Identity wars

Michael Lind writes at The Smart Set,

The nations of old Europe are no longer largely homogeneous ethnic communities exporting conquerors or settlers to other regions of the earth. The flow has reversed. Europe has become a continent of inward migration, often from former colonies. Non-European immigration is turning formerly white and religiously homogeneous nations into societies similar to the multiracial and religiously pluralist countries of the western hemisphere. Elsewhere in the industrialized world, East Asian nations like Japan and South Korea have similar rates of low fertility and population aging to those of Western Europe and the Americas, but to date they have not allowed large-scale immigration.

Iraq, Libya, and Syria are all artificial states in the process of decomposing violently into smaller, more homogeneous entities organized along ethnonational lines. A similar process has been taking place in parts of Africa, where many formally recognized states exist solely on paper and ethnic communities command the deepest loyalties.

...In the case of Syrian refugees flooding into Europe in search of asylum, all of the modern forms of identity conflict are combined. The cause of the exodus is the breakup, in a regional proxy war, of the old, multinational Syrian state originally created by the British and French empires after World War I. The refugees enter European societies which are already riven by debates over immigration, multiculturalism, and terrorism on the part of radical Muslims. Europe is at the eye of a perfect storm of identity politics.

Confronted by the identity wars of the 21st century, intellectuals of the left, right, and center who are used to thinking of politics as a clash among universal ideologies often are at a loss. The abstract debates of the 20th century among liberal democrats, communists, and fascists had philosophical answers. But no abstract, universal principle can answer the question of whether Scots are part of a Scottish nation or a larger, more inclusive British nation.

In practical politics, the adoption by the center-left of support for a policy of open borders and mass immigration will simply lead to the electoral marginalization of progressives and the triumph of right-wing parties and movements that claim to defend national identity as well as national borders. In France and Sweden, the two largest parties as of this writing are two national populist parties with historic roots in fascism — France’s National Front and the Sweden Democrats.

If the great political debate of the 20th century was about the best political-economic organization for the state, the great political question of the 21st century may prove to be about the best way to reconcile ethnic and racial and religious pluralism with the minimum of shared identity required by a successful democracy.

...The ideological wars of the 20th century were settled by the superior economic and military performance of liberal democracy and capitalism, as compared to fascism and communism. Will there be similar winners and losers in the contest among models of 21st-century national identity?

...What is clear is that, apart from the conflict with Muslim Salafist religious radicals, the ideological wars are over and the age of the identity wars has arrived.