Of Marcello Veneziani
Source: Marcello Veneziani
What is the secret of the events that are changing the world, the engine that drives Putin and Trump, Bolsonaro and Le Pen, Ab and Modi, Orban e Kaczynski, Erdogan and Duterte, Brexit and the European populist and nationalist wave, up to Salvini? It is Identity. Ancient word with a new meaning; it comes from philosophy and the principle of identity, it comes from history and culture, designates peoples, indicates the personal identification document. Identity, sometimes intensified by an adjective: national.
An intellectual who is half political scientist and half philosopher dedicates an essay and a dry title to Identity, half Japanese and half American, the famous Francis Fukuyama. Yes, the one who stirred the intellectual world thirty years ago with his essay on The End of History. Then he predicted the triumph of the liberal-democratic order and the American model. Long disputed and even derided, Fukuyama imposed himself on the world debate. This is what happens now with his latest book, in Italy subtitled The search for dignity and new populisms (User). Fukuyama is not a particularly sharp thinker, original and profound, but he photographs the state of things today like few others, offers a global vision of the present. Panoramic photo, from the point of view of ideas in action. Fukuyama seeks a third way beyond the national-populist right and the politically correct left which has stopped representing "the white working class" and defends minorities and elites. For him, identity is a threatening animal to be tamed in a liberal sense, democratic, humanitarian. This is what he thinks of the nation which he wants to remove from nationalism and neutralize within a framework of rules and perspectives in line with globalisation. In short, he is a liberal democrat, neither with Trump nor with Obama and believes that the recipe, also to address migratory flows, and assimilation, with education, rights and duties. Bell’idea, someone already tried it, for example in France, but terrorism and fundamentalism on the one hand and the growth of the Front National on the other (not to mention the yellow vests), demonstrate that the outcome was not happy. Just as the multiculturalism adopted in Great Britain has not been happy, and how integration in the USA is not happy. Brexit and Trump on the one hand and the wave of black claims, Mexicans and Muslims on the other, they confirm it. Fukuyama proposes the disarmament of the ius sanguinis and the adoption of the ius soli to integrate migrants. But what if it's them, for example, Muslims are the first to not want to be "absorbed"?
There is no shortage of inappropriate comparisons and lapses into banality in its pages but the whole holds up and offers an interesting interpretation, also on European prospects. Sometimes he calls national identity what is perhaps imperial identity, in the British world of yesterday, in the Russian or American one of today and in the Chinese one of tomorrow – a return to the Celestial Empire. His search for the father thinkers of identity is reductive: Luther, Kant, Rousseau ed Hegel, to which Herder adds. His analyzes of the relationship between religion and nationalism are approximate. The relationship between Identity and populism or sovereignty is not very clear in its pages. He argues that identity politics was born on the left but then grew on the right. Perhaps it is true that the left's defense of blacks, Islamic, rom, donne, gay is still an identity politics. However, migrants are an identity in the process of mutation. And transgenders are born rather from the rejection of identity. But then what happens if one minority is incompatible with the other, if for example blacks and Muslims deny gay rights, feminism and equality? How do the guardians of political correctness deal in these cases?? Fukuyama reproaches the left for entrenching itself in the defense of increasingly restricted and marginalized groups. But from a global perspective, blacks and Muslims are anything but a small minority. If anything, the role of the radical Western minority in representing this vast world that can very well represent itself becomes inappropriate, without lawyers or interpreters.
His analysis of identity becomes interesting when he realizes that its strength lies in a factor that the society founded on profit, economics and technology do not grasp: it is the Dignity factor, individual and collective, the Soul or interiority factor, the Recognition factor or its inverse, the Frustration that gives rise to Resentment. That mixture of pride and anger, to quote Oriana Fallaci, which the ancients called Thymos and which Fukuyama renamed from Plato to Hegel as megalothymia, desire for great things and recognition. Below classes, beyond economic claims, beyond social disparities, harbors a secret energy that is irreducible to economics and materialism. It already happened once that the class struggle was overcome by the discovery of nations, and fascism was born. Today there is neither communism nor fascism, but politically correct and sovereign national-populism.
That resource can be called spiritual energy, sense of honor; it was the engine of civilizations, of their rise and their depths, sometimes it degenerated into a desire for power and aggressive primacy. It is true, eat says Fukuyama, that the world is moving towards global uniformity and its opposite, fragmentation. But the onset of that unknown energy, denied, shuffle the cards, calls into question the structures and reopens history. Other than the end of the story…