On 9/11/07, David B. Shemano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Actually, to be fair, a lot of countries created at the end of the imperial > era were not based on homogenous ethnicity. Of course, most of those > creations are also failed states and ethnic conflict often plays a big part > in the failure. I think most successful democratic nation-states are > relatively ethnically homogeneous. The US is arguably the exception that > proves the rule, but the US is really historically unique in material ways. >
Well I really hope that is not the case because you are describing a very xenophobic world. Many conflicts that appear to be ethnically based on first sight can be interpreted differently on a less-superficial examination. For instance the case of the Bosnia conflict. Far from being the result of ancient ethnic rivalries, it was an attempt to very artificially homogenize along arbitrarily defined ethnic lines, a society that had long been diverse. Ravi pointed out the example of India - it is not nearly as multi-cultural as the US, but it is far from being ethnically homogenous, so there's a pretty big counter-example for you. I think your conclusion is an unnecessarily pessimistic one. Ethnic conflict has never been all that important, it is just readily adopted as a catch-all explanation because it fits in nicely with the dominant political ideology that has the nation-state at its core. The term "ethnic cleansing" is a dead giveaway. It implies that somehow ethnic populations are made dirty by diversity and it is quite natural to "clean" them up and make them homogenous. -raghu.
