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Konkvistador comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong
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Why is having only one class of citizen a good idea?
Because it works well as a Schelling fence.
Good answer.
I don't think it did much for Soviet or Chinese citizens.
The Chinese don't have only one class of citizens:
1) Ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Mongols, etc.) have a legally recognized status, with affirmative action policies, (some) exemption from the one-child policy, etc.
2) More importantly, the is basically a passport/visa system inside China, and migrant workers from the countryside are pretty similar to immigrants (or worse off) in Europe or the US: they don't benefit from social services like schools (they have to send their kids back in their home province, or not have them in school, or send them to a private school), government jobs, etc. The Hukou system is also as hot a topic in China as immigration is the West.
By that standard Western countries also don't have one class of citizens.
Depends of which country you're thinking of! The US has officially designated categories, but those are pretty much illegal in France, and any official mention of one's "ethnicity" is pretty much a taboo concept (and I found it weird to have to fill in that field in all my paperwork in China).
And even the ethnic categories in the US don't seem as "legally relevant" as ethnic minority status in China; the law is (from what I understand) that you can sue if you believe you've been denied an opportunity because of your ethnic background, but that seems much more vague than having explicit ethnic categories, with different laws applying depending on which category you belong to.
(unless you were referring to to immigrants, but then they aren't citizens)
(convicts would make a better example of a "different class of citizens")
Because you don't want to have different classes of citizens to fight against each other.
You have to first make the argument that an explicit hierarchy is more violence prone than an implicit one.
It's seen as a formal license to spread any specific group-on-group antagonism to all members of the associated formal class/caste. All aristocrats/capitalists/cool people are entitled condescending parasites, all serfs/poor workers/uncool people are dull, crude and amoral; all Jews/Anglo-Saxons/Irish/Slavs/Blacks/Westerners/Catholics/Hugenots/heretics...
My model is, divides along official or semi-official lines in society have practically always tended to accumulate resentment in "quiet" times and blow up in a crisis. Just imagine how much more peaceful and nicer South Africa would've been today, if the goddamn Afrikaners could've got along with colored people like the British did in India! And you'd add a new faultline just for some tactical gain?
The comparison of India to Africa isn't valid because the starting conditions are sufficiently different. Also note that the question is somewhat rhetorical. We de facto do have several kinds of citizen. Can you think of which kinds?
To provide a counter point the Ottoman Millet system seems to have worked pretty well at keeping the peace in that state. Also India is a bad example for your argument for another reason, recall some of the biggest problems the British had there was when they tried to abolish or weaken or even just ignore the traditional caste system.
Informal divides, including ones with consistent disparities of power and wealth, certainly exist everywhere. I'm arguing that it's not clear how government enforcement of them has much point. European countries like Poland or France enforced religious segregation too (Catholic and Orthodox, Catholic and Hugenot), and still had lots of strife along religious lines.
And still their rule eroded it in practice - and who would mourn it? And OK, why not look at British colonies compared to French and Dutch ones and try to see what policies correlated with less blow-ups.