ABSTRACT
State interests in “ethnicizing” groups formerly understood as racial reflect the historical importance of both concepts to nation-building projects as well as states’ international profiles. As traced below, nation-building in the latenineteenth century became highly concerned with race, as seemingly incontestable European racial “sciences” affirmed its determinative role in shaping mental characteristics and, therefore, national cultures, and ultimately each nation-state’s capacity for growth and “higher” civilization. The same ideas suggested that a nation-state’s international relations (most baldly, its capacity
to resist colonial takeover) would depend partly on how its racial character was perceived by European imperial powers. Inserted into the nation-building doctrines of political elites, these ideas indicated that national security itself required the government to craft racial unity where it was lacking, preferably centered on one of the racial types positioned as high as possible on European charts (“Anglo-Saxon” high, “Negroid” low). By the early twentieth century, these ideas had been translated into a range of local solutions: from deliberate diffusion of a preferred racial type throughout a territory (e.g., Javanization in Indonesia) and “whitening” strategies (e.g., Latin American efforts to promote the mass immigration of Europeans) to outright removal or extermination campaigns (e.g., of Jews and Gypsies and Slaves during Nazi rule, as well as genocidal policies toward native North Americans, Australian Aborigines, and Amazonian indigenous peoples).
