Transnational Migrant Communities and Ethnic Minorities in Modern Multicultural Societies

Abstract

Ethnicity today is in ill repute. With the collapse of the bipolar world system after 1989 the various groups, nations and communities which had been held together by the quasi-imperial systems of the superpowers were left to fight for themselves and amongst themselves. In the name of ethnicity, nationalism or ethnic nationalism they fought brutally for territory, and the Serbian notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ came to provoke something of the horror felt towards the Nazi holocaust fifty years earlier. Meanwhile, even though they were not engaged in nationalist projects, migrant ethnic minorities became the focus of suspicion and hostility in their countries of settlement.

Published in 1994 in a special issue of Innovation, vol. 7 no. 3, Carfax Publications, Oxford.