Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral superiority of Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated not, as President Obama once said, as a weak regional player, but as a great power. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, stated in 2017 that his return to power in 2010 marked the point when “we Hungarians also decided that we wanted to regain our country, we wanted to regain our self-esteem, and we wanted to regain our future.”6 The Chinese government of Xi Jinping has talked at length about China’s “one hundred years of humiliation,” and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were trying to prevent its return to the great power status it had enjoyed through the past millennia of history. When the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fourteen, his mother found him fixated on Palestine, “tears streaming down his face as he watched TV from their home in Saudi Arabia.”

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