The Power of Ethnic Identity
28th January 2024
Strong ethnic identities are often portrayed as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why contemporary international conflicts are framed as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody stand-off between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized instance among many of a global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Such moralizing language is not always ill-founded. However, the undeniable ethnic inflections in these conflicts—also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan—testify to the fact that clashes of zero-sum nationalisms remain the primary cause of interstate wars. Every nation state that has collapsed since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has disintegrated along ethnic lines.
However, the strength of ethnic identities is also indicated by conflicts within states. I will draw on two examples to illustrate how two contemporary civil wars in different parts of the world attest to the continued potency of ethnic identities in the 21st century, despite the fact that the prevailing liberal ethos of our time instructs us to transcend—or, put another way, to ignore—the evident importance of ethnic identity in collective human psychology.
I have heard many instances of a ‘proverb’ — it was presented to me as Arab, but really it applies to any Turd World country — that goes ‘Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.’ The amusing thing is that many Cloud People who have intensively internalized Identity Politics (‘You aren’t really an individual who ought to be treated as an individual, you’re merely an instance of whatever category I’ve decided to put you in and by God you’d better act like it!’) will turn right around, without blinking, and criticize Dirt People for the only evolution-certified manner of Identity Politics, i.e. ethnic identity.