Chapter 5
Identity in politics: promises and
dangers
From sex to politics is not a long way, and identity is not the only bridge
connecting one with the other; but this is our focus here. For the Women’s Rights
Movement was an early example of identity politics, a kind of politics centred on
the idea of stressing group coherence, collective identity, and separatism.
Identity politics is organized by a group and designed to promote its interests. It
requires sharp boundaries between groups separated from each other by their
mutually exclusive identities. Identities that have been instrumentalized for this
purpose include ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ideological allegiances.
Overarching all of them, but integrating them not always benignly, is
nationalism. Actually, a great deal of contemporary politics is grounded upon
tensions between discordant forms of identity within the nation state. But what is
a nation state?
The self of politics
In 1866, Friedrich Engels wrote an article about the partition of Poland in which
he discussed the ‘principle of nationalities’ which, he argued, must not be
confused with the question of the existence of European nations. It was an
important question because at the time there was no state in Europe that did not
encompass multiple nationalities. Engels mentions the Highland Gaels, the
Welsh, and the Celtic inhabitants of Brittany, among several others that, in his
opinion, had no claim to statehood. His article reads surprisingly modern,
although, in his days, the present system of European nation states was still in its
infancy. Tensions between nations and nationalities (or call them ‘macro- and