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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.

This supposes that the development of ethnic identities in the first place was an organic process, when in most cases it was a top-down government policy that forcibly assimilated minority groups through a combination of public schooling, historical revisionism, and state propaganda. Forming separate national identities is not the inevitable result of linguistic, religious, or cultural differences, otherwise the Middle East, China, and India would have ended up looking exactly like Europe. The relative youth of these identities is why there aren't many examples of shoring them up yet.

As to whether ethnogenesis has had good outcomes in the past, the question is good for whom? I would say the Turks have done well for themselves, successfully transitioning from being the head of a pan-Islamic empire into a nation-state with a strong identity and relatively good economic development relative to its neighbors, but that success came at the cost of millions of dead Armenians and Greeks. If places like India and Nigeria succeed in melding their disparate inhabitants into united ethnicities, that would in the long run eliminate most of the sectarian tensions that hold countries like them back, but would in the short run actively inflame them.