An Eternal Conflict of Race and Ethnicity: a History of Mankind

Ethnicity is a modern concept. However, its roots go back to a long time ago. This concept took on a political aspect from the early modern period with the Peace of Westphalia law and the growth of the Protestant movement in Western Europe and the formation of the nation-state. The use of common ethnic symbols, language, myth, and common land, and finally the economy following the French Revolution, gave another dimension to the concept of nation-state and ethnicity.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the republics of this empire. Ethnic conflicts based on ethnicity became the focus of new debates related to nationalism. And race and ethnicity are two concepts that are a little confusing to distinguish between them, and in many cases are used interchangeably. Although the two concepts are close to each other, they have slight differences and each belongs to a specific field. Race is related to biological characteristics and ethnicity is mostly used to describe social groups

In fact, ethnicity refers to a person's culture, customs and traditions that originate from the environment to which he belongs. Different ethnic groups are identified according to the different areas in which they live, not their physical characteristics. Ethnic groups have the same history and usually share a common language and religion

Of course, this does not apply to all ethnic groups. Since race can change over generations due to the interbreeding of different races, the ethnicity of a human being can also be easily changed if he chooses the customs of another ethnic group and adapts to those conditions.

Throughout history, there have been many conflicts between different ethnic groups that have diminished over time. For example, the conflict between the Iraqi Kurds and the Iraqi people. Examples of ethnicity: Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, Native Americans in the United States, and Latin American society. The concepts of nation and nationality are closely related to the concepts of ethnic group and ethnicity, but in political societies it imposes a different meaning.

People of the same ethnicity may live in different countries. The system of government of each country determines the nationality of that country, and most countries have their own nationality, but not all societies are uniform. Some societies are made up of several different nationalities, and in these countries minority nationalities usually seek power (such as Catalonia in Spain, Quebec in Canada, Native Americans in the United States), or they even wants independence.

Overall, some nationalities are scattered among different societies (such as Palestine, the gypsies in Rome) and this gives rise to independence tendencies. In the nineteenth century, various governments sought legitimacy by claiming that their country represented a 'nation.' At the same time, some people were deprived for various social reasons. Members of disadvantaged and weak groups therefore sought equal rights or independence, and in some cases even established a completely separatist political party in their own country.