How can we define these "identity ideologies" against which we are trying, in this Observatory, to alert public opinion and those who govern us? How can we trace their genesis? Why fight them?

An ideology is a representation of the world. An identity ideology is a representation of the world through the prism of an identity. Ethnic, sexual, physical, cultural, religious identity, it doesn't matter. Identitarianism is the opposite of universalism. It is the segregation of the individual in a category, it is the attribution of a label thanks to which one believes one can identify him. It consists of locking the other, or even locking oneself, in an "identity" which, most often, has not been chosen. It consists of defining people, not according to their human qualities, but only according to appearance; it is, before to see a human being in front of you, to see a black person or a white person, a man or a woman, a German or a Spaniard, a Christian or a Muslim, a fat person or a thin person.

Where do identity ideologies come from? Most often from the fear of the other, from the desire to isolate oneself, from the desire to take refuge in one's community in the face of the rest of the world perceived as aggressive. And from this victim stance a new aggressiveness is born, which can then take on incalculable proportions. The Nazis seized upon Nordic mythologies to forge an ideology placing an imaginary "race" above all others, denying the primacy of the individual to conceive that belonging to a supposed ethnic group was the primary purpose of the existence of men on earth, rejecting the belonging of Jews and Blacks to the human race. If the monstrosity of the Shoah remains a unique phenomenon in the history of humanity, identity politics is responsible for many other crimes throughout the contemporary world.

Why fight identity ideologies? Are they right-wing or left-wing? Of course, the identity politics that we see in our Western societies is not comparable to inter-ethnic massacres. But if identity politics has its roots in the racist and anti-Semitic ideology of the extreme right, it has found imitators in an uninhibited "left", which has come to essentialize belonging to a sex or an ethnic group, to break the universalism stemming from the Enlightenment in order to compartmentalize individuals. What alerts us is that identity ideologies have developed in an environment that is universalist by essence: the University. As a single example of this drift: Columbia University in New York, one of the most prestigious in the United States, has decided that graduation celebrations could be separated according to ethnic, sexual, or even depending on the income level of students "to provide a more intimate setting [for] students who self-identify in different ways."

These identity drifts are the very justification for our fight.