M Balance

THE POLITICS OF BELONGING

Naila Qalqili — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:18:27 +0000

Why Identity Has Become a Strategic Variable in International Affairs

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 007
Society, Identity & Political Systems

INTRODUCTION

International relations were traditionally explained through states, interests, resources, institutions and power. Identity was often treated as a domestic or cultural variable: important for understanding societies, but secondary to the material forces shaping foreign policy. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Questions of belonging, historical memory, language, religion, ethnicity, citizenship and political identity now influence international behavior directly. Governments appeal to communities beyond their borders. Diasporas participate in political conflicts involving their countries of origin. Historical narratives support territorial claims. Migration transforms domestic politics and relations between states. Digital networks create communities whose political identities are no longer confined to geography. Conflicts that appear strategic or territorial frequently contain unresolved disputes about who belongs, who represents whom and which political community has the right to define the state.

Identity has consequently become a strategic variable in international affairs. This does not mean that material interests have disappeared or that every conflict should be reduced to culture. States continue to compete for territory, security, resources and influence. But these interests increasingly operate through societies whose understanding of themselves affects what governments can concede, what populations will accept and what forms of political settlement can survive. A border can be negotiated on a map more easily than belonging can be negotiated in the minds of the people living around it.

The challenge for diplomacy is therefore substantial. International institutions were largely designed to manage relations among states. Many contemporary crises, however, originate from tensions within and across political communities. Managing them requires understanding not only what governments want, but how societies construct the identities from which political interests themselves emerge.

IDENTITY IS NOT A FIXED OBJECT

Political debates often speak about identity as though every society possesses a stable historical essence. Nations, civilizations, religious communities and ethnic groups are presented as coherent entities moving through history with recognizable boundaries.

Reality is considerably more complex.

Identity is inherited, but it is also constructed. It emerges through language, family, education, institutions, religion, historical experience, political narratives and collective memory. Individuals can possess several identities simultaneously. A person can belong to a city, a nation, a religious tradition, a linguistic community, a profession and a transnational culture without experiencing these affiliations as contradictory.

Political systems determine which of these identities become most important.

Under stable conditions, multiple affiliations can coexist. During political crisis, particular identities may become dominant. Economic insecurity can strengthen nationalist identification. Conflict can transform linguistic differences into political boundaries. Discrimination can turn a cultural community into a mobilized political group. External intervention can reinforce identities that previously carried limited political significance.

Identity should therefore not be understood simply as something societies possess.

It is also something politics continuously activates, reorganizes and interprets.

This distinction matters because policies based on the assumption of fixed identities can unintentionally make those identities more rigid.

THE STATE AND THE NATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING

The modern international system is formally organized around sovereign states. Political identity, however, rarely fits perfectly inside state borders.

Some states contain several linguistic, ethnic, religious or historical communities. Some nations are divided among several states. Some citizens identify strongly with political communities outside the country in which they live. Migration creates societies in which citizenship, ancestry and cultural identity increasingly overlap without becoming identical.

The nation-state therefore remains one of the most powerful political institutions ever created, but the assumption that every state naturally corresponds to one homogeneous national community is historically exceptional rather than universal.

Attempts to force political and cultural boundaries into complete alignment can be extraordinarily destructive.

Population transfers, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing and territorial conflict have frequently emerged from the belief that political stability requires every territory to possess one dominant identity.

A more resilient political system may depend on the opposite principle: the ability of several forms of belonging to coexist within the same political framework.

This is not simply a domestic constitutional issue. When states fail to accommodate internal diversity, identity disputes can cross borders, attract external patrons and become international security problems.

IDENTITY CAN BECOME A GEOPOLITICAL RESOURCE

States increasingly interact not only with foreign governments but with communities inside other societies.

Language, religion, historical memory and cultural affiliation can create networks of influence extending beyond borders. Governments support cultural institutes, media platforms, educational programmes, religious institutions and diaspora organizations. Citizenship policies can maintain relationships with populations abroad. Historical narratives can strengthen claims of responsibility toward communities living in neighboring states.

These practices are not inherently destabilizing. Cultural diplomacy and diaspora engagement can create valuable connections among societies.

The risk emerges when cultural affiliation becomes a justification for political control.

A state claiming responsibility for people with whom it shares language, religion or ancestry can blur the distinction between cultural relationship and political sovereignty. Domestic identity disputes then acquire geopolitical significance.

This creates a difficult diplomatic problem. International law recognizes states and borders more clearly than it recognizes overlapping historical identities. Yet political reality contains precisely such overlaps.

The objective should therefore not be to eliminate transnational identities. That is neither possible nor desirable. It should be to prevent them from becoming automatic instruments for challenging political sovereignty.

THE RETURN OF HISTORICAL MEMORY

Identity is constructed not only through perceptions of the present but through interpretations of the past.

Governments and societies continuously select historical events through which contemporary identity is explained. Victories become national myths. Defeats become collective trauma. Former empires become sources of pride or resentment. Historical injustice can remain politically active generations after the individuals who experienced it have disappeared.

This gives memory a strategic function.

Political leaders can mobilize historical grievance to justify present action. International disputes can be framed as continuations of centuries-old struggles. Compromise becomes more difficult when contemporary negotiation is interpreted through narratives of ancestral sacrifice or historical betrayal.

The past then stops functioning simply as history.

It becomes political territory.

Diplomacy traditionally concentrates on reconciling contemporary interests. Increasingly it must also understand the historical narratives through which those interests are interpreted.

A technically rational agreement may fail if one society experiences it as repetition of an earlier humiliation. Conversely, symbolic recognition of historical experience can sometimes unlock negotiations whose material components appeared impossible to resolve.

Memory should therefore be treated as part of the political environment in which diplomacy operates.

MIGRATION IS CHANGING THE MEANING OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Large-scale migration creates another transformation. Millions of people now live outside the societies in which they or their families originated while remaining connected through communication, travel, remittances and digital networks.

This weakens the assumption that political community is contained entirely inside national territory.

Diasporas can influence politics in both countries simultaneously. They can finance development, support political movements, transmit ideas and maintain cultural relationships across generations. Governments increasingly recognize their diasporas as strategic communities rather than populations permanently lost through emigration.

Host societies face a parallel challenge: how to incorporate populations with multiple cultural affiliations without requiring them to erase previous identities.

The debate is frequently framed as a choice between assimilation and multiculturalism. Both concepts can become overly rigid. The deeper question concerns whether political systems can create shared civic belonging strong enough to accommodate cultural plurality.

Citizens do not necessarily need identical histories, religions or cultural practices.

They do need sufficient confidence that they belong to the same political community.

Where that confidence weakens, identity politics can fragment democratic institutions and foreign policy simultaneously.

DIGITAL NETWORKS HAVE CREATED IDENTITY WITHOUT TERRITORY

For most of history, collective identity depended heavily on physical proximity. Communities shared villages, cities, religious institutions, schools, workplaces and media environments.

Digital communication has changed this relationship.

People can now participate continuously in communities whose members live across the world. Political movements can develop without a territorial center. Diasporas can remain integrated into daily debates in their countries of origin. Ideological communities can become more important to individuals than relationships with geographically proximate citizens.

The result is the emergence of identity without territory.

This has positive consequences. Marginalized communities can find support. Professional and cultural networks can transcend borders. People can maintain relationships across migration and conflict.

But digital identity also creates vulnerabilities. Algorithms can reinforce political polarization. False narratives can spread rapidly inside emotionally cohesive communities. Foreign actors can intervene directly in domestic identity debates without controlling territory or traditional media.

Information security therefore increasingly becomes identity security.

The central issue is not simply whether information is true or false. It is whether political systems retain enough shared informational space for citizens with different identities to recognize one another as members of the same society.

IDENTITY CONFLICTS CANNOT BE SOLVED ONLY BY ECONOMICS

Governments frequently respond to political instability by emphasizing economic development. Poverty, unemployment and inequality clearly contribute to conflict, and improving material conditions can reduce many sources of instability.

But identity conflicts cannot always be purchased away.

A community seeking recognition, political representation, linguistic rights or historical acknowledgement may not consider infrastructure investment an adequate substitute. Economic concessions can even fail when they are interpreted as attempts to avoid addressing the underlying political issue.

The opposite mistake is equally dangerous. Identity should not be treated as completely independent from material conditions. Competition over jobs, land, housing and public resources can become expressed through ethnic or religious categories.

Identity and material interests interact.

Effective conflict prevention therefore requires identifying which dimension is actually driving political mobilization. Is the dispute primarily about resources? Representation? Security? Recognition? Historical memory? Language? Territorial control?

Different problems require different institutional responses.

POLITICAL SYSTEMS NEED CAPACITY FOR PLURAL BELONGING

The long-term stability of diverse societies may increasingly depend on their ability to support several layers of identity without requiring citizens to choose permanently among them.

Federalism, decentralization, local autonomy, language rights, power-sharing, proportional representation and civic constitutional identities represent different attempts to address this problem. None provides a universal solution. Arrangements successful in one society may fail in another because history, geography and political institutions differ.

But the underlying principle deserves greater attention.

A political system becomes vulnerable when recognition of one identity requires denial of another.

Resilient systems create institutional space in which a person can be simultaneously local and national, culturally distinct and politically equal, historically connected to one community while sharing citizenship with others.

Plural belonging should therefore not automatically be interpreted as weak loyalty.

Under the right institutional conditions, it can become a source of political stability.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR IDENTITY-SENSITIVE DIPLOMACY

◆◆ Distinguish identity from political claims made in its name. Cultural, religious or linguistic affiliation does not automatically produce a particular territorial or constitutional entitlement. Diplomacy should avoid treating political leaders as permanent representatives of entire identities.

◆◆ Map communities as well as governments. Understanding a state requires knowledge of the social and historical relationships inside it. Diplomatic analysis should include demographic change, regional identity, language, religious institutions, diaspora networks and collective memory.

◆◆ Treat recognition as a political resource. Not every dispute can be solved materially. Symbolic recognition, language rights, historical acknowledgement and political representation can sometimes reduce conflict at relatively low material cost.

◆◆ Protect plural belonging. International mediation should be cautious about solutions that require populations to choose one exclusive identity where several affiliations have historically coexisted.

◆◆ Address identity disputes before they become territorial conflicts. Once identity becomes mapped onto territory and armed organizations, compromise becomes substantially more difficult. Early political accommodation is therefore a form of conflict prevention.

FROM IDENTITY POLITICS TO IDENTITY ARCHITECTURE

Identity politics is often discussed as a problem to be reduced. A more productive question may be how political systems can architect relationships among identities.

Every state already does this, explicitly or implicitly. Constitutions define citizenship. Schools teach historical narratives. Language laws determine which identities receive institutional recognition. Electoral systems structure political representation. Administrative borders can reinforce or weaken regional identities. National symbols define who appears inside the official story of the state.

There is therefore no identity-neutral political system.

The relevant distinction is between systems that manage identity consciously and systems that allow unresolved identity tensions to accumulate until they become crises.

Identity architecture does not mean engineering people’s beliefs. It means designing institutions capable of accommodating the identities that already exist.

This should become a more explicit field connecting constitutional design, diplomacy, conflict prevention and political psychology.

CONCLUSION

The politics of the twenty-first century cannot be understood through material power alone.

People do not experience states only as administrative systems. They experience them through belonging, memory, recognition, language, history and identity. These forces influence what societies fear, what they consider legitimate and what political compromises they are prepared to accept.

Identity therefore belongs inside strategic analysis.

But recognizing its importance should not lead to another mistake: assuming identities are permanent, homogeneous or destined to conflict. Human beings have always possessed multiple affiliations. Political systems determine whether those affiliations become complementary or adversarial.

The central challenge is consequently not how to remove identity from politics.

It is how to prevent political competition from turning identity into an absolute boundary between people.

For diplomacy, this requires a broader understanding of the societies behind states. Negotiations cannot succeed indefinitely if they reconcile governments while leaving the communities affected by their decisions politically unreconciled.

The future international order will depend not only on how power is distributed among states.

It will also depend on whether political systems can answer one of the oldest and most consequential human questions:

Who belongs?

The most stable answer may ultimately be the one that allows people to answer that question in more than one way.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 007 | Society, Identity & Political Systems

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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Trade disputes, Taiwan and Iran war: Can US and China reach a consensus?

Nelson Wong — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:24:18 +0000

As US President Donald Trump prepares to touch down in China for his first visit to the country since the start of his second term, the world is once again watching the uneasy dance between the world’s two largest economies.

On the surface, the agenda reads like a standard superpower summit: trade, technology, geopolitics and regional security. But beneath the polished schedule lies a striking paradox - one that would have seemed unthinkable only a decade ago.

Today, it is China, not the United States, that appears to be carrying the torch for free trade and multilateral cooperation. Meanwhile, Washington - long the global champion of open markets - finds itself entangled in protectionist instincts, trade wars of its own making, and a painful geopolitical quagmire in the Middle East.

When Trump and his team meet their Chinese counterparts this time, the contrasts will be impossible to ignore.

Economically, the White House is expected to press Beijing on two fronts: firstly, to relax export controls on critical rare earth products - materials essential to American manufacturers, particularly those supplying the military-industrial complex - and secondly, to buy more American agricultural goods.

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Rare earth minerals are no ordinary commodity. They power precision-guided missiles, fighter jet avionics, and drone technologies. For years, China’s dominance over rare earth supply chains has been a source of quiet anxiety in Washington.

Now, as US manufacturers scramble to secure their supply chains, Trump finds himself asking China for help - an awkward role reversal for a country that once prided itself on technological self-sufficiency.

Differing expectations

On agriculture, the hope is that China will once again purchase American soybeans, corn and pork in large volumes. That, too, is a familiar script from earlier trade talks. But the unstated irony is clear: the US wants China to open its market, while keeping its own relatively closed to Chinese investments and goods through high tariffs and a protectionist tax regime.

China, for its part, will likely arrive with a very different set of expectations. It wants the US to create a fairer, more reasonable tax environment for Chinese goods, and to welcome Chinese investments without the kind of political scrutiny that has led to blocked deals in recent years. In other words, China is asking the US to live up to the free trade ideals that Washington itself once championed.

Is it not paradoxical that the country lecturing others about open markets today is the same one that has built walls - both literal and figurative - against foreign competition? When it comes to trade, the roles have almost completely reversed.

Why Washington's global dominance is hanging by a thread

On the geopolitical front, the differences are even starker. According to reports and analysts, Trump is likely to ask China to use its influence with Iran to help broker an end to the military conflict between Tehran and the US-Israelicoalition - a conflict initiated by the latter.

Trump’s urgency is understandable. The Iran war has become a draining liability, and with midterm elections looming at home, the White House needs a quick exit strategy.

Voters are weary of endless foreign entanglements. The defence industry may be profiting, but American families are not. To have any hope in the midterms, Trump needs to show that he can end a war, not just start one.

China’s position, however, is rooted in a different philosophy. For decades, Beijing has consistently advocated for world peace based on coexistence and development for all nations on equal terms, without any single country exercising hegemonic control. That principle is enshrined in China’s foreign policy, from the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to its more recent Global Security Initiative.

Importantly, China also understands and appreciates that nations have different systems, histories and aspirations. That is why Beijing does not impose preconditions when dealing with other countries, including Iran. This non-interventionist approach has earned China a degree of trust in Tehran that Washington cannot match. Whether that trust can be leveraged to end a war, however, is a different question.

China may be willing to facilitate dialogue, but it will not do so as a junior partner following US orders. Any Chinese role in de-escalating the Iran crisis will be on China’s own terms - not as a favour to the White House, but as part of a broader vision for global stability.

Emerging global order

No discussion of US-China relations is complete without addressing Taiwan. It is expected that the upcoming summit will touch upon this most sensitive of issues. The question is whether there will be any joint consensus - or more precisely, whether the US leadership will openly pronounce its disapproval of separatist activities on the island.

Washington has long maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity. But ambiguity is a luxury when the situation on the ground is becoming less ambiguous by the day. Certain forces in Taiwan have grown increasingly emboldened, encouraged by congressional visits, arms salesand symbolic gestures from the US side.

China’s position is clear: Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and separatist activities of any kind are unacceptable. What Beijing would like to hear from Trump is a clear, unequivocal statement that the US does not support Taiwan independence and disapproves of any separatist activities on the island.

Whether Trump is willing to go that far remains to be seen. Known for not being a traditional foreign policy hawk, Trump has shown a willingness to surprise his own advisers. But any concession on Taiwan would face immediate blowback from Congress and the defence establishment, making it a politically costly move ahead of the November midterms.

Perhaps the most profound observation to emerge from the current state of US-China relations is the quiet death of US hegemony - not because China has replaced it, but because the very concept of a single hegemonic power no longer fits the reality of a multipolar world.

China does not seek to dominate the global order. It seeks to participate in it, to reshape it incrementally, and to ensure that no single country can impose its will on others. That is why China pushes for regional free trade agreements, while the US retreats behind tariffs and sanctions.

If Trump wants China's help on rare earths, agriculture and Iran, he will have to offer something in return

This is not a moral argument. It is a practical one. When the US abandons free trade, it creates a vacuum that other nations - including China - are eager to fill.

Trump’s visit to China is unlikely to resolve all these contradictions. Trade disputes will not disappear after one meeting. The Iran war will not end with a single phone call. And Taiwan will remain a dangerous flashpoint for years to come.

But the summit does offer an opportunity for clarity. It forces both sides to confront a new reality: the old order, with the US as the undisputed leader and China as a junior partner, is gone. What is emerging is something messier, more competitive, and yet - paradoxically - more open to dialogue.

If Trump wants China’s help on rare earths, agriculture and Iran, he will have to offer something in return. If China wants fairer treatment for its investments and goods, it will have to continue making the case that free trade benefits everyone, not just Beijing.

And if the world is lucky, the two leaders might even agree on one thing: that no nation, however powerful, can build a stable future on the ruins of cooperation.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Nelson Wong is president of the Shanghai Centre for RimPac Strategic and International Studies, a non-profit and non-governmental research institution based in Shanghai, China, and an active member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think-tank. Wong runs a global business and investment consultancy, ACN Worldwide, and is an independent director and audit committee chairman for two public companies listed on Nasdaq.