ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights that politics is not only what it sometimes appears to be to the reader of newspapers or political science analyses – a certain amount of commands issued by the authority, policies, statements, parliamentary or administrative procedures and the like. More importantly, political legitimacy is also different from consensus and cannot be gauged by votes or opinion polls. Bearing the connection between legitimacy and identity in mind, three aspects now need to be clarified. First, the relevant identity is the political, neither the cultural nor the social one. The belief that the first cannot stand without being merged with the second and the third is based on an unjustified generalisation of national identity, which is not a timeless or definitive model, but only the most relevant example of political identity in modern history after the French Revolution.
