CORE SOLIDARITY 79
THREE
Core Solidarity, Ethnic Outgroup, and Social Differentiation
Theorists of Western development have been hard put to account for the ethnic and racial conflicts that have created the recent wave of nationalist and separatist movements in industrial societies. For developing nations, such conflicts are to be expected; they are part of the "transition" period. But after industrial society is firmly established, it is believed such divisions will become residual, not systematic or indeed intensifying contradictions. (Marx 1848 [1955]; Tonnies 1887 [1957]; Weber 1904 [1958]; Dürkheim 1893 [1947]).
This theoretical difficulty is fundamental; its roots He in the complex history of Western development itself. Theories of nation building are products of Enlightenment thinking, generated by the twin revolutions of political nationalism and industrialism. As the analytic translation of these social developments, they have been rationalistic in the extreme, sharing a utilitarian distaste for the nonrational and normative and the illusion that a truly modern society will soon dispense with such concerns.
One antidote to this theoretical failing is increased sensitivity to secular myth and cultural patterns, phenomena with which theorists have been increasingly concerned (Geertz 1973a; Bellah 1970). But solidarity is the more crucial theoretical dimension for problems of emergent ethnicity i and nationalist conflicts. The concept of solidarity refers to the subjective ■ feelings of integration that individuals experience for members of their : social groups. Given its phenomena logical character, solidarity problems
I acknowledge the advice and helpful critical readings of a number of friends and colleagues: Jeffrey Prager, Seamus Thompson, Leo Kuper, Ivan Light, Dean R. Gerstein, and Ruth Bloch. I have also received invaluable aid from Maria Iosue, who was my research assistant for this project.
clearly diverge from those of economics and politics, which concern themselves, respectively, with scarcity and the self-conscious organization of goals. Yet solidarity also differs from problems of culture, which are oriented toward meaningful patterns relatively abstracted from specific time and space. Thus, although integrative exigencies are not generated by purely instrumental considerations, they are more concrete than "values." In contrast to values, social solidarity refers to the structure of actual social groups. Like religion, politics, and economics, solidarity constitutes an independent determinant of human societies and a fundamental point for sociological analysis (Shils 1975a; Parsons 1967a, 1971; Alexander 1978, 1983; cf. Nakane 1970, Light 1972).
"Inclusion" and the Paradigm of Linear Evolution
Solidarity becomes a fundamental factor because every nation must, after all, begin historically. Nations do not simply emerge out of thin air, for example, as universalistic, constitutional entities. They are founded by groups whose members share certain qualitatively distinct characteristics, traits around which they structure their solidarity. No matter what kind of future institutions this "core goup" establishes, no matter what the eventual liberalism of its social and political order, residues of this core solidarity remain.
From the perspective of the integrative problem, national development can be viewed as a process of encountering and producing new solidary outgroups (cf. Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rokkan 1975). With religious and economic rationalization, new sects and social classes are created. With territorial expansion and immigration, new ethnic groups are encountered (cf. E. Weber 1976). In response to these developments, pressures develop to expand the solidarity that binds the core group. In this way, nation building presents the problem of "inclusion" (Parsons 1967b, 1971).
I define inclusion as the process by which previously excluded groups gain solidarity in the "terminal" community of a society. Two points are crucial in this definition. First, inclusion refers to felt solidarity, not simply to behavioral participation. Pariah groups that fill crucial social roles— like Western Jews in the Middle Ages or Indians in post-Colonial
8o     STRUCTURE, ACTION, DIFFERENTIATION
Uganda—are not "included."* Second, I am concerned here specifically with a society's terminal community (Geerts 1973b). A dominant focus of the American tradition of race relations and ethnicity studies has focused almost exclusively on the primary group level, on whether individuals join the same clubs, make the same friends, and intermarry (Gordon 1964). While such questions are certainly significant, morally as well as intellectually, they cannot provide the only important focus for historical and comparative analysis. In defining the terminal community as the widest solidary group with which individuals feel significant integration, I am referring to those feelings that, extending beyond family and friends, create the boundaries of acknowledged "society." Whether this terminal community is narrow and limiting or is expansive enough to encompass a range of particular groupings—this question is as ramifying an issue as the level of economic or political development or the nature of religious belief. Inclusion, then, refers to a change in solidary status. To the degree that individuals are felt to be full members of the terminal community they have to that degree been "included."
Inclusion can be measured by the degree to which the terminal community has become more "civil" and less "primordial." The latter refer to the given, seemingly natural ties that structure solidarity—race, territory, kinship, language, even religion (Geerts 1973b, Shils 1975b). To the degree that people share any one of these traits, they will feel direct, emotional bonds. Primordial ties are necessarily few. In aboriginal society, where the "world" ended at the farthest waterhole, sex, kinship, age, and territory presented the principal axes for solidary identification.
Civil ties, on the other hand, are more mediated and less emotional, more abstract and self-consciously constructed. Instead of referring to biological or geographic givens, they refer to ethical or moral qualities associated with "social" functions and institutions. The emergence of civil ties can be seen as a process of differentiation, one that parallels the movements toward economic, political, and religious differentiation that have been the traditional foci of modernization theory. Membership in the terminal community must, in the first place, be separated from mem-
*At its extreme, such purely behavioral participation by outgroups forms the basis of "plural societies," in the terminology developed by Kuper and Smith (1969; Kuper, 1978). In their terms, I am dealing in this essay with the causes and consequences of different degrees of pluralLiation in the industrial West, a subject to which plural societies theory has not yet devoted significant attention.
CORE SOLIDARITY 8l
bership in particular kinship groups and, more generally, from biological criteria. This community solidarity must also be differentiated from status in the economic, political, and religious community.
The primordial-civil continuum, then, provides an independent criterion for evaluating the inclusion process. This standard has usually, however, been applied in an artificial, linear way even by those theorists who have taken the integrative problem seriously. From Hegel and Tocqueville to Parsons, the transition from primordial to civil solidarity has been envisioned as rigidly interlocked with political and economic transformation. The ideal-typical point of origin is the narrow moral basis of Banfield's "backward society," a self-contained village where identification scarcely extends beyond the family to the town, let alone to occupation, class, or even religious affiliation (Banfield 1959). This primordial community is then transformed in the course of modernization into Dürkheims organic solidarity, Parsons' societal community, or Tocqueville's mass democracy; given the expansive civil ties in the latter societies, individuals "rightly understand" their self-interest (Dürkheim 1893 [1933]; Tocqueville 1835 [1945]; Parsons 1971).
To a significant degree, such a universalizing transformation in solidarity has, indeed, characterized the modernization process. In the Western Middle Ages, the Christian Church provided the only overarching integration that bound distinct villages and estates. It was, after all, the Papal bureaucracy that created the territorial jurisdictions of Gallia, Germania, Italia, and Anglia long before these abstract communities ever became concrete groupings (Coulton 1935:28-29). It did so, fundamentally, because Christian symbolism envisioned a civil solidarity that could transcend the primordial ties of blood (Weber 1904 [1958]). Similarly, alongside the officers of the Church, the King's henchmen were the only medieval figures whose consciousness extended beyond village and clan. To the degree the King and his staff succeeded in establishing national bureaucracies, they contributed enormously to the creation of a civil terminal community, despite the primordial qualities that remained powerfully associated with this national core group (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1939:8-21; cf. Eisenstadt 1963). Economic development also has been closely intertwined with the extension of civil ties, as Marx himself implicitly acknowledged when he praised capitalism for making "national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness . . . more and more impossible" (Marx 1848 [1955]: 13; cf. Landes 1969:1-40).
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CORE SOLIDARITY 8j
Civil solidarity is, in fact, fundamentally linked to differentiation in these other structural dimensions. Only if religion is abstracted from the earthly realm and oriented toward a transcendent, impersonal divine source can "individualism" emerge, i.e., an accordance of status to the individual person regardless of social position (Little 1969, Walzer 1965). Only with political constitutionalism, which is closely related to such religious developments (Friedrichs 1964), can groups respond to injustice, not in terms of reasserting primordial unity, but in terms of defending their rights as members of the wider community (Bendix 1964 [10,77])-Only with the functional, impersonal form of industrial organization can positions be awarded on the basis of efficiency rather than in terms of kinship, race, or geographical origins. Civil solidarity cannot, however, simply be considered the reflection of these other differentiations. Not only does it constitute an independent, nonresidual dimension with which these institutional developments interact. It occurs, in addition, through particular, concrete mechanisms that, in responding to these developments, create wider solidarity: through more efficient transportation and communication, increased geographical and cultural mobility, urbanization, secular education, mass and elite occupational mobility and intermarriage, and increasingly consensual civic ritualization (cf. E. Weber 1976; Goode 1963:28-80; Lipset and Bendix i960; Shils and Young 1975 [i956]:i35-52) .•
•Although few of the treatments of these mechanisms sufficiently relate them to the distinctive problem of solidarity, the last mechanism I have cited, civic ritualization, is rarely given any attention at all. By civic ritual I refer to the affectively charged, rhetorically simplified occasions through which a society affirms the solidary bonds of its terminal community. Such consensual rituals, microcosms of which are repeated in local milieu, include everything from the funeral ceremonies of powerful leaders to the televised dramas of national political crises (see my discussion of Watergate in chapter 5) and the spectacles of national sport championships. One crucial symbolic element often invoked by these rituals is directly relevant to the crucial historical position of any society's core group, namely, the element of "national ancestors." Every system of national symbolism involves a myth of creation, and these narrative stories must be personified in terms of actual historical persons. These ancestors become an ascriptive "family" for the members of the terminal community, as, in America, George Washington is viewed as the "father" of the American nation. As the personification of the founding core group, ethnic composition of these symbolic national ancestors is crucial, and the solidary history of a nation can be traced in terms of shifts in their purported ethnicity. In the United States, for example, there has been a struggle over whether the black leader, Martin Luther King, will be accorded such symbolic founding status. The creation of a national holiday honoring his birthday may have resolved this in the affirmative, but it is still too early for a definitive answer.
But although these systemic linkages are certainly correct, there has been a strong tendency to conflate such abstract complementarity with empirical history. Theorists of solidarity have themselves been infected by Enlightenment rationalism. From the beginning of Western society, in fact, "progressive" thinking has confidently proclaimed purely civic solidarity to be the "future" of the human race, whether this future lay in the Athenian polis, Roman law, the universal brotherhood of Christianity, the social contract, the General Will, or in classless communism.* But in historical reality differentiation is not a homogeneous process. It occurs in different spheres at different times, and these leads and lags have enormously complex repercussions on societal development (Smelser 1971, Vallier 1971, Eisenstadt 1973, E. Weber 1976). As an autonomous dimension, solidarity varies independently of developments in other spheres. As a result, civic integration is always unevenly attained. Indeed, the newly created, more expansive associations that result from differentiation will often themselves become, at some later point in time, narrowly focused solidarities that oppose any further development. This is as true for the transcendent religions and nationalist ideologies that have promoted symbolic and political differentiation as for the economic classes, like the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which after a triumphant expansion of cosmopolitanism have often become a source of conservative antagonism to the wider whole.
Most fundamentally, however, civil integration is uneven because every national society exhibits a historical core. While this founding group may create a highly differentiated, national political framework, it will also necessarily establish, at the same time, the preeminence of certain primordial qualities.f While members of noncore groups may be extended full legal rights and may even achieve high levels of actual institutional participation, their full membership in the solidarity of the national community may never be complete (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rokkan 1975). This tension between core and civil solidarity must inform any theory of inclusion in industrial societies.
*Even when anticivil developments are acknowledged, they tend to be treated as deviant eruptions from the purely civil mode, as in Nolte's penetrating analysis of Fascism as an "anti-transcendant" ideology or in Mosse's analysis of blood as the common denominator of German "Volk" culture (Nolle 19651 Mosse 1964).
fThis general statement must be modified in applying this model to developing rather than to developed nations. Although every society does have a historical, solidary core, the artificiality of the creation of many postcolonial societies leaves several founding ethnic blocs in primordial competition rather than a single founding group.
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A Multidimensional Model: The Internal and External Axes of Inclusion
My focus here is on the problem of ethnic, not class, inclusion. I define ethnicity as the real or perceived primordial qualities that accrue to a group by virtue of shared race, religion, or national origin, including in the latter category linguistic and other cultural attributes associated with a common territorial ancestry (cf. Schermerhorn 1970:12).
Inclusion of an ethnic outgroup depends on two factors: (1) the external, or environmental, factor, which refers to the structure of society that surrounds the core group; (2) the internal, or volitional, factor, which refers to the relationship between the primordial qualities of core group and outgroup. The external factor includes the economic, political, integrative, and religious systems of society; the more differentiated these systems are, the more inclusion becomes a legitimate possibility. In contrast to this external reference, the internal factor is more volitional: to the degree that primordial complementarity exists between core goup and outgroup, members of the core group will tend to regard inclusion as a desirable possibility. Finally, although both internal and external factors can be measured behaviorally, their most significant impact is subjective and phenomenological. To the degree that the environment is differentiated and primordiality is complementary, the felt boundaries of the terminal community will become more expansive and civil.
While remaining systematic, this general model takes into account a wide range of factors. Each factor can be treated as independently variable, and by holding other factors constant, we can establish experimental control. Of course, such a general model cannot simply be tested; it must also be specified and elaborated. This can be accomplished by at least two different strategies.
Taking a purely analytic approach, we may trace the effects of varying each factor in turn. We can demonstrate, for example, that in terms of the external environment, differentiation in every social sphere—not simply changes in solidarity itself—has consequences for the structure of terminal integration. In South Africa, for example, while the divergence among primordial qualities remained fairly constant, more differentiated economic development ramified in ways that enlarged core and outgroup interaction and increased the pressures on the rigidly ascribed political order (cf. Kuper 1969). Similarly, while primordial anti-Semitism re-
CORE SOLIDARITY 85
mained unchanged and legal restrictions were unaltered, European mercantilism created important opportunities for the exercise of Jewish financial expertise, whose recognition eventually had wide-ranging repercussions. In nineteenth-century America, on the other hand, the black outgroup was not drawn first into qualitatively more differentiated economic production. While the primordial separation between black and Caucasian Americans remained constant, the Civil War initiated changes in the legal system that differentiated some (if not all) individual rights from racial qualities. As an example of variation in the political environment, we can refer to the processes often initiated by the construction of certain great empires. By differentiating overarching bureaucracies and impersonal rules, conquerors like Alexander and Napoleon opened up opportunities for excluded groups, like the Jews, in nations where the primordial distinctions between core group and outgroup, and other structural characteristics as well, had remained relatively unchanged.
Although the relative differentiation of religion constitutes another variable in the inclusion process, as I have indicated in the first section of this chapter and will illustrate further below, the contrast between Protestantism and Catholicism, both relatively transcendent religions, is instructive for the kinds of specifications that must be introduced in applying this model to the complexity of a concrete historical case. Whereas the greater symbolic abstraction and institutional differentiation of Protestantism, especially the Puritan variety, is generally more conducive to inclusion than Catholicism, in the exclusion produced by slavery the reverse has often been true, as the contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Iberian slave conditions has demonstrated (Elkins 1969). Indeed, in the particular conditions of slavery, two of the most traditionalistic aspects of Iberian Catholicism were particularly conducive to black inclusion: (1) Its relative paternalism generated a greater concern for the well-being of out-groups than the more individualistic voluntary principle of Protestant societies did; (2) The Catholic fusion of church and state encouraged religious interference in the political and legal order to an extent unheard of in Anglo-Saxon societies.
These broad structural changes in "external environment" have affected solidarity through the kinds of specific integrating mechanisms I outlined above: through increased interaction as effected through geographic and economic mobility, increased economic and political participation, expanded education and communication, and intermarriage. Significant
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numbers of American blacks, for example, later used their upgraded legal status to emigrate to urban areas, where the racially based qualifications for economic and political participation could not be so easily enforced. Small but influential segments of European Jewry (the Schutzjuden, or "Protected Jews") used the limited political immunity generated by their economic prowess to gain access to the secular, homogenizing culture of nineteenth-century Europe. By the same token, it was participation in South Africa's differentiated economic life that produced for the non-whites increased access to universalistic culture through education, and economic and geographical mobility through, in part, expanding urbanization (Doxey 1961:85-109; Van der Horst 1965; Van den Berghe 1965:86, 279-80). In fact, it was precisely to inhibit and control these mechanisms—to protect core group domination from the effects of societal differentiation—that Apartheid was first introduced by the Akfrikaner Nationalist elite (Kuper i960; Van den Berghe 1965; cf. Blumer 1965).
We may, on the other hand, hold environmental factors constant and trace the effects of variation in the internal factors. Probably the most significant illustration of variation in primordial complementarity and its relation to inclusion is the widespread phenomenon of finely graded color stratification (cf. Gergen 1968). In Mexico, where light Spanish OTCriollo complexion has traditionally defined the racial core, mestizos, or mixed bloods, are granted significantly more inclusion than the darker skinned Indians. This continuum from the light to dark color has created a finely graded series of "internal" opportunities for inclusion. The same kind of color gradation, from black to "colored" to white affects access to the internal environment in South Africa. The rule in both cases is based on the complementarity criterion: members of a solidary outgroup have access to the degree their racial traits are conceived as closer to those of the core group. Similar kinds of gradations could be established along the dimensions of religion and national origins, as I illustrate in part 3. Variation in these internal factors facilitates inclusion by affecting the kinds of structural mechanisms I have cited above. And the latter, of course, affect the way the complementarity criterion manifests itself in turn. Thus, while Peru exhibits the same grading of color, darker "mixed blood" has gained.significantly less inclusion there than in Mexico. This variation can be explained by the interaction of color with the greater differentiation of Mexican social structure, produced by the contrast be-
CORE SOLIDARITY 8j
tween Mexican and Peruvian colonial development and by the impact of the Mexican Revolution (Harris 1964:36-40).
Having outlined the major analytic features of this inclusion model, in the following I seek to demonstrate its applicability via a specific case study.'
The Model Applied: The Uneven Inclusion of Europeans, Asians, and Africans in the United States
In discussing the U.S. case, I compare inclusion for European and non-European immigrants and consider, within each category, the variation in both internal and external factors.
The social system that confronted mass European immigration after 1820 presented, by the standards of its time, an unusually "civil" structure. In large part, this depended on America's historial past, or perhaps the lack of one (Hartz 1955; Lipset 1965:1-233). Without an American feudalism, there existed no aristocracy that could monopolize economic, political, and intellectual prerogatives on a primordial basis. Similarly, without the legacy of Catholicism and an established Church, spiritual domination and monopolization were less viable possibilities (Bellah 1970:168-89).
As a result of this legacy, and other historically specific factors as well, institutional life in America was either unusually differentiated or, at least, open to becoming more so. Schumpeter's notion of an open class system applies more to the early American nation than to Europe, for while geographical and economic mobility did not eliminate the American class structure, they guaranteed that actual class membership fluctuated to a significant degree (Thernstrom 1974). Although America had an unusually weak national bureaucracy, the political system was differentiated in other important ways. The combination of strong constitutional principles and dearth of traditional elites generated early party conflict and encouraged the allocation of administrative offices by political "spoils" rather than according to the kind of implicit kinship criteria inherent in a more traditional status-based civil service. Wide distribution of property, plus populist opposition to stringent electoral qualifications, meant significant disperson of the franchise. Finally, the diversity and decentralized character of Protestant churches in America encouraged the proliferation of
1
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pietistic religious sects and voluntary denominationalism rather than religious establishment (Miller 1956:16-98, 141—52; 1967:90-120, 150-62; Mead 1963:12-37 and chapter 2, above). The transcendent, abstract quality of Anglo-American Protestantism also made it conducive to the secularization of intellectual and scientific discussion and to the emergence of public, nonreligious education.
This external situation must be balanced, however, against the internal one. Despite its relatively civil structure, this American nation had been founded by a strong, self-conscious primordial core. White in race, Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking in ethnicity, intensely Protestant in religious identity, this "WASP" core group sought to maintain a paradox that, though hypocritical, was rooted in the historical experience of the American nation. They asserted that American institutions, while differentiated and civil, were, at the same time, permeated by certain primordial qualities (Jordan 1968). And, indeed, although this was a basic factor in American race relations from the outset, until the 1820s and 1830s this anomaly was not severely tested within the white society. During the seventeenth century, European immigrants were almost entirely English, and though the sources of immigration varied more in the eighteenth century, the nation's English and Protestant primordial core could still conceivably be identified with the institutional structure of the nation (Hansen 1940; Handlin 1957:23-39).
Between 1820 and 1920, America experienced massive immigration from a wide variety of European nations. As the core group tried to defend its privileged position, this process produced waves of xenophobic sentiment and exclusionary movements (Higham 1969). Yet by the middle of the present century, these outgroups had achieved relatively successful inclusion (Glazer 1975:3—32), at least within the limits established by the necessarily historical roots of national identity (Gordon 1964; Glazer and Moynihan 1963).
In terms of the internal, volitional factor in inclusion, the points of conflict and accommodation in the immigration process must be assessed in terms of the congruence between primordial solidarities (Hansen 1940; cf. Schooler 1976). While the Caucasian homogeneity of outgroup and core group prevented racial conflict, significant polarization still occurred between the WASP and non-English immigrants. The division was most intense, howevsr, between core and Northern European immigrants,
CORE SOLIDARITY 8g
on one side, and Southern European groups on the other (Handlin 1957:75, 85; Higham 1969). Southern Europeans, after all, differed more strikingly from the core in national culture and language. Although this national conflict was partly offset by the Christianity that most immigrants shared, antipathy between Catholic and Protestant made the religious variable another significant point of ethnic cleavage.
In the actual empirical process of inclusion, these points of internal cleavage and convergence were combined in a variety of ways (Parsons 1967b; Blauner 1972:56, 68). The Irish, for example, played an important bridging role, for while sharing certain vital cultural and linguistic traits with the English core, their Catholicism allowed them to interpenetrate on the religious dimension with the later, more intensely excluded Catholic group, the Italians (cf. Handlin 1951 [i973J:n6-24). Similarly, although the Jews were disliked for specifically religious reasons, this tension was partially offset by racial and national convergence, particularly in the cases of Northern European Jews like the Germans. Between the Christian core group and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, in fact, German Jews often played a mediating role like that of the Irish Catholics to the Southern Europeans (Howe 1976).
After they had become naturalized citizens, and within the limitations established by their primordial divergence, these European immigrants took advantage of the openings presented by differentiation in the external environment to contest the privileged position of America's WASP core (Handlin 1951 [1973]). According to their respective origins and special skills, groups took different institutional paths toward inclusion. Catholics used American disestablishment to gain religious inclusion and legitimacy, and Catholicism gradually became transformed into one Christian denomination among many (Ahlstrom 1972:546-54, 825—41). In the big cities, Catholics used America's party structure and spoils system to build political power. Jews, on the other hand, parlayed their urban-economic background into skills that were needed in the industrializing economic system (Blauner 1972:62-63). Later, the Jewish emphasis on literacy— which in its similar Old Testament emphasis on the "word" partly neutralized the Protestant religious cleavage—helped Jews gain access to the intellectual and scientific products of America's secular culture.
The internal and external situation that confronted America's non-European immigrants—those from Africa and Asia—was strikingly differ-
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ent.* In terms of primordial qualities, the divergence was much more intense. Racial differences created an initial, highly flammable cleavage, one to which Protestant societies are particularly sensitized (Elkins 1969; Tannenbaum 1969; Bellah 1975:86-112). Asians and Africans were also distinguished more sharply in the religious dimension, for few shared the majority's commitment to Christianity. In fact, as "non-Christians," blacks were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as often the butt of religions slurs as they were of racial epithets. Superimposed on these religious and racial dimensions was the sharp divergence between non-Europeans and the American core in terms of national origins, viz., longstanding American fantasies about "darkest Africa" and the "exotic Orient" (Light 1972; Blauner 1972:65).
Not only were national traditions and territory more disjunctive, but also there existed no common linguistic reference or (for Africans at least) urban tradition to bridge the gap (Blauner 1972:61; Handlin 1957:80-81). The WASP core group, and indeed, the new European immigrants themselves, reacted strongly against such primordial disparity: the history of mob violence against Chinese and blacks has no precedent in reactions against European immigrants.
Equally important in the fate of these immigrants, however, was the nature of the external evironment they entered (cf. Blauner 1972). Entering as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, blacks were without legal right0 Because their participation in American institutional life was at every joint legally fused with the biological criteria of race, they faced a closed, not an open and differentiated, social system. Although the circumstances were much less severe for the Chinese immigrants who entered in mass in the 1850s, their common status as indentured labor sharply limited their mobility and competitiveness in the labor market (Bean 1968:163-65; Lyman 1970:64-77). This external inhibition exacerbated primordial antagonism, and the California state legislature passed a series of restrictive pieces of legislation that further closed various aspects of institutional life (Lyman 1970:95-97). Similarly, whereas the Japanese did not face any initial external barriers, the primordial reaction against the agricultural success of immigrant Japanese
•A complete picture of the U.S. situation would have to include also the core group conquest of the native North American Indian civilization and the incorporation of the Mexican population of the Southwestern United States. Although I believe that these more explicitly colonial situations can be analyzed within the framework presented here, specific variations must be introduced. See the section that follows in the text.
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farmers produced California's Alien Land Law, which fused farm ownership with naturalized citizenship, a status denied to all non-Caucasian, first-generation immigrants (Bean 1968:332-35; Modell 1970:106-10). This law partly undermined their agriculture production, forcing masses of Japanese into the cities (Light 1972:73—74). At one time or another, then, each non-European group faced a social environment that was "fused" to one degree or another. Simply in terms of external factors alone, therefore, non-European immigrants could not as easily transform their numbers into political power, their economic talents into skills and rewards, and their intellectual abilities into cultural accomplishments.
Uneven institutional differentiation and internal primordial divergence together generated massive barriers to African and Asian inclusion that protected not only the WASP core group but also the partially included European immigrants. To the degree that American blacks and Asians have moved toward inclusion, it is the result of accommodation on both these fronts. In terms of internal factors, widespread conversion not only to Christianity but also to "Americanism," the adoption of the English language, and the assumption of an urban life style have had significant impact, as have the changing religious sensitivities of the Christian majority and the continued secularization of American culture.
On the external side, institutional differentiation has opened up in different dimensions at different times. With the legal shift after the Civil War, economic and cultural facilities (Lieberson 1980:159-69) began to be available for some blacks, particularly for those who immigrated to Northern cities after the First World War. Only after further legal transformation in the 1950s and 1960s, however, has political power become fully accessible, a political leverage that in turn has provided greater cultural and economic participation. In the Asian case, discriminatory legislative enactments were gradually overturned in the courts and formally free access to societal resources was restored by the end of World War II. Two facts explain the remarkably greater rate of Asian inclusion as compared to black. First, their great "external" advantages allowed Chinese and Japanese immigrants to preserve, at least for several generations, the resilient extended-kinship network of traditional societies (Light 1972; cf. Eisenstadt 1954). Second, the core group's primordial antipathy was, in the end, less intense toward Asians (Lieberson 1980:366-67), whose racial contrast was less dramatic, traditional religion more literate, and national origins more urbanized and generally accessible.
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A Note on the Model's Application to the Colonial Situation
Although I have developed this model specifically with reference to relatively modernized Western societies, I would like to comment briefly on its relevance to the colonial situation, both because the notion of "internal colonialism" has been recently applied to these Western societies (Blauner 1972; Hechter 1975; see note 1, below) and because colonial and post-colonial societies have themselves been so vitally affected by the modernization process.
As a form of ethnic domination that usually combines a highly fused external environment with vast primordial disparity, the prototypical colonial situation must be viewed as the polar opposite of solidary inclusion. For this reason, and because colonization has involved the initial and often continual application of force, there has been a strong tendency to perceive colonialization in a theoretically undifferentiated way, as initiating a system of total domination that can end only in secession and revolution. From the perspective developed here, this perception is in error: the colonial situation is subject to the same kind of analytic differentiation and internal variation as any other relationship between core group and subordinate outgroup. Indeed, every core group, whether in the West or in the third world, rests initially upon some form of colonialization. Early Parisians colonized the territorial communities that later composed France, much as later Frenchmen tried to incorporate, much less successfully, the North African Algerian community. Similarly, the difference is only one of degree between the aggressive nation building initially undertaken with the island, now called England, by the English core group; the subsequent domination by the English nation over its neighboring communities in the British Isles; and the later English colonization of the non-British empire.
Resolution of the colonial situation, then, varies according to the same analytic factors as the inclusion or exclusion of outgroups in Western societies does. Although the rigidity of later colonial situations has often produced radicalized nationalist movements for ethnic secession (see the section following), there have been alternative developments. The case of Great Britain is instructive in this regard (for background, see Beckett 1966, Bulpitt 1976, Hanham 1969, Hechter 1975, Mitchison 1970, Norman 1968, Philip 1975, Rose 1970, 1971).
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Although Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were all incorporated involuntarily, the nature of the external political factor by which this colonization was accomplished was crucial for later events. The early military domination of Ireland by the still highly traditional English state was far harsher than the later incorporation of Wales and Scotland by an English state much more committed to bureaucratic and, in the case of Scotland, constitutional organization. This initial political variation created a crucial context for the critical primordial relation of religion, helping to determine the relative success of England's attempts to incorporate these colonies into Reformation Protestantism. Scotland and Wales were successfully "reformed"; Ireland was not. In combination with the territorial discontinuity of Ireland, this internal factor created the basis for the much more passionate primordial antipathy that developed between Ireland and England. It also prevented the kind of elite intermingling that helped to further mitigate primordial antagonism between England and the other colonies. On the basis of this primordial religious antagonism, the relatively undifferentiated condition of English church-state relations became crucial to Irish development, producing the fusion of economic, political, and religious position that was unknown to Wales and Scotland. This, in turn, set the stage for the harsh settlement communities that finally transformed the Irish-English relation into the kind of rigid and exploitative situation that is so close to the traditional "colonial" one. Finally, only in this multidimensional historical context can the divergent responses to English industrialization be properly understood. Whereas the vast differentiation of the English economy that occurred in the ninteenth century produced significant leverage for the Welsh and Scots, the Irish were unable to take advantage of this opportunity for inclusion to any comparable degree. Indeed, in Ireland, this industrialization actually helped to create the internal resources for national emancipation.
In such rigid colonial situations, if economic and cultural mobilization do not lead to successful secessionist movements (see below), they may trigger, instead, extraordinary efforts at core group protection. In South Africa, Apartheid was instituted only in 1948, after intensifying economic, political, and cultural modernization threatened to open up various spheres to African participation (Doxey 1961; Van der Horst 1965). In terms of the model proposed here, Apartheid represents an attempt to isolate the "mechanisms" of inclusion—urbanization, geographical and economic mobility, education, communication, intermarriage—from the
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underlying processes of differentiation that produced them. Using formally legitimate coercion, Apartheid tries to link each of these mechanisms to the primordial dimension of race. It establishes racial "tracks" for job training, urbanization, education, intermarriage, sexual intercourse, spiritual action, public association, and communication (Kuper i960). In this strategy of coping with increased differentiation through government-induced and government-legitimated racialism, the Apartheid strategy resembles the Nazi one. Just as Nazism went beyond the merely conservative antidemocratic regimes of an earlier Germany because the latter could no longer manage the strains of a rapidly and unevenly differentiating society, so Apartheid is the kind of radical, violent response to a challenge to core solidarity that occurs only in an industrial society undergoing rapid modernization. In both German Nazism and South African Apartheid, this more radical opposition to change was carried out by the more insecure older social groups, in Germany by segments of the lower middle class, in South Africa by the Afrikaner (not the British) Nationalist party.
If traditional colonization could create such different outcomes depending on the particular content of external and internal relationships, the fate of so-called "internal colonies" in contemporary industrial societies must surely be considered in an equally differentiated way. Only such a sensitivity to analytical variations, for example, can explain the kind of divergent experiences of the descendants of Mexicans, Africans, Indians, Japanese, and Chinese—all of whom have been considered colonized groups—in the United States today.
The Process of Inclusion and Ideological Strategies
Structural dislocations, of course, do not directly imply social mobilization. However, with the single exception of diaspora communities, solidary exclusion will, eventually, provoke mobilization designed to equalize outgroup position vis-á-vis the core. The nature of these struggles and the kind of ideological strategies the outgroups assume will be related closely to the structural bases of their exclusion. Three ideal-typical strategies may be distinguished.
CORE SOLIDARITY 95
Assimilative Movements and "Equal Opportunity." Assimilation may be defined as the effort to achieve full institutional participation through identification with the primordial qualities of the core group. Significant movement in this antiethnic direction will be a viable strategy only under certain conditions. If inclusion is reasonably to be viewed simply as a matter of closing the "primordial gap," fairly substantial external opportunities must exist. Assimilation is not, of course, a rationally calculated strategy. It emerges rather from the experience of relative commonality and from certain levels of actual sociation in institutional life. In the American case, both Christian and Jewish European immigrants have followed this path, as, more recently, have Asian Americans. In Britain, though there have been strong assimilative tendencies within the Scots and Welsh, these have been intertwined, as we will see, with more pri-mordially sensitive strategies.
The conflicts within assimilative groups are between "traditionalists," who wish to maintain strong ethnic identity and are usually regarded as politically conservative, and "modernists" who seek to adopt the dominant ethnic style and most often are viewed as politically progressive. As for conflicts between assimilationists and the host society, assimilating solidary outgroups produce significant independent social and political movements only in the first generation. After this initial wave, however, they often constitute important cultural forces and widely influential ethnic spokesmen. The self-conscious stratificational principle that such assimilative spokesmen adopt is "equal opportunity" rather than "equality of results." The assimilationists' drive for equality is expressed in the desire for "social rights" like public education. Yet they simultaneously embrace the ideal of individual liberty for every member of the society, justifying their demand for limited egalitarianism on the grounds that it is necessary to sustain the principle of individual, meritocratic competition. This commitment to liberty only reflects their structural experience: for assimilative groups, constitutional, individualizing freedoms have been an effective lever in the inclusion process (Raab 1972, Glazer 1975).
Even in the limiting case of maximal external opportunity and internal complementarity, however, it is unlikely that the primordial gap will ever be completely closed. The failure to do so cannot, moreover, be traced only to the core group's historical advantage. Highly assimilated outgroups themselves often seek to maintain vestiges of primordial definition—what Weber cynically labeled ersatz ethnicity and what contem-
g6     STRUCTURE, ACTION, DIFFERENTIATION
porary Americans admiringly call "roots." Ethnic solidarity, after all, need not have a pejorative connotation; it can contribute to the construction of social identification as such. For this reason, the concept of civil society is a limiting case. Although an assimilating outgroup disproportionately identifies with a core group, the definition of core primordiality may itself be subtly changed by the very process of assimilation (cf. Glazer 1975).
Nationalist Movements and Ethnically Conscious Inclusion. In groups that experience stronger primordial divergence and face more difficult structural barriers, assimilative strategies will not predominate. To be sure, assimilation will be one reaction to solidary exclusion, and as long as efforts at inclusion continue it will remain, if only unconsciously, a significant and important strategy in breaking down the barrier of primordial divergence. Yet where solidary groups face significantly fused external structures or possess certain primordial qualities—like race or an autonomous territorial area—that cannot easily be mitigated, they will remain primordially sensitive to a significant degree. When these groups become mobilized, the stratificational principle they advocate shifts from the "balanced" endorsement of equal opportunity to more group-oriented demands for preferential treatment. As equality of results becomes more significant, the individual rights of the dominant core receive increasingly less attention (Hentoff 1964, Präger 1978; Glazer 1975, ignores these basic distinctions in his conflation of the European and non-European aspects of U.S. inclusion). This shift reflects, of course, the relative failure of differentiated constitutional principles and civil rights in effecting outgroup inclusion. Such an ideological transition is reflected in the "affirmative action" demands of America's racial minorities and in the demands by groups like the Welsh and Catalanians for linguistic equality in their public education.
Contrary to the assimilationist tendency, these nationalist groups do form independent social movements. In terms of struggles for actual political power, however, they usually express themselves through institutionalized party structures and economic organizations and only sporadically create vehicles that compete for power with these dominant institutions. While primordially sensitive, these movements still seek equal institutional access. Moreover, though self-consciously committed to maintaining ethnic distinctiveness, they continue to undergo a gradual process of primordial homogenization. For example, while there is sig-
CORE SOLIDARITY 97
nificant support in Wales for linguistic autonomy—social-psychological studies indicate much higher rates of approval for Welsh over English accents (Bourhis et al. 1973)—the actual number of Welsh speakers has greatly declined in recent years. This would seem to have been the inevitable result of meeting the other major Welsh nationalist demands, which have urged inclusion in the English core institutions of culture and economic life (Thompson 1978). Such an unintended consequence will continue to be a source of tension in nationalist movements as long as the primordially sensitive group remains committed to inclusion rather than to secession. Whether these movements continue, indeed, to seek inclusion depends on the relative flexibility of the institutional environment. In the cases of American blacks, the British Scots and Welsh, and the Spanish Catalans, these environments either have continued to be sufficiently flexible or have recently become so. Insofar as they are not, secessionist movements develop (Shils 1975a). In the case of French-Canadian Quebecois, the issue remains unresolved; their situation indicates the independent impact that social mobilization has upon basic structural dislocation.
Nationalist Movements and Ethnic Secession. Whereas efforts at ethnically conscious inclusion are only rarely committed to independent party organization, secessionist movements create political organizations that subordinate not only traditional political disagreements within the outgroup but also economic divisions.
Although the line should not be drawn too sharply, two general factors are crucial in facilitating this movement toward secession. The most basic is unusual rigidity, in terms either of internal primordiality or external environment. Among primordial qualities, independent territory seems to be the most significant factor, hence, the radical nationalism so often associated with the ideal-typical colonial case. Shared territory is an "intrinsic," quasi-permanent factor around which shifts in ethnic consciousness can ebb and flow. In points of high primordial consciousness, furthermore, it allows ethnicity to be connected to the political and economic interests of every sector of the excluded group. Territory has clearly been central, for example, in the most recent movement for Scottish secession from England, where the shifting economic opportunities of center and periphery have quickly become the focus of a new, more ethnically conscious political strategy (Thompson 1978). Such factors must
g8     STRUCTURE, ACTION, DIFFERENTIATION
interact, in turn, with external circumstances. In Ireland, for example, the secessionist drive developed much earlier and more intensively because autonomous territory was combined with the kinds of highly rigid external factors described above.
The second crucial factor in moving ethnically conscious groups from inclusive to secessionist strategies is a more idiosyncratic one: the international climate. If secessionist nationalism appears to be "the order of the day" in the mid-twentieth century, and, more recently, in industrial countries, it establishes a normative reference that will inevitably affect perceptions of the actual situation. This "demonstration effect" (Bendix 1976) or cultural diffusion (Smith 1978) is as significant for twentieth-century nationalism as for nineteenth (Kohn 1962:61—126); the anti-colonial nationalism of the postwar world is as important for explaining the timing of the European secessionist movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the upsurge in Italian nationalism was for explaining the Irish "Home Rule" movement in the 1860s. The international context can also have highly important material effects, not just moral ones, when an outside power supplies arms or financial support to national insurgents.
As the analysis in this section begins to indicate, the relation between "structural" position—in an internal and external sense—and ideological outcome is mediated in any historical situation by a series of more specific intervening variables (see Smelser 1962). Thus, although the general relation obtains, any single outgroup in the course of its development will actually experience all three of these movements. American Judaism, for example, continues to have factions that advocate Zionist secession and ethnically conscious inclusion, as well as assimilation. Furthermore, the movement toward a "structurally appropriate" strategy is never chronologically linear. American black consciousness about primordiality, for example, actually began to increase during the civil rights drives of the 1960s, when the assimilative standard of "equal opportunity" was dominant and when the legal and political orders were finally becoming differentiated from biological, particularistic standards. The particular time order of ideological strategies depends upon a series of such historically specific factors, and on this more specific level conflict itself becomes an independent variable. One also wants to consider the effects of the distinction between leadership and mass. Since strong and independent political leadership so often emerges only from middle, highly educated strata, certain initial advances toward inclusion—no matter how ulti-
CORE SOLIDARITY Op
mately ephemeral—will usually occur before secessionist movements can forcefully emerge.
A similar issue concerns the actual motivation of solidary outgroups themselves. Certainly, there are periods when excluded groups do not actively desire inclusion, and a few groups never want it. The degree to which an outgroup experiences the desire for inclusion relates, in part, to the same internal volitional factors that affect core group receptivity to the excluded party; it also depends upon the length of time of mutual exposure and on the degree to which the external environment of the interaction is differentiated. Where the primordial gap is extreme, the external environment rigid, and the period of mutual exposure relatively short, exclusion is less likely to produce demands for solidarity inclusion. Even in this case, however, instrumental self-interest will usually produce demands for equal treatment, if not solidarity, as a strategy to alleviate unsatisfactory external conditions.
Conclusion
Given their rationalist bias, theories of nation building generally ignore the role of solidarity in societal development. Among those theorists who have discussed the integration problem, moreover, an evolutionary bias leads most to underestimate significantly the permanent importance of primordial definitions of the national community. In contrast to these prevailing perspectives, I have argued that because most nations are founded by solidary core groups, and because societal development after this founding is highly uneven, strains toward narrow and exclusive national solidarity remain at the center of even the most "civil" nation-state. Differences in national processes of ethnic inclusion—even in the industrial world—are enormous. To encompass the variation while retaining systematicity, I have proposed a multidimensional model. On the internal axis, inclusion varies according to the degree of primordial complementarity between core group and solidary outgroup. On the external axis, inclusion varies according to the degree of institutional differentiation in the host society. It is in response to variations in these structural conditions that ethnic outgroups develop different incorporative strategies— assimilation, ethnically conscious inclusion, and nationalist secession—as well as different stratificational principles to justify their demands. Applying this general model primarily to special aspects of the inclusion
I0O     STRUCTURE, ACTION, DIFFERENTIATION
process in the United States, I have elaborated it in important ways. Yet this effort still represents only a first approximation; much further work remains before the model could truly become a theory of the middle range. For example, it would eventually have to be specified for different classes of empirical events. Thus, within the general external and internal constraints I have established, inclusion seems to vary systematically according to the different modes of outgroup contact: indentured servitude versus slavery, economic colonization versus military, colonization over groups within contiguous territories versus more territorially distinct occupation, and so forth.* This variation in turn affects the kind of external variable that is most significant in any given situation, whether the state, the economy, religion, or law.f This factor weighting is undoubtedly also affected by the kinds of historically specific "differentiation combinations" encountered in particular national societies, i.e., which institutional sectors lead and which lag. Finally, different kinds of internal combinations might also be specified; for example, a white-Anglo Saxon Catholic core group will differ in predictable ways from the WASP and a white Catholic Southern European core from a Northern European one.
I hope it is clear, however, how such further conceptualization can fruitfully draw upon the hypotheses already set forth. At a minimum, the model proposed here demonstrates not only that fundamental cleavages in developed societies can be nonutilitarian in scope and proceed along nonlinear paths, but also that within a multidimensional framework such complex strains can be conceptualized in a systematic comparative and historical manner.
NOTES
I. In terms of contemporary sociological theory, then, the animus of this chapter is directed in several directions.
While in one sense further developing the functionalist approach to differentiation theory, I am arguing for a much more serious recognition of group interest, differential power, uneven development, and social conflict than has usually characterized this tradition. My "neofunctionalist" argument begins, for example, from the intersection between neo-Marxist and Shilsian center-periphery theory and one aspect of Parsons' system theory, modifying
•For a discussion of independent political effects in the South African case, see Kuper 1965:42-56.
fThese are the kinds of variables that Schermerhom makes the central focus of his analysis, virtually to the exclusion of the factors I have discussed above.
CORE SOLIDARITY IOI
the former and energizing the latter. I also distance myself from the conflation of ideology, model, and empirical explanation that often characterizes Parsons' work.
On the other hand, by stressing the necessity for analytic differentiation and multidimensional causality, I am arguing against Marxist and structuralist analyses, which even when they formally recognize the independence of ethnic phenomena—whose inequality they rightly insist upon-—continually try to root it in "last instance" arguments. Thus, even in his sophisticated version of Marxist analysis, John Rex (1970) never accepts religion or ethnicity as truly independent variables, nor, more fundamentally, does he view the problem of solidarity as an independent dimension of social life. Concentrating mainly on the activities of labor and work, ethnic domination per se becomes for Rex an extrinsic variable.
Very much the same instrumental theoretical bias reduces the value of Lieberson's (1980) impressive empirical study. In his effort to explain the relative lack of success of postslavery blacks as compared with white immigrants in the United States after 1S80, Lieberson tries to conceive of the "heritage of slavery" simply as a structural barrier, i.e., one that affects only the external conditions of the competition between the two groups. In this way, despite his occasional recognition of their importance {e.g., p. 366), the subjective perception of differences experienced by the groups themselves—and by the other ethnic communities involved—becomes a residual category.
T am suggesting a general process that occurs when racial and ethnic groups have an inherent conflict— and certainly competition for jobs, power, position, maintenance of different subcultural systems, and the like are such conflicts. Under the circumstances, there is a tendency for the competitors to focuB on differences between themselves. The observers (in this case the sociologists) may then assume that those differences are the sources of conflict. In point of fact, the rhetoric involving such differences may indeed inflame them, but we can be reasonably cerrain that the confiicr would have occurred in their absence. . . . Differences between blacks and whites [for example] enter into the rhetoric of race and ethnic relations, but they are ultimalely secondary to the conflict for society's goodies. . . . Much of the antagonism toward blacks was based on racial features, but one should not interpret this as the ultimate cause. Rather the racial emphasis resulted from the use of the most obvious feature(s) of the group to support the intergroup conflict generated by a fear of blacks based on their threat as economic competitors, (pp. 382-83).
Without a multidimensional framework that takes cultural patterns as constraining structures in their own right—see my discussion of "structural analysis" in chapter I, above— Lieberson is necessarily forced to conceive of subjective "discrimination" as an individualistic variable. Indeed, he links the use of discrimination not only to supposedly "psychological" studies of attitude formation but also to analyses that find inherent racial qualities of the victims themselves to be the cause for their oppression.
Finally, by stressing the strong possibility for social and cultural differentiation in Western societies and the distinction and relative autonomy of the external and internal axes of ethnic conflict, I argue against contemporary "internal colonialist" theory. This approach too often refers to domination in an undifferentiated and diffuse way and, conversely, underemphas-izes the variations that characterize the histories of oppressed groups by virtue of their distinctive primordial relations to the core group and their different external environments.
For the relation between the present argument and plural society theory—which still remains relatively unsystematized—see p. Son., above.
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FOUR
The Mass News Media in Systemic, Historical and Comparative Perspective
In its search for greater precision and causal specificity, contemporary sociology has tended to neglect "society" as such, a point of reference whose empirical significance is often matched only by its theoretical obscurity. To speak of the whole invites generality and historical scope, qualities that undermine the assurance of exact verification, yet it is precisely generality and historical perspective that are necessary if the components and boundaries of society are to be understood. If to ignore the whole creates difficulty in every area of "special" sociological focus, it is particularly dangerous in the attempt to understand those institutions whose "function" is actually to address society as a general unit.* The mass media is such an institution.
I am interested in making a theoretical statement about the mass news media that is both thoroughly general and abstract and at the same time directly specifiable in empirical terms. I locate the media in terms of, first, a theory of the social system, and, second, a theory of social differentiation that provides both historical and comparative perspective. By linking analysis of news media to these broader theoretical traditions, I hope to enrich sociological thinking about the relation of the media to the
•My use of the concept "function" here and elsewhere in this chapter is a shorthand form that makes it easier to situate the cultural and "structural" aspects of the mass news media— their causes, effects, and institutional character—in the social system. I believe the following discussion demonstrates that there is nothing teleological, conservative, or static about functionalist analysis when conducted in a certain way. This is not to say, however, that functionalist! is simply "good sociology" by another name (cf. Alexander 1985).
For their earlier comments on this paper, I thank Robert N. Bellah, Ruth H. Bloch, Donald N. Levine, Jeffrey Prager, and Neil J. Smelser.