Identity is about having a sense of place, about what you have in common with other individuals and what makes you unique. It provides you with a sense of personal place at its most fundamental, the reliable foundation of your uniqueness. But it’s also about your complicated interactions with other people, relationships that have grown increasingly complicated and perplexing in the modern world. Every one of us juggles many, potentially incompatible identities that compete for allegiance within us: as men or women, black or white, straight or gay, able-bodied or crippled, “British” or “European”… The possibilities for the list and our possessions are virtually limitless. By and for the new social groups that entered the public consciousness in the late 1960s, such as the black movement, feminism, lesbian and gay liberation, and others, “identity politics” was initially established. The agony of the Left over the past ten years has included the problem of how to incorporate these innovative but ethereal and potentially polarizing forces into the political mainstream. However, the core of contemporary politics is primarily centered on issues of identity. No identity is neutral. Different, and frequently at odds with one another, values underlie the search for identity. By expressing who we are, we also want to communicate who we are, what we think, and what we want. The issue is that these values, wants, and requirements frequently clash not only across different communities but even inside people. Because they involve fundamental, deeply felt questions about who we are and what we want to be and become rather than being merely hypotheses about the world and our role in it, discussions about values are made to be particularly sensitive and tense. Additionally, they raise important political issues, such as how to reconcile our individual and collective human demands.