The World's New Fissures

The World’s New Fissures Identities in Crisis by Vincent Cable

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Contents

Introduction 1

A New Political Fault Line 4

The Underlying Tension 4 Archetypes 7 Identity Politics in Action 10

Why Identity? Why Now? 15 Globalisation and the Decline of the Nation State 15

The Liberalisation Revolution 18 The Fragmentation of Class 20 Myth and History 21

Events and People 23

Alternative Politics 24 Environmentalism and Conservationism 24

The Politics of Gender 26 Democratic Renewal and Human rights 26 Identity Politics as a Transition? 28

The Agenda for Identity Politics 30 Majorities and Minorities 31

(a) Self-Determination and Secession 33

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

(b) Numbers Matter 36

Family Values 42

Managing the Politics of Identity 44

Some Guiding Principles 46 (a) Multiple Identity 46 (b) Decentralisation within Democracy 47

Role Models 52

Conclusion 55

Summary 57

References 63

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Introduction

Politics used to be about left and right. There were many nuances and national variations, and there were major disagreements about the relationship between ends and means. But, in many parts of the world, politics was dominated by the tension between these two distinct views of the world. The vernacular may have varied from place to place but politics had a common language. In the very different conditions of peasant, industrialising and post-industrial societies, it was possible to create powerful allegiances around notions of equality, class solidarity and a belief in the capacity of the state to plan, create and distribute wealth; and counter allegiances around property rights, individual opportunity and markets. The Cold War both symbolised and reinforced this polarity of ideas. We are currently in a transition to a new way of expressing the dominant political ideas of the age. It is already clear that the big issues do not sit comfortably within a left-right framework or within a party system constructed around those ideas. The biggest battle of the Clinton presidency so far has been NAFTA, which pitted a Democratic president and allies among Republican congressmen against organised labour, most Democratic congressmen and the forces of populist nationalism led by Ross Perot. Others have centred on personal morality and religion: homosexuality, for example. France has been engaged in intense debate about its identity, focusing specifically on Maastricht and then GATT in arguments that set Gaullists, communists and the

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

National Front against similarly improbable cross-party coalitions.

Canada has seen two of its traditional three parties – of the right and the left – virtually destroyed by a wave of populist protest based on linguistic and regional identity. Japan’s new coalition brings together market reformers and one of the world’s more uncompromising socialist parties. In Italy, a shifting collection of neo-fascists, regional separatists, greens and reformed communists occupies centre-stage. Elections for the biggest state in India were recently fought out between a party of religion and a party of caste. Russian democracy has thrown up an anti- reformist coalition of communists and fascists, the latter drawing heavily on anti-semitic racism and extreme Russian nationalism. Venezuela has seen the doyen of its conservative,‘right-wing’ leaders elected at the head of a party of former revolutionary guerrillas.And in Argentina the leader of the labour based, ‘left-wing’ Peronists has pushed through some of the most radical market reforms in the world. Few political phenomena are more bizarre, and more important for global development, than ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’: largely unrestrained, and successful, capitalism managed by communist revolutionaries. The old labels don’t fit any more.

Attempts to redefine and twist the old categories produce more heat than light. Commentators from Moscow told us in the midst of the struggle over Russia’s future that ‘right wing’ ‘conservatives’ (ie communists) were engaged in a struggle with ‘left-wing’ ‘liberal’ reformers (ie people trying to create a private market enterprise system). Lord Tebbit was moved to protest to the BBC. He had a point.

The issues which now confront and divide politicians and parties – regional integration and loss of sovereignty; trade disputes; immigration; abortion; environment; linguistic and racial minority rights; regional secessionism; and a general disillusionment with established institutions – do not fit within a traditional left-right framework, and the old policy manuals are not much help.

The political causes which people now fight and die for no longer have even superficial connection with right and left defined in traditional terms. A not very eventful day recently threw up in one news- paper, among the usual grisly reports from the Balkans and the Caucasus,

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Introduction

five or six ethnic civil wars in Africa and Ulster, news stories about attacks on Sikhs in Belgium and on Turks by neo-Nazis in Germany; a riot directed against Africans in Italy; an assassination in Algeria by Islamic fundamentalists; an outcry in the USA against Chinese immigrants; a proposal to restrict Greek citizenship to members of the Orthodox Church; an attack on the Japanese by a leading European industrialist; and a feature on the erosion of women’s rights in Eastern

Europe in the face of rising clericalism and nationalism. It is tempting to treat such a pastiche of events as chaotic, reflecting the many particularities of different societies. But there is a common thread in many of these apparently random and disconnected political phenomena: all reflect attempts to express a sense of threatened cultural identity in political form, a new politics of identity.

This book addresses two challenges thrown up by this kind of politics. One is a challenge of understanding. Is there a politics of identity, what does it amount to, and what has brought it to centre stage? The second is the challenge of response: how can a popular need for a sense of identity be met in ways that are not divisive and destructive?

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A New Political

Fault Line

The Underlying Tension

If left v right is no longer the dominant political dialectic, what could replace it? Is there another organising principle emerging? The argument advanced here is that there is: based on the alternative political possibilities created by movements based on cultural identity or what Isaiah Berlin has called ‘the politics of the soil’.

The underlying assumption is that politics is, and will continue to be, organised around competing ideas. Some might find that difficult to swallow. They see elections as a competition between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between rival media managers and spin doctors: all form and no substance. But few who have lived through the Thatcher or Reagan years, or seen the aftermath of the Cold War, imagine that deep down politics is about anything other than different ideas about the way society should be organised. The important question is not whether ideas are important but rather which ideas are decisive at any particular time. The thesis advanced here is that as the old division between left and right fades a new one is appearing, centred on the different ways in which people define their identity. Most of us feel the need for an identity: a sense of belonging to groups which are larger than our family and smaller than the world; not just being part of society (Gesellschaft) but part of a tighter group (Gemeinschaft).

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A New Political Fault Line

For the most part, at least in the more settled western democracies like Britain, identity is something personal, uncontroversial and non- political.At various times in history, however – notably in the racialism and extreme nationalism of the 1930s – we have seen the destructive potential of cultural identity when harnessed to politics. And for the many people in the world who lived until recently under colonial rule, personal dignity and self-respect were inextricably tied up with the definition of a sense of national identity distinct from the colonial inheritance. But now there are special reasons why cultural identity – whether based on religion, language, race, region, nation, clan or tribe – is gaining greater importance as a vehicle for political interests and grievances. The irony of the situation is captured by Michael Ignatieff:‘the more evident our common needs become, the more brutal becomes the human insistence on the claims of difference. The centripetal forces of need, labour and science, which are pulling us together as a species are counterbalanced by centrifugal forces, the claims of tribe, race, section, region and nation, pulling us apart’. The nature of this shift can be expressed in a semi-formal way through a two-dimensional representation of the forces which drive political movements and parties (Figure 1). Of course, reality is more complex. Politics is multi-dimensional. But as a simplification of the complex reality it is useful to think of an interplay between two sets of ideas or political forces.Traditionally we have tended to categorise political forces in terms of a tension between left and right: different views of the world concerning equality, the role of the public sector and the class loyalty owed to capital or labour. Although those concerns are still with us they are now arguably less polarised in the wake of the end of the Cold War and we now have a second dimension related to cultural identity. What this new dimension captures are two further, and quite different, views of how society should be organised.As a means of analysis it does not assert that racism or religious fundamentalism will triumph; rather that these concerns, and others like them, will define the terms of political debate. At one pole are people who define their own and

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

The Role of Identity in Politics

1. Figure

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A New Political Fault Line

other people’s identity in exclusive, closed terms. For racists, religious fundamentalists or extreme nationalists, cultural identity is of all- embracing importance. For them, identity isn’t something to be easily cast off or acquired: nothing so straightforward as getting a new pass- port. Identity provides a powerful social bond and a link between one generation and the next. Nor is it a private matter. It demands public recognition and respect and has to be defended against outsiders. It is not sufficient that Satanic Verses should be read by non-believers in private or that brown and black Europeans should be good citizens or that abortion be left to the conscience of an individual woman. The very existence of alien people and practices is offensive and a threat to identity. At the other pole are people whose overriding commitment is to individual choice in personal mores and lifestyles. This is the western liberal tradition. Cultural identity is flexible, multiple or essentially superficial, summed up in the sentiment that ‘we are all the same under the skin’ (or the veil). There may also be a sense of society, whether local, national or global, but the boundaries are open and flexible. Political allegiance goes to movements which maximise individual freedom and choice. These are, of course, caricatures. What is important is the tension between the two ideas, the balance of the two forces, which defines how a country’s politics will evolve.

Archetypes

In practice, left-right politics and the politics of identity coexist and interact. Political ideas and movements are best understood in terms of these two dimensions rather than one; from them we can produce several archetypes (Figure 2). One archetype is the combination of left-wing ideas with those of individual choice in matters of cultural identity. There have long been mainstream democratic socialists who have fought as vigorously against ethnic discrimination and for freedom in the bedroom and freedom of belief as they have against a free-for-all in the economic market place.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

Figure 2. Political archetypes

François Mitterand, John Smith and President Clinton are heirs to a tradition which has tried, sometimes with difficulty, to reconcile a commitment to personal liberties with a belief in the need for collective action and social cooperation; we call this communitarianism. But the same leftist ideas have often been suffused with concerns about cultural identity. Colonial liberation movements have often been of this form, for example in Zimbabwe, Burma, Ghana, Vietnam and elsewhere, although others like the ANC in South Africa have been more consciously pluralist. Some of the separatist movements in western democracies have tried to link socialism with a form of separatist identity: the Parti Quebecois, Welsh and Scottish nationalism and the leading parties in Catalonia and in the Basque country. Kurdish separatists and Iranian Mujaheddin are among many others which try to blend socialism and nationalism. The cocktail often has murderous forms: the ‘red-brown’ phenomenon of inter-war fascism,

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A New Political Fault Line

Milosevic’s regime in Serbia and the Khmer Rouge. Their common ideas could perhaps be generically called national socialism,a term with unhappy associations but not necessarily pejorative in itself. On the right there is an intellectual tradition of libertarianism which champions the idea of individual liberties and choice across the board. Libertarians do not distinguish between the economic, social and cultural liberties of the individual; freedom is the overriding concern. Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice and FIDESZ in Hungary reflect this philosophy, which is common in post-communist Eastern Europe, at least among the young and educated. John Major could reasonably claim to identify with the same strand in thinking. He identifies with the market reforming radicalism of his predecessor but has a record also of supporting the personal freedoms of racial minorities and gays.

Others on the right, such as Brittan, Boaz and Crane, have sought to create a philosophical framework for such a combination of freedoms. But libertarians are not necessarily drawn from the political right;

Labour’s Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia pioneered market reform in Australia while also challenging old racial and cultural prejudices and enhancing personal freedoms.

Others combine a belief in the economics of markets with strong religious, moralistic fervour (the ‘born again’ Christian coalition in the USA) or an exclusive, nationalistic approach to capitalism (as seen in

Japan or among French Gaullists like Chirac and Pasqua); what we call cultural conservatives. Cultural conservatism takes in such movements as Christian Democracy in Catholic Europe, particularly the more muscular variants like the Bavarian CSU, and the Spanish opposition with its Francoist ancestry. The ultra-patriotic strain of British conservatism and unionism which produced Enoch Powell, and arguably

Margaret Thatcher, is another example of cultural conservatism. Three major ‘identity’ preoccupations – Europe, Ireland and non-white immigration – have supported an otherwise unwavering attachment to the logic of market forces. While we have identified four archetypes and examples of each, reality is a good deal messier. Most movements, like most individuals, are not easy to pigeon-hole and the emphasis changes over time in

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

response to events. Nonetheless, the archetypes are useful in helping to construct a picture of the dominant themes and tensions running through political life. In Britain it is still broadly true that the left-right dichotomy holds as a definition of parties and of the underlying debate, which is predominantly about the balancing of market economics and social justice. But Britain may be unusual: traditions die very hard. And arguably, even in Britain, the really important debate does not correspond to the outward form but to the internal tensions within the ruling party, notably over Europe. Elsewhere, identity concerns have become dominant, not subsidiary, and the underlying political dialectic is better understood in other terms than left and right (Figure 3). In France, the left is weaker than it has been for decades and the real battle is between the more libertarian strains of French political thinking and cultural conservatism. In Italy, by contrast, it is the communitarian forces of the former communists and the greens who are pitched against the cultural conservatives of the regional parties and the fascists. Indian politics seem to be evolving in similar way. In South Africa, too, cultural conservatism – white racist and black tribal – confronts an essentially communitarian ANC. In

Russia, it is the fascistic national socialism of the comically named Liberal Democrats which now confronts the libertarian reformers. In the Islamic world, questions of identity dominate in the form of struggles between national socialist groups like Baath, or the now somewhat decayed revolutionary regimes of Algeria and Egypt, and the cultural conservatives of Islamic fundamentalism.

Identity Politics in Action

It is not that the politics of identity is new or that the left-right polarity has totally disappeared. It is rather that the emphasis has shifted, and in a radical way. As we show in Figure 4, there are now many countries where political movements drawing on ‘identity’ issues are powerful and, in much of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa these are probably dominant (Nigeria’s brave, if somewhat farcical, efforts to create a left-right polarity on orders from the military showed just how

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A New Political Fault Line

Figure 3. Identity Politics at Work: The Tensions

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

Figure 4. Manifestations of Identity Politics

USA Christian Coalition Race and Political Correctness Perot and NAFTA debate

Canada 1993 Election: Quebec; Manning

Germany Republicans Aliens debate

Ossis v. Wessis

France National Front Gaullism: Chirac; Pasqua

Maastricht debate GATT debate

Italy MSI revival Legas: Bossi

UK Ulster Maastricht and the Conservatives SNP and PC Immigration issue: BNP

India BJP and Muslim League Regional and language parties

S Africa White Conservatives Inkatha PAC

Russia Fascists (Zhirinovsky) and Nationalists Pan-Slavism Regions (Tataristan; Cossacks; Caucasus)

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A New Political Fault Line

dominant identity politics has become in some multiethnic, multi- religious societies). There are also a few exceptions where identity concerns do not loom large. Brazil has the largest African population outside of Africa but this has never been a major political issue (although there is a growing black consciousness movement which draws inspiration from a successful slave revolt forgotten by white historians). In the west, parties generally retain the formal structures, and some of the language, of left v right. But there are strong cross currents. These may come from culturally-based, regional separatism (Canada, Belgium and, to a lesser degree, Italy, Spain and Britain); from racism and anti-immigrant agitation (France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and to a lesser degree in the USA), out of debates over the loss of national identity through regional integration (Canada, UK, France,

Denmark, Norway) or because of a reorientation from one set of regional associations to another (Australia and New Zealand). Many of these identity concerns are handled within established party structures but there has also been a general rise in support for parties which fall outside the left-right divide to levels not seen since the 1930s. It is widely expected that the European elections in 1994 will reflect that shift and, if they lead to enhanced representation from extreme racist and nationalist parties in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, bring the challenges into stark focus. The Canadian elections also sound a warning that established party structures may not survive if identity issues put too much strain on them. The picture described in Figure 3 suggests a kaleidoscope of different and shifting alignments. It is probable that, in time, a clearer pattern will emerge with two poles dominating as left and right once did. The communitarian and national socialist positions seem, at least at present, the weakest. They both, in different ways, draw upon a socialist tradition which has been badly battered by the dramatic failure of communism and the gradual loss of support and motivation of democratic socialist parties in Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, UK and elsewhere. Unless the left can find a new source of energy, moral conviction and intellectual credibility, only two serious contenders for political power will remain: the libertarian right and the cultural conservatives.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

In this sense we perhaps need to look to East and South-East Asia for a glimpse of the future. The most violent ideological encounters of the Cold War took place in Asia, not in Europe: the birth of communist China (and Taiwan), and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Yet this history has largely been left behind. Except in the bizarre world of the two Kims in North Korea, there is now a strong consensus for some form of capitalism (even when, as in China and Vietnam, it is called something else). It has been brilliantly successful – from Japan to Singapore through Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and now China. Yet, it is precisely this consensual, and successful, approach to economics, blending capitalism with judicious use of the powers of the state to provide a background of financial and political stability and good infrastructure which has highlighted – not banished – the ‘identity’ dimension of political life. The one major debate which has run through Japanese politics, and which affects the new coalition as much as the old LDP governments, is how far to compromise a fierce sense of

Japanese national identity with the homogenising demands of a global capitalist system. The ‘insider capitalism’ of Japan, and the issue of how far to give ground to outsiders, has echoes in South Korea, Thailand,

Indonesia and, now, China. Within these countries, moreover, cultural identity, not class, is the main divide. Beneath the cosmopolitan veneer and prosperity of

Singapore there is an almost paranoid fear of the potentially divisive forces of race and religion. In Malaysia and Indonesia these forces are in the open. The underlying tension running through all these societies which may well col- lectively dominate the world economy in the next century is between the libertarians who want to free the individual and the cultural conservatives who cling to traditional cultural identity. Not just individual countries but the world could become polarised in this way, Such a future has been foreseen in Michel Albert’s Capital- isme contre Capitalisme where – as he saw it – three different cultural strands of the private enterprise system compete (and may fight) within a global arena. Whether or not the particular vision is realised, it seems clear that the politics of identity will be an important ingredient.

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Why Identity?

Why Now?

The immediate reason for the emergence of political forces outside the traditional left-right divide is disillusionment with that tradition. The left is in disarray throughout the world, associated with what is seen as a failed project: the collapse of communism and the great difficulties encountered in managing welfare state social democracies. After the triumphalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, right-wing parties are also finding the going difficult. Some have been caught with their hands in the till in Japan and Italy. All are finding that the End of History has not ended cyclical and structural problems in capitalist economies.And none has found an easy way to reconcile their dual mandate: to con- serve tradition and promote stability on one hand and on the other to allow the creative destruction of market competition to transform society.A vacuum has been created for new political forces to enter.

Globalisation and the Decline of the Nation State

If one, dominant, factor has shaped the new politics it is the phenomenon loosely called ‘globalisation’. Identities have been traditionally defined in national terms. While much violence has been done in the name of nation states, they have also bound together disparate peoples and submerged divisive identities. But a powerful mixture of technology and economics is now dis- solving some of those bonds. All but the strongest and most clearly

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

defined national identities are being undermined by the phenomenon of globalisation: the spreading through efficient global communications systems of information and ideas; global capital markets (and what Richard O’Brien calls the End of Geography); easier travel and trade; and the organisation of business by corporations which can operate globally and respond to the demands of shareholders of no particular domicile.

It is no longer obvious what it means to describe the Midland Bank or ICL as British (or for that matter companies like British Petroleum, British Airways, British Gas and British Telecom). Honda and Ford cars are the product of specialisation among many economies. Their workers and customers may be better served but identity is blurred. The recipients of Star, BBC and CNN satellite television inhabit a world in which national identities have to coexist with a cosmopolitan perspective on the world. In such a globalised environment people react in quite different ways.

Many individuals – in rich and poor countries – respond positively to the freedoms, opportunities and choices opened up by the wider hori- zons of global business and communications. Many can readily understand the economic logic of global specialisation, relishing the chances to sample a multiplicity of cultural experiences and identifying strongly with role models offered by international TV,music and sport.

But others feel threatened by the loss of security, stability, and traditional values. They need to identify with a recognisable, settled value system which gives their lives meaning and dignity. This reaction can be explicitly cultural. The French resistance to the attempt during the GATT negotiations to open up the European market for films to greater competition from Hollywood – Germinal versus Jurassic Park – was at least superficially such a response (the Americans suspected that cultural identity masked some less disinterested forms of protectionism). The reaction is also economic. The French concern over ‘delocalisa- tion’ expresses the fear that greater global competition will sweep away not merely jobs, particularly in agriculture, but a traditional way of life. Sir James Goldsmith’s La Piège (The Trap) achieved best seller status, defending French agriculture (and European producers generally)

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Why Identity? Why Now?

against the perceived threat to national identity from global competition. What is important is not whether the argument is valid (the main beneficiaries of the protection of French agriculture are in fact large scale farmers, not the romantic paysans); rather it is the fact that arguments based on cultural identity are seen as having powerful force. Nor are these manifestations exclusively French; the last ditch defence of Japanese and Korean rice farming from the alleged horrors of import competition was conducted in terms of the threat to a whole way of life. In a world where capital has no fixed abode and financial flows are largely beyond the control of national governments, many of the levers of economic policy no longer work.When governments of once powerful nation states helplessly wring their hands and disclaim responsibility for what used to be their task of economic management, it would be surprising if many people did not start to question what these nation states exist for and to seek a sense of identity elsewhere. The threat to cultural identity posed by global economic integration comes variously from trade, from mobile capital, and from the free flow of ideas and images. But it also comes from migrant labour. Immigration has provided much of the emotional fuel behind new extremist movements in Germany, Austria, France and Belgium. The American nativism of Pat Buchanan and others, directed at the influx of Hispanics and Asians, and invoking a spectre of non-white and non-English-speaking states, is a movement which has perhaps yet to reach its full potential. The disparity in wages between rich and poor countries and the growing ease and speed of international travel provides the basis for constant migration pressure, or at least the fear of it. These specific challenges combine to generate deeper uncertainties about what nations actually exist for. The nation state is being weakened from above by the forces of globalisation and from below by groups and regions which no longer identify with it. In Britain the strains and uncertainties have been apparent in the long, agonising debate about Europe, and the threat Europe poses, for some, to British national identity. The process of erosion has gone further for Belgium or Canada, both of which have shorter, less resonant histories, porous borders, minimal real economic sovereignty and strong culturally

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

defined minorities. There, a divisive politics of identity has largely taken over. For many other nation states cobbled together by departing colonial powers a few decades ago, the claims of loyalty to the nation state are becoming weaker still.

There are particular problems in the formerly communist east, where the sudden opening up to global markets and communications comes on top of what was essentially the break-up of an empire. People are being required to establish a new identity: to define, often from scratch, where they belong. As long as Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union existed it was not necessary for Bosnian Serbs to decide whether they were primarily Bosnians or primarily Serbs, or for Crimeans to decide if they were Russians or Ukrainians. Now they are being forced to choose as economic globalisation further erodes the tenuous ties which have held together these and other multicultural nation states.

The Liberalisation Revolution

The second major factor has been the ‘liberalisation revolution’ in economic thinking and organisation which has run in parallel with globalisation and is closely related to it. The collapse of the communist system in the USSR was not just an isolated event but the culmination of a process which has destroyed the credibility of a whole political philosophy. Systems based on state control, central planning and public ownership have been shown not to work, their flaws magnified by the demands of today’s information and communication technology.

Everywhere countries are purging themselves of these ideological remnants. There is a broad consensus (despite disagreements over time- scales) that immersion in the cold bath of market economics is a necessary trauma for the substantial number of countries which have a large dead-weight of loss-making and protected industries, established when socialist planning was seen as a precondition for modernity and progress. While the early pioneers of liberalisation were dogmatic and insensitive (like Margaret Thatcher) or brutal (Pinochet), in few parts of the world, now, is the basic framework of capitalist organisation, and the underlying economic logic of the price mechanism, seriously in dispute.

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Why Identity? Why Now?

But the liberalisation revolution is also a painful affair. While poor people may benefit from the lower inflation that may come as a corollary of liberalisation, much hurt, dislocation and inequality – albeit temporary – is resulting from privatisation, market deregulation, accelerated economic change and restructuring. In developing countries, powerful demographic pressures and urbanisation are being piled on top of adjustment that would be difficult and painful in any event. Radical transformation is already creating deep resentment, particularly in former communist countries, and could still take decades to complete. Anger and frustration at the pain of liberalisation would once have found an outlet in parties of the left. Indeed, in some cases – in Poland, Lithuania and Venezuela – parties of the left have apparently staged a comeback as a reaction to the process of liberalisation (though they seem to have no alternative agenda). In other cases – Chile’s Christian Democrats, Mexico’s PRI, and India’s Congress party – a sophisticated approach to liberalisation is being evolved which sweetens the pill of market reform with anti-poverty programmes and safety net provi- sions. Some countries may thus be able to manage the liberalisation revolution within the traditional political structures.

But the libertarian ideas associated with market economics pose a deeper challenge to many societies, and one which strikes at the heart of their sense of identity. Liberalisation is in danger of being seen not just as painful but as ethically shallow if not positively evil. In the semi-liberalised, semi-capitalist economies of Russia (and the rest of the former USSR), China and India, the dividing lines between entre- preneurial endeavour, corruption and outright gangsterism are very indistinct. All three manifestations of ‘Wild East’ capitalism are widely available in these important countries – and in many others. The rapid erosion of family support systems and/or state provision is exposing large numbers in many countries to as harsh an environment as Britain in the time of Dickens, but without the values and institutions of private charity.‘Freedom of choice’ has often become an alibi for the commercial exploitation of every human perversion. Amid the money making and prodigious growth of the new China, many lament the return of the ‘six evils’ of pre-communist times: pornography, prostitution,

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

drugs, gambling, racketeering and the sale of women and children.

Consumer and producer choice introduced into a vacuum of values, without rules or self-restraint, appears as crude materialism and self- ishness, alien to what are seen as traditional social values.

There will be, and already is, an angry backlash against liberalisation (and in many cases its association with the west). This anger may be misdirected (countries that show the strongest indication of a reaction, like Russia and India and some in the Arab world, have not expe- rienced all that much liberalisation, yet). But it is real enough. When many Russians wanted to vent their anger, in the country’s first democratic election, the largest number turned in protest not to socialism, of which they had already had plenty of unhappy experience, but to the rabid nationalist and anti-semite Zhirinovsky. He will not be the last of his kind.

The Fragmentation of Class

Both liberalisation and globalisation together have accelerated economic and social change and thus undercut the social class base around which traditional left-right politics was organised. In western societies, deindustrialisation is sweeping away the settled industrial working- class communities which formed the heartland of left-wing parties.

New jobs are being created in services, many part time, and on a self- employed or transitory basis. Even where trades unions have not been systematically weakened – as in the UK and USA – they have steadily lost membership. Moreover, they are now increasingly concerned with individual grievances rather than collective action. The association of work, community and politics is being severed at a serious cost for

American Democrats, British Labour and the German SPD. At the same time, the no less settled,‘bourgeois’,middle-class base of the traditional parties of the right is being torn up by the deskilling of many clerical jobs, by competition within the professions and the struggle of small business and family farmers to survive. Goldthorpe and others have warned of the danger of prematurely pronouncing the death of the class system (in Britain at least), but

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Why Identity? Why Now?

social changes are taking place throughout the western world which make traditional politics hard to sustain. Galbraith’s Culture of Content- ment described a two thirds/one third society in which a ‘contented’ majority confronted an unskilled, alienated underclass which provides neither the numerical support nor the discipline and motivation to sustain a left-wing majority.In response, French socialists and American Democrats have embraced the ‘middle class’ only to discover the difficulties of matching their own communitarian tradition to the libertarian agendas of their new supporters. As the French socialists have already discovered, such support is extremely fickle.

There is little prospect of traditional class-based left-right politics being born again in those societies which have not yet arrived at the post-industrial stage. The principal targets of Eastern Europe’s liber- alisers are the heavily unionised, protected, loss-making industries and collective farms, many of which are now being swept away. In newly industrialising countries there are groups of strongly organised workers: the Brazilian Workers Party; Korean steelworkers; the CPI (M) in India. But these are pockets, often a ‘labour aristocracy’ in a larger, rapidly multiplying, mostly underemployed labour force with a weak sense of solidarity and open to competing pulls on its loyalties. The big cities of the Third World have rarely – Calcutta excepted – served as a cradle for western-style class based politics. Indeed, identity politics in some form has flourished more readily; in particular, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism owes much to the pool of unemployed youth in the slums of Cairo, Algiers, Khartoum and, previously, in Teheran.

Myth and History One of the strengths of those trying to cultivate the ‘politics of the soil’ is that they inherit well fertilised ground. In many countries, ethnic hatreds draw on real experience of past suffering – from Yugoslavia’s war-time atrocities and the Indian partition to

Ireland’s interminable Troubles and the massacres of Armenians, Jews, Palestinians,Kurds,Indonesian Chinese,Tutsis and Ibos.Some grievances have fermented for generations or even centuries. History has dissolved into legend and myth. The parties to the Yugoslav wars draw

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

on long memories: the Serbs of Nazi and Ottoman atrocities; Muslims of the persecution of the Bogamites (the early Christian heretics who later converted to Islam); and Croats of the partition of the Roman Empire which left them on the western side of a historic dividing line. The

Georgian civil war was started under a President who insisted that today’s citizens must trace back their family ancestry a thousand years. For the tribes of Ulster, Cromwell and King William could have been alive yesterday.The Indian BJP seeks to remedy the injustices wrought by the Moghul Emperors. In Israel territorial expansionists in Likud establish their case from the Old Testament’s treatment of Judea and Samaria.

The advocates of Apartheid found inspiration in the Book of Genesis. In Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia (and, if fundamentalists have their way, many other Muslim countries) daily social, economic and political life is governed by texts a thousand years old. Even that most modern of societies, the USA, is still grappling with the psychological legacy of slavery. Often, the ‘history’thus invoked bears no more relation to reality than the Norse myths which inspired the Nazis’ Teutonic fantasies. The Hindutva of the ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ is a total negation of an ancient religion long recognised for its eclecticism and toleration as is the newly

‘militant’ Buddhism of neighbouring Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Modern Islamic fundamentalism bears little resemblance to the traditions of early Islamic civilisation, characterised by the open-minded and cul- tured traditions of Moorish Spain (which Christian fundamentalists subsequently destroyed). Real or imagined, the history is believed. And as some cultural identities are moulded and politicised by prejudices drawn from the past, others, in turn, are triggered. Until the creation of Israel, the Sephardic Jews of North Africa lived in reasonable harmony with their Arab neighbours. Greeks have lived in the

Caucasus since 500 years before Aristotle, but have now been pushed out by tribal warfare and pulled out by a new pan-Hellenism. Germans lived for 500 years in the east until the upheavals of the former Soviet

Union and the attractions of the mother country lured them back. The Egyptian Copts, who survived centuries of upheaval, are now threatened by their previously tolerant Muslim neighbours. Cultures which coexisted for centuries now find that they no longer can.

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Why Identity? Why Now?

It is clearly not coincidental that so many historically based claims on identity have reemerged so strongly and in so many places within such a short space of time; identity politics has created a strong demand for history and myths to sustain and reinforce it.

Events and People The shift to identity politics is not a pre-ordained or inexorable change wholly beyond the power of politicians. Events, leaders and chance can be crucial in particular circumstances. In particular, the blunders or cynicism of politicians still thinking exclusively in left-right terms have often reinforced the extreme expressions of identity politics. The French National Front has been able to drive a deep racist wedge into French (and European) politics because President Mitterand eased its path, calculating that he could thereby divide what he saw as the main enemy: the traditional right. India’s secular politicians thought it was politically shrewd to divide their rivals by deliberately building up communal movements like Sant Bhindrawala’s Sikh militants and the Shiv Sena, or by pandering to Muslim fundamentalists, so laying the foundations for much subsequent communal strife. In the interests of the ideological struggle against Soviet communism, the west promoted tribal warriors like Jonas Savimbi and religious fanatics like Gulbaddin Hektmayer, now Prime Minister of Afghanistan (who established his credentials as a student leader by throwing acid into the faces of unveiled women). In the new world of identity politics, they have come into their own. In the future, as in the past, the possibility of a major shift in the nature of politics will hinge on unpredictable events. If Clinton were to face (and lose to) a Christian fundamentalist such as Pat Buchanan on the Republican ticket in 1986; if German xenophobia were to take serious hold; if an Algerian religious fundamentalist regime flooded Southern Europe with refugees; if an aggressively assertive anti-western leadership were to emerge in Japan, or China; if Yeltsin were to be succeeded by Zhirinovsky. All are hypothetical but plausible discontinuities which could radi- cally change the nature of political debate way beyond these countries’ frontiers. And all would give the politics of identity a new impetus.

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Alternative Politics

Environmentalism and Conservationism

Why should identity have emerged as the dominant new organising principle for politics? Other new ideas have entered the political mainstream – environmentalism; feminism – and could arguably also come to dominate.

Indeed there have been times in the last decade when green parties have seemed set to take western Europe by storm. They still pull in a respectable vote in France, Germany and Italy. Moreover, a strong infrastructure of environmental groups run the gamut of political movements from ultra-respectable, multiparty pressure groups like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, to green political parties, direct-action groups (Earth First; Greenpeace), and even terrorism (the Animal Liberation Front). Is it plausible to imagine that a major new political polarity could open up around the axis of conservation versus growth to match in intensity that of left and right, or the politics of identity? On present evidence it seems highly unlikely. Environmen- talists have been very effective with single issue campaigns but have had more difficulty consolidating any beachheads they have gained to launch a broader political struggle.

One fundamental difficulty with green politics is that it contains fundamental elements which are not just different but contradictory. On the one hand, many greens have a global perspective: saving Planet

Earth. More than any other issue, perhaps, the environment gives a

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Alternative Politics

message of shared responsibility and universal values. On the other hand, much of the energy and anger which green politics mobilises concerns the very parochial: summed up in the phrase ‘not in my back yard’. The contradictions become painfully apparent when concrete problems have to be confronted: coal mines which are closed desolat- ing communities but contributing to the greater good of countering the Greenhouse Effect; or GATT, of which French greens were both the strongest supporters and the strongest critics. Green politics also draws on (at least) two quite different views of the world. One, in our terms, is communitarianism, seeing environmental damage as a market failure and a problem associated with poverty (in low income countries) that can be addressed by regulation and taxation within a growing world economy. This type of politics is represented by Gro Harlem Brundtland, advocate of ‘sustainable development’ and a leading Social Democrat; in the green-red coalitions in German Land parliaments and cities and Rocard’s proposed realignment of the left in France. The other ingredient has much more in common with cultural conservatism: alarm at the loss of identity and equilibrium produced by rapid development, changing landscapes, mixing of people, impersonal cities and depopulated countrysides. Conservation means precisely that: conserving, not changing. Conservationism can be defensive. It can be aggressive too. Mexicans must not be allowed to kill dolphins, Norwegians whales, or Africans elephants. Brazilians must be stopped from cutting down their forests; oil companies must be stopped from drilling; the poor must be stopped from breeding and overpopulating the earth. Some of these thoughts surface in the speeches of such fig- ures as the Duke of Edinburgh and in a more intellectually rigorous way in Edward Goldsmith’s Ecologist. This latter way of thinking links also to the new strain of conservatism articulated among others by John Gray (and his left counterpart, Anthony Giddens) which rejects the ‘progress’ of modernisation and growth for the damage which it does to the environment, to settled communities and traditional values and to the arts and architecture.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

It is possible that ecological disasters ahead, the links with wider conservationist thinking, and the currently inchoate churning of ideas in environmental circles, will in time generate a distinctive breakthrough in the way we think about politics. If so, it is some way off.

The Politics of Gender There are few contemporary trends more important than the changing role of women in the workforce and in the family, as felt mainly in western but increasingly in other societies. Yet by and large, this change, and the struggle for recognition which has preceded it, has not forced any significant political realignment. There are many more women playing a leading role in politics – notably in North America and Scandinavia – but, except marginally in Russia and Iceland, no significant political party has emerged to champion the cause of women as its primary objective.

Since women account for half of every electorate (usually more because of greater longevity) this seems a strangely missed opportunity. There are perhaps two reasons. One is that the main battles against discrimination are being won with cross-party support, with the support of men and through a slow process of osmosis and economically determined social change.

The other is that the arguments which are thrown up have been subsumed in the broader politics of identity. Women are not being forced back into the home in Iran, Pakistan or Poland in the name of a man v woman debate but supposedly as part of a reassertion of traditional Islamic or Catholic values and identity by cultural conservatives (including many women). The debate in the west over abortion – the

‘freedom to choose’ versus the ‘right to life’ – is couched in the language of libertarians on the one hand and cultural conservatives on the other. Gender politics is likely to remain in significant respects a sub- set of the politics of identity.

Democratic Renewal and Human Rights Another organising principle for politics could be found in the many movements which are pressing for institutional reform: honest

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Alternative Politics

government; openness and transparency; due legal processes and civil liberties; human rights; and democracy. In this broad category are the Japanese campaigners for ‘clean politics’; La Rete in Italy; the new anti-establishment groupings which threw up Presidents Collor and

Fujimori in Latin America (in both cases with unhappy consequences) and Ross Perot in the USA; the broadly based movements for multiparty democracy in Africa; Cory Aquino’s People’s Power; and the anti-communist dissident movements like Charter 77 and Solidarity. These differ greatly in origin and style. They are all, however, essentially transitional movements with a limited agenda and life. When thrust into power, like Havel’s Civic Forum or Poland’s Solidarity, they are quickly forced to make painful choices – on the economy and the speed of market reforms and on the ‘identity’ questions of nationalism and religion. They have then, predictably, fragmented, and some have fragmented even before getting into power,such as Kenya’s pro- democracy, human rights coalition which succumbed to tribalism within weeks of being legalised. This is why it is not possible to organise politics around the issue of democracy versus dictatorship, although this was often how the Cold

War was portrayed. In any event, with the important exception of China, few regimes, or individuals, are left which try to justify author- itarian rule as a matter of principle, such as the Marxist-Leninist

Dictatorship of the Proletariat (a few others like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew reject western democratic pluralism in principle but – within bounds – accept it in practice). The dictators who survive do so mainly for a mixture of personal greed, fear for their own skins and a not unreasonable fear that – as in Egypt, Syria, arguably also Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe – extreme ‘identity politics’ in the form of religious, racial or tribal conflict could follow a transition to democracy. As Bernard Crick argues in his ‘Defence of Politics’,democracy is not a political organising principle in itself; it provides the framework within which politics, in some form, can then function, for good or ill (Algeria and Russia have recently reminded those who had forgotten the German elections of the inter-war period that ill is as likely to flow as good).

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

For similar reasons human rights has not become a defining principle in politics. As with motherhood, everybody, including nasty dictators, is in favour of human rights in theory. The important question is now they are defined, and here the underlying political assumptions are crucial. In a world of left-right politics, the argument is about whether human rights are individual, including property rights, or socio-economic in the sense of material entitlements. In the world of identity politics the distinction is quite different: between individual rights and the rights of exclusive groups.

Identity Politics as a Transition? It could be that what appears now as a wide political concern over cultural identity is just a temporary phenomenon: one of the eddies thrown up in the turbulence caused primarily by the end of the Cold War.It is interesting to speculate that in time several of the different elements described above may come together. One such convergence could be a new form of conservatism com- bining a concern for preserving cultural identity with ecology and a deeper pessimism about the benefits of scientific progress and economic growth. In elements of post-modernism it would have a coun- terpartä in the arts. It would appeal to many elderly people, who form a growing proportion of the population and the electorates of western democracies. It would appeal too, ä to those who lose from change: people who lack the education and energy to throw themselves into the opportunities which globalised, liberalised economies are throwing up. And there would be a response from those who idealise small, settled communities.

It would have as its antithesis the full weight of the progressive tradition which is optimistic about human beings’ capacity for improve- ment and adaptation. Robert Reich has described a powerful new class emerging of ‘symbolic analysts’ who will flourish in the new post- industrial societies: clever, educated, creative, mobile and flexible. This new class will be cosmopolitan and not rigidly tied to particular cultures or places. It will provide the drive and ideas behind new political

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Alternative Politics

movements which are both hard-headed – addressing ‘the need to compete in a global market place’ – and full of idealistic concern for the global environment and poverty. These progressives would be the natural counterweight to new conservatives.

However, this may be fantasy. There is no sign as yet that the pre- dominant politics of elections, arguments and campaigns is going to take this form.

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The Agenda for Identity

Politics

The politics of identity brings with it a new agenda. Issues which were uncontroversial, or buried, come to the fore: issues which politicians trained to think in left-right terms are often ill-equipped to deal with and have no ready vocabulary for. There is little in the writings of Adam Smith or Milton Friedman, Marx or Keynes, to provide much by way of reference for problems like bilingualism, religious education, gays in the military, interracial adoption, minority rights and positive discrimination, ‘politically correct’ body language, blasphemy, immigration and citizenship, abortion, divorce and unmarried mothers – to mention but a few current political concerns. What sets the distinct agenda of identity politics (Fig 5) is essentially the tension between the concerns of the libertarian right – individual rights, choice, enterprise, and personal freedom – and those of cultural conservatives – group rights, traditional authority, ‘family values’ and religion. There is some overlap with the old left-right approach: abortion is a question of access for the poor as well as of life versus choice. Underprivileged, culturally defined minorities may overlap with underprivileged economic classes, but these are usually secondary aspects of the argument. Several issues now coming to the fore across a wide range of countries reflect this new balance of forces.

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

Figure 5. The Political Agendas

Majorities and Minorities

An absolutely central issue in identity politics is the relationship between minority and majority groups: identifying, counting, regulating, expelling or protecting them. For those who are concerned about cultural identity, the definition of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ is crucial to their belief system.

The defining characteristic of this kind of politics is that it treats people primarily as members of fixed groups. The libertarian right, by contrast, has emphasised that people are individuals and must enjoy equality, as individuals, before the law. And while the communitarian

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

left has emphasised collective action for workers, they are not culturally and exclusively defined. The identity politics of groups is often instigated by the majority defining and excluding unwanted outsiders. Attempts by the Nazis, the

Bosnian Serb and Croatian militias and the (pre-de Klerk) National Party of South Africa to give political legitimacy to the practice of explicit racial discrimination and forced movement, or death, are extreme examples. Throughout Eastern Europe, minorities are being ‘cleansed’ or harassed to leave and there is a near obsession with what one leader of the ruling Hungarian Democratic Forum calls ‘strangers’ (a broad category of alien bodies in which Jews and Gypsies figure prominently). If Zhirinovsky has his way Europe will have a movement dedicated to purging public life of those who do not have blue eyes and blond hair.

More contentious grey areas arise from attempts to deprive minorities of citizenship rights, even when they have strong claims of birth or naturalisation: Germany’s treatment of its Turks; France’s new legislation on ‘aliens’; Britain’s laws effectively stripping Asians in Kenya and later in Hong Kong of their British citizenship; the Baltic states’ barriers to citizenship for Russian speakers.

Where minorities are not excluded they can face the opposite hazard of forced cultural assimilation: demands from the majority not just to be law-abiding citizens and to pay taxes but to observe the customs of the majority. This can be a painful matter: Christian thieves and adul- terers in the Sudan face loss of limb if not life. It may involve a require- ment to change names (for Bulgarian Turks). More trivially, but irksome nonetheless, British Indians are subject to the ‘Tebbit test’ of loyalty at England’s cricket matches with India just as Indian Muslims are expected not to wave green flags when India plays Pakistan. In

France attempts have been made to prevent Muslim girls wearing head- scarves to school. Even the most settled and apparently welcome minorities find that there are strict limits to what is acceptable.

Hampstead Orthodox Jews found that putting a few unobtrusive poles around the neighbourhood to create an ‘eruv’ transgressed that limit. The vulnerability of minorities to the opposite dangers of exclusion and enforced conformity has in turn produced a demand for minority

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

self-definition and self-exclusion, which can lead to other forms of group intolerance. Individuals become less important than groups. In the tribal wars of the former Yugoslavia, it was inconvenient to remem- ber, and was therefore forgotten, that a large number of people, perhaps as many as 30% in Bosnia, enjoy mixed marriages and have no reason to join the tribal killing. Spokesmen for black minorities in Britain and the USA demand exclusive rights to define what is ‘good for their community’ although ‘the community’ may exist largely in their imagination. There have been attempts to stop interracial adoption, even when the only alternative is institutional care, on the grounds that concerns about cultural and racial identity transcend other considerations in parenting. Leaders of Islamic minorities have demanded (and in the case of India been given) separate, communal family law, including restrictions on the rights of women. Other minority leaders seek to outlaw material which they find offensive,even if it is not intended to offend or is not devised for their consumption (such as English language signs in Quebec; Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses). An extreme version of minority self-assertion is geographical separation – like the demand of South African conservative whites for a homeland -which takes us into the broader question of self-determination.

(a) Self-Determination and Secession

In a world where group identity is allowed to transcend the concerns of individuals, questions of territory become crucial. A prolific breeding ground for conflict is the demand by minorities for separate state- hood. There are a few examples in the past of secession occurring without undue conflict, but it requires a long and determined histori- cal search to find them; Norway is the best example. There are as few velvet divorces in nation building as there are in marriage. The Bosnian Model offers a more familiar route.

When right-left politics was the dominant concern, the issue surfaced mainly as a side-show to the bigger struggle.‘Self-determination’ was a useful stick with which to beat the Soviet Union (the Baltic states) or China (Tibet) or it occurred as part of the one-off process of

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

decolonisation, where partition has had a prominent and almost uni- formly disastrous history. Now that secessionist movements are sur- facing worldwide as part of the politics of identity (Figure 6) a more coherent and developed response is going to be required than has been seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia. This was initially rationalised on the grounds that Slovenia was ethnically homogeneous, thereby signalling to the Croats, Serbs and others that the principle of ‘ethnic homogene- ity’ was a virtue to be striven for (as they have). Experience should tell us that whatever superficial appeal ethnically based secession and the redrawing of borders might have – not least the clearly and democratically expressed wish of a minority to secede – the consequences are invariably more far reaching, and painful, than is initially apparent. One obvious practical reason is that it is rarely possible to satisfy one minority’s expression of identity through territorial sovereignty without threatening the identity and security of other minorities. Ulster has its Catholics as a united Ireland would have its Protestants;

Slovakia now has its Hungarians; Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine their Russians; Macedonia its Albanians. Quebec would have its English speakers; Kashmir its Hindus; Eelam its Muslims and Buddhists; Tibet its Han Chinese. If the politics of identity has to be given territorial expression, the end result would either be repeated and complex partition on the lines of apartheid, or large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’.Once the principle is conceded that group identity and rights transcend those of individuals, the battle is largely lost. By the same token, once started, the process of fission is almost impos- sible to stop. Yugoslavia has already generated four recognised states plus three Bosnias and there are probably more to come (Volvojdina, Montenegro, Kosovo). The USSR has produced – at least – 13 states and some of Russia’s 80 plus republics are itching to go. But these are fairly straightforward problems compared with those that would attend a breakup of the Indian Federation or even Indonesia, South Africa or

Nigeria. A further point is that the concerns of the majority and the seced- ing minority may differ for good grounds of security and economic welfare. It is quite understandable that both India and Pakistan, for

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

Figure 6. Minorities and Separatism (* ϭ recent violence)

UK (Ulster*; Scotland) Bulgaria (Turks)

Belgium (Flanders; Wallonia) Greeks (Muslims)

Spain (Basques*; Catalans) Turkey (Kurds)

Italy (Lombardy; Tyrol) Cyprus (Turks*)

Canada (Quebec; Western States) Iraq (Kurds*; Marsh Arabs*)

Russia (Caucasians*; Tatars; Iran (Kurds*; Azerbaijanis; Siberians) Turkomans)

Ukraine (Russians) Pakistan (Sindis*; Baluchis; Pathars)

Baltic States (Russians) India (Kashmir*; NE Tribes*)

Moldova (Russians*) Sri Lanka (Tamils*)

Georgia (Abhazians*, Ossetians*) Burma (Karens*)

Azerbaijan (Armenia*) China (Tibet*; Muslims; Mongols)

Romania (Hungarians) Philippines (Muslims*)

Slovakia (Hungarians; Czechs) Indonesia (Timor*; Irian*)

Serbia (Albanians*; Hungarians) PNG (Bougainville*)

Macedonia (Albanians; Greeks) Israel (Palestinians*)

Albania (Greeks) S Africa (Zulus*; Whites*)

Croatia (Serbs*) Zimbabwe (Ndebele)

Bosnia (Serbs*; Croats*; Muslims*) Sudan (Christians*)

Ethiopia (Eritrea*; Tigre*; Somalis) Zaire (Shaba*; Katanga*; Kiru*)

Somalia (Somaliland*)

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

example – countries with recent and bitter experience of war – should resist amputations which seriously undermine their security. The majority in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Angola, among many others, will naturally want to resist the secession of wealth-producing enclaves. The United States survived because it was able to suppress the secessionist revolt of the Southern Confederacy. In a world where the politics of identity looms large, the underlying tension between the quest for minority ‘self-determination’ and majority ‘territorial integrity’ will provide the basis of much future conflict, where rights and wrongs will never be clear cut.

(b) Numbers Matter

Where identity politics has taken hold, politicians play the numbers game. Enoch Powell’s obsession with immigrants’birth rates in England (and Le Pen’s in France) is perfectly mirrored in Hindu fundamentalists’ worries about Muslim birth rates in India, or Slavic nationalists’ fear of the rapidly multiplying Central Asian races. The dread of Ulster Protestants, as of Israelis and Afrikaaners, is that they will be out-bred.

Quebec nationalists lament their low birth rate. In the United States, there has been great concern over trend extrapolations which purport to show that the USA, or parts of it, are destined to become ‘non-white’ or non-English speaking. In Nigeria, no census can be held because of what it might reveal about group numbers and differential birth rates. In Kenya, little can be done to address the world’s largest population growth because tribal numbers count. In China, bursts of xenophobia, as during the Cultural Revolution, have been marked by abrupt rever- sals of the one-child family policy: the idea taking hold that numbers are strength. In the west the numbers game is played over migration. Fear of the ‘browning of the west’ through immigration and differentially high minority birth rates is the most potent weapon in the armoury of racist politicians in France, Germany and Britain. Two more or less coherent responses are being adopted: accepting, as in the USA and

Australia, that migration is an economic boon, will increasingly be

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

non-white, and will inevitably produce a more heterogeneous society; or, as in the UK, trying to draw a line under past migration while defending the citizenship rights of those already arrived. It remains to be seen which works better. In future, there will be contradictory pressures: economic globalisation and liberalisation will set up a growing demand for freedom of movement, while the politics of identity will act to restrict it.

One of the problems presented by group identity politics is that it spills across frontiers. Minorities in one country are a majority elsewhere; loyalties are divided. We can call this problem ‘pan ethnicity’. These movements come in different forms. The fragmentation of the USSR and the Balkans has encouraged support for a Greater Russia, Greater Serbia, Greater Hungary and Greater Albania, based on a mixture of territorial ambition and concern for fellow nationals across the borders of neighbouring states. There are other cases where the ‘mother country’ provides a focal point for pride and for cultural ties among an expatriate diaspora: the new pan-Turkism, embracing Turkic speaking Central Asia; pan- Hellenism; the revival of Armenian and Mongol identity; and of course

Zionism. The diasporas of China and India have contributed mightily to the current economic growth of both countries. Language and history provide powerful links even among scattered and disparate communities (the Francophonie; the Old Commonwealth if not the New). Pride of place among these movements belongs to the different strands of pan-Islamic sentiment whose growing influence is now transforming the politics of the Middle East and central Asia. There is now a global, and highly politicised, Shia movement linking Iran, Iraq, the Lebanon and Shia groups in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Khartoum- based Sunni Islamic militants are preparing the ground for political advances in Algeria and Egypt and for general confrontation with a hostile west. It is not necessary to perceive Muslims as somehow uniquely intolerant (there is plenty of militant and highly politicised

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

Christianity in the evangelical sects and groups like Opus Dei) to recognise the outlines of what Samuel Huntingdon has identified as a future clash of civilisations based on religious identity. There are many on both sides ready to believe that there is a monolithic and malign enemy at the other side of the divide. Another variant of the same theme is a ‘pan ethnicity’ grouped around ‘white’ and ‘black’. At present this exists in an organised form mainly in the attempts to construct international alliances among the scattered groups of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. However bizarre such groups may appear, the fears which they are trying to exploit are real enough. While the world was divided into east versus west, and ideologically polarised, the underlying sense of inequity created by large discrepan- cies in wealth and economic opportunity between the richest – white – and poorest countries remained a second-order problem. But as communications become truly global – BBC and Star TV and facsimile machines in villages everywhere, the spread of tourism – the dispari- ties are becoming more jarring. At the same time the opportunities now open to the enterprising and ambitious in poor countries to get a green card (or the equivalent for Europe) are contracting. The correla- tion between wealth and pigmentation cannot be assumed away. However, the idea of a simple cleavage between North and South has been rendered somewhat obsolete by the success of much of Asia. But it requires no great imagination to see that on some key interfaces, notably between Europe and its southern neighbours, the poor’s frustration and sense of injustice will find expression in the politics of identity: in race, reinforced by culture and religion. And there are many among the rich, and white, who will all too readily rationalise their sense of superiority or insecurity in matching terms. Minorities, particularly Islamic minorities in Europe, will find themselves trapped in the middle.

Sovereignty and States In the politics of identity, sovereignty is an extremely serious matter; it gives legal form and territorial boundaries to the whole notion of

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

‘being British’ or, for that matter, being a Serb or a Scot or a Kurd. For most established nation states the idea of sovereignty has long been taken for granted, but is now being seen as under attack both from the competing internal identities of minorities, and from the external forces of globalisation, which have stripped the governments of all but the largest and most closed economies of their effective economic sovereignty.

In Europe the sovereignty issue expresses itself in the question: are we primarily British, Norwegian, French, Danes or primarily Europeans? The question is enormously difficult and divisive and has dominated

British political life for decades. Beneath the superficially placid waters of Norwegian politics, intense passions have been aroused by the same issue; as in Britain, left and right give few clues as to how the issue of identity should be resolved. In Switzerland association with the EU highlighted a division between the French and German cantons which confederation seemed amiably to have resolved centuries ago. The

NAFTA integration process in North America has had comparable effects. As the effective autonomy of nation states is undermined by progressively deeper global or regional integration, the question will grow in importance of whether to resist the process in the name of sovereignty, or to adapt to it. Whatever the heart-searching about the loss of European national identities, there is little sign or prospect of the old western European national hatreds resurfacing. A more relevant future concern is exclusive regionalism. The regional groupings of western Europe, and the less developed free trade area in North America, have so far contributed to a breaking down of national barriers to trade and movements of people and capital without creating major barriers to the rest of the world. But there is a danger that a form of exclusive national identity could be sublimated in a closely knit, inward looking,‘Fortress’ European Union. There is already in the EU a clamour for barriers against competing products from Eastern Europe and Asia, and for a Europe-wide clampdown on ‘aliens’.The ‘Frontier Europe’ mentality is very far from being a consensus, but could well become a rallying slogan for a new breed of European politicians who see in it a way of

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

putting a respectable veneer over deeper racial and religious antago- nism towards non-Europeans.Whether this happens depends in significant measure on how far issues of identity will permeate economics.

The Economics of Identity The western world has been painfully reminded in the last few years that a terminal crisis for communism does not mean the end of crises for capitalism. Political battles are being fought against the worst economic backdrop since the 1930s. Yet there is a crucial difference from the

1930s. Radical socialist alternatives are no longer taken seriously. There is a broad consensus among policy makers for some form of capitalist development; the consensus even extends into such technical areas as the need for fiscal deficit reduction or independent, non-political control over money supply. As the ideological, left-right argument evapo- rates, many voters will search for alternatives.

Identity politics provides one in the form of economic nationalism. When the French right swept to power earlier last year, it inherited a combination of popular dissatisfaction and an overall approach to economic policy with which it had little disagreement. Part of its answer to the need to say something new was an aggressive trade policy, directed against GATT. It thereby established its patriotic, French identity as against the Anglo-Saxon world and as defender of the farmers, who in France are not just a troublesome interest group but are projected asä a symbol of Frenchness. And, as a useful supporting theme, it was able to blame unemployment on foreign ‘social dumping’ (Asian and British sweated labour) and illegal immigrants. Such arguments are not just the preserve of the French or the right.

The Clinton team and, even more, congressional Democrats, have never lost an opportunity to blame the loss of manufacturing jobs on ‘unfair’ competition from China, Japan and Mexico. One of their excuses would doubtless be that they have to respond to a populist mood captured in Ross Perot’s memorable phrase about NAFTA being a large vacuum cleaner sucking American jobs to the South. Even in

Britain, where trade policy is not a controversial issue, a large part of

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

the argument against pit closures was that the jobs could be saved by keeping out coal imports, imported electricity (made by French nuclear power) and Venezuelan orimulsion. Beggar-my-neighbour economics has instant and wide appeal.

For those with a sense of history, this recourse to chauvinism in matters of international economics is not new. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, establishing the intellectual foundations of a competitive market economy, he was not responding to the ideas of socialism, a concept then barely articulated, but to mercantilists who abhorred import competition. The arguments have come full circle.

In the 1930s, when protectionist ideas were last in vogue, they helped to wreck the world economy and perpetuate the slump. It seems unlikely that history will repeat itself exactly. Economic globalisation is sufficiently advanced to create powerful countervailing forces to the more obviously self-defeating kinds of tit-for-tat trade conflict. Few governments have any serious ambition to go down the isolationist

Albanian or Burmese road to ruin. A GATT agreement has been reached, albeit with difficulty. The greater likelihood is that the ‘economics of identity’ will take more suble forms which reflect the greater degree of integration of the world economy. One manifestation of the economics of identity would beä a growing list of ‘cultural’ exclusions from the disciplines of international competition. Audio-visual services and agriculture have been two recent flashpoints. In fact there is no reason why this particular problem should be deeply divisive. In a seminal article on the economics of nationalism, Breton argued that nationalism (in his case the nationalism of Quebec) is a public good which has to be paid for like any other. If cultural preferences are defended by transparent subsidies they can be accommodated in an open international system. A more serious problem is what Sylvia Ostrey has called ‘systems friction’: the result of different capitalist cultures being brought into closer contact through ever more intense competition. We have already referred to the idea of ‘capitalism versus capitalism’: the clash of interests and identities which results from different approaches, whether Anglo-Saxon,French,German,Italian,Korean,or Japanese,

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

to business organisation and corporate governance, government intervention and consumer behaviour.As they interact more, through trade and investment, trade friction can become a lightning conductor for popular prejudices about alien lifestyles and the allegedly unfair advantages conferred by international differences. In such a world, failures of competitiveness are commonly attributed to foreigners cheating. Thus we find an obsession with bilateral deficits;

‘dumping’ (Eastern European steel); ‘social dumping’ (by Britain in Europe and by all poor countries); and ‘environmental dumping’ (by Eastern Europe and the poor). Differences in climate, wages, productiv- ity and environmental preferences should be the basis for economically efficient specialisation. But in a world in which people feel deeply about cultural differences there are endless possibilities for turning the issue of ‘unfairness’ into populist politics. For businesses which lose out, failure is easier to rationalise in terms of uneven playing fields than the quality of the opposition.

The greater the difference, the greater the friction. The economics of identity may not provoke a rupture between Europe and the USA, or between the countries of Europe, as it did in the 1930s but it may well do between countries with very different cultural traditions as well as different levels of development. And if such disputes escalate there will be one certain consequence: an increasingly bitter dividing line between the industrial world and new, excluded, competitors from Asia, Latin America and possibly Eastern Europe that could translate the politics of identity onto a global plane.

Family Values

The politics of identity has implications for a whole range of issues, from the global economy to the intimacy of personal relationships. There is a clear dividing line between the libertarian emphasis on personal choice and the idea that family and personal relationships must reflect the disciplines of culture, tradition and faith. Issues which bring these divisions to the fore include women’s equality under the law and right to compete in the labour marketä as an equal; abortion; divorce;

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The Agenda for Identity Politics

the use of contraceptives; sexual preference and lifestyle; publication of pornographic material; expectations about the provision of community care for elderly and disabled relatives; the status of unmarried parents; the age of consent; and the freedoms of children in relation to their parents. Reflecting the differences in perspectives,‘family values’ have become a touchstone for American Christian conservatism; for Muslim fundamentalists across the Middle East, Asia and Africa (and among Islamic minorities in western societies); and across Eastern Europe where many of the rights which women enjoyed at least in theory, under communism, are in danger of being swept away on a tide of religious feeling and extreme nationalism. The reasons why this group of issues has become so prominent are obviously complex but there is perhaps one which stands out. The frustrations and insecurity thrown up by rapid economic and techno- logical change are rarely comprehensible in abstract terms but are nonetheless intimately felt in the home, in tensions between husband and wife, parents and children and with extended kin. It would be surprising if the stresses and strains on family life did not lead to a powerful reaction that meant embracing some of the old certainties of cultural tradition and religious faith. Since the 1960s, Britain (except in Northern Ireland) and most western European countries have enjoyed a broadly libertarian consensus on many of these issues. Those countries which have joined the west European club, like Spain, have embraced libertarian social values notwithstanding a conservative religious tradition. In a world where identity politics comes more to the fore, this consensus could well come under strain, as it already has in the United States.

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Managing the Politics of Identity

There is always the danger of regarding extreme forms of identity politics as something that only happens somewhere else. Western Europe has largely rationalised the Bosnian tragedy as a self-inflicted product of Balkan tribalism. Arabs and Africans are even further from sympa- thetic understanding. But complacency is not in order.Western Europe and the rest of the OECD world has seen some ugly manifestations of racial, religious and linguistic intolerance.

Even in Britain where the old certainties of left and right and traditions of accommodation die hard a few politicians have sniffed around the possibilities of exploiting identity as a dominant political concern.

Enoch Powell immersed himself in three issues which best provide an opening for exploiting British insecurities about identity: race, Ireland and Europe. He failed to make a sustained breakthrough on any of them and, as of now, the racialist parties and factions, the extreme Europhobes and the Celtic nationalists remain on the political periphery. But the sense of frustration over relative national decline which has helped in the past to fuel white, English nationalism has not wholly gone and it has counterparts in much of western Europe. There is an important reason why systematic thought should be given to the problems of identity and how to deal with it. A major gap in understanding is opening up in many countries between large sec- tions of the administrative and business elite and those over whom they preside. The former are usually cosmopolitan in taste, mobile and

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Managing the Politics of Identity

fully tuned to the needs of a global economy and rapid change. The latter often lack mobility, education, skills and languages, and are resentful of the changes being imposed upon them and the communities of which they feel a part. The wall of comprehensive misunder- standing between Gaidar’s young reformers and the sullen, resentful Russian electorate is an extreme example from a society in extreme crisis. But it has echoes in all societies which face serious problems of their own, notably the need to adjust to ever intensifying international competition. Politicians operating on a left-right basis often misunderstand the seriousness of the problem with which they are dealing. Recent history is littered with examples of politicians of left and right falling into one or the other trap as they have tried, often with unhappy consequences, to come to terms with the emotional appeal of identity. Some have unsuc- cessfully tried appeasement (George Bush and born-again Christian Republicans). Some have tried opportunistic manipulation and proved too clever by half (Mitterand and the French National Front). Some simply panicked (the Callaghan government and the Kenyan Asian crisis). Others have hidden behind a cowardly silence (Kohl and the violence of German neo-Nazis). Some have successfully exploited identity issues and then distanced themselves from the consequences (Thatcher’s ‘swamping’ speech). As long as these issues have been on the periphery of the agenda, no lasting damage may be done – British race relations are remarkably good considering their political history, but that may not always be the case.

Much creative energy has been devoted in recent years to the issue of managing ‘mixed’ economies to achieve the optimal mix of effi- ciency and fairness, state and private provision. Much less thought has been given to how to find a role for cultural identity which is enriching but not divisive. What is missing is a set of principles for societies in which many of the old questions about economic organisation and class are no longer a major issue and in which cultural identity problems move from the wings to centre stage. The idea of providing a prescriptive approach to the management of identity in politics is what lies at the heart of political correctness,

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

which now looms large in the USA and increasingly in Europe. At its worst, political correctness has become pedantic, oppressive and dogmatic: a vehicle for asserting the primacy of cultural groups over the individual; rewriting history to produce convenient lies; suppressing criticism and harassing the independently minded. But it is also trying to do something positive: trying to create a code of etiquette for societies in which cultural sensitivities matter. It is simple good manners to refrain from describing people as ‘bitches’,‘queers’ or ‘niggers’ when such language obviously gives offence and it is reasonable to urge others to show sensitivity. Political correctness is something which can be built on. Two approaches are adopted here. One is to suggest some guiding principles. The other is to look at possible role models of societies which seem to be managing the politics of identity with particular skill.

Some Guiding Principles (a) Multiple Identity

Healthy, pluralist societies, like healthy balanced individuals, do have a sense of cultural identity, of belonging. They recognise that there is no such thing as a homogeneous, universal culture. But the sense of belonging is not closed, intolerant and exclusive.A successful society is one in which individuals feel secure and at ease with different facets of their own heritage and identity. For one person it might be as a British and European, Catholic, Highland, Glaswegian Scot working for a Japanese corporation; for another it might be a British and Indian, Asian, Punjabi, Sikh Londoner working for an American bank. Or the two might be married and their children carry forward both sets of identities. In a society dominated by divisive forms of identity politics, such diversity is not possible.

How can a voluntary and inclusive approach to identity be main- tained in the face of strong pressures to stereotype and divide? Can it be taught? The fashionable approach in some western societies is to promote multi-culturalism, which sounds like diversity but often makes

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Managing the Politics of Identity

the mistake of starting with fixed groups rather than individuals.

A happier concept is the idea of multiple identity. Two requirements are necessary to allow people to express their sense of multiple identity. One is a clear set of legal principles which elevate individual over group rights and protect individuals from discrimination, notably on grounds of race, religion and gender, through strong and effective sanctions. The other is that among the several elements of multiple identity, everyone must be expected to subscribe to some unifying aspects of national identity, notably the law of the land (which is why attempts to create a separate body of Islamic law for

Muslims in non-Islamic countries are usually so misguided). One attraction of some form of written constitutional statement of rights and obligations is that it makes such identification explicit.

(b) Decentralisation within Democracy

One of the main attractions of extreme forms of identity politics is that they fill an emotional vacuum left by the disappearance of traditional tightly knit communities, rural and urban villages. It is romantic escapism to imagine that those structures can be recreated. What is possible however is to create the maximum possible discretion in local decision-making, including very local decision making through neighbourhood groups and village councils. It is not necessary or wise to idealise such localised government. American suburbanites often use community politics to create fortresses against a hostile outside world; British community politics, in Tower Hamlets, has dredged up the racial prejudices of the community of which it is part; Indian village panchayats tend to be dominated by the rich and the high caste; direct democracy in Swiss cantons has been xenophobic and misogynist. But it is only through experimentation with structures of this kind that a deeper sense of alienation can be countered. A broader principle is subsidiarity: the idea that decision making should take place at the lowest level possible. Over-centralism, taken to extreme lengths in the USSR, destroys any meaningful sense of local

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

identity (and also contributes to the build up of minority resentments which eventually break out as separatism). Successful, diverse societies, such as the USA, have long recognised the importance of devolution, and others, including Canada, Belgium, India, Spain, Brazil,

Malaysia and Nigeria, recognise that federalism in some form is a necessary condition for managing internal diversity or (as in Germany) containing any tendency to overbearing nationalism.

In this respect, Britain is dangerously adrift. Even France now takes devolved municipal and regional government more seriously than Britain. The steady erosion in the powers of local government and the absence of any political (as opposed to administrative) devolution to Scotland and Wales, makes a mockery of the government’s commitment to subsidiarity in Europe (where it is entirely apt).In time,if unad- dressed, excessive centralisation will lead to a serious identity crisis in the British state, and possibly the break up of the United Kingdom.

Law and order were often seen, in left-right politics, as the preserve of the right, originating in the, often understandable, assumption that they existed to uphold the privileges of the rich. This has led often to an attitude on the left that the police and judiciary are always to be dis- trusted: guilty of miscarriages of justice until proved innocent. In the politics of identity, such a cavalier approach to law and order is disastrous. Extreme forms of cultural identity thrive on mass emotion and prejudice. Imperfect though they may be, legal safeguards, and not street politics, provide the only sustainable defence for minorities against discrimination and injustice. Nothing excites communal passions more than violence and disorder, which is why those promoting a confrontational approach to identity invariably resort to terrorism and provocation whether through arson attacks on immigrants’ homes, bombing abortion clinics or issuing fatwas.

For precisely this reason, there can be few more misguided campaigns than the attempts to discourage ethnic minorities from joining the police as opposed to strengthening legal safeguards against genuine miscarriages of justice or to oppose preventive action against terrorism

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Managing the Politics of Identity

(as opposed to widening its scope to clamp down on violent racial and religious fanatics). If politicians are to be effective in creating strong constitutional bulwarks against the extreme politics of identity,through strong legal powers to outlaw discrimination and harassment, and individual freedoms in the face of communal pressures, they have to fight from the vantage point of a strong ‘law and order’ platform.

(d) A Shared Sense of Equity

The socialist model of society may have lost its way, but one of the key elements, a sense of injustice at large inequalities of opportunity and outcome, has continuing force.

In open market economies equality of outcome may not be an achievable objective, because of the need for incentive structures and because international mobility (of management, capital and skills) makes egalitarianism unfeasible. Yet grievances over lack of opportunity, or the perceived greed, laziness and corruption of the rich and privileged, are deeply corrosive of social cohesion and add much force to the destructive potential of identity politics. Ulster Catholics, black Americans and South Africans (and British), Malay and Indonesian ‘bumiputras’, Palestinians, Egyptian and Algerian Islamic activists all derive much of their anger from poverty and inequality. One of the most dangerous consequences of the triumph of right- wing ideas is that it has reduced, in many societies, the sense of solidarity which dictated fairness in the availability of opportunities (land redistribution in semi-feudal societies; access to good, universal education) and strong safety nets for those in need. In managing the politics of identity, such concerns will be every bit as important as in the politics of left and right.

(e) Practical Globalism

The current preoccupation with distinctive cultural roots occurs at a time when the integrative forces of global communications and travel, trade and capital flows, shared environmental hazards and commons are giving substance to the idea of a global community. Indeed, as we

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

have argued above, part of the problem may well be that big, global changes frighten people and have produced, in many, an inward-looking, defensive response: a retreat into ethnic, religious and exclusively local concerns.

Few people feel themselves to be citizens of the world,but at the same time globalisation is a growing influence on all societies and there is no hiding from it. Retreat into autarky,self-sufficiency and protectionism are not practical options and have been economically disastrous where they have been tried. How are these contradictory pressures to be handled? A good deal of quiet adaptation is already taking place. The old structures which were looked to for solutions, like the UN agencies, have become seriously dated. They are bureaucratic, inefficient, grounded in a bygone era when relationships were conducted by governments formally speaking to governments. Now international problems are being solved in much more flexible yet complex ways. If there is something called world government it is to be found today in the private sector and in the coalitions and networks of officials, businessman, technical experts and volunteers that are creating global systems of telecommunications and computer networks, technical standards, humanitarian relief, environmental monitoring analysis and campaigning, drug control, air traffic control: what has been called a global system based on ‘concordance’.

It is here that the new globalised elite operates. But such a system is precarious and is not securely rooted in the strong rules and institutions which constitute ‘global governance’.Many of these were designed to meet the needs of the Cold War. An alternative has been evolving based on a USA-led, sheriff and posse, approach to global problems which was partially successful in the Gulf but has already run up against the limits of American power (Bosnia) and a lack of real commitment to global solutions and some unexpectedly troublesome outlaws (Somalia). The wiser heads in the USA already recognise that there is no alternative to patiently building up global rules and institutions. During the Cold War any meaningful move towards global governance, particularly where it involved the United

Nations, was stifled. Now there is a new opportunity.

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Managing the Politics of Identity

The role of the UK is not likely to be central in this endeavour but this is no excuse for false modesty or for hiding behind the rest of the European Union. Britain is a member of the Security Council, the G7, NATO and the EU (as well as looser associations like the Common- wealth) and is one of the small number of countries with the economic and military capacity to make things happen. Yet for a country which made a disproportionate contribution to the establishment of the post-war order, the current lack of ideas and interest across the political spectrum is striking.While the issues are many and complex, there are a few major areas where political attention is urgently required.

First, most post war thinking about global governance assumed the existence of stable nation states and the need to manage relations between them. In a world dominated by the politics of identity that assumption is no longer valid. In future, conflict will be more between peoples than between nations (or a messy combination of the two). If the world is not to degenerate into numerous Yugoslavias and Nagorno-

Karabakhs global institutions, inevitably the UN augmented by regional bodies, will have to be ceded greater power for investigation, sanctions and ultimately collective (including armed) intervention in member states to prevent large scale human rights abuses. One of the tragedies of the fiasco in Bosnia has been the message which it sends to ethnic cleansers the world over: that they will be rewarded.Vulnerable minorities are now all the more insecure and, without security, will set off on the vicious circle which starts with attempted ethnic separation. A second and related point is the need for rapid military intervention forces to uphold global order, if necessary. These should be more assertive and more closely coordinated than the traditional Blue Berets. Ideas which were outlandish a few years ago, such as standing multilateral peace-keeping forces (trained and equipped to fight if necessary), are now in the mainstream of debate. One consequence for Britain is that the current rush to cash in the peace dividend may be highly pre- mature; in a dangerous world where the politics of identity could spark numerous new conflicts, some with wide implications, the last thing which is called for is a run down (rather than a reorientation) of military capability.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

No less important is the need for strong rules and institutions to manage an increasingly interdependent world economy (and some of its environmental side effects). At present the main institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and the UN agencies, are being kept starved of resources rather than reformed and overhauled. They are thus pre- vented from playing other than a marginal role. The GATT has just barely survived a serious brush with the protectionist economics of identity, but now has a mandate to impose stronger multilateral rules. The UK has an important role, at least within the EU, in ensuring that multilateral principles prevail.

The old and now rather ired debate about development has also assumed a new importance. At least some of the global hazards that are now being dealt with on a fire-fighting basis or not at all (such as refugee movements), some forms of environmental degradation (such as deforestation), and the spread of global pandemics have as their cause untreated concentrations of poverty. At the same time, with the demise of communism and the discrediting of state-dominated, inward-looking approaches to development, there is a much higher level of consensus on the board approach to economic policy which is a necessary to move out of poverty. Yet at this crucial juncture, western markets are in danger of being closed and the concessional finance, which can play a crucial cat- alytic role, is drying up (especially from Britain). There is a very real danger that neglect of the problem of poverty will produce a new generation full of resentment and armed with the implacable hatreds which religious, racial and nationalistic identity politics will help to rationalise.

Role Models In the days when left and right represented the central organising principle of politics, people often located themselves on the political spectrum with reference to their

favourite country. For the democratic left it was usually Sweden; for leftists of more muscular disposition, Cuba or Vietnam (or Stalin’s Russia). All are now severely diminished in status. Attempts to create new role models (French socialism;

New Zealand labourism) flopped. Brundtland’s Norway is just

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Managing the Politics of Identity

about the last country in the world which offers any sort of

plausible inspiration for the left (and she has survived by astutely tapping a strong sense of Norwegian identity, expressed in relation to the EU, oil and whales).

Role models will also be needed to provide a sense of direction to those who are seeking to combat the extremes of identity politics. The Sweden of identity politics is probably Holland. Left and right have long worked together on a consensus basis in broad coalitions that have produced a successful, outward looking, capitalist economy with strong social services. Identity is not suppressed, as there are both religious and secular trades unions, but Holland has been more successful than most other countries at assimilating non-whites (especially from Indonesia) and allowing strong and competing religious faiths to coexist with libertarian social legislation (for abortion, euthanasia and prostitution). There is pride in national history and language which coexists with European federalism, an almost universal facility with

European languages and strong provincial and community roots. The Europeanism is not, moreover, inward looking and parochial. The Dutch have the most creditable aid policy outside Scandinavia, and

Holland is one of the few EU countries which can be relied upon to take a global view of trade and security. As other societies are tested, capabilities are being developed to manage identity issues: bilingual federalism in Canada and Belgium; the absorption of large numbers of non European immigrants into the USA; the attempts of Australia and New Zealand to redefine their identity in terms of Asia and of native peoples; and Britain’s post colonial multi- racialism. All are somewhat fragile but at least there is an acknowledge- ment that identity politics needs new structures and attitudes.

Outside the settled democracies of the OECD, the problem of managing different claims on identity is often in a different dimension of difficulty. India alone has a population far greater than the whole of the industrialised world and with a greater diversity of religion, language and colour all within one state. Notwithstanding the bloodlet- ting of last year’s riots, for politicians to have managed such a society in a democratic framework is a remarkable achievement in itself.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

And despite the association in the western mind of Islam with fanatical intolerance, some of the more impressive examples of good governance are in the Islamic world. Malaysia has a Muslim majority; but it has found a way of reconciling the contrasting identities of (at least three) very different groups; it has managed to rectify the grievances of the majority without alienating the minorities; and has evolved a form of open, but not unbridled, capitalist development which has produced one of the world’s fastest growth rates without neglecting income distribution. Another Islamic state, the Maldives, offers an impressive example of how to balance a strong sense of social cohesion based on language and religion with modernisation, including the emancipation of women and a constructive role in global and regional institutions.

Some of the most important and instructive role models are to be found in the private sector. Multinational companies have to operate globally and an enormous amount of thought has been given as to the best ways of doing this. Successful companies, of which Shell is a much admired example, apply several of the lessons described above. First, they apply the principle of ‘multiple identity’. They have a strong corporate culture of their own but also try to respect those of the countries of origin of management (in Shell’s case notably British and Dutch) and of the host country by assuming a strong local identity.

Trompanaars is the latest analyst to have highlighted the subtle but important cultural styles which multinational managers have to understand and respect. A second is decentralising management to operating companies with a high degree of independence. Federal companies, a phrase coined by Charles Handy, are now the model being widely emulated because of the sense of responsibility and identity which follows from devolution. But, thirdly, global companies need strong global governance: sets of simple but clear rules and principles which all are expected to recognise. Governments and politicians would do well to look at what the private sector has to teach.

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Conclusion

This pamphlet has sought to describe, analyse and set out some responses to what could be a radical reorientation of politics away from the traditional left-right dialectic to something called the politics of identity. The basic polarity is between an exclusive, narrow expression of cultural identity on the one hand, expressed through religion, language, colour or nationality, and a more open, inclusive, libertarian approach on the other.

This may not seem at present a pressing issue in the UK where the two-party system and traditional party loyalties have kept both institutional reform, and new types of politics, at bay.Where identity politics has surfaced it relates to very old issues (Ireland) or matters which have been intensely felt by relatively small numbers (Maastricht and sovereignty; religious concerns over blasphemy and abortion and private morality) or have apparently been contained (racialism; Scottish nationalism). Such issues may have diverted political attention from the old Tory v Labour, capital v labour arguments but they have not dominated the agenda. This book suggests that in future they might. The traditional polarity has lost much of its relevance in a world where capitalism is now broadly accepted and socialism is no longer a strong countervailing force. Moreover there are powerful new political forces both in western Europe and the USA, let alone further afield, from which Britain cannot remain insulated, whether they wash up on our shores in

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

the form of refugees, trade disputes, terrorist movements or simply as news. If these diagnoses and predictions are correct, there is an urgent need for those concerned with politics and governance to understand not only what is driving political change but also how to manage the politics of identity: above all, perhaps, how to satisfy peoples’ yearning for a sense of belonging and identity without unleashing destructive political forces.

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Summary

The traditional division between left and right is being replaced by the political divisions created by movements based on cultural identity or what Isaiah Berlin has called ‘the politics of the soil’. At one pole are people who define their own and other people’s identity in exclusive, closed, terms. For racists, religious fundamentalists or extreme nationalists, cultural identity is of all-embracing importance.At the other pole are people whose over-riding commitment is to individual choice in personal mores and lifestyles. This is the Western liberal tradition. In this, cultural identity is flexible, multiple, or essentially superficial, summed up in the phrase ‘we are all the same under the skin’.

In practice, left-right politics and the politics of identity coexist and interact. Political ideas and movements are best understood in terms of these two dimensions rather than one; and from them we can produce four archetypes. Communitarians (such as Bill Clinton and François Mitterand) combine left-wing ideas with those of individual choice in matters of cultural identity. National socialists (such as the

Khmer Rouge and Iran’s Mujaheddin) are leftists who have linked socialism with a form of separatist or national identity. Libertarians champion the idea of individual liberties and choice across the board and do not distinguish between the economic, social and cultural liberties of the individual; freedom is the overriding concern. Finally cultural conservatives (such as the US ‘born again’Christians) combine a belief in the economics of markets and private enterprise with strong

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

religious, moralistic fervour or an exclusive, nationalistic approach to capitalism. The immediate reason for the emergence of political forces outside the traditional left-right divide is disillusionment with that tradition.

The left is associated with the collapse of communism and the great difficulties encountered in managing welfare state social democracies. After the triumphalism of the Reagan/Thatcher years, parties of the right are also finding the going difficult with problems of corruption and recession, and the tension between preserving social order and the dynamics of the market. But there are also other specific factors:

globalisation of technology and economics undermines governments’ sovereignty. the liberalisation revolution in economic thinking and

organisation often exacerbates inequalities. Identity politics is one way of responding to the threat it poses to traditional social norms and structures. the fragmentation of class and of the old structures of community and politics is being accelerated by deindustrialisation and by the deskilling of many middle-

class clerical jobs.

Identity politics also draws on real experience of past suffering from Yugoslavia’s war-time atrocities and the Indian partition to Ireland’s interminable troubles and the massacres of Armenians, Jews,

Palestinians, Kurds, Indonesian Chinese, Tutsis and Ibos. Why have other possible political ideas not succeeded in displacing left and right? There have been several contenders:

the environmental movement. Despite some electoral successes, green politics has been constrained by internal contradictions: between globalism and local concerns (eg

when coal mines which contribute to global warming are closed down); and between the view that environmental problems are a species of market failure and the views of

those conservationists who are profoundly against change.

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Summary

feminism. There are few contemporary trends more

important than the changing role of women in the workforce and in the family but this has not forced any significant political realignment. Partly this is because established parties

have taken on anti-discrimination policies, and partly because feminist arguments have been subsumed in the broader politics of identity, eg in the battles over abortion or

the veil. democratic reform. Another candidate might have been the many movements which are pressing for institutional reform:

honest government; openness and transparency; due legal processes and civil liberties; human rights; democracy. But democracy is not a political organising principle in itself; it

provides the framework within which politics, in some form, can then function, for good or ill. The agenda of identity politics brings previously uncontroversial issues to the fore. majorities and minorities. The politics of identifying, counting, regulating, expelling or protecting them. For those who are concerned about cultural identity, the definition of

‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ is crucial to their belief system. self-determination and secession. In a world where group identity is allowed to transcend the concerns of individuals,

questions of territory become crucial. A prolific breeding ground for conflict is the demand by minorities for separate state-hood. numbers.Where identity politics has taken hold, politicians play the numbers game with birthrates. pan-ethnicity. Identity politics spills across frontiers. Minorities

in one country are a majority elsewhere; loyalties are divided. sovereignty and states. In the politics of identity, sovereignty gives legal form and territorial boundaries to the whole

notion of being British, a Serb, a Scot or a Kurd. Sovereignty is now being seen as under attack both from the competing internal identities of minorities and the external forces of

globalisation.

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

economics of identity. Identity politics fuels a more

aggressive economic nationalism and protectionism. family values. These become a touchstone for movements of identity as a response to the pressures of economic

modernisation.

What is the correct response to the politics of identity? Two approaches are adopted here. One is to suggest some guiding principles. The other is to look at possible role models of societies which seem to be managing the politics of identity with particular skill.

the first focus is multiple identity. Two requirements are necessary to allow people to express their sense of multiple identity. One is a clear set of legal principles which elevate

individual over group rights and protect individuals from discrimination, notably on grounds of race, religion and gender, through strong and effective sanctions. The other is

that among the several elements of multiple identity everyone must be expected to subscribe to some unifying aspects of national identity, notably the law of the land.

decentralisation within democracy. To fill the emotional vacuum left by the disappearance of traditional tightly knit communities it is necessary to create the maximum possible

discretion in local decision-making, including very local decision making through neighbourhood groups and village councils. Although we should be wary of idealising them it is

only through experimentation with structures of this kind that a deeper sense of alienation can be countered. order within law. Law and order were often seen, in left-right

politics, as the preserve of the right, originating in the, often understandable, assumption that they existed to uphold the privileges of the rich. But, imperfect though they may be,

legal safeguards, and not street politics, provide the only sustainable defence for minorities against discrimination and injustice. Nothing excites communal passions more than

violence and disorder.

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Summary

a shared sense of equity. The socialist model of society may

have lost its way but one of the key elements – a sense of injustice at large inequalities of opportunity and outcome – has continuing force. In open, market, economies equality of

outcome may not be an achievable objective, but grievances over lack of opportunity, or the perceived greed, laziness and corruption of the rich and privileged, are deeply corrosive of

social cohesion and add much force to destructive potential of identity politics. practical globalism. The current preoccupation with

distinctive cultural roots occurs at a time when the integrative forces of global communications and travel, trade and capital flows, shared environmental hazards and

commons are giving substance to the idea of a global community. But the moves towards global governance are not well founded. To constrain the struggles between peoples the

UN, augmented by regional bodies, will have to be ceded greater power for investigation, sanctions and ultimately collective (including armed) intervention in member states to

prevent large-scale human rights abuses. There is also a need for rapid military intervention forces to uphold global order and for strong rules and institutions to manage an

increasingly interdependent world economy (and some of its environmental side effects).

As in the days when left and right represented the central organising principle of politics, there is a need for role models to provide a sense of direction to those who are seeking to combat the extremes of identity politics. The best model is probably Holland. Other countries which are learning how to manage identity politics include Canada and Belgium, Australia and New Zealand, India (despite much blood- shed), Malaysia and the Maldives. Identity politics may not seem at present a pressing issue in the UK where the two-party system and traditional party loyalties have kept both institutional reform, and new types of politics, at bay. Where

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The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis

identity politics has surfaced it relates to very old issues (Ireland); matters which have been intensely felt by relatively small numbers (Maastricht and sovereignty; religious concerns over blasphemy and abortion and private morality), or has apparently been contained

(racialism; Scottish nationalism). But there are strong grounds for thinking that in the future identity politics will become much more central. The traditional polarity has lost much of its relevance. There are moreover powerful new political forces both in Western Europe and the US – let alone further afield – from which Britain cannot remain insulated, whether they wash up on our shores in the form of refugees, trade disputes, terrorist movements or simply as news. Those concerned about politics have to try to understand what is driving political change and in particular how to manage the politics of identity: how to satisfy peoples’ yearning for a sense of belonging and identity without unleashing destructive political forces.

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Acknowledgements

The ideas in this paper were developed when the author was a member of Group Planning in Shell, in the context of work on Shell’s Global Scenarios. Thanks are due to Roger Rainbow, DeAnne Julius, Eric Grunwald, Adam Kahane and others who commented on drafts or stimulated ideas.

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