements toward independence or separation, the current ones or the earlier ones. Some features of these sentiments are obvious enough. When a subgroup within a nation, or some minority within that subgroup, talks about separation from the larger collectivity, it is usually a clear symptom that basic human needs for ethnic and/or ethnolinguistic identity are unsatisfied and that some new mixture of ethnocentrism and xenophobia has occurred, making it uncomfortable if not impossible for that ethnic group to live harmoniously with others within a common social system. Thus, each success of a separatist movement reflects a failure in democratic coexistence. Those who have faith in democracy realize that coexistence is a continuous challenge, almost always fraught with social unrest and conflict.1 But for democrats it is worth the struggle, no matter how intenseand protracted. The separatist alternative is worrisome because it tends to create a “closed” society, in the sense that Karl Popper uses the term,2 and because it thrives on exaggerations of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. As I see it, an identity that is based on one’s ethnic or ethnolinguistic background runs the risk of overemphasizing the belief that one’s own group is distinctive and special. This in turn exaggerates in-group versus out-group thinking and the belief that national, cultural, or linguistic backgrounds necessarily create unique and distinctive styles of personality and unique modes of thinking. In my own attempts to understand the psychology of identity formation, I have come to question whether culture, national background, or language