A White ethnostate is a proposed type of state in which residence or citizenship would be limited to Whites, and non-whites and any other groups not seen as white would be excluded from citizenship. Within the Anglosphere, the natives of their respective countries would also be excluded from citizenship, such as the Indigenous people of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
In the United States, proposals for the establishment of such a state are advanced by White supremacist and White separatist factions such as Ku Klux Klansmen and Neo-Nazis. Some of these factions claim that a certain part of the country should have a white majority and other factions claim that the entire country should have a white majority.[1][2] Most white ethnostate movements envision a state which will be solely inhabited by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and/or people who are of Northern European descent.
Historical attempts to establish a white ethnostate include Apartheid-era South Africa, where the indigenous black population was pushed into areas which were known as Bantustans through various means, including deportations and racial segregation, with the aim of establishing separate states out of the resulting ethnically cleansed areas, the largest of which would be turned into a white state.[3]
Proposed white ethnostates
North America
A map that shows the suggested boundaries of The Northwest Territorial Imperative in red.
In January 2010, Beeld, an Afrikaans newspaper, held an online survey. Out of 11,019 respondents, 56% (6,178) stated that they would move to a Volkstaat if one were created, an additional 17% (1,908) stated that they would consider moving to it and 27% (2,933) stated that they would not consider moving to it because they did not believe that it was a viable option.[11]
Historically, white nationalist laws were passed and enforced in the United States, beginning with the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790, which only allowed whites to apply for citizenship if they had lived in the United States without breaking any laws for two years, and it only continued to recognize whites— with rare exceptions— as citizens for decades afterwards. Only after the American Civil War did laws begin to change, gradually extending citizenship rights to minority populations. Non-white foreigners as of the Johnson–Reed Act[12] in 1924 were allowed to immigrate to America following a quota of 2% of the number of people from their country of origin who were living in America per the 1890 Census. The 1952 McCarran–Walter Act revised the former 1924 act and decreased the percentage of people who were coming to America. It also removed the ban on immigration from Asia.[13] Discrimination in immigration was legally ended by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In 2013, white supremacist Craig Cobb attempted to take over the small town of Leith, North Dakota, and turn it into a neo-Nazi enclave; this attempt failed due to Cobb's violent behavior towards Leith's residents, which got him arrested. The events form the basis of the documentary Welcome to Leith.
In 1943-1945, forces of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, with some support from the local Ukrainian population, committed genocide of around 85,000 Poles (primarily women and children) in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia that were at that time occupied by the military of Nazi Germany.[14][15] The aim of the OUN-B and its UPA military organisation was to create a homogeneous Ukrainian ethnostate without the Polish, Russian, Jewish, and Czech minorities that inhabited those lands at the time.[16] The UPA sometimes worked together with the Ukrainian SS under German command to carry out other massacres of Polish minorities.[17][18][19]
From 1901 until 1973,[20]Australia maintained a series of policies, collectively nicknamed the White Australia policy, that actively restricted the immigration of non-white migrants. The policy originated after the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which aimed to ban non-Europeans from migrating to the country.[21] These policies were gradually dismantled over the following years, and the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was repealed in 1958 and replaced by the Migration Act 1958.[22] The White Australia policy was definitively ended in 1973, after the Whitlam government passed legislation that made selection of migrants on the basis of race unlawful.[23]
Similar to the White Australia Policy, the "White New Zealand Policy" consisted of legislation which banned Asians and other non-Europeans from immigrating to the country.[24] After the Second World War, a memorandum which was published by the Department of External Affairs in 1953 described the purpose of the policy in clearer terms. The laws were not relaxed until the 1970s and 1980s. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage described the policy in the following way: "Our immigration is based firmly on the principle that we are and intend to remain a country of European development. It is inevitably discriminatory against Asians – indeed against all persons who are not wholly of European race and colour. Whereas we have done much to encourage immigration from Europe, we do everything to discourage it from Asia".[25]
