Conceptualizing Politics

tural nor the social one. The belief that the first cannot stand without being merged 
with the second and the third is based on an unjustified generalisation of national 
identity, which is not a timeless or definitive model, but only the most relevant 
example of political identity in modern history after the French Revolution. It was 
characterised by the forced neutralisation of local cultures and traditions in a cen-
tralised statehood, in which political and cultural identity were forced to coincide; a 
passage post-national and regional identities such as the fledging European one are 
far from requesting. To name another striking example, the peoples who are now 
members of the European Union share with Russia an encompassing European 
cultural identity including Pushkin and Goethe, Tolstoy and Stendhal, Mussorgsky 
and Verdi, whereas the same cannot be said of their political traditions, autocratic as 
they are in Russia and liberal-democratic in most of the EU member states.
Similarly, homogeneous social structures are not associated with the same politi-
cal identity wherever the groups sharing them are kept separated by ethnic, cultural 
or institutional factors; nor do necessarily citizens sharing the same political identity 
also live in the same social structures. For example, as far as the EU member states 
have been able to develop their quasi-polity and the related identity, this happened 
in a continent in which up to four different versions of the ‘European social model’ 
have been identified by sociologists. Post-national identities are not national identi-
ties writ large; besides, even within nation states, social and political identities do 
not always overlap, as the North-South divide shows.
If political, cultural and social identities fail to overlap, they do not belong to 
different planets either. For political identity to develop, a measure of homogeneity 
in the political culture of the group is necessary, which can occur in the framework 
of different general (religious, philosophical, literary, legal) cultures. For example, 

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30  What is politics?
tenets of a liberal-democratic culture are shared by groups having very different 
cultures in the background: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, 
not to name other divides such as common law/civil law. Nonetheless sudden mass 
migrations from ethnic, cultural and political (mostly Islamic) areas, whose values 
and traditions with regard to politics and religion, gender equality, the role of tribal 
and family ties are difficult to reconcile with Western political culture, can shake 
the stability of European countries, if not enough time (generations) is allowed and 
not enough smart policies implemented for the integration of the migrants into the 
social and political culture of the host country – granted this is feasible and cleav-
ages can be neutralised. The policies implemented thus far, or rather omitted, have 
been disastrous even if time enough was given, as the troubles with second genera-
tion immigrants prove; although more felicitous examples such as the Turks living 
in Germany since the Sixties should not be forgotten. Yet, persistent cleavages in 
the worldviews of populations living together in the same economic country sys-
tem can create huge obstacles to the process of reciprocal recognition as fellow citizens 
among diverse persons and communities that is parallel to their recognition of the 
same political values and principles as fundamental for the polity. Celebrating ‘mul-
ticulturalism’ while omitting the problems of political integration has been neither 
a remedy nor a policy that prevents disasters. If all or most of the groups constitut-
ing a community insist on asserting each its own ‘politics of identity’, regardless 
of the broader identity based on the same model of generalised cooperation and 
respect, the polity, whose traded or reformed institutions are the ultimate guarantee 
for all citizens and all guests, is threatened by disunion and paralysis, if not collapse. 
For the ethnic version of this path, in recent European history a frightening exam-
ple is constituted by the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Still, a corollary to these fundamental elements of political identity must be 
named, though it consists of a question rather than an assertion. Where do val-
ues and principles, wrapped in symbols and memories, come from when shaping 
the mind of the citizens? The answer suggested in these pages has been: from the 
value systems of one’s own civilisation as modified and reinterpreted through the 
historical experience of a specific group, for example a nation. But what could 
happen if those value systems are losing their directing force or are dismissed and 
find no equivalent? This is the preoccupation expressed on several occasions by 
conservative thinkers with regards to the modern dismissal of the sturdy religion-
backed beliefs of medieval or early-modern times. Is a secularised or even relativis-
tic worldview capable of providing enough motivation to the people for respecting 
each other and observing the law of the polity? A sharp formulation was given in 
the 1970s to this preoccupation by the German law philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang 
Böckenförde, who asked:
The liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee 
itself. This is the great adventure it has undertaken for freedom’s sake. As a 
liberal state it can only endure if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes 
some regulation from the interior, both from a moral substance of the indi-
viduals and a certain homogeneity of society at large. On the other hand, it 

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The subjective side of politics  31
cannot by itself procure these interior forces of regulation, that is not with its 
own means such as legal compulsion and authoritative decree.
(Böckenförde 1976, 60)
This so-called Böckenförde dilemma is quoted here to document a problem, not to 
prove that secular or, as others prefer to say, republican conceptions of the human 
being and the state cannot nourish peaceful coexistence and cooperation; that 
is what they did in liberal-democratic and social states over the past century – 
 notwithstanding the dark times that in particular Europe went through between 
the World Wars. Yet it seems to be wise to keep our attention focused on the prob-
lem in times in which globalisation and globalisation malaise are putting so many 
elements of world order and domestic cohesion in distress.
Second, political identities are not merely a photograph of what the members 
of a group (polity, party, movement) believe to be as a result of preceding develop-
ments, but also an image of what the group wishes or feels the duty to become – 
particularly in the case of parties. In other words, political identities contain a 
moment of self-adopted normativity.
Third, and very importantly, identities are not pure argumentative or logical 
constructs, and need symbols in order to find cohesion and collective expression. 
Symbols are not just flags and national anthems, but also inspiring documents (the 
Constitution, if inspiring at all) or images, often related to one’s own past (in Europe 
for example the Auschwitz gate or the Berlin Wall torn down by Eastern and West-
ern citizens in November 1989, both as symbols of Europeans’ ‘never again’ pledge). 
It is a matter of fact that people still are accustomed to thinking of themselves, their 
families and countries in historical terms, in spite of the attempts made by analyti-
cal philosophers to eradicate any historical dimension from political discourse. As a 
result, political identities contain not just beliefs in values and shared goals, but also 
some narrative of the group’s evolution – be it the memory of past wars or past 
misery or past glory – and often find symbolical expression in building and monu-
ments, such as the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing’s Tian An Men with Mao 
Zedong’s (1893–1976) portrait hanging outside it or the Vietnam Veterans Memo-
rial in Washington, DC. This, however, should not be misunderstood in the sense 
that political identities are fully a-logical or even irrational formations – something 
residing in the guts. Political symbolism is a-logical, but not outright irrational tout 
court, while irrationalism prevails in identities in which the mirror-identity coin-
cides with the most divisive version of the wall-moment, because the group is kept 
together by hatred for others and has no other value to lay at its foundation. Politi-
cal identities are, indeed, a complex mix of diverse moments, with a general but 
variable structure that requires careful analysis of each single case – as it is often the 
case with the concrete life of categories. Could we perhaps do better dropping the 
latter and concentrating on the single cases? This is an illusion, because we would 
then miss the deeper mechanisms that, in our case, make identity an indispensable 
notion, if one wants to see its core structure, whose variations explain the possibility 
of change – say, of how a conservative identity can open up to progressive positions 
or a liberal one adopt elements of authoritarianism. Categories and awareness of 

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32  What is politics?
their variations under modified conditions help understand change and, even more 
importantly, being perceptive to its first signals – in political life a precious skill.
As a corollary to what we have learned about identity and symbols, let us tackle 
the delicate issue of myth. Symbol and myth are no namesake, and using them inter-
changeably reveals confusion. Symbols are a basic medium in human communica-
tion as well as in the very way by which we grasp the world and put order to our 
thoughts, figures being the best known example; we have just learned what symbols 
are for political identity. Symbols also play a role in foundational narratives, that is the 
account a community gives itself of its own origins (as a part of its mirror-identity) 
and the rest of the world. In liberal regimes, these narratives are subject to argument 
and revision in the framework of conversation of the community with itself and 
its partners – think of how the USA modified its own narrative after the success 
of the Civil Rights movement, and how Germany and Italy did the same after the 
fall of the Fascist dictatorships. On the contrary, foundational narratives of mythical 
character (the mythes d’origine so much talked about in Franche and Québec) are 
untouched by this critical chance and so is the Manichaeic ‘us vs. them’ pattern that 
defines them. They are not capable of revision and stand or fall as a whole, and so 
did in 1945 the nationalist and Fascist myths used by Mussolini (1883–1945) and 
Hitler (1889–1945) to galvanise the masses. Sticking to this conceptual difference 
does not preclude from our vision the cases in which foundational narratives based 
on an argumentative view on history can assume mythical traits, or more exactly, 
risk to become ‘legends’, particularly when they become part of patriotic rituals 
and mass ideologies – as it sometimes happened to the narrative of the Resistance 
in the countries once occupied by the Third Reich. The drive to merge symbol and 
myth, foundational narrative and origin myth is a postmodernist fashion, inspired 
by a Schelling-like predilection – as his counterpart Hegel (1770–1831) sarcasti-
cally put it – for ‘the grey night, in which all cows are grey’ (Hegel 1807, 9).
5
On the other hand, symbols should not be seen as tools used by the powerful 
in order to induce allegiance among the people, as suggested by older classics of 
political science (Lasswell 1935; Edelman 1976). The notion of politics as an exclu-
sively rational, goal-oriented business, which astutely employs a-logical elements 
as instrumenta regni or tools of domination, is naive reductionism of a multifaceted 
activity, though instances of such an instrumentalism can be found throughout his-
tory. Another warning regards the notion of symbolic policy, which indicates token 
acts that only do so, as if important issues were effectively managed by the rulers, 
while only the symbolic appearance of it is enacted. This use of the word symbol 
is possible, but remains reserved to this very specific feature, which by no means 
should be mistaken for the entire complex of political symbolism.
A last warning is not to mistake political identity for a namesake of citizenship, 
a category not belonging to the subjective side of politics, as it rather describes 
in ‘objective’ legal and sociological terms the rights of the members of the polity. 
Only as far as the possession of, or the struggle for, these rights are perceived by the 
citizens and become an element of their political identity does citizenship enter the 
field we have been examining.

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The subjective side of politics  33