Instrumentalist accounts[edit]
Anthony Smith notes that the instrumentalist account “came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, in the debate about (white) ethnic persistence in what was supposed to have been an effective melting pot”.[3] This new theory sought to explain such persistence as the result of the actions of community leaders, “who used their cultural groups as sites of mass mobilization and as constituencies in their competition for power and resources, because they found them more effective than social classes”.[3] In this account of ethnic identification, “[e]thnicity and race are viewed as instrumental identities, organized as means to particular ends”.[4]
Whether ethnicity is a fixed perception is not crucial in the instrumentalist accounts. Moreover, the scholars of this school do generally not oppose neither that ethnic difference is a part of many conflicts nor that a lot of belligerent human beings believe that they are fighting over such difference. Instrumentalists simply claim that ethnic difference is not sufficient to explain conflicts.[5][6]