Ethnic Groups in Motion

Economic Competition and Migration in Multi-Ethnic States

Milica Z. Bookman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136342677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title focuses on one aspect of migration, namely its ethnic competition. Rather than observe population movements in general, the study is limited to the movements of specific ethnic groups. It explores the role played by ethnicity in determining which groups move and which groups stay.

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Introduction: Interethnic Competition, Economic Change, and Labor Migration

Over the last decade three trends pertaining to interethnic competition, economic change, and population movements have become visible across the world. First, there has been a marked increase in interethnic competition resulting in open and violent conflict. Indeed, the number, intensity, and violence of interethnic struggles within states have increased. As noted in the preface, most of the world’s recent conflicts have taken place within borders and among different ethnic or religious groups.¹ The global extent of interethnic turmoil has been pointed out by Helman and Ratner, who claim that

from Haiti in the western hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia, from Somalia, Sudan and Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in southeast Asia, a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation-state, utterly incapable of maintaining itself as a member of the international community … those states descend into violence and anarchy, imperiling their own citizens and threatening their neighbors through refugee flows, political instability and random warfare.²

Many ethnic groups in multiethnic states are taking their frustrations one step further, demanding secession from their unions at unprecedented rates. Indeed, the 1990s came to resemble two other periods in their century of active secessionist activity, namely the aftermath of the First World War and the independence movements of Africa and Asia that gained momentum in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the 1990s, no longer restrained by a Cold War polarization and encouraged by the winds of rapid overall change, subnational groups are seeking to free themselves from central authorities and have created dramatic changes in national boundaries.

Second, there has been an increase in the variety and pervasiveness of economic changes that countries have experienced. In some places, very rapid rates of economic growth and sustained periods of prosperity were experienced while in others there were precipitous declines in national income. Some countries experienced a transformation of their economic systems from communism to capitalism while others replaced economy-wide public sector involvement with deregulation, privatization, and price liberalization. In some countries, peace brought about an economic rebirth while in others wars devastated the economic infrastructure. International sanctions and boundary changes affected rates of growth as well as the nature of growth. Moreover, all these economic changes occurred against a background of (a) the changing division of labor within the global economy, (b) the structural transformation of domestic economies during modern economic growth, and (c) a widespread tendency away from authoritarian rule and an embracing of democracy of the kind that Huntington described as the ‘third wave’.³

Third, the increase in population movements across the globe has been dramatic and overwhelming, leading scholars to refer to the 1990s as the ‘age of migration’.⁴ Widespread famines and environmental disasters are causing unprecedented numbers of refugees to relocate; wars and secessions are inducing voluntary and involuntary migrations as people of varying ethnic groups adjust to new leaders and new borders; differences in human capital needs are causing workers to relocate voluntarily in order to maximize their employment options; wage differentials are attracting workers from low income to high income regions; and movements of enterprises in search of profit maximization induce workers to follow.

Interethnic competitions, economic change, and migration are three ongoing processes that, although they are discussed separately in this chapter, interact in very important ways. The theoretical underpinnings of their interrelationships are presented below.

DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS

Some terms used in this book need clarification since there is little agreement about them in the literature. The introduction of these terms serves merely to describe how they are used in the text, rather than to offer a definitive explanation or resolve some outstanding contradictions in the literature.

Ethnicity, Nations, and Nationalism

Ever since Vilfredo Pareto said that the term ethnic is one of the vaguest known to sociology,⁵ research has attempted to clarify it. According to Anthony Smith, an ethnic group is composed of a people that share a cultural bond and that perceive themselves to share a common origin.⁶ While Brock’s definition of an ethnic group is perhaps the most apropos this time (he defines an ethnic group as a people united by a common dislike of their neighbors and a common myth of their origin⁷), it is Smith’s definition that will be used in this study.⁸ Moreover, ethnic affiliation is viewed as flexible and in some instances transitory, underscoring that ethnicity is neither primordial nor immutable. This dynamic view is based on evidence of changing ethnic affiliations from across the globe.⁹

A nation differs from an ethnic group insofar as it refers to a group of people who share culture, history and usually language, in a specific territory, and who give political expression to this common identity. (It is noted that confusion shrouds this term because nation and state are sometimes used synonymously. For the purposes of this study, state and nation are not interchangeable. A state is a political term that connotes a country.) According to Smith, a nation is ‘a body of citizens bound by shared memories and a common culture, occupying a compact territory with a unified economy and identical rights and duties’.¹⁰ A nation is therefore a wider concept than an ethnic group.¹¹ Moreover, it de facto carries with it an association with rank and status: the status of a nation is perceived to be the highest order in the ranking of peoples.¹²

The term nation underlies the concept of nationalism, a phenomenon that has received much attention in the literature. While its dictionary definition is simply ‘the devotion to one’s nation; patriotism or chauvinism’,¹³ it does in fact connote more, embodying culture, ethnicity, and language. According to Smith, nationalism is ‘a doctrine of autonomy, unity and identity, whose members conceive it to be an actual or potential nation’.¹⁴ Just as the term nation is submerged in contradictory terminology, so too is the term nationalism. Connor has attempted to rectify the semantic sources of misunderstanding by clarifying words: a sloppy use of the term nationalism connotes loyalty to the state. It is, in fact, loyalty to the nation.¹⁵ Kellas’s definition takes nationalism one step further by claiming that it is ‘both an ideology and a form of behavior’.¹⁶ That extension underscores its political character, which is clearly identified by Brass, who claimed that ‘nationalism is a political movement by definition’.¹⁷

The term nation also underlies the term nation-state, in which national and political borders coincide. According to Ra’anan, the term refers to ‘a polity whose territorial and juridical frontiers coincide with the ethnic boundaries of the national entity with which that state is identified, frequently by its very name’.¹⁸ Most countries of the world are not nation-states.¹⁹ Indeed, a study by Connor found that of a total of 132 contemporary states, only 12 are ethnically homogeneous.²⁰

The debate pertaining to the relationship between race and ethnicity is extensive and largely irrelevant for the purposes of this book. Race is the distinguishing feature among peoples in some population classifications. Suffice it to say that while race emphasizes physical properties and biological heredity, ethnicity emphasizes social organization and cultural characteristics. Racism is the ideology associated with race as nationalism is the ideology associated with nations.

The question of how to classify and define peoples remains unresolved and continues to dominate debates on ethnicity and nationalism. Possible categories abound, such as ethnicity, race, language and so forth, and despite their overlap and imprecision, they serve to group populations across the globe. For the sake of simplicity and convenience, in this study ethnicity is referred to as the distinguishing characteristic even though it is not universally applicable. Indeed, sometimes race is the crucial distinguishing characteristic (as in South Africa) or it is language (as in Canada) or religion (as in Bosnia). Ethnicity is, therefore, used in the text as an umbrella term that includes race, religion, language, nation, as the case may be. In that sense, this study heeds the 1997 proposal of the American Association of Anthropologists, suggesting the US government use ethnic categories in federal data to reflect the diversity of the population and to phase out the use of race which is a concept that has no scientific justification in human biology.²¹ Olzak, in her study of competition and ethnic conflict, says that ‘since ethnicity is an outcome of boundary creation and maintenance, there is no obstacle to treating race as a special case of an ethnic boundary, one that is believed to be correlated with inherited biotic characteristics. Hereafter, the term ethnicity refers to both racial and ethnic boundaries, unless otherwise qualified’.²² Finally, Van den Berghe also made a convincing argument for using ethnicity as an umbrella term: ‘While I still think that the greater rigidity and invidiousness of racial, as distinct from cultural distinctions makes for qualitatively different situation, both race and ethnicity share the basic common element of being defined by descent, real or putative. Therefore, I now tend to see race as a special case of ethnicity.’²³

Labor and Migration

Labor migration has been studied by a variety of social scientists. Demographers have the longest record, with their studies of population movements and the resulting transformation of the demographic structure of societies. Economists joined in because of their concern with the movement of labor and its relationship to economic growth and development. Sociologists, psychologists, industrial analysts, and marriage specialists all looked at family issues relating to work and geographical mobility. Regional scientists studied population movements as they related to location of industry and economic activity. Migration is a field of study within anthropology, geography, political science, history, and international law. The research in all these disciplines, bountiful albeit often unrelated across disciplines, has yielded some clarity in definitions and concepts pertaining to the geographical mobility of labor.²⁴ Those relevant for this study are described below.

In Western culture there was a time when all work was for survival of the household unit and took place in the home and its immediate vicinity. Before specialization and the complex division of labor became widespread, simple economic systems focused on subsistence and on the short term, relying on the ideology of self-sufficiency and the practice of minimal barter arrangements. Similarly, in traditional societies today, the lack of complexity in economic relations underlies the lack of separation between work and home. Over time, with increasing complexity and an enlarged perimeter of economic activity, work inched away from the home, especially for men. The divergence between the geographical location of home and work culminated in industrial and post-industrial societies in which the demands of a growing economy, the individual pressure for economic adaptability and survival, an increasing cultural acceptance of geographical mobility as an economic fact of life, and an accommodating transportation system, enabled large scale labor movements and/or commuting to distant workplaces (we are now witnessing gradual return to work in the home, albeit of a qualitatively different kind (spearheading this trend is the US, where in 1993, 33% of the adult labor force worked at home at least some of the time²⁵)).

The labor market is assumed to have players who voluntarily take jobs, who take jobs for pay, and who can leave those jobs. They are assumed to make choices, conduct perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Interethnic Competition, Economic Change, and Labor Migration
• 2. Interethnic Competition During Economic Decline
• 3. Interethnic Competition During Economic Growth
• 4. Voluntary Migration: Capacities and Incentives
• 5. Involuntary Migration: Ethnic Dilution, Consolidation, and Cleansing
• 6. Domestic Regulation of Migration: Inducements and Impediments
• 7. International Regulation of Migration: Immigration and Emigration Policies
• 8. Interethnic Conflict: an Inevitable Consequence?
• Index