Ethnicity

• Few humans live in total isolation. People are members of groups with which they share important attributes.

  • If you are a citizen of the United States of America, you are identified as an American, which is a type of nationality.

• Many Americans further identify themselves as belonging to an ethnicity, a group with which they share a cultural background.

  • One-third of Americans identify their ethnicity as African American, Hispanic, or Asian American.

  • Other Americans identify with ethnicities tracing back to Europe.

• Ethnicity is a source of pride to people, a link to the experiences of ancestors and to cultural traditions, such as food and music preferences.

  • The ethnic group to which one belongs has important measurable differences, such as average income, life expectancy, and infant mortality rate.

    • Ethnicity also matters in places with a history of discrimination by one ethnic group against another.

• The significance of ethnic diversity is controversial in the United States:

  • To what extent does discrimination persist against minority ethnicities, especially African Americans and Hispanics?

  • Should preferences be given to minority ethnicities to correct past patterns of discrimination?

  • To what extent should the distinct cultural identity of ethnicities be encouraged or protected?

• Ethnicity is identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth.

  • Ethnicity comes from the Greek word ethnikos, which means "national."

  • Ethnicity is distinct from race, which is identity with a group of people who share a biological ancestor.

    • Race comes from a middle-French word for generation.

• Geographers are interested in where ethnicities are distributed across space, like other elements of culture.

  • An ethnic group is tied to a particular place, because members of the group—or their ancestors—were born and raised there.

  • The cultural traits displayed by an ethnicity derive from particular conditions and e practices in the group's homeland.

• The reason why ethnicities have distinctive traits should by now be familiar.

  • Like other cultural elements, ethnic identity derives from the interplay of connections with other groups and isolation from them.

• Ethnicity is an especially important cultural element of local diversity because our ethnic identity is immutable.

  • We can deny or suppress our ethnicity, but we cannot choose to change it in the same way we can choose to speak a different language or practice a different religion.

• The study of ethnicity lacks the tension in scale between preservation of local diversity and globalization observed in other cultural elements.

  • Despite efforts to preserve local languages, it is not far-fetched to envision a world in which virtually all educated people speak English.

  • But no ethnicity is attempting or even aspiring to achieve global dominance, although ethnic groups are fighting with each other to control specific areas of the world.

• Ethnicity is especially important to geographers because in the face of globalization trends in culture and economy; ethnicity stands as the strongest bulwark for the preservation of local diversity.

  • Even if globalization engulfs language, religion, and other cultural elements, regions of distinct ethnic identity will remain.

KEY ISSUE 1 - Where Are Ethnicities Distributed?

• An ethnicity may be clustered in specific areas within a country, or the area it inhabits may match closely the boundaries of a country.

Distribution of Ethnicities in the United States

• The two most numerous ethnicities in the United States are Hispanics (or Latinos), at 15 percent of the total population, and African Americans, at 13 percent.

  • In addition, about 4 percent are Asian American and 1 percent American Indian.

Clustering of Ethnicities

• Within a country, clustering of ethnicities can occur on two scales.

  • Ethnic groups may live in particular regions of the country, they may have m particular neighborhoods within cities.

  • Within the United States, ethnicities are clustered at both scales.

REGIOnAL CONCENTRATIONS OF ETHNICITIES.

• On a regional scale, ethnicities have distinctive distributions within the United States.

• Hispanic or Latino/Latina.

  • Clustered in the Southwest, Hispanics exceed one-third of the population of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and one-quarter of California.

    • California is home to one-third of all Hispanics Texas one-fifth, and Florida and New York one-sixth each.

  • Hispanic or Hispanic American is a term that the U.S. government chose in 1973 to describe the group because it was an inoffensive label that could be applied to all people from Spanish-speaking countries.

    • Some Americans of Latin American descent have instead adopted the terms Latino (males) and Latina (females).

    • A 1995 U.S. Census Bureau survey found that 58 percent of Americans of Latin American descent preferred the term Hispanic and 12 percent Latino/Latina.

  • Most Hispanics identify with a more specific ethnic or national origin.

    • Around two-thirds come from Mexico and are sometimes called Chicanos (males) or Chicanas (females).

• African Americans.

  • Clustered in the Southeast, African Americans comprise at least one-fourth of the population in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, and South Carolina, and more than one-third in Mississippi.

    • Concentrations are even higher in selected counties.

    • At the other extreme, nine states in upper New England and the West have less than 1 percent African Americans.

• Asian Americans.

  • Clustered in the West, Asian Americans comprise more than 40 percent of the population of Hawaii.

    • One-half of all Asian Americans live in California, where they comprise 12 percent of the population.

    • Chinese account for one-fourth of Asian Americans, Indians and Filipinos one-fifth each, and Korean and Vietnamese one-tenth each.

• American Indians and Alaska Natives.

  • Within the 48 continental United States, American Indians are most numerous in the Southwest and the Plains states.

CONCENTRATION OF ETHNICITIES IN CITIES.

• African Americans and Hispanics are highly clustered in urban areas.

  • Around 90 percent of these ethnicities live in metropolitan areas, compared to around 75 percent for all Americans.

• The distinctive distribution of African Americans and Hispanics is especially noticeable at the levels of states and neighborhoods.

  • At the state level, African Americans comprise 85 percent of the population in the city of Detroit and only 7 percent in the rest of Michigan.

    • Otherwise stated, Detroit contains less than one-tenth of Michigan's total population, but more than one-half of the state's African American population.

• The distribution of Hispanics is similar to that of African Americans in large northern cities.

  • For example, New York City is more than one-fourth Hispanic, compared to one-sixteenth in the rest of New York State, and New York City contains two-fifths of the state's total population and three-fourths of its Hispanics.

• In the states with the largest Hispanic populations—California and Texas—the distribution is mixed.

  • In California, Hispanics comprise nearly half of Los Angeles's population, but the percentage of Hispanics in California's other large cities is less than or about equal to the overall state average.

• The clustering of ethnicities is especially pronounced on the scale of neighborhoods within cities.

  • In the early twentieth century, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and other Midwest cities attracted ethnic groups primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe to work in the rapidly growing steel, automotive, and related industries.

  • Southern and Eastern European ethnic groups clustered in newly constructed neighborhoods, that were often named for their predominant ethnicities, such as Detroit’s Greektown and Poletown.

• The children and grandchildren of European immigrants moved out of most of the original inner-city neighborhoods during the twentieth century.

  • For descendants of European immigrants, ethnic identity is more likely to be retained through religion, food, and other cultural traditions rather than through location of residence.

• Ethnic concentrations in U.S. cities increasingly consist of African Americans who migrate from the South or immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

  • In cities such as Detroit, African Americans now comprise the majority and live in neighborhoods originally inhabited by European ethnic groups.

• In Los Angeles, which contains large percentages of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, the major ethnic groups are clustered in different areas.

  • African Americans are located in south-central Los Angeles and Hispanics in the east.

  • Asian Americans are located to the south and west, contiguous to the African American and Hispanic areas.

African American Migration Patterns

• The clustering of ethnicities within the United States is partly a function of the same process that helps geographers to explain the regular distribution of other cultural factors, such as language and religion—namely migration.

  • The migration patterns of African Americans have been especially distinctive.

• Three major migration flows have shaped the current distribution of African Americans within the United States:

  • Forced migration from Africa to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

  • Immigration from the U.S. South to northern cities during the first half of the twentieth century.

  • Immigration from inner-city ghettos to other urban neighborhoods during the second half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries.

FORCED MIGRATION FROM AFRICA.

• Most African Americans are descended from Africans forced to migrate to the Western Hemisphere as slaves.

  • Slavery is a system whereby one person owns another person as a piece of property and can force that slave to work for the owner's benefit.

• The first Africans brought to the American colonies as slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, on a Dutch ship in 1619.

  • During the eighteenth century, the British shipped about 400,000 Africans to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

  • In 1808, the United States banned bringing in additional Africans as slaves, but an estimated 250,000 were illegally imported during the next half-century.

• Slavery was widespread during the time of the Roman Empire, about 2,000 years ago.

  • During the Middle Ages, slavery was replaced in Europe by a feudal system, in which laborers working the land (known as serfs) were bound to the land and not free to migrate elsewhere.

  • Serfs had to turn over a portion of their crops to the lord and provide other services as demanded by the lord.

• Although slavery was rare in Europe, Europeans were responsible for diffusing the practice to the Western Hemisphere.

  • Europeans who owned large plantations in the Americas turned to African slaves as an abundant source of labor that cost less than paying wages to other Europeans.

• At the height of the slave trade between 1710 and 1810, at least 10 million Africans were uprooted from their homes and sent on European ships to the Western Hemisphere for sale in the slave market.

  • During that period, the British and Portuguese each shipped about 2 million slaves to the Western Hemisphere, with most of the British slaves going to Caribbean islands and the Portuguese slaves to Brazil.

• The forced migration began when people living along the east and west coasts of Africa, taking advantage of their superior weapons, captured members of other groups living farther inland and sold the captives to Europeans.

  • Europeans in turn shipped the captured Africans to the Americas, selling them as slaves either on consignment or through auctions.

  • The Spanish and Portuguese first participated in the slave trade in the early sixteenth century, and the British, Dutch, and French joined in during the next century.

• Different European countries operated in various regions of Africa, each sending slaves to different destinations in the Americas.

  • The majority of these slaves went to Caribbean islands and most of the remainder to Central and South America.

    • Fewer than 5 percent of the slaves ended up in the United States.

• At the height of the eighteenth-century slave demand, a number of European countries adopted the triangular slave trade, an efficient triangular trading pattern:

  • Ships left Europe for Africa with cloth and other trade goods, used to buy the slaves.

  • They then transported slaves and gold from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, primarily to the Caribbean islands.

  • To complete the triangle, the same ships then carried sugar and molasses from the Caribbean on their return trip to Europe.

• Some ships added another step, making a rectangular trading pattern, in which molasses was carried from the Caribbean to the North American colonies, and rum from the colonies to Europe.

• The large-scale forced migration of Africans obviously caused them unimaginable hardship, separating families and destroying villages.

  • Traders generally seized the stronger and younger villagers, who could be sold as slaves for the highest price.

  • The Africans were packed onto ships at extremely high density. Kept in chains, and provided with minimal food and sanitary facilities.

    • Approximately one-fourth died crossing the Atlantic.

• In the 13 colonies that later formed the United States, most of the large plantations in need of labor were located in the South primarily those growing cotton as well as tobacco.

  • Consequently, nearly all Africans shipped to the 13 colonies ended up in the Southeast.

• Attitudes toward slavery dominated U.S. politics during the nineteenth century.

  • During the early 1800s, when new states were carved out of western territory, anti-slavery northeastern states and pro-slavery southeastern states bitterly debated whether to permit slavery in the new states.

  • The Civil War (1861-1865) was fought to prevent 11 pro-slavery Southern states from seceding from the Union.

  • In 1863, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the 11 Confederate states.

  • The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted 8 months after the South surrendered, outlawed slavery.

• Freed as slaves, most African Americans remained in the rural South during the late nineteenth century working as sharecroppers.

  • A sharecropper works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops.

  • To obtain seed, tools, food, and living quarters, a sharecropper gets a line of credit from the landowner and repays the debt with yet more crops.

  • The sharecropper system burdened poor African Americans with high-interest rates and heavy debts.

  • Instead of growing food that they could eat, sharecroppers were forced by landowners to plant extensive areas of crops such as cotton that could be sold for cash.

IMMIGRATION TO THE NORTH.

• Sharecropping became less common into the twentieth century as the introduction of farm machinery and a decline in land devoted to cotton reduced demand for labor.

  • At the same time, sharecroppers were being pushed off the farms, they were being pulled by the prospect of jobs in the booming industrial cities of the North.

• African Americans migrated out of the South along several clearly defined channels.

• Most traveled by bus and car along the major two-lane long-distance U.S. roads that were paved and signposted in the early decades of the twentieth century and have since been replaced by interstate highways:

  • East coast: From the Carolinas and other South Atlantic states north to Baltimore Philadelphia New York, and other northeastern cities, along U.S. Route 1 (parallel to present-day I-95).

  • East central: From Alabama and eastern Tennessee north to either Detroit, along U.S. Route 25 (present-day I-75), or Cleveland, along U.S. Route 21 (present-day l-77).

  • West-central: From Mississippi and western Tennessee north to St. Louis and Chicago, along U.S. routes 61 and 66 (present-day I-55).

  • Southwest: From Texas west to California, along U.S. routes 80 and 90 (present-day I-10 and I-20).

• Southern African Americans migrated north and west in two main waves, the first in the 1910s and 1920s before and after World War I and the second in the 1940s and 1950s before and after World War II.

  • The world wars stimulated expansion of factories in the 1910s and 1940s to produce war materiel, while the demands of the armed forces created shortages of factory workers.

  • After the wars, during the 1920s and 1950s, factories produced steel, motor vehicles, and other goods demanded in civilian society.

• In 1910, only 5,741 of Detroit's 465,766 inhabitants were African American.

  • With the expansion of the auto industry during the 1910s and 1920s, the African American population increased to 120,000 in 1930, 300,000 in 1950, and 500,000 in 1960.

EXPANSION OF THE GHETTO.

• When they reached the big cities, African American immigrants clustered in the one or two neighborhoods where the small numbers who had arrived in the nineteenth century were already living.

  • These areas became known as ghettos, after the term for neighborhoods in which Jews were forced to live in the Middle Ages.

• ln 1950, most of Baltimore's quarter-million African Americans lived in a 3-square kilometer (1-square-mile) neighborhood northwest of downtown.

  • The remainder were clustered east of downtown or in a large isolated housing project on the south side built for black wartime workers in port industries.

  • Densities in the ghettos were high, with 40,000 inhabitants per square kilometer (100,000 per square mile) common.

    • Contrast that density with the current level found in typical American suburbs of 2,000 inhabitants per square kilometer (5,000 per square mile).

  • Because of the shortage of housing in the ghettos, families were forced to live in one room.

    • Many dwellings lacked bathrooms, kitchens, hot water, and heat.

• African Americans moved from the tight ghettos into immediately adjacent neighborhoods during the 1950s and 1960s.

  • Expansion of the ghetto continued to follow major avenues to the northwest and northeast in subsequent decades.

Differentiating Ethnicity and Race

• Race and ethnicity are often confused.

  • In the United States, consider three prominent ethnic groups—Asian Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

• All three ethnicities display distinct cultural traditions that originate at particular hearths, but the three are regarded in different ways:

  • Asian is recognized as a distinct race by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, so Asian as a race and Asian American as an ethnicity encompass basically the same group of people. However, the Asian American ethnicity lumps together people with ties to many countries in Asia.

  • African American and black are different groups, although the 2000 census combined the two. Most black Americans are descended from African immigrants and therefore also belong to an African American ethnicity. Some American blacks, however, trace their cultural heritage to regions other than Africa, including Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific islands.

  • The term African American identifies a group with an extensive cultural tradition, whereas the term black in principle denotes nothing more than dark skin. Because many Americans make judgments about the values and behavior · of others simply by observing skin color, black is substituted for African American in daily language.

  • Hispanic or Latino is not considered a race, so on the census form members of the Hispanic or Latino ethnicity select any race they wish—white, black, or other.

• The traits that characterize race are those that can be transmitted genetically from parents to children.

  • For example, lactose intolerance affects 95 percent of Asian Americans, 65 percent of African Americans and Native Americans, and 50 percent of Hispanics, compared to only 15 percent of Americans of European ancestry.

  • Nearly everyone is born with the ability to produce Iactase, which enables infants to digest the large amount of Iactose in milk.

  • Lactase production typically slackens during childhood leaving some with difficulty in absorbing a large amount of lactose as adults.

• At best, biological features are so highly variable a members of a race that any prejudged classification is meaningless.

• At worst, biological classification by race is the basis for racism, which is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

  • A racist is a person who subscribes to the beliefs of racism.

Race in the United States

• Every 10 years, the U.S. Bureau of the Census asks people to classify themselves according to the race with which they most closely identify.

• Americans are asked to identify themselves by checking the box next to one of the following fourteen races:

  • White

  • Black, African American, or Negro

  • American Indian or Alaska Native

  • Asian Indian

  • Chinese

  • Filipino

  • Japanese

  • Korean

  • Vietnamese

  • Other Asian

  • Native Hawaiian

  • Guamanian or Chamorro

  • Samoan

  • Other Pacific Islander

  • Other race

  • If American Indian, Other Pacific Islander Other Asian, or Other race is selected, the respondent is asked to write in the specific name.

• In 2000 about 75 percent of Americans checked that they were white, 12 percent black, 4 percent Asian (Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese), 1 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.1 percent Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (including Guamanian and Samoan), and 6 percent some other race.

"SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" DOCTRINE.

• In explaining spatial regularities, geographers look for patterns of spatial interaction.

  • A distinctive feature of race relations in the United States has been the strong discouragement of spatial interaction—in the past through legal means, today through cultural preferences or discrimination.

• The U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 upheld a Louisiana law that required black and white passengers to ride in separate railway cars.

  • In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court stated that Louisiana's law was constitutional because it provided separate, but equal, treatment of blacks and whites, and equality did not mean that whites had to mix socially with blacks.

• Once the Supreme Court permitted "separate but equal" treatment of the races, southern states enacted a comprehensive set of laws to segregate blacks from whites as much as possible.

  • These were called "Jim Crow" laws, named for a nineteenth-century song-and-dance act that depicted blacks offensively.

  • Blacks had to sit in the back of buses, and shops, restaurants, and hotels could choose to serve only whites.

  • Separate schools were established for blacks and whites.

  • After all, white southerners argued, the bus got blacks sitting in the rear to the destination at the same time as the whites in the front, some commercial establishments served only blacks, and all of the schools had teachers and classrooms.

• Throughout the country, not just in the South, house deeds contained restrictive covenants that prevented the owners from selling to blacks, as well as to Roman Catholics or Jews in some places.

  • Restrictive covenants kept blacks from moving into an all white neighborhood.

    • And because schools, especially at the elementary level, were located to serve individual neighborhoods, most were segregated in practice, even if not legally mandated.

"WHITE FLIGHT."

• Segregation laws were eliminated during the 1950s and 1960s.

  • The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954, found that having separate schools for blacks and whites was unconstitutional because no matter how equivalent the facilities, racial separation branded minority children as inferior and therefore was inherently unequal.

    • A year later, the Supreme Court further ruled that schools had to be desegregated "with all deliberate speed."

• Rather than integrate, whites fled.

  • The expansion of the black ghettos in American cities was made possible by "white flight," the emigration of whites from an area in anticipation of blacks immigrating into the area.

  • Detroit provides a clear example.

    • Black immigration into Detroit from the South subsided during the 1950s, but as legal barriers to integration crumbled, whites began to emigrate out of Detroit.

    • Detroit's white population dropped by about 1 million between 1950 and 1975 and by another half million between 1975 and 2000.

    • While whites fled, Detroit's black population continued to grow, but at a more modest rate, as a result of natural increase.

    • In sum, Detroit in 1950 contained about 1.7 million whites and 300,000 blacks.

      • The black population increased to 500,000 in 1960, 700,000 in 19.70, and 800,000 in both 1990 and 2000, while the white population declined from 1.7 million in 1950 to 1.3 million in 1960, 900,000 in 1970, 500,000 in 1980, 300,000 in 1990, and 200,000 in 2000.

• White flight was encouraged by unscrupulous real estate practices, especially blockbusting.

  • Under blockbusting, real estate agents convinced white homeowners living near a black area to sell their houses at low prices, preying on their fears that black families would soon move into the neighborhood and cause property value to decline.

  • The agents then sold the houses at much higher prices to black families desperate to escape the overcrowded ghettos.

  • Through blockbusting, a neighborhood could change from all-white to all-black in a matter of months, and real estate agents could start the process all over again in the next white area.

• The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, wrote in 1968 that U.S. cities were divided into two separate and unequal societies, one black and one white.

  • Four decades later, despite serious efforts to integrate and equalize the two, segregation and inequality persist.

Division by Race in South Africa

• Discrimination by race reached its peak in the late twentieth century in South Africa.

  • While the United States was repealing laws that segregated people by race, South Africa was enacting them.

  • The cornerstone of the South African policy was the cr~tion of a legal system called apartheid.

  • Apartheid was the physical separation of different races into different geographic areas.

    • Although South Africa's apartheid laws were repealed during the 1990s, it will take many years to erase the impact of past policies.

• In South Africa, under apartheid, a newborn baby was classified as being one of four races—black, white, colored (mixed white and black), or Asian.

  • Under apartheid, each of the four races had a different legal status in South Africa.

  • The apartheid laws determined where different races could live, attend school, work, shop, and own land.

  • Blacks were restricted to certain occupations and were paid far lower wages than were whites for similar work.

  • Blacks could not vote or run for political office in national elections.

    • The apartheid system was created by descendants of whites who arrived in South Africa from Holland in 1652 and settled in Cape Town, at the southern tip of the territory.

    • They were known either as Boers, from the Dutch word for "farmer," or Afrikaners, from the word "Afrikaans," the name of their language, which is a dialect of Dutch.

• The British seized the Dutch colony in 1795 and controlled South Africa's government until 1948, when the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party won elections.

  • The Afrikaners gained power at a time when colonial rule was being replaced in the rest of Africa by a collection of independent states run by the local black population.

  • The Afrikaners vowed to resist pressures to turn over South Africa's government to blacks, and the Nationalist Party created the apartheid laws in the next few years to perpetuate white dominance of the country.

  • To ensure geographic isolation of different races, the South African government designated ten so-called homelands for blacks.

  • The white minority government expected every black to become a citizen of one of the homelands and to move there.

    • More than 99 percent of the population in the ten homelands was black.

• The white-dominated government of South Africa repealed the apartheid laws in 1991.

  • The principal anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress, was legalized, and its leader, Nelson Mandela, was released from jail after more than 27 years of imprisonment.

  • When all South Africans were permitted to vote in national elections for the first time in 1994, Mandela was overwhelmingly elected the country's first black president.

• Now that South Africa's apartheid laws have been dismantled a~d the country is governed by its black majority, other countries have reestablished economic and cultural ties.

  • However, the legacy of apartheid will linger for many years: South Africa's blacks have achieved political equality, but they are much poorer than white South Africans.

  • Average income among white South Africans is about ten times higher than that of blacks.

KEY ISSUE 2 - Why Have Ethnicities Been Transformed into Nationalities?

• Ethnicity and race are distinct from nationality, another term commonly used to describe a group of people with shared traits.

  • Nationality is identity with a group of people who share legal attachment and personal allegiance to a particular country.

    • It comes from the Latin word nasci, which means "to have been born."

• Nationality and ethnicity are similar concepts in that membership in both is defined through shared cultural values.

  • In principle, the cultural values shared with others of the same ethnicity derive from religion, language, and material culture, whereas those shared with others of the same nationality derive from voting, obtaining a passport, and performing civic duties.

Rise of Nationalities

• In the United States, nationality is generally kept reasonably distinct from ethnicity and race in common usage:

  • Nationality identifies citizens of the United States of America, including those born in the country and those who immigrated and became citizens.

  • Ethnicity identifies groups with distinct ancestry and cultural traditions, such as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Chinese Americans, or Polish Americans.

  • Race distinguishes blacks and other persons of color from whites.

• The United States forged a nationality in the late eighteenth century out of a collection of ethnic groups gathered primarily from Europe and Africa, not through traditional means of issuing passports (African Americans weren't considered citizens then) or voting (women and African Americans couldn't vote then), but through sharing the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

  • To be an American meant believing in the "unalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

• In Canada, the Quebecois are clearly distinct from other Canadians in language, religion, and other cultural traditions.

  • The distinction is critical because if Quebecois is recognized as a separate nationality from Anglo-Canadian, the Quebec government would have a much stronger justification for breaking away from Canada to form an independent country.

• Outside North America, distinctions between ethnicity and nationality are even muddier.

  • We have already seen in this chapter that identification with ethnicity and race can lead to discrimination and segregation.

  • Confusion between ethnicity and nationality can lead to violent conflicts.

Nation-States

• To preserve and enhance distinctive cultural characteristics, ethnicities seek to govern themselves without interference.

  • A nation-state is a state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality.

• Ethnic groups have been transformed into nationalities because desire for self-rule is a very important shared attitude for many of them.

  • The concept that ethnicities have the right to govern themselves is known as self-determination.

DENMARK: THERE ARE NO PERFECT NATION-STATES

• Denmark is a fairly good example of a nation-state because the territory occupied by the Danish ethnicity closely corresponds to the state of Denmark.

  • The Danes have a strong sense of unity that derives from shared cultural characteristics and attitudes and a recorded history that extends back more than 1,000 years.

    • Nearly all Danes speak the same language—Danish—and nearly all the world's speakers of Danish live in Denmark.

• But even Denmark is not a perfect example of a nation-state.

  • Ten percent of Denmark's population consists of ethnic minorities.

  • The two largest groups are guest workers from Turkey and refugees from ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

• To dilute the concept of a nation-state further, Denmark controls two territories in the Atlantic Ocean that do not share Danish cultural characteristics.

  • One of the Faeroe Islands, a group of 21 islands ruled by Denmark for more than 600 years.

  • The nearly 50,000 inhabitants of the Faeroe Islands speak Faeroese.

  • Denmark also controls Greenland, the world's largest island, which is 50 times larger than Denmark proper.

    • Only 12 percent of Greenland's 58,000 residents are considered Danish; the remainder are native-born Greenlanders, primarily Inuit.

  • Greenlanders have received authority from Denmark to control their own domestic affairs.

  • One decision was to change all place names in Greenland from Danish to the local Inuit language. Greenland is now officially known as Kalaallit Nunaat, and the capital city was changed from Godthaab to Nuuk.

    • In 2009, Greenlandic became the official language of Greenland.

NATION-STATES IN EUROPE

• Ethnicities were transformed into nationalities throughout Europe during the nineteenth century.

  • Most of Western Europe Was made up of nation-states by the early twentieth century.

• Germany did not emerge as a nation-state until 1871, more recently than its neighbors.

  • Prior to that time, the map of the central European area now called Germany was a patchwork of small states—more than 300 during the seventeenth century, for example.

  • In 1871, Prussia—the most powerful German state—forced most its neighbors to join a Prussian-dominated German Empire.

    • Germany lost much of its territory after World War I.

  • Although the boundaries of states in Southern and Eastern Europe were fixed to conform when possible to those of ethnicities, Germany's new boundaries were arbitrary.

• During the 1930s, German National Socialists (Nazis) claimed that all German-speaking parts of Europe constituted one nationality and should be unified into one state.

  • They pursued this goal forcefully, and other European powers did not attempt to stop the Germans from taking over Austria and the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland.

  • Not until the Germans invaded Poland (clearly not a German-speaking country) in 1939 did England and France try to stop them, marking the start of World War II.

• After it was defeated in World War II, Germany was divided into two countries.

  • Two Germanys existed from 1949 until 1990.

  • With the end of communism, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and its territory became part of the German Federal Republic.

Nationalism

• A nationality, once established, must hold the loyalty of its citizens to survive.

  • Politicians and governments try to instill loyalty through nationalism, which is loyalty and devotion to a nationality.

  • Nationalism typically promotes a sense of national consciousness that exalts one nation above all others and emphasizes its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations.

  • People display nationalism by supporting a state that preserves and enhances the culture and attitudes of their nationality.

• States foster nationalism by promoting symbols of the nation-state, such as flags and songs.

  • The symbol of the hammer and sickle on a field of red was long synonymous with the beliefs of communism.

    • After the fall of communism, one of the first acts in a number of Eastern European countries was to redesign flags without the hammer and sickle.

    • Legal holidays were changed from elates associated with Communist victories to those associated with historical events that preceded Communist takeovers.

• Nationalism can have a negative impact.

  • The sense of unity within a nation-state is sometimes achieved through the creation of negative images of other nation-states.

  • Travelers in southeastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s found that jokes directed by one nationality against another recurred in the same form throughout the region, with only the name of the target changed.

• Nationalism is an important example of a centripetal force, which is an attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state.

  • (The word centripetal means "directed toward the center"; it is the opposite of centrifugal, which means "to spread out from the center.")

  • Most nation-states find that the best way to achieve citizen support is to emphasize shared attitudes that unify the people.

Multinational States

• A state that contains more than one ethnicity is a multiethnic state.

  • In some multiethnic states, ethnicities all contribute cultural features to the formation of a single nationality.

    • The United States has numerous ethnic groups, all of whom consider themselves as belonging to the American nationality.

• Other multiethnic states, known as multinational states, contain two ethnic groups with traditions of self-determination that agree to coexist peacefully by recognizing each other as distinct nationalities.

  • A multinational state contains two or more nationalities with traditions of self-determination.

  • Relationships among nationalities vary in different multinational states.

    • In some states, one nationality tries to dominate another, especially if one of the nationalities is much more numerous than the other, whereas in other states nationalities coexist peacefully.

  • The people of one nation may be assimilated into the cultural characteristics of another nation, but in other cases, the two nationalities remain culturally distinct.

• One example of a multinational state is the United Kingdom, which contains four main nationalities—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

  • The four display some ethnic differences, but the main reason for considering them as distinct nationalities is that each had very different historical experiences.

• Wales was conquered by England in 1282 and formally united with England through the Act of Union of 1536. Welsh laws were abolished, and Wales became a local government unit.

• Scotland was an independent country for nearly a thousand years, until 1603 when Scotland's King James VI also became King James I of England, thereby uniting the two countries. The Act of Union in 1707 formally merged the two governments, although Scotland was allowed to retain its own systems of education and local laws. England, Wales, and Scotland together comprise Great Britain, and the term British refers to the combined nationality of the three groups.

• Northern Ireland, along with the rest of Ireland, was ruled by the British until the 1920s. The 1801 Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the 1920s most of Ireland became a separate country, but the northern portion—with a majority of Protestants—remained under British control. The official name of the country was changed to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

• Today, the strongest element of national identity comes from sports.

  • England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland field their own national soccer teams and compete separately in major international tournaments, such as the World Cup.

    • Given the history of English conquest, the other nationalities often root against England when it is playing teams from other countries.

Former Soviet Union: The Largest Multinational State

• The Soviet Union was an especially prominent example of a multinational state until its collapse in the early 1990s.

  • When the Soviet Union existed, its 15 republics were based on the 15 largest ethnicities.

    • Less numerous ethnicities were not given the same level of recognition.

• With the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 independent countries, a number of these less numerous ethnicities are now divided among more than one state.

  • The 15 republics that once constituted the Soviet Union are now independent countries.

• These 15 newly independent states consist of five groups:

  • Three Baltic: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

  • Three European: Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine

  • Five Central Asian: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan. and Uzbekistan

  • Three Caucasus: Azerbaijan. Armenia. and Georgia

  • Russia

• Reasonably good examples of nation-states have been carved out of the Baltic, European, and some Central Asian states.

  • On the other hand, peaceful nation-states have not been created in any of the small Caucasus states, and Russia is an especially prominent example of a state with major difficulties in keeping all of its ethnicities contented.

NEW BALTIC NATION-STATES

• Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are known as the Baltic states for their location on the Baltic Sea.

  • They had been independent countries between the end of World War l in 1918 and 1940, when the former Soviet Union annexed them under an agreement with Nazi Germany.

  • Of the three Baltic states, Lithuania most closely fits the definition of a nation-state because ethnic Lithuanians comprise 85 percent of its population.

  • In Estonia, ethnic Estonians comprise only 69 percent of the population in Latvia, only 59 percent are ethnic Latvians.

• These three small differences neighboring Baltic countries have clear cultural differences and distinct historical traditions.

  • Most Estonians are Protestant (Lutherans), most Lithuanians are Roman Catholics, and Latvians are predominantly Lutheran with a substantial Roman Catholic minority.

  • Estonians speak a Uralic language related to Finnish, whereas Latvians and Lithuanians speak languages of the Baltic group within the Balto-Slavic branch of the Inda-European language family.

NEW EUROPEAN NATION-STATES

• To some extent, the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine now qualify as nation-states.

  • The ethnic distinctions among Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians are somewhat blurred.

  • The three groups speak similar East Slavic languages, and all are predominantly Orthodox Christians.

• Belarusians and Ukrainians became distinct ethnicities because they were isolated from the main body of Eastern Slavs—the Russians—during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  • This was the consequence of Mongolian invasions and conquests by Poles and Lithuanians.

  • Russians conquered the Belarusian and Ukrainian homelands in the late 1700s, but after five centuries of exposure to non-Slavic influences, the three Eastern Slavic groups displayed sufficient cultural diversity to consider themselves as three distinct ethnicities.

• The situation is different in Moldova.

  • Moldovans are ethnically indistinguishable from Romanians, and Moldova (then called Moldavia) was part of Romania until the Soviet Union seized it in 1940.

  • When Moldova changed from a Soviet republic back to an independent country in 1992, many Moldovans pushed for reunification with Roman ia, both to reunify the ethnic group and to improve the region's prospects for economic development.

• But it was not to be that simple.

  • When Moldova became a Soviet republic in 1940, its eastern boundary was the Dniester River.

  • The Soviet government increased the size of Moldova by about 10 percent, transferring from Ukraine a 3,000-square-kilometer sliver of land on the east bank of the Dniester.

NEW CENTRAL ASIAN STATES

• The five states in Central Asia carved out of the former Soviet Union display varying degrees of conformance to the principles of a nation-state.

  • Together the five provide an important reminder that multinational states can be more peaceful than nation-states.

• In Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the leading ethnic group has an overwhelming majority—85 percent Turkmen and 80 percent Uzbek, respectively.

  • Both ethnic groups are Muslims who speak an Altaic language; they were conquered by Russia in the nineteenth century.

  • Turkmen and Uzbeks are examples of ethnicities split into more than one country—the Turkmen between Turkmenistan and Russia, and Uzbeks among Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

• Kyrgyzstan is 69 percent Kyrgyz, 15 percent Uzbek, and 9 percent Russian.

  • The Kyrgyz-also Muslims who speak an Altaic language-resent the Russians for seizing the best farmland when they colonized this mountainous country early in the twentieth century.

• In principle, Kazakhstan, twice as large as the other four Central Asian countries combined, is a recipe for ethnic conflict.

  • The country is divided between Kazakhs, who comprise 67 percent of the population, and Russians, at 18 percent.

  • Tensions exist between the two groups, but Kazakhstan has been peaceful, in part because it has a somewhat less depressed economy than its neighbors.

• In contrast, Tajikistan—80 percent Tajik, 15 percent Uzbek, and only 1 percent Russian-would appear to be a stable country, but it suffers from a civil war among the Tajik people, Muslims who speak a language in the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian branch of Inda-European language.

  • The civil war has been between Tajiks, who are former Communists, and an unusual alliance of Muslim fundamentalists and Western-oriented intellectuals.

    • Fifteen percent of the population has been made homeless by the fighting.

Russia: Now the Largest Multinational State

• Russia officially recognizes the existence of 39 nationalities, many of which are eager for independence.

  • Russia's ethnicities are clustered in two principal locations.

    • Some are located along borders with neighboring states, including Buryats and Tuvinian near Mongolia, and Chechens, Dagestani, Kabardins, and Ossetians near the two former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Georgia.

    • Overall, 20 percent of the country's population is non-Russian.

  • Other ethnicities are clustered in the center of Russia, especially between the Volga River basin and the Ural Mountains.

• Independence movements are flourishing because Russia is less willing to suppress these movements forcibly than the Soviet Union had once been.

  • Particularly troublesome for the Russians are the Chechens, a group of Sunni Muslims who speak a Caucasian language and practice distinctive social customs.

• Chechnya was brought under Russian control in the nineteenth century only after a 50-year fight.

  • When the Soviet Union broke up into 15 independent states in 1991, the Chechens declared their independence and refused to join the newly created country of Russia.

  • Russian leaders ignored the declaration of independence for 3 years but then sent in the Russian army in an attempt to regain control of the territory.

  • Russia fought hard to prevent Chechnya from gaining independence because it feared that other ethnicities would follow suit.

  • Chechnya was also important to Russia because the region contained deposits of petroleum.

Turmoil in the Caucasus

• The Caucasus region, an area about the size of Colorado, is situated between the Black and Caspian seas and gets its name from the mountains that separate Russia from Azerbaijan and Georgia.

  • The region is home to several ethnicities, with Azeris, Armenians, and Georgians the most numerous.

  • Other important ethnicities include Abkhazians, Chechens, Ingush, and Ossetians.

    • Kurds and Russians—two ethnicities that are more numerous in other regions—are also represented in the Caucasus.

• When the entire Caucasus region was part of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government promoted allegiance to communism and the Soviet state and quelled disputes among ethnicities, by force if necessary.

  • With the breakup of the region into several independent countries, long-simmering conflicts among ethnicities have erupted into armed conflicts.

  • Each ethnicity has a long-standing and complex set of grievances against others in the region.

    • But from a political geography perspective, every ethnicity in the Caucasus has the same aspiration—to carve out a sovereign nation-state.

  • The region's ethnicities have had varying success in achieving this objective, but none have fully achieved it.

AZERBAIJAN

• Azeris (or Azerbaijanis) trace their roots to Turkish invaders who migrated from Central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries and merged with the existing Persian population.

  • An 1828 treaty allocated northern Azeri territory to Russia and southern Azeri territory to Persia (now Iran).

  • In 1923, the Russian portion became the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union.

• With the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991, Azerbaijan again became an independent country.

  • The western part of the country, Nakhichevan (named for the area's largest city), is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by a 40-kilometer (25-mile) corridor belonging to Armenia.

• More than 7 million Azeris now live in Azerbaijan, 91 percent of the country’s total population.

  • Another 16 million Azeris are clustered in northwestern Iran, where they constitute 24 percent of that country's population.

  • Azeris hold positions of responsibility in Iran's government and economy, but Iran restricts teaching of the Azeri language.

ARMENIA

• More than 3,000 years ago Armenians controlled an independent kingdom in the Caucasus.

  • Converted to Christianity in 303, they lived for many centuries as an isolated Christian enclave under the rule of Turkish Muslims.

• During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in a series of massacres organized by the Turks.

  • Others were forced to migrate to Russia, which had gained possession of eastern Armenia in 1828.

• After World War I the allies created an independent state of Armenia, but it was soon swallowed by its neighbors.

  • In 1921, Turkey and the Soviet Union agreed to divide Armenia between them.

  • The Soviet portion became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and then an independent country in 1991.

• Armenians and Azeris both have achieved long-held aspirations of forming nation-states, but after their independence from the Soviet Union, the two went to war over the boundaries between.

  • The war concerned possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, a 5,000-square-kilometer enclave within Azerbaijan that is inhabited primarily by Armenians but placed under Azerbaijan’s control by the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

  • A 1994 cease-fire has left Nagorno-Karabakh technically part of Azerbaijan, but in reality, it acts as an independent republic.

GEORGIANS

• The population of Georgia is more diverse than that in Armenia and Azerbaijan.

• Georgia's cultural diversity has been a source of unrest, especially among the Ossetians and Abkhazians.

  • During the 1990s, the Abkhazians fought for control of the northwestern portion of Georgia and have declared Abkhazia to be an independent state.

  • In 2008, the Ossetians fought a war with the Georgians that resulted in the Ossetians declaring the South Ossetia portion or Georgia to be independent.

• Russia has recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries and has sent troops there.

  • Only a handful of other countries recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, although the two operate as if they were independent of Georgia.

Revival of Ethnic Identity

• Europeans thought that ethnicity had been left behind as an insignificant relic, such as wearing quaint costumes to amuse tourists.

  • Karl Marx wrote that nationalism was a means for the dominant social classes to maintain power over workers, and he believed that workers would identify with other working-class people instead of with an ethnicity.

• Until they lost power around 1990, Communist leaders in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union used centripetal forces to discourage ethnicities from expressing their cultural uniqueness.

  • The role of organized religion was minimized, suppressing a cultural force that competed with the government.

• In the twenty-first century, ethnic identity has once again become more important than nationality, even in much of Europe.

• The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were dismantled largely because minority ethnicities opposed the long-standing dominance of the most numerous ones in each country—Russians in the Soviet Union, Serbs in Yugoslavia, and Czechs in Czechoslovakia.

  • The dominance was pervasive, including economic, political, and cultural institutions.

  • No longer content to control a province or some other local government unit, ethnicities sought to be the majority in completely independent nation-states.

  • Republics that once constituted local government units within the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia generally made peaceful transitions into independent countries—as long as their boundaries corresponded reasonably well with the territory occupied by a clearly defined ethnicity.

• Slovenia is a good example of a nation-state that was carved from the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

  • Slovenes comprise 83 percent of the population of Slovenia, and nearly all the world's 2 million Slovenes live in Slovenia.

  • The relatively close coincidence between the boundaries of the Slovene ethnic group and the country of Slovenia has promoted the country's relative peace and stability, compared to other former Yugoslavian republics.

KEY ISSUE 3 - Why Do Ethnicities Clash?

• Ethnicities do not always find ways to live together peacefully.

  • In some cases, ethnicities compete in civil wars to dominate the national identity.

  • In other cases, problems result from division of ethnicities among more than one state.

Ethnic Competition to Dominate Nationality

• Sub-Saharan Africa has been a region especially plagued by conflicts among ethnic groups competing to become dominant within the various countries.

  • The Horn of Africa and central Africa are the two areas within sub-Saharan Africa where conflicts among ethnic groups have been particularly complex and brutal.

Ethnic Competition in the Horn of Africa

• The Horn of Africa encompasses the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.

  • Especially severe problems have occurred in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, as well as in the neighboring country of Sudan.

ETHIOPIA AND ERITREA.

• Eritrea, located along the Red Sea, became an Italian colony in 1890.

  • Ethiopia, an independent country for more than 2,000 years, was captured by Italy during the 1930s.

  • After World War II, Ethiopia regained its independence, and the United Nations awarded Eritrea to Ethiopia.

  • The United Nations expected Ethiopia to permit Eritrea considerable authority to run its own affairs, but Ethiopia dissolved the Eritrean legislature and banned the use of Tigrinya, Eritrea's major local language.

  • The Eritreans rebelled, beginning a 30-year fight for independence (1961-1991).

    • During this civil war, an estimated 665,000 Eritrean refugees fled to neighboring Sudan.

• Eritrean rebels defeated the Ethiopian army in 1991, and 2 years later Eritrea became an independent state.

  • But war between Ethiopia and Eritrea flared up again in 1998 because of disputes over the location of the border.

  • Eritrea justified its claim through a 1900 treaty between Ethiopia and Italy, which then controlled Eritrea, but Ethiopia cited a 1902 treaty with Italy.

  • Ethiopia defeated Eritrea in 2000 and took possession of the disputed areas.

• A country of 5 million people split evenly between Christian and Muslim, Eritrea has two principal ethnic groups: Tigrinya and Tigre.

  • At least in the first years of independence, a strong sense of national identity united Eritrea's ethnicities as a result of shared experiences during the 30-year war to break free of Ethiopia.

• Even with the loss of Eritrea, Ethiopia remained a complex multiethnic state.

  • From the late nineteenth century until the 1990s, Ethiopia was controlled by the Amharas, who are Christians.

  • After the government defeat in the early 1990s, power passed to a combination of ethnic groups.

    • The Oromo, who are Muslim fundamentalists from the south, are the largest ethnic city in Ethiopia, at 34 percent of the population.

    • The Amhara, who comprise 27 percent of the population, had banned the use of languages other than Amharic, including Oromo.

SUDAN.

• In Sudan, a country of 41 million, several civil wars have raged since the 1980s between the Arab-Muslim dominated government in the north and other ethnicities in the south, west, and east:

• South: Black Christian and animist ethnicities resisted government attempts to convert the country from a multiethnic society to one nationality tied to Muslim traditions. A north-south war between 1983 and 2005 resulted in the death of an estimated 1.9 million Sudanese, mostly civilians. The war ended with the establishment of Southern Sudan as an autonomous region scheduled to have a referendum on independence in 2011. Three bordering districts—Abyei, Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile—may also become part of Southern Sudan in 2011.

• West: Black Muslim ethnic groups in the Darfur region of western Sudan fought against the government of Sudan beginning in 2003. The United Nations estimates that 400,000 died in Darfur and 2 million became refugees. The United States considers the mass murders and rape of civilians conducted by Sudanese troops to be genocide.

• East: Ethnicities along the Eastern Front fought the government of Sudan between 2004 and 2006 with the support of neighboring Eritrea. At issue was the disbursement of profits from oil.

SOMALIA.

• On the surface, Somalia should face fewer ethnic divisions than its neighbors in the Horn of Africa.

  • Somalis are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims and speak Somali.

  • Most share a sense that Somalia is a nation-state, with a national history and culture.

• Somalia's 9 million inhabitants are divided among several ethnic groups known as clans, each of which is divided into a large number of subclans.

  • Traditionally, the major clans occupied different portions of Somalia.

    • In 1991, a dictatorship that ran the country collapsed, and various clans and subclans claimed control over portions of the country.

    • Clans have declared independent states of Somaliland in the north, Puntland in the northeast, Galmudug in the center, and Southwestern Somalia in the south.

• The United States sent several thousand troops to Somalia in 1992, after an estimated 300,000 people, mostly women and children, died from famine and from warfare among clans.

  • The purpose of the mission was to protect delivery of food by international relief organizations to starving Somali refugees and to reduce the number of weapons in the hands of the clan and subclan armies.

    • After peace talks among the clans collapsed in 1994, U.S. troops withdrew.

• Islamist militias took control of much of Somalia between 2004 and 2006.

  • Neighboring countries were drawn into the conflict, Eritrea on the side of the Islamists and Ethiopia against them.

    • Claiming that some of the leaders were terrorists, the United States also opposed the Islamists, and launched airstrikes in 2007.

    • The fighting generated several hundred thousand refugees.

  • Islamist militias withdrew from most of Somalia in 2006, but have since returned and again control much of the country.

Ethnic Competition in Lebanon

• Lebanon has 4 million people in an area of 10,000 square kilometers (4,000 square miles), a bit smaller and more populous than Connecticut.

  • Once known as a financial and recreational center in the Middle East, Lebanon has been severely .. damaged by fighting among ethnicities since the 1970s.

• Lebanon is divided between around 60 percent Muslims and 39 percent Christians.

  • Lebanon's most numerous Christian sect is Maronite, which split from the Roman Catholic Church in the seventh century.

  • The second-largest are Greek Orthodox, the Orthodox church that uses a Byzantine liturgy.

• Most of Lebanon's Muslims belong to one of several Shiite sects.

  • Sunnis, who are much more numerous than Shiites in the world, account for a minority of Lebanon's Muslims.

  • Lebanon also has an important community of Droze, who were once considered a separate religion but now consider themselves Muslim.

    • Many Druze rituals are kept secret from outsiders.

• Lebanon's diversity appears to be religious not ethnic.

  • But most of Lebanon's Christians consider themselves ethnically descended from the ancient Phoenicians who once occupied present-day Lebanon.

  • In this way, Lebanon's Christians differentiate themselves from the country's Muslims, who are considered Arabs.

• When Lebanon became independent in 1943, the constitution required that each religion be represented in the Chamber of Deputies according to its percentage in the 1932 census.

  • By unwritten convention, the president of Lebanon was a Maronite Christian, the premier a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies a Shiite Muslim, and the foreign minister a Greek Orthodox Christian.

    • Other cabinet members and civil servants were similarly apportioned among the various faiths.

• Lebanon's religious groups have tended to live in different regions of the country.

  • Maronites are concentrated in the west-central part, Sunnis in the northwest, and Shiites in the south and east.

  • Beirut, the capital and largest city, has been divided between a Christian eastern zone and a Muslim western zone.

    • During a civil war between 1975 and 1990, each religious group formed a private army or militia to guard its territory.

    • The territory controlled by each militia changed according to the results of battles with other religious groups.

• When the governmental system was created, Christians constituted a majority and controlled the country's main businesses, but as the Muslims became the majority, they demanded political and economic equality.

  • The agreement ending the civil war in 1990 gave each religion one-half of the 128 seats in Parliament.

  • Israel and the United States sent troops into Lebanon at various points in failed efforts to restore peace.

    • The United States pulled out after 241 U.S. marines died in their barracks from a truck bomb in 1983.

    • Lebanon was left under the control of neighboring Syria, which had a historical claim over the territory until it, too, was forced to withdraw its troops in 2005.

Dividing Ethnicities Among More Than One State

• Newly independent countries are often created to separate two ethnicities.

• However, two ethnicities can rarely be segregated completely.

  • Conflicts arise when an ethnicity is split among more than one country.

• South Asia provides vivid examples of what happens when independence comes to colonies that contain two major ethnicities.

  • Several major ethnic conflicts have ensued in the region.

India and Pakistan

• When the British ended their colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent in 194 7, they divided the colony into two irregularly shaped countries—India and Pakistan.

  • Pakistan comprised two noncontiguous areas, West Pakistan and East Pakistan—1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) apart, separated by India.

  • East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971.

    • An eastern region of India was also practically cut off from the rest of the country, attached only by a narrow corridor north of Bangladesh that is less than 13 kilometers (8 miles) wide in some places.

• The basis for separating West and East Pakistan from India was ethnicity.

  • The people living in the two areas of Pakistan were predominantly Muslim; those in India were predominantly Hindu.

  • Antagonism between the two religious groups was so great that the British decided to place the Hindus and Muslims in separate states.

  • Hinduism has become a great source of national unity in India.

    • In modern India, with its hundreds of languages and ethnic groups, Hinduism has become the cultural trait shared by the largest percentage of the population.

• Muslims have long fought with Hindus for control of territory, especially in South Asia.

  • After the British took over India in the early 1800s, a three-way struggle began, with the Hindus and Muslims fighting each other as well as the British rulers.

  • Mahatma Gandhi, the leading Hindu advocate of nonviolence and reconciliation with Muslims, was assassinated in 1948, ending the possibility of creating a single state in which Muslims and Hindus could live together peacefully.

• The partition of Soutli Asia into two states resulted in massive migration because the two boundaries did not correspond precisely to the territory inhabited by the two ethnicities.

  • Approximately 17 million people caught on the wrong side of a boundary felt compelled to migrate during the late 1940s.

  • Some 6 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan and about 1 million from India to East Pakistan.

    • Hindus who migrated to India included approximately 6 million from West Pakistan and 3.5 million from East Pakistan.

    • As they attempted to reach the other side of the new border, Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India were killed by people from the rival religion.

      • Extremists attacked small groups of refugees traveling by road and halted trains to massacre the passengers.

• Pakistan and India never agreed on the location of the boundary separating the two countries in the northern region of Kashmir.

  • Since 1972, the two countries have maintained a “line of control” through the region, with Pakistan administering the northwestern portion and India the southeastern portion.

  • Muslims, who comprise a majority in both portions, have fought a guerrilla war to secure reunification of Kashmir, either as part of Pakistan or as an independent country.

  • India blames Pakistan for the unrest and vows to retain its portion of Kashmir.

    • Pakistan argues that Kashmiris on both sides of the border should choose their own future in a vote, confident that the majority Muslim population would break away from India.

• India's religious unrest is further complicated by the presence of 25 million Sikhs, who have long resented that they were not given their own independent country when India was partitioned.

  • Although they constitute only 2 percent of India's total population, Sikhs comprise a majority in the Indian state of Punjab, situated south of Kashmir along the border with Pakistan.

    • Sikh extremists have fought for more control over the Punjab or even complete independence from India.

Sinhalese and Tamil in Sri Lanka

• Sri Lanka, an island country of 20 million inhabitants off the Indian coast, is inhabited by two principal ethnicities known as Sinhalese and Tamil.

  • War between the two ethnicities erupted in 1983 and continued until 2009.

  • During that period, 80,000 died in the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil.

• Sinhalese, who comprise 82 percent of Sri Lanka's population, migrated from northern India in the fifth century B.C., occupying the southern portion of the island.

  • Three hundred years later, the Sinhalese were converted to Buddhism, and Sri Lanka became one of that religion's world centers.

    • Sinhalese is an Indo-European language, in the Indo-Iranian branch.

• Tamils—14 percent of Sri Lanka's population—migrated across the narrow 80-kilometer-wide (50-mile-wide) Palk Strait from India beginning in the third century B.C. and occupied tile northern part of the island.

  • Tamils are Hindus, and the Tamil language, in the Dravidian family, is also spoken by 60 million people in India.

• The dispute between Sri Lanka's two ethnicities extends back more than 2,000 years but was suppressed during 300 years of European control.

  • Since independence in 1948, Sinhalese have dominated the government, military, and most of the commerce.

    • Tamils feel that they suffer from discrimination at the hands of the Sinhalese-dominated government and have received support for a rebellion that began in 1983 from Tamils living in other countries.

• The long war between the ethnicities ended in 2009 with the defeat of the Tamil.

  • With their defeat, the Tamil fear that the future of Sri Lanka as a multinational state is jeopardized.

  • Back in 1956, Sinhalese leaders made Buddhism the sole official religion and Sinhala the sole official language of Sri Lanka.

    • The Tamil fear that their military defeat jeopardizes their ethnic identity again.

KEY ISSUE 4 - What Is Ethnic Cleansing?

• Throughout history, ethnic groups have been forced to flee from other ethnic groups’ more powerful armies.

• Ethnic cleansing is a process in which a more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogeneous region.

  • In recent years, ethnic cleansing has been carried out primarily in Europe and Africa.

• Ethnic cleansing is undertaken to rid an area of an entire ethnicity so that the surviving ethnic group can be the sole inhabitants.

  • The point of ethnic cleansing is not simply to defeat an enemy or to subjugate them, as was the case in traditional wars.

  • Rather than a clash between armies of male soldiers, ethnic cleansing involves the removal of every member of the less powerful ethnicity—women as well as men, children as well as adults, the frail elderly as well as the strong youth.

Ethnic Cleansing in Europe

• The largest forced migration came during World War II (1939-1945) because of events leading up to the war, the war itself, and postwar adjustments.

  • Especially notorious was the deportation by the German Nazis of millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups to the infamous concentration camps, where they exterminated most of them.

• After World War II ended, millions of ethnic Germans, Poles, Russians, and other groups were forced to migrate as a result of boundary changes.

  • For example, when a portion of eastern Germany became part of Poland, the Germans living in the region were forced to move west to Germany, and Poles were allowed to move into the area.

    • Similarly, Poles were forced to move when the eastern portion of Poland was turned over to the Soviet Union.

• The scale of forced migration during World War II has not been repeated, but in recent years ethnic cleansing within Europe has occurred in portions of former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

  • Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia is part of a complex pattern of ethnic diversity in the region of southeastern Europe known as the Balkan Peninsula.

  • The region, about the size of Texas, is named for the Balkan Mountains (known in Slavic languages as Stara Planina), which extend east-west across the region.

    • The Balkans includes Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania, as well as several countries that once comprised Yugoslavia.

Creation of Multiethnic Yugoslavia

• The Balkan Peninsula, a complex assemblage of ethnicities, has long been a hotbed of unrest.

  • Northern portions were incorporated into the Austro-Hungary Empire; southern portions were ruled by the Ottomans.

  • Austria-Hungary extended its rule farther south in 1878 to include Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the majority of the people had been converted to Islam by the Ottomans.

• In June 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb who sought independence for Bosnia.

  • The incident sparked World War I.

  • After World War I the allies created a new country, Yugoslavia, to unite several Balkan ethnicities that spoke similar South Slavic languages.

    • The prefix "Yugo" in the country's name derives from the Slavic word for "south."

• Under the long leadership of Josip Broz Tito, who governed Yugoslavia from 1953 until his death in 1980, Yugoslavs liked to repeat a refrain that roughly translates as follows: "Yugoslavia has seven neighbors, six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets, and one dinar”. Specifically:

• Seven neighbors of Yugoslavia included three longtime democracies (Austria, Greece, and Italy) and four states then governed by Communists (Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania). The diversity of neighbors reflected Yugoslavia's strategic location between the Western democracies and Communist Eastern Europe. Although a socialist country, Yugoslavia was militarily neutral after it had been expelled in 1948 from the Soviet-dominated military alliance for being too independent-minded. Yugoslavia's Communists permitted more communication and interaction with Western democracies than did other Eastern European countries.

• Six republics within Yugoslavia—Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia—had more autonomy from the national government to run their own affairs than was the case in other Eastern European countries.

• Five of the republics were named for the country's five recognized nationalities—Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. Bosnia & Herzegovina contained a mix of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

• Four official languages were recognized—Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Slovene. (Montenegrins spoke Serbian.)

• Three major religions included Roman Catholic in the north, Orthodox in the east, and Islam in the south. Croats and Slovenes were predominantly Roman Catholic, Serbs and Macedonians predominantly Orthodox, and the Bosnians and Montenegrins predominantly Muslim.

• Two of the four official languages—Croatian and Slovene—were written in the Roman alphabet; Macedonian and Serbian were ·written in Cyrillic. Most linguists outside Yugoslavia considered Serbian and Croatian to be the same language except for different alphabets.

• One, the refrain concluded, was the dinar, the national unit of currency. This meant that despite cultural diversity, common economic interests kept Yugoslavia’s nationalities unified.

• The creation of Yugoslavia brought stability that lasted for most of the twentieth century.

  • Old animosities among ethnic groups were submerged, and younger people began to identify themselves as Yugoslavs rather than as Serbs, Croats, or Montenegrins.

Destruction of Multiethnic Yugoslavia

• Rivalries among ethnicities resurfaced in Yugoslavia during the 1980s after Tito's death, leading to the breakup of the country.

  • Breaking away to form independent countries were Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia during the 1990s, and Montenegro in 2006.

  • The breakup left Serbia standing on its own as well.

• As long as Yugoslavia comprised one country, ethnic groups were not especially troubled by the division of the country into six republics.

  • But when Yugoslavia's republics were transformed from local government units into five separate countries, ethnicities fought to redefine the boundaries.

  • Not only did the boundaries of Yugoslavia's six republics fail to match the territory occupied by the five major nationalities, but the country contained other important ethnic groups that had not received official recognition as nationalities.

ETHNIC CLEANSING IN BOSNIA.

• The creation of a viable country proved especially difficult in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  • The population of Bosnia &: Herzegovina consisted of 48 percent Bosnian Muslim, 37 percent Serb, and 14 percent Croat.

  • Bosnian Muslim was considered an ethnicity rather than a nationality.

  • Rather than live in an independent multiethnic country with a Muslim plurality, Bosnia &: Herzegovina's Serbs and Croats fought to unite the portions of the republic that they inhabited with Serbia and Croatia, respectively.

• To strengthen their cases for breaking away from Bosnia &: Herzegovina, Serbs and Croats engaged in ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims.

  • Ethnic cleansing ensured that areas did not merely have majorities of Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, but were ethnically homogeneous and therefore better candidates for union with Serbia and Croatia.

    • Ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims was especially severe because much of the territory inhabited by Bosnian Serbs was separated from Serbia by areas with Bosnian Muslim majorities.

  • By ethnically cleansing Bosnian Muslims from intervening areas, Bosnian Serbs created one continuous area of Bosnian Serb domination rather than several discontinuous ones.

• Accords reached in Dayton, Ohio, in 1996 by leaders of the various ethnicities divided Bosnia & Herzegovina into three regions, one each dominated, respectively, by the Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs.

  • The Bosnian Croat and Muslim regions were combined into a federation, with some cooperation between the two groups, but the Serb region has operated with almost complete independence in all but name from the others.

  • In recognition of the success of their ethnic cleansing, Bosnian Serbs received nearly half of the country, although they comprised one-third of the population, and Bosnian Croats got one-fourth of the land, although they comprised one-sixth of the population.

    • Bosnian Muslims, one-half of the population before the ethnic cleansing, got one-fourth of the land.

ETHNIC CLEANSING IN KOSOVO.

• After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia remained a multiethnic country.

  • Particularly troubling was the province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians comprised 90 percent of the population.

  • Under Tito, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo received administrative autonomy and national identity.

• Serbia had a historical claim to Kosovo, having controlled it between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

  • Serbs fought an important—though losing—battle in Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389.

  • In recognition of its role in forming the Serb ethnicity, Serbia was given control of Kosovo when Yugoslavia was created in the early twentieth century.

• With the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia took direct control of Kosovo and launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Albanian majority.

  • At its peak in 1999, Serb ethnic cleansing had forced 750,000 of Kosovo's 2 million ethnic Albanian residents from their homes, mostly to camps in Albania.

  • Outraged by the ethnic cleansing, the United States and Western European countries, operating through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), launched an air attack against Serbia.

  • The bombing campaign ended when Serbia agreed to withdraw all of its soldiers and police from Kosovo.

    • Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008.

    • Around 60 countries, including the United States, recognize Kosovo as an independent country, but Serbia and Russia oppose it.

BALKANIZATION.

• A century ago, the term Balkanized was widely used to describe a small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it was inhabited by many ethnicities with complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other.

• World leaders at the time regarded Balkanization—the process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities—as a threat to peace throughout the world, not just in a small area.

  • They were right: Balkanization led directly to World War I because the various nationalities in the Balkans dragged into the war the larger powers with which they had alliances.

• After two world wars and the rise and fall of communism during the twentieth century, the Balkans have once again become Balkanized in the twenty-first century.

  • If peace comes to the Balkans, it will be because in a tragic way ethnic cleansing "worked."

  • Millions of people were rounded up and killed or forced to migrate because they constituted ethnic minorities.

    • Ethnic homogeneity may be the price of peace in areas that once were multiethnic.

Ethnic Cleansing in Central Africa

• Ethnic conflict is widespread in Africa largely because the present-day boundaries of states do not match the boundaries of ethnic groups.

  • During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European countries carved up the continent into a collection of colonies with little regard for the distribution of ethnicities.

• Traditionally, the most important unit of African society was the tribe rather than independent states with political and economic self-determination.

  • Africa contains several thousand ethnicities (usually referred to as tribes) with a common sense of language, religion, and social customs.

  • The precise number of tribes is whether a particular group forms a distinct tribe or is part of a larger collection of similar groups.

• When European colonies in Africa became independent states, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, the boundaries of the new states typically matched the colonial admi~istrative units imposed by the Europeans.

  • As a result, some tribes were divided among more than one modern state, and others were grouped with dissimilar tribes.

• Long-standing conflicts between two ethnic groups, the Hutus and Tutsis lie at the heart of a series of wars in central Africa.

  • The Hutu were settled farmers, growing crops in the fertile hills and valleys of present-day Rwanda and Burundi, known as the Great Lakes region of central Africa.

  • The Tutsi were cattle herders who migrated to present-day Rwanda and Burundi from the Rift Valley of western Kenya beginning 400 years ago.

  • Relations between settled farmers and herders are often uneasy—this is also an element of the ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

    • The Tutsi took control of the kingdom of Rwanda and turned the Hutu into their serfs, although Tutsi comprised only about 15 percent of the population.

• Rwanda, as well as Burundi, became a colony of Germany in 1899, and after the Germans were defeated in World War I, the League of Nations gave a mandate over the two small colonies to Belgium.

  • Colonial administrators permitted a few Tutsis to attend university and hold responsible government positions while excluding the Hutu altogether.

• Shortly before Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, Hutus killed or ethnically cleansed most of the Tutsis out of fear that the Tutsis would seize control of the newly independent country.

  • Those fears were realized in 1994 after the airplane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi back from peace talks was shot down, probably by a Tutsi.

  • Descendents of the ethnically cleansed Tutsis, most of whom lived in neighboring Uganda, poured back into Rwanda, defeated the Hutu army, and killed a half-million Hutus while suffering a half-million casualties of their own.

    • Through ethnic cleansing, 3 million of the country's 7 million Hutus fled to Zaire, Tanzania, Uganda, and Burundi.

• The conflict between Hutus and Tutsis spilled into neighboring countries, especially the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  • The region's largest and most populous country, the Congo is thought to have had the world's deadliest war since the end of World War II in 1945.

    • An estimated 5.4 million have died in Congo civil wars as of 2009.

• Tutsis were instrumental in the successful overthrow of the Congo's longtime president, Joseph Mobutu, in 1997.

  • Mobutu had amassed a several-billion-dollar personal fortune from the sale of minerals while impoverishing the rest of the country.

  • After succeeding Mobutu as president, Laurent Kabila relied heavily on Tutsis and permitted them to kill some of the Hutus who had been responsible for atrocities against Tutsis back in the early 1990s.

  • But Kabila soon split with the Tutsis, and the Tutsis once again found themselves, offering support to rebels seeking to overthrow Congo’s government.

• Kabila turned for support to Hutus, as well as to Mayi Mayi, another ethnic group in the Congo that also hated Tutsis.

  • Armies from Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and other neighboring countries came to Kabila’s aid.

    • Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and succeeded by his son, who negotiated an accord with rebels the following year.