Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The second path to nationhood is to move borders to fit existing linguistic or cultural populations. Historically, this has been accomplished either through unification, as in the case of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and ’70s, or through separation, as when the Irish Republic left the United Kingdom in 1919, or when Ukraine declared its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991. The third path is to assimilate minority populations into the culture of an existing ethnic or linguistic group. France was a polyglot nation two hundred years ago, but over time the different local languages such as Provençal, Breton, or Flemish were gradually displaced by Parisian French. Similarly, immigrants to Argentina or the United States—or more likely, their children—learned Spanish or English to fit into the dominant culture and move up the social ladder. The apparent ethnic homogeneity of China, where more than 90 percent of the population are said to be Han Chinese, was the product of a lengthy cultural and biological assimilation of minority populations over three millennia. The fourth path is to reshape national identity to fit the existing characteristics of the society in question. Contrary to the views of many nationalists, “nations” are not biological entities that have existed from time immemorial; they are socially constructed from the bottom up and the top down. Those doing the constructing can deliberately shape identities to suit people’s characteristics and habits....