Challenge: "separate but equal" apartheid that does exactly what it says on the tin

Thande

Donor
Everyone knows that the term "separate but equal" to describe the system of segregation in the US south was a whitewash (hah) at best and an outright lie at worst. But is it possible to get a system of apartheid where two or more races live apart by mutual consent and are indeed equal in the eyes of the law and convention? Presumably the government and state structure would be equally apportioned between members of the two or more races.

Not necessarily in the US South or South Africa, they were just examples.

This should be primarily a racial thing, not religious. (The Jews, I admit, muddy the waters a bit in that distinctioN).
 
Maybe this could happen in some multicultural empire where people all around empire had for long had the possibility to attain some high or even the most highes office in the empire (Emperor or whatever) but where most people still lived 'among their own people'.

So the situation would be such that no ethnic group is in charge, even though originally one of them was. In countryside, people would mostly live in areas where most (all?) people are of their own race and in cities too, people would live in communities comprised of 'their people'.

These ethnic communities, wheter in countryside or in cities, would naturally be lead by their traditional community leaders. What those community leaders would be, depends on the culture of the said ethnic group and community, but I would bet that family ties, wealth and religion would be rather usual sources of local power.

Point here is, that this unnamed empire would have turned from project of leaders of one ethnic group into a common project and interest of local leaders from several ethnic groups.

I would assume that the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism would have a devastating effect on traditional power structures of this empire. More and more people would move to cities and the whole power of modernity would start both severing traditional relationships between people, and at the same time, start bringing down boundaries between people.

One way the community leaders could act, is to keep co-operating and create this ideology of "separate but equal" in order to save their power among their own people.
 
Could the Ottoman millet system have led to something like this?

I was originally thinking the Blues and Greens in Byzantium, but that was a religious difference not a racial one.
 
Well this was something thought about a little bit back in the day, from the 1960s onwards, when the National Party was doing its thing in South Africa. There were even a few legal/political theorists (outside of SA too) who spent some time trying to work the theory through, right up until the early 1990s during the constitutional discussions of that era in SA, although dammed if I remember who/what/when.

You would need access to a good University library to track a lot of them down, even if I could remember citations.

Speaking of which, my university had a huge ornate leather copy of a book issued to commemorate the foundation of the Republic of Transkei, no doubt given out by the South African High Commission as a PR gesture. Interesting to read.

Another bit to read would be the last Apartheid constitution, the 1983 South African Tri-cameral Constitution
 
the problem of 'separate but equal' is that people don't divide themselves so neatly. In this hypothetical equal apartheid nation, what happens when two people from opposite races want to marry? It would happen sooner or later. Which side of the line do their children live on? And then there's the government issue... who rules? If you had a US type federal government, whichever race didn't get a member to be President would inevitably feel as if they were being discriminated against, particularly if that race is a minority and thus would never win an election. If you actually did have two 'separate but equal' races living together in one country, I can't see any result but that they would eventually mix together....
 
Lebanon is an example of this kind of government, with different government positions specifically reserved for different religious factions. You could probably argue that Bosnia's current set-up is also something like this, with separate ethnic enclaves. You have this sort of de facto situation in Kosovo and the "frozen conflicts" around the former USSR.
 
There are a few other countries that still operate at least in part (not always on an electoral system, but maybe on say family or property law) on a communal basis - Fiji and India would be the most obvious examples. However in the former case it clearly is to the detriment of the substantial Indian minority.
 
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