‘Dominant ethnicity’ and the ‘ethnic-civic’ dichotomy in the work of A. D. Smith

This article considers the way in which the work of Anthony Smith has helped to structure debates surrounding the role of ethnicity in present-day nations. Two major lines of enquiry are evident here. First, the contemporary role of dominant ethnic groups within 'their' nations and second, the interplay between ethnic and civic elements in nationalist argument. The two processes are related, but maintain elements of distinctiveness. Smith's major contribution to the dominant ethnicity debate has been to disembed ethnicity from the ideologically-charged and/or anglo-centric discourse of ethnic relations and to place it in historical context, thereby opening up space for dominant group ethnicity to be considered as a distinct phenomenon. This said, Smith's work does not adequately account for the vicissitudes of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary West. Building on the classical works of Hans Kohn and Friedrich Meinecke, Anthony Smith has also made a seminal contribution to the debate on civic and ethnic forms of national identity and nationalist ideology. As well as freeing this debate from the strong normative overtones which it has often carried, he has continued to insist that the terms civic and ethnic should be treated as an ideal-typical distinction rather than a scheme of classification

Dominant ethnicity: from minority to majority

This article argues that the world is in the midst of a long-term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority domination was common in premodern societies, modernity (with its accent on democracy and popular sovereignty) has engendered a shift to dominant majority ethnicity. The article begins with conceptual clarifications. The second section provides a broad overview of the general patterns of ethnic dominance that derive from the logic of modern nationalism and democratisation. The third section discusses remnants of dominant minorities in the modern era and suggests that their survival hinges on peculiar historical and social circumstances coupled with resistance to democratisation. The fourth section shifts the focus to dominant majorities in the modern era and their relationship to national identities. The article ends with a discussion of the fortunes of dominant ethnicity in the West

The decline of the 'WASP' in Canada and the United States

Book synopsis: The impact of liberal globalization and multiculturalism means that nations are under pressure to transform their national identities from an ethnic to a civic mode. This has led, in many cases, to dominant ethnic decline, but also to its peripheral revival in the form of far right politics. At the same time, the growth of mass democracy and the decline of post-colonial and Cold War state unity in the developing world has opened the floodgates for assertions of ethnic dominance. This book investigates both tendencies and argues forcefully for the importance of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary world

International Centre for the Study of Historical consciousness

My social studies education friend thought I had proposed a program of “history awareness.” My graduate student feared I was setting myself up in competition with Hayden White’s History of Consciousness program. My historiographically oriented colleague detected tones of 19th century German ideal- ism. Yikes! And I thought it was such an innocent title

Subject, text, nation: Situating narrative fiction in nationalism studies

For the abstract, please see the PDF file

Modern formation, ethnic reformation: the social sources of the American nation

The question, 'When is the nation?', ranks second in importance only to the related query, 'Why is the nation?' in the contemporary social science and humanities literature on nationalism. This issue is confronted by this essay, which considers Anthony Smith's important perennialist-modernist dichotomy through the lens of the American experience. Along the way, it will address the related but independent question of whether nations are 'top-down' artefacts constructed by the modern state, or 'bottom-up' social formations generated by ethnic groups within civil society. The importance of this theoretical question lies not merely with the antiquarian interest in how our world system of nations emerged, but with the more pressing question of why it is persistently re-created, and, for idealists, how it may be superseded

From Exclusion to Assimilation: Late Precolonial Burmese Literati and "Burman-ness"

This is the draft of a paper that was written for presentation at the Euroseas Conference in 2004, but ultimately I did not attend. Much of the discussion in the paper wound up, in more polished and elaborated form, in my Powerful Learning book in 2006

O passado revolucionário: descolonizando o direito e os direitos humanos

Combining a radical revision of the historical formation of occidental law with perspectives derived from decolonial thought, this paper advances a deconstruction of occidental law. That deconstruction is then brought to bear on human rights. Although occidental law and human rights are shown in this way to be imperial in orientation, that same deconstruction reveals resistant elements in law and in human rights. These are elements which the decolonial can draw on in its commitment to intercultural transformation