Ethnic Identity

Ethnic Identity in World Politics

Ethnic identity refers to an individual's identity with a group of people who share physical and/or cultural traits that signal a blood relationship or a common and enduring descent. Beyond physical similarities, those characteristics include a common language, common ancestry, and shared history, traditions, culture, religion, and/or kinship. When an individual recognizes that he or she shares these characteristics with others, unique individual and personal identities can dissolve, and a common identity with an enduring collectivity can emerge.

Although ethnic identities can manifest themselves simply as distinct cultural practices and institutions of a particular ethnic group (e.g., “Chinese” food, “Latin” music, the “German” language, the “Russian/Greek/Serbian” Orthodox Church), ethnic group identity has had profound political consequences in international relations. In world politics, ethnic identity is often linked with claims to territory believed to be the exclusive “homeland” of a particular ethnic group. The ideology that legitimates this claim is an exclusive nationalist doctrine that is sometimes referred to as “ethnic nationalism.” Ethnic nationalism is the belief that the members of a particular ethnic group are a “nation”—part of an extended family with intrinsic rights to a particular piece of land. They believe that other groups that might inhabit or claim that land do not have those same rights. This belief has particular emotive power, providing ethnic groups with a crucial source of solidarity while it reinforces ethnic identity.

This ethnic nationalist ideal has been largely realized across the globe. In fact, the current system of nation-states is, for the most part, the product of a violent process of ethnic separation or outright destruction of ethnic groups too weak to claim territories of their own. In Europe, after massive population transfers in the wake of the two world wars, every state except two—Belgium and Switzerland—was designated as the territory of a single dominant ethnic group. For much of the developing world, decolonization led to violent ethnic disaggregation and the creation of states with distinct ethnic identities through the exchange or expulsion of local ethnic minorities. Salient examples include India, Pakistan, Kashmir, and Israel. During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia were the only multiethnic states in the Soviet bloc. But at the end of the Cold War, each of these countries broke apart along ethnic lines, and their separate ethnic populations demanded a homeland of their own. Sometimes they achieved that goal: Czechs and Slovaks achieved it peacefully, Serbs and Croats achieved it through violent conflict. In some areas, ethnic groups have settled for ethnic minority status—with its accompanying limited rights and opportunities—in the homeland of a dominant ethnic group. Examples include Hungarians in Serbia, Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic states, Turks in Germany, and Roma throughout the countries of Europe. Some are still fighting for a separate homeland or control of land claimed by another ethnic group: South Ossetians, Abkhazis, Chechens, Kosovars, and Tibetans are prominent examples of self-identified ethnic groups seeking varying degrees of autonomy that would grant them a homeland of their own.

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