Ethnic group | Definition, Characteristics & Examples (2024)

ethnic group, a social group or category of the population that, in a larger society, is set apart and bound together by common ties of race, language, nationality, or culture.

Ethnic diversity is one form of the social complexity found in most contemporary societies. Historically it is the legacy of conquests that brought diverse peoples under the rule of a dominant group; of rulers who in their own interests imported peoples for their labour or their technical and business skills; of industrialization, which intensified the age-old pattern of migration for economic reasons; or of political and religious persecutions that drove people from their native lands.

Until the 20th century ethnic diversity posed no great problems for empires. Its chief historic significance has been and remains its relationship to the nation-state, whose primary goal is political unity, which tends to be identified with social unity. In theory, the nation-state and ethnic diversity are diametrically opposed, and on many occasions nation-states have attempted to solve the problem of ethnic diversity by the elimination or expulsion of ethnic groups—notable examples being the Nazi policy against the Jews during World War II, the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from 15th-century Spain, or the expulsion of the Arabs and East Indians from several newly independent African countries in the 1960s and ’70s.

More common solutions have been assimilation or acculturation, whether forced, induced, or voluntary. Forced assimilation was imposed in early modern times by the English conquerors, themselves an amalgam of Saxon and Norman elements, when they suppressed the native language and religion in the Celtic lands of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Similar methods were employed by their French contemporaries as they extended their conquests into the langue d’oc region of southern Europe. Through considerably less brutal methods, the Chinese ethnic groups in Thailand and Indonesia have been legally induced to adopt the dominant culture through a process called “directed acculturation.”

A variant of this process has been the more or less voluntary assimilation achieved in the United States under the rubric of “Americanization.” This is largely a result of the unusual opportunities for social and economic mobility in the United States and of the fact that for the European ethnic groups, in contrast to the racial minorities, residence in the United States was a matter of individual or familial choice, not conquest or slavery. But both public policy and public opinion also contributed to American assimilation.

Another way of dealing with ethnic diversity, one that holds more promise for the future, is the development of some form of pluralism, which usually rests on a combination of toleration, interdependence, and separatism. One of the most notable long-term solutions has been that of Switzerland, where the three major ethnic groups are concentrated in separate cantons, each enjoying a large measure of local control within a democratic federation. Another, less stable federal pluralism is found in Canada, where the French Catholic province of Quebec is increasingly assertive about its desire for complete independence and forced acculturation of its own ethnic minorities.

The political function of ethnicity is more important today than ever, as a result of the spread of doctrines of freedom, self-determination, and democracy throughout the world. In 19th-century Europe, these doctrines influenced various movements for the liberation of ethnic minorities from the old European empires and led to some partially successful attempts to establish nation-states along ethnic lines, as in the case of Poland and Italy. After World War II the rising tide of democratic aspirations among the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa led to the breakup of empires established by European conquerors, sometimes in areas of enormous ethnic complexity, without regard to ethnic considerations. The result was a proliferation of national states, some of which experienced local conflicts with ethnic-related causes. Most of the new countries in Asia were relatively hom*ogeneous, but the majority of those in sub-Saharan Africa were composed of many relatively small ethnic groups whose members spoke different languages.