The Melting Pot: How Nations Have Emerged And Mixed Through History

Policies

Aknowledgement

The book was revised and edited by my son, Bogdan Tatar and his wife Andreea Tatar, and I want to thank them for their effort and support. I would also like to thank my wife, Letitia, for the support and encouragement she has provided throughout the writing of this book and through all of my career.

Preface

The book is a splendid introduction in the world of ethno-linguistic assimilation. While it may seem like a complex and scientific subject, the Melting Pot tries to answer a very simple and common question for all persons: Who am I?

In a world where multi-culturalism or race discussions are common, we would all want to understand these subjects better. Each and everyone of us identifies itself as a character in the multi-cultural story. And how can one understand something that has happened throughout the entire course of human history unless it looks behind in time. And the book is precisely about that. It’s a walk-trough races mixing, nations mixing and languages mixing. It tries to cover all aspects of the problem and avoids to offer resolutions and to let the reader reach his own conclusion.

The way it is written defines the precisely the character of the author: technical but with the power of expressing ideas in a story-like manner; providing personal opinion combined with opinions of others to let the reader see more points of view on the same matter; expressing general ideas but with relevant particular examples to support them.

I recommend reading the book entirely to get a full understanding of the subject and I recommend trying to fit yourself in the story. Because the book, as scientific as it may seem, is in fact about… you!

Bogdan Tatar

To become something else, an individual must be something.

In this book I propose to the potential reader a moving vision of a ubiquitous social phenomenon in human history since the advent of language: assimilation.

The ethnic family and community to which a newly born child belongs ensures that, in parallel with the development of physical and intellectual capabilities, he becomes a member with all community attributes, especially ethno-linguistic elements and faith. His ethnic and religious registration follows automatically, in the absence of options, and the sense of ownership of the family and the community giving them rights assumed beforehand. Only after internalizing these spiritual components, they cease to be purely formal, becoming realities. Failure of free will in the first years of life, due to the fact that the baby is weak and ignorant, according to American educator and psychologist William Heard Kilpatrick, allows and requires the formation of social skills on a clean slate.

International adoption, which occurs between natural parents and adoptive parents of different nationalities, widely spread nowadays, allows for ethno-linguistic and religious metamorphosis, the condition considered and intuited by the adoptive parents being the young age of the adopted child. The main instrument of socialization on an ethnically determined direction is language, which not only gives form to thinking, but puts an indelible stamp on the spirituality of the human in the making, which is the child. Language gives it an ethnicity, customizes it compared to native speakers of another language and associates it to the community in which he grew up.

Assimilated in its ethnic environment, language provides lots of subtleties that are almost impossible to internalize outside of it, because "a people’s particular psychic structure determines certain aspects of language structure" (Ivanescu), which explains why "speaking a language means adopting a soul, in time" (Iorga). It is widely considered that Italian is a most affected language, Spanish more passionate, German more adequate for abstract, philosophy language, English suited for scientific and technical language etc., in connection with certain characteristics of the peoples that speak them.

Ethnicization is not given only by language, even if it is its main element. Community traditions have a deep impact, more pronounced as the child exceeds the spectator stage and becomes an active participant. If the participation is honest and engaging, it imprints itself deeper into what we call ethnic consciousness or ethnological nature.

The collective unconscious is largely composed and penetrated by the pleasures and emotions aroused by the beauty of the specific ethnic song and dance. Not incidentally, during events of great sincerity, on the occasion of important moments of one’s life such as baptisms, marriages, anniversaries, community celebrations, the passion felt during song and dance emphasizes the deep unconscious of feelings of ethnicity.

These two ethnicization elements give ethnic consciousness certain strength, different from person to person.

Faced with another ethnic option, under the surrounding pressure, it reacts according to this strength, when reaching adulthood and a consciously assumed free will.

In the moments of the first registration, free will did not exist, being forced, and a possible future option is no longer performed on an empty land and, as such, it is an act of divergence from the actions of the first educators (the parents).

Consent may be more or less voluntarily, according to the environmental or public policy assimilating pressure, but in the end the choice is the result of personal deliberations. A denationalized individual cannot invoke the pressure factor as the reason for his decision, as long as he manages his fate freely.

Any crisis of conscience is made in the ego, which alone can torture and punish it. A strongly ethnicized ego resists the assimilating pressure, simulating assimilation in the dominant community. However, at the first opportunity it returns to its specificity. The less ethnicized or more pragmatic people are more exposed to assimilation, following the Latin saying where I am alright, there is my country. They abandon their home community to make something with their lives.

The re-ethnicization of others in a bilingual environment generates a dramatic discomfort for each ego in turn, especially for the first generation that makes this step of alienation. In the second generation the dramatic nature of uprooting is less severe as the root itself was shallow. If it has its roots in another community, the shock of denationalization is further attenuated.

Next generations will only have a vague memory of their ancestors’ origin and will integrate more fully into the dominant community.

Omnipresent and therefore universal, ethno-linguistic assimilation is a complex process which occurs over several generations, and involves a gradual abandonment of the mother tongue by members of an ethnic community and a learning of the community language with which they come into contact.

The mobility of human populations caused inevitable overlapping of populations and languages ​​in the same territory and the need for understanding through mutual learning of languages, extended according to their interpenetration. These extensive overlaps generated spontaneous language competitions, some languages ​​becoming losers (loss of ground) and other winners. The latter I call assimilants.

Some communities became thinner through assimilation while others increased numerically, outside natural growth. When linguistically losing ethnicities were located entirely in overlapping territories, they disappeared from history and the other perpetuated through marginal ethno-linguistic relics, such as the Bretons, Macedo- Romanians or Istro-Romanians.

Far from being isolated cases, ethno-linguistic extinctions that occured through assimilation were typical phenomena in history, permanently simplifying ethnic and linguistic maps.

Assimilation ends with an ethnogenesis only if the assimilated community is sufficiently reflected – spiritually – in the new community, to whose birth it contributed. Not all assimilation ends like this, since more often it does not generate a new ethno-linguistic community. Only large assimilated communities, some local, others settled, left visible spiritual and material traces, contributing to the genesis of ancient, medieval or modern languages.

When a language supported by a rising number of its speakers or through its promotion by a conquering state puts out multiple languages, across multiple territories, it generates a family of related languages​​ such as Romance, Germanic and Slavic.

Assimilation unifies disparate communities, leads to the extinction of languages ​​, tribes and nations, weakens some nations and strengthens others. Therefore, the political factor is not indifferent to its evolution, on which the stability of the state itself depends.

I shall discuss about the methods used to increase the cohesion of the state by assimilation in the last chapter. In another chapter I talk about spontaneous assimilation and factors favoring the assimilant community in relation to the assimilated through a lack of political involvement. State managed assimilation, which acted for most ethnic developments in history, is a phenomenon that has had consistency and continuity only in a few cases, in ancient and modern times.

As shown in Chapter III: Cultural assimilation and ethnological synthesis, linguistic assimilation must be accompanied by the full gradual integration of those assimilated in the assimilant community, until the perception of us is spread over the whole community. If the winners become detached from the losers that have adopted their language and culture, including through social and political status, the language union is still not an ethnic one.

If the mistake endures, the younger brothers of the language consider themselves as a separate nation and will want their own state (such as the Irish, Croats, Latin Americans, etc.). As I shall later show, overt discrimination arouses resentment that maintains the desire to preserve the ethnic nature of their forerunners.

The ethnological fund has a greater stability compared to language. If many languages ​​have disappeared entirely, the customs and traditions of the communities that spoke them have largely been kept. The ethnological nature of modern peoples is more balanced than the language one.

The French are more Gauls from an ethnological than a language point of view, the English are more British in the same ways, the Romanians more Dacians etc.

A third aspect, the biogenetic mixture involved in assimilation, has a lower relevance in relation to the first two people, and only for nations that resulted from an obvious racial or subrasial mixed.

As I show in the chapter entitled Biogenetic mixture and assimilation, the intelligence index is virtually the same in all races and subraces, and the common human condition generates the same joys and sorrows regardless of race. Mutual racial bias attenuates as a result of coexistence and biogenetic mixture, inevitable fact considering the overlap of multiple human races and subraces on the same territory.

Assimilation involves three simultaneous and coexisting processes, i.e. linguistic assimilation, ethnological synthesis and biogenetic mixture, virtually depleting the consequences of ethnic communities mixing together.

Spontaneous assimilation, as well as the one determined by an ethno-linguistic policy, will continue to change the native characteristics of human individuals or groups, including ethnic, probably leading to a homogenization, meaning fewer ethno-linguistic entities, but never a single one.

1

Language, Ethnicity and Assimilation

Is a nation, historically speaking, pure?

No!  No nation in the present world has a uni-linear ethnic descendance! All nations have been, more or less, in a point in time, a melting pot of other nations.

1. Language

The appearance of articulated language responded to the vital needs of the Stone Age society, whose solution allowed the improvement of the human condition itself. There is a distinction to be made: "… between the physical possibility of organizing expressive sounds or gestures and the intellectual possibility of designing expressive symbols, convertible into sounds or gestures,¹ the latter being physiologically conditioned by a brain already equipped for language. The quoted author links the appearance of speaking (i.e.when) to the beginning of tool manufacturing, because thetool and language are neurologically related, and both are inextricably linked in the social structure of humanity".²

If the inarticulate languages ​​of early hominids aimed at connecting the individual to the environment, not fixing or transmitting information from one individual to another, the purpose of speech is just this. It appeared in direct relationship with production, following the transmission of work experience, by means of speech from one individual to another, from one generation to the next.

Human progress would have been impossible without the relay between generations mediated by language, which includes the work and life experience of society at a given time. This relationship explains the dependence of the development of language to the development of society’s productive forces. The extent and richness of language signs is proportional to the scale and diversity of the material and spiritual creation of a population that spoke it through the centuries and which, in an always perfectible form, still speaks it today.

A German linguist rightfully asked: "Why do human beings have to speak thousands of different ​​and mutually incomprehensible languages, and why homo sapiens, whose way of assimilation has developed and operates in exactly the same complicated ways everywhere, whose biochemical structure and genetic potential are essentially common… why, then, this united – although unique – species of mammal, individually, does not use one common language?"³. This enigma has preoccupied thinkers and ordinary people many millennia ago, and the Old Testament proves its acuity during the time of the prophets.

Moses believed that, after the flood,"one language and one speech was spread across the entire earth (Genesis 11, 1), but that God prevented the building of the tower of Babylon and there the Lord mixed the languages of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them all over the earth (Genesis,11, 9). Linguistic diversity and the permanent obstacles it raises between individuals and communities are divine punishment for the recklessness of the people who tried to build a tower whose top would reach unto Heaven" (Genesis, 11, 4), in the exclusively divine universe.

Linguists start from the objective reality of the existence of a large number of languages – ​​in the thousands – and the idea that "… it is reasonable to say that the human species has developed and used at least twice as many languages ​​than those spoken today".⁴

Language is the primary defining attribute of an ethnic community, more important than all others. The ethnic habitat can be dropped through migration for a new territory, without losing or altering the language of the ethnic community (except in cases of assimilation), whereas losing one’s own language is synonymous with its extinction.

The Turks of Central Asia created a new Turkey in Asia Minor, while peninsular Arabs who were dispersed on a huge territory want to affirm their belonging to the Arab ethnic group, sometimes under the official title of the country (Arab Republic of Egypt).

English colonists on the Atlantic coast founded New England, Spanish conquistadors New Spain etc.

Languages define ethnic groups ​​in the territory; ethnic boundaries correspond to linguistic ones. This way, languages influenced and determined, sometimes substantially, the scope of political action, namely geopolitics.

Changing the ethno-linguistic border ultimately determines a change of the political boundary. Romanization, Arabization and other forms of assimilation present in history have profoundly modified ethno-linguistic borders and have created the premises for new state embodiment (of relatively long viability).

According to a famous Romanian linguist, language"isthe safest criterion that distinguishes one people from another and believes that the loss of one’s language is … the event with the toughest consequences in the history of a nation"⁵, whereas its replacement with a new language equals an ethnic death, with an ethno-extinction. In a simple way, Puşcariu thus gave us a definition of ethno-linguistic assimilation (abbreviated E.L.A.).

Ethnic neighborhoods or overlaps have consequences ranging from mutual influences to assimilation in the second case. Ethnic neighborhoods only determine word loans and mutual local phonetic pressures. Individual assimilation or assimilation of