The fear of failed belonging drives identity to slide into nationalism and racism

Evidence

Collective identity is based on the (selective) process of memory, so that a given group recognizes itself through its recollection of a common past. From this perspective national identity is a specific form of collective identity, a belonging, which is both a way of being, of social existence, and a longing. Identity thus conceived fluctuates between two poles, “romantic longing” and “terror.” “Romantic longing” involves a hungering for identification with common members, those one takes to be like oneself because social representation has suggested they are. “Terror,” by contrast, is prompted by the inevitable failure to fulfill the membership drive (Goldberg, Musheno, and Bower, 2001). This is the fear at the heart of the question of identity, whether posed at the level of the individual or nation. Driven by such fears, the defense of a cherished cultural identity easily slips into the most hackneyed nationalism, or often enough racism, and the nationalist affirmation of the superiority of one group over another. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 124

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘romantic longing vs terror’ poles of identity could anchor an article about how political movements weaponize the longing-for-belonging and its attendant terror of exclusion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that nationalism/racism emerge from the unavoidable failure of the membership drive — identity as a structural terror, not mere prejudice — is a dense, counterintuitive mechanism.