The link between race and politics was first established by the European racialism of the nineteenth century. This preached doctrines of racial superiority / inferiority and racial segregation, in the twentieth century mixing with fascism to produce Nazism, and helping to fuel right - wing nationalist or anti-immigration movements. The central idea behind such movements is that only a racially or ethnically unified society can be cohesive and successful, multiculturalism and multiracialism always being sources of conflict and instability. Very different forms of racial or ethnic politics have developed out of the struggle against colonialism in particular and as a result of racial discrimination and disadvantage in general. However, the conjunction of racial and social disadvantage has generated various styles of political activism. These range from civil - rights movements, such as that led in the USA in the 1960s by Martin Luther King, to militant and revolutionary movements, such as the Black Power movement and the Black Moslems ( now the Nation of Islam ) in the USA, and the struggle of the African National Congress ( ANG ) against apartheid in South Africa up to 1994. Ethnic politics, however, has become a more generalised phenomenon in the post - 1945 period, associated with forms of nationalism that are based upon ethnic consciousness and regional identity. This has been evident in the strengthening of centrifugal tendencies in states such as the UK, Belgium and Italy, and has been manifest in the rise of particularist nationalism. In the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yuoslavia, it led to state collapse and the creation of a series of new nation - states. The two main forces fuelling such developments are uneven patterns of social development in so-called ' core ' and ' peripheral ' parts of the world, and the weakening of forms of ' civic ' nationalism resulting from the impact of globalisation.