INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ETHNIC NATIONS

The Concept of E'Claves.

National movements among indigenous peoples and ethnic nations can only be understood in terms of a long-term world-systems context. Although ethnic communities have overlapped each other ever since cities and civilizations came into existence, the modern world has given ethnic nations a central role as the source of legitimacy for governance in sovereign states. Contemporary globalization reinforces the process whereby ethnic communities become self-conscious about themselves in relation to other communities, aware of threats to their own cultural practices and interested in mobilizing to protect and enhance them in the modern world system, relying on self-determination and sovereignty as key concepts.

During the past half-century such movements led to the formation of new states in most of the dependencies of the industrial empires that were located outside the boundaries of their metropoles. Increasingly, during the coming decades, we may expect them to occur inside the boundaries of existing states -- both old and new -- as ethnic nationalism arises among both indigenous peoples and within the framework of tribalized and conquered nations surviving in the heartlands of many of the well established states of our post-Westphalian world. An important factor, both in the emergence of ethnic nations and the likelihood that they will achieve autonomy or independence, involves the presence of politically recognized boundaries that separate their homelands from external lands and peoples. Although the collapse of industrial imperialism means the world no longer needs to fear major wars between super-powers, it does need to recognize a rising danger caused by the efforts of existing states to preserve their internal and external borders as they have increasingly come under attack by ethnic nations who seek sovereignty and want to create their own autonomies or states within newly created boundaries.

This paper examines differences in the practices and policies of indigenous communities and non-state nations as well as those of the enclosing states found today in our post-Westphalian inter-state system. The paper is divided into these parts:

• first, a discussion of the differences between ancient and modern ethnicity as they relate to the rise of ethnic nationalism;


• second, an analysis of the relation between states and nations as it contextualizes the rise of ethnic nationalism;


• third, some thoughts about how the distinction between external possessions (exclaves) and internal domains (enclaves) affects the development and prospects of nationalist movements;


• fourth, the status of minorities and the influence of migrations in relation to ethnic nations; and


• fifth, how the differences between exclave and enclave nations have affected their prospects for self-determination.

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The distinction between class and caste highlights differences that can help us understand the main contrasts between ancient and modern ethnicity. Use of this metaphor may also help us understand some important properties of modern nationalism as it has emerged with growing force in the world today. Three important properties of the class/caste distinction are relevant here: mobility, occupation and niche.

• By mobility we refer to the opportunities for individuals and families to move, both upward and downward, when they increase or lose wealth, social status, and knowledge.
• By occupation I mean the work/professional activities that may be attributed to any community -- as farmers, pastoralists, artisans, doctors, lawyers, chemists, sociologists or unskilled workers.
• By niche we can designate the social position occupied by a whole community and the ecological relationships that perpetuate its identity and roles.
  
  

Models for both caste and class can be visualized by reference to these three properties, as suggested in the following table:

The table may help us visualize the fundamental distinctions:

• Caste systems are personally immobile, occupationally rigid, with impermanent niches in the sense that the hierarchic status of a caste (or sub-caste) can move, gradually, to a higher or lower position.
• Class systems, by contrast, are personally mobile since individuals and families can change their class position, they are occupationally flexible inasmuch as members of any given class may engage in a wide range of occupations, but niches -- higher, middle and lower classes, as on a liner like the Titanic -- remain permanently fixed as places that retain their identity even though individuals might move between them, though with difficulty.

These are ideal types and, in the real world, mixtures of class and caste features are quite normal. The use of race and ethnicity as a kind of fixed phrase represents this kind of mixture, like kith and kin which we link unthinkingly when we describe a traditional rural community because, in them, we cannot distinguish clearly between "kith" (neighbors) and "kin" (relatives). Similarly, in modern societies, the contrast between the caste-like features of racial groups and the class-like properties of ethnic communities overlap so much that we cannot clearly distinguish between them. However, the phrase, "race and ethnicity," has become anachronistic insofar as modern (class-like) ethnicity has replaced traditional (caste-like) race relations. In contemporary America, however, the two concepts have become so intermingled that one often hears religious or linguistic communities referred to as "races" and racially different groups are, in fact, treated like ethnic communities. Reference to Table I will help us visualize these important points.

• Mobility: racial features are immobile (as in a caste system) but ethnic status is mobile insofar as members of any ethnic community are able to move up and down, both within their own community and, by integration, within the larger society where they live.
• Occupation: racial communities are typically boxed into occupational roles -- as Africans in America were, first, enslaved and, after emancipation, limited to unskilled occupations as tenant farmers and unskilled urban workers. Asian immigrants were similarly stereotyped as to the occupations they were permitted to occupy. By contrast, members of any ethnic community are expected to become mobile professionals, merchants, or public servants as they move from Ellis Island to urban ghettos to suburban comforts. Members of a racial category like "black people" become ethnicized to the degree that increasing social mobility enables them to shift from racial to ethnic life styles.
• Niche: Racial niches have been modified for "black" Americans by emancipation following the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement in recent years. This caste-like niche shift is easily symbolized by the removal of "Jim Crow" signs in public places, and the transformation that enabled "black" people to sit where they pleased in buses or to register in any hotel of their choice. By contrast, the labels for "upper," "middle" and "lower" class people cannot be shifted no matter how much individual members of these classes move upward or downward in their social status.

By substituting status categories for racial stereotypes, the class-like situation of modern ethnicity is well symbolized. When modernity prevails in America, racial stereotypes will vanish: although we continue to use the "black/white" racial contrast to perpetuate many residential and occupational niches, they have almost vanished for Asians whose ethnicization is marked by the abandonment of "yellow" as a racial category. Similarly, we no longer characterize native Americans as "red," but their ethnicization is linked to nationalism, a theme to which I will now turn.

The Historical Transformation. A similar kind of transformation has occurred with respect to ethnicity. So long as cities and civilizations have existed, there has been ethnicity in the sense of cross-cultural contact and relationships. Multi-culturalism is an ancient phenomenon and it has normally been associated with hierarchic notions of superiority and inferiority. Members of dominant communities often used terms like heathen, pagan, gentile, primitive, infidel, and uncivilized to refer to peoples different from themselves. They were sometimes feared as threatening barbarians, or conquered, slain and enslaved as prisoners or conquered peoples. The victims were denied civil rights based on citizenship, by contrast with the hierarchy of privileges accorded to members of the conquering societies. Sometimes, of course, inter-ethnic relations were tolerated or even cherished, as when foreigners came bearing tributes or valued objects which dominant elites wished to acquire for their own use, leading to the proliferation of marginalized trader communities, typically with their own distinctive languages, religious practices, and customs.

These relationships were caste-like in structure possessing the three properties identified in Table I. They were immobile insofar as members of one community could not readily move to another. Their occupations were normally inherited and rigid -- this supported familiar occupational categories such as a barber, warrior, priest, farmer, carpenter, chief, or trader, each of which came to be associated with a cultural community whose members reproduced the specializations of their ancestors and perpetuated their own distinctive group practices. Each community occupied a niche which had a dual function: in the short run, it protected and perpetuated its members while also permitting their exploitation and domination. On a longer time horizon, however, historic changes enabled these niches to move. Broad generalizations like this need to be made more concrete to provide illustrations and to explain exceptions.

In India, for example, these linkages became institutionalized in an overarching social structure which permits us to think of a single cultural matrix in which sub-cultural caste distinctions prevailed, each with its own characteristic occupations -- actually, they were prerogatives in the sense that only members of a particular caste inherited the right to do certain things and they would resist encroachment by outsiders on their caste monopolies. They provide the classic prototype of a caste system that persists in the modern world, despite all the external influences that have also deeply affected contemporary Indian society and life. As a result, although niche mobility is an important aspect of the Indian social system, it was less conspicuous that it was in the rest of the ancient world

More commonly, elsewhere, major cultural distinctions rather than their occupational specializations gave ethnic communities their distinctive names (ethnonyms), and the relationships between them were not so stable. The famous and long-term clash between the desert and the sown that Ibn Khaldun described (cf. Tehranian) epitomizes these transformations as nomadic hordes invaded and occupied settled agricultural peoples, only to be absorbed in turn. When hitherto despised outsiders conquered and replaced indigenous elites, niche transformations became dramatically obvious, but such changes also occurred in other ways. The Christianization of the Roman Empire and, later, the Islamization of the Mediterranean world, involved monumental niche changes in which hitherto marginalized communities became dominant. Refugees and migrants, colonists and conquerors, have deeply influenced the ancient world, producing radical niche changes as one people or community replaced or modified the niches previously occupied by others.

No doubt such sweeping generalizations involve a huge historical simplification of the ancient world, but they pave the way for helping us understand the modern world in which ethnic relationships have become more class-like than caste-like. As a result of modernity -- a composite set of inter-active forces based on industrialization, democratization and nationalism [cf. Riggs] -- inter-ethnic relations in the contemporary world have been radically transformed. This change becomes evident when we consider the three properties of class systems:

• Mobility. The most obvious of these changes involves occupational mobility -- within each ethnic community all the traditional social roles plus a great many new ones have become available. Indeed, one of the easiest ways for individuals to break out of the traditional molds of ethnic specialization has involved leapfrogging into new professional and technical roles created by the industrial and scientific revolution -- most notably in our times by means of computer science and the INTERNET.
• Occupations. Not only do these new occupations offer opportunities for social mobility, but they become strategic weapons available to help one's co-ethnics improve their lot in life. Some current example come to mind: until the 1940s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese living in America were limited to the laundry and restaurant business, even though their young people often obtained advanced university degrees. Remarkably, labor shortages during World War II catapulted many if not most of these young people into prestigious and well paid professional jobs, thereby transforming the popular image of a "Chinese" from that of an unassimilable racial minority to that of someone to be judged by performance, not ancestry. Michele Kwan, as a skating champion at the recent Nagano Olympics, was never, so far as I can recall, referred to on television as "Chinese," but only as "American."
• Niche. Does the transformation of ancient into modern forms of ethnicity apply to niches as well as to mobility and occupations? At first glance, one might think that ethnic nationalism and the movement to create new national states is more comparable to mobile caste niches than the rigidity of class niches. However, if we visualize niches on a horizontal rather than a vertical scale, I think we can reconcile this apparent contradiction.

In caste systems, many niches co-exist within a single society, each providing a place for some community whose members may, however, shift the status of their niche within the existing social system -- this applies to classical forms of hierarchic ethnicity. In class systems, by contrast, we presuppose fixed social positions within a society, but expect individuals to move from one class to another. This is even true of the Marxian vision of class struggle in which lower class people (the proletariat) may seize power and leap into the upper class, while former aristocrats and capitalists would be downgraded. This perspective does not contemplate any movement of classes, however -- the movement involves individuals changing their class positions. Despite the rhetoric of a "classless" society, it is now clear that class differences remain under Communist domination. No doubt the class model offers different scenarios: revolutionaries contemplate a rapid replacement of ruling elites, whereas conservatives endorse enhanced mobility by individuals whose class position can change without sweeping socio-political transformations.

The two options of normal and accelerated change in class relations postulated in the Marxian model have their counterparts in modern ethnicity. These options are both modern, however, and contrast with the caste-like characteristics of traditional ethnicity. They both require occupational flexibility and mobility -- individuals are able to move in time and space between ethnic and occupational statuses. However, an important difference can be seen between patient and impatient ethnics. This difference involves niches. Their significance become apparent when we recall that in pre-modern societies, a conquering invader -- such as a nomadic tribe or an urban empire -- would gain control over a neighboring society and impose its domination on the conquered peoples.

This involved a niche transformation by different cultural communities. The position of individuals within each of these community reflected the niche change -- they could not easily move from one community to another. By contrast, in modern societies, where class roles are inflexible, the best hope for low status individuals is to change their class position. This applies not only in ethnically homogenous societies, but also in multi-cultural contexts. Marginalized ethnics face two possibilities -- no doubt their choices are limited by constraints imposed from the outside, but within limits they contemplate two possibilities.

It they are patient and willing to work within the status quo, they can usually become integrated by cultural assimilation, expecting that their diligence and intelligence will enable them to enhance their personal positions. By contrast, if they are impatient, they may, instead, reject the status quo and seek to leapfrog into a better situation for themselves and their friends or followers by establishing a new context in the form of their own state or autonomous regime. Of course, the decision about which option to adopt is not just a personal choice -- it also hinges on state policies and the behavior of people who are not co-ethnics.

The importance of public policy and social attitudes in modern societies as shapers of ethnic attitudes reflects a fundamental world transformation that can most easily be explained if we recognize the dynamics of modernity. I use this word here not to refer to the present day, although the word originally did refer to contemporary things. However, we now link the present age with certain socio-economic and political transformations that have occurred in the world during the last two or three centuries. I have discussed these changes elsewhere ["Malody of Modernity"] and will not digress to review the argument here. However, a salient feature relevant to this discourse involves the transformation of sovereignty from an attribute of rulers whose right to rule was viewed as divinely sanctioned to a notion which attributed sovereignty to nations, each of which had the right to govern itself. This transformation gained widespread acceptance during the 19^th century as representative government in republics replaced monarchic rule in country after country -- including those that became constitutional monarchies. Since national identity and state boundaries rarely coincided, this belief created new problems that had not been felt under monarchic rule. The emergence of ethnic nationalism as a wide-spread phenomenon is a direct consequence of this transformation. We need to see that although ethnicity is ancient and persists as a socio-cultural fact of life, it has acquired a new significance in the form of ethnonationalism.

Closely linked with the rise of modern nationalism is democracy, grounded in notions of equality and representative governance. Clearly, democracy never operated at a world-system level, but only at the level of states as political entities that, taken together, would constitute a world-system. Moreover, the theorists of democracy never assumed that any multi-cultural assortment of peoples could govern themselves -- rather they argued that only members of a nation, a people sharing common cultural norms and practices, could and should govern themselves in states where equalitarianism among nationals would be able to establish and maintain responsible government based on majoritarian principles. Although non-members of a nation might live within a state, they would be treated as outsiders without the rights of citizenship. As a result of this premise, a distinction arose between citizens and subjects, persons eligible to participate as members of a sovereign state, and others who were ineligible and would only be tolerated as non-citizens or aliens. This situation is reproduced in minature on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina where non-Cherokee may live but not vote for members of the governing Tribal Council -- of course, as citizens of the U.S., they vote in state and national elections.

This idea led, historically, to the emergence of two contrasting processes. At one extreme, totalitarian states have sought to consolidate their national identity by eliminating non-nationals, whether by expulsion or genocide. In some contemporary states, this ugly process is called "ethnic cleansing." This is nation-building by the deletion of ineligibles.

By contrast, most states are willing to integrate aliens into their nations by a process of naturalization. This word is normally used narrowly to refer only to the legal process by which immigrant aliens become citizens of a state, but a similar transformation applies to any non-nationals who accept citizenship and the principle of jus soli enables some states to grant citizenship to anyone born within their boundaries. A natural term for this process would be nationalization which does carry a dictionary definition that reads: "to accept as a citizen or national." However, the word is normally used to refer to property, not people -- it describes the different process whereby states acquire title to property. This meaning is so powerful that we court ambiguity if we use this word to talk about outsiders joining a nation. Consequently, we do need another word. If we were willing to accept neologisms, I would suggest a form like nation-ize to apply to the process of extending national identity to someone by any means. Thus, indigenous peoples have normally been treated as non-members of the nation established by colonizers who conquered them and viewed them as ineligibles. Yet at some point, historically, most of them have been nation-ized en bloc and granted citizenship rights. We should distinguish nation-izing from nation building, which refers to the complementary process by which states create nations. In liberal democracies, states have usually been eager to nation-ize people living within their boundaries -- "ethic cleansing" is the contrasting process whereby totalitarian regimes try to build their nations.

I mention these facts because they help us understand the emergence of ethnic nationalism which may be defined as the process whereby any nation seeks to establish its independence or autonomy. Incidentally, we may use autonomy, by itself, to refer to any autonomous jurisdiction. This practice enables us to use sovereignty generically to characterize both autonomies and independent states. This means that both sub-states like Alberta and California as well as states like the United States and Canada can be characterized as "sovereign."

Moreover, because nationalism is often used ambiguously to mean patriotism, I will use state nationalism whenever speaking about the sense of solidarity citizens have with their state. The rise of modernity in the West involved nation building by state nations that augmented their power and legitimacy by nation-izing ethnic minorities living within their boundaries. They sought to achieve the status of a national state, i.e., an ethnically homogeneous state. Although this goal was rarely if ever achieved in reality, it became a powerful motivator. Conventional use of the term, nation state, to mean nothing more than an independent state that may, in fact, be quite heterogeneous ethnically, masks the hidden premise that it should become ethnically homogeneous -- but wishes do not easily turn into realities. As we shall see, globalization has increasingly undermined the importance of nations as a basis for the legitimacy of states.

Whenever I speak of a "nation" or "nationalism," I refer to an ethnic nation or ethnic nationalism -- i.e., ethnic communities that demand sovereignty but lack it. Since the middle of the 20^th century, many such nations have struggled to achieve sovereignty (i.e., autonomy or independence). Those that have arisen in exclaves have, for the most part, succeeded and can be found today in the new states generated by the collapse of industrial empires. Their success resulted not only from the pressures generated by national liberation movements, but also from the weakening of the imperial powers as a result of their inter-imperial wars. They were also immensely facilitated by the pre-existence of imperial boundaries which they simply adopted as their own.

Unfortunately, many of these new states are even more ethnically heterogeneous than the state nations that controlled the empires, and their own nation-building projects have been notably unsuccessful. Instead, they have often provoked ethnic communities within their domains to organize new ethnonational movements, as the Serbs are now notoriously doing in Kosovo with gravely threatening consequences. Moreover, the success of national liberation movements in the imperial possessions have stimulated ethnic minorities in the imperial homelands and in other older states to spark ethnic nationalism, notably among indigenous peoples and among various ethnic communities that were never assimilated by earlier state nationalist movements.

Significantly, the rise of ethnic nationalism is not only due to nationalist sentiments, but it is also driven by democratic ideals. This sounds paradoxical but only because we tend to focus on the relation of democracies to their citizens who enjoy many opportunities to influence public policies designed to meet their needs. By contrast, subjects -- residents of a state who are denied the rights of citizenship -- feel not only deprived thereby but actually stripped of the supernatural benefits that monarchic rule promised its subjects. Moreover, to the degree that anarchy and political oppression prevail in any country, disaffected and marginalized communities may well feel that their best hope lies in projects to create their own polities by secession from the state where they find themselves confined.

In short, ethnic nationalism is a specifically modern reaction to the rise of democracy and state nationalism in the Western countries that subsequently created industrial empires. It has already contributed to the collapse of those empires and the emergence of a host of new states. The process has not ended, however. Rather, it is entering a new stage marked by the rise of ethnic nationalism within the boundaries of many existing states, including not only those generated by the collapsed empires but also many found in the older industrialized states.

As explained above, ethnic nationalism has replaced state nationalism and it has already won power in many new states where exclave nations had prevailed. However, the history of ethnic nationalism has not ended. Enclave nationalism is now replacing exclave nationalism and it promises to lead to many horrors. To explain this dire forecast, we need to be more specific about the differences between these two forms of nationalism. The basic distinction between enclaves and exclaves is rudimentary and merely involves the geographic location of a domain that is culturally different from that of the dominant state: when its boundaries are located within that state, the domain is an enclave and when they are external, it is an exclave. These terms sound heartlessly neutral but the reality is often brutally tragic -- conquered peoples living in enclaves or exclaves have suffered great injustices. However, past oppression and brutality scarcely justify renewed violence, especially when the victims themselves are likely to suffer the most. .

Discourse about enclaves/exclaves requires a complementary term to refer to the state that controls them. It would be convenient to borrow the French word, metropole, but it is imprecise for two reasons. First, this term implies imperial domination but it would be wrong, for example, to characterize the relation of Finland to the Aaland Islands, or of Norway to Spitzbergen as "imperial." Yet both of these territories are exclaves because of the ethnic differences found in their populations. Elsewhere ["Who's Indigenous?"] I have proposed the use of metro-pol to designate any state in relation to all its exclaves and enclaves, whether or not they involve imperial domination: the metro-pols of Greenland, Spitzbergen and the Aaalands are Denmark, Norway, and Finland, none of which can be thought of as "empires." Similarly, "Metropolitan France" is the metro-pol for Corsica, and the U.S. is a metro-pol for Guam and Puerto Rico.

The use of metro-pol helps us distinguish between enclaves and sub-state jurisdictions which also have boundaries. What distinguishes them is the ethnic homogeneity assumed to prevail in sub-states by contrast with the heterogeneity that distinguishes the people of an enclave from those who inhabit their metro-pol. Whenever the population in a bounded sub-state is homogeneous with its metro-pol, we class the domain as a province (district, jurisdiction, precinct) but not as an enclave.

A similar distinction can be made between exclaves and colonies which are identified by the prevalence in them of colonists, i.e., settlers coming from the metro-pol. Often colonists want to preserve their relation with the metro-pol. The movements that led to independence in countries like the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia were not based on ethnic nationalism and need to be distinguished historically from the nationalist movements of this century which led to the liberation of exclaves like India, Vietnam, Nigeria, or the Philippines. Incidentally, it is misleading to use "colony" as a synonym for "possession." Colonies were settled by colonists who share the ethnicity of their metro-pols, whereas exclaves are conquered possessions whose populations are ethnically different from the people of their metro-pols. We may, therefore, expect ethnic nationalism to arise in exclaves but not in colonies. Unfortunately, the word colonies is used so carelessly that it often refers to possessions where liberation movements are said to lead to de-colonization. If this usage causes ambiguity, we will need to find other terms but let me retain the original distinction between colonies and exclaves. No doubt there are fuzzy situations in which the concepts overlap -- for example, Spitzbergen may have a minority of Norwegian settlers, and although the Aaland Islanders speak Swedish, they are contented with their Finnish citizenship.

. The cultural differences between a domain's population and the population of its metro-pol mark it as an e'clave, the generic term I use to include both enclaves and exclaves. For an extended discussion of these terms and concepts jump to "Enclave Nations". E'claves, of course, do not automatically contain ethnic nations. The occupants of an e'clave, for various reasons, may be content with their status or accept it as unavoidable, in which case ethnic nationalism will not arise in such enclaves or exclaves. Our focus here, however, is not on these cases but, rather, on those where an e'clave's population becomes an ethnic nation.

The Need for Boundaries. Since the definition of an e'clave hinges on the existence of borders (as well as cultural differences) we need to clarify this concept and discuss its importance.. Borders are politically established lines based on treaties between states, or on legislative and administrative fiats between jurisdictions within a state. They are invisible and without geographic meaning, though sometimes rivers, mountains, deserts or other physical features provide a basis for boundaries. The rise of modern states has greatly increased the importance of boundaries which often have a powerful influence on the life of people -- in pre-modern times boundaries were usually fuzzy and often did consist of geo-physical barriers. All e'claves are, by definition, bounded domains: exclaves if the area they occupy exists outside the borders of their metro-pol and enclaves if their boundaries are enclosed within a state.

For ethnic nations, prospects for success in their struggle for sovereignty are profoundly affected by the pre-existence of boundaries. Many ethnic nations, like the Hawaiians, lack a bounded territorial homeland and this imperils their efforts to achieve sovereignty. We cannot, therefore, think of them as an enclave nation. How shall we refer to them? Consider that a region or area without a defined border can be called a zone. Of course, there are many kinds of zones: in the nineteenth century when the major powers established "spheres of influence" in China, they were creating zones without boundaries, dominated from outside. Politically, guerrillas establish zones of operations controlled from within. People living in cities often establish socially important zones: when I lived on East 122nd St. in New York, I found myself in a mainly Italian and Puerto Rican zone, close to an African-American zone across 2^nd Avenue. Such ethnic residential zones have no borders visible on maps, even when a tangible line, like 2^nd Ave., separates their residents. To refer to zones dominated by an ethnic community, we might speak of an ethnic zone. When members of such a community seek autonomy or independence, they constitute an ethnonational zone, but not an enclave, simply because they lack politically recognized borders. Such zones need to be distinguished from enclaves whose borders can be drawn on a map.

Frequently, ethnic zones are a product of discrimination rather than choice and no doubt there may be walls or fences to keep the residents inside. When and if such barriers are mapped and politically operative,, a zone becomes an enclave. Historically, urban zones in which Jews were required to live were called ghettos. In the world today there are many such zones whose residents belong mainly to particular ethnic minorities. Sometimes, we find residential communities whose privileged occupants use walls and gates to insulate themselves from the outside world -- they are sometimes called golden ghettos but not enclaves because their boundaries are privately established, not based on public policy.

Most "ghettos," of course, are still zones for social outcastes, but because the word now has multiple connotations, we need a more precise term for the original sense of a ghetto. In my own mind, I use a phrase like ghostly ghetto -- reminding us of the idea that outsiders would rather not see their "invisible" residents.

Having these two polar concepts enables us to introduce a third, intermediate, category to represent ethnic zones occupied by residents who are free to live where they please, but they prefer life with co-ethnics who share their culture and life styles. In a dramatic scene in "Titanic" one experiences the joy of spontaneous dancing among steerage passengers who clearly see life in the First Class as horribly boring. Such zones are self imposed and spontaneous -- they enable co-ethnics to share their joys and sorrows and also, no doubt, to cultivate rage against outsiders whom they may come to view as enemies. Although "homely" often means ugly, the word can also means "plain" or "very friendly." With the latter senses in mind, I propose homely ghetto to refer to a self-selected residential zone for members of an ethnic community. A homely ghetto may, of course, evolve into a kind of "homeland" that is a zone where residents have a sense of security and can enjoy life. They can protect and reproduce their distinctive cultural practices and beliefs while also accepting membership in the state where they live. A conspicuous example of such a homely ghetto is an Amish settlement -- only their self-imposed rules prevent members from leaving.

Sometimes residents in a homely ghetto become so alienated from the state where they live that they develop nationalist ideas and strive for autonomy. As an ethnic zone, they lack precise borders and, therefore, the margins of a homely ghetto are fluid. To protect themselves and to pave the way for achieving more autonomy, a homely ghetto may seek recognition by the state as an enclave -- this occurred in North Carolina when a self-governing Cherokee Reservation was recently established in a county that had hitherto been only an administrative jurisdiction. The transformation involved granting permission to all "Cherokee" people to vote for members of their tribal council, while withdrawing suffrage rights from non-Cherokee residents who chose to live on the reservation.

In such situations, autonomy is a realistic option whereas independence is not -- any small bounded territory located inside the borders of a state will certainly encounter fierce resistance to any demands for full independence and, if granted, it will not be able to secure its borders -- only the assurance of continued toleration or, preferably, active support by the metro-pol can be counted on to safeguard the interests of an enclave nation. There is, indeed, a striking contrast between the situation confronting enclaves and that faced by exclave nations. For an in-depth analysis of administrative autonomy see Self-Determination and Self-Administration: A Sourcebook edited by Wolfgang Danspeckgruber and Arthur Watts (Lynn: 1977). "A Draft Convention on Self-Determination through Self-Administration" submitted to the UN by the Principality of Liechtenstein can be found, with an extended commentary, on pages 21-45.

States that stoutly resist autonomy, however, and use violence to suppress demonstrations and the organization of nationalist movements are likely to generate domestic violence and civil war. The stumbling block to be faced incolves the transformation of an ethnic zone into an enclave. Autonomy seems to require a bounded territory for self-determination to work -- it provides criteria for establishing the functions of self-administration.

Ethnic communities without an enclave are, therefore, severely handicapped. Homely ghettos seeking self-rule in a bounded territory (enclave) who demand full sovereignty and independence assuredly frighten their metropols and provoke them to resort to violence -- a process visible before our eyes today in Kosovo. The mere fact that a people is indigenous and can demonstrate that, historically, their ancestors were citizens of an independent regime may convince members of an ethnic community that their claims are just but it is unlikely to persuade a state to grant sovereignty to such a would-be nation. In the case of Kosovo, actually, the Serbs protest that their ancestors lived in Kosovo before the Albanians. Disputes over ancestry seem irrelevant in such cases -- perhaps this is a significant difference that separates the situation of "indigenous peoples" from other stateless nations. However, if a community can gain state recognition based on its national identity and limits its goals to those of autonomy (self-administration as a "nation within a state") it may be able to reach agreements that will safeguard its basic interests which, assuredly, cannot be protected if ethnic cleansing and civil war develops.

Members of an enclave nation may be a local majority although they are a minority within the state. However, the word "minority," is so slippery that we need to use it with care. No doubt most enclave nations do constitute a minority in some sense -- but we need to know whether they are truly a local majority. Thus the Cherokees on reservation are a local "majority" although a "minority" in their state. The terminological problems with minority are both intrinsic and extrinsic in character. Since the "Minorities at Risk" that Ted Gurr has created provides a wealth of data that we can use in our comparisons, it is important to make sure that we understand each other when using this fundamental term.

The intrinsic ambiguity in "minority" is not difficult to clarify: it can be resolved by distinguishing between the numerical and political meanings of the word. Originally, and in its most commonly used sense, a "minority" is simply any number of items in a set that is less than 50%. We use this concept when discussing the outcome of elections and decision-making in any assembly. By contrast, politically, a "minority" is a marginalized community which, of course, can well constitute a majority of the population. Thus, until its democratic constitution was adopted, South Africa had a marginalized majority and a dominant minority. This situation is not rare and we need to be able to make the distinction. The use of adjectives can easily solve this problem: I shall use numerical minority in the statistical sense, and marginalized minority in the political sense. Because both ideas are important, I will use "minority" without qualifiers only when the immediate context clearly indicates which sense of the word is relevant or the distinction does not matter.

There is also an extrinsic source of ambiguity about "minorities" that is more elusive. It arises from fuzziness in our identification of the boundaries of states that have marginalized minorities. Perhaps normally, anyone speaking of an ethnic minority has in mind an independent state, not a sub-state nor a supra-state. Any administrative jurisdiction within a state (Quebec or Texas, for example) may be viewed as a "sub-state". All states with exclaves (Denmark, Norway, France and the United States) are "supra-states" -- many are "empires" but some are not -- and they are not, by definition, "super powers." A community may be a minority in one of these contexts but a majority in another. For example, the Quebecois are a minority in Canada but a majority in the sub-state of Quebec; and Guamanians are a minority in the American supra-state but a majority in Guam. In order to get a more balanced understanding of the relation between marginalized minorities and ethnic nationalism, we need to be clear about the political context. Normally, we are thinking only about the state level when we use "minority," excluding both their sub-states, and the exclaves belonging to a supra-state. Whether or not a community is a "minority", therefore, depends on context -- any community can be both a majority and a minority at the same time.

Migration: Diasporas and Anasporas. Moreover, the status of any community can change -- minorities can become majorities and visa versa. An important reason involves migration. In order to discuss this variable, we need terms for several important variables, among which I will speak of only one: namely, whether or not members of an e'clave nation live outside or inside its borders. The term, diaspora, is used to refer to citizens of a state living outside its borders. However, the word can also refer to all members of an enclave nation living outside their enclave -- thus Hawaiians living in California or Quebecois living in Ontario belong to diasporas as much as do Americans in France, or Chinese in Canada.

Normally, diasporas are identified by reference to a mother-country rather than the place to which they have migrated. If we identify the home place (whether it be a state or an e'clave) we can be clear about all its members living outside its borders. Persons in diaspora need a mother-country to establish their identity, but if it has disappeared, they need to perpetuate its existence as a myth and they may even seek to restore it. Since our use of this word is a metaphor taken from the long-term use of "Diaspora" to refer to the Jewish diaspora, we might even view this situation as prototypical. However, there are few similar cases. The Armenians in exile, especially those who reject the existing Armenian state, continue to struggle to re-establish a new Armenia in Turkey. The Romany people, scattered in many states, constitute a diaspora without any vivid memories or dreams of a mother country, a fact that hampers their ability to act or think of themselves as a nation. Confusingly, "diaspora" is often used to mean an "ethnic minority." Here I will use "diaspora" to refer only to members of a nation living outside the borders of their mother country, either imagined or real, and whether or not it is a state.

One's mother-country can be defned as the zone which members of a diaspora think of as their original homeland -- though often a state, it is sometimes an e'clave. When Zionist Jews decided to create their new state in Palestine, then a British mandate, their historical memories not only determined where they wanted to locate, but also what boundaries they would attempt to re-establish. In a normal case, the nationals living in an e'clave who promote statehood for their people also dream of restoring their mother-country with its original boundaries even when they differ significantly from those of their existing e'eclave. E'clave nations, however, are always fortunate insofar as they do have a territorial base with a resident population, whereas many national communities have a home base but no bounded e-clave.

Strangely, we lack any term to refer to the members of a nation who reside within the borders of their e'clave, the counterpart to their diaspora. Instead, we tend to identify ethnic nations with their e'claves even though a substantial portion of their members are living in diaspora. Anyone thinking of Tibetans today, however, may well have in mind the members of this community living outside of Tibet. Elsewhere, I have proposed a complementary term, anaspora, that could be used to refer to Tibetans still in Tibet, or Hawaiians in Hawaii. Admittedly, it is a raw neologism, yet logically formed and easy to remember. The common stem of both words is -spora, referring to dispersal: dia- identifies those who are indeed dispersed and ana- (meaning "not") can be used to characterize all those who are not dispersed, those resident in their e'clave or state. We can easily say that every ethnic nation consists (normally) of an anaspora and a diaspora. The migration of nationals between their anaspora and diaspora is an important factor explaining the development and prospects of any ethnic nation, and needs to be included in our analyses.

In general, we may assume that nationals in diaspora are more easily influenced by modern ideas and technologies than those living in anaspora and they often play a decisive role in the history of their e'claves. No doubt many diasporans (persons living in diaspora) choose to integrate with the local populations wherever they go. However, some diasporans retain their national identities and attachments, especially if they find themselves unwelcome or disadvantaged in their hostlands. They may then dream of returning home and even becoming leaders in the national movements of their homelands. Even though many fail to realize this dream, there are enough cases where diasporans become leaders of their nations to make this a pattern worthy of our attention. Even diasporans who do not aspire to leadership roles may well contribute money, information, and political influence with the governments of their hostlands to bolster the prospects for success of their home nationals.

During the past half-century, virtually all the exclave nations of the imperial powers acquired their independence and become new states, whereas very few enclave nations have succeeded. The main exceptions are the frontier enclaves of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and their success came only recently. Why was this true? First, remember that exclaves are always difficult to retain -- this was as true of pre-modern as of modern states. The pre-industrial colonists who supported the American revolution were not ethnic nationalists -- their leaders were colonial elites, culturally linked with their motherland, but ambitious and eager to control their own life in the colonies and escape domination by a distant king and his royal bureaucracy. Economic interests and fiscal or legal problems were more salient than any sense of ethnic nationalism. The "American nation" evolved after the revolution succeeded -- it was not one of its causes. The point is that distance and time seriously hampered the survival of all pre-industrial empires, facilitating independence movements by the elites of their exclaves.

After the Industrial Revolution, the underlying basis for the rise of modernity, the potential power of modern empires greatly increased during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, enabling the vast empires of England, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Russia and Japan to come into existence. For reasons mentioned above, the rise of industrial imperialism was associated with the spread of democracy and nationalism. These modern ideas and practices soon penetrated all the possessions of these imperial powers and produced ethonational movements in all their e'claves. In historical retrospect, the century from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was the rise of ethnic nationalism. During the second half of this century, these movements generated new states in all the imperial exclaves, and now we are witnessing the rise of ethnonational movements in most of the world's enclaves, scattered within both the old and the new states.

No doubt national movements are also arising in ethnonational zones (notably in homely ghettos) that lack boundaries. Their prospects for success are quite limited, however, unless they are able, along the way, to gain recognition for an enclave in which their anasporas can organize more effectively. It it is now clear in retrospect that exclave nations were able to succeed in part because they already had boundaries -- even though these borders rarely coincided with ethnic nations and produced a heterogeneous hodge podge of states, their pre-existence facilitated the hiving off of new states each bounded by the borders of an imperial possession. The rulers of these states, moreover, are united in their determination to preserve existing boundaries, no matter how irrational they may be. Consequently, ethnonational leaders in borderless zones would do well to consider the strategic value of creating enclaves first, waiting to cultivate their national movements until after they have an anaspora large enough to support their claims for sovereignty. Metro-pols may well support the creation of autonomous enclaves in the expectation that their new self-governing leaders will cooperate in suppressing terrorists who, otherwise, become a threat to everyone. Israeli policy in Gaza provides a good current example.

The Resistance to Enclave Nationalism. Ethnonationalist struggles to achieve sovereignty may create long-lasting conflicts, but they are by no means assured of success. An important reason arises from the fact that the rulers of all the new states share a common interest with the older states in the maintenance of existing inter-state borders. By contrast, in the early post-Westphalian world, existing states fought each other to change their boundaries and protect or enlarge their borders. When these wars ended and the basic motives for global inter-imperial wars vanished, a new era has dawned. To think of it as the "post-Cold War" era puts too narrow an ideological spin on this major transformation. The era that has ended is one in which states fought each other to protect or enlarge their domains and state nationalism prevailed as a dominant motivator. By contrast, in the "new world [dis]order", virtually all the world's states consider boundary changes a major threat to their survival and unite to resist the many such changes that are now demanded by ethnic nations -- especially by enclave nations that have borders but not sovereignty.

Increasingly, they will rely on the United Nations, NATO, ASEAN, the CIS, the OAU, the OAS, and other available instruments of collective security to safeguard the status quo by blocking border changes. They will, however, soon discover that most of the indigenous peoples and ethnic nations described in the Minorities at Risk project already live in enclaves and are rapidly mobilizing, using all the modern means of power (organization, communications, ideology, weapons, and wealth), in close linkage with their diasporas and with each other, to advance their nationalist claims.

Violent opposition to these claims is unlikely to succeed -- it may actualy provoke back lashes that grow in strength. Far more promising strategies are available to states that can see the value of accommodation. Democratic states need to discover new ways to organize themselves that do not rest on the premise of majoritarian rule in a mono-national state. The idea of consociationalism has come to refer to a form of democratic design in which the interests of ethnic minorities, no matter how small they may be, are institutionally safeguarded.
Moreover, the myth that viable states must be founded on a national identity must, I think, be overcome by a new world view that sees states as nothing more than administrative districts in a world based on global sovereignty. In such a world, all peoples living with the borders of any state, whatever their cultural diffrences, need security and respect for their cultural heritage. A model of governance that looks more like the UN with its General Assembly representing highly disparate states can, I think, be adapted to intra-state governance as well.

State elites will, I suspect, embrace consociationalism when they recognize that not all ethnic minorities seek to establish their own states. Some, indeed, will be happy to live in autonomies where their own traditions are protected and can be reproduced. Many more will accept citizenship in the states where they live, provided their basic cultural values and practices are respected. They have only to be persuaded that they have more to gain by integration within the established political system than by resisting and seeking to establish their own state.

Consider, first, that an increasingly large number of ethnic minorities are composed of voluntary immigrants, refugees, and diasporans -- if they are committed to ethnonational causes, they will be found outside the hostland where they are living, in their home countries. Their prospects for a better life usually hinge on their willingness to integrate into the cultural mainstream of their adopted countries. Second, without an enclave and ancestral myths to support their claims, any aspirations they might have to establish a state in an enclave seem outrageously unrealistic. Those who truly aspire to independent statehood for their own people will direct their attention to movements in their homeland rather than in the hostland where they reside. Meanwhile, of course, they can group themselves informally in homely ghettos to protect their traditional cultures without making heavy political demands.

To conclude this discussion, let us consider several options open to states confronting demands for sovereignty by enclave nations.

1. Response to enclave nations. Where enclave nations exist and are making demands for sovereignty, non-violent negotiations and compromise will work better than violence and efforts to suppress the movements. The Serbs today seem to be creating the Albanian violence in Kosovo by their own militancy, thereby provoking a vicious circle of militancy. Although ethnic nationalism is very modern, and its rise in enclaves is a sequel to the success of exclave nationalism during the past half century, it usually has deep historical roots -- Kosovo offers a classic example -- but the current impasse reveals the fundamental forces of modernity: industrialization, democracy and nationalism. Efforts to resist enclave nationalism can succeed -- temporarily, I believe -- in totalitarian states where single-party rule is strongly entrenched. Relatively weak autocracies relying on violent repression will only strengthen the commitment of ethnonationalists, leading to genocide, civil war and the horrors of "ethnic cleansing." By contrast, democratic regimes have an opportunity to enable enclave nations to establish autonomies in which self-government will help them achieve their main goals. Real support for autonomies will, I think, dampen movements for full independence which can scarcely succeed in enclaves where relatively small populations cannot count on their own security systems to sustain their independence as sovereign states.

2. Ethnonational Zones. Alienated ethnic minorities lacking bounded territories of their own may, nevertheless, organize movements demanding sovereignty and self-determination. Such movements will not, I believe, succeed unless they can establish enclaves, bounded territorial "homelands". Although there may be ethnic zones in which these communities constitute local majorities, states seeking to avoid the creation of enclave nations would do well to rely on a variety of inclusive strategies designed to attract support from members of these communities. The use of intrusive force to compel compliance with the goals of the state will assuredly provoke resistance and the formation of guerilla zones marked by long-term violence.

3. The National State as an Illusion. The notion of a nation as the source of sovereignty may have served a useful purpose during the struggle to replace monarchy with representative governance. Moreover, when state nations were willing to integrate minorities and accept them as full-fledged nationals, movements for the nation-ization of aliens and racial minorities probably served a useful purpose. Today, however, the dynamics of democratization have been reversed. Existing ethnic nations seek to create their own states, leading to hideous crimes of genocide and "ethnic cleansing," and bloody civil wars in which civilians have become the main victims.

4. Cosmopolitanism and Globalization. The world-system has, today, become fully global in a way that is best symbolized by the INTERNET. It no longer focuses on states as the primary actors -- instead, sub-states, inter-state organizations, and a host of non-state entities have become equally important, and individuals, as cosmopolitans, are now free to interact and cooperate with their counterparts anywhere in the world. They have already establish innumerable networks capable of taking action without formal support or recognition from outside their virtual cyber space havens. Many of the functions of states are being transferred to organizations that exist within and across state borders. Sovereignty has, therefore, lost its meaning as a unique basis for legitimizing the authority of a state. Instead, we need to recognize the multiplicity of cross-cutting sovereignties or, even better, think of the only valid sovereignty as that of all humanity, expressed in a complex (syntropic) world-system. Within that context, all boundaries have become mere administrative conveniences and no longer serve to divide and identify nations. New, cross-cutting boundaries will increasingly identify regions and functional jurisdictions, both within and across state borders.

In such a world, cultural diversity becomes an asset that can help us maintain creativity and excitement in an increasingly homogenous world. The goal of glocalization will, increasingly, celebrate the importance of the local in a global context. Democratic government will, I think, no longer focus on geographic and demographic districts as an exclusive basis for legitimization. Instead, it will recognize cultural diversity as a value to be enhanced. Instead of "nation-building" as a norm, we will think about how to preserve and cultivate humane living in multi-cultural environments that are, indeed, part of a global system. States will survive, but only as members of a hierarchy of political structures overlapping and criss-crossing each other in a glocalized world. Both nationalism and sovereignty will decline as popular values, to be replaced by cosmopolitanism and respect for cultural diversity. Although this may sound utopian, I believe it is a necessity if we are to avoid the descent into universal chaos and violence that now threatens the world.

See related documents [] The IPSR Symposium || ISA8 Minn. Plan || Discourse Links []

See linked pages [] Enclaves || Who's Indigenous || Gurr comments || Gurr2 comments || Tilley comments || The PER Report || Hall's comments || Response to Hall's Comments || Hall's paper ||Wilmer's paper []