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1 I Conflicting Identities and the Dangers ofCommunalism DANIEL CHIROT Comparing the two most prominent entrepreneurial minorities in the modem world, European Jews and Southeast Asian Chinese, raises questions about almost every important and controversial aspect of nationalism and ethnic conflict. Because of what appears to be intensified xenophobic nationalism and t4e spread of bloody ethnic wars in parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa in the late 1980s and the 1990S, the salience of such questions is at its peak in the social sciences as well as in the general public's awareness. Presenting information about these two successful but often persecuted minorities offers insights about the very formation ofethnic and nationalist identities, and clues about when such a process is more or less likely to lead to either violent social separation and conflict or peaceful accommodation. It also addresses contemporary debates about whether or not ethnonationalism is a recent or an ancient phenomenon. Furthermore, any study of these two groups raises venerable but still relevant controversies about why certain ethnic groups seem able to adapt more successfully to modem capitalist economies than others. Are there cultural traits that determine groups' prospects in modem economies that are so deeply rooted as to be virtually hereditary properties transmitted from generation to generation? Or is the success of any particular ethnic group simply situationally determined and explainable in terms of recent, almost chance political and economic configurations? In the case of most of Europe's Jews, such questions are ofgreater historical than contemporary interest. The extermination of some two-thirds of European Jews from 1939 to 1945 has made them less a focus for hatred and jealousy than was the case before. It is possible, though hardly certain, that anti-Semitism could once again play a political role in some parts of the collapsed Soviet Union, but it seems almost inconceivable that there could 3 4 DANIEL CHIROT be any repetition of such virulent anti-Semitism in Central or Western Europe. But in Southeast Asia, any discussion about the role of the Chinese is of pressing contemporary importance. Even though, as some ofthe chapters in this volume show, tension between Chinese and non-Chinese throughout Southeast Asia is less problematic today than it was in the 1960s and 1970S, the potential for conflict remains. The alleviation that has occurred in the past quarter-century is due to the phenomenal economic boom that has enriched a growing proportion of the region. What would happen. as Linda Lim and Peter Gosling ask in chapter 11, if economies declined, or even if they stopped growing so quickly? Would this exacerbate economic conflict between ethnic communities and raise the specter of renewed intercommunal warfare? Is the fact that the Chinese have been disproportionately more enriched by the boom than other communities going to make them a more obvious target of resentment? And how has their growing wealth affected the self-image and ethnic confidence ofthe various Chinese communities in Southeast Asia? At one time it was thought by many European liberals, both Christian and Jewish, that growing prosperity and modernization, along with the elimination of legal discrimination, would eliminate anti-Semitism. In a sense, despite lingering prejudices against Jews. that is roughly what happened in Britain and North America, although rather more slowly and far less completely than optimists expected. But in France, despite its tradition ofliberal emancipation of Jews during the Revolution, the period from the 1880s until World War II saw an intensification of anti-Semitism, which became one of the central ideological positions of the nationalist right. And in Germany and Austria, what had been a tradition of growing legal and official tolerance in the second half of the nineteenth century was sharply reversed, and anti-Semitism became the defining political ideology of the state in the 1930S. For certain countries farther east and south, especially Russia, Poland, and Romania, anti-Semitism became. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an essential component of their nationalist identities.1 Is there any possibility that ethnic hostility on such a level could be directed toward the Chinese in Southeast Asia by those who consider themselves "natives"? Might the lessening of recent ethnic conflict be the same kind oflull before the storm that Europe experienced in about the middle of the nineteenth century? There have been enough examples of brutal antiSinicism in some Southeast Asian countries over the past four decades to remind us that the phenomenon is neither illusory nor just a declining holdover...

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