Institutions of Identity in Times of Crisis

• In Event: Migration, Populism and Democratic Politics in Europe

Abstract

Most accounts of the crisis of the contemporary liberal order view economic interdependence and technological innovation as having undermined the embedded liberal compromise of the post-WWII era. This paper considers the social foundations of the contemporary crisis, and argues that the embedded liberal order introduced a central dilemma to advanced industrialized democracies: expansive and varied immigration alongside strong demands for governments to protect 'their citizens' from the vagaries of globalization. Drawing on a cross-subfield literature on conceptual and physical borders of the state, I develop and test a theory of national coherence, in which the presence of immigrants, and contemporary re-imagining of the national community to incorporate them, leads opponents to contest the new, negotiable boundaries of national identity and make increased demands of the state for more reactionary forms of membership. This is not only an argument about politics, there is an intrinsic feature of liberal democracy that makes it both strong and susceptible to challengers. That is, to satisfy dual imperatives of inclusion (of outsiders) and boundedness (of community, and given material constraints), states must actively regulate institutions of identity, namely citizenship, language and integration policies, to construct new, stronger definitions of belonging that justify and allow for participation. Yet, this updating or accommodation is the exact source of populist, anti-immigrant challenges, who claim to represent the “legitimate people” and thus frame this regulation as part of the problem. Employing a comparative case study approach of the Germany, the US, and Spain, we can observe a strong correlation between the politics of updating identity institutions and the strength of populist capture. In the end, the stakes are high; immigration is both inevitable and immutable. The way in which states manage it, and the forces that seek to undermine it, it a crucible for the domestic commitments to the liberal order.

Author

• Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine