Respect My Right to Dominate

Recognition Politics and Foundationalist Representation

Abstract

In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representation has enabled reactionary political forces, which increasingly recognize its inner contradictions and turn them against the basic principle of universal dignity, with the clear aim of corroding the whole recognition political edifice from the inside out. Taking the field of the symbolic construction of European identity as our main focus, we will reconstruct how the takeover of recognition politics has destabilized political and historic representation in Europe and ended up undermining European integration rather than enhancing it. Following one of the most important theorists of political and historic representation, Frank Ankersmit, we introduce the conceptual distinction between antifoundationalist vs. founda-tionalist representation in order to account for the series of decisive institutional changes that since the 1970s have contributed to the intersection of two separate fields into ‘memory politics’ and led to the rise of a new and inherently non-democratic foundationalism, of which recognition politics is one of the main symptoms.