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Even ten years ago serious students were looking at Turks in Germany, where there were already three generations, each with its own experience with German, and only gradual acceptance—and some integration and then assimilation. What will the fifth and sixth generation experience? Recently, French suburbs have exploded—in the land that claimed assimilation was part and parcel of la mission civilisatrice—the “civilizing mission.” Yet a young Frenchman astonished me in telling me that in his secondary school, deep in the provinces, non-ethnic French were in a majority, but that no one paid any attention to these differences at all. It was beyond his comprehension that any of them would not be considered French. Black and white intermingle without comment or notice.
DNA will, of course, be the ultimate arbiter. Thus we now know that one of the greatest American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, had numerous black descendants, presumably through Sally Hemmings, a slave he even took with him to France during his ambassadorship.
In the meantime we have today’s practical problems of multi-ethnic societies. There are very few that are not—and where there is homogeneity, as in Somalia, there is clan rivalry, on a scale equaling any competition of recent history. While dealing with the failures of assimilation, are there any successes to which we can turn for inspiration, or maybe just for a comparative assessment?
Arguably, Thailand is one of these. The record is spotty but the results as of today are inspiring. There is an old joke circulating in scholarly circles worldwide, of the professor under the premiership of Pibulsonggram, appointed to dictate ‘Mandates’ of proper behavior to all Thai, at the time when Phibul was trying to bring the kingdom up to the behavioral standards—as he saw it—of advanced European societies. These Mandates determined dress, how to address one’s seniors—and how to despise the Chinese. ‘Except of course your grandfather,’ so the joke goes in deed. But Khun Wichit, who authored the Mandates, was Chinese.