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Are ethnically diverse societies a source of instability? Or would their alternative, "mono-ethnic" societies, be even more unstable? Ultimately, won't people always find ways to discriminate against one another?

Europe has a troubled history when it comes to minorities. During the exterminations and ethnic cleansings of the 20th Century, Europe's diversity came under attack, and millions of people belonging to minority groups were killed or expelled from national borders. Nevertheless, at no point in Europe's history have states had completely homogeneous populations.

Today, there are some 60 million people from ethnic and religious minorities living in the European Union, representing roughly 12% of the total EU population. Exact definitions of what constitutes a "minority" are difficult to agree (some countries, such as France, do not officially recognise the existence of minorities), however the scholars Christoph Pan and Beate Sibylle Pfeil have estimated there are 87 distinct "peoples of Europe".
Curious about the statistics on minorities in Europe? We've put together some facts and figures in the infographic below (click for a bigger image):

We had a comment from TheHarmonicaman, who thinks that the deporations and population swaps at the end of the Second World War created what he called "mono-ethnic states" in Europe, and he believes that this was the primary reason for peace in Europe after 1945:

Respect nations. A major contributing factor to the peace in Europe has been the creation of mono-ethnic states after the Second World War by the Allies... Can anyone name a successful multi-cultural democratic empire?

We put this comment to Stefan Wolff, a German political scientist and specialist in international security, particularly in the management, settlement and prevention of ethnic conflicts. He is currently Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. How would he react?

I think that is a rather short-sighted view of what happened in Europe at the end of the Second World War. On the one hand, [the Allies] did not manage to create completely homogeneous societies; in fact, most of the countries that experienced the largest population exchanges still remain multi-ethnic. So, for example, Slovakia still has a Hungarian population of about 10% concentrated in the south of the country, Poland still has about 200'000 to 250'000 ethnic Germans living in particular in parts of Silesia, and Poland still has a large number of Ukrainians, while there are Poles living in Belarus and Ukraine. So, from that perspective, it was never as clean and as complete a solution as the designers of these policies had in mind.

The second point, of course, is that the post-War expulsions came at enormous human cost... For example, in 1945 to 1947, you probably had between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans being expelled in particular from Poland and what is now the Czech Republic and some parts of Slovakia and, depending on which accounts and statistics you trust, up to 2 million people died in the process. That is a huge price to pay.

At the same time, if you look further West, there was a similar "problem" with the Germans in France in the two regions of Alsace and Lorraine, and there no such population exchange, or transfer, or ethnic cleansing, or whatever you want to call it, took place. Yet relations between France and Germany after the Second World War have been completely stable and there has been no renewed outbreak of war. So, if anything, what I would probably say is that despite the enormously troublesome legacy of these population exchanges, peace has been preserved, rather than peace being preserved because of the fact that people were forced to leave their ancestral homes by force at the end of the Second World War.

We had a very different suggestion sent in by another user, using the fantastic username Riot Chopin, who thinks that building a pan-European identity would be the best solution to ending ethnic tension and discrimination in Europe. How would Professor Wolff react?

I think that is certainly a very good idea, and one that I would fully endorse. However, I'm not so sure that it is necessarily the silver bullet... In many ways, people today have very hybrid, situational identities... There are different components of identity, and different parts of a person's identity matter at different times, so there's no such thing as a "European identity" on its own.

By the same token, I would argue that we cannot necessarily force people to adopt a European identity and thereby make them forget what their own linguistic, religious, regional, professional, gender, sexual and other identities are. One of the things I've learned having studied ethnic conflicts and civil wars for almost 20 years is that people find identities that are challenged and threatened much, much more important than if they are just given the opportunity to have an identity and not required to defend it on a daily basis.

So, I think in that sense a European identity should not be seen as something that supersedes and wipes out all these other identities, but rather coexists in a harmonious way with all these other identities.

Finally, we put Riot Chopin's comment to Bashy Quraishy,a Danish-Pakistani author and campaigner who specialises in issues of minority rights. How would he respond?

I think he's raising a very important point, which is that we now need a new identity in Europe. Until now, many people in Europe, both politicians, media, even the Pope, have been pushing for Europe to be identified as a Christian continent. And, in fact, it is has been a Christian continent - but the situation has changed now. There are different faiths, different cultures now. So, we need to re-evaluate what is a European. Is a European only a white, Christian person? Or is a European a person who adheres to European values like human rights, democracy and the rule of law? I think it's important that we enlarge the definition of European identity, so that it is inclusive, and it respects and accepts other cultures and religions. And that is what I would call an inclusive, pan-European identity.

Are multicultural societies more peaceful than the alternatives? Let us know your thoughts and comments in the form below, and we'll take them to policy-makers and experts for their reactions!

Image credits: CC / Flickr Thomas Leth-Olsen

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Does ethnic diversity cause conflict? - Debating Europe

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Are ethnically diverse societies a source of instability? Or would their alternative, "mono-ethnic" societies, be even more unstable? Ultimately, won't people always find ways to discriminate against one another? Europe has a troubled history when it comes to minorities.

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Diversity comes in many forms: gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, age, culture, socioeconomic background, etc. All of these contribute to an individual's unique experience of the world.

Sometimes we need to take a step back and examine the presence of diversity in our own life. How diverse is your school? Neighborhood? Place of work? Group of friends? Is diversity something we should strive for in all aspects of our lives? Here are 5 reasons why we at AMP Global Youth think we should:
1. Productivity
Bringing together people of various backgrounds with different life experiences can generate ideas or perspectives that others may not have ever considered or been aware of. Everyone has their own way of viewing a problem, shaped by the individual experiences that they have had. When tackling an issue, wouldn't it be better to have multiple interpretations and approaches, rather than everyone contributing the same thoughts and conclusions?
2. Becoming a World Citizen
If you experience diversity in your every day life, you will have regular exposure to people, cultures, traditions, and practices that are unlike your own. You will learn the skills to communicate and interact with communities and concepts that you are unfamiliar with and gain a more worldly view.

Not only will you enhance your social development, but you will also increase your understanding of the world. This will prepare you to be a part of a global society, whether you are traveling to a new country, working with diverse co-workers, or just reading about events in the news that have heavily impacted a population different than your own.
3. Perspective
Hearing about another's experience can shed light on a life different than your own and provide you a new perspective. When you compare your struggles, priorities, and values, you can really begin to comprehend where an individual is coming from and understand his or her actions and behaviors. Perhaps talking to someone new will change your mindset and priorities, or at least make you appreciate another's motivations and hardships.
4. Growing Acceptance, Diminishing Discrimination
Promoting diversity is the first step to not just "tolerance," but true acceptance. Through growing contact with, exposure to, and communication between new people with unique ideas, individuals may see that they may have more in common than they thought. Or, they may still be remarkably different, and that is okay, too! Increasing familiarity with these differences can alter perspectives (see #3), facilitate acceptance, and diminish the misconceptions and prejudices that fuel discrimination.
5. Richer Life Experience
Diversity is colorful! What if everyone who surrounded you was exactly like you, in every way? Where is the fun in that? We need new ideas, views, and practices to stimulate and inspire us, to show us the way others eat, celebrate, and love!

Together, our differences make a strong, beautiful, world community. Even in the face of intolerance, discrimination, and violence, we must not forget to spread the word about the importance of diversity and to respond to that violence with a love and a celebration of our differences.

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5 Reasons Why Diversity is Important in the 21st Century - AMP Global Youth

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Diversity comes in many forms: gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, age, culture, socioeconomic background, etc. All of these contribute to an individual's unique experience of the world. Sometimes we need to take a step back and examine the presence of diversity in our own life. How diverse is your school?

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(Editor's note (1/30/17): In response to President Donald Trump's immigration order to close U.S. borders to refugees and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which has impacted scientists and students, we are republishing the following article from our 2014 special report on how diversity powers science and innovation.)
The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word "diversity" can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious-you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts-but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?

The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.

Information and Innovation

The key to understanding the positive influence of diversity is the concept of informational diversity. When people are brought together to solve problems in groups, they bring different information, opinions and perspectives. This makes obvious sense when we talk about diversity of disciplinary backgrounds-think again of the interdisciplinary team building a car. The same logic applies to social diversity. People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from one another as an engineer and a physicist-and that is a good thing.

Research on large, innovative organizations has shown repeatedly that this is the case. For example, business professors Cristian Deszö of the University of Maryland and David Ross of Columbia University studied the effect of gender diversity on the top firms in Standard & Poor's Composite 1500 list, a group designed to reflect the overall U.S. equity market. First, they examined the size and gender composition of firms' top management teams from 1992 through 2006. Then they looked at the financial performance of the firms. In their words, they found that, on average, "female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value." They also measured the firms' "innovation intensity" through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits. In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, a professor of management at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.

Evidence for the benefits of diversity can be found well beyond the U.S. In August 2012 a team of researchers at the Credit Suisse Research Institute issued a report in which they examined 2,360 companies globally from 2005 to 2011, looking for a relationship between gender diversity on corporate management boards and financial performance. Sure enough, the researchers found that companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity) and better average growth.

How Diversity Provokes Thought

Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they only show that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.

In 2006 Margaret Neale of Stanford University, Gregory Northcraft of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I set out to examine the impact of racial diversity on small decision-making groups in an experiment where sharing information was a requirement for success. Our subjects were undergraduate students taking business courses at the University of Illinois. We put together three-person groups-some consisting of all white members, others with two whites and one nonwhite member-and had them perform a murder mystery exercise. We made sure that all group members shared a common set of information, but we also gave each member important clues that only he or she knew. To find out who committed the murder, the group members would have to share all the information they collectively possessed during discussion. The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity. Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.

Other researchers have found similar results. In 2004 Anthony Lising Antonio, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, collaborated with five colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions to examine the influence of racial and opinion composition in small group discussions. More than 350 students from three universities participated in the study. Group members were asked to discuss a prevailing social issue (either child labor practices or the death penalty) for 15 minutes. The researchers wrote dissenting opinions and had both black and white members deliver them to their groups. When a black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of whites, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective. The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.

This effect is not limited to race. For example, last year professors of management Denise Lewin Loyd of the University of Illinois, Cynthia Wang of Oklahoma State University, Robert B. Lount, Jr., of Ohio State University and I asked 186 people whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican, then had them read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. Next, we asked the subjects to prepare for a meeting with another group member by writing an essay communicating their perspective. More important, in all cases, we told the participants that their partner disagreed with their opinion but that they would need to come to an agreement with the other person. Everyone was told to prepare to convince their meeting partner to come around to their side; half of the subjects, however, were told to prepare to make their case to a member of the opposing political party, and half were told to make their case to a member of their own party.

The result: Democrats who were told that a fellow Democrat disagreed with them prepared less well for the discussion than Democrats who were told that a Republican disagreed with them. Republicans showed the same pattern. When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.

For this reason, diversity appears to lead to higher-quality scientific research. This year Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, along with Wei Huang, a Harvard economics Ph.D. candidate, examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 using Thomson Reuters's Web of Science, a comprehensive database of published research. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers were associated with a greater number of author addresses; geographical diversity, and a larger number of references, is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.

The Power of Anticipation

Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them and that belief makes people change their behavior.

Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another; that they will understand one another's perspectives and beliefs; that they will be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

In a 2006 study of jury decision making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision making.

Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case. These improvements did not necessarily happen because the black jurors brought new information to the group-they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.

Group Exercise

Consider the following scenario: You are writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as her or his culture, upbringing and experiences-differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise.

This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity-in teams, organizations and society as a whole-if we are to change, grow and innovate.

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(Editor's note (1/30/17): In response to President Donald Trump's immigration order to close U.S. borders to refugees and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which has impacted scientists and students, we are republishing the following article from our 2014 special report on how diversity powers science and innovation.)