ABSTRACT
Every society of any size contains cultural differences. If they are sufficiently significant and have sufficiently wide-ranging consequences for people’s ways of life or their moral attitudes, they can be regarded as making divisions between different groups of people, especially if several different kinds of cultural difference coincide in the same groups. Such differences might be rooted in religion, or language, or social attitude, e.g. to consumption of alcohol or drugs. Other differences (which are usually – but not always – regarded more lightly) include support for different football teams, or liking for different kinds of music and dance, or levels of formal education. Sometimes differences of physical appearance coincide with such cultural differences – most notably, colour of skin. Since every society contains many such differences, there is no reason in general to think that they have to prevent social interaction or cooperative and friendly relations within that society. But it can happen that different groups that such cultural differences set up become hostile to each other; they may even fight each other, or one may try to exterminate the other (genocide). Usually, this happens because there are real or perceived clashes of interest between them. Before 1945, Europe had a long and unhappy history of hostilities between such culturally determined groups, although also many examples of untroubled coexistence.
