Fifteen Eighty Four

Ethnicity is everywhere. From the delights of ‘ethnic cuisine’ to the grim realities of ‘ethnic cleansing’, this concept helps us make sense of the world around us. In many countries, including the United Kingdom, it has become commonplace for population censuses and diversity monitoring forms to ask for the ethnic identity of the respondent. And yet, for such a ubiquitous and taken-for-granted category, ethnicity is a surprisingly recent invention: the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first modern use of ‘ethnicity’ to 1920, and the term did not gain widespread traction until the second half of the century. How did this newcomer in our vocabulary become so fundamental to our understanding of the world?

My new book, Ethnos of the Earth: International Order and the Emergence of Ethnicity, seeks to answer this question by charting the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity. Through an extensive survey of scholarly writings, policy documents, and archival material from Geneva, London, and Paris, the book reconstructs how terms such as the English ‘ethnicity’, the French ‘ethnie’, and the Russian ‘etnos’ were invented and popularised in the twentieth century. This was not a concept born of a single mind or moment, but one with many interconnected beginnings. From Paris and Port-au-Prince to Makerere and Manchester, a variety of actors wrestled with the inadequacies of existing categories, as nineteenth-century concepts struggled to grasp twentieth-century realities. Into this vacuum stepped the concept of ethnicity.

The near-simultaneous emergence of ethnicity at multiple sites around the world leads me to the argument that its rise had systemic causes. While influential individuals certainly play a role in the story, the sources of ethnicity cannot be ascribed to the agency of a single actor or even a plurality of actors. Instead, I argue that the rise of ethnicity was symptomatic of a deeper, systemic transformation of the global order: the world-historical transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states.

To substantiate this argument, the book’s three main chapters trace how the concept of ethnicity was articulated in relation to its forerunners. Chapter 1 focuses on ‘nation’ and the political problems generated by the linkage of nationhood with statehood in the nineteenth century. By the time the League of Nations was founded in 1920, it was commonplace to use ‘nation’ as a synonym of ‘state’ and ‘nationality’ as a synonym of ‘citizenship’. To refer to a group of people as a ‘nation’ implied that this group either had a state of its own or was sufficiently large and advanced to warrant one. Against the backdrop of the First World War and the disintegration of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman multinational empires, this was a politically explosive proposition. Wary of legitimating secessionist claims, the architects of the interwar minority rights regime deliberately avoided any reference to ‘national’ minorities in the treaties. After much negotiation, they settled on ‘racial, religious and linguistic minorities’, but the phrase ‘ethnic minorities’ also appears in many documents. Ethnicity thus emerged to fill the terminological void left by the politicisation of nationality, providing a ‘safer’ way to acknowledge human diversity that did not invite new claims to statehood.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus to ‘race’, another concept that was becoming problematic in the eyes of many twentieth-century commentators. There was a whole host of complex reasons behind this, but one of the most salient developments was the critique of Nazi race science during the Second World War. As notions of superior and inferior races were exorcised from polite society, the concept of ethnicity was proposed as a more ‘neutral’ way of describing human groups. Thanks to the campaigning of prominent public intellectuals such as biologist Julian Huxley and anthropologist Ashley Montagu, this new concept was also embraced by the United Nations in 1950. Crucially, whereas the concept of race had been intrinsically intertwined with the hierarchical ordering of the European empires, the concept of ethnicity lacks a global or transnational dimension. To paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, there is no ‘global ethnic line’ comparable to the ‘global color line’.

The third of ethnicity’s key precursors, and the subject of the book’s third chapter, is ‘tribe’. During the colonial period, anthropologists conducting fieldwork in Africa conceived of tribes as ‘primitive’ stateless societies without industrial economies or urban centres. By the middle of the twentieth century, the industrialisation and urbanisation of the African continent had rendered this framework problematic. As tribesmen moved into urban areas in growing numbers, anthropologists sought to distinguish the ‘primitive’ tribalism of the countryside from the ‘modern’ tribalism of the towns. To do so, they turned to the concept of ethnicity, differentiating rural ‘tribes’ from urban ‘ethnic groups’. This terminological shift was accelerated by the wave of decolonisation in the 1960s, which made many scholars uncomfortable with the pejorative connotations of the tribe concept. ‘Ethnic group’ thus replaced ‘tribe’ as a more palatable label, aligning with the emerging postcolonial order.

Ethnicity, then, participated in a fundamental transformation of the global sociopolitical order. With the help of this new concept, racial and civilisational hierarchies were expunged from international political discourse and the governance of human cultural diversity was recast as a domestic matter. On the surface, this erasure of imperial hierarchies may appear as an entirely positive development. But digging below the surface, the picture becomes more complex. Ethnicity still retains a connotation of foreignness (witness your ‘ethnic food’ aisle at the local supermarket) and thus subtly upholds a hierarchy between ‘ethnic’ minorities and the ‘non-ethnic’ national majority. Neither does the erasure of global racial and civilisational hierarchies eliminate their material realities. Civilisational hierarchies have been recoded through the culture-neutral language of development, while old forms of racial discrimination have given way to a new kind of ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ racism. Whereas nineteenth-century racism was predicated upon the existence of a global racial hierarchy, the new racism insists ‘only’ on the existence of irreconcilable differences between ethnic groups and the importance of protecting humanity’s cultural diversity.

By reconstructing the global conceptual history of ethnicity, Ethnos of the Earth unsettles the taken-for-grantedness of this category in both academic and popular discourse. Even as we scrutinize neighbouring terms like ‘nation’, ‘race’, and ‘tribe’ for their imperial baggage, we let ‘ethnicity’ glide under the radar unnoticed. Yet ethnicity, too, is a product of historical forces, and thus politically laden. This does not necessarily make it any less useful as an analytical tool, but it does call for greater care in how we wield it.

While the book’s primary audience is the field of International Relations, it is written with the hope that its findings will also be of interest to other fields that grapple with the concept of ethnicity, including Anthropology, Sociology, and History, among many others.