Identity is a demand for dignity and policies of dissatisfaction

Author's name: Francis Fukuyama Publisher: Arab and International Relations Forum Year of publication: 2024 Literary classification: History and Politics Brief about the book: Global politics today no longer centers around the traditional conflict between the left and the right. From the civil rights movement and the feminist movement and environmental parties, to European nationalist movements against immigration, refugees, minorities, and multiculturalism, to white Trumpian racism, to dignity revolutions and the Arab Spring, global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century revolves around identity politics and the demand for recognition of the dignity of groups feeling resentment due to marginalization, silencing, or threats to their existence. Fukuyama attempts to understand the emerging identity conflict mainly between liberalism and populism (which he summarizes doctrinally and problematically as “democracy without liberalism”), examining the two types of identity produced by economic and social-individualist modernity, through Luther, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, which theoretically ended with the adoption of the Bill of Human Rights; and the collective, through Herder and Lagrange, which led aggressive nationalism to its fascist and Nazi ends — to narrate the history of equal recognition of dignity and humanity, and to conclude the impossibility of populist discourse by reducing identity to racial, ethnic, or religious sectarianism. The book argues that modern societies are inherently pluralistic, and that the only possible community identity today is “covenantal identity” based on democratic principles and liberal openness, within local cultural containers fundamentally shaped by language. The book thus raises urgent questions that all cultures — including Arab and Islamic cultures — need to reconsider, provide modern answers to, and think through their dimensions and implications. Along the way, the book extensively discusses the crisis of the global liberal system, which originally allowed populism to emerge, offering (as in Fukuyama’s last two books: The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay) significant modifications to the core thesis of the end of history.