Identity formation requires defining enemies across cultural fault lines.

Evidence

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.” The unfortunate truth in these old truths cannot be ignored by statesmen and scholars. For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 33 (#expands, via linked claim)

Rodolphe Gasche comments that this nonidentity is itself doubled, is “double in kind.” … First, the identity of a culture-here, Europe-presupposes “an external difference. This is a difference with itself that derives from identity’s continual reference to the identity of other cultures over and against whom any self-identity is established. These other cultural identities, as identities of the Other, can simply be different from the one of European culture, but they can also be identities that stand in relation of opposition to European identity.” … As Derrida puts it, “there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the diffirence to oneself. The grammar of the double genitive also signals that a culture never has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 66 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: National identity requires crafted enemies to become activist ideology — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1656; The new immigration became a target largely because prior enemy categories failed — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 518; Contentious claims sort into identity, standing, and program, usually building in that order. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 222 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Group identity formation requires the existence of enemies to define the self against #expands (0.96) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 33
• Identity is constructed through opposition to a continuously reinterpreted other #corroborates (0.94)
• Cultural identity requires both external difference from others and internal self-difference. #complicates (0.82) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 66
• Cultures differ in whether identity derives from relationships rather than from category membership #complicates (0.79) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1626
• National and religious identity can conflict when war pits same-faith enemies #complicates (0.78) — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 56