Cultural identity has replaced ideology as the defining basis of state alignment

Evidence

In the post-Cold War world, culture is both a divisive and a unifying force. People separated by ideology but united by culture come together, as the two Germanys did and as the two Koreas and the several Chinas are beginning to. Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 44 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Thus, cultural identities tend less to be truly organic expressions of belonging or affiliation than marriages of convenience encouraged by the political ideologies of the time. Those liberal characters who are not denounced as hypocritical tend to be well meaning but misguided in their attitudes to cultural difference. Deedee packs her students’ curriculum with representative texts from black music and culture. Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye provide a soundtrack to her teaching of the U.S. civil rights struggle, and she encourages her students to treat canonical and popular texts as interchangeable. Interestingly, though, whereas popular culture provides a valorized means of youth identification in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is treated with more suspicion in The Black Album. On the one hand, Shahid and Chad bond over their pop-music tastes. On the other, Kureishi’s determination to define art and culture as an antidote to religious fundamentalism requires that he reassert the liberal humanist reading of the European canon as personally liberating and culturally vitalizing. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 174 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Place-based identity politics replace class politics and revive geopolitics. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1725; Shared Arab cultural identity does not translate into political bloc action; Cultural identity overrides ideological unity in determining state cohesion (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural affinity now outweighs shared ideology as a political glue #corroborates (0.95) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 44
• Post-Cold War politics reconfigured itself along cultural identity lines. #corroborates (0.93)
• Cultural identities are political marriages of convenience more than organic belonging #complicates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 174
• States respond to perceived cultural-ideological threats, not raw power balances #complicates (0.78)
• Nationalist ideologies emerged against the backdrop of prior large cultural systems #complicates (0.72) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 90
• Diaspora is quietly subverting the nation-state model of identity #complicates (0.72)