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Identity Politics: Introduction to a New Series1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Richard Bellamy
Richard Bellamy*
Affiliation:
The University of Essex
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Extract

Commissioning A Series On ‘Identity Politics’ Inevitably involves making contentious, if hopefully defensible, editorial choices about what each of these terms involves. Issues relating to ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have figured ever more prominently on both the political and academic agendas over the past thirty years. These terms are often employed to describe a wide range of somewhat heterogeneous phenomena. For example, a recent UK Economic and Social Research Council Programme on ‘Identity and Choice’ lists under this rubric everything from ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion, to class, disability, shopping and musical preferences. However, such usage risks broadening the concept of identity to the point of vacuity. Therefore, the scope of this series is somewhat narrower: namely, political identity. Of course, the concept of the ‘political’ is itself contested and likewise seemingly infinitely expandable to all issues and areas of life. Consequently, a more restricted meaning applies here too, with politics limited to the making of collectively binding decisions amongst people holding divergent opinions and interests.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 295 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2002

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Jim Tully and Dario Castiglione for their comments on an earlier version.

References

2 Kymlicka, W., Politics in the Vernacular, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Tamir, Y., Liberal Nationalism, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1993 Google Scholar.

4 See Canovan, M., Nationhood and Political Theory, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1996 Google Scholar.

5 See Tully, J., ‘Identity Politics’, in Ball, T. and Bellamy, R. (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,Google Scholar forthcoming, ch. 24.

6 For this distinction between ‘polity’ and ‘regime’ and its relevance to the ways in which citizens challenge and remake the state, see Bellamy, R., ‘The “Right to have Rights”: Citizenship Practice and the Political Constitution of the EU’, in Bellamy, R. and Warleigh, A. (eds), Citizenship and Governance in the European Union, London, Continuum, 2001, pp. 41–70 Google Scholar. For its importance within accounts of legitimacy, see Bellamy, R. and Castiglione, D., ‘Legitimising the Euro-polity and its Regime: The Normative Turn in EU Studies’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2:1 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar forthcoming.

7 See R. Bellamy, ‘Sovereignty, Post-Sovereignty and Pre-Sovereignty: Three Models of the State, Democracy and Rights within the EU’, in N. Walker (ed.), Sovereignty in Transition, Oxford, Hart, forthcoming.

8 Tully, J., ‘The Unfreedom of the Moderns in Comparison with the Ideals of Constitutional Democracy’, Modern Law Review, 65:2 (2002), pp. 211–24Google Scholar.

9 Barry, B., Culture and Equality, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001.Google Scholar

10 Kymlicka, W., Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 333–35Google Scholar.

11 I am grateful to Jim Tully for urging me to stress this point. See his ‘Identity Politics’.

12 See Bellamy, R., Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise, London, Routledge, 1999 Google Scholar, ch. 4.

13 Ibid.

14 J. Tully, ‘The Unfreedom of the Moderns’.

15 Bellamy, R., ‘Constitutive Citizenship versus Constitutional Rights: Republican Reflections on the EU Charter and the Human Rights Act’, in Campbell, T., Ewing, K. D. and Tomkins, A. (eds), Sceptical Essays on Human Rights, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 15–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Gagnon, A.-G. and Tully, J. (eds), Multinational Democracies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar