The fragile ‘We’: What is at stake is the symbolic boundary of membership

The crisis in liberal democracies is not just about inflation, migration, or polarisation. It is about the slow erosion of a shared “we” that once held very different people together. There is not a single issue behind the malaise of the West, but a combination of real problems (particularly those related to migration) and the general sense that governments are incapable of dealing with them. In the US, only 22 per cent of the adult population trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, and a survey across 30 European countries showed the share of people who say they “tend to trust” their national parliament or political parties is often in the 20–40 per cent range, and has declined by around 5–15 percentage points in many countries compared with the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

Such levels of distrust cannot go on forever without existing institutions taking lasting damage. If institutions depend on deep cultural and emotional commitments and not just rational benefits, the ongoing institutional fatigue in Europe and North America could soon reach a critical point. For decades, liberal theory promised that societies could be held together by procedures and rights alone. People would join overlapping associations, pursue their own conceptions of the good life, and tolerate others doing the same. Politics would be reduced to technocratic management of Enlightened individuals, held together by pure economic interests.

This, of course was also the EU project in a nutshell: The once distinct nations of Europe would become nothing more than administrative units named Germany, Austria, France, etc. but they would not have any meaning beyond that. If it all, the only meaning permitted to continue was an endless tyranny of guilt, where once proud nations could only look into a future dedicated to dealing with their past. Culture, in this vision, was an optional extra, a kind of emotional gumball machine dispensing meaning without ever demanding real loyalty. Yet the last 25 years suggest that this thin, procedural “we” is not enough.

From Washington to Warsaw, populist movements thrive on promising something (although often only vaguely) liberalism never fully delivered and in its most modern form outright rejects: Thick emotional belonging. When people feel culturally dislocated the way they do in Europe, the promise of equal equality no longer compensates for the loss of a shared story and a shared past. Liberalism assumed that once people realised culture was a tool for individual fulfilment in a world where only the presence matters, conflicts between cultures would fade. This was always a misconception, papered over by an economy that delivered enough prosperity to conceal the growing cultural dissatisfaction accumulating underneath the surface. Once the double whammy of economic crisis and unfettered migration hit between 2010 and 2015, it was foreseeable that this model would come to an end rather quickly. 

This is why arguments about numbers, labour-market needs, or fiscal impacts rarely settle anything. What is ultimately at stake is the symbolic boundary of membership. Populist actors understand this intuitively: They frame migration as the moment when an already fragile community risks being dissolved into a mere population, administered from above rather than bound together from within. Liberal elites, by contrast, often insist that as long as everyone enjoys the same rights and opportunities, the question of collective identity can be postponed or bracketed. But postponing it has only made it return in more radical, less manageable forms.

A similar pattern appears in the broader rhetoric of “diversity” and “inclusion”. These terms promise a frictionless coexistence of ways of life, united by nothing more demanding than mutual respect. Yet the more diversity is affirmed in abstract, universal terms, the less clear it becomes what, if anything, citizens are supposed to share beyond legal status. When overlapping minorities become the primary lens through which politics is seen, majorities begin to feel both morally discredited and politically dispossessed. They no longer recognise themselves in their institutions, and they are no longer sure that their sacrifices—to pay taxes, to serve in the military, to accept redistributive policies—are reciprocated by others.

This erosion of reciprocity feeds directly into institutional distrust. If parliaments, courts, and bureaucracies seem to reflect only the values of a narrow, metropolitan class, it becomes tempting to read every policy dispute as a clash between an insulated elite and an unrepresented “real people”. The language of liberal neutrality then appears not as a safeguard of fairness, but as a smokescreen hiding very particular cultural preferences: Mobility over rootedness, autonomy over obligation, self-expression over restraint. Once this perception takes hold, even well‑intentioned technocratic solutions are viewed with suspicion, because they are seen as instruments of an alien way of life.

It is against this backdrop that so‑called “illiberal democrats” have gained traction. They promise to reverse the hierarchy between procedures and people: Not rules first and identity later, but identity first and rules as its expression. Their central claim is simple and powerful: Democracy without a thick, historically grounded “we” is not democracy at all, but a managerial regime. By appealing to religion, nation, or tradition, they offer a sense of moral orientation that procedural liberalism has neglected. At the same time, they often reduce pluralism to conditional tolerance: minorities may stay, but only as long as they do not challenge the dominant culture.

Liberal critics are right to worry that this project slides easily into majoritarian domination and the erosion of individual rights. Yet their own position is weaker than they admit, because they rarely acknowledge that liberal orders also rest on substantive cultural commitments. The way forward, then, cannot consist in returning to a naïve faith in procedures, nor in embracing an exclusionary politics of homogeneity. Liberal democracies must instead learn to articulate a more demanding common life that is both emotionally resonant and normatively constrained. This means accepting that some values—non‑cruelty, non‑humiliation, the equal civic standing of women and men, the protection of religious and ideological dissent—are not up for negotiation, even if this limits certain traditional practices. But it also means recognising that citizens need more than individual rights to feel at home: They need institutions, narratives, and rituals that acknowledge their histories and give them a role in a shared project that stretches across generations.

Concretely, this requires re‑imagining key sites of socialisation. Schools cannot be reduced to spaces of skills acquisition and identity affirmation; they are one of the few remaining institutions where a common language of citizenship can be taught and practiced. Public media cannot content themselves with mirroring fragmentation; they can help cultivate a vocabulary in which conflicts are framed as disagreements among members of the same political community, not as battles between enemies. Local associations, religious communities, and civic organisations must again be seen not as private hobbies, but as mediating structures that bridge the gap between isolated individuals and distant states.

Such efforts will not eliminate deep disagreements on migration, morality, or national purpose. They can, however, change the tone and stakes of those disagreements. When people feel that their way of life is at least seen and partially honoured in the public sphere, they are more willing to accept losses in particular policy battles. When they experience institutions as extensions of a shared story rather than as instruments of a rival tribe, trust has a chance to recover. The task for liberal democracies in the coming decades is therefore not to escape the politics of identity, but to practice it more honestly: To admit that they are, and must be, bearers of a particular moral culture, and to invite their citizens—old and new alike—into a common home that can survive both prosperity and crisis.