Ethnic Conflict

An ethnic minority is a social group that is set apart or sets itself apart from the rest of the community based on race, language, nationality, or culture.² Sometimes it entails official recognition, such as the Nazi requirement that Jews wear a distinctive armband or the affirmative action program intended to help American blacks.

Many cases of ethnic conflict originate in past conquests and migrations. The Welsh and Scots maintain a sense of identity in the UK, as do (to cite a few examples) the Basques in Spain, Biafrans in Nigeria, Kurds in Iraq, Uighurs in China, and Xingu in Brazil. In the US, ethnic diversity is the result of voluntary immigration, conquest of indigenous peoples, and the legacy of slavery.

States have tried six major strategies for dealing with minorities. The first and most reprehensible is genocide.⁴ There have been military campaigns that approach it, including Scipio’s destruction of Carthage (salting the fields so that crops could not grow to prevent rebuilding). Additional examples are Julius Caesar’s campaigns against the Gauls and Helveti, the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, the campaigns of Timurlane (marked by the towers of skulls he left behind), and the Jacobin campaign against the Royalists in the Vendee (Secher 2003). Lord Amherst’s effort to spread smallpox among American Indians during Pontiac’s rebellion and the highland clearances following the battle of Culloden were genocidal in intent if not result.

Acts of war such as the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima do not qualify as genocide simply because many were killed or because years later armchair strategists armed with selective hindsight judge them to have been militarily unnecessary.⁶ On the other hand, killing just a few hundred people can be genocide if the victims are members of a small tribe. Genocide properly defined is an effort to destroy an ethnic group regardless of numbers. International conventions specifically list the deprivation of food, medical services, shelter, or water, environmental destruction, forced sterilization, and forced transfer of children to divorce them from their native culture as genocidal.

The second method nations have used to deal with unwanted minorities is expulsion, which the Spaniards tried with the Jews and Muslims in the fifteenth century, the Americans tried in the nineteenth century for dealing with ex-slaves, and several African nations tried in the twentieth century for dealing with East Indians. The American effort was unusual in being voluntary and in helping the emigrants to establish their own country, Liberia.

The third method is segregation. It has taken many forms, from the ghettos of Eastern Europe through the apartheid of South Africa. Many immigrant groups have suffered segregation in varying forms in the United States (Myrdal 1944). Sometimes, it was a matter of government policy, sometimes as in the case of the treatment of early Irish immigrants to America, a matter of social pressure without legal sanction.

The fourth method is internal migration. Stalin and the czars before him moved whole populations⁷ away from their homelands to make revolt less likely or to provide needed labor in under-populated areas. American Indians were forced onto reservations, sometimes far from their traditional homeland. The method hardly is new: the Babylonian exile of the Jews probably is history’s most famous instance, although the Assyrians⁸ and even earlier the Hebrews themselves under David practiced the method.

Switzerland’s three major ethnic groups are concentrated in separate can-tons enjoying considerable autonomy. Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Lapps, Scots, and Welsh are among many groups that are similarly concentrated in Europe and exhibit considerable cultural pride but little serious interest in separatism. The same situation exists in many other countries around the world. Many Quebecois want independence in their hearts, but know in their minds that it will not work, so the issue festers without resolution and occasional symbolic votes but without violence either. Many immigrants to the United States concentrated geographically by ethnicity, often in places where the climate and terrain were similar to their homelands. The Basques came with their sheep and dogs to the mountains of Oregon and California. The Scandinavians chose the upper Mississippi. The Germans settled Pennsylvania and Missouri. Those who stayed in the cities formed ethnic neighborhoods, which soon had names like “Chinatown” or “Little Saigon.”

The fifth method is assimilation, its metaphor the melting pot. Roman citizenship was desirable and extended regardless of ethnicity. British passports were available to colonials. The French forced assimilation of Langue d’oc after the Albigensian Crusade and centuries later in their African colonies where John Dewey was bemused by black children chanting “All of our ancestors were Gauls” in French. Traditionally, immigrants to the United States, although they might live in ethnic neighborhoods or even regions and maintain much of their old culture, tried to assimilate. The Civil Rights movement and the resulting legislation and court decisions was an overdue effort to assimilate black Americans into the majority culture.

The sixth method is pluralism, its metaphor the salad bowl in which each ingredient maintains its own identity but contributes to the whole. It rests on a combination of toleration, interdependence, and separatism. In part, it was a reaction to the difficulties encountered in achieving the dreams of the Civil Rights movement. Some blacks initially demanded integration; some now demand separation. The charge that assimilation requires extinguishing cultures is largely untrue. Millions of Americans maintain ties to their ancestral countries—it is in fact a national strength in a world of multinational business. The American approach at its best always has exhibited both assimilation and pluralism. John Steinbeck (1966) puts it elegantly:

Our land is of every kind geologically and climatically, and our people are of every kind also—of every race, of every ethnic category—and yet our land is one nation, and our people are Americans. The motto of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum,” is a fact… In the beginning, we crept, scuttled, escaped, were driven out of the safe and settled corners of the earth to the fringes of a strange and hostile wilderness… Many others were sent as punishment for penal offenses. Far from welcoming us, this continent resisted us… America did not exist. Four centuries of work, of bloodshed, of loneliness and fear created this land. We built America and the process made us Americans—a new breed, rooted in all races, stained and tinted with all colors, a seeming ethnic anarchy. Then, in a little, little time, we became more alike than we were different—a new society; not great, but fitted by our very faults for greatness, E Pluribus Unum… The surges of the new restless, needy, and strong—grudgingly brought in for purposes of hard labor and cheap wages—were resisted, resented, and accepted only when a new and different wave came in. Consider how the Germans clotted for self-defense, until the Irish took the resented place: how the Irish became “Americans” against the Poles, the Slavs against the Italians. On the West Coast the Chinese ceased to be enemies only when the Japanese arrived, and they in the face of the invasions of Hindus, Filipinos, and Mexicans… All this has been true, and yet in one or two, certainly not more than three generations, each ethnic group has clicked into place in the union without losing the pluribus.