The Uncomfortable Reality of Ethnic-Determined Politics

The fragmentation within countries now increasing across the world is largely due to ethnic-determined politics. Ethnic-determined politics is the difficult reality of real politics, but it is less difficult than other political philosophies which are often not much more than intellectual fantasies about what determines politics, such as class-determined or nation-determined politics. Definitions of imperialism, one-nation, one-country, and ethnopluralism, are not the same. The word country is a geographical designation with internationally recognized borders. A nation is associated with a group of people sharing a culture, language, and history. I use the term ethnopluralism to describe the reality of ethnic-determined politics. Real human nature remains kin-centered and ethnic-centered, with group-selection as the main unit of selection.

Ethnic-determined politics does not rule out the affirmation of a protecting federalism, and ethnic-determined politics need not negate democratic republics, it could actually strengthen them. For example, the separation of powers and states in the U.S. Constitution could accommodate ethnic-determined states and regions. Ethnic character, tone and guiding belief already determines much of the cultural ethos. The charge of “racism” has largely been the deceptive, and sometimes naive, attempt of one ethnic group to dominate another. Even when force has been used by empires to block natural ethnopluralism, it is only for relatively short periods of time before they break back into various versions of ethnostates.

As E. O. Wilson has brilliantly and poignantly pointed out, humans are conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection between the individual and the group, these are the forces that created us, we are suspended in unstable and constantly changing positions between the two forces, and we must find a way to balance these forces. In the same way we need to find a balance between ethnic cultures and ethnopluralism. This is what we are, and ethnopluralism is the real base of conservative politics, although the religious base is even deeper.