• DOI:10.1163/9789004436107_006
• Corpus ID: 236580880

From Identity Politics to the Identitarian Movement

@article{ima2021FromIP,
  title={From Identity Politics to the Identitarian Movement},
  author={Karel {\vS}ima},
  journal={National Stereotyping, Identity Politics, European Crises},
  year={2021}
}

• Karel Šima
• Published 11 May 2021
• Sociology, Political Science
• National Stereotyping, Identity Politics, European Crises

The motivation behind this contribution is to explain how the concept of identity got from the emancipatory context of identity politics to the conservative revolutionary context of nationalistic, xenophobic, far-right movements of the Generation Identity. On one hand the notion of identity was mobilised to challenge the dominant oppres-sive power relations by the marginal social groups based mainly on distinctiveness of ethnicity, race, gender etc. On the other hand, recent crises in Europe brought to the fore the far-right youth movements that posed the defence of identity as their main motto. The aim of this contribution is to analyse cultural references within the discourses and performances of the pan-European identitarian movement in order to understand their mechanisms of instrumentalising national, ethnic, as well as local and European cultural characteristics and values. This case study is of relevance as it not only shows cultural representations behind specific social movements reacting to recent European crises, but also explains the processes by which they are being ‘euro-peanised’ into pan-European cultural and political discourses.