A Dangerous Text: Francis Fukuyama’s Mischaracterisation of Identity, Recognition and Right-Wing Nationalism

Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays liberalism as under threat from the global rise of a reactionary and exclusionary identity politics. For Fukuyama contemporary identity politics, taking place as struggles for recognition and manifestations of resentment, are dangerous, illiberal forms of right-wing populist nationalism. I demonstrate how he appropriates the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ and puts these to use to sustain a version of neoliberal rationality and neoliberal politics. Such an appropriation denies the transformative and radical potential of intersubjective recognition and depoliticises and delegitimises any non-liberal claims and struggles of identity politics that might threaten to disrupt neoliberal political order, security and capitalist accumulation. Fukuyama’s account of identity is dangerous in the way that it legitimises a right-wing nationalist discourse of blame targeted at the mischaracterisation of minority and left-wing ‘identity’ politics, and in the way he detaches a contemporary extremist and right-wing nationalist discourse from the history of a less extreme, but similar, neoliberal nationalist discourse which, since the 1980s, has mobilised the language of identity politics as a political strategy and weapon against progressive political movements and against the welfare state.