Ethnicity

Ethnic identity politics, Eric Hobsbawm argues, arises as an effort to established impermeable boundaries in a situation where boundaries are permeable: “The very fluidity of ethnicity in urban societies made its choice as the only criterion of the group arbitrary and artificial. In the USA, except for Blacks, Hispanics, and those of English and German origins, at least 60 percent of American-born women of all ethnic origins married outside the group . . . . Increasingly one’s identity had to be constructed by insisting on the non-identity of others. How otherwise could the neo-Nazi skinheads in Germany, wearing the uniforms, hair-styles and musical tastes of the cosmopolitan youth culture, establish their essential Germanness, except by beating up local Turks and Albanians? How, except by eliminating those who did not ‘belong’ could the ‘essentially’ Croat or Serb character of some region be established in which, for most of history, a variety of ethnicities and religions had lived as neighbors?”