Ask yourself who writes the exams.

@John the Ministry of Rites. The government basically decides for itself who is virtuous enough to serve in it; but due to the high turnover rate in bureaucrats in most positions of influence, this method does not become egregiously corrupt. The text of the exams is pretty static too.

@PatriciaShanahan Well, I suppose it isn't going to be 100% perfectly multicultural with institutionalised exams, but certainly more so than China or Rome ever was; who all saw non-Han or non-Romans as barbarians to be educated or eradicated.

Not quite a government, but Silicon Valley would seem to be a pretty good example of a multicultural meritocracy.

@KeizerHarm: "Saw non-Han or non-Romans as barbarians to be educated or eradicated": (1) In the case of Rome this is hilariously wrong; half of the empire never spoke Latin. (2) Trajan was from Spain. Diocletian was from Dalmatia. Philip the Arab was, well, from Arabia. Constantine and Justinian were from Dardania (modern Serbia and Northern Macedonia; Constantine was born in Naissus, modern Niš, and Justinian was born in Tauresium, modern Gradište). And those are very far from all the emperors who were not ethnic Romans or Constantinopolitans.

@AlexP Birthplace outside Rome, sure, but weren't they all at least born to Latinised (or Greek, fair enough) peoples, soldiers settled in those foreign provinces, etcetera? Was there ever a Roman emperor who grew up speaking proto-Germanic or Celtic?

@KeizerHarm: There were plenty emperors who spoke Greek... (In fact Justinian was the last emperor who spoke Latin as his first language.) (1) Even if they spoke Greek, they still considered themselves Romans. (2) Asking for a Roman emperor who doesn't speak Latin or Greek is like asking for an American president who doesn't speak English; cannot be done, it's the primary language of the empire. (3) The Germanic peoples were not in the empire; and the Gauls adopted Latin early and enthusiastically.

@AlexP I said grew up speaking - referring to their birth culture, not the lingua franca used in the empire. And "everyone considers themselves Romans" is the not quite the kind of multiculturalism I was looking for. Were there any people in high stations who considered themselves Gauls as well?

@KeizerHarm: Not really. Again, compare with the modern U.S.A. People have all sorts of backgrounds, but all consider themselves Americans. In fact, having rulers and magnates who consider themselves as belonging to some particular culture different from the empire is much more a feature of the Middle Ages. It is not a good thing. Multiculturalism does not and should not mean encouraging divisions among the people of the empire; everybody can continue to worship their ancestral gods, continue to follow the ancestral customs of their city, but they are all Romans, or Americans, etc.

... Otherwise, what you get is Austria-Hungary, or the Russian empire, "the prison of the peoples". Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman empire, did have policies (implicit in the case of Austria-Hungary, explicit in the case of the Ottomans) to divide the population along ethnic lines; it didn't end well for them.

@AlexP There's better examples of the opposite. Ask a citizen of the Iroquois Confederacy if they are Iroquoian: they might agree, but consider that term not nearly as meaningful as whether they're Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, or Seneca. Whether such a nation could last for a thousand years, well that's what the question is about.

@KeizerHarm: There was no such thing as "a citizen of the Iroquois Confederacy". There were no citizens in the Iroquois Confederacy. Maybe, if that structure had been allowed to evolve for quite a few centuries, they might have reached a stage were they had citizens. We will never know. (And having the short-lived and doomed Iroquois Confederacy as a "better example" is dubious at best. I thought we were speaking about successful, long lived empires.)

@AlexP I... am not following you. Are you calling the whole idea of confederacy antithetical to citizenship, or do you not consider that political entity civilised enough to have citizens?

@KeizerHarm: They simply did not have citizens. As I said, maybe, if that structure had had the time to evolve and develop, they may have reached a stage where they had citizens. The Roman empire had citizens. Then came the Middle Ages, and everybody was a subject, not a citizen. Then came the emergence of the free cities, and with it came a new meaning of the word citizen. Then, after a very long time, came the French revolution, and for the first time since the days of Rome the people of large powerful state were citizens again.

@KeizerHarm: "Civilized enough" is a red herring. The Qing empire, or the Ottoman empire, for example, were very civilized, long lived, powerful states, which survived well into the modern age, but they surely did not have citizens. They had subjects.

@AlexP We're discussing tribal/ethnic vs national identities here. I don't see how semantics over the rights and freedoms of people living in a country - or whatever you want to call it, if you consider the word country problematic as well - bear any relevance to the discussion when we have already established the time period of the question.

@KeizerHarm The key point to the Iroquois Confederacy is the word "Confederacy". A Confederacy is not a nation, but an alliance where each state has the full rights of self-governance. For a more modern idea of what this might look like, consider NATO. No one is a citizen of NATO because NATO is not a government, just a mutual interests agreement.

@Nosajimiki there's a spectrum between loose agreements like NATO, supranational governments like the EU, confederacies like Ethiopia, and federated countries like Belgium. I would consider Ethiopia more like Belgium than like NATO.

Some governments call themselves confederacies (like the Confederate States of America) but they have central governments making them not true confederations. The Iroquois Confederacy however was a group of independent nations who allied to resist European colonialism. There was no such thing a chieftain of the Iroquois Confederacy, because rulership ended at the national level.

@Nosajimiki They were headed by a council. Having a single head of government is not a determinant of nationhood, see Switzerland. But I feel like it's becoming too specific; my question was more about people having unique (and important) ethnic identities, leaving it open how well those identities are represented in the government. If confederacy is one way of having a multicultural meritocracy, then I would like to hear about it.