Pluralism and the Politics of Difference

Abstract

Abstract How do political processes, working through the authoritative institutions of society (the state), shape and reproduce difference? How do societies cope with ethnic and cultural diversity? Ernest Gellner observed that culturally and ethnically plural societies ‘worked well in the past’ but not under modern conditions. Comparison of anthropological and other data on ethnic and cultural pluralism in various historical configurations of state and society (early or pre‐industrial states; modern industrial states; and contemporary, post‐modern, and post‐industrial states) is instructive. In many early states, rulers had little concern with the ethnic identity and cultural practices of their subjects so long as they paid their taxes. In some cases, such as the Ottoman empire, societies were divided into ethnic and cultural corporations, which were in large measure autonomous. Under conditions of modernity, however, many industrial nation states engaged their populations in processes of national integration, demanding the suppression of difference within national territories and the ethnic and cultural assimilation of immigrants and refugees (when they did not reject them). In the last third of the twentieth century, however, in the post‐industrial, neoliberal economies of the West, there was apparently a move towards greater acceptance of differences as societies experimented with various forms of multiculturalism. Whether contemporary states have the political and economic will to sustain non‐essentializing forms of egalitarian multiculturalism remains an open question.