6. CONCLUSION

The processes of transformation undergone by modern societies, with the expansion of information technologies and economic globalisation, have left a trail of deep erosions on the social institutions that articulated the personal and collective identity of their individuals.

The centrifugal force of religious practices, ideological mobilisation and class conflicts has not ceased to become weaker in the majority of western societies, although it is true that numerous examples of these types of expression appear today in other geographical ambits. However, the difference lies in that these forms of conflict, competition and cooperation lack the centrality and pre-eminence that their predecessors achieved.

The erosion suffered by these social institutions does not mean that they have ceased to be relevant. On the contrary, they continue to hold an enormous significance as mechanisms that generate community cooperation and collective identity. However, the situation now seems more complex, since they must compete with other sources of identity.

Amongst the situations of conflict that have not ceased to develop over the course of recent decades, we have considered those that hold as their central object gender discrimination, the struggle against degradation and in defence of the environment, the demand of the right to appropriate a portion of land that would permit the peasants to be citizens, the conflicts around the promotion of cultural, ethno-linguistic and national diversity, the recognition of sexual alterity, as well as solidarity with the socially and economically excluded. These forms of cooperation (inwards) and of conflict (outwards) have come to compete with the social institutions of modern society in the tempestuous task of providing meaning and becoming a source of collective identity for the individual.

This situation of competition generates new social conflicts but also new contexts favourable to cooperation, such as that found today between former ideological opponents, religious competitors or class adversaries, giving rise to new alliances that would have been unthinkable in the past. Véase, por ejemplo, el papel desempeñado por partidos confesionales, o los nuevos movimientos nacionalistas tras los cambios de 1989.

Together with these forms, there are a whole series of hybridisations (peasant women, indigenous ecologists, homosexuals belonging to ethnic minorities, etc.), which we cannot deal with here, in spite of their being highly relevant socially and analytically. In any case, the forms that we have analysed here have already been able to agglutinate important social aggregates to cooperate around a collective identity. Besides, they have made their demands for recognition visible through political mobilisation and social conflict, to the extent of breaking the pre-existing oligopoly in modern society.

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