Can Multi-Racial States Ever Function? Some Examples with Caveats.

Much has been written about the failure of multi-racial and multi-ethnic states.  Pierre L van den Berghe, Frank Salter, Steve Sailer, Robert D. Putnam, J. Phillipe Rushton, Jared Taylor, Satoshi Kanazawa, Kevin MacDonald, Miller McPherson, Neil Munro, Alex Rutherford, Rob Waugh and others have all written about the problems with multi-ethnic and multi-racial states.

From an evolutionary perspective, the instability of multi-racial states makes sense.  The more genetically diverse a state, the less likely people are willing to invest in the overall societal well-being.  For instance, small homogenous states (e.g. Sweden or Japan) of Europeans or North Asians seem to be at the pinnacle of state-wide altruism.  Everyone is closely related so by investing in the state (taxes, welfare, etc) one can still maximize his inclusive fitness.  But in multi-racial states, people aren’t so closely related, so there is probably no great desire to invest in the general well-being.  In fact, the more extreme — not only not investing in the general well-being but the general hostility between races — seems to be the norm in multi-racial states.   As Lawrence H Keeley points out in War Before Civilization, pre-modern history has really been a history of inter-tribal genocide.

OK, multi-racial states are failures.  Have they ever worked? Can they?

In an attenuated sense, there have been multi-racial and multi-ethnic success stories but there are many caveats to these stories.

Habsburg Empire: The differences here are largely ethnic, not racial, as the genetic distances between various European ethnic groups are small, but ethnic differences can still matter. The “other” is often defined by what is most proximate. The Hapsburg Empire was a multi-ethnic empire and largely successful.  What was its secret? Like most attenuated success stories, it pursued a policy of ethnopluralism — different groups were kept discrete; there were no governmental policies of forced assimilation, forced integration, etc.  The Habsburgs, in short, had no “busing programs” [carriage programs?].  Different ethnic groups were left alone and lived largely isolated from other groups.

The Roman Empire: Here we have a large multi-racial empire that was successful.  But, as in the case of the Hapsburg Empire, we have a policy of ethnopluralism — different racial groups largely live apart (except for mass immigration to Italy, which might have eventually undone the empire).  The Roman Empire largely cared only about collecting taxes and left various subjects alone.  In the classical sense, the Roman Empire was not a nation (a group of people related by blood — like Sweden or Japan) but but a collection of nations under the authority of the emperor.  There was also no forced assimilation.  While the Celts of Gaul eventually adopted Latin, most of the people of the East kept their indigenous languages and customs and Hellenized Greek remained the dominate language and culture of the East.

Switzerland: Like the Hapbsburg Empire, we here have a multi-ethnic state (not empire) and what is predominate in this multi-ethnic state is the demarcation of clear boundaries.  As this recent paper shows, ethnic boundaries in Switzerland are clearly demarcated and respected.

Pre-1964 United States:  In the 1960 census, the USA was 90% white, there were clear demarcations between white and non-white neighborhoods and the majority was self-confident and set an example for the rest.  Pre-1964 USA, although it had problems, probably could have continued indefinitely, but the Civil Rights Act and Immigration Act of 1964 have probably sealed its fate.

Success:  When surveying the above, factors that seem to lead to attenuated success stories are:  ethnopluralism (not multiculturalism), segregation, confident ruling class or majority, states demarcated into smaller nations, etc.

Failure: Notice that most Western nations today have the opposite of the above:  multiculturalism, the cult of diversity, forced integration, de-segregation, an unconfident ruling class or majority, policies of assimilation, etc.

Perhaps the most dangerous mix is when you don’t have a self-confident ruling class or majority, but rather a state divided into half between two racial groups, or into rough thirds of three racial groups with an assimilationist government trying forcing diversity upon everyone.  This has largely been the policy of the USA for the last 50 years and it’s falling apart.  A “race war” of sorts is already breaking out in California between blacks and mestizos.

Many pundits want to believe that the USA will mix into a “uniform coffee-colored nation” but this is highly unlikely.  Latin American countries have had centuries for this to occur but the patters across Latin America are largely the same:  a small European upper class and below it large segregated masses of Mestizos, Mulattoes and Amerindians, which are almost always mutually hostile.  In Latin American countries we most often see a color continuum; the lighter one is, the more likely he is to upper-class; the darker one is, the more likely he is to be lower class.  (Perhaps this has to do with a biological fact that fairer people are better adapted to function in modern states?)

In short, I tend to agree with the critics of multi-racial states.  They are rife with problems and often end in racial or ethnic strife.  And when multi-racial or multi-ethnic states are largely successful, the states or empires are clearly demarcated into smaller entho-states within the larger state.

Updates:

“Primer on Immigration and Human BioDiversity“