The World’s New Fissures Identities in Crisis by Vincent Cable Open access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. Users are welcome to download, save, perform or distribute this work electronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translation without written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos open access licence which you can read here. Please read and consider the full licence. 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The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org 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 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess The World’s New Fissures: Identities in Crisis (b) Numbers Matter 36 (c) Pan-ethnicity 37 Sovereignty and States 38 The Economics of Identity 40 Family Values 42 Managing the Politics of Identity 44 Some Guiding Principles 46 (a) Multiple Identity 46 (b) Decentralisation within Democracy 47 (c) Order within Law 48 (d) A Shared Sense of Equity 49 (e) Practical Globalism 49 Role Models 52 Conclusion 55 Summary 57 References 63 iv Demos This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess 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, industri- alising 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 dom- inant 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 sys- tem constructed around those ideas. The biggest battle of the Clinton presidency so far has been NAFTA, which pitted a Democratic presi- dent 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 moral- ity 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 Demos 1 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess 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 lin- guistic and regional identity. Japan’s new coalition brings together mar- ket 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 heav- ily 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 develop- ment, 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 com- munists) 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; immigra- tion; 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 tradi- tional terms. A not very eventful day recently threw up in one news- paper, among the usual grisly reports from the Balkans and the Caucasus, 2 Demos This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess 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 immi- grants; 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 poli- tics. 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? Demos 3 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess 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 argu- ment 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.