There is a reflective relationship in which the former's basic traits are identified through a presumed diametrical opposition with the latter's.

Most concepts of Europe as an ‘ imagined community’ are characterized by a bipolar scheme in which the notion of Europe appears together with contrastive representations of ‘Anti-Europe’ (Arab–Muslim culture, Asia, Africa, the Orient, etc.). Giordano, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 But while articulating a transnational discourse of indigeneity, the charter of the Fourth World is the perpetuation of the particular differences of its constituency.

Largely due to the support of international nongovernment organizations and the United Nations, the Fourth World has become a global presence. Notwithstanding their weakness in terms of conventional political resources, and their often minuscule numbers, indigenous peoples have in the last decades of the twentieth century been able to resist encroachments on their space by mobilizing international opinion. The Fourth World claims that it is in the interest of humanity as a whole that indigenous peoples are able to perpetuate these life ways, and it thus claims a particular set of rights within the broader field of difference politics. In Fourth World discourse, indigeneity implies a radical difference from the world's other life ways, and a rejection of material progress in favor of spirituality and closeness to nature. Indigenous identity is grounded in the claim to be descended from the original inhabitants of a country, vis-à-vis ethnic groups that came later, as conquerors and colonists. The Fourth World is both an imagined community and a political coalition of indigenous peoples, transcending the borders of nation states. Beckett, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

Examples of imagined communities