ABSTRACT
A new kind of European citizen, a ‘stranger’, is being constructed, in the context of a fragmented Yugoslavia as well as in today’s Europe in general. The dilemmas and ambiguities of modern society appear in the nexus between bridge-building, multi-cultural, transethnic communities and a fortress Europe that builds new walls around and inside its imagined cultural territories. Modern identities are formed in a dynamic interplay of different cultural elements from the composite living world which stresses the meaning of the transethnic in the construction of modern identities and the process of belonging. Ethnicity has become a key question in the discussion of multicultural and immigrant policy in Sweden and all over Europe. The widespread static view of ethnicity, with its emphasis upon cultural difference, has come under increasing criticism as a deterministic view that portrays cultural preservation as a goal in itself, while presenting social inequality as cultural deviance. Ethnicity and race, have come to be understood as social constructions.
