Yes. Different groups have different interests and they will inevitably compete with each for scarce resources such as land and water and power.
My essay is not agenda-driven or prescriptive. It is meant to suggest that the power of ethnic nationalism in the twentieth century has been greater than is generally recognized and that
the probability of its ongoing global impact is greater than is generally appreciated. I argue that Americans often have a distorted sense of substantial areas of the world because they
tend to generalize on the basis of their own national experience or, rather, a truncated and idealized version of that experience. Of course, ethnicity (and its conceptual cousin, race) has long played a role in American life and continues to do so, as reflected in everything from residential patterns to voting behavior.
But by and large, ethnic identification in the United States tends to erode across generations, and the notion that different ethnic groups ought to have their own political entities is marginal. (Voting districts drawn along racial lines echo conceptions of ethnic nationalism. And the Chicano vision of the reconstitution of Aztlán — a lost nation of indigenous Americans said to include Mexico and much oF the American Southwest — would qualify as ethnonationalist but seems to have limited appeal.) Thus, Americans have a hard time imagining the intensity of the desire that many ethnic groups abroad have for a polity of their own or the determination of others to maintain the ethnic structure of existing
polities. If Poles and Ukrainians get along tolerably well in Chicago, why not Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen in Kirkuk?
I further argue that this misperception also occurs among educated western Europeans, who project the cooperative and pacific model of the EU onto the rest of the world while losing sight of the history of ethnic disaggregation that seems to have served as a precondition for the comity of contemporary Europe. The propensity to impose on the rest of the world one’s own categories and idealized conceptions of one’s historical and current experiences leads to a kind of misleading universality, apt to result in misunderstanding and miscalculation.
There are categories of self-definition that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable to some people’s sensibilities — including ethnonational identity, caste (common in India), or tribe (common in
much of Africa and the Muslim world). But the fact that some people may find these categories unreal (since they know that beneath the skin humans are ultimately the same: put them in a room together with a game to play, and see how little they differ) does not
make them any less real to those who do believe in them.
The problem of taking seriously the diverse ways in which people in different parts of the world define themselves is exacerbated by the universalizing and scientistic pretensions of some streams of academic political science. “Scientism” refers to the endeavor to apply the methods and criteria of the natural sciences to all realms of human experience — although for some they are inappropriate. This includes the effort to explain all phenomena with simplified theories of human motivation and the attempt to replicate the hard sciences by using laboratory conditions to study political science. History provides a useful source of data with which to study the range and complexity of human behavior. It is a highly imperfect
laboratory, where both the data and their interpretation are influenced by the methodological and ideological predispositions of the investigator. But it is often superior to the alternative: apparently scientific forms of explanation.
My claim is not that the violence of the European experience will repeat itself but a more modest one: that ethnic tensions are likely to be exacerbated, rather than eliminated, by the occurrence of similar processes of modernization in other parts of the world. Contrary to what James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein claim, nowhere do I argue that “ethnic divisions inevitably generate violence.” And while I quoted Churchill, I did not endorse his views as a general policy prescription.
What I actually wrote, toward the end of my article, was this: “Sometimes, demands for ethnic autonomy or self-determination can be met within an existing state…. But such arrangements remain precarious and are subject to recurrent renegotiation. In the
developing world, accordingly, where states are more recent creations and where the borders often cut across ethnic boundaries, there is likely to be further ethnic disaggregation and communal conflict. And as scholars such as Chaim Kaufmann have noted, once ethnic antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within a single polity becomes far more difficult.
“… When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even undesirable.
“… Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts.”
Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner, and Weinstein continue their misrepresentations by claiming that I attribute ethnic tension merely to “enduring propensities of the human spirit”; in fact, I attribute ethnic tension to “some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation.” My explanation, drawn largely from the sociologist Ernest Gellner, is actually echoed by the four co-authors, albeit in a different
vocabulary, when they write that members of the same ethnic group tend to come together because “they speak the same language, have access to the same types of information, and share social networks.” As so often happens in the social sciences, here is an attempt at
product differentiation through rebranding — recasting known insights in a new vocabulary.
More novel is the authors’ belief that their quasi-scientific experiments in Uganda provide useful new avenues for public policy. They say that their game-playing experiments provide insights as to how the diverse ethnic actors would behave when freed of the social and political contexts in which their actions are known to others. Perhaps, but it is precisely the nature of the real world that this would never be the case.
Moreover, their conclusion that the problem lies in a weak institutional environment characterized by an “absence of functional and impartial state institutions” is both true and misleading, for it fails to consider that the very multiplicity of ethnicities is among the major sources of this institutional environment. A reading of Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease — about the plight of an idealistic young civil servant who tries to embody the
ethos of impartiality in a setting in which such norms are at odds with the understanding of his co-ethnics, who regard his bureaucratic position as a form of group property — would
cast more light on the situation than hundreds of experimental games.
This is not the place for a full critique of the much-cited calculations of Fearon and Laitin on the incidence of interethnic violence in Africa from 1960 to 1979. If one lives in a
neighborhood where three in a thousand interactions result in violence and one has three interactions per day, one is violently attacked only three times a year. But is that a safe neighborhood or a dangerous one? The assertion that “with few exceptions, African state boundaries today look just as they did in 1960” is also both true and misleading. It attests as much to the ability of the dominant ethnic coalitions to suppress attempts at rebellion as to the absence of ethnic conflict.
The Biafran War (1967-70) counts as only one incident of interethnic violence in Fearon and Laitin’s data and resulted in no change of borders. The million or so lives lost do not register in their calculations. Had Fearon and Laitin repeated their computations for the years since 1979, the murder of some 800,000 Rwandans (mostly Tutsis) would also have appeared as a matter of small statistical consequence.
The claim by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein that the ethnonationalist ideal of a separate state for each cultural unit has been a source of instability is true or, at least, a half-truth. That is what a good part of my article is about. But the fact that ethnonationalism is destabilizing has not diminished its appeal or impact. The other half-truth is that the fulfillment of the ethnonationalist ideal has had a stabilizing effect, at least for large groups.
However, as my article notes and as Rosecrance and Stein emphasize, not every ethnonational aspiration can be realized, and ethnonational aspirations for autonomy and self-determination can be realized within larger political units through federalism — the
devolution of power and income to subnational units. As such, federalism represents a form of “semi-partition,” as the political scientist Donald Horowitz has noted. It has the very real advantage of permitting participation in larger political and economic units. But, as Horowitz has also noted, “federalism is not cheap. It involves duplication of facilities, functions, personnel and infrastructure” and often entails jurisdictional disputes. Moreover, “states that could benefit from federalism typically come to that realization too late, usually after conflict has intensified.”
Rosecrance and Stein may be right that a greater pool of income can alleviate ethnonational aspirations. But it is worth recalling that the governments in a position to distribute sums equivalent to 50 percent of their GDPs are in Europe, whereas the ethnic groups in potential conflict are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where there is less wealth and so less GDP available for redistribution. Moreover, massive government redistribution through taxation
may itself inhibit economic growth or make capturing the state apparatus too enticing a prize compared with other pursuits.
Various claims by Rosecrance and Stein are questionable, if not clearly mistaken. The authors assert that mass emigration can serve as an “alternative to secession when the home government does not sufficiently mitigate economic disparities.” First, this assumes
that all discontents are ultimately expressions of individually conceived economic interest, a radical simplification of human motivation that ignores the desire of some people to share a
common culture and their perception that protecting that culture requires political autonomy.
For example, throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, French Canadians emigrated from Canada to the United States, where over time they assimilated into the larger population. Québecois nationalism represents a rejection of that path.
Second, the authors’ emigration-as-safety-valve strategy ignores the fact that in contrast to the earlier era of globalization (from the late nineteenth century through World War I), the current era of globalization is characterized by governments better able and more inclined to police their borders and, hence, by the comparatively limited mobility of people across national borders. Moreover, discontent in the relatively wealthy states of the West with some
recent streams of immigration has already led to pressures for governments to exercise greater control over the movement of people from particular regions. It is far from clear that emigration from the Maghreb to France, for example, will be allowed to continue indefinitely.
Rosecrance and Stein’s assertion that a new era of bigness in international economic affairs is here is truer than the implications they draw from it. The economic advantages of the
division of labor do expand with the extent of the market, as Adam Smith explained over two centuries ago. But it is simply not true that “to keep up, states have to get bigger.” States can negotiate treaties and other forms of association that allow for freer international trade. As the authors note in passing, smaller nations have opted for inclusion in transnational markets and have often prospered as a result.
In short, Rosecrance and Stein assume that a rational economic calculus governs international activity. This simplification of human motivation has the advantage of methodological elegance. But their predictions conflate three very different circumstances:
what global actors would do if they rationally calculated their utilities based on a set of preferences much like those of American professors of political science; what global actors would do if they rationally calculated their utilities based on their actual preferences, which may diverge substantially from those of American political scientists; and what may actually happen given the unlikelihood that either American political scientists or global actors would rationally calculate their utilities. That is to say, Rosecrance and Stein have purchased methodological elegance at the expense of explanatory power by radically reducing the range of relevant motivations and interactions.
For a historian, the authors’ assertion that “international economics increasingly dwarfs politics” — like so much of their response to my essay — is eerily resonant of a British
bestseller of a century ago. In 1910, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, which explained on economic grounds why an extended war between great powers was impossible under the contemporary economic conditions. His argument was logically compelling but wrong. In 1933, Angell published a new edition of his book, in which he suggested that nations could not enrich themselves by conquering their neighbors and that war was therefore futile. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his message seems not to have reached all the relevant parties. I fear that the predictions of Rosecrance and
Stein about the future of ethnic nationalism will meet the same fate.
Still, Rosecrance and Stein do raise an important issue that I did not explore in my article: the question of external recognition and support for potential new states. What ought to be the response by external countries, such as the United States, to ethnonationalist claims for independence? If one takes seriously the forces leading to the enduring power of ethnonationalism — rather than dismissing them as archaic, illusory, or subject to elimination by good governance conjured out of the blue — the implications for policy are by no means self-evident.
I leave aside the purely legal and philosophical issues, since the “right” to self-determination, like so many others, often conflicts with other purported rights. Representatives of existing states are strongly disposed against the redrawing of borders and the formation of new states. They see self-interest in maintaining the international status quo, which may or may not be justified by prudence. To recognize that national self-determination does provide satisfactions of its own and may well result in viable states is not to say that the endless creation of new states is either viable or desirable. Yet there are dangers both in supporting ethnonationalist claims and in denying them prematurely.
One danger of the international recognition of insurgent ethnonationalist claims to sovereignty is that it may lead to unilateral secession (as in the recent case of Kosovo) as
opposed to mutually agreed separation. Secession without ethnic partition usually means that the new political entity will include a substantial minority of people whose co-ethnics dominate the state from which the new state has seceded. This provides a ready source for new ethnic tensions within the new state and international tensions between the new state and the old. Mutually agreed partition that separates the rival ethnic groups may be preferable in order to minimize the likelihood of future conflict. Another danger of a greater international willingness to recognize ethnonationalist movements is that it may create an incentive for the governments of existing countries to violently crush incipient ethnic political movements before they can organize.
There are perils, however, in a blanket refusal of the international community to recognize the claims of legitimate ethnonationalist movements. For having deemed secession an impossibility, governments may feel no incentive to respond to the desire of ethnic groups for
greater power and self-determination within the confines of the current states. To recognize the enduring power of ethnic nationalism is not to support it or provide a ready recipe for
action but to offer a more realistic appreciation of the dilemmas that will continue to arise in the twenty-first century.
