Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition

by Francis Fukuyama

Identity grows, in the first place, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity.

The inner self is the basis of human dignity, but the nature of that dignity is variable and has changed over time. In many early cultures, dignity is attributed only to a few people, often warriors who are willing to risk their lives in battle. In other societies, dignity is an attribute of all human beings, based on their intrinsic worth as people with agency. And in other cases, dignity is due to one’s membership in a larger group of shared memory and experience.

the philosopher Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was the ultimate driver of human history,

But Socrates points to another type of behavior by relating the story of the Athenian Leontius, who passes by a pile of corpses left by the public executioner. Leontius wants to look at the corpses, but at the same time tries to avoid doing so; after an internal struggle, he looks, saying, “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.”3 Leontius, while tempted to indulge his desire to see the corpses, knew it was ignoble; that he gave in to his cravings aroused his anger and self-loathing. Socrates asks: And in many other places, don’t we . . . notice that, when desire forces someone contrary to the calculating part, he reproaches himself and his spirit is roused against that in him which is doing the forcing; and, just as though there were two parties at faction, such a man’s spirit becomes the ally of speech?4

Problemet med att låta algoritmer styra över vad vi får se.

The modern concept of identity unites three different phenomena. The first is thymos, a universal aspect of human personality that craves recognition. The second is the distinction between the inner and the outer self, and the raising of the moral valuation of the inner self over outer society. This emerged only in early modern Europe. The third is an evolving concept of dignity, in which recognition is due not just to a narrow class of people, but to everyone. The broadening and universalization of dignity turns the private quest for self into a political project.

The idea that dignity is rooted in human moral choice has received political recognition by becoming embedded in a significant number of modern democratic constitutions, including those of Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Israel, and South Africa. For example, article I, section 1, of the German Basic Law of 1949 states, “The dignity of man is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all public authority.” Similarly, section 10 of the South African constitution states, “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.” The South African Constitutional Court has noted, “A right to dignity is an acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of human beings.”

The other problem with this expansive understanding of individual autonomy is that not everyone is a Nietzschean superman seeking to revalue all values. Human beings are intensely social creatures whose emotional inclinations drive them to want to conform to the norms surrounding them. When a stable, shared moral horizon disappears and is replaced by a cacophony of competing value systems, the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is. This crisis of identity leads in the opposite direction from expressive individualism, to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon. This psychological fact lays the groundwork for nationalism.

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...

Tänker på utvecklingen i sweat shops.

Ernest Gellner was a major theorist of nationalism, and he suggested that modern Islamism needed to be seen through a similar lens of modernization and identity. 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.

The identity problem is particularly acute for young second-generation Muslims growing up in immigrant communities in Western Europe. They are living in largely secular societies with Christian roots that do not provide public support for their religious values or practices. Their parents often came from closed village communities offering localized versions of Islam, such as Sufi saint worship. Like many children of immigrants, they are eager to distance themselves from their families’ old-fashioned ways of life. But they are not easily integrated into their new European surroundings: rates of youth unemployment, particularly for Muslims, are upward of 30 percent, and in many European countries a link is still perceived between ethnicity and membership in the dominant cultural community—an issue that we will return to in later chapters. 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; ...

When they showed up in Syria with a long beard and toting an AK-47 or staged a murderous attack on their fellow Europeans, their families always professed surprise and incomprehension at the transformation. 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.8

The Roy-Kepel debate centers around a critical question: 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? Answering this question is critical to knowing how to deal with the problem in practical terms.

Human happiness is oftentimes more strongly connected to our relative than to our absolute status. Frank points out that in surveys, people with higher incomes report higher degrees of happiness. One might think this is related to absolute levels of income, except that people with comparable relative status report comparable levels of happiness regardless of their absolute wealth: upper-income Nigerians are just as happy as their German counterparts, despite the economic gap separating them. One compares oneself not globally to some absolute standard of wealth, but relative to a local group that one deals with socially.2 A great deal of evidence coming out of the natural sciences suggests that the desire for status—megalothymia—is rooted in human biology.

If therapy became a substitute for religion, religion itself took an increasingly therapeutic turn.

While not all of the writers of such laws were rapists, she said, “they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms.”4

The lived experience of women was not the lived experience of men, she argued. Women’s subjective experiences raised the profile of subjectivity as such, which was applied to other groups and categories: those based on race, ethnicity, gender orientation, disability, and the like. Within each of these categories, lived experiences were different: those of gays and lesbians differ from those of transgender people; a black man in Baltimore has a different experience from a black woman in Birmingham, Alabama.

So there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. It becomes problematic only when identity is interpreted or asserted in certain specific ways. Identity politics for some progressives has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the thirty-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality.

a second problem that arises with a focus on newer and more narrowly defined marginalized groups: it diverts attention from older and larger groups whose serious problems have been ignored.

Weak national identity has been a major problem in the greater Middle East, where Yemen and Libya have turned into failed states, and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia have suffered from internal insurgency and chaos. Other developing countries have remained more stable, yet remain beset by problems related to a weak sense of national identity. This is the situation throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and it is a major obstacle to development.

National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system, whether that system is democratic or not. Identity can be embodied in formal laws and institutions that dictate, for example, what the educational system will teach children about their country’s past, or what will be considered an official national language. But national identity also extends into the realm of culture and values. It consists of the stories that people tell about themselves: where they came from, what they celebrate, their shared historical memories, what it takes to become a genuine member of the community.

A fourth function of national identity is to promote a wide radius of trust. Trust acts like a lubricant that facilitates both economic exchange and political participation. Trust is based on what has been called social capital, that is, the ability to cooperate with other people based on informal norms and shared values. Identity groups promote trust among their members, but social capital often remains limited to the narrow in-group. Indeed, strong identities often decrease trust between in-and out-group members. Societies thrive on trust, but they need the widest possible radius of trust to do well.

A fifth reason national identity is important is to maintain strong social safety nets that mitigate economic in e quality. If members of a society feel that they are members of an extended family and have high levels of trust in one another, they are much more likely to support social programs that aid their weaker fellows. The strong welfare states of Scandinavia are underpinned by their equally strong senses of national identity. By contrast, societies divided into self-regarding social groups who feel they have little in common are more likely to regard themselves as in a zero-sum competition with one another for resources.

The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy itself. A liberal democracy is an implicit contract between citizens and their government, and among the citizens themselves, under which they give up certain rights in order that the government protects other rights that are more basic and important.

But the leaders of the EU were not in a position to invest much effort in building an alternative new identity.5 They did not create a single European citizenship; rules for citizenship remained the province of individual member states. The symbols of nationhood such as a flag and an anthem came late, and the EU’s diverse membership had no common civic education. But the most important failure was in the democratic accountability of the EU itself. The most powerful institution within the EU was the European Commission, an unelected technocratic body whose main purpose was to promote a single market within Europe. It was answerable to the people only indirectly, via the Council of Ministers, which represented the individual member states. A directly elected European parliament had rather limited powers, which has consequently failed to generate significant voter turnout or enthusiasm. Citizens of Europe knew that the important votes they cast were still those at the member-state level, and their chief energies and emotional attachments were directed there. As a result, they felt little sense of ownership or control over the institutions governing Europe as a whole.

National identity in Europe is today confused, to put it charitably. Proponents of the European Union have not succeeded in creating a strong sense of pan-European identity that supersedes the identities of its member states. Those national identities are tenacious and vary tremendously among themselves, ranging from relatively open ones that could accommodate diverse populations, like that of France, to others that create deliberate barriers to the assimilation of immigrants, such as the one espoused by Hungary.

While it would be wrong today to link identity to race, ethnicity, or religion, it is correct to say that national identity in a well-functioning democracy requires something more than passive acceptance of a creed. It requires citizenship and the exercise of certain virtues. A creedal identity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for success.

But if the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative. One does not have to deny the potentialities and lived experiences of individuals to recognize that they can also share values and aspirations with much broader circles of citizens. Erlebnis can aggregate into Erfahrung; lived experience can become just plain experience. So while we will never get away from identity politics in the modern world, we can steer it back to broader forms of mutual respect for dignity that will make democracy more functional. How do we translate these abstract ideas into concrete policies at the current moment? We can start by trying to counter the specific abuses that have driven assertions of identity, such as unwarranted police violence against minorities or sexual assault and sexual harrassment in workplaces, schools, and other institutions. No critique of identity politics should imply that these are not real and urgent problems that need concrete solutions. Beyond that, there is a larger agenda of integrating smaller groups into larger wholes on which trust and citizenship can be based. We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cult...

The European agenda must start with redefinitions of national identity embodied in its citizenship laws. Ideally, the EU should create a single citizenship whose requirements would be based on adherence to basic liberal democratic principles, one that would supersede national citizenship laws.

Those laws of EU member states still based on jus sanguinis need to be changed to jus soli so as not to privilege one ethnic group over another.

Well-assimilated immigrants bring a healthy diversity to any society, and the benefits of immigration can be fully realized. Poorly assimilated immigrants are a drag on the state and in some cases constitute dangerous security threats.