ABSTRACT
So far then, so banal. The world has changed, democracy is more difficult in a society that is more individualised and complex. A range of differentiated and plural identities are more forceful and mobilising than the unifying factors of class and nation, both of which formed the bases of political identity for much of the modern epoch. This is all hardly news, and these phenomena have been described in a variety of books, both academic and more popular.8 I use the label of ‘fragmentation’ to describe this process. It has led to a situation in which unifying forces of citizenship have become weaker, with significant implications for the process of democratic politics. Reactions to such fragmentation range from those of lament to those of celebration. On the side of lament, are those who regret the loss of solidarity and certainty which accompanies identity politics and the decline of class-based parties. This is often associated with concern at the weakening of the shared citizenship secured through a nation-state with a common ‘public culture’. The term ‘public culture’ is seen by David Miller as a constitutive element in nationality, and invoked to suggest ‘a sense that the people belong together by virtue of the characteristics that they share’.9 These shared characteristics are not those of biological descent, or common ethnicity. A public culture is described as ‘a set of understandings about how a group of people is to conduct its life together’.10
