Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

The 2000s saw the emergence of an intense debate across Europe over citizenship, immigration, and national identity. Citizenship is a two-way street: it endows citizens with rights that are protected by the state, but it also enjoins duties on them, above all, the duty of loyalty to the country’s principles and laws. This was a particularly neuralgic issue due to the large welfare benefits of many European states: strong opposition arose to providing such benefits to immigrants who did not seem to accept the basic terms of the social contract. And some feared that Muslims, as opposed to earlier immigrant groups, might never properly assimilate into the countries’ cultures. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties such as the National Front in France, Denmark’s Danish People’s Party, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands gained support and put pressure on mainstream parties to accommodate their demands.