القومية الإثنية والدولة الفاشلة: مصادر تفتّت الدولة المدنية في الاقتصاد السياسي الدولي

Ethnonationalism and the Failed State: Sources of Civil State Fragmentation in the International Political Economy

For all the influence of kinship, culture and history, the phenomenon of ethnonationalist mobilization and conflict stems most directly from elements of state failure. Institutional and economic deficiencies, including chronic poverty and underdevelopment, rampant corruption and the pressures of globalization, erode the ability of the civil state to maintain its unifying force in the hearts and minds of its citizens. Failed or failing states can set in motion a number of forces that ultimately bring about a shift in individuals’ primary political identification from membership in an associative civil state to membership in a particular ethnic or religious nation. This article surveys the current literature on ethnic conflict and war economies, and makes a case for approaching the phenomenon of shifting group identities as a rational choice of individuals, rooted in local and international economic/political conditions. Recent civil conflicts such as the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are discussed to exemplify the essentially flexible nature of political identity – disguised though it is by the seemingly immutable claims of ethnicity and history.

Abby Stoddard is currently working toward a doctoral degree in politics at New York

University, where she also holds the professional position of Research Associate at the Center on International Cooperation, performing policy analysis on international humanitarian assistance and post-conflict recovery. After receiving an MA in international affairs from Columbia University (SIPA), Abby worked for ten years in international humanitarian organizations, most recently as Program Director for Doctors of the World-USA. She is co-author with Shepard Forman of “International Assistance Organizations” to be published in a forthcoming edited volume entitled The State of Nonprofit America.

INTRODUCTION

The initial optimism that greeted the end of the Cold War, with promises of a “new world order”ⁱ and even “the end of history,”ⁱⁱ quickly faded when the 1990s witnessed a new surge of violent civil conflicts and the splintering of nation-states along ethnonationalist lines. The term “ethnonationalism” refers to a politicized group affiliation based on inherent traits – ethnicity, race, clan, tribe, cultural heritage or religion – that define “a people” in the minds of its members. Most ethnonationalist conflicts are fought within or across national borders, are prolonged, intractable, and often become inseparable from the humanitarian crises they engender.

The response of many policymakers and pundits to such conflicts has ranged from the apathetic to the apocalyptic. Ethnonationalist upheavals should not surprise, went the common refrain, as they are based on primordial human emotions and centuries of history. Furthermore, because of their emotional, irrational basis, such conflicts are by nature unresponsive to reason or traditional diplomacy. The implicit policy prescription seemed to be for the international community to wash its hands of the new horrors now visited upon peoples of the developing world, and regrettably to accept a certain amount of violence and ethnic partition as inevitable.

Some saw these events as signifying the decline of the nation-state itself. In two notable articles, Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” and Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy,” it is argued that “the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe.”ⁱⁱⁱ But are we to accept that only these ethnic identities are truly “real”, and that they are so solid and permanent? This article will explore an emerging school of thought that takes issue with this claim. I aim to advance the argument that the nature of political identity, though at times disguised by seemingly immutable claims of blood ties, culture and history, is in fact flexible, and is politically, economically and rationally determined.

The growing scholarly literature on “ethnic conflict,” as the name suggests, focuses mainly on the conflict aspect. Most of its theorists are concerned with studying the forces that drive people to commit ethnically based violence. This article, in contrast, seeks explanations for the internal transformation, in which the individual’s primary identity and allegiance shifts from the civil state to the ethno-nation, for example, the process by which a Yugoslav redefines himself as Croat, first and foremost. This shift may or may not result in violent conflict, or may itself be provoked by initial incidents of violence. The dynamics of ethnic identity and allegiance will be examined from a political economy, or rational choice, perspective.

I will consider the following systemic and unit-level causal factors: post-Cold War politics, globalization, the economics of conflict, the phenomenon of failed states, and the competing conceptual identities of ethno-nationalism and civil statehood. I will then review and attempt to synthesize the most recent developments toward a rational choice approach. In brief, it is my contention that:

• state failure is a process of which the archetypal “failed state” is only the most extreme outcome. It occurs at many levels and to varying degrees, engendering political and economic responses by groups and individuals;
• the economic response is manifested in the creation of illegal or parallel economies, with new economic actors engaging in war-profiteering made possible by globalization;
• the political response, in the worst case, is the manipulation of fear by legitimate leaders or ethnic activists to obtain or maintain control over portions of public and territory;
• the majority of the public is ultimately swept along as they shift their political identity from citizen of the state to member of the ethnic or religious nation – a self-interested switch of allegiance,now that state is no longer ensuring their security or their economic opportunity;
• this process reflects a process of rational decision-making that is nonetheless masked, even to the individual decision-makers, by the trappings of altruism and group solidarity.

Simply put, the failure (or failings) of states did not simply ignite or “set loose” preexisting animosities, but has played a direct role in creating them, by forcing individuals to shift their identifications out of rational self-interest.

In Search of the New World Order

Political scientists have dubbed the era at the dawn of the twenty-first century as “postCold War,” “postmodern,” or “post-Fordist.” The fact that these definitions are framed in the anterior denotes that the old ordering concept of the international system has disappeared, and has yet to be replaced with a new common paradigm. Arguably the two most important features of the current system are the now unrivaled power position of the United States on the one hand and globalization on the other. These two phenomena have contributed significantly to the weakness and/or failure of many states, and to the rise of ethnonationalist movements.

Unipolarity without Peace

Some have compared the end of the Cold War with the end of World Wars I and II, as being catalytic to a new surge of nation building. Yet the ethnically based conflict and violence occurring today runs counter to the very idea of the nation-state system. It is a reordering in reaction to a negative situation. No longer valuable as strategic game pieces in the Cold War, many underdeveloped countries saw their superpower patronage supports (American as well as Soviet) dry up, revealing chronic institutional and economic weaknesses that in some cases proved fatal.

The end of bipolar competition has also reduced dramatically the motivation to use aid and trade as political instruments to obtain allies and keep them in power. One consequence has been that superpower or major power patrons have withdrawn the foreign financial and military support on which some governments had come to rely for their power and their capacity to govern. Dependent more on foreign resources than on domestic tax base, and more on skills in obtaining foreign resources than on those of winning allegiance at home, …such regimes collapse rapidly when external resources disappear. Verbal support has replaced the funds, arms, and bases of legitimacy that had been used to neutralize or coopt other contenders for power, buy domestic support, and distribute the minimal welfare necessary to social equity and to the peaceful resolution of conflicts provoked by inequalities. One need only mention the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia and Zaire/Congo.^iv

As Michael Ignatieff expressed it, “huge sections of the world’s population have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation-states are collapsing.”^v

Despite predictions of a Pax Americana, with the fading of the Cold War ideological contest, conflicts proliferated rather than petered out. Yet the majority of the conflicts were intra-national as opposed to international. States splintered along ethnic lines and many descended into armed conflict. Czechoslovakia’s “civilized divorce” was the rare exception among the examples of brutal violence and ethnic cleansing that came to define the 1990s.

The Mixed Opportunities of Globalization

Along with the end of bipolarity, an equally important set of factors has been the pressures and opportunities of globalization. Technological innovations in communications and transportation, and in particular the movement of capital across borders, have circumvented or eroded traditional state sovereignty not only in the conduct of international finance and trade, but increasingly in their own domestic affairs.

While world trade has greatly increased overall, developing countries have seen their share of the value of this trade decrease in past decades, notwithstanding the rapid expansion of Asian exports. No single cause or set of causes underlie chronic underdevelopment, but a constellation of obstacles to development may include the absence of capital markets needed for the development of innovative ideas; coordination problems for the collective action (retraining, etc.) needed to move into new markets; declining/cyclical terms of trade for primary products, which makes it hard to finance this move; inequitable income and land distribution among developing country populations; and, quite possibly, the combined effects of international structural adjustment programs requiring fiscal austerity on the one hand, and the inflow of development assistance resources on the other, creating significant incentives for corruption.^vi

The effects of globalization on countries mired in the poverty trap are widely debated. On the one hand many proclaim it as a positive progressive force, creating jobs, business opportunities and bridges to modernity throughout the developing world.^vii Globalization is viewed as having a beneficial effect on standards of living and education, even democratization, as the power of local elites is subverted by global competition and norms of transparency.^viii Yet there are those, even among globalization’s proponents, who concede its potential for political disruption. They argue that contrary to expectations, globalization has in many cases weakened civil state institutions rather than forcing them to be more efficient so as to compete in the global market as economic units. Some have claimed that globalization increases rather than decreases inequities within states, causing demand for conflict among those who do not share in its benefits:

Conversion to free markets has exacerbated the problem of economic inequality in underdeveloped countries, many of which have underdeveloped regions which correspond to specific ethnic groups or segments of society…. Indeed, some of the poster children for globalization proved that they were more, not less, vulnerable to civil strife as a result. The riots, lootings, and rapes that occurred in Indonesia in May-June 1998 provided a stark example of civil conflict – albeit fortunately not civil war – sparked by an economy’s inability to cope with the demands as well as the opportunities of globalization.^ix

Others say the problem is that growth of unregulated capital markets increases the instability of national economies, and that this instability can lead to conflict. Dani Rodrik, for one, has contended that openness to the global market can affect redistributive politics inside a country. Rodrik points out that the efficiency of the state in tax collection and redistribution is decreased when the country is opened up to trade, for it is harder to assess and collect taxes on incomes when capital is flowing easily across borders. Confidence in the state as a means to ensure that the entire population will share in the benefits of increased trade will decrease as income gaps widen.^x

Finally, there exists the threat of what could be called globalization’s “dark side”, meaning its potential to trigger or prolong civil conflict and help spread it across national boundaries. In a trend that will be examined in more detail in a subsequent section, recent research has uncovered links between the world market and regional “war economies,” such as drugs, arms, oil and diamonds. These illegal opportunities create incentives among certain actors in conflicts to promote and perpetuate the violence and anarchy to protect their economic interests. Mark Duffield has observed that the increasing globalization of the international economy has lent itself to new forms of war, characterized by their prolonged duration and links to expanding international black and gray markets.^xi This view sees protracted instability and social breakdown as essentially an economic adaptation to globalization.

Michael Hechter posited that markets in general tend to destabilize social groups. Unlike the production of collective goods, the market is better able to produce goods with independent and divergent individuals acting in the absence of formal controls. This logic “suggests that the growth of markets should have destabilizing consequences for many preexisting groups. Indeed the rise of the market is accompanied by the demise of a host of different kinds of groups – the traditional extended family, kinship groups, etc.”^xii Globalization pressures, it can be argued, have had this effect on the weak state. In some underdeveloped countries the nominal state has ceased to be a viable group to which to belong.

The vacuum left behind after the Cold War, coupled with the vagaries of globalization, has thus created serious external strains on the traditional nation-state apparatus, particularly in the developing world. Many developing states were already weakened or failing due to a variety of internal factors, to which we will now turn.

The Phenomenon of Failed and Failing States

Much scholarly attention has been paid recently to the so-called “failed states,” which surfaced after the end of the Cold War and resulted in a number of the conflicts that became emblematic of the 1990s. A failed state results when the leadership and institutions of the state are weakened and discredited to the point where the state can no longer fulfill its responsibilities or exercise sovereign power over the territory within its borders. The concept of the state is not confined to government and political systems, but encompasses the basic structures on which political, civil and economic life is conducted. The major responsibilities of states reside in the provision of public goods. In other words, a functioning state must be able to maintain law and order and protect rights within its borders, defend against threats from without, and provide (at a minimum) the infrastructure to allow for economic activity.

In an article on complex political emergencies (“CPEs”), Lionel Cliffe and Robin Luckham write that “the causes (of CPEs) are not only to be found in the issues around which conflicts are politicized, such as ethnicity or regional identity, but also in the prior trend towards a failure of governance.”^xiii I argue that, in fact, it is often this prior failure of governance that is the causal factor in the politicization of ethnic identity issues.

Some of the earliest examinations of weak states are found in economic development literature. An overview of the debate that preceded the current failed state literature shows an evolution in thinking about the appropriate role and purpose of the state in development, and whether it serves as a motor or a drag.^xiv Most recently the debate has progressed with the works of William Reno, Mark Duffield, and Mats Berdal, among others, who have focused on “criminal” states as opposed to the merely highly corrupt ones. The distinction revolves around the purpose of the state’s action in the economy. A corrupt state, it could be reasoned, has been derailed from the long-term goal of benefiting the whole in favor of short-term benefits for a few individuals. A criminal state, on the other hand, can be seen as having a wholly separate purpose, and is operating in a different economic reality. A failing state is one that becomes “criminalized,” when the government ultimately exists mainly to extract surplus for the enrichment of a few, keeping the potential opposition divided and “offering different fiefdoms to different groups.”^xv In countries such as Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the end result has been the total collapse of central government into a chaotic and violent interplay of rural warlords.

In his book Warlord Politics and African States, William Reno explicates the process of degeneration of weak states into warlordism. This occurs through policies of “elite accommodation” in which leaders intentionally stymie development by outsourcing economic roles to outsiders and increase dependencies in order to simultaneously deny power to those who may be an internal threat, and to gain a source of external wealth that can be used to pay off potential rivals. Because it has ceased to serve collective interests and lacks legitimacy among vast portions of its citizenry, the weak state is compelled to privatize security, hiring mercenaries, practicing political division, essentially “mirroring future warlord politics.” Politics are “commercialized” by leaders intervening in markets to accumulate wealth directly, and limiting access to potential rivals. These leaders intentionally keep state institutions and bureaucratic structures weak, as they are a potential source of power for various rival elites. The resulting “weak” or “quasi” state increasingly has less to do with collective interests and serves only to maintain the hold on power of the leadership and patronage system. Cold War patron states underwrote this process of elite accommodation at first, and later this role was assumed by the international financial institutions, which continued to prop up the regimes under the mistaken assumption that with Cold War patrons gone, the rulers would have no choice but to act in the interests of economic development.

Reno’s work points to a rational explanation of political behavior that heretofore defied rational explanations because of its debilitating effects on the institutions of a civil state. The weakening of states can be profitable for certain parties: “The failure of state institutions allows non-state organizations to take advantage of economic opportunity and create new political alliances.”^xvi

Not surprisingly, the examples of failed and failing states (and the bulk of ethnonationalist conflict) have occurred in the developing world. Shashi Tharoor has written that the root cause of state failure is the condition of longstanding underdevelopment, which breeds conflict: “The uneven distribution of infrastructure in a poor country, for instance, can lead to resources being distributed unequally, which in turn leads to increasing fissures in a society between those from ‘neglected regions’ and those better served by roads, railways, power stations, telecommunications, bridges, and canals.”^xvii

There are levels and degrees of state failure, and they need not lead inexorably to violent conflict. As Zaire proved, a state can be failing for many years before it disintegrates completely, and, although a rarity, Czechoslovakia demonstrated that a peaceful separation on ethnic grounds is at least possible. While one finds the archetypes of state failure in Africa (Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Zaire/Congo), they have their parallels in the former Yugoslavia and other postcommunist countries. Rwanda never fit the profile of a failed state in the conventional sense. In fact, its strong administrative and governance structures actually facilitated both the genocide and the quick consolidation of power by the invading RPF. Nonetheless, the Rwandan state had failed in important ways before the cataclysm of ethnic violence. Its president fronted a highly corrupt and inefficient system of patronage that had abdicated responsibility for security and governance of its people, while using fear and ethnic scapegoating to remain in power. This, as we shall see, created the conditions of the ethnonationalist movement that led to the massacres.

In all of these countries, the state had ceased to be a security provider or guarantor of economic opportunity. The state’s politics and patronage worked to divide rather than unify, certain economic and political actors seized the opportunity for personal enrichment and localized power, and the mass of the people followed the only viable course that was laid open to them: they sought out other non-state group affiliations to protect their interests.

The Economics of Ethnicity and Conflict

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, reporting on complex humanitarian emergencies, cites a study by the United Nations University that found a positive relationship between war and inequality among domestic social groups. More than simple poverty, it is this inequality, which the weak state is unable or unwilling to manage, that breeds conflict. Although not all poor states with high levels of inequality experience civil war, in those that have, inequality corresponding to ethnicity proves an especially potent destabilizing force. As the SecretaryGeneral stated:

Political demagogues have little difficulty finding targets of opportunity and mobilizing support for chauvinist causes…. But in other cases armed conflict has less to do with ethnic, national or other enmities than the struggle to control economic resources. The pursuit of diamonds, drugs, timber concessions and other valuable commodities drives a number of today’s internal wars. In some countries the capacity of the State to extract resources from society and to allocate patronage to cronies is the prize to be fought over.^xviii

The literature concerning these so-called “war economies” (including works by Duffield, Reno, Keen and Berdal, among others) provides perhaps the most compelling argument yet that today’s ethnic civil wars are not merely the acting out of ancient hatreds, but have a rational economic basis in the failed state context. The dynamic can be explained by entitlement theory, as expanded by Stewart and Fitzgerald’s concept of “non-entitlements” or illegal gains.^xix The loss of direct entitlements of the market and public sector of the failing state are “more than compensated for by the opportunity that conflict creates for increased access to non-entitlements.”^xx

Even the act of violence itself can be seen to have a rational basis beyond the forces of human emotion.^xxi Mats Berdal and David Keen have identified and examined the various “functions” that are served by violence, even atrocities against civilians, in civil conflicts. These functions, according to Berdal and Keen, are political, economic, defensive and psychological, and all are in service of self-interested goals.^xxii Thus basic self-interested behavior is disguised as blood feuding. As Reno has illustrated, what may appear as ethnic struggle in African states is instead often a case of “enterprising strongmen focus[ing] on controlling accumulation, which may now mean collecting aid, seizing natural resources, and manipulating calls for reform.”^xxiii This notion is echoed by authors Cliffe and Luckham who state that “in most [complex political emergencies] of the 1990s discontents arising from social and economic deprivation are more often articulated in ethnic nationality, regional or communal terms… In Somalia, for instance, …whatever the definition of groups, the object of their contestation often came down to matters of land.”^xxiv

Goodhand and Hulme have termed these groups of actors “predatory social formations.” Today’s complex political emergencies, they write, are characterized by a virulent ethnonationalism, but this often serves as a cover for the war profiteers and political opportunists who foster and manipulate these sentiments. These motives are the same as the ones that serve to prolong the conflicts, as “[p]eace would disrupt the systems of production and exchange that provide such warlords and their followers with livelihoods.”^xxv There have even been cases of mutual cooperation between warring parties in sharing the spoils of their continued conflict.^xxvi

The connection between the looting economies in wartorn countries and global black or gray markets is well documented: opium in Afghanistan; cocaine in Columbia; diamonds in Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone; oil, diamonds and other natural resources in the DRC. All of these conflicts are buttressed by the vast global trade in weapons, much of it emanating from Eastern Europe and the former USSR.

An emerging field of study known as “the regionalization of conflict” calls attention to the way that opportunities presented by these global markets create “an open invitation to spreading ethnic conflict not only within individual countries, but across borders and whole regions.”^xxvii Globalization thus helps generate the “supply side” of civil conflict and draws in local, regional and international actors.^xxviii This creates difficulties for those seeking to contain and resolve civil conflicts, because the individual state has ceased to be a viable unit of analysis.

Like war economies, ethnonationalist identities transcend national borders, which is what makes ethnonationalism such a useful mobilizing force as well as a convincing cover or rationale for profiteering activities. Glazer and Moynihan (1979) have pointed to the “salience of ethnicity” as an expression of and vehicle for pursuing economic interests. “Paradoxically, ethnicity is an effective means of mobilizing around common material interests precisely because of its non-material, that is symbolic, content, which masks or ‘mystifies’ those interests for the group members themselves.”^xxix Ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other groupings can serve this function equally well. Even criminal organizations have been known to adopt the ethos and rituals of family or tribe.

Competing Identities: Ethnonationalism and the Civil State

Having examined the links between state failure and non-state economic opportunities (i.e. black markets and war economies), this section will look to more political dimensions, to see how ethnonationalist sentiments are used to rally peoples behind a non-state identity, and to make their rational behavior in doing so appear irrational. To do so it is useful to review the theories of ethnonationalism and ethnic conflict.

First, regarding concepts of nation and state: the idea of the nation is not easily defined in the modern political context. Distinct from the concept of “state,” which implies a juridical order, a civil-political association, and recognized geographical boundaries, the term “nation” is more abstract and intangible, involving the consciousness of a “people” holding a shared perception of its history. Modern day nation-states contain both of these dimensions to varying degrees. Truly ethnically homogenous nation-states are virtually non-existent, while most countries contain a variety of diverse ethnic groups within their borders and depend upon their peaceful cohabitation.

Theories of ethnonationalist movements and identity construction

To cherish a sense of group identity, of belonging, is undoubtedly a fundamental human trait. Individuals seek group identification for reasons of security and to pursue collective interests. Of course, identity is necessarily relational, and would be meaningless without a broader context (there cannot be an “us” without a “them.”) This concept helps to explain the apparent contradiction between the concomitant trends of economic globalization on the one hand and ethno-political fragmentation on the other. As Turton has argued, “One cannot think locally unless one already has an idea of a global context in which localities can exist. (To make a claim to self determination) is also to assert global identity.”^xxx

Yet while ethnicity is a subjective, relational concept, it is at the same time very real in the sense of its power to motivate people and in its basis in historical events. It cannot be disputed that nationalism is capable of unifying a nation and consolidating domestic order, and alternatively of breaking states apart and instigating war. But is nationalism necessarily the predominant feature of personal identity and human relations?

Historically, the debate surrounding this question has polarized around the “primordial” viewpoint, which holds that the truest and most binding identity are those of “tribe,” and the constructivist position, which insists that ethnonationalist identity, like all others, is a purely social construction. The primordialist-constructivist debate on ethnic identity has been framed elsewhere as “ascriptive” vs. “situational”,^xxxi but the fundamental question boils down to whether such identities are essentially fixed or flexible. More recently, a third view has begun to emerge that effectively synthesizes the two opposing perspectives, maintaining that in fact, “ethnic identity is both rooted in history and subject to social engineering.”^xxxii

Primordialism originated in the anthropological writings of Shils and Geertz, who hypothesized that all modern humans are subject to the strong and prevailing emotional influence of ancient primordial bonds of their ethnicity.^xxxiii This view holds that ethnicity is fundamentally different from other forms of social groupings by virtue of its “relative disengagement from interest, especially economic interest,”^xxxiv and is used to explain why ethnonationalism may prevail, even when it appears to run counter to rational interestmaximizing behavior.

A simplified version of the primordialist approach became popular in press and policy circles in the 1990s, especially in regard to the civil conflicts that erupted in the immediate postCold War period. The metaphor often used was of ancient ethnic hatreds being “thawed out” or “set loose” after communism’s fall. In Africa, the postcolonial nation-states were widely dismissed as artificial boundaries cutting across the “true” groupings corresponding to tribal identities. To quote one author, “Collective identities in underdeveloped societies are particularly conflict prone because identities are derived from fundamental, incontrovertible, and non-negotiable values such as language, history, and religion.”^xxxv

That this attitude is so common when examining ethnic conflict is understandable given the intense brutality of modern civil conflict and the apparent irrationality of the warring parties who seem to deliberately choose bloodshed and anarchy over negotiated settlement. The IRA refusing to disarm in accordance with the negotiated power-sharing agreement is case in point of a seemingly irrational decision, when compliance with the agreement would afford it greater long-term benefits. The New York Times quoted author Brian Feeny: “‘There’s nothing about the IRA’s decision that is strategic. It’s atavistic and sentimental.’ Said another analyst, “Never underestimate the impact of folk memory on the psychology of republicanism.”^xxxvi Unfortunately the primordialist argument leads to a theoretical and political dead-end. If one cannot fathom what is in the human heart, one cannot construct policy solutions or alternatives either.

Though the scientific consensus is that the concepts such as race have no real meaning beyond superficial physical characteristics, and that “most human groupings are highly subjective,”^xxxvii some theories for ethnonationalism persist which stress a “natural,” inborn and unavoidable sense of bonding with one’s own kind. So-called “genetic similarity theory”^xxxviii holds that it is an evolutionary imperative for like to bond with like in order to increase the chances of gene survival. For reasons of genetic likeness one chooses a mate, a community, and even a best friend, according to the theory. Whatever the scientific merit of such an argument, it cannot satisfactorily explain the experience of assimilated immigrants in America, or the numerous intermarriages in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before the conflicts.

The opposite side of the debate is the “circumstantialist” approach, associated most often with Barth (1969) and Glazer and Moynihan (1975). These authors argued that ethnic identity and groupings are partially determined by social conditions and economic interests, pointing out that “many of the groups that had engaged in ‘primordial’ conflicts are themselves recent historical creations.”^xxxix Charles Kupchan goes further, defining nationalism and ethnic identity as purely a socio-political construct, and not a human trait: “Precisely because nationalism is not primordial or essentialist, it is malleable and its trajectory is susceptible to influence through policy instruments.”^xl

Taking a similar view, Shashi Tharoor refers to the spate of ethnonationalist movements as a form of “postmodern tribalism.”^xli Ethnonationalism is now more commonly manufactured, he says, usually by leaders trying to maintain their hold on power, “or to distract their citizens from other domestic failures, often when ethnic division is nowhere as profound as being claimed … All nationalisms are essentially invented (or reinvented) in modern times, through a combination of imagining ethnic, linguistic, or historical communities that have no greater basis than communal indoctrination.”^xlii For the ends of economic advancement, power, and control over resources, ethnic separatism is promoted as the most effective means, and is supported by the language of human rights and the concept of self-determination.

Representing the third, or synthesis, approach is Balkan specialist Stephen Majstorovic. Majstorovic has identified in ethnonationalist movements a phenomenon he calls “primordialization,” by which he means a process of “creating, re-creating or enhancing an identity that is subjective and historically rooted.”^xliii This was especially true of the Serbs, for whom, “more than for the Muslims or the Croats, the parameters of construction and reconstruction become narrower with each historic alliteration of identity formation, or primordialization.”^xliv

An important empirical contribution to the study of ethnic conflict has been provided by Ted Robert Gurr at the University of Maryland, whose database classifies and tracks 233 “politicized” ethnic minorities around the world.^xlv Taking the mobilized ethnic minority group as his unit of analysis, Gurr has developed detailed profiles of ethnonationalist movements in every region, starting from 1945. As is to be expected with the benefit of side-by-side comparison, the differences between ethnonationalist movements appear more striking than their similarities. Indeed, some theorists have used these findings to call for the disaggregation of “ethnic conflict” as a study,^xlvi on the grounds that one cannot reasonably lump together such diverse and complex situations as Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, Burundi and Quebec. However, one stands the risk of losing the forest for the trees, and the wealth of data may obscure some important general findings. For example, Gurr’s data show that, in the main, ethnonationalist conflict is on the rise in most regions of the world except in the western democracies and Japan (where it is decreasing), and that ethnonationalist movements are most intense in the world’s poorest and weakest states.^xlvii The primordialist school might counter that the minority groups in the western democracies and Japan make up much smaller percentages of those populations, but would be hard pressed to explain the recent rise of intra-state conflict across the board without consideration of economic circumstances and interests.

The argument of this article therefore takes a position akin to the third view: i.e., that there is a particular salience to the inherent qualities of ethnicity, religion or culture, and a potency to ethnonationalism as a mobilizing force, but that these “organic” or inherent values do not automatically trump those of the associative variety. Rather, it is the weakness of the structures of the associative state that ultimately forces a shift in identity and allegiance to the ethnonationalist stance. The momentum for this shift is first initiated by deliberate actions of economic and political opportunists with interests in ethnic separation. The manipulation of history and nationalist myths and the exploitation of fears by power-seekers lead more and more people to switch their allegiance to the ethnonationalist group, creating a snowballing or “complementarities” effect on the mass public, until there is total polarization. As such, in this line of reasoning, ethnic identification is treated as endogenous, rather than a fixed independent variable. This is not to deny that factors such as historical experience, religious fervor, and strong feelings of unity exist, but only that they do not inexorably trump other identities and associations. Nor should it be construed as the utopian view that the associative state can transcend and overcome all divisions.

The economic motivations behind instigating and perpetuating ethnic division and conflict were explored in the preceding section. Global markets have provided incentive to corrupt state actors or non-state actors to pursue enrichment outside the formal state structure, often in war-profiteering, smuggling, and other criminal activities that thrive in anarchic conditions. Acknowledging that the spheres of politics and economics are fundamentally inseparable,^xlviii we turn now to the more power-based motivation for sowing ethnonationalist divisions.

Political opportunists and the function of history, fear and complementarities

Charismatic leadership, a shared version of history, and the manipulation of fear are important contributors to the formation of a national identity. These factors work in concert with economic motivations in driving ethnonationalist movements.

Nationalist sentiment can and has been manipulated by leaders not only to mobilize a domestic population against a foreign enemy, but also to legitimize dictatorships and deflect criticism away from the domestic regime. In this way, it can be argued, ethnonationalism and autocratic government are mutually reinforcing. In an atmosphere of authoritarianism, where the rights of individuals are subordinate to the group, political matters are not open to the public scrutiny and debate that could potentially expose and defuse nationalist myths and paranoia. Ethnonationalist movements are typically preceded by revivals of historical narratives and symbols, and these “positive” unifiers are later merged with the incitement of hatred, which is at bottom the cultivation of fear. In every bloody ethnic conflict, the average individual believed that the actions of its group were justified to defend against an enemy bent on their destruction. In the months preceding the genocide in Rwanda the national radio warned repeatedly of an ensuing raid by exiled Tutsis bent on killing and enslaving Hutus. Serbs in Bosnia spoke with utmost conviction of their names being seen on “death lists” drawn up by Croats and Muslims.

The media plays a special role in fomenting civil conflicts and has been seen to wield great power in inciting ethnic fears and violence. Television propaganda images in the Balkans, and Hutu nationalist radio in the days leading up to and during the massacres in Rwanda, are often cited as major contributing factors to the violence. The appeal to ethnic images and folklore, and a call for the return to real or imagined glory days of old, especially when the modern state structure is failing, are powerful tools in the hands of those who would maintain their grip on power, even if it is over a smaller subset of their former sovereignty.

A report on the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Ambon, Indonesia, provides a textbook example of the engineering of fear and hatred to the point where violence becomes almost unavoidable:

In Indonesia, still reeling from the carnage in East Timor, chaos is a political tool, and most outbreaks of violence seem to have been either set off or fueled by provocateurs. Most people interviewed here in Ambon are convinced that someone — political schemers, disaffected soldiers, religious extremists, corrupt business interests, perhaps all of these — has provoked their war and is determined to keep it alive. Echoing sentiments of some Western policy makers in the wake of Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other ethnic conflagrations, the president’s supporters cite helplessness in the face of such “complex and deeprooted” problems in Ambon…

Ambon today is hostage to rumors and false reports. Unverified and exaggerated accounts are repeated in the national press, fueling passions around this nation of 210 million, where nearly 90 percent of the people are Muslim. In Ambon, both sides insist that they fight only in self-defense.

Even if the fighting were to stop today, the hatreds and brutality that have taken root over the last year may take generations to heal…(depression, frustration and) despair that seems to have driven so many people into religious warfare, beyond the reach of any real religion.^xlix

The particular extremism of expatriates has also been seen to play an important role in galvanizing people into ethnonationalist movements. This was evidenced, for example, in the role of expatriate intellectuals “in creating, practically out of whole cloth, an Oromo national self-consciousness where none had existed, and in financing a ‘liberation army’ to win a state in the Horn of Africa for a nation that had never existed before in the midst of most of its putative citizenry.”^l An additional factor contributing to the ethnicization of a group is external recognition and hence legitimization of the movement, such as the precipitous recognition of Croatia at the outset of the Yugoslav breakup. Finally, some theorists have emphasized the process of democratization, particularly premature elections, as instigating ethnic strife. In addition to the conditions of underdevelopment and the loss of Cold War patron states, democratization introduced to institutionally weak states can easily be seen as a contributor to state failure and civil strife.

The complementarities effect on individual self-identification

To understand the dynamics of ethnonationalist polarization, it is necessary to examine the notion of individual identity. In his book One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict, Russell Hardin echoes Erikson’s supposition that the essence of identity is not inborn characteristics, but rather the act of identification, i.e. a personal choice based on what “motivates” the individual.^li Depending on the circumstances, ethnicity need be no more motivating than civil statehood, or for that matter, profession or social class. Most people identify with a number of different and sometimes overlapping social groupings, and will emphasize one or another identity depending on the time and circumstances. However, a major shifting of prominence from geographic group identity to a subset of that identity, say American to Texan, has major political implications because the second identity necessarily negates the first.

If one accepts the notion that an individual chooses his or her primary identity, then the concept of complementarities can help describe the process of people’s redefinition of themselves by ethnonationalist identities. The complementarities principle holds that the return for any one individual depends on what everybody else (in that industry and complementary industries) is doing. The cost of adoption (of a new technology, for example) falls as the number of others adopting it rises. By the same token, it becomes more costly to stick with an old technology as the number of people using it falls: “This divergence between individual gain and social cost occurs whenever a system of production, or organizational form, exhibits externalities, so that the cost or benefit of adopting that system by an individual depends on how many others have adopted that system.” A tipping point is reached where it is no longer in one’s interest to maintain the civil state association when all around you are forming separate camps.

This is possible even when individuals do not privately subscribe to the ethnonationalist line, as Timur Kuran contends in his work on “preference falsification.”^lii People will tend to “go with the flow” of public opinion in their environment, either by displaying positions they do not privately hold, or by remaining silent. There is then a snowball or cascading effect that firmly entrenches the position. This phenomenon explains how public opinion can be shaped and groups mobilized by a few vocal activists.

In Europe, ethnonationalist identities and animosities were not thawed after communism, but were actually further hardened than during the Cold War period. In Africa, colonialism planted the seeds for ethnic strife by setting down rigid class and territorial boundaries that made ethnic groups less permeable, and framed them in political competition.^liii As the following case examples of Rwanda and Yugoslavia will illustrate, it was not primordial sentiments or ancient hatreds at the root of these conflicts, but rather state failure coupled with deliberate political manipulation. These particular cases were chosen precisely because they were so often held up as examples of intractable conflicts based on primordial loyalties and hatreds.

Rwanda

The dumbfounding horror of the Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of over half a million Tutsis and thousands of Hutu sympathizers, certainly seems to defy rational explanation. Once the scale of the carnage became known, world leaders shook their heads as the Western press wrote of ancient, inexorable tribal hatreds. Upon closer inspection, however, the ancient hatreds theory cannot explain why the organized political violence by one group against the other did not actually begin until 1959.

In fact, the assignation of Rwandans to the Hutu or Tutsi group has little to do with true ethnic ties, but was primarily an economic class or caste construct harking back to the Belgian colonial period.^liv Although the majority of modern Rwandans descended from two separate peoples who migrated to the area beginning some 2000 years ago, after centuries and centuries of coexistence and intermixing, “ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups.”^lv Unlike many other African countries, Rwanda existed as a self-contained nation state prior to the colonial period, in which Hutu and Tutsi lived intermingled, sharing the same language, religion and culture. The political leaders could be either Hutu or Tutsi, and members of one group could join the other through marriage and clientage.

Although most Hutu and Tutsi could not be identified by appearance, certain physical archetypes remained, with some of the Tutsi displaying longer, thinner “more European” features. It was this difference that was exploited by Belgian colonizers as a method of divide and rule. In the early 1930s Belgian colonizers using “racial scientists” armed with calipers and measuring tapes undertook a census and issued ethnic identity cards to every Rwandan. This measure prevented hereditary crossing over and established a political system in which the Tutsis, deemed superior by the colonial power due to their physical traits, became the predominant economic and political class. Although traditionally Tutsis were herdsman and Hutus were cultivators, leading to a degree of economic differentiation, the hierarchy of one group over the other was entirely externally imposed in the twentieth century. In his book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch speculates that the Belgians saw this divisive order as necessary precisely because pre-colonial Rwandans, despite being of different ethnic heritage, were so strongly unified under a common Rwandan identity.^lvi

Following the census of 1933-34, the Belgians created a colonial order in which Tutsis dominated economic, social and political life, and as directed by the Belgian colonial power, repressed, taxed and physically beat the Hutu, who were used as forced labor and denied most educational and employment opportunities. This undeniably created an indelible, if relatively short-lived, historical legacy to overcome in subsequent inter-group relations. As Gourevitch writes:

Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence…(W)ith every schoolchild reared in the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, the idea of a collective national identity was steadily laid to waste and on either side of the Hutu-Tutsi divide there developed mutually exclusionary discourses based on the competing claims of entitlement and injury.^lvii

The political order turned on its head when Hutus, supported and led by Belgian reformers, staged a coup and replaced Tutsi leaders with Hutus in 1960, just two years before Rwanda gained full independence from Belgium. The Tutsi dictatorship was replaced with a Hutu dictatorship, and distrust between the two groups escalated to the point of state-sponsored pogroms against Tutsis every few years. Each of these massacres resulted in a growing of the Tutsi-led army in exile, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

The Rwandan state under the government of Habyarimana was corrupt to the point it could easily be classified as “predatory,” to use the terminology of economics author Peter Evan.^lviii The president and a small group of cronies centered in the northwestern provinces enriched themselves while the majority of Rwandans remained in extreme poverty. After the prices of Rwanda’s chief exports – coffee and tea – crashed in 1986, the economic situation got worse, while the corrupt oligarchy began to focus on skimming foreign aid donations.^lix Meanwhile, Habyarimana’s original promises of peace, unity and development for all Rwandans were shattered when scattered pogroms against Tutsis began occurring, spurred on by anti-Tutsi propaganda in the popular press and threats of an RPF invasion. The fear of an invading Tutsi army from without, coupled with a scapegoat Tutsi minority within, allowed the oligarchy to maintain control and distract the majority of the population from the disastrous economic situation. Yet the power holders within the oligarchy were increasingly competing with each other over a shrinking pot of resources.

The 1994 massacre, now recognized by the international community as a true case of genocide, occurred immediately after the death of Hutu President Habyarimana in a suspicious plane crash. The corrupt power structure, now without the nominal leadership of Habyarimana, and alarmed over the Arusha Accords which called for power sharing with the RPF, essentially called on every Hutu to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda. By best estimates, between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered over a three-month period before the RPF took control of the country and installed a new government.^lx The Hutu army and militia groups were so focused on killing Tutsis that they did not put up a serious resistance to the invading army but kept moving in a swath across the country until they were driven across the border, along with about two million civilian refugees, by the much smaller RPF force. It was as if the oligarchic power structure of the Habyarimana government, in tatters after the years of corruption and infighting simply disintegrated. The brutally swift and decisive actions of the exiled RPF in moving in and taking control of the state apparatus was the primary reason Rwanda did not end in a situation of anarchic warlordism like other failed African states.

Yugoslavia

The ethnonationalist groups that tore apart Yugoslavia in the early 1990s had different cultures, histories, and resentments from those in Rwanda, yet, when looked at from the perspective of economic crisis and state failure, there are some fundamental similarities: specifically, the disintegration of the state and the manipulation of fear and the use of the media by power-holders.

Tribes of Slavic peoples first settled in the territory of former Yugoslavia in the sixth century, and lived independently until the Middle Ages, when Croats and Slovenes came under control of Austria-Hungary and Serbians were defeated by the Ottoman Empire. Serbia maintained its Orthodox religion and cultural identity throughout the years of Turkish rule. Croatia and the northern republics remained a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Roman Catholic faith. Under the Ottomans, many Serbian and Croatian inhabitants of BosniaHerzegovina converted from Orthodoxy or Catholicism to Islam. Later Bosnia was transferred to Hapsburg rule.

Many other European states, including Germany, are united of much more diverse groups than the South Slavs.^lxi What differentiate the people of Yugoslavia are their separate histories – in essence, the political and religious legacies of their previous foreign occupiers. Except for the ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs were of the same Slavic ancestry and shared a common language

Like Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia has often been perceived as a seething cauldron of longstanding ethnic hatreds, which kept a lid on the violence only as long as Tito and the USSR were in existence. There are those who are now questioning this conventional wisdom. A few theorists have looked at ways the Yugoslav structure of government, as it evolved during the socialist period, actually helped to construct and entrench ethnic identities. Gojko Vulkovic has blamed the style of decentralized socialist self-management introduced under Tito for “creating the conditions for development by the republics of extreme ethnocentric policies.” Vulkovic maintains it was the structure of political and economic institutions that set the stage for the ethnic conflict to come. Economic life in socialist Yugoslavia was organized vertically – through guilds, while political power was organized horizontally – in communes and regions that corresponded in many areas to ethnic groupings. After the 1974 constitution granted increased autonomy to the regions, the regional political leaderships increasingly empowered themselves and attempted to expand their control over regional resources.

The constitution that was built on ethnic identity, far from stemming ethnic rivalry, would ultimately dissolve along these same lines:

This outcome led to ethnic violence and disintegration in a period when an already weakened Yugoslavia tried to transform its socialist self-management system into a multi-party democracy … Yugoslav political institutions and administrative state appeared incapable of maintaining unity in the absence of a strong central authority. The ethno-national skeleton of political and administrative institutions reemerged at the surface of political competition. It was the system of socialist self-management … that provided the ideological, institutional, and administrative environment that generated such ethnic polarization of the South Slavs.^lxii

James Fearon has reinforced this strand of thought. He maintains that Yugoslavia’s “federal bargain,” which was meant to provide both economic security and protection of minorities, essentially disintegrated in the late 1980s, leaving the republics as effectively the centers of government. The bargain collapsed due to the exit of the economically better off Slovenia and the reneging of the longstanding taboo of fomenting of nationalist sentiments – thus removing two linchpins from Tito’s structure. As the national layer of government ceased to provide the economic benefits or act as a unifying force, identities and loyalties shifted to the sub-units. Fearon makes the analogy of a shift to state identification among Americans should the federal government collapse: “state politicians would have strong incentives to whip up political support on the basis of state identities. Add ethnic ‘ownership’ of particular states and ethnically mixed state populations, and it starts to look like Yugoslavia in 1990.”^lxiii

Some of the “social-construct” school of thought have argued that the ethnic hatred manifesting itself in the Bosnian war was nothing more than a cynical invention of politicians such as Milosevic and Tudjman, and those aspiring to power such as Karadzic and Mladic. It is true that national and religious identities were always fluid in Yugoslavia, that religious conversions were made for political expediency, and that people would identify with this or that relative, Serb, Croat, or Slovene depending on their times and circumstances. Yet to place full responsibility for the nationalist resurgence solely on the politicians seems naive. Their nationalist propaganda had to have fallen on fertile ground for the hostility to erupt so quickly into such extreme violence. The truth was that the previous attempts at state-building had not laid the necessary groundwork for unity. Socialist countries did not have the civil society institutions now recognized as crucial to a feeling of civil-state identity, and when the economy is failing the people had little incentive to maintain this particular allegiance.

What was now occurring was a different kind of state-building. Smaller, ethnically homogenous nations were attempting to be formed out of the corpse of the failed federal entity. For some in power, most notably those in the former Communist Party of Serbia, this was the most promising route to sustaining power in the new era. In a 1989 speech that may have marked the turning point in the fate of post-Communist Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic stood at the site in Kosovo where the Serbs were defeated by the Turks exactly six hundred years earlier and spoke directly to and about the Serbs, recounted their heroism and humiliation in history, and appealed for Serbian unity in the face of new threats. In that speech, some say, the ideal of the state of Yugoslavia was dealt a death blow and the nationalist dream of a Greater Serbia was reborn. Exploiting their historical fears and strong sense of victimization, Milosevic rallied the Serbs around him and sent a warning to his fellow Yugoslavs.

Aided considerably by his party’s monopoly of the media, Milosevic was able to nurture Serbian nationalism while at the same time obscuring the fact that the national infrastructure had deteriorated irreparably due to decades of communist misrule and incompetence. Milosevic, in the words of George Schöpflin, “successfully convinced the Serbs that the reason for their economic plight is not that the Serbian economy is run badly, but because various aliens (the Kosovo Albanians, the Croats, the West through the embargo, etc.) are threatening the integrity of the Serbian nation, although in fact these factors have nothing to do with the economy.”^lxiv It is interesting to note that of the three groups at war in Bosnia, the Muslims, who are widely perceived as the primary victims of the conflict, had the least in terms of nationalist folklore and icons, and arguably felt less of a group identity as Muslims than their fellow Slavs did as Croats and Serbs. Unfortunately, the experience of the Bosnian war can be expected to even things up on this score. As Majstorovic writes, “It should be apparent that at this point the Muslim identity is still in the process of primordialization.”^lxv

Ethnonationalism has its own powerful momentum, and once the identity shift has been made it is extremely difficult to persuade people to think in terms of larger group interests. Leaders have incentives to keep nationalist sentiments and fears high, to be seen as the most loyal to the group. The International Crisis Group has found this to be true in its analysis of elections in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina: “The current electoral system favours ethnicallybased parties. Most voters, fearful and mistrustful of other ethnic groups, cast their votes primarily on the basis of which party is perceived as being the staunchest defender of the narrow interests of their own ethnic group…. Thus on many issues, politics turns into a zero-sum game, as ethnic leaders strike postures designed to show their nationalist credentials, to the detriment of responsible government.” ^lxvi

For the purposes of this argument, the examples of the Rwanda and Yugoslavia conflicts are deficient only in that they ended, unlike several ongoing conflicts in Africa where the state remains in a state of failure and warlords and smugglers continue to reap the commercial benefits of anarchy and chaos.

Identity politics in a strong state

The term “identity politics,” often used to describe domestic political dynamics in the United States, is associated with issues of class, race, or gender consciousness and power sharing and civil rights within a democratic state. Identity politics, it is safe to say, are generally practiced by the weakest members within a strong state, those who derive the fewest tangible benefits from the civil state apparatus. The closer a group is to the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder, the stronger their group affiliation in domestic politics. However, Gurr’s data on ethnic minority groups show that in western democracies, minorities express their grievances “in protest, rarely in rebellion,”^lxvii implying continued confidence in the overarching state framework under which conflict can be managed. The fact that identity politics are practiced in the U.S. shows that strong group associations can exist without risking state fragmentation because a strong economy and civil state structures help maintain the viability of the associative state.

Some theorists emphasize democratic institutions in particular as vital to this cohesion. As Tharoor contends, “Democracies that offer minorities the opportunities to find their place in the sun and to determine their own political future within a national framework usually do not need to fear ethnic rebellion.”^lxviii In a weak or failing state, however, identity politics overwhelm the associative concept of the civil state. Grievances are more often met with repression than accommodation, and rebellion is sometimes perceived as the only option when all legitimate outlets for expression are barred. Tharoor writes in praise of India, which he believes to embody the paradigm of “one land embracing many … a land of belonging rather than blood.”^lxix By virtue of its democratic system, India has survived by successfully managing conflict and maintaining the civil association of its many different groups. “The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for 50 years is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.”^lxx

Tharoor’s argument may place too much weight on the type of government (democratic) in maintaining unity as opposed to the strength of the state itself. It is arguable that continued underdevelopment and corruption threaten to unravel the India’s civil state consensus. While there are numerous ethnonationalist sentiments (including racial, religious and linguistic) and inter-group tensions are increasing in India,^lxxi conditions have not reached the point where one’s ethnic group supersedes the Indian state as the rational identity choice.

I have attempted to show that in many cases failing or deficient states lead to ethnic polarization and not the other way around, as others have argued:

If a state fails, it is weakened because political participation and opportunities become defined along narrow bands of ethnic sensibility and are coupled with the deliberate suppression of non-ethnic issues. The result is a perceived narrowing of policy options, leading to inter-ethnic confrontation, violence, and secession….Identity-based politics also detract from the public’s ability to appreciate the value of market exchange; the value of depriving a rival group of benefits may be perceived as greater than the costs of foregoing gains from trade.^lxxii

I maintain, on the contrary, that the decision to adopt a sub-state identity as primary is not a matter of relative positioning, but rather the seizing of an alternative made urgent by the shortterm decision horizon of those in difficult circumstances.

Elise Giuliano’s article on the ethnonationalist movement of Tatarstan argues persuasively that ethnic preferences cannot be assumed to be in any way fixed or endogenous, for to do so would be to overpredict ethnic conflict.^lxxiii Rather, she asserts, political issues can be defined by leaders as either ethnically exclusive or as a general public good. In Tatarstan the ethnonationalist movement for independence was defeated by the Tatar government’s more moderate alternative of “sovereignty,” which granted the region more autonomy and control over its resources while maintaining an affiliation with the Russian Federation. This was done by framing the issue as being in the interests of all ethnic groups in the Tatarstan, Russians included: “President Shamiev essentially created an aggrieved community, a nationalist movement without an ethnic identity but with loyalty to a particular territorial state.”^lxxiv Giuliano’s case study of Tatarstan thus lends support to the contention that the associative state model can survive ethnonationalist entrepreneurship simply by providing a viable political and economic umbrella, communicated by its leadership as serving the interests of all its members. (Similarly, in South Africa, where the ethnic divide could not be any more straightforward, whites are joining the ANC because it is not defined as a party of blacks.) It is particularly telling that, as Giuliano points out, “Tatarstan is one of Russia’s most economically advanced, urbanized and Russified republics.”^lxxv The economic situation of Tatarstan in the early 1990s stands in stark contrast to Chechnya, whose ethnonationalist movement had a very different outcome. The proportion of ethnic Tatars living in cities (63.4%) and participating in government and professional life was quite high by developing world standards, whereas according to a 1989 census, 70% of all Chechens lived in rural areas, surviving as farmers and herdsmen.^lxxvi

Keen and Berdal divide the functions of conflict into political “changing or retaining the rules of the game” and non-political, which includes economic (profiteering and warlordism), psychological (sense and satisfaction in turning the tables) and security motivations. Psychological seems more of a by-product, but the political, economic and security functions interrelate closely. Economic and political triggers by elites and new groups can cause the initial switch in identity followed opportunism then finally by a fear reaction where ordinary people realize it is economically sounder or physically safer to be inside a particular community than outside it, especially in a failed state context where there is no central provider of security. For these same reasons many Afghans initially welcomed the Taliban’s rise to power, as seemingly the only group capable of imposing order over chaos. Likewise, ethnic ties did very little to stem the mass defections from the Taliban regime when the U.S.-led military campaign rendered it an unviable.

While globalization has contributed to the economic opportunism of war economies, the end of the Cold War power structure has been responsible for the “top-down” political motivators of ethnic fragmentation. As in former Yugoslavia, “much of the violence has been initiated not by revolutionaries seeking to transform the state, but by a range of elites seeking to deflect political threats, often by inciting violence along ethnic lines … taking advantage of the fear, need and greed of ordinary people.”^lxxvii Rwandans will readily admit that in most cases Hutus and Tutsis cannot tell each other apart by sight. It was the Belgians’ census and ethnic identity cards that made the genocide logistically possible. What made it imaginable was the initial switching of conscious political identity from a civil political statehood to blood ties to one’s ethnic group. This switch may or may not lead to cataclysmic ethnic violence. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ethnic violence such as occurred in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and should be seen as an important precursor to political change.

The following section will explain the dynamics of the ethnonationalist identity shift using a rational choice argument. This does not square with the received wisdom on the subject. In the words of one author: “Despite the penchant in postmodern analysis for stressing the decentered person who can change identities like clothing, ethnonational identity often predisposes people to dispense with rational decisionmaking and instead embrace a policy of radical ethnic altruism in which lives are sacrificed.”^lxxviii It is this assumption of irrationality that I am questioning.

A Rational Choice Approach

The field of international political economy traditionally has not contended with the issue of separatist ethnonationalism and civil wars. Neoclassical economists could only see such behaviors as irrational, by reason of the loss in aggregate production and consumption and the erosion of capital they incurred.^lxxix This view takes for granted that the unified nation-state is the basic unit-actor in the global economic system, and that its leadership and population identify with the nation-state as such. These assumptions were challenged in the 1990s with the work of theorists such as Duffield, Keen and de Waal, who maintained that the breakdown of states and emergence of conflicts represent “‘a new type of political economy, not simply the disruption of the old one.’”^lxxx A new economic ordering has replaced the political economy of the nation state, one in which individuals may more effectively seek their fortunes outside the crumbling state structures. War economies have provided one of the most direct routes.

The emerging game theoretic approaches to ethnic conflict have focused mainly on the decision to use violence, beginning from the assumption that war is costly to all parties.^lxxxi While still treating ethnic identity as an exogenous variable, these approaches have nonetheless helped to take the study of ethnonationalist conflict out of the realm of the psychological and historical, in order to seek logical explanation for ethnonationalist conflict, i.e. one more satisfactory than simply “the eruption of long simmering animosities.”

Authors Brubaker and Laitin have surveyed the various game theoretic approaches to ethnic conflict and grouped them into three main categories:^lxxxii One looks at the issue from the aspect of credible commitments,^lxxxiii examining the problem of how an “ethnicized” government could credibly commit to protecting minority groups. Other studies have taken the tack of asymmetric information problems (Fearon and Laitin 1996), where low levels of communication between communities lead to triggers for violence; and a third, broad category is that of intragroup dynamics (Hechter, Hardin, Kuran, and Laitin), which looks not only at the decision to resort to violence, but also at how ethnonationalist groups are mobilized to begin with. That point is important for the purposes of this argument, for the term ethnic conflict must not be equated with ethnic violence or civil war, which is merely its worst-case scenario outcome. Conflict occurs naturally between individuals’ and groups’ ideas and interests, and the peaceful management of such conflict under consensus of a shared identity is the responsibility of state government. Of interest here is how conflict becomes ethnically framed, and when the conflict no longer occurs within a common assumption of an overlaying civil association. As Turton phrases the question, “what turns ethnic politics into nationalist politics?”^lxxxiv

In approaching problems of ethnonationalism from the perspective of intragroup dynamics, it is necessary to bring in other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology. Writing from a sociology background, Michael Hechter has proposed a rational action theory approach to group solidarity. As originally posited by Emile Durkheim, different types of social groups vary in the degree of their “groupness” or solidarity, which determines the extent of the group’s influence over individual behavior. Normativists hold that those groups with the highest levels of solidarity (for example, the family) have the greatest degree of internalized norms or “rules of the game.” Structuralists, however, maintain that the greater the commonality of interests, the greater the solidarity of the group, and emphasize the influence of institutions on behavior. In his theory of group solidarity, Hechter explicitly rejects the normativist-structuralist divide in sociology, preferring a rational choice approach, which allows the theorist to incorporate “three separate elements: individuals, institutions, and collective, or social, outcomes.”^lxxxv

Following the logic of Mancur Olson’s “selective incentives” (1975), Hechter assumes that individuals join or form groups in order to obtain “excludable, jointly produced goods” i.e. collective goods that do not entail a free-rider problem: “Solidarity can be best understood as compliance in the absence of compensation or a quid pro quo. The theory of group solidarity treats these group obligations as a tax that is imposed on each member as a condition of access to the joint good.”^lxxxvi Starting from the assumption that “groups exist to supply their members with some desired joint good,”^lxxxvii Hechter posits an instrumental explanation for ethnonationalist conflict and violence. The concept of aggregation is important to understand how rational choice can be used to explain group behavior. “The commonly held preference impels everyone who is subject to the same constraints to act similarly,”^lxxxviii Hechter explains, while idiosyncratic preferences cancel each other out. By this reasoning, the various emotional predilections toward violence are randomized among individuals in a population and neutralized, while the instrumental underpinnings of violence may conform to the commonly held preference (such as the collective good of physical security, made urgent by the fear element in a polarized situation). In the aggregate, therefore, it is the instrumental or rational bases for ethnonationalist violence that are decisive. Like Hechter, Russell Hardin also expands on Olson’s group theory and employs a rational choice explanation for how ethnic groups coalesce and develop norms of exclusion.^lxxxix

Kuran and Laitin do not assume that ethnic groups are unified in their interests, but rather that ethnic “activists” or “entrepreneurs” use pressure, humiliation, and fear tactics to persuade other members of the group to shift from ethnically neutral to ethnicized positions, creating a “cascading effect.” ^xc The cascade leads to a polarized situation in which conflict is easily ignited (yet if one take a broad definition of interests, then Hechter’s “commonly held preference” can be that of physical security, and the fear fostered by the ethnic activists can certainly work to help strengthen group affiliation).

As mentioned earlier, this analysis is concerned not so much with what tips the scales toward actual violence, but with that which, in the earlier stages, works to dissolve the civil association and reorder the identity priorities of individuals. I propose this dynamic is set in motion by state failure: as the formal state erodes, non-state political and economic activity propagate like weeds in a decaying structure. Economic interests are pursued either by using the corrupt state apparatus as a means of extracting resources, or in illegal activities (and increased access to global markets has been a boon to both types of activity). Power interests are pursued by carving out smaller fiefdoms within the original territory of the state or across formal national boundaries. In many cases, the political and economic interests are as one and the actors are the same. Either way, they are served by ethnonationalist polarization, animosity and fear and in turn help to foster them. The existence of ethnonationalist provocateurs and Kuran’s theory of preference falsification can then help to explain the mobilization of ethnonationalist groups. I suggested in a previous section that the existence of complementarities may also add to the understanding of this dynamic. Once one segment has identified itself as distinct and possessed of group interest, a fear reaction causes similar bonding among the other group or groups. Societal norms can play the same role as multiple equilibria in economic models, in that adhering to a certain norm, say the associative state identity can be like remaining at a low level equilibrium – the more people depart from it, the more one is compelled to follow suit.

To restate the basic theoretical problem in using a rational choice explanation for ethnonationalism: How can the adoption of a new ethnonationalist identity be considered an interest maximizing behavior of individuals when (a) in the long-run the ethnonationalist polarization promises violence and perhaps ruination, and (b) it is by definition a group behavior, and the group clearly contains members possessed of many different motivations (e.g., there are the primary instigators and others who stand to gain in economic and political power, there are individuals who firmly believe they are doing it for altruistic, solidarity reasons, and finally a number of others who are simply going along out of fear)?

Although an individual’s interests may be better served by membership in the associative state, state failure has created a constraint that compels the individual to seek his or her interests in a different association. It is a well-known phenomenon in economics that the poorer a person is, the more urgent one’s situation, the shorter one’s time horizon (in game theoretic terms, the higher his “discount rate”). Better to cast one’s lot with the group promising immediate security and/or economic opportunity than hold out for broader collective goals in an uncertain future. Indeed, state failure may create a situation where there is simply no viable alternative to ethnonationalist affiliation. In this regard, Hobsbawm has suggested that ethnic group identification is used by individuals as a “fall back position,” when faced with the failure or instability of formerly reliable state structures and ideology.^xci

Regarding the second part of the problem, the work of theorists such as Hechter and Hardin have provided intriguing explanations for how the interests of individuals are aggregated in such a way that the bonding is rational and the conflict and violence are instrumental. Furthermore, groups containing diverse elements are commonly used as unitary actors in rational choice theory, as when modeling the behaviors of states’ international relations. Brams and Kilgore point out that international policies of states are usually the result of compromise, allowing the state to be considered a single player. This can apply to any group containing common preferences, whether the unified position is the result of aggregation, compromise, repression or intimidation. However, this question poses a particular problem for some because of the unique masking function of ethnonationalism. As stated earlier, many members of ethnonationalist movements may feel real emotions and altruism, and vehemently deny any ulterior motive beyond group solidarity. Nevertheless, their actions show a rational path toward self-interested goals given the constraints they face, as they perceive them.

This question of perception is important, for it may also be argued that rational choice approaches are simply inadequate to capture the full scope and complexity of ethnic identification, since people’s perceived risks and choices are themselves socially constructed. Yet, this criticism may be applied to the use of rational choice theory in any area. The discipline has continued to develop despite these concerns because it promises at least a gateway toward understanding. Ultimately, rational choice theory does not require us to know what is in the head of each individual in order to achieve a rationalist understanding of the events, but only that the choices made reflect self-interested behavior given the particular constraints: “It is an evaluation of the consistency of choices and not the thought process … Our purpose is not to explain cognition but rather to understand political acts.”^xcii

Rational action theory is a path worthy of exploring further in the analysis of ethnonationalism and failed states, particularly in the search for policy. The rational action approach can lend a degree of predictability to these phenomena, such predictability being essential for preparedness and preventive action.

CONCLUSION

Chester A. Crocker, speaking on ethnic conflict in 1999, challenged the prevailing wisdom that ethnic conflicts were intractable because they were based on ancient hatreds and primordial sentiments. On the contrary, he said, ethnic conflict “can be a response to stimuli of all kinds. It can be a response to the removal of alien rule. It can be simply the playing out of political entrepreneurship. It can be a response to the creation of new economic threats and opportunities. It can be the response to or the result of, premature elections … Ethnic conflict can arise from the collapse of a state or an empire.”^xciii

What all of the above have in common is a realignment of populations within nationstates to a new order. Some theorists have argued that the decay of the “Weberian state” is over diagnosed. Rather, it is weak or quasi states that are failing now that the Cold War buttressing is gone. And indeed “state failure” may perhaps be too strong a term to use for the catalyst of the identity shift. Whether the civil state has actually collapsed, it has failed to maintain its hold on the identity consciousness of its citizenry. This paper has attempted to describe the mechanism for that, and how it is economically and rationally determined.

It bears repeating that although this argument has taken a political economy approach to the study of group identification and state fragmentation, this by no means discounts the human factors in fueling the behavior. As Hechter attests, “There is nothing in rational choice that denies that individuals can pursue altruistic or prosocial ends.”^xciv Undoubtedly even those actors who directly profit by the conflict feel some sense of genuine ethnic solidarity and deep enmity toward the opposing group. Rational choice theory, I have argued, at least offers a way forward.

For, despite continued media messages, there is a growing consensus among scholars that “ethnicity will not serve as a causal explanation of war.”^xcv Simply dismissing such behavior as irrational or pathological leaves no room for solution. Taking the alternative view of state breakups and protracted conflicts as expressions of rational, albeit sub-optimal behavior rooted in current economic reality has important implications for policy precisely because it leaves this door open.

NOTES

1. The Bush Administration briefly used this phrase in an attempt to define a post-“containment” foreign policy.
2. Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 editorial of this title prophesied an outbreak of world peace owing to a synthesis of socialist and capitalist ideals (Washington Post, 7/30/89) ⁱⁱⁱ Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1994): 60.

^iv Susan L. Woodward, “Warlordism and ‘Tribal’ Warfare,” Naval War College Review (Spring 1999). ^v Michael Ignatieff quoted in David Carment, “Modelling Ethnic Conflict: Problems and Pitfalls,” Politics and the Life Sciences 16 (September 1997).

1. Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998).
2. Francis Fukuyama, “The Left Should Love Globalization,” Wall Street Journal (1 Dec. 1999).
3. Fukuyama Wall Street Journal.
4. Shashi Tharoor, “The Future of Civil Conflict,” World Policy Journal 16. 1 (Spring 1999).
5. Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997). ^xi Mark Duffield, “Aid Policy and Post-Modern Conflict: A Critical Review,” Occasional Paper 19, (School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, 1998).

^xii Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 170. ^xiii Lionel Cliffe and Robin Luckham, “Complex Political Emergencies and the State: Failure and the Fate of the State,” Third World Quarterly 20. 1 (1999).32.

^xiv From the 1920s through the 1960s, neoclassical theorists emphasized the crucial role of the state in economic development, as a necessary intervener where markets were imperfect. The “rent-seeking” school of thought later emerged in a backlash against the state-led development theories. Anne Kruger argued that state or government failures could have worse economic effects than market failures (The term “state failure” here refers to a failure to act effectively, not the total collapse implied by today’s “failed state”). This is because the state does not act as a unitary and disinterested institution, but rather exists as a conglomeration of self-interested individuals. State actors will act like private sector actors and engage in rent-seeking (corrupt) behavior. In many developing countries, the abuse of power to issue licenses pervades the public sector and thwarts development. The solution, according to Kruger, is

minimal state intervention. The state should confine itself to investing in infrastructure development and human capital, protecting property rights, enforcing contracts and maintaining macroeconomic stability.

Theorists such as Peter Evans and Larry Westphal rebutted the rent-seeking argument, and called for a more nuanced assessment of states and state capacities. Kruger’s description, they argued, does not fit all states, but only those so corrupt as to be considered “predatory,” such as Congo (Zaire) (Evans 1994). The state can complement the market by using the feedback from firms to inform its long-range, big picture economic strategies. East Asia’s success, for example, lay in the particular policies of export-led development that the state used to move into and excel in the technology sector (Westphal 1990). Pranab Bardhan (1997) makes the further distinction between types and levels of corruption. A state with centralized corruption and lump sum payment does not have the same oppressive effect on competition as free-for-all corruption. ^xv Chester A. Crocker, “How to Think About Ethnic Conflict,” Orbis 43.4 (Fall 1999) 3. ^xvi William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998) 27. ^xvii Tharoor. ^xviii Kofi Annan, Facing the Humanitarian Challenge: Towards a Culture of Prevention (New York: UNDPI, 1999).

1. Jonathan Goodhand and David Hulme, “>From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies: Understanding Conflict and Peace-building in the New World Disorder,” Third World Quarterly 20. 1 (1999) 20.
2. Goodhand and Hulme 20.
3. Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of Massacres in Algeria,” Rationality and Society (Thousand Oaks, August 1999).
4. Mats Berdal and David Keen, “Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars,” Millennium 26.3 (1997). ^xxiii Reno 26. ^xxiv Cliffe and Luckham 44. ^xxv Goodhand and Hulme 17. ^xxvi Tharoor. ^xxvii Crocker 3.
5. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (forthcoming 2002) (Yale UP).
6. David Turton, ed., War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997) 11. ^xxx Turton 6-7.
7. Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
8. Steven Majstorovic, “Ancient Hatreds or Elite Manipulation? Memory and Politics in the Former Yugoslavia,” World Affairs 159 (Spring 1997) 4.
9. Jack David Eller, From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict (University of Michigan Press, 1999) 78.
10. Eller 79.
11. David Carment, “Modelling Ethnic Conflict: Problems and Pitfalls,” Politics and the Life Sciences 16 (September 1997) 2. Italics added. ^xxxvi Warren Hoge, “I.R.A. and the Arms Principle,” The New York Times 5 February 2000. ^xxxvii Scott I. Malcomson, “The Color of Bones,” The New York Times Magazine 2 April 2000.
12. Philippe J. Rushton, “Genetic Similarity Theory and the roots of Ethnic Conflict,” The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies 23. 4 (Winter 1998).
13. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1975) 19.
14. Charles A. Kupchan, “Introduction: Nationalism Resurgent,” in Charles A. Kupchan, ed., Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe, Council on Foreign Relations (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1995) 3.
15. Tharoor 1. ^xlii Tharoor 2. ^xliii Majstorovic 5. ^xliv Majstorovic 5.

^xlv Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk:A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: USIP, 1993). ^xlvi Brubaker and Laitin 1998. ^xlvii Unfortunately, Gurr’s 1993 publication presents data only up to 1989, omitting the most recent decade which saw some of the century’s worst ethnic conflicts.

1. An important point made by Berdal and Keen (1997) is that neither a purely political nor economic analysis can be used here. Today’s “complex political emergencies,” as ethnically based conflicts within and across borders have come to be known, are defined by the interplay of both spheres.
2. Seth Mydans, “Religious Warfare in Indonesian Isles Bodes Wide Chaos,” The New York Times February 9, 2000.
3. Tharoor 6.
4. Russell Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995) xi. ^lii Timur Kuran, “Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.” ^liii Turton 6.
5. See Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch (1999); and Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999).
6. Gourevitch 48. ^lvi Gourevitch 54. ^lvii Gourevitch.57-58.
7. Peter B. Evans, “Predatory, Developmental, and Other Apparatuses: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on the Third World State,” Comparative National Development, ed. Douglas Kineard, (University of North Carolina, 1994).
8. The extent to which foreign development aid contributed to Rwanda’s tragedy has been debated. See for example, Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Kumarian Press, 1998).
9. Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, “Study 1: Historical Perspective: Some Explanatory Factors,” Tor Sellström and Lennart Wohlgemuth (March 1996): http://www.reliefweb.int/ library/nordic/book1/pb020.html.
10. Aleksa Djilas, “Fear Thy Neighbor: The Breakup of Yugoslavia,” ed. Charles A. Kupchan, Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe, Council on Foreign Relations (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) 87.
11. Gojko Vuckovic, “Failure of Socialist Self-Management to Create a Viable Nation-State, and Disintegration of the Yugoslav Administrative State and State Institutions,” East European Quarterly 32.3 (Fall 1998): 12.
12. James D. Fearon, “The World/Yugoslavia: Was Tito’s Way the Best to Keep Peace?” Los Angeles Times 5 September 1999.
13. Schöpflin, George, “Nationalism and Ethnicity in Europe,” in Charles A. Kupchan, ed., Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe, Council on Foreign Relations, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1995: 56-57.
14. Majstorovic 9.
15. International Crisis Group, “Whither Bosnia?” 9 September 1998: http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/ projects/bosnia/reports/bh39rep.htm#intro.
16. Gurr 139. ^lxviii Tharoor 2. ^lxix Tharoor 9. ^lxx Tharoor 9. ^lxxi David Zurick, “Lands of Conflict in South Asia,” Focus 45. 3 (Winter 1999).
17. Carment 2.
18. Elise Giuliano, “Who Determines the Self in the Politics of Self Determination?” Comparative Politics (April 2000). ^lxxiv Giuliano 311-312.
19. Giuliano 304.
20. Edward Kline, “ASF Chechnya Brief,” The Andrei Sakharov Foundation, www.wdn.com/asf/cgi.html.
21. Berdal and Keen.
22. Majstorovic 9. Italics added. ^lxxix Goodhand and Hulme. ^lxxx David Keen, “The Political Economy of War” (1997), cited in Goodhand and Hulme 19.
23. Fearon 1995.
24. Brubaker and Laitin. ^lxxxiii Fearon 1994. ^lxxxiv Turton 13.

^lxxxv Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity (University of California Press, Berkely, 1987) 30. ^lxxxvi Hechter 11. ^lxxxvii Hechter 31. ^lxxxviii Hechter 31.

^lxxxix Hardin. ^xc Brubaker and Laitin 10.

1. Turton 13.
2. James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton UP, 1994) 17-20.
3. Crocker. ^xciv Hechter 11. ^xcv Turton 3.