Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
multiculturalism has been seen as a stage in the absorption of newcomers
into a common American nationality and culture. In recent times, however,
multiculturalism has developed an ideology and mystique of its own. In
its militant form, it becomes an alternative to, even a hold-out against,
the idea of a common nationality. Militant multiculturalism minimizes or
denies the claims of a common nationality and culture in the interest of
celebrating and perpetuating separate ethnic and racial communities.
The politics of identity is based on the proposition that membership in
an ethnic racial, group is the defining experience for Americans and creates
for each of us his or her paramount, permanent and indelible loyalty.
It is this belief in the autonomy and immutability of the various groups
and their priority over the common culture that has excited such spirited,
often angry, debate.
What is it that holds a nation together For, unsatisfactory as the
nation-state may be, it is surely better than a country fragmented into warring
sects and tribes. No one in the 19th century thought more carefully
about the problems of representative government than John Stuart Mill.
The two elements that define nationality, said Mill, are the desire to be
governed together and the “common sympathy” created by shared history,
values and language. He wrote, “Free institutions are next to impossible
in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without
fellow feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the
united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government,
cannot exist.... It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions
that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with
those of nationalities” [Representative Government, ch xvi].
In today’s world those boundaries coincide less and less. Few of the
more than 180 nation-states are ethnically homogeneous; in half no single
ethnic group makes up as much as three-quarters of the population. What
holds heterogeneous nations together As Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian
novelist—many of you must know his book Things Fall Apart—writes of
his own country, one of the richest in Africa but a long and cruel military
despotism and still on the edge of chaos, “This is the Nigerians’ greatest
weakness—their inability to face grave threats as one people instead of as
competing religious and ethnics interests.” Countries break up when they
fail to give diverse peoples compelling reasons to see themselves as part
of the same nation.
Now the United States has been a multicultural country from the
start; yet, except for a terrible civil war, it has somehow held together.
What has created this capacity to face grave threats as one people It is
surely the binding sense of a common nationality and culture, of a shared
national identity—precisely the condition now under attack by militant
multiculturalists.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 117