How Is Collective Identity Possible in Democracies? Political Integration and the Leitkultur Debate in Germany

The quest for a common collective identity has become a challenge for modern democracy: Liberal demands for greater inclusion and individual freedom, aspirations for a strong and solidaric political community, as well as nationalist or right-wing populist calls for exclusion and a preservation of hegemonic national identities are creating tensions that cannot be overlooked. This article therefore formulates the central question of how collective identity can be possible in a liberal democracy. Based on a case study on Germany, it will therefore be examined whether Leitkultur as a model of political integration can serve in generating a functional democratic collective identity. The necessary benchmarks guiding the analysis will be defined beforehand from a systems-theoretical perspective, balancing inclusion and exclusion within three crucial dimensions: normative basics, historic continuity, and affirmative bindings. The results show that a static definition of a German Leitkultur would in the long run neither achieve functional inclusion nor be able to generate the necessary cohesion of a political community, especially regarding the second and third identity dimensions.

“Retweet for More”: The Serialization of Porn on the Twitter Alter Community

This article examines the notion of seriality in the context of the Filipino alter community, a network of Twitter users producing, distributing, and consuming pornographic images. The alter community is prominent among Filipino gay men who satisfy their need for sexual arousal, collective identity, and validation of their sexuality in the alter community. Seriality is influenced by technological features and affordances of a media platform. In the case of Twitter, the platform’s short form formats and real-time content generation fosters a particular kind of seriality. This essay analyzes data from online observations, content analysis of tweets and profiles, and interviews and is informed by theories on seriality, gay sexuality, and Internet studies. In situating seriality within the context of gay amateur porn economy, this article argues that serial pornography is instrumental in satisfying both present and long-standing affective, sexual, and social needs of gay men. These needs, this essay claims, stem from long history of minoritization of homosexuality. As Twitter renders older tweets ephemeral and quantifies social engagement, seriality enables gay men to satisfy the aforementioned needs longer. Furthermore, this essay proposes that serial porn on Twitter brings new insights to how seriality is conceived. Serial porn images are strategically and carefully constructed narratives of sexual encounters aimed at garnering higher social engagement and validation. Thus, serial narratives can resolve present and urgent affective tensions and needs that unravel within an ongoing life narrative rather than working toward supporting a plausible ending, as seen in other serial forms. This article contributes to an understanding of how pornographic images and serial narratives fit into consumerist culture and how platforms exploit long-standing affective needs of sexual minorities to ensure extended production and consumption of contents.

Leaving the Discursive Definition of Populist Social Movements: The Case of the Yellow Vest Movement

In this article, I analyze whether the case of the Yellow Vest movement fits Paris Aslanidis’ definition of populist social movements, and find that within the discursive theoretical framework Aslanidis adheres to, it does. However, I use the case of the Yellow Vest movement to demonstrate how this discursive approach lacks explanatory potential. I therefore propose moving away from a discursive definition of populist social movements, and advocate for studying political content as a way of detecting common interests shaped by political and societal structures that are shared by participants in a populist social movement. A theory of populist social movements must look at political and economic structures as well as individual agency, framing, and collective identity as a way to explain mobilization. A discursive approach to populism, which only considers language, is therefore not sufficient to explain movements such as the Yellow Vest movement.

Networked Collective Symbolic Capital Revisited

This study attempts to illustrate identity performance via the display of symbolic capital by Taiwanese gay men through photo-sharing experiences on Instagram. For Taiwanese gay men, photo-sharing experiences on Instagram have become a significant venue where they can interact with selected publics through performing various personae. This study has classified roles with various forms of cultural capital as well as clarifying how distinction is meticulously maneuvered among collapsed contexts. Through ethnographic interviews with 17 gay male college students from Taiwan and textual analysis of their correspondence though texting on Instagram, this study first contextualizes how the interactional processes engaged in on Instagram help constitute a collective identity pertaining to Taiwanese gay men on Instagram. The photo-sharing experiences are examined as an identity-making process involving the display of various symbolic capital, illuminating the calculated performance of taste and the collective past oppressed by the heteronormative society. The conclusion offers an alternative sociological intervention that goes beyond the notion of digital narcissism to help understand how the cultural capital on the presumption of photo-sharing experiences is invested.

Pursuing European Strategic Autonomy: Up-to-date Results

2016–2020 witnessed significant structural changes in the foreign and security policy of the European Union. External factors encouraged the need to strengthen the EU strategic autonomy not only in the form of particular practical moves related to the establishment and development of new institutions, but also as part of an attempt to formulate a new common discourse. The article examines these processes through the security communities theory, traditionally applied to analyze transatlantic dynamics. This helps to both systemically address the recent changes and identify miscalculations and missing elements in framing the European security community. Since the 2020 PESCO Strategic Review to a certain extent summed up the initial phase of development of the central initiative of the whole process, the article analyzes the so far achieved results in setting up the new agenda for the EU and the prospects of translating it into joint practices. The main assumption posits that the key obstacle for enhancing strategic autonomy is the need to use a collective identity - both a tool for developing institutions and a goal of this process. As a result, neither a new collective identity, nor a functional network of institutions have been built, leaving the EU unprepared to bring the idea of strategic autonomy further.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Separation of Powers in Federal Polity and “Wills of Nation”

The problem of this article is built around the tension between the concept of organ sovereignty and democracy theory. First of all, this vision of sovereignty fails to describe the diverse forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. It speaks very sparingly of the people as a political actor. Moreover, the concept of organ sovereignty does not provide the theoretical resources to describe the intermediary bodies in the space between the state and the individual. The tradition of liberal democracy emphasises the importance of such bodies for maintaining popular control over state. Also, the idea of organ sovereignty, by reducing all power to a single legislature, ignores the demand for self-government coming from communities located within the same state and yet united by a certain collective identity. Today, democracy theorists are turning to the concepts of federalism in order to overcome the above-mentioned limitations set by the concept of organ sovereignty. So far, however, the concepts of federalism have not been very convincing in describing the various forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. Above all, they have failed to consistently justify the existence of multiple decision-making centres within a single polity. The article argues that the model of the federal polity proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his later work “Considerations on the mode of government in Poland” explains how within one polity multiple centres of collective decision-making can coexist. The model also provides an understanding of how citizen participation in multiple decision-making centres can be organised.

Agency and Identity in the Collective Self

Contemporary research on human sociality is heavily influenced by the social identity approach, positioning social categorization as the primary mechanism governing social life. Building on the distinction between agency and identity in the individual self (“I” vs. “Me”), we emphasize the analogous importance of distinguishing collective agency from collective identity (“We” vs. “Us”). While collective identity is anchored in the unique characteristics of group members, collective agency involves the adoption of a shared subjectivity that is directed toward some object of our attention, desire, emotion, belief, or action. These distinct components of the collective self are differentiated in terms of their mental representations, neurocognitive underpinnings, conditions of emergence, mechanisms of social convergence, and functional consequences. Overall, we show that collective agency provides a useful complement to the social categorization approach, with unique implications for multiple domains of human social life, including collective action, responsibility, dignity, violence, dominance, ritual, and morality.

Sculpture in Socialist Realism—Soviet Patterns and the Polish Reality

Socialist realism was more than just a trend in art. It was also, and perhaps predominantly, a method of educating the new post-revolutionary society in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In socialism, the state became the commissioner, consumer, and critic of art, treating it as a major propaganda tool. It is thus not surprising that the socialist realism patterns were imposed on artists working in those countries which found themselves in the Soviet sphere of influence after the end of the Second World War. In Poland, which was the Soviet Union’s closest neighbour and one of the larger countries in the post-war “Eastern Bloc”, socialist realism was the only permitted creative method in the years 1949–1956. The ideologists of the new art assigned a special role to sculpture, which, next to posters and murals, was considered the most socially accessible form of artistic expression due to the possibility of placing it in public space. Monuments as material carriers of ideology were used as an expression of power, but they also marked the places of strengthening collective identity. During the period of socialist realism in Poland, sculptural activity followed the main three directions: heroic, portrait, and architectural–decorative. Therefore, this paper aims to present theoretical and ideological assumptions relating to socialist sculpture and their confrontation with realisations in Poland during the period of the Soviet artistic doctrine. The paper also presents the aesthetic paradigms of socialist sculptures and their relationships with the canons of European art, and, for Poland, also with the native art, mainly sacral.

Caught Between the Notions of Ethnicity, Citizenship and Diaspora. The Case of the Bosniaks in Turkey

Along with many others, Bosniaks are an ethnic group within the contemporary Turkish nation with immigrant roots dating back to the last quarter of the 19th century. Constituting a significant ethno-demographic part of the Ottoman legacy within the modern Turkish nation, Bosniaks in Turkey have long refrained from identifying themselves with a separate ethnic or cultural identity when confronted with the assimilationist cultural policies of the new nation state. But, while adapting themselves to Turkish culture and identity, Bosniaks have also preserved a collective identity of Bosniakness, mostly owing to the fact that their population in Turkey has been fed by continuous migration waves in different periods. The aim of this study is to analyze the problematic development of a Bosniak identity in Turkey with regards to the cultural assimilation processes and continuous migration waves and other factors on both foreign and domestic scales. Based on the findings of the study, it can be concluded that Bosniaks in Turkey do not yet constitute a Bosniak diaspora, but rather they can be regarded as a diaspora in the making.