ABSTRACT
While the end of 1992 marked the consolidation towards a ‘New Europe’, it was also a time of much turbulence and change. In the recent past the world witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, the war against Iraq, the massacre of over a million people by the State of the People's Republic of China, the break up of Yugoslavia, the US invasion of Panama, and the jury verdicts of not guilty against four Los Angeles police officers who were recorded on videotape as beating a black man. All of these events had the themes of ‘race’, nation and identity as central to their occurrence. In a similar, yet more optimistic vein, Nelson Mandela was freed in South Africa in 1990. For although Nelson Mandela was gaoled because of his opposition to apartheid, he was also freed as a result of that very same opposition. It is in this way that the inequalities of ‘race’, nation and identity contain the seeds for their own destruction—they produce their own gravediggers.
