Beyond
either/or:
the politics of 'and' in
ethno-nationalist conflicts
Robin Wilson, Democratic Dialogue
September 1999
The politics of negation
Ulrich Beck (1997: vii) opens his The Reinvention of Politics with a
discussion of the suggestion by the early Soviet constructivist artist Wassily
Kandinsky that if the 19th century was dominated by
'either-or'separation, specialisation, claritythe 20th should be
devoted to work on 'and'simultaneity, multiplicity, uncertainty. Beck argues
that two late-80s watersheds signal the breakthrough of And: Chernobyl and the
fall of the Wall.
Yet the 90s, it has become a commonplace to
recognise, have proved to be the decade of recrudescent ethnonationalism (Smith, 1999: 331)bookended by appalling wars
in the Balkans, the like of which Europe has not seen since the second world
war. Ethno-nationalist tension has been a recurrent feature of post-communist
evolution in east and central Europe, including the former USSR. Sub-Saharan
Africa has been criss-crossed by fighters of various ethnic and national
origins, mainly arising from the horrific genocide in Rwanda in 1994; in the
horn, a futile border war smoulders on between Ethiopia and secessionist
Eritrea. The Indian sub-continent has revisited, nuclear-armed, the
Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, while the war of attrition between the
Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers continues. The seizure of Abdullah Ocalan
and retreat of the PKK, while holding out real hope of an accommodation between
the Kurdish community and the state, could yet prove the occasion for the pursuit
of final victory by the state in Turkey's no-compromise culture. A year after
the ETA ceasefire in the Basque country, a predictable stand-off on the
principle of 'self-determination', between the various strands of Basque
nationalism and the Spanish government, remains. Even the settlements of the
period, in Israel/Palestine, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Northern Ireland, have
fallen well short of their authors' hopesin terms of the timescale of their
implementation (Northern Ireland, the middle-east) or the goal of multi-ethnic political
co-existence (Bosnia). And any hope that a multi-ethnic Kosovo might be
restored after the NATO victory over Milosevic died on the bridge at Mitrovice
(Cullen, 1999).
This sequence of events was not, by any means, widely
foreseen. In the late 80s, Eric Hobsbawm delivered a series of lectures on
nationalism in Belfast. At the end he concluded (Hobsbawm, 1990: 163, 173) that
"while nobody can possibly deny the growing and sometimes dramatic, impact of
nationalist, or ethnic politics
[i]t is no longer a major vector of
historical development". More embarrassingly still, he claimed that "it was the
great achievement of the communist regimes in multinational countries to limit
the disastrous effects of nationalism within them"stressing how at the time of
writing there had not been a single fatality in Yugoslavia. Just a few years
later, in his survey of the 'short twentieth century', Hobsbawm's tone was
quite different. He bemoaned how "the Wilsonian-Leninist 'right to national
self-determination' for supposedly homogeneous ethnic-linguistic-cultural
'nations', was patently being reduced to a savage and tragic absurdity as the
new millennium approached" (Hobsbawm, 1994: 567).
Yet perhaps this is not, after all, so surprising.
For, just as the comforts of 'socialist realist' art were to succeed the
challenges of the constructivists, Beck argues (1997: 61-6) that 'the
ambivalences of the And' have precisely favoured 'a renaissance of the
Either-or', a 'counter-modernity' characterised by 'constructed certitude':
All the concepts
that modernity dismantles, unmasks and delegitimates are sacred to
counter-modernity; of course this includes 'tradition' and the 'cultivation',
that is, invention of it, but also nature, religion, the nation, the
distinction between ourselves and 'strangers', we-they identities and hence
their extreme intensification, friend-enemy relationships. Violence is the
magic wand of resimplification
Mary Kaldor (1996: 53-54) endorses this claim more
specifically:
The new nationalism
is a counterproductive project. The main implication of globalisation is that
territorial sovereignty is no longer viable. The effort to reclaim power within
a particular spatial domain will merely further undermine a group's ability to
influence events. This does not mean that the new nationalism will go away.
Rather, it is a recipe for new closed-in chaotic statelets with permanently
contested borders dependent on continuing violence for survival.
While Ignatieff's ethnic-versus-civic, dichotomous
representation of nationalism is ideal-typical, the phenomenon we are exploring
has been almost everywhere predominantly ethnic, with primarily civic counter-examples such as Scotland (though see
McMillan, 1999) relatively exceptionalNorthern Ireland's sustained ethnic
antagonism is much more typical. As Ignatieff (1994: 5) himself has written,
"the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism". By contrast, there are,
quite simply, relatively few non-democratised political spaces left around the
globe where a 'classical' politics of self-determination can pit an 'oppressed'
national group against a colonial/imperialist power in a demand for democratic
citizenship. The obvious counter-example, East Timor, in a sense underscores
this point since the recent atrocities there were the ultimate product of the second colonisation of the countryby
the Indonesiansfollowing the withdrawal by the Portuguese in 1975, as from
their African colonies.
Ethnonationalism in that sense is profoundly
different. The fault lines it draws are vertical, not horizontal. Its
counterpart is not the state (except by proxy) but the Other. Its protagonism
is proportionate not to any inequalities its social constituency suffers
relative to its comparator/competitor groupas in Northern Ireland, the former
may intensify as the latter diminish. Its relationship with violence is at
worst an easy one, at best ambivalent. Its relationship with dialogue is at
worst of refusal, at best dogmatic. Far from there being an evident settlement
in a transfer of power in a democratising direction, these are zero-sum games
in which incompatible democratic contentions are advanced from each side.
Accepting 'self-determination' demands in such circumstances frequently implies
greater violence and certainly a displacement effect on to a newly disgruntled
group.
At face value it thus seems possible only to contain,
not to counter, the ethno-nationalist challengethrough political
institutionalisation which may bring an 'acceptable level of violence', as in
Northern Ireland or the Basque country; through establishing an international
protectorate, as effectively remains the case in Bosnia, via which violence can
be suppressed; or through ex post facto
deployment of force, as in Kosovo. Yet this need not be the only conclusion.
First of all, theoretically, to say that rationalist philosophies neither
predicted nor could stem the rise of ethnic nationalist claims around the globe
is not to say that ethnonationalism cannot be rationally understoodincluding
its strongly affective, 'irrational' aspects (Guibernau, 1996).
Hobsbawm's error was hardly a unique one. Within
liberal as well as Marxist versions of enlightenment rationalism,
ethnonationalism would eventually be swept aside by the march of progress: a
universal subjectwhether the proletariat or the individual citizenwould take
the place of any particularist identities. In this context, it is noteworthy
how Northern Ireland used to be routinely described as a 'hangover' of 17th-century
religious conflict in Europe; after the horrors of a 90s war between Orthodox,
Catholics and Muslims, no one would be so sanguine. Or so you would think: in
fact, the historian John Keegan decided that the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina was
'a primitive tribal conflict only anthropologists can understand' (Mazower,
1998: xiv).
As Gray (1995: 129) has argued, what we now find is:
the supreme problem
of communities in our time, which is that of finding terms of peaceful
coexistence among themselves
Communities make rival claims on territories
they inhabit together, they are animated by conflicting narratives and cultural
traditions, they renew their identities across the generations by strategies of
exclusion and subordination, and so on. The real agenda for political thought
is this agenda of relations among communities having irresolvably conflicting,
and sometimes incommensurable claims
The ethnonationalist answer to the problem is a
simple one: render ethnic and territorial boundaries co-terminous, so that the
ruled are ruled by rulers of the same ethnic affiliation: 'All Serbs in One
State' is its rhetorical expression, 'ethnic cleansing' its practical
consequence. With fewer than 200 states in the worldof which perhaps only one
quarter are strictly 'nation-states' (Ryan, 1995: 3)yet perhaps more than
5,000 ethnic groups (Kymlicka, 1995), it is as unrealistic as it is
reactionary.
There is no evidence, however, that the problem is
likely to diminish. As Kymlicka (1995: 1) writes:
Minorities and
majorities increasingly clash over such issues as language rights, regional
autonomy, political representation, education curriculum, land claims,
immigration and naturalisation policy, even national symbols, such as the
choice of national anthem or public holidays. Finding morally defensible and
politically viable answers to these issues is the greatest challenge facing
democracies today
There are no simple answers or magic formulas to resolve
all these questions.
It is such conflicts
which have been the source of the now recognised trend by which modern wars are
increasingly intra-, rather than inter-state. This has left the international
community struggling to adapt, given that the United Nations was established
with a view to preventing inter-state wars (Judd, 1998: ix).
Yet in a fundamental sense the idea that such
intra-state conflicts are not simply the expression of 'ancient hatreds' is a
potentially emancipatory one. As Ronen (1997: 100-101) points out, Serb and
Croat recourse to the war-time language of Chetnik and Ustashe still begs the
question: why was there not violent
conflict for the intervening four decades and more? And the answer is
Ignatieff's (1999: 7):
Even the
long-standing, apparently adamantine antipathies of the ethnic war zones turn
out, on closer examination, to be expressions of fear created by the collapse
or absence of institutions that enable individuals to form civic identities
strong enough to counteract their ethnic allegiances. When individuals live in
stable stateseven poor onesthey do not need to rush to the protection of the
group. It is the disintegration of states, and the Hobbesian fear that results,
that produces ethnic fragmentation and war.
Hence the prominent role of paramilitaries, to whom
many have turned for securityhowever reluctantlyin Northern Ireland and
ex-Yugoslavia: 'bands of young men
who make a living through violence or
threats of violence
and who either base their power on particularistic
networks or seek respectability through particularistic claims' (Kaldor, 1996:
52).
In other words, what matters is the process by which
such conflicts escalate from day-to-day, manageable tensions to outright
antagonism and violence. It is a process characterised, in the political
domain, by the collapse of dialogue in favour of fundamentalism. And it is in
and through such a process that 'neighbours once ignorant of the very idea that
they belong to opposed civilisations begin to thinkand hatein these terms'
(Ignatieff, 1999: 36).
By contrast, the substance
of a conflictwhat is held to fuel the 'ancient hatreds'is actually largely
self-referential. As Ignatieff puts it (1999: 36-37), the definition of a Serb
simply becomes someone who is not a Croat, and vice versa: When he pressed a Serb paramilitary in Croatia during
the war there, on what made him different from his Croat enemies, all the
latter could think of was the cigarettes they smoked! This he understands by
reference to Freud's notion of the 'narcissism' of minor differencesthat nationalism
works up what are otherwise indifferent
differences into self-regarding intolerance (Ignatieff, 1999: 51-53).
Similarly, in Northern Ireland Frank Wright argues (1987: 141) that 'antagonism
is itself before it is any of the interests it has been fashioned to serve'.
Yet if this is so, if ethnonationalist conflict is a
matter principally of process, in which substantive issues are relatively
inconsequential, then the scope for preventing, de-escalating or even reversing
such processes becomes apparent. This, however, with two very important riders.
Firstly, precisely because ethnonationalist conflict is so self-referential,
like a self-perpetuating flywheel it acquires an inertia very difficult to
stem, as Northern Ireland shows all too clearly'obsolete' sectarian and
paramilitary protagonism continuing under what is meant to be a new political
dispensation. Secondly, there is a law of entropy at work: it is much easier to
set in train what Anthony Giddens (1994: 245) calls 'degenerate spirals of communication'
than to reverse themthe labour of Sisyphus that is the recreation of
multi-ethnic life in Bosnia-Hercegovina being an obvious example.
Rethinking sovereignty
One of the certain ways to escalate a conflict within
a state is to set in motion a zero-sum dynamic counterposing (state)
'sovereignty' to (minority) 'self-determination'. In fact, the second notion is
a derivative of the first: secessionist groups seek to establish a sovereign
state ruled by 'their own'the Turkish-Kurdish conflict is a classic instance.
This sovereigntist paradigm may be described as the billiard-ball conception of
the world: it is an order based on internally homogeneous states, which have
impermeable boundaries, and whose character is utterly unaffected by any relations
established between them. And one of the first steps to tackling
ethnonationalist divisions is a reappraisal of the idea of sovereignty.
Rethinking sovereignty takes place at two levelsthe
sub-state and the intergovernmental. As to the former, moves towards
regional/national devolution/autonomy, under the banner of 'subsidiarity', make
possible a revisiting of the possibility of multi-national states, apparently
discredited in the past because of their pre-WWI associations with the empires
of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.
A case in point is Catalonia, where, as Montserrat
Guibernau (1997) argues, there is a clear contrast between the fundamentalist
Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the autonomist Convergence and Unity (CiU) of
the Catalan leader, Jordi Pujol. For the ERC, the Catalan nation cannot survive
without its own state and the Spanish state cannot contain its component
nationalities; for the CiU, on the other hand, it is possible to be a
nationalist without seeking independence and nationalities such as Catalonia
can live and develop within the framework of larger political institutions
(Guibernau, 1997: 109):
The relevance of
Pujol's nationalism stems from the assumption that it is possible for a nation
to live and develop within a multinational state if this state is genuinely
democratic and allows enough space for its nations to feel represented and
cultivate their difference. This is an innovative conception which could
contribute to the resolution of nationalism in some areas, particularly since
it seems politically unviable to suddenly multiple the number of states
covering the world.
As the Catalan instance shows, the possibilities of
subsidiarity are connected to the possibilities of supra-national (or, rather,
supra-state) developments, which brings us to look at the future of
intergovernmental institutions such as the United Nations. Let us consider
first a classic statement of the sovereigntist argument, from a British
policy-maker, James Headlam-Morley, recalling discussion of what was to become
the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (Mazower, 1998:
56):
At first there was,
so far as I recollect, a proposal that there should be inserted in the League
of Nations some general clause giving the League of Nations the right to
protect minorities in all countries which were members of the League. This I
always most strongly opposed
for it would have involved the right to
interfere in the internal constitution of every country in the world. As I
pointed out, it would give the League of Nations the right to protect the
Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada,
quite apart from the more serious problems, such as the Irish. This point of
view was, I think, not seriously opposed by any except the unofficial bodies
[today's NGOs] who wished the League of Nations to be a sort of super-state
with a general right of guarding democracy and freedom throughout the world
My own view was that any right given
to the League of Nations must be quite definite and specific, and based on
special treaties entered into because of definite exceptional cases, and that
such a right could only be recognised in the case of a new or immature state of
Eastern Europe or Western Asia. Even if the denial of such a right elsewhere
might lead to injustice and oppression, that was better than to allow anything
which would mean the negation of the sovereignty of every state in the world.
The United Nations has survived rather longer, and
been rather more effective, than its inter-war predecessor. But article II(vii)
of the UN Charter states specifically that the organisation does not have the
right to interfere with matters that fall under the 'domestic jurisdiction' of
any member state; the latter must consent to, indeed invite, any intervention
(Rupesinghe, 1998: 19). This year, the irrelevance of the UN in terms of the
Kosovo conflict has only been matched by its impotence, until after the horrid
fact, in East Timor. An organisation based on the very principle of sovereign
statehood is by definition unable adequately to address intra-state
conflictseven if it did not suffer the appalling resource problems that it
does (Thornberry, 1998: 18). The 90s have therefore seen the UN to some extent
rivalled by the emergence, greater assertion or redefinition of a range of
other intergovernmental organisations: the EU, NATO, the OSCE and the Council
of Europe.
The EU has been crucial to the assertion of Catalonia
as an autonomous subject, through Mr Pujol's para-diplomacyincluding his
period of leadership of the Committee of the Regionsand its collaboration with
Rhône-Alpes, Baden-Württemberg and Lombardy in the 'Four Motors' project
(Loughlin, 1998: 32-33). This is part of a wider process of transformation of
the EU in the 90s into a structure of 'multi-level governance' (Jeffery, 1996:
184), defying those whowithin a sovereigntist problematichad only been able
to imagine that the future was a Europe of nation-states or a new country
called Europe. As Udo Bullman (1996: 11) puts it,
The European Union
after Maastricht thus provides the framework for a new and different political
order in which authority is scattered and sovereignty shared. In consequence a
new type of politics has arisen in which institutions and competences overlap.
New modes of exchange and representation have come into existence which
emphasise the role of sub-national political arenas as spheres for action and
dialogue.
Related to this protagonism of the 'third level' in
the European Union has been growing attention to the scope for 'transnational'
and 'inter-regional'not just 'cross-border'co-operation, especially in the
arena of spatial planning, where the union itself is acquiring the competence
to act. As Christiansen (1999: 45) contends, albeit at this stage
theoretically, 'for the first time the opportunity exists to view the union as
an entity without state borders'. This clearly allows of new arrangements, such
as on the island of Ireland, where the heimat
identities of national minorities can be assuaged without the redrawing of
boundaries. It is, however, important to recognise that the post-Amsterdam
'differential integration' in the EU, which will be exacerbated by
enlargementallied to the unintended tendency of measures introduced to permeate
borders to generate new onesis creating what Christiansen (1999: 49) has aptly
described as a 'Maze Europe' increasingly impenetrable to its citizens.
Overall, this double movement, above and below the
(misnamed) 'nation-state' allows of an exit from the either-or sovereignty
dilemma. As the international community's anathema against secession has been
progressively shatteredbeginning perhaps with the 1971 secession of East from
West Pakistanthe international norm on the resolution of ethnoterritorial
disputes has been the holding of a plebiscite in the contested area (Guelke,
1998). The obvious difficulty with this approach is that it merely overturns
the balance of forces between groups, without doing anything to diminish the
underlying 'force field', as Wright (1987) described it. Beyond the
billiard-ball paradigm, however, lies a much more fluid set of political
possibilities, characterised by degrees
of autonomy and transnational competences. But their successful exploitation
requires two further reappraisalsin the satisfaction of 'minority rights' and
the development of multiple political identities, as discussed below.
There can be no doubt, however, that such benign
outcomes to ethnonationalist conflicts will not everywhere result. And if states
do disintegrate then an external
Sovereign, in the Hobbesian sense, is required to prevent the
(ethnonationalist) war of all against all. In the European theatre, NATO has
clearly emerged as the nearest thing to a Sovereign to hand. While many hoped
that the fall of the Wall would issue in the dissolution of both NATO and the
Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the former Soviet bloc left NATO as the only show
in town. It has since struggled to redefine its 'strategic concept' and it
emerged as the protagonist in the Kosovo war largely by default. Nor was it
able to stop the horror of ethnic cleansing that the Serbian leadership's
'Operation Horseshoe' envisaged; nor, either, after the return of the refugees
to stem significantly the tide of reprisals. But until such times as the UN is
put on a more genuinely supranational footingnot the victim of great-power
vetoesand the resources it needs are provided for it, in Europe NATO is going
to be a key player. Its role will be to provide the security underpinning for
other organisations, including the UN and NGOs, to play their roles in
addressing conflict. As a NATO representative put it (Wilson, 1998: 87), 'If
the bridges are mined or destroyed, you can't bring people together.'
A further important development in this regard is the
gradual emergence of the International Criminal Court, building on the ad hoc experiences of the tribunals in
Arusha and the Hagueand it is noteworthy how the NATO intervention against
Serbia in Kosovo appears to have emboldened the tribunal on ex-Yugoslavia to
indict Slobodan Milosevic. It is true that the purview of the ICCthe degree to
which it will undermine the sovereignty problematichas been significantly
weakened by the US stance during the negotiations on the court. But, nevertheless,
as the convenor of the NGO coalition in support of the court argues (Race,
1999: 1), 'The globalisation of justice, led largely by the historic ICC
process, is an amazing development in international affairs, and an antidote to
so many other dark and dangerous global forces.'
Minority rights
Giddens (1994: 85) has persuasively argued that the
biggest threat to today's world is fundamentalisma reaction to globalisation,
'detraditionalisation' and cultural interchange which can be described as the
defence of tradition in a traditional way.
It is thus a refusal of reflexivity. Ethnonationalism is in that sense a
continuing embodiment of Bismarck's invocation to the Volk (Connor, 1994: 198): 'Germans, think with your blood.'
It is also, as indicated earlier, a refusal of
dialogue. Yet, if dialogue is essentially the means by which democracy can act
as a substitute for violence, the consequences can evidently be disastrous. As
Guibernau (1996: 144) writes, 'The current proliferation of struggles for
self-determination in several parts of the world indicates that the desire of
nation-states to present themselves as democratic does not necessarily result
in the adoption of a dialogic attitude towards the national minorities they
contain.' Such struggles have proved most intense and difficult to resolve in
situations, such as in large areas of central and eastern Europe, where the
fraught relationship between 'newly nationalising states' and 'national
minorities' is compounded by the existence of an external 'homeland' to which
the latter can be ethnoculturally deemed to belong and whose own nationalism
adds a further complexifying dimension (Brubaker, 1996: 4-6).
The collapse of the Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg
empires served up a vast array of minority-rights claims for the nascent League
of Nations, some dealt with more successfully than others. But Hitler's
exploitation of the plight of the Sudeten Germans and, in the post-war years,
the focus of the UN on the 'self-determination' of 'colonial peoples' meant
minority questions were to be marginalised during the cold war (Ronen, 1997:
70). The decades-long process of elaborating what was to become the 1992 UN
Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National, Religious and
Ethnic Minorities (Eide, 1993) was telling (Hannum, 1992).
But the practical challenges issuing from the end of
the cold war were evident as soon as the three Baltic states sought to break
away from the old USSRwith the obviously problematic consequences of
citizenship arrangements for the new states, geared to the 'reawakening' of
national identity, tending to alienate Russian speakers (Zaagman, 1999). As the
explanatory report accompanying the 1995 Council of Europe Framework Convention
for the Protection of National Minorities puts it (Troebst, 1998: 11), when the
heads of state and government of the member states met in Vienna in October
1993, 'it was agreed that the national minorities which the upheavals of
history have established in Europe had to be protected and respected as a
contribution to peace and stability'. Key provisions of the framework
convention are non-discrimination and promotion of equality; preservation of
identity and promotion of tolerance and mutual understanding; protection of
language rights, including in education and the media; 'effective
participation' in public life; and freedom of contacts across frontiers plus
encouragement of bilateral agreements.
Neither of these documents has a justiciable
character: the UN declaration is precisely that and, while the Vienna meeting
did envisage that a protocol would be drafted complementing the European
Convention on Human Rights, this has never been doneFrance led the resistance,
the whole idea of minority rights being alien to its assimilationist concept of
la nation (Wilson, 1998: 46). This,
moreover, is one of only a number of flaws from which the convention suffers:
the wording is vague and the monitoring mechanism weak. As Stefan Troebst
(1998: 11) sums it up, the convention 'resembles a net which is not only very
wide-meshed but contains a great number of large holes'. But the importance of
the declaration and the framework convention is that they breach the
traditional jurisprudence of rights which attaches rights only to universal,
abstract citizens. They do not introduce particularist rights: after all, they
set new universal standards for their member states. What they do is to begin
to construct the notion that, above the floor of universal rights to which all
citizens are entitled, each citizen is also entitled to specific expression of
the universal rights they enjoy as members of particular groups.
Moreover, some concrete progress can be identified in
the work of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a product
largely of the reinvention of the CSCE after the fall of the Wall. At their
Helsinki meeting in 1992, given their failure to stop the ethnic wars in
Yugoslavia and the Caucasus, the OSCE states established the post of high
commissioner on national minorities, occupied ever since by Max van der Stoel,
a former Dutch foreign minister. While the commissioner can not investigate
individual complaints, or address conflicts that have already become violent,
he can engage at an early stage in preventive diplomacy. His aim has been to
encourage 'structured dialogue' between the states and minorities concerned,
with the hope that they develop solutions of their own. In the Baltic states,
for example, he appears to have had some success in persuading the Estonian
government in particular of the need to address the concerns of the
Russian-speakers about the naturalisation process and the status of aliens
(Zaagman, 1999: 16, 51).
It should be stressed that 'minority rights' is now
in many ways a misnomer for what would be better described as equality of
citizenship. For the notion conveys a sense of homogeneous blocs, and appears
to beg the question of what rights individual members of minorities (or indeed
majorities) have to dissent from a collectively-perceived position. In fact,
none of the emergent international jurisprudence on minority rights is
presented in that way. The UN declaration and the Council of Europe convention
are very careful to refer to 'persons belonging' to minorities: the person, not
the group, represents the legal subject, even though exercise of such rights
'in community with others' is endorsed.
Moreover, the framework convention makes clear that
individuals have the right not to be
treated as belonging to a national minority. This is a very important principle,
to defend the rights of those who, owing to the balance of power within any minority, may otherwise lose
out. Nira Yuval-Davis (1998) warns that such a constructed 'group voice
can
in actuality collude with fundamentalist leaderships who claim to represent the
true "essence" of their collectivity's culture and religion, and who have high
on their agenda the control of women and their behaviouras campaigns like the
forceful veiling of women by Muslim fundamentalists and the major anti-abortion
campaigns by Christian fundamentalists demonstrate'.
In addition, the notion of 'minority rights' tends to
convey, at least to some degree, offsetting arrangements granted to a minority
only partially to compensate for their loss of the zero-sum sovereignty game.
Now the foregoing comments on sovereignty and the succeeding remarks on
identity challenge this assumption. But, further, Attracta Ingram (1994) has
persuasively argued that rights should be conceived as derived, not from the
self-ownership of property but from the value of individual autonomyfrom the
capacity of all moral persons for self-government. This must include a capacity
to make reasoned judgments about one's own particular projects, and so reasoned
engagement with those of others. But if such dialogue is to be based on
reasonrather than power or appeals to traditionall individuals must have
equal entitlements to citizenship, such as in terms of freedom of expression,
and all must stand in a relationship one to another of mutuality and interdependence.
Linked to the above argument that 'minority rights' are still individualised,
this makes clear that, whatever the
relative sizes of minority and majority, the precise basket of rights
applying in any particular polity should be derived through what Ingram,
following Habermas, calls 'ideal discourse' between such equal citizens.
Multiple identities
'If you ask me what is
my native country,' wrote the playwright Odon von Horvath, 'I answer: I was
borne in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg, Vienna and Munich,
and I have a Hungarian passport; but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical
mix of old Austria-Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my
country is Hungary, my mother tongue is German.' (Mazower, 1998: 43)
Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz
(1999: 221-223) contends that an individual's identity is best understood as
comprised of various overlapping 'canopies' or 'worlds' which, together,
'express the richness of our being' and are the product of 'a lifelong process
of developing varying options and claims'. Notably, 'ethnic' and 'national
identities' need not coincide. But for some, identity is reduced to an idée fixe expressed in one 'chosen
trauma' (such as the Battle of Kosovo Plain) or 'chosen triumph' (such as the Battle
of the Boyne). The consequence of this is a 'totalism' incompatible with
pluralism, and which requires the demonisation of alternative identity
elementsand, in extremis, the
physical destruction of those who embody them through 'ethnic cleansing'.
Walker Connor argues (1994: 42, 48) that key to the
transition from A N Other ethnic group to 'nationhood' is a sense on the part
of its members that they are 'unique in a most vital sense'. But this is not
simply a sense of 'we'-hood. It is rather of us-hood: 'The conception of being unique or different requires a
referent, that is, the idea of "us" requires "them".' According to Smith
(1999), this becomes possible because the affective aspect of nationalism is
often rooted in an idea of a 'national mission and destiny', based on a belief
in 'ethnic election' which confers on the chosen 'a sense of their moral
superiority over outsiders'. Guibernau (1996: 90) concurs: 'The "other" is not
someone who makes us aware of our own particularities, someone we can learn
from, respect, live with and take as a point of reference in the construction
of our own identity. This nationalism sees in the "other" a potential or
factual enemy, but above all someone inferior.'
Ericksen (1993: 157-158) points towards an alternative
with his argument that identity need not be conceived in such a 'digital',
either-or way, in which someone is a member of X group or they are not; rather
it can be 'analogic', in which someone can be somewhat X. Most importantly, as a result, 'People may be a bit of
this and a bit of that.' Catalonia again provides a benign example. Identity
research by Moreno et al (1998) finds
a very even distribution in Catalonia of degrees of 'Spanish-ness' or
'Catalan-ness', with the largest group of respondents defining themselves as
'as much Catalan as Spanish'. They point out that Catalan nationalism has
always avoided limiting its horizon to the regional/national but has sought to
influence Spanish politics. One third of Catalonia residents are immigrants, mainly
from elsewhere in Spain, yet: 'Both collectivities seem to be interwoven in
various degrees and manifestations. Integration and tolerance are among the
main features present in Catalonia's social life.'
Müller-Fahrenholz' emphasis on identity as a diachronic
sedimentation adds a further, individual-biographical dimension.
Schleswig-Holstein offers in this regard a benign instance. Jørgen Kühl (1998:
37) contends: 'It is a fact that, for many people North and South of the
border, the individual choice of identity has never been a final or
irreversible process. People in the Danish-German border region actually do
join or leave the minoritiesnot only in theory, but in daily practice.' The
author used to have a UK passport, whereas now he bears an Irish one; no great
degree of Angst was involved in the
decision.
Such a recognition of the labile nature of identity,
of the interdependence of identities, and of the extent of individual variation
within perceived 'communities' is essential in the construction of workable
political arrangements for the resolution of ethno-nationalist conflicts.
Matters are difficult enough where such communities are, for the most part,
geographically separated and so two-state (as in the middle-east) or
autonomy-based (as in south-eastern Turkey) solutions are at least in theory
viable. Where co-existence is unavoidable, howeveras in Northern Ireland or
Bosnia-Hercegovinashared governance is essential.
The evidence of recent years of the fate of
'consociationalism' is not encouraging in this regard. Belgium is clearly a
state on the edge of break-up, amidst ever-growing Walloon-Fleming tension and
a general political culture of méfiance.
Switzerland's continuing success rests on its perhaps unique combination of
cantonisation by language-group and tempering, cross-cutting religious
cleavages. Lebanon remains viable only under Syrian tutelage. And the problems
of securing multi-ethnic administration in Northern Ireland and Bosnia need
little elaboration.
Yet consociationalism has been premised on a
pillarised conception of society, in which far from being labile,
interdependent or subject to individual choice, identities are perceived in an
essentialist fashion, separation is preferred to integration, and politics is
perceived as a process confined to élite deal-makers best subject to minimum
popular pressure. It is quite simply out of date in less deferential and more
differentiated times. In that sense, consociationalism is like black-and-white
television in an age of colour: it was a big advance over radio but it
represents obsolescent political technology today. The goal must be to set in
train political arrangements which guarantee equality of political citizenship
and allow expression of diverse identities, while allowing a collective
political subject to emerge to act on this new international stage.
Giddens' (1994: 15-17) notion of 'dialogic democracy'
encapsulates a broader and less rigid perspective. Instead of pillars either
pressing against each other with equal and opposite force or, worse, repelling
each other like like poles of a magnet, we have individual citizensnot
confined to the political sphereengaging in a process of mutual understanding
and trust-building. Of course, it is not easy, and the retreat from dialogue to
fundamentalism is always possible, but it can work: the all-too-brief coalition
between Brian Faulkner and Gerry Fitt in Northern Ireland in 1974 was a
remarkable testimony to the substitutive power of dialogue.
Giddens is right to focus on this cultural dimension
of politics: the evidence is scant that one can safely establish such
institutions in the hope that the requisite cultural change to make them work
will follow, as the fate of the Belfast agreement indicates. But clearly there
must be rules that reassure minorities that, in the political arena, the force
of argument rather than the force of numbers will prevail. Agreement that the
shared polity is a sui generis entity
which has transcended the zero-sum sovereignty gameperhaps through a written
constitutioncan defuse the underlying tension which expresses itself in
endless ethnonationalist attrition. Equality-of-citizenship provisionsperhaps
expressed in a bill of rightscan assuage fears of majority domination while
stemming minority demands for secession. And democratic proceduresperhaps a
weighted-majority requirement for controversial legislationcan militate in
favour of dialogic political relationships as the alternative to endless
deadlock.
But the neutrality of the state itself should be
protected: a democratic society is one in which any citizen, working in
association with others, may seek to paint any political colournot just orange
or green, for exampleon the palette which the state represents. Specific
identities should not be referred to in defining weighted majorities,
governments should be voluntary coalitions able to command weighted-majority
support, and the symbols of the state should be civic rather than
ethno-national. The state can thus be at once multi-national and non-national
(Cassese, 1995: 365).
Conclusion
In this paper, I have sought to outline what could be
described as a broadly 'progressive' strategy for addressing today's
ethnonationalist conflicts. The elements of it have emerged in a number of
intellectual innovations in the past decade. New distributions of power, new
provisions for equality of citizenship, and new democratic arrangements allow
of an exit from the contradiction, which has defined the 20th-century
order, between 'sovereignty' and 'self-determination'.
But it is also clear that actual policy is generally
far from so advanced. The UN, still wedded by its members in large measure to
the national-sovereignty problematic, has proved disastrously incapable of
filling the Hobbesian Sovereign role so tragically missing in Rwanda, Kosovo
and East Timor, when that was needed. Moreover, the international community, as
it has sought to establish political settlements for ethnonationalist
conflicts, has mostly groped forward with a Realpolitik
based on the existing balance of forces. This has tended to have a freezing
effect on intercommunal relationshipsthe Dayton agreement being an extreme
examplewhen what is necessary is to free them up, so that such accords (the
Belfast agreement being another) can be implemented effectively. Establishing
solid and dynamic settlements, and providing more adequate policy responses to
new eruptions of ethnonationalist conflict, requires more profound and coherent
interventions.
As we face the turn of the millennium, fin-de-siècle pessimism may be
understandable. Yet there are some reasons, if not to be cheerful, for
believing that we are at least better placed in the new century to address the
challenges of ethnonationalism. While anticipations of a 'new world order' in
the aftermath of the Wall proved overblown, elements of the international
communityinter-governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations and
associated policy-makers and academicshave begun to evolve a new paradigm, in
which the international scene is occupied by a differentiated range of sub- and
supra- as well as state actors, in which the last no longer have hard and
opaque boundaries. It is best conceived as a web of interrelationships between
overlapping nodal points, the constraints being international human-rights
conventions, international legal jurisdiction (including ad hoc tribunals and the International Criminal Court), and,
ultimately, the threat of collective military action to humanitarian purposes.
It is, it must be stressed, an architecture which is much more developed for
Europe than elsewhere in the world.
There is some evidence that the wave of
ethnonationalist violence may be on the ebb: wars in general are now declining
in numbers (Rupesinghe, 1998: 3). And globalisation, as Guibernau (1996: 129)
argues, sets in train a moral imperative, implying as it does 'an awareness
that the whole of humanity has to face a set of common problems that cannot be
solved individually'. Whether this is matched by the political will to do so
is, of course, another matter. We are a long way from being able to speak, in
terms that are not very thin, of a transnational civil society, and the perils
of intergovernmental co-ordination are evident enough.
Yet if not, the 'great lesson of the Yugoslav wars'
drawn by Silber and Little (1995: 388) will remain valid'that in the post-Cold
War world there is no collective security, no international will to protect the
weak against the strong,
that to win freedom and security for one's people requires
neither a sound argument nor a good cause but a big army'.
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