User:Mabandalone/Drafts/Ethnic group

Ethnicity and nationality

 * This section is copied from the real page on 31 Oct 2016 and is being modified by me

There is debate over the relationship between ethnicity and nationality. The traditional nationalist view saw little distinction between the two. Reacting to this, some anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding as proposed by Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the 17th century. In the modernist understanding, while nationalists used preexisting ethnic identities in their nation building projects, the use was selective. The ethnosymbolist school of thought shares the modernist conception of nations as modern creations, but accords more importance to the consonance of modern nations with traditional ethnic identities. Other writers, critical of modernists, assert that ethnicity and nation have coincided throughout history. XX has asserted that modern nations are the result of modern forces acting on preexisting nations and ethnic groups, and therefore modern nations are a transformation of traditional nations in modernity, not created by it.

In the 19th century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation in their own nation-state. Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another, or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.

Multi-ethnic states can be the result of two opposite events, either the recent creation of state borders at variance with traditional tribal territories, or the recent immigration of ethnic minorities into a former nation state. Examples for the first case are found throughout Africa, where countries created during decolonisation inherited arbitrary colonial borders, but also in European countries such as Belgium or United Kingdom. Examples for the second case are countries such as Germany or the Netherlands, which were ethnically homogeneous when they attained statehood but have received significant immigration during the second half of the 20th century. States such as the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland comprised distinct ethnic groups from their formation and have likewise experienced substantial immigration, resulting in what has been termed "multicultural" societies especially in large cities.

The states of the New World were multi-ethnic from the onset, as they were formed as colonies imposed on existing indigenous populations.

In recent decades feminist scholars (most notably Nira Yuval-Davis) have drawn attention to the fundamental ways in which women participate in the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national categories. Though these categories are usually discussed as belonging to the public, political sphere, they are upheld within the private, family sphere to a great extent. It is here that women act not just as biological reproducers but also as 'cultural carriers', transmitting knowledge and enforcing behaviours that belong to a specific collectivity. Women also often play a significant symbolic role in conceptions of nation or ethnicity, for example in the notion that 'women and children' constitute the kernel of a nation which must be defended in times of conflict, or in iconic figures such as Britannia or Marianne.