Ethnocultural minorities around the world are demanding various forms of recognition and protection, often in the language of “group rights.” Many commentators see this as a new and dangerous trend that threatens the fragile international consensus on the importance of …
Minorities are always more important than their numbers might seem to merit for, if nothing more, they are society’s bellwethers. Changes in their legal status and social roles reveal broader changes in a society. In North Africa the shrinking role …
Men with video cameras were waiting at the entrance to Cizre, a rundown city in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast. The cameras rolled when police pulled me out of the car and checked my bags, my body, and my press card. Behind …
Why won’t the minority issue in East Central Europe go away? By 1914 more than half the people in the area belonged to minorities. By the interwar period the proportion had gone down to one-quarter. Since 1945 minorities have never …
No country in the world matches India in its diversity. It has more than six hundred eighty-seven million Hindus, more than one hundred million Muslims, more than nineteen million Christians, more than sixteen million Sikhs, more than nine million Buddhists …
My friend Mustafa likes to tell the story of the mystified Egyptian hotel clerk. On his first trip to Egypt, the clerk at Mustafa’s hotel asked for his passport. Mustafa duly handed over his Israeli passport, at which point the …
The historian Oscar Handlin noted in 1965 that the “attention [of the civil rights movement] has been so narrowly focused on tactical issues that there has been no time to consider ultimate goals.” He warned that “[i]n the absence of …
We live in an ever-widening circle of genocides, achieved and attempted, perpetrated in the present and discovered in the past. But we see and care about few of them. Such selective perception is, I believe, encouraged by the often-repeated claim …
When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, pundits predicted that it would end up like Yugoslavia, with ethnic wars tearing the union into fragments. Russians left “abroad”—in Central Asia, Crimea, and the Baltic Republics—would become tinder for …
I have come back here to die,” Desta Abdissa told me in Addis Ababa, “and the sooner the better.” Desta is an Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia’s eighty ethnic groups, comprising as much as half the population. He comes from …
Books on economic affairs don’t sell well in Britain. I should know. In 1982 I presented an eight-part television series for the BBC entitled Whatever Happened to Britain? There was a book of the show, and every evening that the …
One of the most useful things intellectuals can do is to invent a term or phrase that flood-lights a new social situation. Society is constantly throwing up problems that are too diffuse and too complex to grasp until someone comes …
That taxes cannot be legitimately established except by the consent of the people or its representatives, is a truth generally admitted by all philosophers and jurists of any repute on questions of public right. Contributions levied on the people are …
Black America finds itself looking down a cold and poorly lit road toward an uncertain political and economic future as the early months of 1996 focus attention on this fall’s presidential and congressional elections. Black America is now in the …
There are two tendencies in the American economy that many have noticed as isolated phenomena but that few connect with each other. The first is the enduring decline of most U.S. workers’ real wages. The second is the top-heavy, bloated …
