Now that we have identified the basic conceptual terrain within which this book is located, it is time to turn our attention to the central issue with which it is concerned. According to John Stuart Mill, a democracy cannot succeed unless its citizens share a common national identity. This chapter begins by highlighting two main reasons why this is so – in the absence of a common national identity, citizens (1) will not see themselves as bound by a single political authority or (2) be motivated to do their part in carrying the burdens of self-government. I argue, however, that although Mill's basic claim has troubling implications for divided societies aiming to make the transition from conflict to democracy, a more complete assessment of this issue needs to distinguish between two main forms that national identity can take – civic and ethnic. In some divided societies, the difficulty is not so much that citizens do not share a sufficiently strong sense of common nationality, but that they have not been able to balance the need to recognise competing ethnic identities with the need to create an over-arching civic allegiance to the state.

Although ethnicity is an enormously complex phenomenon, two major approaches to its study predominate: primordialism, which stresses ideas of kinship and descent, and constructivism, which stresses context and fluidity. Ontologically, constructivism is the more convincing view. In a world marked by increasing social diversity, constructivism also has the more normatively attractive consequences.