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The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World QUOTES

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In addition to size, political power also distinguishes minority and majority peoples. Minority groups suffer limited social mobility, political disadvantage, restricted access to material well-being, and government policies have directly or indirectly perpetuated these conditions. According to Messina, minorities may be described as ‘groups that are underrepresented in positions of authority and control in the major institutions of society. They are limited to ineffectual, low prestige, poorly paid positions within major institutions or excluded from the institutions altogether.’ In that case, political minorities need not be numerical minorities. Moreover, a nation differs from a minority insofar as, according to Gurr, the minority has a defined status within a larger society, and it seeks to improve upon that status, while the nation seeks some form of autonomy from the state. In other words, the minority wants to improve its position within the system, while the nation strives for exit from the system.

While nationalism is simply defined by a dictionary as ‘the devotion to one’s nation; patriotism or chauvinism’, it does in fact connote more, embodying culture, ethnicity, language. Indeed, according to Smith, nationalism is a’a doctrine of autonomy, unity and identity, whose members conceive it to be an actual or potential nation’. Just as the term nation is submerged in contradictory terminology, so too is nationalism. Connor has attempted to rectify the semantic sources of misunderstanding by clarifying words: a sloppy use of the term nationalism connotes loyalty to the state. It is, in fact, loyalty to the nation. Loyalty to the state is patriotism. In the case of nation-states, the two forms of loyalty coincide, but they must be treated separately in the literature. To avoid this confusion, Connor introduced the term ethno-nationalism. The mix of ethnicity and nationalism leads to ethno-nationalism, which according to Connor and Shiels, is ‘the sentiment of an ethnic minority in a state or living across state boundaries that propels the group to unify and identify itself as having the capacity for self-government’. "

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