In response to Metics Twelve I received a note from Michael, who pointed out that dealing with diversity is hardly a modern phenomena. And he's right. There's a political philosopher called Ernest Gellner, pretty much one of the doyen of the study of nationalism, who argues that many of the pre-modern empires adapted to the reality of diversity by utilising what could be called 'vertical integration'.
I'm simplifying this a lot, but Gellner noticed that most of the old empires tended to be characterised by vertical 'strata' that separated groups, usually with their own elites. These ethnic silos were in turn governed by one horizontal group that sat across the top of the strata and were the 'natural leaders' of a given sovereign territory. He goes on to argue that around the time of the industrial revolution a new idea was brought to bear, nationalism. This new type of society sought to capture the energy of the fractured empires by encouraging everyone to identify with the culture of the imperial elite. Bretons and Basques were encouraged to become Frenchmen, Scots and Welsh to become English.
Once again, I'm simplifying this a great deal, but nationalism was an idea that really took hold as the industrial revolution got up a head of steam, and had well and truly overtook Europe, and the rest of the globe, by the time the First World War had rolled round.
In a nutshell, the old system of hierarchical 'vertical' integration of empires couldn't complete with the new horizontally integrated states. Assimilation and the minimisation of diversity was an idea that worked well, and delivered very real outcomes for Western Europe. But despite having become the norm it was an idea that was starting to come under serious scrutiny by the 1970s.
What nationalism assumed was that social equality could be achieved by educating and socialising the range of individuals in a state into a relatively uniform identity. Where older empires tended to create a range of rules and exceptions for each ethnic minority (the Ottoman Empire for example), these new things called "nation-states" reached new levels of efficiency and cohesion by focussing attention on the one nation.
As I say, by the 1970s this system had pretty much reached with zenith. Despite years of attempts to overwrite minority identities they had not entirely disappeared in any nation-state world-wide. In the search for solutions to this issue of pesky non-assimilating minorities the main idea taken up was called 'multiculturalism' and the exemplar of the model was in my humble opinion Australia, as mentioned in Metics Twelve.
The Australian example is very interesting though, because what it demonstrated was that assimilation is not really a one-way road. Despite trying to turn a huge variety of metic identities into dinky-di Aussies, the process of doing so profoundly influenced the majority nation, and produced a number of shifts in the nature of Australian identity. Out the door went the emphasis on the exclusively British nature of the Australian people, and in came a more nuanced national mythology of the 'welcoming British settler'.
However, this story was not all roses and big warm hugs from Mediterranean men with giant moustaches. While the migrant metic was conversely welcome and alienated in Australia another group, Aboriginal people, was only alienated. Doubtless the influence of the Aboriginal is present in contemporary Australia, witness the wonderful token dance troops and outback guides in the "Where the bloody hell are you?" ads, but the substance of Aboriginality is not.
And that's the rub. What we have in multiculturalism is a method devised to accommodate the larger project of homogenising populations. The nation-state is a political system built around the idea of a single-identity group that has the sole right to govern. Another author called Wimmer calls nation-states a perpetual cultural compromise. When a group is introduced to a nation the majority makes subtle adjustments in the way it does things to make the other group welcome, and then absorbs it with minimal disruption to the larger nation-state. Wimmer provided a number of examples of this, and Australia could easily have been one of them.
Where multiculturalism falls over though is when placed next to minorities disinterested in assimilating into the majority. In other words, permanent metics.
It's an issue that Australia still has not solved. Although it really wants to make things better for Aboriginal people its default setting for minorities is, 'make them happy, and turn them into Australians'. But Aboriginal people keep insisting on remaining metics, while also being full Australian citizens.
This sends politicians into frenzies, and causes liberal philosophers no end of confusion. Because to be a citizen you have to be 'the same', but being a metic means you're not. And the answer to this has eluded thinkers for a fair old while.
And that's where I come in, if I could be so humble.
Nationalism and liberalism, two great Western traditions of thought, are usually considered antithetical. But I'm not so sure. Although classical liberalism is all about the individual, and classical nationalism is all about subsuming the individual into the collective whole, the tenets of both are essentially the same.
Unfortunately though, I am out of space here, just for now.