The twenty-first century has burst upon the stage of history in a worldwide epidemic of racial and ethnic violence. Whereas the twentiethcentury pundits sought to eliminate the natural human instinct for self- and group identification (partly as a reaction to the gross misuse of that instinct that led to the Second World War), the end of the Cold War saw an outbreak of local conflicts between peoples of diverse cultures seemingly no longer able to share a small piece of the planet with