Identity

12 WE THE PEOPLE

In the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, Syria descended into a devastating civil war that has left an estimated 400,000 people dead. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 4.8 million people have fled the country, including 1 million going to Europe, and another 6.6 million have been displaced within Syria—this in a country that had a population of 18 million at the start of the conflict. The knock-on consequences of this war include destabilization of the politics of Syria’s neighbors Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, and a migrant crisis that has rocked the European Union.

Syria is an extreme example of what happens when a country lacks a clear sense of national identity. The proximate cause of the war were peaceful protests that broke out in 2011 against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which were triggered by the Arab Spring. Rather than stepping down, Assad met his opponents with fierce repression. The latter then responded with violence themselves, and the conflict began to attract the attention of outside groups, with foreign fighters streaming in to join ISIS. The civil war was further deepened by support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and the United States.

Underlying these events were the realities of sectarian division. Following a coup in 1970, Syria was ruled by Hafiz al-Assad and, after 2000, by his son Bashar, who were members of the Alawite sect. The Alawites, a branch of Shia Islam, constituted perhaps 12 percent of Syria’s prewar population; the majority of the remainder were Sunni Muslims, with significant Christian, Yazidi, and other minority populations. There were also ethnic and linguistic divisions between Arabs, Kurds, Druze, Turkmen, Palestinians, Circassians, and the like, which sometimes also corresponded to religious fractures. Ideological divisions also existed between violent extremists, moderate Islamists, leftists, and liberals. The Alawites had come to dominate Syrian political life because they had been recruited into the military by the French under a divide-and-rule strategy when the latter were the region’s colonial masters. Throughout the Assad family’s rule, the Alawites were hated and resisted by other groups in the country, and stability was maintained only by harsh repression by both Hafiz and Bashar Assad. Little sense of loyalty to an entity called Syria transcended loyalties to one’s sect, ethnic group, or religion, and when the repressive state looked as if it was weakening, as in 2011, the country fell apart.

Weak national identity has been a major problem in the greater Middle East, where Yemen and Libya have turned into failed states, and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia have suffered from internal insurgency and chaos. Other developing countries have remained more stable, yet remain beset by problems related to a weak sense of national identity. This is the situation throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and it is a major obstacle to development. Countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, for example, are ethnically and religiously divided; stability is maintained only because different ethnic groups take turns in power to loot the country.^{1} High levels of corruption, poverty, and failed economic development are the result.

By contrast, Japan, Korea, and China all had well-developed national identities well before they began to modernize—indeed, prior to their confrontation with the Western powers in the nineteenth century. Part of the reason they have been able to grow in such spectacular fashion in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that they did not have to settle internal questions of identity as they opened up to international trade and investment. They too suffered from civil war, occupation, and division. But they could build on traditions of statehood and common national purpose once these conflicts were stabilized.

National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system, whether that system is democratic or not. Identity can be embodied in formal laws and institutions that dictate, for example, what the educational system will teach children about their country’s past, or what will be considered an official national language. But national identity also extends into the realm of culture and values. It consists of the stories that people tell about themselves: where they came from, what they celebrate, their shared historical memories, what it takes to become a genuine member of the community.^{2}

In the contemporary world, diversity—on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and the like—is both a fact of life and a value. For many reasons it is a good thing for societies. Exposure to different ways of thinking and acting can often stimulate innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Diversity provides interest and excitement. In the year 1970, Washington, D.C., was a rather boring biracial city in which the most exotic food one would dine on was served at the Yenching Palace on Connecticut Avenue. Today, the greater Washington area is home to an incredible amount of ethnic diversity: one can get Ethiopian, Peruvian, Cambodian, and Pakistani food and travel from one small ethnic enclave to another. The internationalization of the city has stimulated other forms of interest: as it becomes a place where young people want to live, they bring new music, arts, technologies, and entire neighborhoods that didn’t exist before. Washington’s story has been replicated in any number of other metropolitan areas around the world, from Chicago to San Francisco to London to Berlin.

Diversity is also critical to resilience. Environmental biologists point out that artificially produced crop monocultures are often highly vulnerable to diseases because the population lacks genetic diversity. Indeed, genetic diversity is the motor of evolution itself, which is based on genetic variation and adaptation. The broad concern over the loss of diversity in species around the world rests on its threat to long-term biological resilience.

Finally, there is the matter of the individual search for identity that we have examined in earlier chapters. People often resist being homogenized into larger cultures, particularly if they were not born into them. They want their specific selves to be recognized and celebrated, not suppressed. They want to feel a connection with their ancestors and know where they came from. Even if they are not part of the culture, they want to hold on to the world’s fast-disappearing indigenous languages, and traditional practices that recall earlier ways of life.

On the other hand, diversity is not an unalloyed good. Syria and Afghanistan are very diverse places, but such diversity yields violence and conflict rather than creativity and resilience. Kenya’s diversity sharpens the divisions between ethnic groups and feeds an inward-looking political corruption. Ethnic diversity led to the breakdown of the liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire in the decades prior to World War I, when its component nationalities decided they could not live together in a common political structure. Fin de siècle Vienna was a melting pot that had produced Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud. But when the empire’s narrower national identities—Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and Austro-Germans—asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance.^{3}

National identity got a bad name in this period precisely because it came to be associated with an exclusive, ethnically based sense of belonging known as ethno-nationalism. This type of identity persecuted people who were not part of the group and committed aggressions against foreigners on behalf of co-ethnics living in other countries. The problem, however, was not with the idea of national identity itself; the problem was the narrow, ethnically based, intolerant, aggressive, and deeply illiberal form that national identity took.

Things do not have to be this way. National identities can be built around liberal and democratic political values, and the common experiences that provide the connective tissue around which diverse communities can thrive. India, France, Canada, and the United States are examples of countries that have tried to do this. Such an inclusive sense of national identity remains critical for the maintenance of a successful modern political order for a number of reasons.

The first is physical security. The extreme example of what can happen absent national identity is state breakdown and civil war, as in such cases as Syria or Libya, noted above. But short of this, weak national identity creates other serious security issues. Large political units are more powerful than smaller ones and can protect themselves better. They are in a better position to shape the international environment to suit their own interests. Britain, for example, could not have played nearly the same role on the geopolitical stage as it has in the past centuries if Scotland had remained an independent country. The same would be true for Spain if its richest region, Catalonia, seceded. Highly divided countries are weak, which is why Putin’s Russia has provided quiet support to independence movements across Europe and has intervened in American politics to increase the level of political division there.^{4}

Second, national identity is important for the quality of government. Good government—that is, effective public services and low levels of corruption—depends on state officials placing public interest above their own narrow interests. In systemically corrupt societies, politicians and bureaucrats divert public resources to their own ethnic group, region, tribe, family, political party, or to their own individual pockets because they do not feel obligated to the community’s general interests.

This points to a third function of national identity: facilitating economic development. If people do not take pride in their country, they will not work on its behalf. The strong national identities in Japan, South Korea, and China produced elites that were intensely focused on their countries’ economic development rather than on their personal enrichment, particularly during the early decades of rapid economic growth. This kind of public-directedness underlay the “developmental state” and was much less common in such regions as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America.^{5} Many identity groups based on ethnicity or religion prefer to trade among themselves and use their access to state power to benefit their group alone. While this may be of help to an immigrant community newly arrived in a country, their future prosperity will depend critically on their ability to assimilate into the larger culture. Economies thrive on having access to the widest possible markets, where transactions will be completed without regard to the identities of the buyers and sellers—provided, of course, that national identity does not become the basis for protectionism against other nations.^{6}

A fourth function of national identity is to promote a wide radius of trust. Trust acts like a lubricant that facilitates both economic exchange and political participation. Trust is based on what has been called social capital, that is, the ability to cooperate with other people based on informal norms and shared values. Identity groups promote trust among their members, but social capital often remains limited to the narrow in-group. Indeed, strong identities often decrease trust between in- and out-group members. Societies thrive on trust, but they need the widest possible radius of trust to do well.^{7}

A fifth reason national identity is important is to maintain strong social safety nets that mitigate economic inequality. If members of a society feel that they are members of an extended family and have high levels of trust in one another, they are much more likely to support social programs that aid their weaker fellows. The strong welfare states of Scandinavia are underpinned by their equally strong senses of national identity. By contrast, societies divided into self-regarding social groups who feel they have little in common are more likely to regard themselves as in a zero-sum competition with one another for resources.^{8}

The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy itself. A liberal democracy is an implicit contract between citizens and their government, and among the citizens themselves, under which they give up certain rights in order that the government protects other rights that are more basic and important. National identity is built around the legitimacy of this contract; if citizens do not believe they are part of the same polity, the system will not function.^{9}

But the quality of democracy depends on more than mere acceptance of the system’s basic rules. Democracies need their own culture to function. They do not produce automatic agreement; indeed, they are necessarily pluralistic collections of diverse interests, opinions, and values that have to be reconciled peacefully. Democracies require deliberation and debate, which can happen only if people accept certain norms of behavior on what can be said and done. Citizens often have to accept outcomes they do not like or prefer, in the interest of a common good; a culture of tolerance and mutual sympathy must override partisan passions.

Identity is rooted in thymos, which is experienced emotionally through feelings of pride, shame, and anger. I’ve already noted the ways in which this can undermine rational debate and deliberation. On the other hand, democracies will not survive if citizens are not in some measure irrationally attached to the ideas of constitutional government and human equality through feelings of pride and patriotism. These attachments will see societies through their low points, when reason alone may counsel despair at the working of institutions.

The policy issue that has raised the greatest challenges to national identity is immigration, and the related issue of refugees. Together, they are the driving force behind the upsurge of populist nationalism in both Europe and the United States. France’s National Front, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, the AfD in Germany, and the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom are both anti-immigrant and opposed to the European Union. But for many populists, these are the same issue: they intensely dislike the EU because they think it is depriving them of their sovereign right to control their own borders. The EU had created the Schengen system of visa-free travel within most of its member states in 1985, in the interests of labor mobility and economic growth. In addition, the EU has granted extensive rights to refugees once they enter Europe, rights that are enforced not by national courts but by the European Court of Human Rights.[4]

This system has worked as advertised, allowing labor to flow to areas where it can be used more productively, and offering refuge to victims of political persecution. But it has also led to massive increases in the numbers of foreign-born individuals in many EU countries, an issue that came to a head in 2014 when the Syrian civil war sent more than a million Syrians into Europe.

Similarly, in the United States, immigration has largely displaced class and race as the chief reason why Americans vote for Republican candidates, according to data by political scientists Zoltan Hajnal and Marisa Abrajano.^{10} The incorporation of African-Americans into the Democratic Party following the civil rights movement of the 1960s is widely credited for driving the South into the arms of the Republican Party; today immigration is playing a similar role. Opposition to Mexican and Muslim immigration figured centrally in Donald Trump’s election campaign and subsequent rise to the presidency. At the core of conservative complaints over immigration are the approximately 11–12 million undocumented immigrants now estimated to be living in the United States. As in Europe, anti-immigrant politicians bemoan the country’s failure to exercise its sovereign right to control the flow of people across its southern borders. Hence Trump’s promise of a “big, beautiful” wall on the Mexican border.

It should not be surprising that immigration has triggered a backlash, since levels of migrants and corresponding cultural change have been high and in some cases historically unprecedented. Table 2 provides data on the numbers of foreign-born individuals in a group of rich countries over the past sixty years. Levels in the United States are today as high as they were in the 1920s following the large wave of immigrants who entered the country before and after the turn of the twentieth century.

The common objective of populist politicians in both Europe and the United States is to “take back our country.” They argue that traditional understandings of national identity are being diluted and overtaken both by newcomers with different values and cultures and by a progressive left that attacks the very idea of national identity as racist and intolerant.

But what country are they trying to take back? The U.S. Constitution begins with the statement “We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The Constitution says clearly that the people are sovereign and that legitimate government flows from their will. But it does not define who the people are, or on what basis individuals are to be included in the national community.

This silence in the American Constitution raises some important questions: Where does national identity come from in the first place, and how is it defined? What makes for a “people,” whose sovereignty is the basis for democratic choice? Is multiculturalism, both de facto and as an ideology, weakening our sense of common citizenship, and if so, are there means of rebuilding a shared understanding of national identity across populations that are diverse?

The American Constitution’s failure to define who the American people are reflects a broader problem for all liberal democracies. The political theorist Pierre Manent notes that most democracies were built on top of preexisting nations, societies that already had a well-developed sense of national identity that defined the sovereign people. But those nations were not created democratically: Germany, France, Britain, and the Netherlands were all the historical by-products of long and often violent political struggles over territory and culture under nondemocratic regimes. When these societies democratized, their territorial extent and their existing populations were simply taken for granted as the basis for popular sovereignty. A similar story could be told for Japan and Korea in East Asia, which were nations centuries before they democratized and did not have to litigate issues of peoplehood as they opened up politics to democratic choice.^{11}

Manent identifies a major gap in modern democratic theory. Thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, the authors of the Federalist Papers, and John Stuart Mill all assumed that the world was predivided into nations that formed the foundation of democratic choice. They did not provide a theory of why the border between the United States and Mexico should run along the Rio Grande, whether Alsace should belong to France or Germany, whether Quebec should be part of Canada or a “distinct society,” on what grounds Catalonia could legitimately separate itself from Spain, or what the proper level of immigration should be.

Such theorizing has been left to others. Nationalists such as Paul de Lagarde or Adolf Hitler grounded their definitions of nation in biology and argued that the existing nations of the world constituted racial entities that had existed from time immemorial. Others made an allegedly unchanging inherited culture the basis for nationhood. Such theories became the justification for the aggressive nationalisms of early twentieth-century Europe, whose exponents were defeated with the fall of Nazism in 1945.

Those one might characterize as “global cosmopolitans” argue that the very concepts of national identity and state sovereignty are outmoded and need to be replaced by broader transnational identities and institutions. Two types of argument underpin this school. The first is economic and functional, saying that problems today are global in scope and therefore need to be addressed globally. Such issues range from trade and investment to counterterrorism, the environment, infectious diseases, narcotics, human trafficking, and many others. Nations and national identities are potential obstacles to international cooperation and need to be gradually superseded by a new layer of transnational rules and organizations.

The second strand of argument is more theoretical and comes out of international human rights law. Liberal democracies are built on a premise of universal human equality, and that equality does not begin or end at national borders. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights became the basis for a growing body of international law that asserted that rights are inherent in all human beings and need to be respected by all nations.^{12} As human rights law has evolved, so have the obligations of states not just to their own citizens, but to immigrants and refugees as well. Some advocates have even posited a universal right to migrate.^{13}

Both of these arguments are valid to some degree. But they do not undermine the case for an international order built around national states, or for the necessity of the right sort of national identity within those states. The idea that states are obsolete and should be superseded by international bodies is flawed because no one has been able to come up with a good method for holding such international bodies democratically accountable. The functioning of democratic institutions depends on shared norms, perspectives, and ultimately culture, all of which can exist on the level of a national state, but which do not exist internationally. Effective international cooperation can and has been built instead around cooperation between existing states. For decades now nations have been giving up aspects of their sovereignty to protect their national interests.^{14} The kinds of cooperative agreements needed to resolve a host of issues can continue to be addressed in this fashion.

The obligation to respect universal human rights has been voluntarily undertaken by most countries around the world, and rightly so. But all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can undertake an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and whether the world would be better off if they all tried to do so is not clear. While countries rightly feel a moral obligation to shelter refugees and may welcome immigrants, such obligations are potentially costly both economically and socially, and democracies need to balance them against other priorities. Democracy means that the people are sovereign, but if there is no way of delimiting who the people are, they cannot exercise democratic choice.

Thus political order both at home and internationally will depend on the continuing existence of liberal democracies with the right kind of inclusive national identities. But we have yet to explain the provenance of such identities in existing democracies, and how they might change in the future.