Racial Conflict in Global Society E-Book

John Stone

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 330

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Despite global shifts in world power, racial conflict remains one of the major problems of contemporary social life. This concise and engaging book demonstrates the interplay between identity, power and conflict in the creation, persistence and transformation of patterns of race and ethnic relations across the globe.

Stone and Rizova employ a neo-Weberian comparative approach to explore how evolving systems of group conflict have been - and continue to be - impacted by changes in the world system, global capitalism, multinational corporations, and transnational alliances and institutions. The authors analyse critical debates about ‘post-racialism’, ‘exceptionalism’, ethnic warfare and diversity management in global organizations, drawing on cases from South Africa to Darfur, and from global migration to the Arab Spring uprisings. In conclusion, the search for effective strategies of conflict resolution and the quest for racial justice are evaluated from multiple perspectives.

Racial Conflict in Global Society provides stimulating insights into the basic factors underlying racial conflict and consensus in the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is essential reading for scholars and students across the social and political sciences, management and international relations.

Leseprobe

Racial Conflict in Global Society

Political Sociology series

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Daniel Béland, What is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State

Cedric de Leon, Party & Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics

Nina Eliasoph, The Politics of Volunteering

Hank Johnston, States & Social Movements

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Siniša Maleševic´, Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organization, Ideology and Solidarity

Andrew J. Perrin, American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter

John Stone & Polly Rizova, Racial Conflict in Global Society

Racial Conflict in Global Society

John Stone and Polly Rizova

polity

Copyright © John Stone and Polly Rizova 2014

The right of John Stone and Polly Rizova to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8640-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

This book is dedicated to our graduate students in the Sociology Department at Boston University and the Atkinson Graduate School of Management at Willamette University who, because of their diversity, humanity and intelligence, have managed to transcend any trace of global conflict.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Diversity: Conflicts in the New Millennium

2. Power: The Changing Geo-politics of Race

3. Boundaries: Identity in the New World Disorder

4. Organizations: Challenges Facing Global Institutions

5. Violence: Extreme Racial Conflict

6. Justice: The Search for Solutions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

While this book is dedicated to our graduate students at Boston University and the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, we would also like to acknowledge our debt to so many friends and colleagues who have shared their ideas and wisdom with us over the years. As we cannot possibly mention them all, we will simply note our appreciation to our fellow editors on the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), Rutledge Dennis, Xiaoshuo Hou and Anthony Smith.

We would also like to thank Jonathan Skerrett at Polity Press for his assistance and encouragement, and Helen Gray for her most helpful editorial suggestions.

John Stone and Polly Rizova

Boston and Portland, 2013

Introduction

In this book, we have attempted to present an analysis of racial conflict as it has taken place historically and against a broad comparative context. Although we are both sociologists by training, this problem area requires an appreciation of other perspectives across the social sciences and historical studies in order to understand the types of debates that have occurred in a highly controversial and complex field. A fundamental premise of our approach is that no single explanatory system can provide the reader with a comprehensive appreciation of the dynamics of racial conflict and that a better strategy is to consider race relations, alongside ethnicity and nationalism, as one of a series of divisions that has been employed to shape the nature of group relations. If any one approach can be isolated to explain the manner in which racial conflict is generated or reduced it is the relative power that one group has over another. It is for this reason, and because of the subtlety of Weber’s exploration of power relationships in societies around the world, that we have chosen to adopt a neo-Weberian perspective throughout this volume, following in the tradition of the seminal writings of the great German sociologist of the early twentieth century. Furthermore, it explains why this book fits in well with a series exploring different themes within political sociology.

Weber’s writings date mainly from the first two decades of the last century, an era that was very different from today, when Europe was still the home of powerful states dominating vast areas of Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia. And racial ideas and race relations reflected this overwhelming imbalance in power and influence between individuals and groups that were considered by many to consist of different types of peoples. In some respects, Weber’s early ideas retained some of the inherent biases of the age in which he lived and it could be argued that few of his key works focused centrally on matters of race and ethnicity. Nevertheless, the overall framework he developed to explain the emergence of modern industrial society, and its impact on social life, provides easily adaptable concepts that can be applied as readily to racial as to social stratification, and to ethnic and national struggles as much as to class conflict and political divisions. In the early chapters, we will outline some of Weber’s struggles with these issues and how race, power and conflict are key themes in the central argument in the book. Ideas about the true significance of ‘race’ have changed fundamentally over the past century; so too has our understanding of the complexities of power and our assessment of different types of conflict and their impact on group relations.

While Weber, along with Marx, is generally seen as a contributor to the conflict school of sociological theory, there are important differences between the two influential thinkers (Giddens 1971, 1981). It is not that the Weberian approach ‘refutes’ Marx’s emphasis on class conflict so much as develops it in a more complex manner to take into account a range of other factors that influence and drive social conflict and change. Recognizing the importance of ideas, values and culture as critical forces in shaping conflict and social change has particular value in a field where passionate beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority have been endemic. Thus, racial ideas cannot be simply dismissed as largely irrelevant in the struggles between different groups for privilege or justice. In the same way, the power of nationalism to mobilize populations to fight and die for ‘their’ country, to seek autonomy from dominant groups living in the same political unit or to conquer territories that they believe are historically part of the nation, should not be dismissed as mere financial or economic manipulation, as a crude Marxist interpretation might suggest. Without ignoring the strength of material factors, we argue that ideas, beliefs and values – no matter how misguided or downright bizarre they may appear to outsiders, or with the benefit of hindsight – must also be included in the analysis.

In the first chapter, we look at definitions of race, power and conflict to demonstrate the complexity of these superficially straightforward concepts. Although the idea of ‘race’ is based on false, pseudo-scientific ideas, it does not mean that racism can be simply dismissed as ignorance and folly. The powerful impact of the ‘social construction of reality’ – that once individuals and groups start to believe that something is true, it becomes very real in its consequences – must not be overlooked. There is a parallel here between the way that Weber famously discusses the central role of Calvinist belief systems in the development of early capitalist activity at the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the practical power of racism in forging racial conflict. This is followed by a discussion of Weber’s emphasis on the boundaries between groups and the importance of ‘social closure’ – building on an analogy between the tendency for capitalist markets to create monopolies in the economic sphere – as a fundamental cause of the strongly cohesive character of many racial and ethnic groups. The importance of these boundaries, and the various mechanisms that are used to enforce them, are explored in greater detail in chapter 3. Subsequent sections of the first chapter further examine how racist ideas provide legitimacy to systems of racial exploitation and stratification, and then we introduce the theme of globalization that, both in the past and increasingly in modern times, has begun to impact the balance of power between major states and the racial and ethnic groups who live within them.

The argument in chapter 2 explores some of the issues highlighted by the general shifts in power resulting from globalization and recent internal changes within major multi-racial societies. While recognizing that these are matters often associated with ‘world system’ theorists, a branch of neo-Marxism that stresses the role of economic exploitation between all societies influenced by capitalist trading and manufacturing relationships, the actual outcome of contemporary shifts in the global economy are less one-sided than the empires of previous centuries. This is because economic development and wealth are not simply being drained from the developing world to the more advanced economic states of the developed world, but have come about as a result of an increasing transformation of world production, so that much of the global manufacturing capacity, as well as the service-sector industries, are being outsourced to new locations. Enhanced migration flows, the growth of substantial middle classes in countries like China and India, and the economic strains faced by displaced factory and office workers in North America and Europe, all have serious political and social implications for global power relations.

Two illustrations of such changes can be found in a discussion of the arguments concerning the blurring boundaries between racial and national groups in the United States and Europe. We will consider the provocative arguments put forward by leading thinkers in this area, notably Rogers Brubaker and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, to consider the degree to which we are entering a ‘post-ethnic’ or ‘post-racial’ situation, where shifts in power are fundamentally redrawing the contours of group life. Then we will look in greater detail at the debates surrounding the impact of global capitalism, both historically and in contemporary times, to see how market forces are likely to impact race and ethnic relations. The chapter concludes by exploring the development and changes in patterns of race relations in three critically important societies, China, Brazil and South Africa, to see the extent to which similar shifts in power relations have, over the centuries, helped to shape the emerging forms of group relations on three different continents. The contrasts and similarities with the experience in Europe and North America provide a useful test of the universality, or otherwise, of our general analysis.

The third chapter returns to the central issue of the nature of boundaries and identity in the changing world of the twenty-first century. We start by examining the experience of the United States and the claim that some scholars and political leaders have made that it has a unique history that makes it different from other societies in certain important respects. This concept of ‘American exceptionalism’ dates back to the foundation of the Republic and received its classic formulation in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. While Tocqueville, a French aristocrat living in the aftermath of the revolution of 1789, was focusing on the democratic political experiment in the early years of the new republic, the question remains about how exceptional the American experience actually is, and whether this applies to the patterns of race and ethnic relations in that country. One answer to this question can be explored by comparing and contrasting the United States with the societies of the European Union as far as race, ethnicity and nationalism is concerned. Our discussion includes the rising salience of Islam and the reaction of both continental powers to increasingly ethnocentric movements and political parties that have been characterized as part of a trend towards Islamophobia. The United States’ military intervention in the Muslim-dominated societies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increasing number of migrants from the Islamic world currently living in European societies and in the US, has raised the issue of religious (ethnic) conflict to a new level.

Our next chapter looks at the manner in which the increasingly diverse workforces affect the structure and functioning of organizations, both at the national and international levels. In this case we move beyond the more traditional Weberian analysis of modern bureaucratic organizations, characterized by managerial hierarchies and rigid rules specifying appropriate forms of behaviour, to look at the new and experimental forms of organizational design and incentives associated with ‘learning organizations’. These new models pay much greater attention to the variability of cultural beliefs and norms found in an increasingly diverse and global employment structure, at both the managerial and workforce levels. Global industries are searching for talent from all over the world in order to compete in a marketplace for labour and consumers that recognizes few state boundaries. But despite these trends, previous patterns of racial and ethnic hierarchy have not completely dissolved as the complex developments in the United States clearly demonstrate. One important explanation for this rests with the continuing significance of social networks when it comes to finding and gaining employment, since these are frequently based on racial, ethnic and national associations. Evidence from the United States, Russia, China and the Middle East reveals how racial and ethnic stratification in employment is perpetuated – classic examples of Weberian ‘social closure’ – despite the growing diversity associated with globalization.

We then turn our attention, in chapter 5, to the most extreme types of racial conflict. These situations of war, genocide and violence have received surprisingly little attention from sociologists despite their powerful impact on millions of individuals and every society at one historical period or another. After briefly outlining the reasons for this lack of attention in the mainstream sociological tradition, we focus on the Weberian analysis of power yet again, by examining the situation of many indigenous peoples and their struggles for survival when confronted by explorers and settlers from societies possessing more powerful technologies and weapons. The contrasts between the situations in North America and Russia (the Soviet Union), and the reasons for the degrees of decimation of native peoples throughout the world, once again fit in with a Weberian perspective on power.

A further illustration of war and violence brings in the overlapping fields of racial conflict and nationalism. Just as in the case of race and ethnic relations, so in scholarship on nationalism, arguments have centred on the issue of whether nationalism has its roots in deep-seated centuries of tradition, a ‘primordial’ source of identity and affiliation, or whether most forms of nationalism are socially constructed and can therefore be quite new in their creation. The ‘invention of tradition’ is a favourite term of the ‘modernists’ who view nationalism as a recent development in world history despite the claims and fervent beliefs of many contemporary nationalists. As Weber saw it, nationalism is the political expression of racial or ethnic groups who seek to create an independent political unit, a state, to be the exclusive domain of a particular self-defined group. In the modern era, the near impossibility of creating a state that is the sole homeland of a single ethnic group results in the conflict and violence that frequently accompanies extreme nationalist movements. Warfare and genocidal massacres are so often defined in exclusive racial, ethnic and nationalist terms.

The concluding chapter returns to the age-old enigma of how to reconcile the claims of diverse racial and ethnic groups and whether political policies or structures can produce viable solutions to the problem of justice and diversity. Once again, we return to Weber’s emphasis on power and its distribution in order to understand the difficulty of achieving reasonable and effective solutions to these questions. While forces at the global level, such as the post-Cold War political realignments and the destabilizing consequences of the ‘War on Terror’, have altered the climate in which such solutions are being sought, at the state level certain policies have been implemented with varying degrees of success.

We examine the policies described generally under the label of ‘affirmative action’ that have been pursued for up to a century in India and for shorter periods in the United States and Malaysia, and more recently in societies like Brazil and South Africa, to see the extent to which they provide some answer to rectifying the imbalances in power between different racial and ethnic groups. Finally, we consider two contrasting cases where the outcome of racial and ethnic conflict has not followed the path predicted by conventional wisdom, or indeed by many social scientists. These are the successful transition towards multi-racial democracy in post-apartheid South Africa, a result that appeared highly unlikely before the 1980s; and the destructive collapse of the former state of Yugoslavia into inter-ethnic warfare and massacres, despite the fact that it had previously been viewed as one of the most likely candidates for a peaceful transition into a democratic federation after the collapse of communism. Understanding the subtle changes in power relations and the ways in which a variety of forces operated to produce these contrasting outcomes serves as a further illustration of the insight of the neo-Weberian perspective.

Throughout our book we are well aware that there are other theories and models of social conflict and change that have been used to explore these important issues. Scholars who are more closely associated with a variety of Marxian and neo-Marxian analyses would tend to place a greater stress on the economic factors operating in each situation. So, too, would those writers in the neoclassical economic tradition who also focus on impersonal market forces as a key to understanding why events move in the direction they do. There are many sub-fields that stem from these overall perspectives, whether world systems theories on the one hand or rational choice models on the other, but none of these approaches, in our opinion, provide greater insight into the dynamics of racial and ethnic conflict than ideas derived from the Weberian tradition. There has also, periodically, been a revival of ideas that tend to stress more inherent biological characteristics to account for group formation and affiliation – sociobiology and genomics – which we consider to provide little extra insight into group relations and to have potentially dangerous implications that such differences are generalizable and unalterable. The history of racism should make us very careful when dealing with these types of arguments, just in the same way that Weber chose to dismiss such theories as he found more plausible social and political explanations for group variations. Hopefully, developments in neuroscience – for example, the current excitement about mapping the internal operations of the human brain – will not move in this direction either, and become a twenty-first-century version of phrenology, the nineteenth-century pseudo-science which claimed that examining the bumps on the head could predict personality and other behavioural characteristics.

Other approaches are more closely based on the experiences of a particular society and these tend to focus on the special characteristics of one society and the particular circumstances that gave rise to patterns of racial domination, resistance and change in that unique setting. The great weight of American scholarship and the central theme of slavery in United States history, while hardly exceptional, nevertheless have tended to concentrate attention on factors that may not be equally important in other societies. A recent symposium and critique of the influential writings of Omi and Winant on ‘racial formation theory’ (Ethnic and Racial Studies, June 2013) seems to focus on whether the authors are simply ‘“evading white racism” and underestimating the persistence of racial structures in the “colorblind”, “post-racial” language of a contemporary white frame’. As Rutledge Dennis perceptively remarks, what is needed is a careful analysis of ‘how racist systems may be altered and changed’ (2013: 988) and to do this requires a broader comparative perspective (see also Michael Banton’s comments ‘In Defense of Mainstream Sociology’ in the same symposium, pp. 1000–4). So, while we will be referring briefly to alternative interpretations of racial conflict throughout the book, the neo-Weberian emphasis on power will be the guiding thread of our analysis.

1

Diversity

Conflicts in the New Millennium

It should be quite clear to any observer of societies in the twenty-first century that major changes in the political, economic and social structure of the modern world are transforming the environment in which all peoples live. This is particularly noticeable in the case of industrialization with the rise of the newly emergent economies in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (often referred to collectively as the BRICS countries).1 The shift from the traditional centres of industrial manufacturing, such as the United States, Japan and Europe, towards these other states has produced a corresponding realignment of political strength. Such trends can only be expected to increase over time. In this book, we seek to demonstrate some of the implications that these global changes are likely to produce on the patterns of race relations and, in particular, on the levels of racial conflict around the world. We are starting from the basic premise that race relations are a subset of power relations so that the two forces are intimately connected. Before we can proceed with this analysis it is essential to define what we understand by race, power and conflict, the three central terms in our approach.

Race, power and conflict

The idea of ‘race’, a concept that has no scientific basis in fact, raises so many of the crucial elements that we will be discussing throughout the book. Sociologists have long recognized that ‘the social construction of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966) implies that ideas or knowledge that may have little or no scientific validity can, nonetheless, be devastatingly important in social life. What the political scientist, Donald Horowitz, has acutely captured as ‘the figment of pigment’ (1971: 244) is yet another variation on W. I. Thomas’s famous dictum that ‘if men (people) define situations as real they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928; Merton 1995). In other words, while no serious contemporary student of human biology or genetics would suggest that you can meaningfully divide the world into distinct groups based on visual criteria like the colour of their skin or the shape of their heads or bodies, these ideas were very common in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The reason for this lies not in biology but in the differences in the geographical distribution of power and resources which, in turn, superficially suggested a causal connection between certain physical characteristics and so-called ‘levels of civilization’. This, of course, was a convenient rationalization for colonialism and the imperial domination by European states, as well as the emerging powers of the United States and Japan, of much of the rest of the world (Go 2011). Thus, the idea of ‘race’, linked as it was to imperialism and several centuries of racial slavery, came to be used by powerful groups as the justification to exploit those they had been able to conquer and dominate.

Power is a rather different concept, but one that is by no means easy to define. Awareness of the importance of differences in power has not simply been the basis of political sociology but of politics itself from the earliest days of human settlement and the growth of towns. But what exactly is power? One of the most useful basic definitions was provided by Max Weber who argued that power is the ability to make people do what you want, even if it is against their own wishes and interests (Weber 1922). As a starting point this is quite helpful, but there are other dimensions of power that make the concept even more complicated when you start to analyse specific situations. In an influential re-evaluation of these issues, Steven Lukes has pointed to the ‘three faces of power’ (Lukes 1974, 2005; Swartz 2007) that lead from the brutal imposition of control by physical force and violence – tanks, secret police and other draconian measures associated with authoritarian regimes – to the more subtle processes of selective socialization, persuasion and influence. These can run the gamut from media commercials, religious pronouncements and political ideologies to extreme forms of thought control that include indoctrination and brainwashing. The ultimate type of control, as George Orwell pointed out in his political satire 1984, is to persuade people that their interests and those of their rulers are one and the same.2

Conflict, the third of our key terms, is also much more complex than it is often portrayed. The general association of conflict with violence as seen in warfare, genocide and other forms of severely destructive actions is but one type of conflict activity. Another less violent manifestation of conflict, usually referred to as competition, which can take place in economic, political and social realms, is often a more common form of conflict between different groups. In some cases, as Max Weber’s contemporary, German sociologist Georg Simmel, pointed out at the beginning of the twentieth century, such competitive struggles can actually serve to strengthen the long-term stability of the social order by allowing for dissent, innovation, social mobility and the peaceful resolution of group differences under the banner of democratic regimes (Simmel 1908; Coser 1956). This broader conceptualization of conflict is particularly important when considering measures to reduce racial conflict and promote inter-group trust and cooperation. However, even this approach raises a diverse set of issues concerning the desirability, or even feasibility, of maintaining the completely free expression of ideas in an environment recovering from severe forms of racial and ethnic conflict. In other words, what are the limits of free speech in the aftermath of genocidal massacres perpetrated, at least in part, by a relentless barrage of hate speech? The ban on Nazi political parties and the outlawing of anti-Semitic propaganda in post-Second World War Germany, or the prohibition on references to ethnic affiliations like Hutu or Tutsi in post-conflict Rwanda (Straus 2006; Longman 2011; Canellos 2012)), are two such examples of the limits of tolerance towards intolerance.3

A neo-Weberian perspective

So, if ‘race’ is a false idea that has been used historically as a principal explanation for group inequality, and power and conflict are complex concepts that are, nonetheless, valuable to expose the dynamics that underlie group membership and struggle, how can Weber’s formulation unite the three elements? Weber’s basic analysis of racial and other types of group conflicts starts from an analogy between economic and social processes. In his research on economic history, Weber noted the tendency for economic activities to develop in the direction of monopolies. Gaining control over the supply of particular goods or services would allow a producer to fix prices and eliminate unwanted competition. If we apply this tendency to social life more generally, the advantages of creating groups with distinct boundaries for membership, and therefore fostering a related process of monopolizing the benefits for insiders rather than outsiders, become obvious. Such a perspective helps us to understand the similarities between groups whose identities can be based on a whole series of different characteristics. These may include ethnicity, nationalism, religion, language and class (gender and sexual orientation might also be added to the list although they have certain distinctive properties of their own), and such groupings answer the puzzle of why some conflicts are based primarily on race and others on religion, language or ethnicity.

Weber’s explanation for this was that the choice of boundary markers is a result of historical circumstances, almost chance encounters between groups who differ from one another because they happen to speak a particular language, adhere to a specific religion or have a different physical appearance, but who were also very unequal in terms of their control of resources and power. Once the initial contacts have taken place, the more powerful will tend to strengthen group markers and erect boundaries to maintain and increase their control over the less powerful. This helps to explain why in one situation, Belgium, for example, language has become a crucial symbol of group membership; while in another, Northern Ireland, ‘religion’ (nationalism) has been vital; and in yet another, the United States, ‘race’ (skin colour) has been the most powerful boundary marker. Of course, just as these situations emerge out of differential power relations so they will change over the years as groups struggle to alter their position in the power hierarchy or, indeed, strive to eliminate such differences altogether.

While this formulation offers a broad sketch of the often rational underpinnings of group membership, persistence and survival, the reality is much more complicated. Weber’s approach to sociology in general also emphasized the role of the individual’s understanding and interpretation of social life (verstehen), thereby bringing variables like culture and belief systems, non-material factors, into a more rounded and nuanced analysis. Actors do not always think or behave in an entirely rational manner, or at least their ‘rationality’ is imbued by cultural values, traditions and emotions that cannot be reduced to a simple and universal political (or economic) formula. This is particularly true in the area of race relations where a complex amalgam of conflicting values, identities and other factors may be crucial to understanding what is actually going on.

Race, ethnicity and nationalism

Weber’s ideas about race, ethnicity and nationalism evolved over his lifetime. Some of his earliest writings in the 1890s were based on empirical studies of rural life in eastern Germany. These involved comparisons between ethnic Germans and ethnic Poles, both as farmers and as farm labourers. In these early studies, Weber displayed a thoroughgoing German nationalism in which he castigated the Junkers, the landed aristocracy, for using cheap Polish labour that undercut and systematically displaced German farm workers from the great estates of the eastern parts of the country. At this time, Weber had not totally rejected the influential notions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of inherent racial differences, as his references to ‘Slavic adaptability’ implied, but he was much too careful a scholar to pursue this line of reasoning without substantial evidence to support it. Time and again, he found concrete historical and social causes to explain observable differences in the economic behaviour and social status of the Polish and German populations, which made the idea of inherent group characteristics redundant. His growing rejection of racial theorizing was not based on a conviction that no such differences could exist, and even in his later writings he always regarded the question, at least in principle, as an open one. What was crucial for Weber was the weight of evidence that the work habits of Germans and Poles were a product of historical circumstances and environmental conditions rather than permanent biological or cultural attributes. As a result, references to such variables increasingly faded from Weber’s subsequent writings on these issues.

There are two other major themes in Weber’s work that illustrate this consistent rejection of racial ‘explanations’ of historical change and national character. In contemporary debates about the factors claiming to explain the decline of the Roman Empire, Weber attacked the notion that ‘barbarian’ blood among the leadership groups could in any manner account for the collapse of this great civilization. Such a hypothesis simply did not fit the facts. At the height of its power and prestige, the Roman Empire acquired many of its most brilliant leaders from the ethnic periphery of its vast territories, and there is no evidence that it was external rather than Roman cultural influences that accompanied the social and political disintegration of the empire.4 Explanations had to be found in other, less simplistic causes. In writing about another of the great historical civilizations, that of the Chinese, Weber addressed the same basic issue from a different angle. He considered the question of outsiders’ stereotypes of the Chinese ‘character’ and demonstrated how these were often mutually contradictory or that certain types of behaviour could be interpreted as typical of most groups under similar circumstances. Once again, Weber’s commitment to value-neutral methods to explore and test hypotheses, considered to be eminently plausible by many contemporary scholars, led him to reject racial explanations of social and political events.5

Weber’s mature position on race and ethnicity, and the stratification based on these criteria, thus represents a significant and vital shift from the emphasis of his turn-of-the-century writings on rural life in Eastern Prussia. This is further illustrated by his analysis of the Indian caste system and the situation of postdiaspora Jews in Western societies. Manasse provides a balanced assessment, pointing to the crucial change in the type of question that Weber considered to be important in these later studies. The confusion between race and culture was resolved and ‘instead of asking which innate qualities distinguish one Indian caste from another, he raised the question why the solution of the racial problem in India differed so greatly from the solution in analogous situations, such as that in England after the Norman Conquest’ (1947: 207). A similar change of focus could be detected in his attempt to understand the factors inhibiting the assimilation of Jews in the diaspora by their host societies. Turning away from any allegedly hereditary characteristics of the Jews as a minority group, he asked, ‘What historical and sociological experiences shaped those attitudes that caused the segregation of Jews from their neighbours?’ (ibid.).

In both cases, Weber’s interest in the historical development of the caste system or in the remarkable persistence of the Jews as a distinct minority – or ‘pariah group’ to use his more controversial terminology – caused him to focus on the interaction between economics, religion and ethnicity. Economic monopolization provided much of the rationale for the creation of these particular social structures, religion served as a potent source of legitimation, and racial or ethnic characteristics acted as convenient types of group markers. He saw caste as originating in racial conflict, with the dominant, light-skinned conquerors forcing the darker-skinned, indigenous populations out of those occupations that carried social prestige. Understanding the religious doctrine of karma and the taboos against intermarriage and commensality provided, as in his argument about the unique contribution of ascetic Protestantism to the birth of modern capitalism, vital clues to the resilience of the caste system in India. A similar appreciation of the special characteristics of traditional Judaism, such as the emphasis on strict dietary laws, also played an important part in explaining why the Jewish people had preserved their distinct communities in a largely Gentile world.6

It can be seen from these illustrations that the scope of Weber’s vision was impressive but the specific contributions that have remained crucial for the field may be considered under the following broad headings: (a) the insight of his basic definitions; (b) the process of group closure and boundary maintenance; (c) the role of racist and other ethnocentric ideas, and the importance of legitimacy; and (d) the centrality of power and domination. When it comes to definitions Weber was as interested in ethnicity as in race. His evident frustration with the elusive quality of ethnicity is well captured by many of his statements on the subject in Economy and Society. Nevertheless, he did not abandon the concept and proceeded with great care to try to isolate its essential character. As a result, he produced a formulation that has been adopted, in most of its basic elements, by many subsequent scholars of the subject. Weber defined ethnic groups as ‘human groups (other than kinship groups) which cherish a belief in their common origins of such a kind that it provides a basis for the creation of a community’ (Runciman 1978: 364). In this definition, he isolates the fundamental characteristics of the phenomenon that centre on a set of beliefs and not on any objective features of group membership such as shared language, religion, and especially biological traits associated with the everyday understanding of race. It is this sense of common ancestry that is vital, but the identification with shared origins often turns out to be largely, if not totally, fictitious.7

The elusive quality of ethnicity stems from the minimal core on which ethnic groups are based and accounts for the variety of other elements that are found among the many examples of individual ethnic groups. Weber is adamant that the difference between ethnic groups and kinship groups lies precisely on the question of ‘presumed identity’ (Roth and Wittich 1968: 389). Ethnic membership per se does not necessarily result in ethnic group formation but only provides the resources that may, under the right circumstances, be mobilized into a group by appropriate political action. This leads on to a discussion of nationalism, another closely related concept in the analysis of race and ethnicity. Weber’s view of nationalism was a political extension of the ethnic community that arose as its members and leadership sought to create a unique political structure by establishing an independent state (Smith 1992b: 62–3). However, as Anthony Smith has noted, he did not provide an historical account of the rise of nationalism, but he did, nevertheless, seek to discuss the important relationship between ethnicity and nationalism, which has been a key feature of much subsequent scholarship.

Group closure and boundary maintenance

Apart from providing these basic definitions of race, ethnicity and nationalism, Weber’s discussion of what he termed ‘social closure’ is another particularly helpful contribution to our understanding of the origin and dynamics of ethnic and racial groups, which we outlined earlier. Not all social scientists, however, have agreed that boundary-closing mechanisms are entirely a random product of historical circumstances. Writers such as Murphy (1988) proposed a hierarchy of closure mechanisms rather than the almost random process of group demarcation suggested by Weber. The theme of social closure has become an important element in the neo-Weberian literature; while it has been developed with particular focus on social stratification, it is of equal if not greater relevance to ethnic and racial stratification.

Frank Parkin’s (1979) trenchant critique of Marxism, along with subsequent studies by Murphy and Brubaker, has demonstrated how ‘the mechanisms of closure provide a key to understanding the formation of status groups and social classes engaged in the struggle over the distribution of rewards and opportunities’ (Manza 1992: 276). Although much of this debate has been concerned with aspects of class analysis, many of the examples have in fact been drawn from situations of deep racial and ethnic conflict. This has exposed the limitations of the sociology of stratification that has ignored or downplayed these critical ethnic and racial divisions and it is true of gender as well. As a result, modern stratification theory has steadily regained a wider vision that typifies the approach found in Weber’s writings on these issues rather than being preoccupied by the more restricted view of the mechanisms associated with economic classes found in industrial societies.