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The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
By Jerry Z. Muller
Foreign Affairs , March/April 2008
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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
Copyright 2002--2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
By 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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