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MUST READ:
Us and Them - The Enduring Power
of Ethnic Nationalism
- Ethnic nationalism a formidable
force -
Jerry Z. Muller
Foreign Affairs
March/April 2008
Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic
nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some
enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by
modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global
politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has
captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society,
ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic
University of America. His most recent book is The Mind and the
Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought.
Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world,
Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in
politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic
origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three
generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated
by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot
be so different elsewhere.
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both
intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths
to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture,
often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems
based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to
the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into
their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But
for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have
lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities
often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to
political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of
nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of
ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet
occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.
A familiar and influential narrative of twentieth-century European
history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then
again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded
that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the
postwar decades, western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of
transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union
(EU). After the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational
framework spread eastward to encompass most of the continent.
Europeans entered a postnational era, which was not only a good
thing in itself but also a model for other regions. Nationalism,
in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful
liberal democratic order.
This story is widely believed by educated Europeans and even more
so, perhaps, by educated Americans. Recently, for example, in the
course of arguing that Israel ought to give up its claim to be a
Jewish state and dissolve itself into some sort of binational
entity with the Palestinians, the prominent historian Tony Judt
informed the readers of The New York Review of Books that "the
problem with Israel ... [is that] it has imported a
characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into
a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open
frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state'
... is an anachronism."
Yet the experience of the hundreds of Africans and Asians who
perish each year trying to get into Europe by landing on the coast
of Spain or Italy reveals that Europe's frontiers are not so open.
And a survey would show that whereas in 1900 there were many
states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant
nationality, by 2007 there were only two, and one of those,
Belgium, was close to breaking up. Aside from Switzerland, in
other words -- where the domestic ethnic balance of power is
protected by strict citizenship laws -- in Europe the "separatist
project" has not so much vanished as triumphed.
Far from having been superannuated in 1945, in many respects
ethnonationalism was at its apogee in the years immediately after
World War II. European stability during the Cold War era was in
fact due partly to the widespread fulfillment of the
ethnonationalist project. And since the end of the Cold War,
ethnonationalism has continued to reshape European borders.
In short, ethnonationalism has played a more profound and lasting
role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the
processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and
the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to reoccur
elsewhere. Increased urbanization, literacy, and political
mobilization; differences in the fertility rates and economic
performance of various ethnic groups; and immigration will
challenge the internal structure of states as well as their
borders. Whether politically correct or not, ethnonationalism will
continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century.
THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
There are two major ways of thinking about national identity. One
is that all people who live within a country's borders are part of
the nation, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious
origins. This liberal or civic nationalism is the conception with
which contemporary Americans are most likely to identify. But the
liberal view has competed with and often lost out to a different
view, that of ethnonationalism. The core of the ethnonationalist
idea is that nations are defined by a shared heritage, which
usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common
ethnic ancestry.
The ethnonationalist view has traditionally dominated through much
of Europe and has held its own even in the United States until
recently. For substantial stretches of U.S. history, it was
believed that only the people of English origin, or those who were
Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern Europe were real
Americans. It was only in 1965 that the reform of U.S. immigration
law abolished the system of national-origin quotas that had been
in place for several decades. This system had excluded Asians
entirely and radically restricted immigration from southern and
eastern Europe.
Ethnonationalism draws much of its emotive power from the notion
that the members of a nation are part of an extended family,
ultimately united by ties of blood. It is the subjective belief in
the reality of a common "we" that counts. The markers that
distinguish the in-group vary from case to case and time to time,
and the subjective nature of the communal boundaries has led some
to discount their practical significance. But as Walker Connor, an
astute student of nationalism, has noted, "It is not what is, but
what people believe is that has behavioral consequences." And the
central tenets of ethnonationalist belief are that nations exist,
that each nation ought to have its own state, and that each state
should be made up of the members of a single nation.
The conventional narrative of European history asserts that
nationalism was primarily liberal in the western part of the
continent and that it became more ethnically oriented as one moved
east. There is some truth to this, but it disguises a good deal as
well. It is more accurate to say that when modern states began to
form, political boundaries and ethnolinguistic boundaries largely
coincided in the areas along Europe's Atlantic coast. Liberal
nationalism, that is, was most apt to emerge in states that
already possessed a high degree of ethnic homogeneity. Long before
the nineteenth century, countries such as England, France,
Portugal, Spain, and Sweden emerged as nation-states in polities
where ethnic divisions had been softened by a long history of
cultural and social homogenization.
In the center of the continent, populated by speakers of German
and Italian, political structures were fragmented into hundreds of
small units. But in the 1860s and 1870s, this fragmentation was
resolved by the creation of Italy and Germany, so that almost all
Italians lived in the former and a majority of Germans lived in
the latter. Moving further east, the situation changed again. As
late as 1914, most of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe
was made up not of nation-states but of empires. The Hapsburg
empire comprised what are now Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
and Slovakia and parts of what are now Bosnia, Croatia, Poland,
Romania, Ukraine, and more. The Romanov empire stretched into Asia,
including what is now Russia and what are now parts of Poland,
Ukraine, and more. And the Ottoman Empire covered modern Turkey
and parts of today's Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia and
extended through much of the Middle East and North Africa as well.
Each of these empires was composed of numerous ethnic groups, but
they were not multinational in the sense of granting equal status
to the many peoples that made up their populaces. The governing
monarchy and landed nobility often differed in language and ethnic
origin from the urbanized trading class, whose members in turn
usually differed in language, ethnicity, and often religion from
the peasantry. In the Hapsburg and Romanov empires, for example,
merchants were usually Germans or Jews. In the Ottoman Empire,
they were often Armenians, Greeks, or Jews. And in each empire,
the peasantry was itself ethnically diverse.
Up through the nineteenth century, these societies were still
largely agrarian: most people lived as peasants in the countryside,
and few were literate. Political, social, and economic
stratifications usually correlated with ethnicity, and people did
not expect to change their positions in the system. Until the rise
of modern nationalism, all of this seemed quite unproblematic. In
this world, moreover, people of one religion, language, or culture
were often dispersed across various countries and empires. There
were ethnic Germans, for example, not only in the areas that
became Germany but also scattered throughout the Hapsburg and
Romanov empires. There were Greeks in Greece but also millions of
them in the Ottoman Empire (not to mention hundreds of thousands
of Muslim Turks in Greece). And there were Jews everywhere -- but
with no independent state of their own.
THE RISE OF ETHNONATIONALISM
Today, people tend to take the nation-state for granted as the
natural form of political association and regard empires as
anomalies. But over the broad sweep of recorded history, the
opposite is closer to the truth. Most people at most times have
lived in empires, with the nation-state the exception rather than
the rule. So what triggered the change?
The rise of ethnonationalism, as the sociologist Ernest Gellner
has explained, was not some strange historical mistake; rather, it
was propelled by some of the deepest currents of modernity.
Military competition between states created a demand for expanded
state resources and hence continual economic growth. Economic
growth, in turn, depended on mass literacy and easy communication,
spurring policies to promote education and a common language --
which led directly to conflicts over language and communal
opportunities.
Modern societies are premised on the egalitarian notion that in
theory, at least, anyone can aspire to any economic position. But
in practice, everyone does not have an equal likelihood of upward
economic mobility, and not simply because individuals have
different innate capabilities. For such advances depend in part on
what economists call "cultural capital," the skills and behavioral
patterns that help individuals and groups succeed. Groups with
traditions of literacy and engagement in commerce tend to excel,
for example, whereas those without such traditions tend to lag
behind.
As they moved into cities and got more education during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic groups with
largely peasant backgrounds, such as the Czechs, the Poles, the
Slovaks, and the Ukrainians found that key positions in the
government and the economy were already occupied -- often by
ethnic Armenians, Germans, Greeks, or Jews. Speakers of the same
language came to share a sense that they belonged together and to
define themselves in contrast to other communities. And eventually
they came to demand a nation state of their own, in which they
would be the masters, dominating politics, staffing the civil
service, and controlling commerce.
Ethnonationalism had a psychological basis as well as an economic
one. By creating a new and direct relationship between individuals
and the government, the rise of the modern state weakened
individuals' traditional bonds to intermediate social units, such
as the family, the clan, the guild, and the church. And by
spurring social and geographic mobility and a self-help mentality,
the rise of market-based economies did the same. The result was an
emotional vacuum that was often filled by new forms of
identification, often along ethnic lines.
Ethnonationalist ideology called for a congruence between the
state and the ethnically defined nation, with explosive results.
As Lord Acton recognized in 1862, "By making the state and the
nation commensurate with each other in theory, [nationalism]
reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities
that may be within the boundary. . . . According, therefore, to
the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body
which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races
are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in
a condition of dependence." And that is just what happened.
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
Nineteenth-century liberals, like many proponents of globalization
today, believed that the spread of international commerce would
lead people to recognize the mutual benefits that could come from
peace and trade, both within polities and between them. Socialists
agreed, although they believed that harmony would come only after
the arrival of socialism. Yet that was not the course that
twentieth-century history was destined to follow. The process of "making
the state and the nation commensurate" took a variety of forms,
from voluntary emigration (often motivated by governmental
discrimination against minority ethnicities) to forced deportation
(also known as "population transfer") to genocide. Although the
term "ethnic cleansing" has come into English usage only recently,
its verbal correlates in Czech, French, German, and Polish go back
much further. Much of the history of twentieth-century Europe, in
fact, has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic
disaggregation.
Massive ethnic disaggregation began on Europe's frontiers. In the
ethnically mixed Balkans, wars to expand the nation-states of
Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia at the expense of the ailing Ottoman
Empire were accompanied by ferocious interethnic violence. During
the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, almost half a million people left
their traditional homelands, either voluntarily or by force.
Muslims left regions under the control of Bulgarians, Greeks, and
Serbs; Bulgarians abandoned Greek-controlled areas of Macedonia;
Greeks fled from regions of Macedonia ceded to Bulgaria and Serbia.
World War I led to the demise of the three great
turn-of-the-century empires, unleashing an explosion of
ethnonationalism in the process. In the Ottoman Empire, mass
deportations and murder during the war took the lives of a million
members of the local Armenian minority in an early attempt at
ethnic cleansing, if not genocide. In 1919, the Greek government
invaded the area that would become Turkey, seeking to carve out a
"greater Greece" stretching all the way to Constantinople. Meeting
with initial success, the Greek forces looted and burned villages
in an effort to drive out the region's ethnic Turks. But Turkish
forces eventually regrouped and pushed the Greek army back,
engaging in their own ethnic cleansing against local Greeks along
the way. Then the process of population transfers was formalized
in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne: all ethnic Greeks were to go to
Greece, all Greek Muslims to Turkey. In the end, Turkey expelled
almost 1.5 million people, and Greece expelled almost 400,000.
Out of the breakup of the Hapsburg and Romanov empires emerged a
multitude of new countries. Many conceived of themselves as
ethnonational polities, in which the state existed to protect and
promote the dominant ethnic group. Yet of central and eastern
Europe's roughly 60 million people, 25 million continued to be
part of ethnic minorities in the countries in which they lived. In
most cases, the ethnic majority did not believe in trying to help
minorities assimilate, nor were the minorities always eager to do
so themselves. Nationalist governments openly discriminated in
favor of the dominant community. Government activities were
conducted solely in the language of the majority, and the civil
service was reserved for those who spoke it.
In much of central and eastern Europe, Jews had long played an
important role in trade and commerce. When they were given civil
rights in the late nineteenth century, they tended to excel in
professions requiring higher education, such as medicine and law,
and soon Jews or people of Jewish descent made up almost half the
doctors and lawyers in cities such as Budapest, Vienna, and Warsaw.
By the 1930s, many governments adopted policies to try to check
and reverse these advances, denying Jews credit and limiting their
access to higher education. In other words, the National
Socialists who came to power in Germany in 1933 and based their
movement around a "Germanness" they defined in contrast to "Jewishness"
were an extreme version of a more common ethnonationalist trend.
The politics of ethnonationalism took an even deadlier turn during
World War II. The Nazi regime tried to reorder the ethnic map of
the continent by force. Its most radical act was an attempt to rid
Europe of Jews by killing them all -- an attempt that largely
succeeded. The Nazis also used ethnic German minorities in
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere to enforce Nazi domination,
and many of the regimes allied with Germany engaged in their own
campaigns against internal ethnic enemies. The Romanian regime,
for example, murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews on its own,
without orders from Germany, and the government of Croatia
murdered not only its Jews but hundreds of thousands of Serbs and
Romany as well.
POSTWAR BUT NOT POSTNATIONAL
One might have expected that the Nazi regime's deadly policies and
crushing defeat would mark the end of the ethnonationalist era.
But in fact they set the stage for another massive round of
ethnonational transformation. The political settlement in central
Europe after World War I had been achieved primarily by moving
borders to align them with populations. After World War II, it was
the populations that moved instead. Millions of people were
expelled from their homes and countries, with at least the tacit
support of the victorious Allies.
Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin all
concluded that the expulsion of ethnic Germans from non-German
countries was a prerequisite to a stable postwar order. As
Churchill put it in a speech to the British parliament in December
1944, "Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able
to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be
no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. . . . A clean
sweep will be made. I am not alarmed at the prospect of the
disentanglement of population, nor am I alarmed by these large
transferences." He cited the Treaty of Lausanne as a precedent,
showing how even the leaders of liberal democracies had concluded
that only radically illiberal measures would eliminate the causes
of ethnonational aspirations and aggression.
Between 1944 and 1945, five million ethnic Germans from the
eastern parts of the German Reich fled westward to escape the
conquering Red Army, which was energetically raping and massacring
its way to Berlin. Then, between 1945 and 1947, the new
postliberation regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and
Yugoslavia expelled another seven million Germans in response to
their collaboration with the Nazis. Together, these measures
constituted the largest forced population movement in European
history, with hundreds of thousands of people dying along the way.
The handful of Jews who survived the war and returned to their
homes in eastern Europe met with so much anti-Semitism that most
chose to leave for good. About 220,000 of them made their way into
the American-occupied zone of Germany, from which most eventually
went to Israel or the United States. Jews thus essentially
vanished from central and eastern Europe, which had been the
center of Jewish life since the sixteenth century.
Millions of refugees from other ethnic groups were also evicted
from their homes and resettled after the war. This was due partly
to the fact that the borders of the Soviet Union had moved
westward, into what had once been Poland, while the borders of
Poland also moved westward, into what had once been Germany. To
make populations correspond to the new borders, 1.5 million Poles
living in areas that were now part of the Soviet Union were
deported to Poland, and 500,000 ethnic Ukrainians who had been
living in Poland were sent to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic. Yet another exchange of populations took place between
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with Slovaks transferred out of
Hungary and Magyars sent away from Czechoslovakia. A smaller
number of Magyars also moved to Hungary from Yugoslavia, with
Serbs and Croats moving in the opposite direction.
As a result of this massive process of ethnic unmixing, the
ethnonationalist ideal was largely realized: for the most part,
each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made
up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality. During the
Cold War, the few exceptions to this rule included Czechoslovakia,
the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. But these countries' subsequent
fate only demonstrated the ongoing vitality of ethnonationalism.
After the fall of communism, East and West Germany were unified
with remarkable rapidity, Czechoslovakia split peacefully into
Czech and Slovak republics, and the Soviet Union broke apart into
a variety of different national units. Since then, ethnic Russian
minorities in many of the post-Soviet states have gradually
immigrated to Russia, Magyars in Romania have moved to Hungary,
and the few remaining ethnic Germans in Russia have largely gone
to Germany. A million people of Jewish origin from the former
Soviet Union have made their way to Israel. Yugoslavia saw the
secession of Croatia and Slovenia and then descended into
ethnonational wars over Bosnia and Kosovo.
The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long play.
But the plot of that play -- the disaggregation of peoples and the
triumph of ethnonationalism in modern Europe -- is rarely
recognized, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the
spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and
unappreciated.
DECOLONIZATION AND AFTER
The effects of ethnonationalism, of course, have hardly been
confined to Europe. For much of the developing world,
decolonization has meant ethnic disaggregation through the
exchange or expulsion of local minorities.
The end of the British Raj in 1947 brought about the partition of
the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, along with an orgy of
violence that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Fifteen million
people became refugees, including Muslims who went to Pakistan and
Hindus who went to India. Then, in 1971, Pakistan itself,
originally unified on the basis of religion, dissolved into
Urdu-speaking Pakistan and Bengali-speaking Bangladesh.
In the former British mandate of Palestine, a Jewish state was
established in 1948 and was promptly greeted by the revolt of the
indigenous Arab community and an invasion from the surrounding
Arab states. In the war that resulted, regions that fell under
Arab control were cleansed of their Jewish populations, and Arabs
fled or were forced out of areas that came under Jewish control.
Some 750,000 Arabs left, primarily for the surrounding Arab
countries, and the remaining 150,000 constituted only about a
sixth of the population of the new Jewish state. In the years
afterward, nationalist-inspired violence against Jews in Arab
countries propelled almost all of the more than 500,000 Jews there
to leave their lands of origin and immigrate to Israel. Likewise,
in 1962 the end of French control in Algeria led to the forced
emigration of Algerians of European origin (the so-called
pieds-noirs), most of whom immigrated to France. Shortly
thereafter, ethnic minorities of Asian origin were forced out of
postcolonial Uganda. The legacy of the colonial era, moreover, is
hardly finished. When the European overseas empires dissolved,
they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut
across ethnic patterns of settlement and whose internal
populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to
suppose that these boundaries will be permanent. As societies in
the former colonial world modernize, becoming more urban, literate,
and politically mobilized, the forces that gave rise to
ethnonationalism and ethnic disaggregation in Europe are apt to
drive events there, too.
THE BALANCE SHEET
Analysts of ethnic disaggregation typically focus on its
destructive effects, which is understandable given the direct
human suffering it has often entailed. But such attitudes can
yield a distorted perspective by overlooking the less obvious
costs and also the important benefits that ethnic separation has
brought.
Economists from Adam Smith onward, for example, have argued that
the efficiencies of competitive markets tend to increase with the
markets' size. The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into
smaller nation-states, each with its own barriers to trade, was
thus economically irrational and contributed to the region's
travails in the interwar period. Much of subsequent European
history has involved attempts to overcome this and other economic
fragmentation, culminating in the EU.
Ethnic disaggregation also seems to have deleterious effects on
cultural vitality. Precisely because most of their citizens share
a common cultural and linguistic heritage, the homogenized states
of postwar Europe have tended to be more culturally insular than
their demographically diverse predecessors. With few Jews in
Europe and few Germans in Prague, that is, there are fewer Franz
Kafkas.
Forced migrations generally penalize the expelling countries and
reward the receiving ones. Expulsion is often driven by a majority
group's resentment of a minority group's success, on the mistaken
assumption that achievement is a zero-sum game. But countries that
got rid of their Armenians, Germans, Greeks, Jews, and other
successful minorities deprived themselves of some of their most
talented citizens, who simply took their skills and knowledge
elsewhere. And in many places, the triumph of ethnonational
politics has meant the victory of traditionally rural groups over
more urbanized ones, which possess just those skills desirable in
an advanced industrial economy.
But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict,
it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When
French textbooks began with "Our ancestors the Gauls" or when
Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of "this island race," they
appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual
trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are
not only compatible; they can be complementary.
One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War
II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of
its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of
conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic
and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are
fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to
the most stable territorial configuration in European history.
These ethnically homogeneous polities have displayed a great deal
of internal solidarity, moreover, facilitating government programs,
including domestic transfer payments, of various kinds. When the
Swedish Social Democrats were developing plans for Europe's most
extensive welfare state during the interwar period, the political
scientist Sheri Berman has noted, they conceived of and sold them
as the construction of a folkhemmet, or "people's home."
Several decades of life in consolidated, ethnically homogeneous
states may even have worked to sap ethnonationalism's own
emotional power. Many Europeans are now prepared, and even eager,
to participate in transnational frameworks such as the EU, in part
because their perceived need for collective self-determination has
largely been satisfied.
NEW ETHNIC MIXING
Along with the process of forced ethnic disaggregation over the
last two centuries, there has also been a process of ethnic mixing
brought about by voluntary emigration. The general pattern has
been one of emigration from poor, stagnant areas to richer and
more dynamic ones.
In Europe, this has meant primarily movement west and north,
leading above all to France and the United Kingdom. This pattern
has continued into the present: as a result of recent migration,
for example, there are now half a million Poles in Great Britain
and 200,000 in Ireland. Immigrants from one part of Europe who
have moved to another and ended up staying there have tended to
assimilate and, despite some grumbling about a supposed invasion
of "Polish plumbers," have created few significant problems.
The most dramatic transformation of European ethnic balances in
recent decades has come from the immigration of people of Asian,
African, and Middle Eastern origin, and here the results have been
mixed. Some of these groups have achieved remarkable success, such
as the Indian Hindus who have come to the United Kingdom. But in
Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United
Kingdom, and elsewhere, on balance the educational and economic
progress of Muslim immigrants has been more limited and their
cultural alienation greater.
How much of the problem can be traced to discrimination, how much
to the cultural patterns of the immigrants themselves, and how
much to the policies of European governments is difficult to
determine. But a number of factors, from official multiculturalism
to generous welfare states to the ease of contact with ethnic
homelands, seem to have made it possible to create ethnic islands
where assimilation into the larger culture and economy is limited.
As a result, some of the traditional contours of European politics
have been upended. The left, for example, has tended to embrace
immigration in the name of egalitarianism and multiculturalism.
But if there is indeed a link between ethnic homogeneity and a
population's willingness to support generous income-redistribution
programs, the encouragement of a more heterogeneous society may
end up undermining the left's broader political agenda. And some
of Europe's libertarian cultural propensities have already clashed
with the cultural illiberalism of some of the new immigrant
communities.
Should Muslim immigrants not assimilate and instead develop a
strong communal identification along religious lines, one
consequence might be a resurgence of traditional ethnonational
identities in some states -- or the development of a new European
identity defined partly in contradistinction to Islam (with the
widespread resistance to the extension of full EU membership to
Turkey being a possible harbinger of such a shift).
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
Since ethnonationalism is a direct consequence of key elements of
modernization, it is likely to gain ground in societies undergoing
such a process. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it
remains among the most vital -- and most disruptive -- forces in
many parts of the contemporary world.
More or less subtle forms of ethnonationalism, for example, are
ubiquitous in immigration policy around the globe. Many countries
-- including Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Hungary,
Ireland, Israel, Serbia, and Turkey -- provide automatic or rapid
citizenship to the members of diasporas of their own dominant
ethnic group, if desired. Chinese immigration law gives priority
and benefits to overseas Chinese. Portugal and Spain have
immigration policies that favor applicants from their former
colonies in the New World. Still other states, such as Japan and
Slovakia, provide official forms of identification to members of
the dominant national ethnic group who are noncitizens that permit
them to live and work in the country. Americans, accustomed by the
U.S. government's official practices to regard differential
treatment on the basis of ethnicity to be a violation of
universalist norms, often consider such policies exceptional, if
not abhorrent. Yet in a global context, it is the insistence on
universalist criteria that seems provincial.
Increasing communal consciousness and shifting ethnic balances are
bound to have a variety of consequences, both within and between
states, in the years to come. As economic globalization brings
more states into the global economy, for example, the first fruits
of that process will often fall to those ethnic groups best
positioned by history or culture to take advantage of the new
opportunities for enrichment, deepening social cleavages rather
than filling them in. Wealthier and higher-achieving regions might
try to separate themselves from poorer and lower-achieving ones,
and distinctive homogeneous areas might try to acquire sovereignty
-- courses of action that might provoke violent responses from
defenders of the status quo.
Of course, there are multiethnic societies in which ethnic
consciousness remains weak, and even a more strongly developed
sense of ethnicity may lead to political claims short of
sovereignty. Sometimes, demands for ethnic autonomy or
self-determination can be met within an existing state. The claims
of the Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, and the Scots in
the United Kingdom have been met in this manner, at least for now.
But such arrangements remain precarious and are subject to
recurrent renegotiation. In the developing world, accordingly,
where states are more recent creations and where the borders often
cut across ethnic boundaries, there is likely to be further ethnic
disaggregation and communal conflict. And as scholars such as
Chaim Kaufmann have noted, once ethnic antagonism has crossed a
certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within
a single polity becomes far more difficult.
This unfortunate reality creates dilemmas for advocates of
humanitarian intervention in such conflicts, because making and
keeping peace between groups that have come to hate and fear one
another is likely to require costly ongoing military missions
rather than relatively cheap temporary ones. When communal
violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of
large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a
cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even
undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of
conflict down the road.
Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such
intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of
refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue. The
challenge for the international community in such cases is to
separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding
in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and
providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption.
The bill for all of this will be huge, but it will rarely be
greater than the material costs of interjecting and maintaining a
foreign military presence large enough to pacify the rival ethnic
combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing.
Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to
stress the contingent elements of group identity -- the extent to
which national consciousness is culturally and politically
manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They regularly invoke
Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if
demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept
of its power. It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity
is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it
would be a mistake to think that because nationalism is partly
constructed it is therefore fragile or infinitely malleable.
Ethnonationalism was not a chance detour in European history: it
corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit that
are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a
crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or
another, it will remain for many generations to come. One can only
profit from facing it directly.
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