Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

In addition to changing the formal requirements for citizenship, European countries need to shift their popular understandings of national identity away from those based on ethnicity. In the early 2000s, a German academic of Syrian origin named Bassam Tibi proposed Leitkultur, “leading culture,” as the basis for German national identity.3 Leitkultur was defined in liberal Enlightenment terms as belief in equality and democratic values. Yet his proposal was attacked from the left for suggesting that those values were superior to other cultural values; in doing so the left gave unwitting comfort not just to Islamists, but also to the right that still believed in ethnic identity. Germany needs something precisely like Leitkultur, a normative change that would permit a Turk to speak of him- or herself as German. This is beginning to happen, but slowly.4