Ethnicity, Nationalism and Violence

Conflict Management, Human Rights, and Multilateral Regimes

Christian P. Scherrer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351759175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003. Meticulously documenting Intra-state violence and the responses to it from a global perspective, this volume deals with a core element of future global governance within its historical and sociological context. It provides a striking analysis of the prevention of violence and resolving conflict, elaborating on the role that key regional and international organizations (e.g. UN, OSCE, COE, OAU-AU and OSA) have or should have in the prevention of violence and terrorism, as well as in the protection of human and minority rights. The work is an invaluable addition to the collections of scholars and students in the fields of peace and conflict research, international relations, sociology, ethnic studies, international law and development research.

Part I
Ethno-Nationalist Challenge within the Nation-State

Chapter 1
The Nation-State Project: Colonial Export and ‘Mother of Disorder’

The European colonisation of the world in the last 500 years and the three waves of proliferation of capitalist production resulted—on the level of political organisation—in widespread, coercive and rapid change. This first phase of globalization was first based on raw military violence, followed by political domination and economic exploitation. Following the geopolitical changes of 1990 the new area of capitalist globalization is characterised by high dynamics in a number of world regions.

Today the globalization process is far from having achieved a degree of homogenisation and having produced the global village. Conspicuous and ongoing contradictions prove that there is no homogenous linear dynamic. It seems that an equally powerful process of fragmentation permanently counteracts the process of globalization, with both being at odds with the key political actor of modern times: the nation-state.

The emergence of ethnic and nationalist warfare started with the decolonisation after 1945. It is simply one of the most popular misconceptions to link the emergence of ethno-nationalism with the end of the Cold War. Since World War II more than 200 wars and explosions of mass violence took place. Almost all violent conflicts were fought in the Third World. The majority of contemporary violent conflicts are intra-state wars or acts of genocide. Ethnicity and the struggle against the colonial world order play a dominant role.

The Colonial Clash of Civilizations

Colonialism brought about a rigid reduction of the number and the diversity of pre-colonial political systems, in some cases 'only' an alteration of the originality and peculiarities of indigenous political systems. Such enduring systems were part of distinct social formations, today renamed civilizations:¹ irrigation-based societies with strong central states; other states based on 'slavery'; tributary and feudal systems; agricultural proto-states, and other 'traditional societies'. The latter notion has usually escaped the attention of political science.

Enduring sustainable political systems were also developed in traditional societies. This includes the type of acephalous societies that means previously stateless egalitarian societies without central organisation and dominance. So-called primitive societies co-existed peacefully with irrigation-based high cultures. Boundaries were fluid. Stateless spaces, currently rather unthinkable, posed 'security problems' but were part of normality in pre-colonial times.

The global change of this diverse structure materialised as a result of European colonial expansion, accelerated by the genesis of the modern state in the Europe, following the era of absolutism. European militarism clashed with the old civilizations of the Far East and the civilizations of the South. Resistance against European penetration and hostility took different forms. In the first phase of out-right violence the European expansion clashed with Indigenous societies, for example Spain versus American Indian or the Portuguese in Africa. The resistance of highly centralised indigenous states (Aztecs, Incas) was broken in astonishing short time while the subjugation of decentralised and acephalous societies took centuries of colonial warfare. The second phase of expansion to the West (North America), to the East (India, Island Asia, Far East), and to the South (Africa, Arabia) was less violent. Strong military resistance of established empires and kingdoms modified the agenda of the European powers. The goal of establishing trade links and spreading unequal exchange contributed to a more sophisticated agenda.

Resistance against attempts to coerce ancient state society into the colonial system of Indirect Rule necessarily took different forms. These attempts were of shorter duration (India) or remained superficial (Japan) and territorially limited (China). In the case of traditional societies, with the exception of gatherers and hunters societies, stateless societies mobilised a high degree of ongoing, armed resistance against intruders of all types, be it colonial powers, new states or settlers.²

Irrigation-based societies produced the most stable states characterised by sustainable development. Both, the mode of production as well as the administrative structure of the state and the cultural ideological scope, were determined by the logic of constructing large irrigation systems (mainly for wet rise agriculture). The construction of such systems is a regional or district activity. Large-scale public works need a strong central state as managing instance. Public works such as irrigation constituted a state-owned managerial and true form of political economy.³

Irrigation-based states developed a system of regulatory mechanisms for securing the long-term reproduction of 'the entire system'. Strong internal orientation was predominant and internal conflict settlement was fairly well established. Other types of political systems (such as slave-based societies, despotic or feudal states) were more aggressive and therefore unstable.

Traditional unilinear hypotheses of the development of regional and global society formations reflect, in no way, the richness in form and diversity of formerly autonomous socio-political systems.⁴ Unilinear development became realised through colonial capitalist expansion, and it is an illusion that there were any 'white spots' on the map of the colonial expansion.

The 'historic revenge' of the colonised, feared by Huntington and other authors, who remain slaves of the military thinking and the mentality of the Cold War, shall materialise in the 21st century.⁵ It already showed its first expressions. However this 'revenge' came in a very different form as expected in the West. On the one side the September 11 attack on America was perceived as a 'clash of civilizations' or as an outright challenge for 'civilization' as such, with a US president calling for a new 'crusade' against Islamists and terrorists. On the other side, as a peaceful but powerful challenge, capitalist production forces as well as new sophisticated technologies and the advancement of science were rapidly developed in several East Asian countries. And they were long used more efficiently, with much innovation and in a so far less war-oriented way (arguably with the exception of Japan until 1945) as in Europe and its former settler colonies earlier.

The European Idea of the Nation-State and its Ambivalence

At the birth of the modern state several elements were constitutive: the absolutist state and the radical break with the monarchic clerical world. This became possible with the revolution in philosophy (during the era of enlightenment) and the national movement of the bourgeoisie with its idea of a nation state. Both, the impetus of revolutionary emancipation and Hobbesian pessimism were midwives of the project of modernism. The European idea of the 'nation state' proved to be an ambitious and not very peaceful endeavour.

Conditions for the Making of Nation-States

Since the French revolution the nation has been seen as a horizontal relationship of brotherhood (fraternity in liberty and equality). This important element may explain why masses of people were ready to die in the name of their nation.⁶ Even in Europe itself several notable deviations from above seven preconditions were occurring. This also concerns the way ethno-national unification processes have been structured. My key hypothesis is that for most conditions for the idea of the nation-state there was no correspondent adequate base outside of Europe. There were a series of (pre-) conditions for the making of nation-states:

1. A nation with potentially unified ethnic base
2. An often violent process of unification, which results in ethno-cultural homogenisation
3. A demarcated and limited territory
4. Ideally geographical and ethnic boundaries are congruent
5. A national bourgeoisie and a political will to struggle for so-called national interests (allegedly not identical with class interests)
6. The claim of national sovereignty, as usage of the collective key principle of freedom, directed against the predominance of supra-national religious beliefs
7. The element of formal equality of all members of an imagined nation, independent of real equity and divorced from the exploitation of farmers and workers.

The concept of the nation has shown fairly early its ambivalence as a political category. During the area of enlightenment the nation was seen as a state erecting community of people. The French revolution brought as a result the constitution of a class, the Thiers État, as a nation. Further development sprung from the nation to the Unity State. All so-called back-ward local identities could only be violently subjugated to the hegemony of the emerging nation state. In some areas violent resistance was the order of the day. In the rural region of the Vendée for instance a rebellion of the lower gentry against the revolution (having its base among the urban sectors of the French society) was violently repressed. The Vendée-syndrome but was positively turned upside down: the nation emerges in violent struggles. The French nation came into being under the influence of revolutionary changes resulting from its opposing parts, a violent process that is until today not a closed process (as violent resistance in Corsica, civil resistance in Brittany and cultural resurgence in the South of France might show).

The European nationalism of the 19th century was the political expression of the emerging bourgeoisie and the liberal citizen movements. Its degeneration into national chauvinism turned Europe into killing fields. In a global perspective Europe was the main theatre of wars since 1500.⁷ Europe accounts for two third of all war-related victims. In total close to hundred million people died in European 'tribal wars' or became victims of so-called 'ethnic cleansing'.

The Career of an Export Product

Regarding the impact of the idea of nation state on the political organisation and statehood elsewhere we may only speak of in the framework of asymmetrical relationships of power. The proliferation of stereotypical integration forms of the modern nation state outside Europe began with military force and was imposed by violent means. The definition of the political realm was done under condition of exclusion or with marginal participation of educational elites of the subjected society societies.

The new states of the colonised World were subsequently enlarging the exclusive club of sovereign states. From the mid 19th century the new states of Latin America became part of the sovereign states, followed by some by a few nominally socialist states of the Second World (from 1917 onwards) and followed in the mid 20th century by the Afro-Asiatic states of the Third World. These cases of state building do not exclude latecomers. The unity states in Germany and Italy only were only erected after the first wave of Latin American states joining the club. No state, not even the huge Chinese Empire, could sustain totally outside of these processes of colonial subjugation and separation of the world.⁸ The first capitalist globalization, the European colonial expansion, did not succeed to penetrate as deep into the subjected societies of Asia and Africa as in the Americas. Colonialism failed to end the existence of several social formations. However, it succeeded in modifying indigenous forms of statehood.

In all rule the colonisers and the large colonial companies had no interest in a total control as long as the foreign economies could the streamlined according to their economic interest, their claim of sovereignty and colonial mastery. Reflecting the different conditions of the genesis of modern statehood in Europe and its resulting immediate consequences for the Colonial World, different colonial trajectories can be distinguished.

Diverse political systems of subjected nations and nationalities were the reason for structurally different forms of resistance against military penetration by European powers:

• Formerly acephalous societies had a leading role in anti-colonial movements (compare the works of Amilcar Cabral) and continued to resist in a bitter and ongoing struggle against assertions by post-colonial states.
• Transitional societies often revolted in anarchic resistance.
• Societies with relatively weak states (e.g., sacred kingdoms) organised resistance if a strongman (chief, mtemi or king) or a spiritual leader gave the order.
• Other historic types of statehood produced different forms of resistance that was ranking from the sustained resistance of ethnically almost homogeneous, irrigation-based societies of Eastern Asia against foreign intruders, as in China, Japan and Vietnam, to the defenceless collapse of ethnically heterogeneous tributary systems, as in Mexico and Peru.

One of the most revealing observations in my research into ethnonationalism has been the repeated indication of massive support for (or the actual creation of) ethnic resistance-movements by members of previously stateless societies. It is my thesis that the dichotomy between (formerly) acephalous and centrally organized peoples persists. The differing capacities for opposition of acephalous and centrally organized peoples are empirically on solid basis. It manifests itself in a much greater participation in ethno-national movements and anti-regime struggles by, for example, members of segmentary pastoral societies in Africa, acephalous Hill Tribes in South-East Asia, or indigenous egalitarian-communitarian communities in America, than in societies with a centralized system of rule either in the more restricted region concerned or in the same country. The resistance of acephalous nations, as contrasted with the collaboration of chiefs and kings, is illustrated by the struggle of the Ogoni in Nigeria and of the Konkomba in Ghana.⁹

Rigidly centralised state societies, especially those with far reaching ethnical homogeneity and long state traditions, staged successful re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• The Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• Introduction: Ethno-nationalism in the International System
• PART I: ETHNO-NATIONALIST CHALLENGE WITHIN THE NATION-STATE
• PART II: RESPONSES OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
• Summary
• References and Bibliographical Sources
• Appendices
• Abstracts of Related Books
• Index