up against the government, to hold free and fair elections, to host free universities and a free press. If we do not insist on this and if European leaders cease backing this up, in my opinion, the EU has signed its own death warrant. What is Europe meant to defend, at home and abroad, if not these values? If we fail to go on the offensive and actively oppose the tribalist forces we currently face, democracy in its true conception may soon become a thing of the past.
Notes
1 See A.M. Slaughter, “A Real New World Order,” Foreign Affairs, 76 (1997). 2 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, 1992. 3 The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project is directed by Staffan Lindberg from Gothenburg University in Sweden. Through its V-Dem index, it examines the state of democracy in the world, using seven different democratic forms. The data I refer to here are from the 2018 report. See a summary of the findings in S.I. Lindberg, “The Nature of Democratic Backsliding in Europe,” Carnegie Europe, July 24, 2018. 4 See W.G. Sumner, Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals, Dover Publications, 2002, p. 13. 5 The Economist, “The New Political Divide: Farewell, Left Versus Right. The Contest that Matters Now Is Open Against Closed,” July 30, 2016. 6 See the revealing coverage by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, and Benjamin Novak in “The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions,” The New York Times, November 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/europe/eu-farm-subsidy-hungary.html. 7 See E. Rosenbach, “The Catalan Independence Referendum is a Smokescreen for Other Issues,” Independent, October 1, 2017. 8 Harriet Agerholm, “Denmark Uses Controversial ‘Jewellery Law’ to Seize Assets from Refugees for First Time,” Independent, July 1, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/denmark-jewellery-law-migrants-refugees-asylum-seekers-unhcr-united-nations-a7113056.html.
Imagined Communities and Identity Politics
“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” This now famous statement appears in the unfinished memoirs of Italian statesman and writer Massimo d’Azeglio (1798–1866). He played a fundamental role in the unification of the Italian peninsula – a process that was officially completed in 1870. By stressing that the creation of a unified state with formal authority was only the first step, d’Azeglio was conceding that the most difficult part remained to come: the creation of an Italian people – and of a common identity. What provoked many later nationalists (and scholars) was d’Azeglio’s claim that identity isn’t “just there” to be dug up from the ground, but must be created – often by elites, and often from above.
The British historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson1 picked up on d’Azeglio’s points in an important work of his own, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Here Anderson systematically demonstrates the so-called “thesis of modernity,” which points to how national identities and history are products of narratives that only gain meaning as remembrance, and thus a sense of unity, when used in stories and encounters from one generation to the next. Communities and their corresponding identities have always been “imagined” and created by people. They are not “naturally given” in the sense that they have always been there, as the so-called primordialists would otherwise claim. As the Danish historian Uffe Østergaard puts it, the thesis of modernity has never been repudiated by historians: “the thesis of modernity, that nations and national identities are largely the result of relatively few intellectuals’ conscious efforts to ‘construct’ or ‘invent’ these, only becomes real later when a great majority starts acting as if the identities were ‘real.’”2
In Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, national identities were created and nurtured by elites, often with an explicit personal interest in shaping a given community’s common mores, identity, and conceptions.
Anderson sees the rise of print technology, Christianity, and the educational system in particular as essential to the creation of “deep horizontal comradeship” in the nation-building process in Europe. More importantly, though identities were socially constructed, they were experienced as genuine. Only in this way could identities be meaningful, powerful, and mobilizing.
In line with Anderson and the many historians and political scientists he inspired, it is now widely recognized that all our divergent national identities have been shaped and cultivated through the school system as an unambiguous nation-building exercise.
The nation-state was a product of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and thus a European invention. It was only after the Second World War that the idea of the nation-state “went global” and became the common organizing mode for the world. The difference between the European territorial states and the nation-state was precisely the formation of identity itself, which proved to be far stronger and more enduring than most had expected. In the nineteenth century in many cases, the initial goal was to use identity as a mobilizing force to convince young men to go to war for a higher purpose.3 As families had to sacrifice their sons freely, rulers knew that they would only do so obediently if presented with an idea that transcended their earthly being – the nation. Joseph Weiler puts this well: “The (national) collective transcends the life of any individual – and automatically bestows, on each and every one to whom it belongs, both a past and a future.”4
It is important to reiterate here that simply because most historical pasts and presents are manmade creations, they are not, for this reason, less real. Identities are very real to those who live them, who believe in them, and whose leaders marshal them in the fight against opposing rivals. My point is not to state this rather obvious fact. Rather it is to emphasize that the cultivation of an exclusive identity, and the possible use of it as a weapon against others, is not at all an innocent exercise. One cannot simply dig up and adopt mores from the past or long-lost historical linkages of the kind today’s populists and their tribal cousins take on as signs of identity. These are not constituent elements of personalities and nations, but traits that are shaped and cultivated.
When this is done strategically, we are far away from the idea of the nation as a home for merely peaceful co-existence. However, today we tend to forget that most European (and other) nation-states are exactly that: products of war, ethnic cleansing, flight, and expulsions. When used in modern politics in these years, we may call the phenomenon “fabricated tribalism.” Fabricated tribalism is part of a cynical power game in which political leaders exploit a feeling of belonging to mobilize against well-defined enemies. Amy Chua has described how tribalism has become a central new part of world politics today:
tribalism remains a powerful force everywhere; indeed, in recent years, it has begun to tear at the fabric of liberal democracies in the developed world, and even the postwar liberal international order. To truly understand today’s world and where it is heading, one must acknowledge the power of tribalism. Failing to do so will only make it stronger.5
“Fabricated” tribalism, where culture and identity are employed deliberately for political mobilization, can also be seen as a form of activist identity policy. Identity politics are proliferating everywhere today – not only in Europe. Most people recognize the discussion of identity politics from America, where left-leaning minority groups are accused of being too concerned with their own specific grievances to face issues of broader concern for society. In this book, identity politics is first and foremost seen as a national or (in the case of Catalonia) regional project. What the two have in common is the dangerous tendency to put identity or culture before politics. Why is this immensely problematic? Because while political projects and arguments can be debated and questioned, culture and identity belong to a different sphere that is largely impervious
