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ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 221

European bourgeoisie and homogeneous proletariat that I doubt existed there
any more than they did in America. I think you are right about that. It
is interesting how in Europe collective identity is almost always framed
in terms of nationality or in relation to the nationality question and in
the efforts to resolve it in a territorial-pohtical way. Nathan Glazer and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan edited a book on the subject in 1975.^^ In that
work, writers from Europe and Asia, as well as America, describe the
ethnic divisions in their own societies and conclude that the whole world
is organized ethnically. Moreover, the number of self-proclaimed ethnona-
tional peoples is many times greater than the number of existing
nation-states.
/ think that with the formation of the nation state, this modem geo-
political entity, this institutionalization of the Enlightenment, we have the
legitimation of the legal person, Le., the person with all the ethnicity, gender,
and class characteristics stripped away. To put that into effect would have
required the suppression of ethnic differences. It would have been much
easier for those in power to consider themselves as having ^'normal*
characteristics, to consider the other groups 'deviant," and to urge that the
ethnic differences of the others be replaced with ''normal" ones. This is how
I understand the acculturation-assimilation-integration model. In this way,
some if not all Western European nation states turn out to be 'ethnic
empires' in which one ethnic group or an oligarchy of ethnic groups
dominates the others. Yes, and it was long this way in the United States,
with the W.A.S.P.S. Until very recently. Yes.
A prominent Austro-Hungarian sociologist of the late 19th Century,
Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842-1904), predicted, much to the chagrin of the
assimilation oriented American sociologists, that there would come a time
in the United States of America when the population would become
dense and the struggle for existence difficult. At that moment, he claimed
there would be a reawakening of ethnic and national consciousness. He
said this in 1893, the very same year that Engels wrote to Sorge about
the permanence of ethnic separateness in America. Albion Small
(1854-1926), the founder of the Department of Sociology at the University
of Chicago, adapted Ratzenhofer's sociology of the American situation,
but he balked at the idea that ethnic consciousness could be revived.
That, Small insisted, would never happen.

^^ Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and
Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).