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The paradox of multi-ethnicity

Bhuwan Thapaliya - 5/24/2006

When the definitions of nationhood, are suddenly put up for grabs, the goal of multi – ethnicity is even harder to attain according to most analysts. According to them, under despotism or colonialism, it did not matter much, whether frontiers reflected the true ethnic reality. But now, it’s a different ball game. As today, in sudden liberty, it is easy to persuade people to care about these things a lot. Freed from a common yoke, peoples fight for a prime position. No one wants to wind up a surrounding minority. On such logic cleansing begin.

In the non–Russian republics in the former Soviet Union, people are itching to cleanse their countries of the Russians that past leaders imposed on them, and a tentative upsurge of democracy in Africa brings similar worries. As the continent’s one party states fell before a wave of democracy at the beginning of the last decade, new leaders drew on regional or ethnic support to gain power.

With a few honourable exceptions they then excluded other groups. Winner took all; and Africa now has to come to terms with that.

“Whenever people have different answers to the questions “What is your land?” and “Who are your people?” there is room for division,” most observers are saying.

According to the analysts, largely because of widespread political change, those divisions are erupting all over the world. And according to them, once the divisions have been opened, transfers of population can be effective, even if the process of transfer is, at the time, traumatic and deadly for those uprooted.

But, however, this raises a major concerns - mass settlement can be done but resettlement to where, as forced assimilation of the weak by the strong does not offer a stable solution.

When the economic and ethnic distinctions create a difference as deep in Rwanda and in few other tense African hotspots, where distinctions separate neighbouring huts, it is hard to discern where to start. However, the fact that some ethnic conflicts now seem insoluble does not mean that all were.

Take this reality for instance, in the wake of Greece’s catastrophic failure to achieve a Greater Greece by military incorporating bits of western Turkey, a compulsory exchange of populations was agreed upon in 1923, after the Treaty of Lausanne. More than 1m Greeks has already fled Turkey during the war, and it was agreed that they would not go back.

Of the remaining 250,000 Greeks in Turkey, the 100,000 in Istanbul were allowed to remain, while the other 150,000 were turfed out. At the same time 388,000 Turks in Greece went back to their ethnic homeland, according to the sources.

This worked. Enmity lingers, but Greeks and Turks have, with one exception, not fought again. The exception was in the one place where their populations remained intermingled: Cyprus. There, too, it can be conceded that the eventual involuntary exchange of populations made the divided island more peaceful than it was.

Paradoxically, a more dramatic example of an ethnic cleansing that produced stability was the expulsion of some 8m Germans from parts of Eastern Europe after the Second World War, according to the sources.

Such approaches go hand in hand with partition but rarely can such a carve ups be exemplary, since the two populations will normally be intermeshed. Invariably a group on one side of the line thinks it has come off worse than another. Yet once erected, the partitions tend to stand forever.

Take this for instance. How many Palestinians or Israelis think they can live in harmony in one state rather than two? And, how many Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis believe their countries should reunite?

But, however, it’s not that multi – ethnic societies are impossible. It is just that they are often rather delicate, according to the observers.

“Divisions of race, of language, of class, of religion can be accepted, tolerated and even enjoyed; they add to the complexities and the possibilities of life. But they also make a society more fissile, especially when the divisions all line up the same way, and one group can be racially, religiously and economically distinguished from another,” according to the report published by The Economist.

But The Economist’s report also further states that, societies with such internal divisions seem not to stand up well to external shocks. Strength or subtlety can both be used to hold such societies together. A powerful hegemony is a good start. That there may be an imperial solution to the problem, though, is little consolation in a world increasingly turned toward national democracy.

Meanwhile, observers say that the overarching ideal is why America remains the most successful experiment in ethnic diversity – an irony amongst all the ironies, considering that the country rests on a wholesale cleansing of its native people.

Language is one great American bond; religious faith and traditions are other ropes that have been binding the American society since ages. But the biggest bond of all is a sense that being American means something in itself: something to do with freedom, self- confidence, the rule of law, democracy and fellow feeling.

Despite the legacy of slavery, and despite the urban ghettoes in which a third of them live, many of America’s blacks belive in this too, according to the social experts.

However, residential separation is still the urban norm, but Black Americans have advanced in the institutions of power and government. There are black members of congress, black generals in the armed forces, black city mayors, a black justice on the Supreme Court, and so on.

Nonetheless, the advancement by racial quotas is threatening the American ideal of equality before the law and is leading to professional ghettoisation and social alienation. It is certainly provoking a backlash in middle America, fraying confidence in meritocracy, and threatening that shared sense of Americanness.

The manoeuvre in a successful society is for minority citizens to be able to feel that they are more than one thing at once: to be able to feel American and black, Scottish and British, and Muslim and an Indian. Nonetheless, this is hard, and it is easy for anyone seeking a power base to make it harder still, as ethnicity raises so many difficulties precisely because it is easily appealed to but hard to implement, especially in the contemporary world.