TOWARDS A CRISIS IN IDENTITY

A psychologist once noted that only in times of crisis do individuals become aware of the complexity of their personalities. Each is ‘a combination of capacities created in the distant past and of opportunities divined in the present; a combination of totally obvious preconditions developed in individual growth and of social conditions recreated in the precarious interplay of generations.’ Political regimes, too, experience crises of identity, which expose the complex foundations of their own ‘personalities,’ the tenuous accommodation of divergent internal forces and the interplay of human volition, contingency, and their surrounding environment. The blend of these diverse factors seems so satisfying and so capable of providing a coherent picture of the world and of one's place within it – satisfying, that is, until some internal contradiction or external force disrupts this complacency.