Feliks Gross - Böcker

What happens in a region inhabited by various nationalities and hostile ethnic groups after a long period of antagonism and conflicts culminates in genocide and massacres? Are people able to forget the past, to live together as good neighbors? How diverse nationalities, Italians and Slavs, once mortal enemies, learned to live together is one of the major themes of Ethnics in a Borderland.The area chosen for field research was the Italian borderland, the northern Italian-Yugoslav frontier region, called the Julian Region. As a preliminary step toward examining ethnic tensions, Feliks Gross takes a fresh look at the problem of nationality in the first part of the book. He asks: What is ethnicity? Nationality in terms of the natives? In terms of their perceptions rather than ours? The second part analyzes and tells the story of how, after genocide and massacres, persecutions and conflicts, various nationalities have learned again to live together.

The primordial bonds of early societies—common ancestry or tribal bonds and territorial or neighborhood bonds—are at the root of early political organization. States based on common tribal or ethnic identity have tended to develop into highly nationalistic states. The civic state, based upon territory, appeared in embryonic form in Athens. It was Rome, however, that made the complete transition, creating a civic state based on an association of free citizens, irrespective of ethnicity.The tribal state in its extreme, often totalitarian, form has led to genocide, holocausts, and ethnic cleansing. The civic or territorial state has developed into modern pluralistic, multiethnic, democratic states with equal rights for diverse groups. This was accomplished by a historical process of separation of ethnicity from citizenship. As Feliks Gross shows, there are many types of civic and tribal states: they do not fit into a single model, but they can be grouped into related families. This important survey of political and social development will be of great interest to students and scholars of political sociology, ethnic studies, and political history.

Today, all industrialized states are multinational. However, as Political Sociologist Feliks Gross points out, there remains considerable debate and experimentation on how to organize a multiethnic, democratic, and humane state. Gross examines various types of multiethnic states as well as their early origins and prospects for success. In the past, minorities were usually formed as a consequence of conquest or migration; minorities tended to have an inferior status, subordinated to the ruling, dominant ethnic class.While Athens provides an early example of a state formed by alliance and association, the Romans advanced this concept when they extended to subjected peoples the status by means of citizenship. After the fall of Rome, citizenship continued in Italian and other continental cities. In England, subjectship associated with individual freedom had native roots. The American and French Revolutions revived and created the modern definition of citizenship. Along with Rome, however, only the United States provides an example of a successful multiethnic state of continental dimensions.