Ethnicity

Ethnic Group in Constitutional Law

From the Comparative Constitutions Project: We have chosen to define ethnic groups broadly; therefore, any of the following could be included in the category ethnic groups: castes, nationalities, linguistic groups, racial groups, etc.

State and Ethnicity

The state can intervene in two basic ways to structure group life. It can encourage or require the groups to organize themselves in corporatist fashion, assigning a political role to the corporations in the state apparatus.

This is the autonomist strategy, the nearest thing to national liberation that is possible under conctitions of multiethnicity. The effect of autonomy would be to intensify and institutionalize cultural difference. Alternatively; the state can act to reduce differences among groups by establishing uniform or symmetrical acruevement standards for their members. Each group would be represented, though not through any form of collective action, in roughly equal proporrions in every area of political, social, and economic life. This is the integrationist strategy: it can be applied in a limited and compensatory way to particular oppressed groups or, more generally, to all groups. Applied generally, its effect would be to repress every sort of cultural specificity, turning ethnic identity into an administrative classification.

What the state cannot do is to reproduce politically the pluralist pattern that the intmigrants and their children have spontaneously generated, for that pattern is inherently fluid and indeterminate. Its existence depends upon keeping apart what nation-state and corporatist theory bring together: a state organized coercively to protect rights, a society organized on voluntarist principles to advance interests lincluding cultural and religious interests). State officials provide a framework within which groups can flourish but cannot guarantee their flourishing, or even their survivaL The only way to provide such guarantees would be to introduce coercion into the social world, transforming the groups into something like their Old World originals and denying the whole experience of immigration, individualism, and communal rebirth. Nothing like this would appear to be on the American agenda.

The survival and flourishing of the groups depends largely upon the vitality of their centers. lf that vitality cannot be sustained, pluralism will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, a way station on the road to American nationalism. The early pluralists may have been naive in their calm assurance that ethnic vitality would have an enduring life. But they were surely right to insist that it should not artificially be kept alive, any more than it should be repressed, by state power. On the other hand, there is an argument to be made, against the early pluralists, in favor of providing some sorts of public support for ethnic activity. It is an argument familiar
from economic analysis, having to do with the character of ethnicity as a collective good.

Individual mobility is the special value but also the characteristic weakness of American pluralism. It makes for loose relations between center and periphery; it generates a world without boundaries. In that world, the vitality of the center is tested by its ability to hold on to peripheral men and women and to shape their self-images and their convictions. These men and women, in turn, live off the strength of the center, which they do not have to pay for either in time or money.

They are religious and cultural freeloaders, their lives enhanced by a community they do not actively support and by an identity they need not themselves cultivate. There is no way to charge them for what they receive from the center, except when they receive specific sorts of material help. But their most important gain may be nothing more than a certain sense of pride, an aura of ethnicity, otherwise unavailable. Nor is there anything unjust in their freeloading.

The people at the center are not being exploited; they want to hold the periphery. Freeloading of this sort is probably inevitable in a free society.

But so long as it exists -that is, so long as ethnicity is experienced as a collective good by large numbers of people- it probably makes sense to permit collective money, taxpayers’ money, to seep though the statelethnic group (state/church) barrier. This is especially important when taxes constitute a significant portion of the national wealth and when the state has undertaken, on behalf of all its citizens, to organize education and welfare. It can be done in a variety of ways, through tax exemptions and rebates, subsidies, matching grants, certificate plans, and so on. The precise mechanisms do not matter, once it is understood that they must stop short of a corporatist system, requiring no particular form of ethnic organization and no administrative classification of members. A rough fairoess in the distribution of funds is probably ensured by the normal workings of democratic politics in a heterogeneous society.

Ticket-balancing and coalition-building will provide ethnic groups with a kind of informal representation in the allocative process. Democratic politics can be remarkably accommodating to groups, so long as it has to deal only with individuals: voters, candidates, welfare recipients, taxpayers, criminals, all without official ethnic tags. And the accommodation need not be bitterly divisive, though it is sure to generate conflict. Ethnic citizens can be remarkably loyal to a state that protects and fosters private communal life, if that is seen to be equitably done.

The question still remains whether this kind of equity, adapted to the needs of immigrant communities, can successfully be extended to the racial minorities now asserting their own group claims. Racism is the great barrier to a fully developed pluralism and as long as it exists, American Indians and blacks, and perhaps Mexican-Americans as well, will be tempted by (and torn between) the anti-pluralist alternatives of corporate division and state-sponsored unification. It would be presumptuous to insist that these options are foolish or unwarranted so long as opportunities for group organization and cultural expression are not equally available to all Americans. A state committed to pluralism, however, cannot do anything more than see to it that those opportunities are available, not that they are used, and it can only do that by ensuring that all citizens, without reference to their groups, share equally, or roughly equally, in the resources of American life.

Beyond that, distributive justice among groups is bound to be relative to the vitality of their centers and of their committed members. Short of corporatism, the state cannot help groups unable or unwilling to help themselves. It cannot save them from ultimate Americanization. Indeed, it works so as to permit individual escape (assimilation and intermarriage) as well as collective commitment. The primary function of the state, and of politics generally, is to do justice to individuals, and in a pluralist society ethnicity is simply one of the background conditions of this effort.

Ethnic identification gives meaning to the lives of many men and women, but it has nothing to do with their standing as citizens. This distinction seems worth defending, even if it makes for a world in which there are no guarantees of meaning. In a culturally homogeneous society the government can foster a particular identity, deliberately merging culture and politics. This the u.s. government cannot do. Pluralism is thus still an experiment, still to be tested against the long-term historical and theoretical power of the nation-state. [1]

Pluralism

Resources

Notes

1. MICHAEL WALZER, Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980)

See Also

Social Diversity
Pluralism