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  • The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism

    http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87203 /jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html


    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


    Copyright 2002--2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
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