Identity politics have always been a feature of international and domestic life, but one could argue that their prominence has grown over the last 20 years. And accompanying this post-Cold War prominence is a slew of questions that have been asked before, although obviously not to everyone’s satisfaction.
Is the political invocation and exploitation of identity a positive means to create political community or not? Is it actually desirable, given the inevitable danger of in-group versus out-group hostility? Should the identity politics of today be, as has traditionally been the case, grounded in religion, culture, geography and society, or must it inevitably reflect an eclectic mix of these categories, and new ones too? What about nationalism – just how robust is this venerable form of political-cultural identity formation today? And what about the role of individual and collective emotions? It’s often presupposed that creating and maintaining political-cultural identity requires intense emotions, but is that necessarily true?
The answers to these questions may not be as clear as desired because when we ask them what we’re really doing is raising the specter, yet again, of how we go about building "symbolic codes of distinction" amongst ourselves. Because these codes then spill over into how we go about defining "security" and other concepts, the answers we seek continue to taunt us. They taunt us, as George Friedman discusses today, when it comes to defining citizenship. They also complicate the self-definitions and security postures pursued by Egypt, Israel, the US and China, as we will successively discuss over the course of this week.