An inclusive republic, if you can keep it

This is a response to Monica Duffy Toft’s recent Foreign Policy piece, "The United States’ Demographic Revolution Doesn’t Need to Be Destabilizing.” In it, Toft argues that one reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse was its failure to be more inclusive as its demography shifted away from its Slavic Russian majority. The United States must become more inclusive to avoid suffering the same fate, she writes.

The advice here is compelling and sound, but this is a deeply depressing piece because it gives no examples of such inclusivity taking place. And the reason it gives no examples is that there aren’t any.

1. Tribes gonna tribe

In almost every known instance, an historic in-group facing demographic or democratic demands by out-groups has grimly held on to power, or, if it lost power, has found itself subjugated or cleansed from the land. This dynamic has produced conflict or dissolution virtually every time it has happened: not just in the USSR, but in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Cote d’Ivoire, Cote d’Ivoire again, Ethiopia repeatedly, French Algeria, Afghanistan, Guatemala, and many more. It caused the Rwandan Genocide. It’s the reason market-dominant minorities like Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority get targeted for mass removal or worse. It’s the reason why few Turks remain in the Balkans and why almost no Christians of any sort remain in Anatolia. This is a grim list, and it is far from exhaustive.

Things get even worse when one adds in all the times a previously closed political system was opened, suddenly exposing people for the first time to the potency of demography in a democratic society. Results of this experiment include the India-Pakistan partition; the cleansing and division of Cyprus; the mutual cleansing of the Jewish-Arab partition; the breakup of Yugoslavia; Sri Lanka’s civil war; Singapore’s secession from Malaysia after deadly race riots; the Jim Crow South; South Sudan’s bloody secession from Sudan and subsequent civil war; the Biafra conflict; and many, many others.

Against this litany of horrors, what counterexamples do we have? South Africa? Hardly; the apartheid regime gave way only after assurances that the white minority’s economic and social privileges would be constitutionally secured, and that the country’s truth and reconciliation commission wouldn’t punish anyone. The result? More than a quarter century on, multi-racial South Africa today is the most unequal country on Earth. South Africa is correctly lauded for having the most uniquely peaceful transfer of power from a minority regime we’ve ever seen… but “inclusive” is not exactly the correct word to describe its present condition.

2. What is equality anyway?

The reason it’s difficult to create inclusivity where it previously did not exist is that equality feels like different things to different people. As the saying goes, when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. But the opposite is also true; when you’re used to being oppressed, oppressing others feels like equality. Example A is Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed, who is absolutely certain that his government is democratic and inclusive even as it teams up with Eritrea to starve the Tigrayans and loot their hospitals. The same is true with a great many other revisionist regimes. In Croatia, the summer day in 1995 when the army ethnically cleansed the entire Serb population out of the country is commemorated annually with a celebratory holiday and, on notable anniversaries, a parade. And while I’ve never met former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, I’m fairly confident he will go to his grave convinced that his government was a just one. Few Sunni Arabs would agree, not least his former Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who he ordered arrested on charges of running a death squad.

One inevitable feature of any active inclusion campaign will be high-profile squabbling amongst elites of different backgrounds for a fair distribution of top political, cultural, and academic positions. But in any society, most people of all backgrounds are not elites and have little hope of joining those circles, and to them basically all power machinations come off as a rather unseemly royal rumble. The average citizen watching the introduction of the identity card into this power-jockeying is highly likely to subsequently become receptive to any demagogue who tells them that opportunity is zero-sum and that some other group stands between them and success. This means that multiethnic democracy is an infinite number of finite games. Milošević and Tuđman need only win one time for everything to go to hell.

3. America, land of no Stans

So will the US break up like the USSR before it, as Toft worries? In some ways, America’s prospects are better than those of the Soviet Union because its economic model is not completely bankrupt. But in other ways it is in more dangerous waters. One reason the USSR’s dissolution was largely peaceful was because it was a constellation of ethnic homelands with clear borders, and so there were few territorial conflicts except where the borders and the people did not line up. (See the ongoing disputes over Nagorno-Karabakh and Crimea.)

Yugoslavia was configured the same way. Most of the infamous bloodshed accompanying its collapse took place in diverse, disputed zones, Bosnia and the Krajina most notably. Homogenous Slovenia, by contrast, skipped town so easily that today, were it not Melania Trump, Slavoj Žižek, and Luka Dončić, most people wouldn’t know the country even exists, because it is never in the news.

America, by contrast, has no Slovenias. It is a land of no Stans. There is no Uzbekistan for Uzbek-Americans to call home. Its diversity is diffuse and concentrated in its cities. Thus, the US is much more likely to descend into a hideous Syria-style zero-sum ethno-sectarian death match for control of the whole country than to have a velvet divorce like the USSR. If America falls, it will fall hard.

4. Gender and ethnicity are different

Toft’s piece discusses the role of gender extensively. This is highly important. The near-universal demographic principle of “wealthier and more urbanized people have fewer babies and they have them later in life” was a major factor in the Soviet Union’s demographic transformation, and it is having the same effect in the United States. And it should go without saying that women’s economic empowerment is integral to achieving an equal and prosperous nation.

That said, gender inclusivity is entirely distinct from ethnic or religious inclusivity, because gender is a non-lineage-based identity—one doesn’t inherit it from one’s parents like ethnicity—and thus its distribution is fixed and diffuse. This is enormously important because, put bluntly, genders by definition cannot secede or ethnically cleanse each other. So, right from the beginning, the question of gender relations is, “How are we going to live together?” It is a question of inclusivity. By contrast, for lineage-based identities like ethnicity or religion, secession and ethnic cleansing are very real possibilities, and so the fundamental question is, rather, “Are we going to live together?” And as the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrates, the answer people very often give is, “No.”

5. Is there no hope then?

If there’s a single example of an in-group peacefully welcoming out-groups into an equal arrangement anywhere in the world, I am unaware of it… at least in instances where each group maintained its distinct identity. There are many places, however, where people merged into a single super-group, to the point that they no longer consider themselves to be different groups at all. “German,” “Italian,” “Dutch,” “Japanese,” “Chinese,” “Russian,” to some extent “Indonesian,” and a number of other large national identities were formed from a bunch of formerly different and highly conflictual and unequal ethnic, linguistic, and religious traditions that were hammered into a common identity through a mutually agreed national program. This is what is known as a nationalization campaign.

The “mutually agreed” part of such a campaign is critical. China, for instance, is currently extending “Han Chinese” identity out to its Uighur minority. This is decidedly not inclusivity.

Note that every one of the above groups still discriminates to some extent against out-groups. It’s just that the nationalization campaign each undertook conferred in-group status on nearly everyone living in the country, leading to a much more equal and stable society than what came before. The latent ethnonationalism of these peoples has not been eliminated, merely reconfigured.

If there is hope for the United States, this is quite likely where it lies: not that people will view themselves primarily through their ethnic, racial, and religious affiliation and simultaneously treat each other as pure equals—this would be basically unprecedented in human affairs—but that they will think of themselves primarily as Americans. In that outcome, all other identities will be a fun fact and not a salient political issue, with race or religion being treated with the same gravity as eye color or hometown.

The most durable form of inclusivity is the one that, when it’s done, nobody even notices or remembers that it took place.