Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Successful democracy depends not on optimization of its ideals, but balance: a balance between individual freedom and political equality, and between a capable state exercising legitimate power and the institutions of law and accountability that seek to constrain it. Many democracies try to do a whole lot more than this, through policies that try to promote economic growth, a clean environment, consumer safety, support for science and technology, and the like. But the effective recognition of citizens as equal adults with the capacity to make political choices is a minimal condition for being a liberal democracy.

In relatively benevolent dictatorships, such as those of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or China under Deng Xiaoping, the state adopted a paternalistic attitude toward its citizens.

A state guaranteeing equal political rights was the only rational way to resolve the contradictions that Hegel saw in the relationship between master and slave, where only the master was recognized.

But what was meant by autonomy? Martin Luther, as we have seen, stood in a long Christian tradition that saw mankind’s freedom as a gift from God that gave human beings dignity above the rest of the natural world.

Kant continued in this tradition, providing a secularized version of autonomy centered on the human ability to make moral choices based on abstract rules of reason.

In this tradition, then, human dignity centers on an individual’s ability to make proper moral choices, whether defined by religion or by secular reason.

This tradition does not build autonomy around free will; freedom is simply the ability to pursue one’s desires and passions free of external constraint.

Luther, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel

Yet the demand for recognition often takes a more particular form, centering on the dignity of a particular group that has been marginalized or disrespected.

He empathizes with the pain of Africans taken in slavery and asserts that cultures can be measured by their treatment of women.

The “long nineteenth century” that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 saw two versions of dignity and two approaches to identity in competition with each other. The first sought recognition of the universal Rights of Man (not, at that point, necessarily of women as well). The other sought recognition of the dignity of particular peoples who had been oppressed or held in bondage by others.

By the early twentieth century, the liberal version of dignity was joined by another universalist doctrine, Marxist socialism, which would fight for the rights of proletarians. Both the liberal and the socialist movements contended with nationalism through the two world wars; after fascism’s defeat in 1945, the two universal doctrines emerged as the poles around which global politics was organized during the Cold War.

A modern market economy, by contrast, depends on the free movement of labor, capital, and ideas from places where they are abundant to places where they can earn a high return.

As the social anthropologist Ernest Gellner explained, “A society has emerged based on a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers.” This necessitates a uniform national language, and a state-sponsored educational system to promote national culture. “The employability, dignity, security and self-respect of individuals … now hinges on their education … Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.”4

But nationalism was also born out of the acute anxieties bred by industrialization. Consider the situation of a young peasant, Hans, who grows up in a small village in Saxony. Hans’s life in the little village is fixed: he is living in the same house as his parents and grandparents; he is engaged to a girl whom his parents found acceptable; he was baptized by the local priest; and he plans to continue working the same plot of land as his father. It doesn’t occur to Hans to ask “Who am I?” since that question has already been answered for him by the people around him. However, he hears that big opportunities are opening up in the rapidly industrializing Ruhr valley, so he travels to Düsseldorf to get a job in a steel factory there. Hans is now living in a dormitory with hundreds of other young men like himself, coming from all over northwestern Germany. People speak in different dialects; some of the people he meets are not German at all, but Dutch or French. He is no longer under the thumb of his parents and local priest and finds people with different religious affiliations than those in his village. He is still committed to marrying his fiancée but tempted by some of the local women he has met, and he feels a bracing sense of freedom in his personal life. At the same time Hans is troubled. Back in his village, he was surrounded by friends and relatives, who knew him and would support him in times of sickness or a bad harvest. He does not have that kind of certainty about...

The need for nostalgic national identity in a mobile industrialized nation.

Lagarde, like Julius Langbehn, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, and other nineteenth-century German nationalists, saw the German people as victims of outside forces. Lagarde had a conspiratorial view of why German culture had decayed: the Jews were the bearers of liberal modernity, inserting themselves into the cultural life of the new modern Germany, bringing with them universalist ideas of democracy and socialism that undermined the unity of the German people. To reestablish German greatness, the Jews would have to be banished from the new order he envisioned.

He spoke to the anxieties of people making the transition from agrarian village society to modern, urban industrial life, a transition that for millions of Europeans experiencing it pushed the question of identity to the forefront.

The answer given to a confused peasant like Hans from ideologists such as Lagarde was simple: You are a proud German, heir to an ancient culture, connected by your common language to all of the millions of other Germans scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The lonely and confused worker now had a clear sense of dignity, a dignity that, he now realized, was disrespected by bad people who had somehow infiltrated his society.

This reminds me of recent american feelings towards immigrants and Donald J. Trump's message "I'll make America great again!".

Uniting scattered Germans under a single Reich would become a political project over the next three generations undertaken by leaders from Bismarck to Hitler. Other nationalities—Serbs, Poles, Hungarians, Russians—were also seeking to create or consolidate states based on ethno-nationalism, which would lead Europe into two devastating world wars in the early twentieth century.

As nationalism spread in Europe, it took root as well in Europe’s colonies, leading by the middle of the twentieth century to open revolts in such places as India, Vietnam, Kenya, and Algeria in the name of national liberation.

Both nationalism and Islamism are rooted in modernization. The shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft has been occurring in the contemporary Middle East, as peasants or bedouin have left the countryside for cities such as Cairo, Amman, and Algiers.

Alternatively, millions of Muslims experienced modernization by migrating to Europe or other Western countries in search of better lives, settling in Marseille or Rotterdam or Bradford and confronting there an alien culture. In other cases, the modern world came to them in their villages via satellite TV from stations such as Al Jazeera or CNN International. People living in traditional villages with limited choices are suddenly confronted with a pluralistic world with very different ways of life in which their traditional norms are not respected.

Under these circumstances, confusion about identity becomes acute, just as it was for newly urbanized Europeans in the nineteenth century. For some Muslims today, the answer to this confusion has not been membership in a nation, but membership in a larger religious group—an umma, or community of believers, represented by a political party such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Turkey’s Justice and Development Party or Tunisia’s Ennahda. Like classic nationalists, contemporary Islamists have both a diagnosis of the problem and a clear solution: you are part of a proud and ancient community; the outside world doesn’t respect you as a Muslim; we offer you a way to connect to your true brothers and sisters, where you will be a member of a great community of believers that stretches across the world.

Many of these women are indeed pious Muslims, but others are not particularly religious; wearing the hijab is rather a signal of identity, a marker that they are proud of their culture and not afraid to be publicly identified as a Muslim.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,

Roy has described this not as the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamicization of radicalism—that is, a process that draws from the same alienation that drove earlier generations of extremists, whether nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Communists such as Leon Trotsky.

Radical Islam by contrast offers them community, acceptance, and dignity.

Is the rise of Islamist radicalism in the early twenty-first century best understood as an identity problem, or is it at base a genuinely religious phenomenon?

That is, is it the by-product of the sociology of our age and the dislocations brought on by modernization and globalization, or does it represent a timeless feature of one particular religion, and the independent role of ideas in motivating human behavior?

Both nationalism and Islamism can thus be seen as a species of identity politics. Stating this does not do justice to the full complexity or specificity of either phenomenon. But they nonetheless have a number of important similarities. They both appeared on the world stage at moments of social transition from traditional isolated agrarian societies to modern ones connected to a broader and more diverse world. They both provide an ideology that explains why people feel lonely and confused, and both peddle in victimhood that lays the blame for an individual’s unhappy situation on groups of outsiders. And they both demand recognition of dignity in restrictive ways: not for all human beings, but for members of a particular national or religious group.

8 THE WRONG ADDRESS One of the striking characteristics of global politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century is that the dynamic new forces shaping it are nationalist or religious parties and politicians, the two faces of identity politics, rather than the class-based left-wing parties that were so prominent in the politics of the twentieth century.

Nationalism may have been sparked initially by industrialization and modernization, but it has in no way disappeared from the world, including in those countries that have been industrially developed for generations. A host of new populist nationalist leaders claiming democratic legitimacy via elections have emphasized national sovereignty and national traditions in the interest of “the people.” These leaders include Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Hungary’s Orbán, Poland’s Kaczynski, and finally Donald J. Trump in the United States, whose campaign slogans were Make America Great Again and America First. The Brexit movement in the United Kingdom has not had a clear leader, yet here too the basic impulse was a reassertion of national sovereignty. Populist parties are waiting in the wings in France, the Netherlands, and all over Scandinavia. Nationalist rhetoric has not been limited to these leaders, however; Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and Shinzo Abe of Japan have both been identified with nationalist causes, as has Xi Jinping of China, who has emphasized a socialism with distinctively Chinese characteristics.

Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat.

Brazil's Social Democratic Party (PSDB) retreat since 2002 is aligned with Social Democracy retreat worldwide.

Left-wing parties throughout Europe shifted to the center in the 1990s, accepting the logic of the market economy, and many became hard to distinguish from their coalition partners on the center-right.

Left-wing populism made a strong showing primarily in parts of Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and the Kirchners in Argentina. But this wave has already retreated, with the self-immolation of Venezuela under Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. The strong showings of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States may be harbingers of a recovery, but parties of the left are nowhere the dominant forces they were through the late twentieth century.

Brazil's Labor Party (PT) retreat is also part of a global wave.

But as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, within-country inequality around the world has seen a large increase since 1980; contrary to the long-accepted theory of the economist Simon Kuznets, rich-country incomes have been diverging rather than converging.

But the part of the global population around the eightieth percentile experienced either stagnation or else marginal gains. This group largely corresponds to the working class in developed countries—that is, people with a high school education or less.

Within the developed world, inequality has been the most pronounced in Britain and the United States, the two countries that led the “neoliberal,” pro–free market revolution of the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Since the French Revolution, the left has defined itself as the party of economic equality, willing to use state power to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. Yet the aftermath of the global financial crisis has seen something of the opposite, a rise of right-wing populist nationalist forces across many parts of the developed world.

In 2016, voters failed to endorse the most left-wing populist candidates, choosing nationalist politicians instead.

How do we explain the failure of the left to capitalize on rising global inequality, and the rise of the nationalist right in its place? This is not a new phenomenon: parties of the left have been losing out to nationalists for well over a hundred years, precisely among those poor or working-class constituencies that should have been their most solid base of support.

This postal delivery error occurred because of the way in which economic motivations are intertwined with identity issues in human behavior. To be poor is to be invisible to your fellow human beings, and the indignity of invisibility is often worse than the lack of resources.

9 INVISIBLE MAN Economists assume that human beings are motivated by what they label “preferences” or “utilities,” desires for material resources or goods. But they forget about thymos, the part of the soul that desires recognition by others, either as isothymia, recognition as equal in dignity to others, or megalothymia, recognition as superior. A great deal of what we conventionally take to be economic motivation driven by material needs or desires is in fact a thymotic desire for recognition of one’s dignity or status.

While women have made huge gains over the past fifty years in the labor force, considerable attention has been paid to the glass ceilings that have kept women out of senior management positions or, more recently, from the upper ranks of tech firms in Silicon Valley.

Among this group, what is the real motive driving demands for equal pay? It is not economic in any conventional sense. A female lawyer who is passed over for partner or is made vice president but at a salary 10 percent lower than that of her male counterparts is in no sense economically deprived: she is likely to be in the very top of the national income distribution and faces little economic deprivation. If she and her male counterpart were paid twice their relative salaries, the problem would still remain.

Rather, they want other things: to have the biggest collection of Francis Bacon paintings, or to skipper the winning America’s Cup yacht, or to build the largest charitable foundation.

But the pain of poverty is felt more often as a loss of dignity: as Smith notes, the poor man’s situation “places him out of sight of mankind,” such that they have no fellow feeling for him. This was the basic insight of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, Invisible Man, about a black man moving from the American South to Harlem. The real indignity of racism in the North was that African-Americans were invisible to their white peers, not necessarily mistreated but simply not seen as fellow human beings.

Consider that the next time you give money to a homeless person, but fail to make eye contact with him or her: you are relieving the material want, but failing to acknowledge the shared humanity between the beggar and you.

Having a job conveys not just resources, but recognition by the rest of society that one is doing something socially valuable. Someone paid for doing nothing has no basis for pride.

He calls this a “positional good”: I want that Tesla not because I care so much about global warming, but because it is trendy and expensive, and my neighbor is still driving a BMW.