This will come as no surprise to my Canadian friend Daniel A. Bell, but, according to Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker profile of Michael Ignatieff (the full article can only be seen through subscription), folks north of the border have more of a collectivist sensibility than do those of us in the USA.  This passage captures the contrast:

     Yet the belief that the right of the community can trump the rights of the individual – and that this is not incompatible with liberalism but exactly what humanizes it – really is a distinctly Canadian intuition.  It is argued in different ways, and with different emphasis, by the influential McGill philosopher, Charles Taylor – who as an N.D.P. candidate in the 1965 elections, was defeated by the newcomer Trudeau in his first run for Parliament – and by the essayist John Ralston Saul and the Queens University philosopher Will Kymlicka.

     We are not, and have never been, the Canadian collectivists argue – in conscious opposition to older Anglo-American traditions – the rational individuals of liberal contract theory.  No man is an island, and rule made for imaginary islands ignore the fragile ecology of the actual archipelago.  We are people who live in communities, and our sense of who we are derives from what the people around us are like.  To exalt the individual and his rights at the expense of nurturing the tenuous threads of togetherness leads to violence, alienation, political apathy, and the growth of crazy movements that can supply, in moonshine form, the sense of solidarity that pure "rights" liberalism can't – the very traits that Canadians see in a nearby country, they name no names.

To me Gopnik's description of Canadians sounds rather like a modern day Confucianism, with an emphasis on an individual's embeddedness in community.  "No man is an island," indeed.  And I think the point about this kind of perspective being compatible with liberalism is an important thing to keep in mind regarding the contemporary relevance of Confucianism.   To my mind, if Confucianism is to be applicable in modern settings – and this extends not only to North America and Europe but to China as well – it cannot simply reject the concerns of liberalism but, rather, must work to compromise with a concern for individual rights.  While Confucianism would also reject what Gopnik refers to as "pure rights" liberalism, it cannot simply throw the liberal baby out with the individualist bath water. 

This is not an easy task: how can we know where to strike the balance between individual rights and community interests?  At the very least, if you are interested in Confucian answers to that question, Canada might be a place to look.