Introduction: Ethnicity and Public Service. How the State Deals with Ethnic Differences

Abstract

and the Nation-StateThe discipline of sociology has a long international tradition of both theoretical and empirical research on processes of ethnic differentiation and the manifold consequences that accompany them (see, for example, Weber 1980Weber [1921Du Bois 1995[1899; Barth 1969). However, it was not until the 1960s that the notion of ethnicity began to spread more widely in the sociological context and established itself as a fundamental concept. As late as the mid-1970s, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (1975, 1), in their classic reader, promoted "ethnicity" as "a new term" helping to understand what was meant by "black politics" or "to find a satisfactory place for the French-speaking element in an undivided Canada" (Glazer and Moynihan 1975, 2). The relevance of this new sociological category was high and equivalent to the classical category of social class. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the political demands for a "representative bureaucracy" (Kingsley 1944), which exposed the problems of the relationship between public administration and "ethnic groups or minorities", were also responsible for this increase in significance. One example was the context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. 1 In German-language sociology, the concept of ethnicity has been gaining in importance since the 1980s, thus returning to a certain extent from the American debate, decades after Max Weber (1980 [1921], 237) had sharpened the concept to his famous sociological definition of an ethnic commonality belief [«ethnischen Gemeinsamkeitsglauben»]. As the ethnic community is increasingly discussed in social sciences towards the end of the 20 th century (Imhof 1997), the nexus of ethnicity and the state in its national (or 1In the meantime, many empirical studies have emerged that attribute an essential role to the representation of ethnocultural diversity in the provision of administrative services or the filling of public positions (see, among