The Politics of National Minority Participation in Post-communist Societies: State-building, Democracy and Ethnic Mobilization

State-building, Democracy and Ethnic Mobilization

Jonathan Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317455295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

With the upsurge of nationalist sentiment in post-communist societies, the problem of political rights for ethnic minorities became a dangerous flashpoint. The introduction of electoral competition, the rewriting of constitutions, the breakup of federations, the weakness of civic institutions, and the social and economic dislocations associated with marketization have all contributed to the salience of majority-minority relations. This collection systematically analyzes different models of minority politics in Eastern Europe, in an effort to understand why tensions are manageable in some contexts, uncontainable in others. Anchoring the volume are essays by Carlos Flores Juberias on electoral systems, and Janusz Bugajski on national minority parties. Six case studies examine the interaction of different types of institutional arrangements (which structure political participation) and different demographic conditions (ethnic balances and territorial concentrations) in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania. Framing these studies are overviews by the editors and by Jack Snyder.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1

National Minorities and Political Development in Post-Communist Europe

Jonathan P. Stein

Over the past decade, the assertion of ethnic identity has dominated much of the politics of post-communist central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. During the period of Soviet state-building and later during the Cold War, this region, extremely diverse ethnically both within and across neighboring states, was marked by a rigid channeling of political participation that attempted uniformly to suppress officially unsanctioned demands and modes of expression, including those emerging from ethnic cleavages. With the collapse of communism, however, there has been a dramatic expansion of distinctively ethnically-focused political action, ranging from ethnic voting to ethnic cleansing. Clearly, the recognition, cultivation, and assertion of ethnicity is now unbound from the strictures of the recent past.

But exactly in what sense is the high salience of ethnic group identities and their claims upon the state a response to the demise of communism? On one level, ethnicity “unbound” seems to be in keeping with conventional wisdom. Observers often assume that the mobilization of ethnicity as the primary cleavage of post-communist social and political conflict is inevitable, a thesis that comes in both vulgar and analytically more sophisticated variants. In its vulgar form, communist repression is seen as having placed latent ethnic antagonisms in a “deep freeze.” According to this view, significant portions of the regions populations managed covertly to bear their ethnic identities—intact, unaffected, and primary—across two or more generations, resolved and prepared to seize the first available opportunity to settle old accounts with ethnic foes. Thus, the post-communist “thaw” reactivated a host of dormant group conflicts, border disputes, and primordial or ancient “tribal” hatreds.¹

Stated in such a reductionist manner, this view has been widely challenged by scholars who locate the “necessity” of post-communist ethnopolitics in the collapse or weakening of states whose stability depended on the political monopoly of a single party. To be sure, historical grievances may contribute to shaping the form ethnopolitics assumes.² Yet ethnic categories provide an attractive template for building new states or strengthening old ones not because they express some underlying condition sub specie aeternitatis, but because they are relatively fixed and are thus easily identifiable by actors within emerging polities and potential challengers who have been excluded from them. One need not have well-developed state institutions to frame the distinction between friend and foe or collective self and other; in their absence, “groupness” itself becomes a highly valued resource, the more so as individuals perceive increasing threats to their economic and physical security. Thus, ethnopolitics fills the ideological and institutional vacuum left by the collapse of the party-state.³

Clearly, there is much to recommend focusing on the structural context of nation-state building, for in many respects, the dynamics of the regions ethnic conflicts are similar to those found in the postcolonial developing world, which have themselves exhibited remarkable similarities.⁴ Recognition of these similarities is reflected in renewed attention to the influence of the international environment on ethnic conflict within states, particularly the relational dynamic between ethnic minorities, their external homelands (or “kin states”), and the “home states” in which they reside.⁵ Such similarities also form the premise for efforts to come to grips with the successes and failures of (non) intervention by intergovernmental organizations and other interstate actors.⁶ All of this suggests that ethnic conflicts, while informed by the past, are more usefully thought of as eminently rational political struggles over the future.⁷

This volume shares many of the assumptions and analytical foci of the rationalist approach to ethnopolitics, recognizing that it is precisely the primordial concern with communal solidarity, the preservation and expression of collective identity, and the allocation of group prestige that provides politicized ethnicity with its profound mobilizational power and gives competing claims their zero-sum character.⁸ Indeed, because rational and primordial motivations usually operate simultaneously within ethnic communities, and because the state is the primary locus of the material and symbolic power for which they strive, there often seem to be precious few brakes on ethnicity’s momentum as a political force. In the absence of external hegemony, internally weak multi-national states, such as those that emerged from communism, face the threat of disintegration into smaller parts, only to produce unstable successor states that are themselves wracked by ethnonational conflict. Ethnicity “unbound” can seem to resemble a machine that goes of itself, fueled by the dismal Hobbesian logic of a culturally homogenizing war of all against all.

But from the perspective of this volumes contributors, ethnicity “unbound” connotes something quite different, for its contemporary political importance in much of the region, while undeniably conditioned by structural factors, has been far from inevitable and uniform. Rather, given the numerous ways in which political participation and contestation have been organized, the relative salience of ethnic cleavages and the consequences of their mobilization require a good deal of explanation. Moreover, ethnic categories, even those operative in the regions most heated pairings of ethnic majorities and minorities, are often more malleable than many scholarly observers and policymakers recognize. Indeed, as the first decade of post-communism comes to a close, it is not at all obvious that ethnic identity must or will remain among the central motive forces of social and political conflict. On the contrary, perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from this volume is that ethnicity, as it has functioned in post-communist politics, is best considered “unbound” by explanations that are all too often freighted with teleological assumptions.

The varied contours of ethnopolitics in post-communist Europe require a conception of ethnic conflict that is not restricted to organized inter-communal violence. In fact, notwithstanding the widespread attention it has received as human tragedy or international security threat, and despite the extremely high stakes for national minorities implied by the formation of 22 new states in post-communist Europe and the former Soviet Union, inter-ethnic violence has remained exceedingly rare.⁹ This does not mean that ethnic relations within these states are typically harmonious or that cultural heterogeneity has not significantly affected their ability to consolidate democratic regimes and develop the institutional coherence required for urgent tasks such as economic reform. It is no accident that of the five post-communist countries invited in July 1997 by the European Union to begin “fast-track” accession negotiations, four—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia—most closely approximate the nationalist ideal of congruent ethnic and political boundaries, while the fifth (Estonia) achieved a similar result at independence through the proxy of ethnically exclusive citizenship.¹⁰

Organized, and especially militarized, violent ethnic conflict is often sufficient to undermine a state’s efficacy, if not its viability, but it is not necessary to such an outcome, as the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia most plainly demonstrates. Ethnic conflict is therefore best defined as describing a broad range of circumstances in which different ethnic groups inhabiting the same state’s territory maintain antithetical goals regarding the degree of public recognition and autonomy accorded to them by the political system. Thus understood, differences in the determinants, degree, and form of conflict, and in the ability of domestic and international actors to manage it, can more readily be identified and analyzed. At the same time, and of equal importance to scholars and policy makers concerned with the prospects for democratic consolidation in the region, the contributors to this volume collectively attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the complicated interplay between ethnic conflict and post-communist regime transition.

The chapters include a comparative analysis of post-communist electoral systems, an examination of nationalist ethnic majority parties, five country-specific case-studies, an exploration of the politics of the region’s Roma population, and a concluding chapter that evaluates options for ethnic conflict management by domestic- and international-level actors. The focus of these studies is limited in two important ways. First, and most obviously, the volume’s geographic scope is largely contained to post-communist Europe and the Baltic successor states of the former Soviet Union. The decision to forgo treatment of the extremely complex ethnopolitics within what is now the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) reflects not only a pragmatic concern with what a single volume can feasibly achieve, but also the marked gap in political development within the post-communist world. Compared with central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states, the CIS is uniformly characterized by far lower state institutional capacity, dramatically poorer democratic performance, higher susceptibility to external threats, and weaker receptiveness to western influence.¹¹ As James Pettifer’s chapter demonstrates, some of these distinctive macro-political features have played a central role in shaping ethnic relations also in Albania.

Similarly, while western Europe is clearly experiencing an ethnic “revival” as it accelerates simultaneous processes of integration and regionalization,¹² the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict in the East are sufficiently distinctive to merit separate attention. The regions pre-communist history, the legacy of communist rule, and the vagaries of the exceptionally uncertain and fluid post-communist context all caution against a continent-wide analysis, at least until the politics of ethnicity in central and eastern Europe, like the regions political regimes more broadly, exhibit more settled patterns that are better understood.

Second, the country case studies focus almost exclusively on political interactions between ethnic majorities and the largest of each country’s ethnic minorities, despite the presence in each of these states of other ethnic minorities of varying sizes. The rationale for this is not an ethnic minority’s size, however, but rather its ‘ ethnicness,” that is, the degree of its consciousness as a distinct collectivity and the extent of its political organization to maintain itself as such. It is politically conscious and organized ethnic minorities’ demands concerning past and present treatment, their mobilization within or against the political system to realize these demands, and the political system’s response to this mobilization that are of most serious consequence both domestically and internationally. In short, these are the ethnic minorities whose modes of political participation shape the establishment of either civic and inclusive or ethnically defined and exclusive polities.

The remainder of this introduction examines several themes that emerge in the individual chapters and attempts to situate them within current theorizing about ethnicity and post-communist political change, occasionally referring to cases from the region that are not included among the country studies. An important caveat is in order, however. While there are many common factors shaping post-communist ethnopolitics, the manner in which they operate is often difficult to tease out. In some cases, they seem to fuel or exacerbate ethnic conflict, while in others they appear to reflect or be caused by ethnic conflict itself. A la Tocqueville, indirect effects often seem more important than direct effects, and dependent and independent variables are frequently difficult to distinguish.¹³ It may be helpful, therefore, to think of these relationships in terms of a process of structuration in which political institutions established by a set of agents affect social attitudes and identities, which in turn potentially lead to further institutional change.¹⁴ Above all, the variations on the themes discussed below point to the contemporary fluidity of political outcomes and the explanatory and predictive limitations analysts must confront. While t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Politics Ethnic Majorities Make
• Part III: The Politics of Mobilization Against the Nation-State
• Part IV: The Ethnopolitics of Weak States and Nations
• Part V: The Politics of Declining
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Index