ETHNICITY AND RACE IN THE WORLD POLITICS

A common heritage, a common language, a common culture makes a group of people identify themselves an ethnic group .Looking at the history there has two different studies which mainly focus on the study of ethnicity. The primordialism which focused on the ethnic ties and the social bond of an ethnic group and instrumentalism which treated ethnicity as an ad-hoc element of the political strategy are the isms that concentrated on ethnicity.

The Equal Employment opportunity Commission on the other hand demanded the employers to report their activities regarding the racial or ethnical categories in order to prevent the discrimination which is mainly based on the ethnicity and race in world politics. 

Revisions to the standards for the classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity have been called upon by the Office of Management and Budget in 1997. The EEO’s EEO1 report was asked to be used in order to establish grounds for racial or ethnic discriminations. Racial discrimination was mainly made upon the person’s color or physical appearance and the national origin of the person.

While dealing with it one should not confuse the term minority and the ethnic group. Taking into consideration the Ethnicity and race in the world politics, Ethnic groups need not to be a minority group they can even be majority in population. The group’s size also matters on these grounds. Still many people think that the ethnic categorization implies a connection between the culture and the biological inheritance. All humans today are 99.9% identical and most important variation is the difference between the males and females. The closest biological relative of man the chimpanzees are 2-3 times more different than people which make that the human creatures are the cultural creations and not biological realities.

The deceptive variations in terms of the color of the skin, the shape of the body, and the hair texture can make discrimination to take chances. The attempts to divide humanity into biological races on the basis of these differences have been a flop.  Ethnicity and racism are the constructs of the culture and history which makes it clear that the people and not the nature create our own identities.

The political liberation all over the world in the early 90s made the ethnic groups to come out with their interests and lay claims on the state. There were two different states namely Czech Republic and Slovakia in the former Czechoslovakia. Simililarly in Britain there was devolution of power to Scotland and Wales. The continued war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and the demand of the Zapatistas of justice and Indian rights bills in Mexico marked the aspects of the Ethnicity and Race in World Politics.

Questions:

• What is an Ethnic Group?
• What is the impact of Political liberation in the 1990s on the Ethnic groups?