Getting Serious About Race – Stratfor Worldview (press release) (subscription) (blog)

Approaches to Unity

Over the millennia, people have found many different ways to solve coordination problems. Broadly speaking, there was a shift from a more cooperative hunter-gatherer toward a more coercive world after the agricultural revolution (which began around 9500 B.C. in the Middle East) followed by a shift back toward more cooperative versions in the last few hundred years. Between about 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1500, most people in the world lived in empires in which a small elite monopolizing military, administrative, religious and sometimes commercial functions used state power to integrate the activities of vast numbers of people in villages and towns. The Roman and Han Chinese empires coordinated tens of millions of subjects; the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties in China ruled over 100 million.

These empires tried to lower the costs of obtaining their subjects' obedience by promoting shared identities, but local, kin-based loyalties typically retained more appeal than the center. This became a fatal flaw when, in the last 200 years, empires had to compete with nation-states, which fused politics and ethnicity by insisting that the citizens of each state all shared a common ethnicity. Nation-states were, on the whole, much better than empires at persuading their citizens to make sacrifices for the common good, and the strains of competing against nation-states brought about the collapse of all the great traditional empires between 1911 (Qing China) and 1922 (Ottoman Turkey).

In reality, of course, the populations of nation-states were anything but homogeneous, and so their leaders always had to struggle to find ways to override genetic imperatives and make different people feel similar. We might range their responses along a spectrum from the illiberal to the liberal. Illiberal responses aimed to create homogeneity by destroying difference, in extreme cases by expelling or killing people who did not conform to the ideal. Communist Russia and China defined the ideal in terms of class and killed tens of millions of non-proletarians; fascist Germany defined it in terms of race and killed six million Jews.

Liberal responses, by contrast, aimed to create homogeneity by arguing that difference just did not matter. Two hundred years ago, even the most liberal societies excluded the bulk of their populations from full membership on the basis of race, sex, class, religion or some other variable. Since then, legislation and changing attitudes have steadily rolled back the exclusions. Thanks particularly to the defeat of fascism in World War II and Soviet communism in the Cold War, the illiberal vision of the nation-state was broadly discredited in the West, and for seventy years its democracies not only leaned toward liberal solutions but even pursued equality of outcome through aggressive programs of affirmative action.

For a good fifty years, anyone such as Barry Goldwater in the United States in 1964 and Enoch Powell in Britain in 1968 who emphasized racial differences between citizens courted political suicide. But that is now changing. Enough of the liberal consensus survives that politicians still have to treat race carefully, but in 2016 almost half of American voters supported a presidential candidate who promised to spend between $4 billion (his own lowest estimate) and $21.6 billion (the Department of Homeland Security's estimate) to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and slightly more than half of the British electorate said it was ready to accept the major economic costs of leaving the European single market in order to limit immigration to 100,000 people per year. Something important is happening in politics.

Something important is happening in the scientific study of race too. In June 2000, in a speech celebrating the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome, President Bill Clinton announced that "one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same." This remains true; however, it is also true that humans and chimpanzees are genetically more than 98.8 percent the same. The 1.2 percent, however, makes all the difference in the world; and as they map genetic distributions in increasing detail, scientists have increasingly asked whether the 0.1 percent difference separating human genomes might not also matter.

As yet there is no clear answer to this question, as I learned in June at a conference at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. There, a group of distinguished economists, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists debated the causes of institutional change, and several of the speakers discussed cross-country correlations between genetic differences and institutional differences. This is controversial stuff; any scientist who raises the possibility that genetic distance might have institutional and cultural consequences runs the risk of being dismissed as a Goldwater/Powell kind of crank, not fit for civilized company. However, at a time when racial arguments seem to be on the rise in Western politics, there can surely be few questions more important than this, and I was delighted to learn that scholars of this caliber were willing to take the risks.

However, not everyone is ready to do so. From Toulouse, I went directly to a conference at the British Academy in London, where another distinguished gathering, this time of historians, sociologists and experts in cultural studies were debating the concept of the "Anglosphere." This is a new name for the old idea that something vitally important connects Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In a famous book, Winston Churchill called this group The English-Speaking Peoples; other scholars since the late 19th century have preferred to speak of the Anglo-Saxon Race.

The newest term, "Anglosphere," leaves the question of whether we are investigating a racial or a linguistic category deliberately ambiguous. Speakers who thought "Anglosphere" was a useful concept tended to emphasize linguistic ties, arguing that these had created cultural and institutional similarities, which, in the wake of Brexit, should be deepened. Some even argued for that the time is ripe for a formal political union of Canzuk (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom). Other speakers, however, insisted that the "Anglosphere" is a deeply racist idea, designed merely to legitimate White Anglo-Saxon Protestant oppression of minorities within these countries.

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Getting Serious About Race - Stratfor Worldview (press release) (subscription) (blog)