Identity functions as a substitute for the protection that stable orders once provided.

Evidence

Senocak represents a hybrid author who is in his own estimation therefore the exemplary cosmopolitan German: “I don’t have an identity. People in my world have more and more problems with this. It is as if the fall of The Wall, the collapse of the old order, did not only have a liberating function. Without The Wall one no longer feels oneself protected. Identity is a substitute concept for being protected” (47). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 769

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation: identity as a protective container that substitutes for lost Cold War geopolitical certainty rather than something found or possessed.
• XREF: Echoes the identity-as-shelter theme in Frost’s A Very Minor Prophet and the search for protective frameworks generally. — connects to: Regimes with capital substitute purchase for direct coercion of subjects — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 129