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US AND THEM: THE ENDURING POWER OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM
Jerry Z. Muller
Foreign Affairs Magazine
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301fae ssay87203/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html
Feb 27 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.
Jerry Z. Muller
Foreign Affairs Magazine
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301fae ssay87203/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html
Feb 27 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.