Polarization and The Third: How Attempts to Eliminate Difference Can Intensify Conflict
Essay · John Borneman on Why Germany's Reunification Story Reveals the Logic of Polarization — and How an "Intersubjective Third" Can Interrupt It
Why Do Attempts to Eliminate Difference Often Intensify Conflict?
Anthropologist John Borneman traces a paradox through Germany's transformation from Cold War division to reunification and beyond: when the fragile capacity to live with internal difference collapses, oppositions harden into self-sealing dyads sustained by projection, resentment, and the circulation of hate. What breaks such circuits is not the elimination of difference but the emergence of an intersubjective third — a presence that belongs to neither side and cannot be fully claimed by either. In this fifth and final essay of his FoD series on the interiority of difference, Borneman argues that Germany's "new Germans" — refugees who have become citizens — now occupy precisely that position.
Essential points in this essay:
Polarized dyads are self-sealing: each side confirms the other’s worst projections, and the circuit becomes its own justification — opposition itself becomes the organizing principle of political life
Germany’s arc from Cold War division through reunification to anti-immigrant resentment shows how attempts to eliminate difference can intensify the very antagonisms they seek to resolve
An “intersubjective third” — a presence belonging to neither pole — does not resolve opposition but reframes it, creating enough distance for reflection and enough common ground for negotiation
About the author: John Borneman is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His most recent book is I Was Married to a Horse, and Other Tales of an Accidental Anthropologist (2026, HAU Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press).
Differences within the self or within societies do not always remain negotiable. When the fragile capacity to live with internal difference collapses, they crystallize into hardened oppositions — left and right, secular and religious, native and foreigner. When this occurs, political life becomes organized around polarized dyads that appear mutually exclusive and morally irreconcilable. The boundary between inside and outside no longer shifts; it freezes into emotional structures sustained by projection, suspicion, and the circulation of hate. Hate rarely remains where it begins. It is deposited in ideological opponents, returned in modified form, and sent onward again, creating a chain of mutual confirmation in which opposition itself becomes the organizing principle of political life.
Germany’s transformation from division to reunification offers a particularly clear historical example of how the attempt to eliminate difference can, paradoxically, intensify polarization — and how it might eventually be interrupted.
Cold War Opposition: Asymmetrical Comparison, Not Yet Hate
After 1945, Germany was occupied and partitioned by the four victorious powers into a democratic and free market zone on the West side, authoritarian and collectivist on the East. Between 1948 and 1989, the two systems confronted one another across a fortified border, each projecting its anxieties, failures, and possible dystopic futures onto the other. Yet this Cold War opposition was structured less by hate than by asymmetrical comparison. West Germans regarded the socialist state with arrogance and condescension, convinced their system represented the inevitable future. East Germans experienced the West through resentment and envy, while entertaining, with varying conviction, the illusion that their socialism represented an alternative future. The antagonism was real — and heavily armed — but it remained fundamentally about ideology: each defined itself against the other while depending on that opposition to stabilize its own identity.
When the Wall fell in 1989, the opposition was resolved by dissolving the East German state. Reunification meant the rapid transplantation of Western political and economic structures into the East. Entire regions were reorganized according to prewar political order and current West German market logic. The fantasy was simple: the East could be remade in the image of the West. East Germans voted for that remake, and for a decade it appeared plausible — with massive federal subsidies, infrastructure improved, consumer goods flooded in, and many East Germans experienced new mobility and opportunity. Yet the process also produced dislocation and loss. Industries vanished, property was privatized, local elites were displaced, and biographies built within the socialist system suddenly lost their social value.
From Ostalgie to Displaced Hostility
One early response in the East was Ostalgie — a reimagining of everyday life as it was under socialism that, however questionable its veracity, allowed some former East Germans to reclaim fragments of dignity from a vanished world. But nostalgia gradually gave way to something sharper. Starting around 2010, resentment toward political elites, European integration, and immigration became increasingly visible in the East, where inequality had deepened and feelings of abandonment had gained force. The projections that had once structured the East–West divide never disappeared; they were constantly displaced onto new fissures. When the Arab Spring produced refugee flows and politicians and media began talking of a “refugee crisis,” migrants — especially those from Syria and the Middle East — became containers for anti-foreign and anti-Muslim anxieties built up over a century of restructuring and symbolic dislocation. Resentment toward West German dominance found a new object.
The arrival of more than a million asylum seekers in the long summer of 2015 intensified these tensions but also produced a remarkable government-endorsed Willkommenskultur that framed their reception as a moral and civic responsibility. Hundreds of thousands of Germans volunteered in shelters, organized language courses, and helped newcomers navigate asylum bureaucracies. I witnessed this in Berlin, where gestures of hospitality were ubiquitous — though not equally everywhere. In many places, especially the former East, ambivalence crystalized into open xenophobia.
“Attempts to eliminate difference entirely often intensify the very antagonisms they seek to resolve.”
The sequence — Cold War opposition, reunification, internal resentment, displaced hostility, polarization — reveals an unintended consequence of efforts to unify: attempts to eliminate difference entirely often intensify the very antagonisms they seek to resolve.
The Intersubjective Third: Interrupting the Closed Circuit
To understand how such antagonisms might be positively transformed, we must look not only at institutions and interests but at what moves beneath them — the unconscious circuits through which hostility passes between opposing camps, gathering force with each exchange. A polarized dyad is self-sealing: each side confirms the other’s worst projections, and the circuit becomes its own justification. What breaks it is not the elimination of difference or embrace of a harmony ideology but the emergence of an intersubjective third — a presence, a relationship, a shared but unowned space that belongs to neither side and cannot be fully claimed by either. The third does not resolve the opposition; it reframes it, creating enough distance for reflection and enough common ground for negotiation. It arises not from conscious design but from accidental encounters, from the overlap of two worlds that produces an everyday reconciliation that neither could generate alone.
Willkommenskultur was not itself an intersubjective third. It was a German counter-move — residents of Germany acting against the historical legacy of Zivilcourage‘s absence, the long national habit of looking away. They were countering those Germans who are, as the majority have been historically, decidedly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. It was, in other words, a confrontation within Germany, between Germans — still a dyad, still structured by the same polarized logic it sought to interrupt.
New Germans as the Third
The Syrian and other refugees who received this welcome were not initially in a position to act as a third. They were newcomers, not yet subjects in the full civic sense — without language, citizenship, and standing, without the footing from which one can speak and be heard. But that is changing. Those I know have become citizens and are employed. Arabic food in restaurants has, at least in cities, become a frequent culinary choice. And in Berlin, where I live, the representations of Arabic cultures is concentrated in two neighborhoods but present in all of them. They are “new Germans” now, not carriers of the old polarizations: neither the resentments of the former East nor the complacencies of the former West, neither the history of fear of the anti-immigrant right nor the sometimes-patronizing sympathy of the liberal left.
It is precisely this position — neither fully inside nor outside, belonging yet not-quite-belonging — that gives them the capacity to interrupt the closed loop. They are an intersubjective third that Germany’s polarization cannot easily absorb or dismiss if there are opportunities for encounters. But that capacity remains latent until it is exercised. New Germans must claim their place in public life and speak from their own experience — not as symbols of successful incorporation, not as representatives of their religion or ethnicity, nor of their country of origin, but as residents whose singular trajectories have something nonpareil to say about what it means to live with difference from within.
“Polarized societies do not escape conflict by eliminating difference but by creating relationships in which difference no longer returns as hate.”
The future of difference lies not in perfecting our systems of classification but in strengthening our capacity to live with contradiction and transformation — in ourselves and in others. That capacity — to hold difference in new relational forms — is never given in advance. It is made, slowly and unevenly, accelerated through the encounters with an intersubjective third that interrupts the closed circuits of polarization. Polarized societies do not escape conflict by eliminating difference but by creating relationships in which difference no longer returns as hate.
References
Borneman, John. 2011. “Daydreaming, Intimacy, and the Intersubjective Third in Fieldwork Encounters in Syria,” American Ethnologist 38 (2): 234–48.
Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge University Press.
Ogden, Thomas. 2006. “The Analytic Third: An Overview.” Available at therapyvlado.com.
John Borneman is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His most recent book is I Was Married to a Horse, and Other Tales of an Accidental Anthropologist (2026, HAU Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press). His ethnographic research has spanned Berlin, Lebanon, Syria, and the United States, with sustained attention to kinship, political authority, accountability after violence, and the inner lives of social actors.
Futures of Difference is produced by Steven Vertovec at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science (formerly the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity).