The collapse of Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been one of the most genuinely devolved, ethnically diverse states in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, demonstrates how rapidly such arrangements can disintegrate in the aftermath of political change Sekulic, With the initial breakaway of Slovenia, followed by the wars between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, what had once been a unified power-sharing arrangement rapidly degenerated into a power struggle articulated in nationalist terms.
The split with Montenegro, and the declaration of independence by Kosovo in , finally left Serbia on its own, thus completing the total disintegration of what had been a unified state since While Yugoslavia was falling apart, much of the rest of Eastern Europe, having emerged from the political control of the Soviet system, was involved in a scramble to join the European Union.
Just as one part of the continent was fragmenting into an increasing number of units defined by their dominant ethnic population, other parts, comprising firmly established states, were voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty in order to enjoy the benefits of an enlarged economic and political community. Thus, a continuing dialectic of national fission and fusion demonstrates that there is nothing inevitable about the strength and direction of nationalist sentiment, which can wax and wane depending on a range of economic, social, and political factors.
The component parts of the former Yugoslavia would also join the scramble for EU membership in the early decades of the 21st century. While European consolidation during and after the s was a remarkable transition from centuries of rivalry and warfare, even this has to be seen as an ever-changing development.
After having narrowly defeated the Scottish independence referendum in September , the United Kingdom was locked in a struggle to leave the EU in June , after almost half a century of membership. While this was in part a political miscalculation by Prime Minister David Cameron designed to silence critics within his party, the surprising outcome and the protracted negotiations to work out an exit from the EU—Brexit—came to a head with the electoral victory of Boris Johnson in This outcome resonated with other global trends, including the unexpected electoral victory of Donald Trump in the American presidential election together with a string of parallel political movements from Turkey to Brazil, from India to Indonesia, and including Russia and China.
Thus, the gradual solution of the centuries-old Northern Ireland struggle can in part be attributed to the lower salience of national boundaries resulting from the increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. While many Unionists Protestants and Nationalists Catholics had a visceral dislike of dealing with Dublin and London respectively, the prospect of a fundamental shift in the European political center of gravity meant that both groups could increasingly bargain with a third party.
This was the politically neutral European Parliament and Commission bureaucracy , which rendered their traditional foes much less important and prevented compromise from looking like capitulation. No one would suggest that this was the only factor involved in the lessening of tensions and facilitating the historic power-sharing arrangement. However, given the earlier emphasis on the ever-changing nature of these group relationships, the arrival of Brexit raised a totally new obstacle to sustained peace in Northern Ireland.
The academic scholarship on nationalism has involved a series of debates about the fundamental nature of the phenomenon that is being analyzed. Proponents of primordialism, ethnosymbolism, and modernism, the three most influential perspectives in the literature, have argued extensively about the content and origin of nationalism.
Some maintain that this form of identity is rooted in a long and continuous association of specific peoples, whether it is tied to a perceived cultural history often stretching back over centuries, if not millennia, or whether it is, in fact, a relatively recent form of identity. There are a large number of permutations and combinations of these basic perspectives.
Thus, sociologists such as Edward Shils and Steven Grosby stress cultural and social mechanisms that bond human groups together on the basis of family, culture, and territory. While not biologically programmed, these cultural affiliations are deeply felt and are often experienced with great intensity, which helps to explain the power and resilience of nationalist sentiments.
Connor draws a firm distinction between two closely related, but he would insist distinct, sources of identification: nationalism, which refers to loyalty to an ethnic group or nation; and patriotism, which is defined as political identification with the state. The fact that the nation-state, a perfect overlap between one specific ethnic group and a given political unit, only exists in a few cases, and even then is only an approximation to reality, explains the nature of so many types of nationalist conflict.
States often seek to incorporate minority ethnic groups into the structures and culture of the dominant group, and this can often result in reactive resistance by the minority group s : subordinate nationalism to counter dominant nationalism. A related distinction that is frequently made is between ethnic and civic nationalism, a difference between those states that explicitly attempt to fuse the nation and the state and those that try to maintain an ethnically neutral political organization.
In practice, this too is an analytical dichotomy that was initially developed to contrast the types of nationalism found in Eastern Europe and those typically prevailing in the Western states of the continent. Once again, no matter how much the civic ideal-type is professed, it is rarely pure in form, and many of the cultural characteristics of the dominant group are subtly, or often less than subtly, incorporated into the basic assumptions of the state.
Other theorists of nationalism tend to emphasize the modern nature of the phenomenon, insisting that none of the forms of identity that characterized society for long periods of human history share the vital ingredients of the modern understanding of the term.
There are several variations on this perspective, some coming out of the Marxist tradition that dismisses nationalism, like religion, as yet another form of false consciousness, and others that view the emergence of nationalism as an integral element of modernity. It is a variant on the divide and rule strategy that promotes ideological confusion and pits worker against worker on the basis of a totally irrelevant set of distinctions.
Modernity theorists, meanwhile, do not link the rise of nationalism with the growth of capitalism alone but see it as stemming from a combination of political, social, and economic forces generated by the Enlightenment. One result of the economic and political revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries , and the scientific and technological advances associated with these historical transformations, is the need for mass education to build a culturally homogeneous platform to sustain these developments Gellner, Central to these changes, and resulting as an unintended consequence of the functional requirements of a modern lifestyle, are conditions that encourage and sustain nationalism.
The ethnosymbolists, exemplified by the writings of Anthony Smith , and John Hutchinson , , take a middle position between modernist social construction and the sense of historical continuity. While Smith and his colleagues are fully aware of the cultural foundations of nations, they are also equally cognizant of the role of myths, symbols, and the frequently distorted collective memory that underpins all the major forms of nationalist movements.
This middle path between the extremes of construction and continuity provides a valuable balance that helps us to understand a wider range of nationalist movements, from those with a pedigree stretching back millennia to the nationalisms of the postimperial era during the 19th and 20th centuries.
With the emergence of a variety of interpretations of how and when nationalism developed in modern society, much of the current debate concerns an assessment of the impact of such forces as globalization, religious fundamentalism, and international nonstate terrorism as factors that may shape the continuing importance, growing salience, or declining significance of nationalism in the future. Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades?
If so, what would be the explanation for such trends? Social scientists do not have a particularly good record in predicting far into the future. While W. DuBois was remarkably prescient in seeing the power of the color line throughout the 20th century , other predictions have proved to be far less accurate. The particular forms of identity that are likely to be salient or, in contradistinction, may quite probably diminish in significance in the decades to come remains an enduring question.
Of the three elements, racism seemed, until the arrival of Trump, to be the least likely candidate for a rapid revival as a basis of group categorization. There are several forces that could strengthen a general antiracist trend in modern global society.
Olzak has stressed the need to integrate the changing nature of international organizations and processes into the analysis, particularly the complex ramifications of globalization with its impact on migration, transnational communities, suprastate institutions, and transnational corporations. Increased diversity in all the major societies as a result of the global transformation of the world economy, and the interconnections of capital and labor, can be expected to increase during the successive decades of the century.
This will apply not only to the postindustrial societies of the First World, but also to the intermediate developing economies and to the Third World. The sheer diversity of migration patterns, internal flows within regional free trade areas, transnational communities whose dynamics will be enhanced by accelerated innovations in communication technologies and transportation, growing groups of highly skilled global migrants, and the unpredictable flows of refugees from political persecution, famines, and genocidal massacres, will all combine to increase the multiracial complexion of states and federations throughout the world.
No one would expect these trends to be entirely in one direction, or to be without the potential for strong backlashes or reactive political movements against the type of social changes that such developments represent. Ethnicity and nationalism, meanwhile, will probably be rather more persistent markers of group boundaries.
There are several reasons for this conclusion. While the United Nations, as a global organization for political governance, has a role to play in trying to respond to crises and catastrophes that cut across state boundaries or involve multiple state conflicts, its structure is fundamentally state-bound.
If one overarching political structure is unlikely to reduce ethnic and nationalist sentiments, what about the impact of intermediate-scale organizations that bunch together clusters of states in regional groupings? Will they, on balance, help to diminish the types of ethnic and national mobilization as increased cooperation and mutual dependency in economic, social, and political ties start to extend the traditional boundaries of group interaction?
If we add the factors of international terrorism, environmental pressure resulting from global climate change, the worldwide implications of drug policies, and the competitive rivalries of major religious faiths, a volatile mix of influences will undoubtedly be unleashed. Some sociologists such as Richard Alba point to demographic factors that could exert pressure on societies such as the United States to move toward greater economic and social justice for ethnic minorities.
Given the differential fertility rates of dominant whites and those of minorities, particularly minorities of color, Alba suggests these trends will have a tendency toward minority inclusion in the upper levels of the U.
While in the past immigration from Europe was one mechanism that provided an alternative reservoir of talent to fill a range of positions in the economic hierarchy, since the s the shortfall in the supply of scientific, technical, and managerial talent has often been filled by foreigners, either those directly recruited by U.
Alba argues that this pool of talented individuals will be subject to increasing competition from many other growing economies and that, combined with the domestic demographic shortfall, the result will be the incorporation of more American minorities into professional, managerial, and technical positions. What is true of the United States is likely to be repeated in Europe with its even lower demographic rates of reproduction and similar patterns of migration both within the enlarged economic community and from the peripheral regions surrounding it.
None of these macro sociopolitical trends necessarily diminish the tensions that arise from increasing globalization that can be channeled along ethnic and nationalist grooves.
In fact, the very success of the integrative economic forces may exacerbate ethnonational mobilization as a way to maintain meaningful identity in a world subject to mounting anomic strains associated with rapid and discontinuous social change. These modern methods can combine the destructiveness of scientific means with the tenacity of group identity to attain highly particularistic ends.
Regrettably, there is nothing intrinsically benign in the forces underpinning the societal changes that have taken place during the first two decades of the 21st century.
The precise balance between racism, ethnicity, and nationalism remains unclear but their possible eradication from future social, economic, and political conflicts seems highly unlikely. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within Show Summary Details. Race, Ethnicity, and Nation. Keywords race ethnicity nation nationalism transnational migration colonial expansion globalization populist nationalism. Updated in this version Updated references, enhanced discussions of globalization and populist nationalism.
Introduction: Three Variations on a Theme The three terms—race, ethnicity, and nation—represent forms of group identification that may be the result of internal choice, external categorization, or some combination of the two perspectives. Race: Biology as Destiny In spite of the intellectual demolition of the genetic basis of racial theorizing since the second half of the 20th century , the legacy of racism lives on.
Ethnicity: Group Divisions Rooted in Culture The power of race as a boundary marker has been continuously demonstrated for the past two centuries in many societies throughout the globe. The Continuing Significance of the Nation Thus, ethnicity and nationalism form different stages along a continuum. Globalization and Populist Nationalism Is it possible that racism, ethnicity, and nationalism will become much less salient in the coming decades? Further Reading Acosta, D.
The national versus the foreigner in South America: Two hundred years of migration and citizenship law. Cambridge University Press. Boucher, A. Crossroads: Comparative immigration regimes in a world of demographic change. Cramer, K. The politics of resentment. University of Chicago Press. Elias, S. Racial theories in social science: A systemic racism critique.
Esch, El. The color line and the assembly line: Managing race in the Ford empire. University of California Press. Favell, A. Immigration, integration and mobility: New agendas in migration. ECPR Press. Hanchard, M. The spectre of race: How discrimination haunts Western democracy.
Princeton University Press. Noble, S. New York University Press. Stone, J. The Wiley-Blackwell companion to race, ethnicity and nationalism.
Suarez-Orozco, M. Humanitarianism and mass migration : Confronting the world crisis. Tesler, M. Post-racial or most racial? Race and politics in the Obama era. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system. Thus, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined.
Theories about the relation between race, ethnicity, and nationality are also linked to more general ideas concerning globalization and populist nationalism. You do not currently have access to this article.
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Sign In Article Navigation. In other words, Ethnicity is the ethnic identity of a person which is ascertained by descent-based characteristics.
Descent-based characteristics connote the traits which are connected to descent, i. Ethnicity is the category of people, called as an ethnic group, who consider themselves as distinct from others on the basis of ancestral, social and national heritage. People belonging to this group share common traditions, history, language or dialect, culture, behaviour, religion, physical appearance and similar other factors like geographical affiliation to a particular place, dressing style, food, beliefs, etc.
For example : In India, the total population of 1. In other words, nationality means the identity of a large group of people having a legal connection and personal allegiance to a specific place, because of being born there.
It indicates the country, where the individual is from and is the legal citizen. Nationality law deals with its provision and sets the conditions for obtaining nationality. However, it can be acquired by birth, inheritance or naturalisation.
It bestows the state, authority over the person and confers the person, protection of the state. The rights and powers of the state and its nationals may vary from country to country. It is psychological and thus provides the source for patriotism and self-sacrifice. So, you might have gained ample knowledge about ethnicity and nationality from the points mentioned above.
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