Minorities in Europe and the U.S. have contended with very different concepts of national identity as they interact with their “mainstream” societies. In a spate of recent events, hostility among Europeans toward their immigrant populations has surfaced so overtly that eminent political expert Ian Buruma is led to wonder whether the much-vaunted notion of European multiculturalism is now dead.

Author and journalist Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, New York. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he also writes regularly for the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, and New Yorker. He was cultural editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1983-86) and Foreign Editor of The Spectator, London (1990-91). He has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C., St. Antony's College, Oxford, and NYU's Remarque Institute.

His books include Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004), Inventing Japan (2003), Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001), Anglomania: a European Love Affair (1999), and The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (1997), among others. His latest book is Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006).