Identity
Politics and the Left
My lecture is about a surprisingly new subject. We have
become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity
politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how
recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon,
of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written
in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one
about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson, who was concerned chiefly with
such things as the so-called ‘identity crisis’ of adolescents who are trying
to discover what they are, and a general piece on voters’ identification.
And as for ethnicity, in the Oxford English Dictionary of the early
1970s it still occurs only as a rare word indicating ‘heathendom and heathen
superstition’ and documented by quotations from the eighteenth century.
In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which
really come into use only in the 1960s. Their emergence is most easily followed
in the usa, partly because it has always been a society unusually interested
in monitoring its social and psychological temperature, blood-pressure and
other symptoms, and mainly because the most obvious form of identity politics—but
not the only one—namely ethnicity, has always been central to American politics
since it became a country of mass immigration from all parts of Europe. Roughly,
the new ethnicity makes its first public appearance with Glazer and Moynihan’s
Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and becomes a militant programme with
Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972. The first,
I don’t have to tell you, was the work of a Jewish professor and an Irishman,
now the senior Democratic senator for New York; the second came from a Catholic
of Slovak origin. For the moment we need not bother too much about why all
this happened in the 1960s, but let me remind you that—in the style-setting
usa at least—this decade also saw the emergence of two other variants of identity
politics: the modern (that is, post suffragist) women’s movement and the gay
movement.
I am not saying that before the 1960s nobody asked themselves
questions about their public identity. In situations of uncertainty they sometimes
did; for instance in the industrial belt of Lorraine in France, whose official
language and nationality changed five times in a century, and whose rural
life changed to an industrial, semi-urban one, while their frontiers were
redrawn seven times in the past century and a half. No wonder people said:
‘Berliners know they’re Berliners, Parisians know they are Parisians, but
who are we?’ Or, to quote another interview, ‘I come from Lorraine, my culture
is German, my nationality is French, and I think in our provincial dialect’. [1] Actually, these things only led to genuine identity
problems when people were prevented from having the multiple, combined, identities
which are natural to most of us. Or, even more so, when they are detached
‘from the past and all common cultural practices’. [2] However, until the 1960s these problems of uncertain
identity were confined to special border zones of politics. They were not
yet central.
They appear to have become much more central since the
1960s. Why? There are no doubt particular reasons in the politics and institutions
of this or that country—for instance, in the peculiar procedures imposed on
the usa by its Constitution—for example, the civil rights judgments of the
1950s, which were first applied to blacks and then extended to women, providing
a model for other identity groups. It may follow, especially in countries
where parties compete for votes, that constituting oneself into such an identity
group may provide concrete political advantages: for instance, positive discrimination
in favour of the members of such groups, quotas in jobs and so forth. This
is also the case in the usa, but not only there. For instance, in India, where
the government is committed to creating social equality, it may actually pay
to classify yourself as low caste or belonging to an aboriginal tribal group,
in order to enjoy the extra access to jobs guaranteed to such groups.
The Denial of Multiple Identity
But in my view the emergence of identity politics is a
consequence of the extraordinarily rapid and profound upheavals and transformations
of human society in the third quarter of this century, which I have tried
to describe and to understand in the second part of my history of the ‘Short
Twentieth Century’, The Age of Extremes. This is not my view alone.
The American sociologist Daniel Bell, for instance, argued in 1975 that ‘The
breakup of the traditional authority structures and the previous affective
social units—historically nation and class...make the ethnic attachment more
salient’. [3]
In fact, we know that both the nation-state and the old
class-based political parties and movements have been weakened as a result
of these transformations. More than this, we have been living—we are living—through
a gigantic ‘cultural revolution’, an ‘extraordinary dissolution of traditional
social norms, textures and values, which left so many inhabitants of the developed
world orphaned and bereft.’ If I may go on quoting myself, ‘Never was the
word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades
when communities in the sociological sense become hard to find in real life’. [4] Men and women look for groups to which they can belong,
certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting,
in which nothing else is certain. And they find it in an identity group. Hence
the strange paradox, which the brilliant, and incidentally, Caribbean Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson has identified: people choose to belong
to an identity group, but ‘it is a choice predicated on the strongly held,
intensely conceived belief that the individual has absolutely no choice but
to belong to that specific group.’ [5] That it is a choice can sometimes be demonstrated.
The number of Americans reporting themselves as ‘American Indian’ or ‘Native
American’ almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1990, from about half a million
to about two millions, which is far more than could be explained by normal
demography; and incidentally, since 70 per cent of ‘Native Americans’ marry
outside their race, exactly who is a ‘Native American’ ethnically, is far
from clear. [6]
So what do we understand by this collective ‘identity’,
this sentiment of belonging to a primary group, which is its basis? I draw
your attention to four points.
First, collective identities are defined negatively; that
is to say against others. ‘We’ recognize ourselves as ‘us’ because we are
different from ‘Them’. If there were no ‘They’ from whom we are different,
we wouldn’t have to ask ourselves who ‘We’ were. Without Outsiders there are
no Insiders. In other words, collective identities are based not on what their
members have in common—they may have very little in common except not being
the ‘Others’. Unionists and Nationalists in Belfast, or Serb, Croat and Muslim
Bosnians, who would otherwise be indistinguishable—they speak the same language,
have the same life styles, look and behave the same—insist on the one thing
that divides them, which happens to be religion. Conversely, what gives unity
as Palestinians to a mixed population of Muslims of various kinds, Roman and
Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and others who might well—like their neighbours
in Lebanon—fight each other under different circumstances? Simply that they
are not the Israelis, as Israeli policy continually reminds them.
Of course, there are collectivities which are based on
objective characteristics which their members have in common, including biological
gender or such politically sensitive physical characteristics as skin-colour
and so forth. However most collective identities are like shirts rather than
skin, namely they are, in theory at least, optional, not inescapable. In spite
of the current fashion for manipulating our bodies, it is still easier to
put on another shirt than another arm. Most identity groups are not based
on objective physical similarities or differences, although all of them would
like to claim that they are ‘natural’ rather than socially constructed. Certainly
all ethnic groups do.
Second, it follows that in real life identities, like garments,
are interchangeable or wearable in combination rather than unique and, as
it were, stuck to the body. For, of course, as every opinion pollster knows,
no one has one and only one identity. Human beings cannot be described, even
for bureaucratic purposes, except by a combination of many characteristics.
But identity politics assumes that one among the many identities we all have
is the one that determines, or at least dominates our politics: being a woman,
if you are a feminist, being a Protestant if you are an Antrim Unionist, being
a Catalan, if you are a Catalan nationalist, being homosexual if you are in
the gay movement. And, of course, that you have to get rid of the others,
because they are incompatible with the ‘real’ you. So David Selbourne, an
all-purpose ideologue and general denouncer, firmly calls on ‘The Jew in England’
to ‘cease to pretend to be English’ and to recognize that his ‘real’ identity
is as a Jew. This is both dangerous and absurd. There is no practical incompatibility
unless an outside authority tells you that you cannot be both, or unless it
is physically impossible to be both. If I wanted to be simultaneously and
ecumenically a devout Catholic, a devout Jew, and a devout Buddhist why shouldn’t
I? The only reason which stops me physically is that the respective religious
authorities might tell me I cannot combine them, or that it might be impossible
to carry out all their rituals because some got in the way of others.
Usually people have no problem about combining identities,
and this, of course, is the basis of general politics as distinct from sectional
identity politics. Often people don’t even bother to make the choice between
identities, either because nobody asks them, or because it’s too complicated.
When inhabitants of the usa are asked to declare their ethnic origins, 54
per cent refuse or are unable to give an answer. In short, exclusive identity
politics do not come naturally to people. It is more likely to be forced upon
them from outside—in the way in which Serb, Croat and Muslim inhabitants of
Bosnia who lived together, socialized and intermarried, have been forced to
separate, or in less brutal ways.
The third thing to say is that identities, or their expression,
are not fixed, even supposing you have opted for one of your many potential
selves, the way Michael Portillo has opted for being British instead of Spanish.
They shift around and can change, if need be more than once. For instance
non-ethnic groups, all or most of whose members happen to be black or Jewish,
may turn into consciously ethnic groups. This happened to the Southern Christian
Baptist Church under Martin Luther King. The opposite is also possible, as
when the Official ira turned itself from a Fenian nationalist into a class
organization, which is now the Workers’ Party and part of the Irish Republic’s
government coalition.
The fourth and last thing to say about identity is that
it depends on the context, which may change. We can all think of paid-up,
card-carrying members of the gay community in the Oxbridge of the 1920s who,
after the slump of 1929 and the rise of Hitler, shifted, as they liked to
say, from Homintern to Comintern. Burgess and Blunt, as it were, transferred
their gayness from the public to the private sphere. Or, consider the case
of the Protestant German classical scholar, Pater, a professor of Classics
in London, who suddenly discovered, after Hitler, that he had to emigrate,
because, by Nazi standards, he was actually Jewish—a fact of which until that
moment, he was unaware. However he had defined himself previously, he now
had to find a different identity.
The Universalism of the Left
What has all this to do with the Left? Identity groups
were certainly not central to the Left. Basically, the mass social and political
movements of the Left, that is, those inspired by the American and French
revolutions and socialism, were indeed coalitions or group alliances, but
held together not by aims that were specific to the group, but by great, universal
causes through which each group believed its particular aims could be realized:
democracy, the Republic, socialism, communism or whatever. Our own Labour
Party in its great days was both the party of a class and, among other things,
of the minority nations and immigrant communities of mainland Britainians.
It was all this, because it was a party of equality and social justice.
Let us not misunderstand its claim to be essentially class-based.
The political labour and socialist movements were not, ever, anywhere, movements
essentially confined to the proletariat in the strict Marxist sense. Except
perhaps in Britain, they could not have become such vast movements as they
did, because in the 1880s and 1890s, when mass labour and socialist parties
suddenly appeared on the scene, like fields of bluebells in spring, the industrial
working class in most countries was a fairly small minority, and in any case
a lot of it remained outside socialist labour organization. Remember that
by the time of World War i the social-democrats polled between 30 and 47 per
cent of the electorate in countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland, which
were hardly industrialized, as well as in Germany. (The highest percentage
of votes ever achieved by the Labour Party in this country, in 1951, was 48
per cent.) Furthermore, the socialist case for the centrality of the workers
in their movement was not a sectional case. Trade unions pursued the sectional
interests of wage-earners, but one of the reasons why the relations between
labour and socialist parties and the unions associated with them, were never
without problems, was precisely that the aims of the movement were wider than
those of the unions. The socialist argument was not just that most people
were ‘workers by hand or brain’ but that the workers were the necessary historic
agency for changing society. So, whoever you were, if you wanted the future,
you would have to go with the workers’ movement.
Conversely, when the labour movement became narrowed down
to nothing but a pressure-group or a sectional movement of industrial workers,
as in 1970s Britain, it lost both the capacity to be the potential centre
of a general people’s mobilization and the general hope of the future. Militant
‘economist’ trade unionism antagonized the people not directly involved in
it to such an extent that it gave Thatcherite Toryism its most convincing
argument—and the justification for turning the traditional ‘one-nation’ Tory
Party into a force for waging militant class-war. What is more, this proletarian
identity politics not only isolated the working class, but also split it by
setting groups of workers against each other.
So what does identity politics have to do with the Left?
Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political project
of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings. However we
interpret the words, it isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for
everybody. It isn’t equality for all members of the Garrick Club or the handicapped,
but for everybody. It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but
for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but
for the members of a specific group only. This is perfectly evident in the
case of ethnic or nationalist movements. Zionist Jewish nationalism, whether
we sympathize with it or not, is exclusively about Jews, and hang—or rather
bomb—the rest. All nationalisms are. The nationalist claim that they are for
everyone’s right to self-determination is bogus.
That is why the Left cannot base itself on identity
politics. It has a wider agenda. For the Left, Ireland was, historically,
one, but only one, out of the many exploited, oppressed and victimized sets
of human beings for which it fought. For the ira kind of nationalism, the
Left was, and is, only one possible ally in the fight for its objectives in
certain situations. In others it was ready to bid for the support of Hitler
as some of its leaders did during World War ii. And this applies to every
group which makes identity politics its foundation, ethnic or otherwise.
Now the wider agenda of the Left does, of course, mean
it supports many identity groups, at least some of the time, and they, in
turn look to the Left. Indeed, some of these alliances are so old and so close
that the Left is surprised when they come to an end, as people are surprised
when marriages break up after a lifetime. In the usa it almost seems against
nature that the ‘ethnics’—that is, the groups of poor mass immigrants and
their descendants—no longer vote almost automatically for the Democratic Party.
It seems almost incredible that a black American could even consider standing
for the Presidency of the usa as a Republican (I am thinking of Colin Powell).
And yet, the common interest of Irish, Italian, Jewish and black Americans
in the Democratic Party did not derive from their particular ethnicities,
even though realistic politicians paid their respects to these. What united
them was the hunger for equality and social justice, and a programme believed
capable of advancing both.
The Common Interest
But this is just what so many on the Left have forgotten,
as they dive head first into the deep waters of identity politics. Since the
1970s there has been a tendency—an increasing tendency’ to see the Left essentially
as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race, gender, sexual or
other cultural preferences and lifestyles, even of economic minorities such
as the old getting-your-hands-dirty, industrial working class have now become.
This is understandable enough, but it is dangerous, not least because winning
majorities is not the same as adding up minorities.
First, let me repeat: identity groups are about themselves,
for themselves, and nobody else. A coalition of such groups that is not held
together by a single common set of aims or values, has only an ad hoc unity,
rather like states temporarily allied in war against a common enemy. They
break up when they are no longer so held together. In any case, as identity
groups, they are not committed to the Left as such, but only to get support
for their aims wherever they can. We think of women’s emancipation as a cause
closely associated with the Left, as it has certainly been since the beginnings
of socialism, even before Marx and Engels. And yet, historically, the British
suffragist movement before 1914 was a movement of all three parties, and the
first woman mp, as we know, was actually a Tory. [7]
Secondly, whatever their rhetoric, the actual movements
and organizations of identity politics mobilize only minorities, at
any rate before they acquire the power of coercion and law. National feeling
may be universal, but, to the best of my knowledge, no secessionist nationalist
party in democratic states has so far ever got the votes of the majority of
its constituency (though the Québecois last autumn came close—but then their
nationalists were careful not actually to demand complete secession in so
many words). I do not say it cannot or will not happen—only that the safest
way to get national independence by secession so far has been not to ask populations
to vote for it until you already have it first by other means.
That, by the way, makes two pragmatic reasons to be against
identity politics. Without such outside compulsion or pressure, under normal
circumstances it hardly ever mobilizes more than a minority—even of the target
group. Hence, attempts to form separate political women’s parties have not
been very effective ways of mobilizing the women’s vote. The other reason
is that forcing people to take on one, and only one, identity divides them
from each other. It therefore isolates these minorities.
Consequently to commit a general movement to the specific
demands of minority pressure groups, which are not necessarily even those
of their constituencies, is to ask for trouble. This is much more obvious
in the usa, where the backlash against positive discrimination in favour of
particular minorities, and the excesses of multiculturalism, is now very powerful;
but the problem exists here also.
Today both the Right and to the Left are saddled with identity
politics. Unfortunately, the danger of disintegrating into a pure alliance
of minorities is unusually great on the Left because the decline of the great
universalist slogans of the Enlightenment, which were essentially slogans
of the Left, leaves it without any obvious way of formulating a common interest
across sectional boundaries. The only one of the so-called ‘new social movements’
which crosses all such boundaries is that of the ecologists. But, alas, its
political appeal is limited and likely to remain so.
However, there is one form of identity politics which is
actually comprehensive, inasmuch as it is based on a common appeal, at least
within the confines of a single state: citizen nationalism. Seen in the global
perspective this may be the opposite of a universal appeal, but seen in the
perspective of the national state, which is where most of us still live, and
are likely to go on living, it provides a common identity, or in Benedict
Anderson’s phrase, ‘an imagined community’ not the less real for being imagined.
The Right, especially the Right in government, has always claimed to monopolize
this and can usually still manipulate it. Even Thatcherism, the grave-digger
of ‘one-nation Toryism’, did it. Even its ghostly and dying successor, Major’s
government, hopes to avoid electoral defeat by damning its opponents as unpatriotic.
Why then has it been so difficult for the Left, certainly
for the Left in English-speaking countries, to see itself as the representative
of the entire nation? (I am, of course, speaking of the nation as the community
of all people in a country, not as an ethnic entity.) Why have they found
it so difficult even to try? After all, the European Left began when a class,
or a class alliance, the Third Estate in the French Estates General of 1789,
decided to declare itself ‘the nation’ as against the minority of the ruling
class, thus creating the very concept of the political ‘nation’. After all,
even Marx envisaged such a transformation in The Communist Manifesto.
[8] Indeed, one might go further. Todd Gitlin, one of the
best observers of the American Left, has put it dramatically in his new book,
The Twilight of Common Dreams: ‘What is a Left if it is not, plausibly
at least, the voice of the whole people?...If there is no people, but only
peoples, there is no Left.’ [9]
The Muffled Voice of New Labour
And there have been times when the Left has not only wanted
to be the nation, but has been accepted as representing the national interest,
even by those who had no special sympathy for its aspirations: in the usa,
when the Rooseveltian Democratic Party was politically hegemonic, in Scandinavia
since the early 1930s. More generally, at the end of World War ii the Left,
almost everywhere in Europe, represented the nation in the most literal sense,
because it represented resistance to, and victory over, Hitler and his allies.
Hence the remarkable marriage of patriotism and social transformation, which
dominated European politics immediately after 1945. Not least in Britain,
where 1945 was a plebiscite in favour of the Labour Party as the party best
representing the nation against one-nation Toryism led by the most charismatic
and victorious war-leader on the scene. This set the course for the next thirty-five
years of the country’s history. Much more recently, François Mitterrand, a
politician without a natural commitment to the Left, chose leadership of the
Socialist Party as the best platform for exercising the leadership of all
French people.
One would have thought that today was another moment when
the British Left could claim to speak for Britain—that is to say all
the people—against a discredited, decrepit and demoralized regime. And yet,
how rarely are the words ‘the country’, ‘Great Britain’, ‘the nation’, ‘patriotism’,
even ‘the people’ heard in the pre-election rhetoric of those who hope to
become the next government of the United Kingdom!
It has been suggested that this is because, unlike 1945
and 1964, ‘neither the politician nor his public has anything but a modest
belief in the capacity of government to do very much’. [10] If that is why Labour speaks to and about the nation
in so muffled a voice, it is trebly absurd. First, because if citizens really
think that government can’t do very much, why should they bother to vote for
one lot rather than the other, or for that matter for any lot? Second, because
government, that is to say the management of the state in the public interest,
is indispensable and will remain so. Even the ideologues of the mad Right,
who dream of replacing it by the universal sovereign market, need it to establish
their utopia, or rather dystopia. And insofar as they succeed, as in much
of the ex-socialist world, the backlash against the market brings back into
politics those who want the state to return to social responsibility. In 1995,
five years after abandoning their old state with joy and enthusiasm, two thirds
of East Germans think that life and conditions in the old gdr were better
than the ‘negative descriptions and reports’ in today’s German media, and
70 per cent think ‘the idea of socialism was good, but we had incompetent
politicians’. And, most unanswerably, because in the past seventeen years
we have lived under governments which believed that government has enormous
power, which have used that power actually to change our country decisively
for the worse, and which, in their dying days are still trying to do so, and
to con us into the belief that what one government has done is irreversible
by another. The state will not go away. It is the business of government to
use it.
Government is not just about getting elected and then re-elected.
This is a process which, in democratic politics, implies enormous quantities
of lying in all its forms. Elections become contests in fiscal perjury. Unfortunately,
politicians, who have as short a time-horizon as journalists, find it hard
to see politics as other than a permanent campaigning season. Yet there is
something beyond. There lies what government does and must do.There is the
future of the country. There are the hopes and fears of the people as a whole—not
just ‘the community’, which is an ideological cop-out, or the sum-total of
earners and spenders (the ‘taxpayers’ of political jargon), but the British
people, the sort of collective which would be ready to cheer the victory of
any British team in the World Cup, if it hadn’t lost the hope that there might
still be such a thing. For not the least symptom of the decline of Britain,
with the decline of science, is the decline of British team sports.
It was
Mrs Thatcher’s strength, that she recognized this dimension of politics. She
saw herself leading a people ‘who thought we could no longer do the great
things we once did’—I quote her words—‘those who believed our decline was
irreversible, that we could never again be what we were’. [11] She was not like other politicians, inasmuch as she
recognized the need to offer hope and action to a puzzled and demoralized
people. A false hope, perhaps, and certainly the wrong kind of action, but
enough to let her sweep aside opposition within her party as well as outside,
and change the country and destroy so much of it. The failure of her project
is now manifest. Our decline as a nation has not been halted. As a people
we are more troubled, more demoralized than in 1979, and we know it. Only
those who alone can form the post-Tory government are themselves too demoralized
and frightened by failure and defeat, to offer anything except the promise
not to raise taxes. We may win the next general election that way and I hope
we will, though the Tories will not fight the election campaign primarily
on taxes, but on British Unionism, English nationalism, xenophobia and the
Union Jack, and in doing so will catch us off balance. Will those who have
elected us really believe we shall make much difference? And what will we
do if they merely elect us, shrugging their shoulders as they do so? We will
have created the New Labour Party. Will we make the same effort to restore
and transform Britain? There is still time to answer these questions.
[1] M.L. Pradelles de Latou, ‘Identity as a Complex
Network’, in C. Fried, ed., Minorities, Community and Identity, Berlin
1983, p. 79.
[2] Ibid. p. 91.
[3] Daniel Bell, ‘Ethnicity and Social Change’, in
Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience,
Cambridge, Mass. 1975, P. 171
[4] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short
Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London 1994, p. 428.
[5] O. Patterson, ‘Implications of Ethnic Identification’in
Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity, pp. 28–29. O. Patterson,
‘Implications of Ethnic Identification’in Fried, ed., Minorities: Community
and Identity, pp. 28–29.
[6] O. Patterson, ‘Implications of Ethnic Identification’in
Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity, pp. 28–29.
[7] Jihang Park, ‘The British Suffrage Activists
of 1913’, Past & Present, no. 120, August 1988, pp. 156–7.
[8] ‘Since the proletariat must first of all acquire
political supremacy, must raise itself to be the national class, must constitute
itself the nation, it is itself still national, though not in the bourgeois
sense.’ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848,
part ii. The original (German) edition has ‘the national class’; the English
translation of 1888 gives this as ‘the leading class of the nation’.
[9] Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams,
New York 1995, p. 165.
[10] Hugo Young, ‘No Waves in the Clear Blue Water’,
The Guardian, 23 April 1996, p. 13.
[11] Cited in Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational
Left, Verso, London 1989, p. 54.