racial or cultural inferiority of ‘coloured’ people compared with the
‘white’ race. In theory official attitudes might not quite go so far as to
allege permanent inferiority on the part of the governed. British
policy in principle was based on grooming colonies for self-governing
‘dominion’ status (like the white ex-colonies of Australia, New
Zealand and Canada), whilst the French, for instance, were much
more prepared to accord equal rights to ‘natives’ if they assimilated
French culture and behaved as black Frenchmen. However the Nazi
view of the permanent inferiority of ‘non-Aryan’ races probably
reflected the practice of European colonial residents more accurately
for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The near
extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania, and the
South African colonists’ doctrine of apartheid are extreme examples
of these attitudes at work.
In contrast to this, the Chinese restricted their empire mainly to
groups who could be assimilated into the Chinese way of life, though
viewing groups outside the empire as racially and culturally inferior.
The Romans extended Roman citizenship to a number of other urban
centres and made no systematic discrimination between Italian,
Greek or African subjects of the empire.Nations and states
Earlier we took the state to be, in Weber’s words, an organisation
‘that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory’. We suggested that the model
of government and the state which this may suggest – of a world
dominated by sovereign ‘nation states’ – is a relatively arguable and
new one. Europe did not look much like this until about 1919, after
the Treaty of Versailles. Africa only came near to the model from the
1960s. Countries like the United Kingdom (as we saw earlier) and the
former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are (or were) clearly multi-
national. The Antarctic remains the subject of (frozen!) conflicting
claims to jurisdiction.
We shall examine questions of national and ethnic identity at
greater length in Chapter 5, but it is worth stating here that states
with a one-to-one relationship with an unambiguous ‘nationality’
are difficult, or impossible, to find. Thus even France, one of the
originators of the doctrine, is still faced with regional identities such38 SYSTEMS