The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read Online Free Page B

into two or more biologically indistinguishable but culturally differentiated ethnic groups. The process may be voluntary, but it may also be based on coercion – notably where major changes of religious belief are concerned. One or both groups may even opt for residential and other forms of segregation; the majority may insist that the minority lives in a clearly delineated space, or the minority may choose to do so for its own reasons. The two groups may cordially ignore one another, or there may be friction, perhaps leading to civil strife or one-sided massacres. The groups may fight one another or one group may submit to expulsion by the other. Genocide is the extreme case, in which one group attempts to annihilate the other.
    Why, if minorities face such risks by not assimilating, do ethnic identities persist, even in cases where no biological distinction exists? There are, to be sure, fewer ethnic groups in the world today than there were a century ago; witness the decline in the number of living languages. Yet despite the best efforts of the global market and the nation state to impose cultural uniformity, many minority cultures have proved remarkably resilient. Indeed, persecution has sometimestended to strengthen the self-consciousness of the persecuted. Passing on an inherited culture may simply be gratifying in its own right; we enjoy hearing our children singing the songs our parents taught us. A more functional interpretation is that ethnic groups can provide valuable networks of trust in nascent markets. The obvious cost of such networks is, of course, that their very success may arouse the antagonism of other ethnic groups. Some ‘market-dominant minorities’ are especially vulnerable to discrimination and even expropriation; their tightly knit communities are economically strong but politically weak. While this may be true of the Chinese diaspora * in parts of Asia today, it also has applicability to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War or the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second. However, because exceptions suggest themselves (the Scots were unquestionably a ‘market-dominant minority’ throughout the British Empire, but aroused minimal hostility), two qualifications need to be added. The first is that the economic dominance of a vulnerable minority may matter less than its political lack of dominance. It is not only wealthy minorities that are persecuted; by no means all the European Jews were rich, and the Sinti and Roma were among Europe’s poorest people when the Nazis condemned them to annihilation. The crucial factor may have been their lack of formal and informal political representation. The second qualification is that, if an ethnic group is to be deprived of its rights, property or existence, it cannot be too well armed. Where there are two ethnic groups, both of which have weapons, civil war is more likely than genocide.
    Of considerably less importance is the relative size of an ethnic minority. There are, indeed, cases when a majority population was the victim of violent persecution by a minority, counter-intuitive though that may be. As the people of predominantly Jewish cities in the Pale of Settlement † discovered repeatedly in the first half of thetwentieth century, numbers do not always mean safety. Also relatively insignificant as a predictor of ethnic conflict is the degree of assimilation between two populations. It might be thought that a high level of social integration would discourage conflict, if only because of the difficulty of identifying and isolating a highly assimilated minority. Paradoxically, however, a sharp rise in assimilation (measured, for example, by rates of intermarriage) may actually be the prelude to ethnic conflict.
    Assimilation, to give perhaps the most important of all examples, was in fact quite far advanced in Central and Eastern Europe by the 1920s. In many places of mixed settlement, rates of intermarriage