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— Norbert Elias"Perhaps I should say that in general there are three solutions to such a situation. I mean not only in Holland, but everywhere where there are minority groups: in America, in Vietnam with the Chinese. Everywhere there is the same problem. But there are fundamentally three, actually only two possible solutions. A possible solution is that the despised minority is able to establish its own state somewhere else. The other solution is a higher or lesser degree of assimilation. And the third possibility, which is not a solution at all, is the permanence of the tension and conflict over time."
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The heart of assimilation process of absorbing minorities lies in the self-image of a nation. There are, as you will know, big differences for instance between the self-image of the French and the English. And the Germans, in accordance with their rather chequered history, had at least in the past very little capacity for absorbing minorities.
— Norbert Elias
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The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.
— Peter York
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