2
Second, how did the post-war incidents of labor related ethnic violence help to
shape each polity? Can the different post-war political regimes that emerged in each case
be traced to the nature and outcomes of internal political violence? Post-war violence in
Ulster and South Africa helped to institutionalize what van den Berghe termed herrenvolk
democracies,
2
or the incorporation of dominant group labor into particularist regimes.
Whereas in the United States dominant group labor appeared not to gain politically from
postwar racial violence. Why did exclusivist labor based regimes develop in South
Africa and Northern Ireland after World War I? Yet why if the US was itself the
province of a Herrenvolk was white American labor vanquished by the combined forces
of capital and the state?
The causes of dominant group violence, I argue, were similar in the three cases:
labor related status group violence was the product of competition between workers from
dominant and subordinate ethnic or racial groups for access to labor market opportunities.
The wartime expansion of each economy opened opportunities to workers from
subordinate ethnic/racial groups. The subsequent post-war economic contractions and
struggles over the distribution of employment led dominant groups to try to reassert
control of local labor markets by combinations of violence and intimidation. But I will
then go further to argue that the violence in interaction with prior levels of state
consolidation, and the relative strength of dominant group labor, helps to explain the
variation in post-war regimes – the institutionalization of labor based herrenvolk
democracies in two cases and the first seeds of the unraveling of the racial order in the
United States.
2
Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1967); Idem., South Africa: A Study in Conflict (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1965).
Convention