Keywords

Introduction

In explaining a complicated topic, the grave advice of the King (okay, the King in Alice in Wonderland) is usually reliable. “Begin at the beginning...and go on until you come to the end: then stop.” Here, however, there seems little end to the influence of ethno-politics in the daily events and shaping histories of modern states and societies. Ethnic identify formed the basis for the nineteenth-century development of national identities and demands for self-determination throughout much of Europe. Contrary to the respective predictions of Marxists, who put their faith in social class, and of the postindustrialists who foresaw modern politics revolving around quality of life issues, it endured as a most potent factor in the destabilization of the multinational states given their independence by their colonial powers after World War II. More recently, ethnonationalism lay at the heart of the implosion of the Soviet Union and explosion of Yugoslavia into, combined, more than a score of states, and the durability of “old,” ethnicity based national identity has blocked the pathway of those who would build new democracies on a civic identity rather than an ethnic one in numerous post-civil war states. Likewise, today exclusionary nationalism and ethnic identity are shaping the politics of the world’s oldest democracies as they react negatively to the growing presence of “others” in their increasingly multicultural societies.

No, the end of this centuries’ long run of ethno-political considerations and movements shaping politics around the globe is not in sight, but it is possible to begin, as the King would suggest, at a beginning with some basic definitions and by identifying many of the characteristics of contemporary ethno-politics.

The Ethnie, Nations, and the Faces of Ethno-politics in the Contemporary World

Ethnic and National Identity. A well-respected dictionary on the terminology of ethnicity and nationalism defines the ethnie, or ethnic group broadly – as opposed to narrowly in terms of genetic traits – as a people “who identify themselves or are identified by others in cultural terms, such as language, religion, tribe, nationality, and possibly race” (Spiro 1999: 207). Members of the group are thus able to identify one another by the more outwardly visible manifestations of their groupness, such as language and perhaps attire. The same characteristics, however, also allow outsiders to identify the group’s “otherness.”

In contrast, a nation largely exists only in the realm of an individual’s sense of identity. To use Rupert Emerson’s still serviceable definition, a nation is “the largest community which, when the chips are down, effectively commands men’s loyalty, overriding the claims both of the lesser communities within it and those which cut across it or potentially enfold it within a still greater society” (Emerson 1960: 95–96). Nonetheless, as in the past, in much of the contemporary world there remains an extremely close link between national identity and ethnic identity. There are multiethnic/multicultural nation-states, in which the people identify with one another as a nation despite their ethnic diversity, and with the government as their legitimate government. The United States still is often cited as a successful example of one; that is, a civic nation-state based on the shared political culture and civic identity of its various ethnic communities. Such states are, however, extremely rare, especially compared to multinational states incorporating two or more different national communities, which account for the vast and still growing majority of states in the contemporary world.

The more common thread is for nations to be rooted in an ethnically distinct community. It is almost axiomatic that people are most prone to develop a common sense of identity with others with whom they already share much in common in terms of such outwardly apparent variables as language, religious, and other cultural practices, and perhaps appearance. Collective histories and daily contact also play a role in fostering the development of a common sense of national identity. Hence, with relatively rare exceptions nations emerge only within ethnic groups concentrated in a common territorial homeland, whereas ethnic groups often retain their identity even when geographically dispersed among a wider population. In both instances, however, significant political conflict is most likely to result when ethnic or ethnonational identity is reinforced by other factors.

From Identify to Conflict. As Aristide Zolberg noted, culture, class, and territory tend to define the principal arenas in which political activity currently occurs (Zolberg 1976). Samuel Huntington’s description of the last days of the twentieth century as a Clash of Civilizations involving differing cultures and religions rather than state interests offers an example of the first (Huntington 1996). The historic bloodletting resulting from the schisms within Christianity and within Islam provides other examples here. So does the persecution of Jewish and Catholic immigrants from Europe by the Ku Klux Klan and other white Christian (i.e., Protestant) supremacists in the post-Civil War United States’ south, which by the 1880s had become so notorious that the Italian government threatened to halt the further immigration of its citizens if Washington did not intervene.

Rivaling the influence of religion on politics within the states of the Western World, in the nineteenth century social class differences intensified by the Industrial Revolution began to shape societies and begat political upheavals before evolving into the basis of party systems inside most developed industrial democracies in the twentieth century. The divisions between the rich and the poor, the middle class and the working class, the ultra-wealthy and the average citizen still shape and shake their politics, from the annual decisions involving the movement of monies in national and subnational budgets to law and order issues involving crime and controlling the violence in protests against economically “unjust” systems.

Thirdly, there is the territorial segmentation of societies across state boundaries and within state systems. Former United States House of Representatives Speaker Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill, and one of the principal facilitators of the Anglo-Irish (Good Friday) Agreement of 1985 that began the process of bringing peace to the troubled region of Northern Ireland, remains best known in many circles for his aphorism that “all politics is local.” His actual meaning was more appropriate to democracies insofar as he was primarily referencing the skills needed to win local elections, especially those involving representation in municipal and state governments. In a much wider sense, though, all politics is territorial in the sense that it plays out on a territorial game board. There, for democratic and nondemocratic forms of government alike, struggles for influence pit locales against locales, regions against regions, regions against central authorities, and states against states in the world of international politics.

Ethno-Class Conflict. Zolbert’s principal point for the comparative study of ethno-politics was, nevertheless, not the existence of these three distinguishable arenas for political action, but rather that they often intersect with a profound impact on the nature and tractability of ethnic and national politics. The overlay of reinforcing ethnic and social class lines of segmentation, for example, can result in ethno-class conflict more intense than would be the product of rivalry between two members of the same ethnic group or social class. Civil rights laws produced extremely tense politics where the only advantage of, say, unskilled French workers or white southerners over immigrant laborers or unskilled African-Americans lay in the fact that they were, respectively, native French rather than of foreign origin, and white rather than black, and hence occupied a higher step near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Indeed, such ethno-class politics have not only been divisive on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but have spawned a series of anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe and have long sustained racist sentiments in the United States. The 1978 slogan of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party in France – “Two Million Unemployed is Two Million Immigrants Too Many!” – has not lost its evocative nature with the passage of time. Indeed, ethno-class segmentation and politics have seemingly intensified with the arrival in Europe and elsewhere of the hundreds of thousands of twenty-first-century refugees displaced by the violent, often ethnic civil wars in the Middle East and Africa.

Immigrants, war refugees, and transitory migrants like the Romany customarily take more lowly jobs and possess lower social status than their host populations, and to the extent that they come from culturally as well as geographically remote areas, they are apt to stand out in the populations of economically advanced democracies. As such, they constitute ripe targets for local partisan profiteering, especially because they rarely have the right to vote. The same, ironically, can also be true where the immigrants are more educated, skilled, and/or affluent than host populations as a whole. Such tends to be true even in economically developing areas, where Ibos may face discrimination as the “Jews of Africa” outside Nigeria. It remains an epithet also attached to the Chinese throughout Asia and those of Indian origin in Africa. And sometimes conflict between two tribes within the same country can feed on overlapping ethno-class divisions and end in tragic consequences, as occurred in Rwanda in early April of 1994, when tens of thousands of the historically privileged Tutsis were massacred by members of the majority Hutu tribe.

Finally, lest we overlook the more distant past in this short and hardly exhaustive inventory of instances of ethno-class differentiation and conflict, ethno-class divisions also shaped history in the settler societies of the New World in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Almost immediately upon their arrival, Europeans quickly appropriated the best land and established commerce-based societies that they deemed innately superior to what they perceived to be the primitive ways of the native tribes and aborigines (Headrick 1981).

Ethno-Territorial Conflict. At least equally significant in its impact on domestic and international politics has been the intersection of territorial identity and ethnic identity, which has often led to map-redrawing ethnonational demands for and accomplishment of national self-determination (Connor 1972). Yet even where territorialized majorities do not develop a nationalistic desire for independence in states where, overall, they constitute minorities, their ethno-regional demands involving regional languages, regional economic conditions, and ethno-political representation in a country’s capital can redefine the constitutional order. Belgium, for example, during the last three decades of the twentieth century went from being Western Europe’s most centralized unitary system to becoming almost a confederate association of its Flemish, Brussels and Walloon regions in its efforts to accommodate the escalating demands of the ethno-regional and ethnonational parties springing up in those areas.

Nor are such ethno-regional and ethnonational demands limited to regions where the territorial majority is a system-wide minority. In a truly terrible pun referring to the politics of ethno-nationalism, Walker Connor once quipped that “nothing secedes like success.” Rich minority regions can tire of subsidizing what they see as ungrateful majority areas and think in terms of going their separate ways, as events involving Catalonia’s recent efforts to secede from Spain underscore. Likewise, nationalists speaking for ethnically distinct communities both occupying the richest region and constituting the numerical majority in a multinational state may push separatist agendas, as Flemish nationalists in Belgium have been doing for nearly two generations.

That noted, by far the most common form of ethno-territorial conflict shaping domestic and international politics over the last several decades has been the demand for self-determination by territorialized minorities constituting a majority in their region and striving, violently if necessary, for independence. The Soviet Union imploded during the winter of 1991–1992 into 15 sovereign (but still mostly multinational) states when its non-Russian union republics seceded peacefully. The same period, however, marked the beginning of a decade of violent warfare that split the former Yugoslavia into seven states when Kosovo, recognized by approximately half of the countries in the world, is included.

The Soviet and Yugoslavia examples of state multiplication by secession fit into the long post-World War II period in which warfare has shifted from battles fought across international frontiers to domestic civil wars. A Heidelberg’s Institution for International Conflict Research report filed more than a decade after the 1995 Dayton Accord officially ended the war involving, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia is telling. Of the 254 conflicts tabulated that year, only 91 were interstate, all 30 of the instances of violence characterized as “severe crises” occurred within a single state, and eight of the nine conflicts identified as constituting warfare were intrastate. (Heidelberg Institute 2008) Not surprisingly given the stakes involved by regional minorities seeking to secede on the one hand and state leaders trying to avoid the dismemberment of their state on the one hand – the most violent civil wars continue to trend towards ethnic civil wars.

Moreover, although the most violent of these wars gain at least initial news coverage, minority struggles for regional autonomy and/or independence are far more widespread, both geographically and in number, than a reliance on headlines would suggest. Including such groups as the Chiapas in Mexico, China’s Xinjiang separatists, English language separatists in Cameroon, and the Karens and Rohingyas in Myanmar (nee Burma, and often described as the scene of the world’s longest running civil war), at any given moment there are at least 40 ethnic civil wars occurring around the globe. In some instances, the central government prevails – as when the government of Sri Lanka, after more than a quarter century of warfare, finally defeated the efforts of its Tamil minority to carve an independent Tamil state out of the north of that island. Sometimes the separatists prevail, as in the case of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia achieving their independence from Serbia’s leaders in Belgrade, albeit with outside support.

Outside support can also result in a state of diplomatic limbo and “frozen” conflict when a third party intervenes on behalf a breakaway minority, resulting in a de facto state with only one country in the world diplomatically recognizing it. Perhaps the best known of these entities is the Northern Cyprus Turkish Republic, which emerged in 1974 following Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus to prevent its Greek Cypriot leaders from collaborating in a Greece takeover of the island. It is still independent of Nicosia’s rule, although Nicosia has remained the pretend ruler of the entire island, a status last sanctioned by the European Union when it admitted Cyprus in 2004.

Other frozen conflicts exist, many dating from the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It was then that Moldova’s Russian population in the east successfully seceded after a brief skirmish with Moldovan authorities to found – with Russian support in the form of both financial aid and troops on the ground – the unrecognized state of Transnistria (officially the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic). Neither subsequent warfare not diplomatic recognition has ensued, unlike in Georgia, where the government’s 2008 efforts to retake the two northern regions – South Ossetia and Abkhazia – that broke free nearly two decades previously led to Russian military intervention on their behalf. For the greater part, though, these ethnonational conflicts just continue as low-grade warfare because the separatists are not strong enough to break free and the central government is not strong enough to end their rebellion.

Ethno-Territorial-Class Conflict. Finally, Zoberg’s model entailed a small sector where all three arenas overlap and territorial, cultural, and class differences reinforce one another in separating communities even in complex industrial and postindustrial democracies where the lines of segmentation – region, age, gender, religion, profession, social class, etc. – normally cross-cut one another, thereby reducing the salience of any single source of cleavage. Such instances of ethnic-class-territorial politics often produce the most complex scenarios and protracted conflicts. Consider the case of politics in Northern Ireland, where the terms “Protestant” and “Catholic” remain short hand for referencing multiple, reinforcing sources of division separating the one from the other.

The Protestants are the descendants of the settler communities who were imported from Great Britain to colonize Ireland and who brought with them a different ethnic heritage, language, and religion from that of the indigenous Gaelic-speaking, religiously Catholic population. Territorially, the Protestants concentrated in Ulster, the northeast quarter of the Island, where most debarked. There, they came to number two-thirds to three-fourths of the population, though rarely exceeding 3% of the population in the rest of Ireland. Throughout the island, however, they became the dominant economic as well as ruling class. The same was true in Ulster, although there they also came to constitute the majority in all socio-economic tiers. All of which produced a dichotomy of territorialized political associations. A minority in Ulster but solid majority in Ireland as a whole, the Catholics became the Nationalists, initially pressing for a full independence from British rule, and continuing to pursue a reunification agenda following the 1921 partition of Ireland and subsequent Irish civil war. The latter set three-fourths of the island on the path to full independence but London retained the northern six counties of Ulster as parts of the rechristened United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, a small minority in Ireland as a whole but part of an overwhelming ethno-religious majority in the United Kingdom, Ulster’s Protestants adopted a staunch Unionist position with respect to their province’s continued integration with Great Britain.

The Protestant-Catholic division in Ireland flared again in the 1960s when a civil rights movement by Ulster Catholics inspired by the success of the Civil Rights movement in the United States resulted in a violent counter-reaction in the Protestant community. By 1972, the conflict had reached such a level that the Government in London found it necessary to dismiss Ulster’s self-governing assembly in Belfast, place Northern Ireland under direct London rule, and deploy a sizeable peacekeeping force throughout Ulster. Although meant to last for only 12 months, the resistance of the province’s Protestant majority to the power-sharing features of London’s plan for restoring direct rule turned a temporary, exceptional measure into a political necessity that lasted more than 30 years. Only then, following 20 years of diplomatic negotiations involving United States Senators as well as government and party leaders from the Republic of Ireland, London, and Ulster was a sustained system of provincial self-government restored in Northern Ireland (Mitchell 2001).

Meanwhile, the other most commonly cited example of ethno-class-territorial conflict continues to simmer and the body count on all sides continues to creep up in spite of more than 40 years of international efforts to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The parallels with the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Ireland are not perfect, but neither are they hard to find. Poorer as a whole than the Israelis, the Palestinians living in the areas occupied by Israel since 1967 are Arab in their ethnic roots and Muslim in religion. Many of the leaders of Israel can trace their roots to the Zionist European immigrants that settled Israel when it was a League of Nations Mandate between World War I and World War II, or who came to Israel from Europe (including Russia) following World War II. In the Fertile Crescent area in which they live, the population is overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim, but their desire for statehood remains opposed by the Israel government with authority over them, and much of their territory on the West Bank continues to be the subject of Israeli settlements reducing it in size.

All of which leads us to a consideration of the means employed by and goals of ethno-political groups, and of the oft difficulty of accommodating them, all of which are significantly affected by whether the group is a territorialized majority or a minority broadly distributed within the country in which it resides.

Means, Goals, Dreams, and Ethno-politics

Means. As the examples above indicate, those pursuing ethno-political agendas exist in open and closed systems alike; however, the same options for pressing their demands do not. Where the political process permits it, they may form interest groups to protest government actions or lobby for policies as varied as those championed by White Supremacists in the United States and the Welsh Language Society in Britain. They may also form parties and openly contest for political power to advance their agendas from within; for example, the National Front party in France and its anti-immigrant, antirefugees kin campaigning on essentially ethno-class issues throughout Europe, Australia (the Australia First Party), Japan (the Japan First Party), Latin America (the Free Brazil Movement), and elsewhere around the world. Almost equally ubiquitous in our world of multinational states are the various Nationalist parties with a capital “N” focused on achieving federal status if not independence for their ethno-territorial communities. Of course, articulating demands does not guarantee that they will be addressed. Especially when the demands emanate from a regionalized community seeking greater autonomy, they are apt to be initially ignored. Alternately, the state may challenge the legitimacy of those raising the issues, as Belgium’s ruling parties once chose to do with the slogan: “Federalism = Separatism.”

Contrastingly, in less open systems, where dissent is repressed regardless of the grievances or nature of the demands, the vehicles of ethno-political assertiveness are more likely to be clandestine and engage in various levels of political violence. There were, for example, the essentially nuisance attacks on French television transmitting stations by Breton nationalists in France during the de Gaulle era when the official policy was to deny that France contained ethno-linguist minorities. At the other end of the spectrum lie the dark days of cross-burning and lynching by the Ku Klux Klan during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. To this can be added the fighting in Ulster between the Irish Republic Army and the Order of the Orange’s defenders of Protestant rule, and the civil warfare in Franco;s Spain between the Government in Madrid and the Basque ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty). Such para-military expressions of ethno-political objectives and communities are even more likely to be the carrier movements in repressive regimes where opposition opinions are unwanted and potentially fatal.

The focus here, then, is much more on ethno-politics in more open societies inclined towards accommodative policies, noting that even here both government receptivity towards the demands of ethno-political communities and the demands themselves can be affected by a wide set of variables, two of which stand out. First, there is the hitherto noted issue of pluralism. In complex social and economic systems, individuals tend to be members of a variety of different associations and carry multiple identities. Ethnic origin is one. Territorial concerns can be another and separate. Age and gender can affect outlooks, as can the importance of specific issues to different groups depending on their class, employment, social status, religion, and philosophies of life. The more these identities and associations crosscut one another, the more they can dilute – at least on a day-to-day basis – the salience of any single identity, including ethnicity.

The other element involves the community’s ability to engage in cost-benefit analysis in pursuing courses of action rooted in ethnic or national identity. In part, this may be a function of outlook. Hypothetically, the more cosmopolitan and less provincial, the more likely options will be viewed dispassionately. Likewise, outlook may reflect different levels of education – the more educated the individual or group, the more likely a greater set of consequences will be taken into account in evaluating courses of action. Popular referendums on independence provide some support for these conjectures. At a time of a global economic recession, the French-speaking majority in Quebec voted against pursing independence from Canada. Their province’s economy depended on the continued presence of English-owned businesses in Quebec, and its budget relied extensively on economic transfers from Canada’s government in Ottawa.

The calculus changes, of course, depending on the subjective weight assigned to the benefits of self-determination – almost always a powerful Siren’s call to a minority national community feeling itself under the shadow of a more famous and majoritarian one. No referendum was held to test its weight, but no one in Slovakia at the time doubts that those steering it towards independence knew well that their poorer region would be economically worse off disconnected from the Czech lands yet still went forward with their demands to separate in the early 1990s.

At least as frequently, however, unfavorable conditions can significantly limit ethno-political options. The resurfacing of ethnonational movements in the regions of many European states only in the last third of the twentieth century is largely explicable in terms of the circumstances of twentieth-century Europe until that time. Surviving and recovering from a World War, an interwar depression, another World War, an even more challenging round of postwar reconstruction, and warding off an expansionistic Soviet Union were all challenges that called for larger, rather than smaller scale political undertakings. They offered little political space in which ethno-regionalists and nationalists could operate in lobbying for greater autonomy, much less independence. Only after a generation or more of peace and economic growth, during which the system-wide governments lost a bit of their luster by having to relinquish their empires, did the luxury of pushing the nationalist agenda emerge.

The same applies to a degree, but only to a degree, to the ethno-class based agendas of the anti-immigrant parties of Europe. The need for foreign laborers to rebuild the countries of Western Europe following World War II was beyond dispute and it was therefore not until the recession of the 1970s, with domestic unemployment rising, that parties like the French National Front could find the political space to argue against their presence as a threat to French workers.

Goals. As for their goals, nearly four decades ago John Wildgen helpfully noted that the demands of ethnic and nationalist organizations and movements can be grouped under one or more of four headings. Some are output-oriented demands, some are authority-focused in nature, still others challenge the nature of the constitutional regime and – the most difficult to accommodate – there are those that challenge the definition of the political community (Rudolph 2006: 230). In the intervening period, ethno-political, and especially ethnonational, conflicts have grown in number, spawned greater divisiveness in even established democracies, and produced horrific body counts, but the distinction remains a useful one.

Output Goals. At a minimum, those articulating the interests of ethnic groups and national aspirations are interested, like interest groups in general, in government outputs; that is, what government does in terms of the policies adopted and the actions to which governments commit themselves. Racial minorities and immigrant groups, for example, might be particularly interested in the passage of antidiscrimination housing and employment laws – interests they might share with other memories of their societies with whom they might collectively try to influence government. Likewise regional minorities with national self-determination on their minds might join the ethno-regionalists of similarly poorer regions in lobbying for regional development funds and better regional infrastructure – demands, again, in which the support of less ethnically mobilized others might be coopted. Alternately, linguistic minorities like the Welsh Language Society in Britain may by themselves successfully push objectives of a more narrow interest – for example, having their languages taught in local schools, public documents translated into their tongue, and public television programming in their language – given a government interested in accommodation.

Accommodating this set of demands is easier than dealing with authority-, regime-, or community-focused ones insofar as they do not require those in authority to relinquish any of their decision-making authority; however, in practice they have not usually found readily receptive audiences. Quite apart from the fact that the system may not have the resources to fund the desired courses of action, the demands themselves have often lacked legitimacy in the eyes of decision-makers in the capitals. Regionalists in France long failed to gain the right to teach their languages in the public schools in Alsace and Corsica because the French government classified their tongues as bastardized mixtures, respectively, of French and German and of Italian and French. Likewise, those seeking to advance the rights of foreign workers in Germany found little support until forced by the European Union to adopt naturalization procedures because the official policy of the Federal Republic of Germany was that it was not an immigrant country but a returnee states. Translated, that policy meant that those of German blood who were cut off from Germany by Cold War borders could return to Germany as citizens, but that the Turkish workers and their descendants born in Germany remained foreigners under the country’s jus sanguinis citizenship laws, subject to a termination of their residency should they lose their jobs.

Authority-Focused Objectives. Even less likely to fall immediately on receptive ears among the decision-makers or to draw support from others in society have been the authority-focused demands of ethnic organizations centering on who makes the decisions. Unlike output-oriented demands, these are of a zero-sum nature in the sense that they necessarily dilute the authority of the decision-making Establishment, even if they do not displace it. The most common of these demands involves some variant on proportionality if not parity for minority groups in decision-making processes (in the Cabinets in parliamentary systems, for example), and perhaps as well within the higher ranks of the military and policy level bureaucrats. The preference is normally for a policy codified in the constitutional order; however, informal adherence has frequently become the rule. Even judiciaries may succumb to the practice, as has been true in both the United States and Canada for more than half a century. The US Supreme Court has had a “black seat” ever since Thurgood Marshall joined its other eight Justices in 1967 – a time when African-Americans constituted approximately one-ninth of the country’s population. In a like manner, with approximately a third of Canada’s population, Quebec continues to be the home province of a third of the Canadian Supreme Court justices despite the fact that the effort to write that figure into the Canadian Constitution (the Lake Meech Accord) failed more than 30 years ago.

Closely related to the desires of ethno-class and ethno-territorial groups to have a presence in executive and/or judicial decision-making arenas have been their efforts to secure a presence in the legislative assemblies. Such has been constitutionally achieved in a few states. Kosovo’s constitution thus not only mandates that 30% of the seats be held by women, but also mandates that seats be allocated to the country’s smallest minorities, which individually constitute less than 1% of the population. More commonly, however, the debate has focused on electoral arrangements. Because single-member-district/winner-by-plurality systems favor the stronger parties overall, majorities are loathe to consider other arrangements. Minorities, and not just ethnic minorities, on the other hand, often press for the adoption of Proportional Representation (PR) systems in general and especially regional PR systems with low threshold requirements.

At first blush, such systems seem tailor made to enhance the influence of both ethno-territorial parties and those with an (ethno-class) anti-immigrant focus. The differences in outcomes resulting from the two systems are obvious in the parliaments of Europe. The Freedom Party in Austria has long profited from the country’s PR system to the point where it has frequently been part of the country’s coalition governments. With a similar share of the popular vote, France’s National Front party has seldom been able to advance beyond the first round of voting in France’s single-member district system to win even a single seat in the country’s Chamber of Deputies.

Less anecdotally, broader studies generally confirm the correlation between the use of PR voting systems and an enhanced representation of small cadre parties, single issue parties, and especially starter-up political competitors in democratic systems (Richie et al. 2000). At the same time, scholarly examinations of the value of PR systems in empowering ethno-political associations in particular have been less decisive in concluding that, on a long term basis, they benefit the electoral fortunes of such parties. To the contrary, John Huber, a political scientist at Columbia University in New York, has noted that PR systems may actually lead to less politicization and promotion of ethno-political causes in pluralist systems than single member district systems because PR arrangements encourage multiple other interests to organized and carry their appeals directly to the voters, thus further fragmenting the vote over a wider number of parties (Huber 2010).

Finally, in terms of authority-focused demands and possible concessions, there are the power sharing arrangements that have become increasingly popular international recommendations for areas restoring democratic governments in the aftermath of ethnic civil wars and/or multinational countries transitioning from nondemocratic to democratic regimes. As noted with respect to Northern Ireland, solid ethnic and national majorities tend to resist such schemes, so to date they have most often been imposed on communities by “outsiders” as the price of achieving self-government; for example, London vis a vis Ulster, and the negotiators at Dayton and UN administrators vis a vis Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethnonational communities. Yet even where successfully imposed, power-sharing arrangements do not necessary result in collective decision-making. Rather, as in the case of Bosnia, constitutions whose future evolution depends on decisions collectively agreed upon by all ethnic communities may remain locked in the time of their origin. On the other hand, policy paralysis does not necessarily mark these peace-making schemes as failures. Political limbo is preferable to the resumptions of civil war.

Regime Change Demands and Constitutional Engineering. Constitutional engineering – the practice of designing institutional arrangements in order to address problems previously besetting a political process and/or to minimize anticipated future problems – has a long history, to some scholars reaching as far back as Socrates’ search for the perfect polity in Plato’s Republic. Its modern birth is usually accredited to James Madison, and the intended horizontal (federalism) and vertical (separation of powers) fragmentation of authority in the United States’ Constitution he designed in order to assure the fearful that the resultant government would not be too powerful. The twentieth century saw Charles de Gaulle adopt the opposite approach – a powerful, directly elected president to offset the fragmentary tendencies in French society often resulting in a multiparty system and paralysis in the French assembly. A similar system was adopted in Russia in the early 1990s when endowing the Russian legislature with most political authority led to policy paralysis and sometimes fisticuffs. Most recently, it has been in the international efforts to reconstruct states in a democratic fashion in postcommunist and post-civil war countries that the practice has most enjoyed a renaissance, with the Juan Linz school (Linz 1996, 1996) stressing the value of federal formulae and others embracing Arendt Lijphart’s power-sharing approach in postconflict institution-building (Lijphart 1977, 2008). But its use has not been limited to those situations.

Whereas both spatially dispersed ethno-class groups and territorialized ethno-regional and ethnonational interests can profit from output and authority concessions as well as make demands in these areas, demands for some variant of regime change – including power-sharing designs – are most likely to emanate from ethno-territorialized communities seeking greater control over their own affairs. Moreover, even authoritarian systems have found it useful to respond to such demands at least in part. It can be far less expensive to accommodate and try to co-opt the support of ethno-regional groups than to garrison an unruly area, and bitterly divisive politics sometimes may be lessened by decentralizing decision-making responsibility to localized communities not necessarily sharing the system’s dominant political culture. Thus, within the fold of the unitary and controlling Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and in accordance with the process that the Soviet Union labeled national delimitation, the Soviet state was federally divided into 15 national republics (the Soviet Socialist republics, or SSRs). Then, within many of these, decision-making authority was further distributed downwardly to semi-autonomous provinces, districts, and locales in order to accommodate the Soviet Union’s numerous ethnic subregions.

For democratic states lacking an integrative machine like the CPSU, the costs of regime change involving territorial concessions to regionalized minorities can be higher in terms their control of the overall political process. The existing options are nonetheless much the same. A unitary state can decentralize administratively by allowing more local governments adjust centrally made laws to local conditions or – more far reaching – by giving local councils the ability to make law in specific areas (for example, educational curriculum). In each instance, the primacy of the central government remains clear. Constitutional engineering schemes that devolve legislative and administrative authority to regionally elected governments, however, stretch the nature of unitary governance in a decidedly federal direction. It is one thing politically to recall a prior grant of authority to a local government; it is quite another to tell an elected regional assembly that it no longer has the authority previously devolved to it because the center that giveth can constitutionally taketh it away.

Making concessions beyond regionalization requires formally crossing the gap separating a unitary system in which the center legally retains the totality of political authority, to a federal system in which multiple levels of government exist, each with the ability to make, adjudicate, and execute laws in the areas assigned to it. Furthermore, crossing that line may itself trigger a new set of demands, with the federal entity’s leaders demanding the transfer of an expanding list of decision-making powers from the center to the state.

One other note here. Although the debate involving regime change most commonly focuses on the territorial management of power, it need not exclusively do so in democracies and democratizing states. Beyond power-sharing arrangements involving geographically dispersed ethnic communities, the drafting and revising of constitutions can also entail the adoption of a Bill of Rights backed by a system of judicial review to protect the interests of spatial and nonspatial minorities alike.

Finally, with respect to the organization of government at the center, although the United States’ separation of branches/checks and balances model has generally been shunned, the issue of whether to adopt a conventional parliamentary system or a hybrid system in which a directly elected President is vested with wide domestic as well as foreign policy decision-making authority has received considerable attention. The latter offers the promise of more decisive government in states with a highly fragmented political culture, resultant extreme multiparty systems, reliance on weak coalition cabinets, and potentially legislative paralysis. Ukraine’s recent experience with a presidential system, however, suggests it can aggravate ethno-political tensions in a bi-national state if the presidency is perceived to be clearly favoring the interest of one nation over the strongly held preferences of the other, thus propelling the “losing” side towards decidedly undemocratic courses of action, including violently challenging the terms of the union itself.

Differing Definitions of the Political Community. To summarize briefly before venturing into the world of extra-constitutional politics, to a high degree ethno-politics and conflicts reflect both where they take place (weak multinational states, racially divided societies, societies feeling besieged by the unwanted but clearly rising tide of multiculturalism within) and what they are about. In the older, established democracies, most political quarrels – including those involving spatial and nonspatially distributed ethnic communities – occur over what government does; that is, the conventional, who gets what, when, and in what form dimension of politics. Where groups feel left out, the debate may escalate to focus on who makes the decision. Demands for affirmative action programs to push into leadership positions groups previously left out, for parity or proportionality as a basis for staffing government positions, and power-sharing are frequently chosen examples of internal conflict management devices here. And, as just noted, sometimes the debate will escalate to where the decision is to be made, as in federal system where sensitive issues can be down-loaded for treatment in provinces corresponding to the boundaries of minority nationalities.

Nevertheless, sometimes the issue that cannot be side-stepped boils down to the definition of the political community itself and the legitimacy of the state’s existing borders in countries with territorialized ethnic communities. Or, simply stated, what is the nation’s homeland? Is it Scotland or Great Britain, Alsace or France, Catalonia or Spain? These are the most difficult conflicts to manage. Where they are particularly ugly – and as noted, ethnic civil wars are often the ugliest of all forms of warfare because each side believes that it is in the right – they can become the subject of international intervention because of a flagrant disregard for human rights and/or because they result in a regionally destabilizing, massive flow of refugees into neighboring areas. It is at this point that the politics of accommodation and compromise are most likely to break down.

To be sure, dichotomous definitions of the political community need not end in violence. In a variation of Arend Lijphart’s conceptualization of consociational democracy, leaders of the national communities may choose to work together to hold the state together lest its pieces individually suffer. The menace posed by Soviet expansionism inclined the leaders of Yugoslavia’s Macedonia, Croatian, and Slovene union republics to accept Belgrade’s rule even after the death of Tito until the Soviet Union imploded. There is also a precedent for the separation of ethnonational communities by a peacefully negotiated division of territory and shared property in the “velvet divorce” dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two sovereign states. In the same manner, at this writing, to enhance their chances of admission to the European Union, Serbia and Kosovo are trying to work out a land swap: the northern, heavily Serbian part of Kosovo to go to Serbia in exchange for Serbia transferring a strip of predominantly Albania-Muslim populated areas in eastern Serbia abutting Kosovo. And Quebec remains in Canada, the beneficiary of a greater transfer of decision-making power from Ottawa than enjoyed by the English-speaking states in the Canadian federation.

Today’s “management” devices for resolving community-based conflicts nonetheless do often involve those of an extra-constitutional nature; that is, means that lie outside the normal processes for conflict resolution inside a political system. Secession, whether successful or otherwise, can provide a definitive answer to the question of what constitutes the state’s official political community. The prevalence of the North over the South in the United States Civil War determined the future development of national identity there. There would be no separate country carved out of the rebellious states around which one could continue to develop a sense of national identity. The Ibos may continue to hold a separate national identity in multinational Nigeria, but the failure of Biafra’s effort to secede ended the question of whether they would enjoy national self-determination. The same applies to the Tamils’ failed effort in multinational Sri Lanka to win a state of their own. Alternately, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina prevailed in their series of wars with Serbia, as did Bangla Dash (nee East Pakistan) a quarter century earlier in its efforts to liberate itself from the rule of (West) Pakistan. Civil Wars are a costly way of deciding issues of self-determination, and those mentioned above took a horrific toll in lives lost and an even greater number in lives disrupted, often irrevocably. Nevertheless, in their outcome civil wars effectively function as extra-constitutional means of determining the nature of the state’s political community, even if it is to remain a multinational one.

Other, for the most part less drastic approaches to ethno-political conflict also fall under the extra-constitutional/extra-systemic umbrella. To the extent that ethnonational conflict is resulting in unrestrained separatist violence and/or border conflicts threatening regional stability, especially in strategically important areas, there is the possibility of third parties – states, international organizations, even mediation-offering nongovernment actors – offering pathways to conflict resolution in the form of good office diplomacy and third-party peacekeeping operations. In the event of a total breakdown of the system, the third party may become a direct part of the conflict resolution process, assuming a form of international tutelage over the area in question and overseeing democracy-building activities, as the UN did in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in intervening in the wars in Yugoslavia affecting those regions.

Third party involvement in ethno-class conflict inside a country must usually be indirect. Absent the aforementioned violent breakdown of the legal and political systems, what happens inside a state is still sheltered from the outside world by the principle of state sovereignty. But it is not immune from influence. Outside states have an interest in the treatment of their ethnic kin settled in other countries and on occasion may be able to affect their treatment short of direct intervention. Hungary thus held up Slovakia’s application for membership in the Council of Europe until the government in Bratislava retreated from the more discriminating practices it aimed at its Hungarian minority shortly after Slovakia gained independence. Likewise, the Baltic Republics with substantial Russian populations operate with a full awareness that Moscow is monitoring their treatment in Latvia and Estonia, where ethnic Russians constitute approximately a quarter of the population.

The watchfulness of outside countries over the treatment of their immigrants abroad is paralleled by the role that international organizations like the United Nations and nongovernmental actors like Amnesty International play in reporting on the treatment of minorities more generally. Beyond publicizing the mistreatment, however, their options are few and they normally lack any means of forcing changes in policy, but not always. The European Union’s efforts to end much of the more egregious anti-Romany policies in its member states under threat of economic sanctions, for example, have produced some positive results. Still, for the most part outside advice is unwanted and normally ineffective in terms of improving the conditions of ethno-class minorities in states throughout the world. Likewise, most ethno-territorial conflicts either continue or reach some form of resolution without the direct involvement of outside parties if for no other reason than if it is at all possible to do so, states prefer to treat their social and political conflicts themselves.

Negotiating Ethno-political Demands

Negotiating ethno-political issues is not always possible. Apart from the fact that a demand for independence by an ethno-territorial community may be nonnegotiable, those raising them may be doing so for private reason, and more interested in the personal benefits of exploiting them than resolving them. The championing of Greater Serbian Nationalism by Milosevic, for example, had more to do with his desire to hold power in postcommunist Yugoslavia than the treatment of Serbs in those union republics where they were in a minority, and no country holds a monopoly on demagoguery.

Meanwhile, the prospects for both more ethno-politically sensitive politics (the relatively recent re-examination of the rights of native groups in the settler states of the North America, Australia, and New Zealand, for example) and ethnic and national conflict continue to grow. Migration from the poorer south to the richer states of the developed democratic world, as noted previously, continues to turn formerly homogeneous, or nearly homogeneous societies with little experience with diversity into multicultural, multiracial, and to a large extent de facto multilingual countries. One result of this migration has been the revival of a negative species of nationalism, most conspicuously in the EU zone and Trump’s America. Nor has this sharpening of differences between majorities and minorities within the developed democratic world been limited to conflict between the host and immigrant populations. The growth in anti-Semitism, racially motivated violence, anti-Muslim sentiment, and overt discrimination against Roma minorities in North America and Europe all reflect a rise in ethno-class conflict and decline of tolerance in established democracies of the Northern Hemisphere. Meanwhile, to the south conflicts seem to just continue to grow in the multinational and multiethnic states of the developing world, with the most recent entrant literally during the creation of this Handbook – the secession movement by Anglophones in Cameroon sparked the government’s crackdown on the English-speaking minority territorialized in its southwest (Searcey 2018; O’Grady 2019).

Still elsewhere in the world of ethno-territorial conflict, with each newly created state carved out of separatist, civil war torn states as an approach to ending the conflict – Kosovo, East Timor, South Sudan – there is an additional incentive for others to plow the same field in the hope that if the conflict is awful enough third parties may step in and grant their wishes. The same state-creating process likewise encourages areas with far greater prospects of being economically viable independent states to press their own cases in Spain (Catalonia), Belgium (Flanders), the United Kingdom (Scotland), and elsewhere. Nearly 40 years before the European Communities morphed into the European Union, a French politician, Guy Heraud, predicted that by the time Europe grew to be as politically united a federation as the United States of American, it would contain nearly as many member states (Heraud 1973).

Even where there is a sincere interest in peacefully managing divisive issues, the complexity of the negotiating process can itself become a problem. Different voices weigh in with different intensity in different settings. An ethno-territorial or anti-immigrant party that commands a third of the regional vote speaks more forcefully than one with – perhaps only initially – a smaller following. Spatial minorities with close ties to a major party – for example, African Americans and the United States Democratic Party – may have considerable influence compared to other spatially distributed minorities, but only when that party is in power. And sometimes an important participant in an ethno-political conflict may scarcely have a voice in the domestic political process, as in the case of foreign workers and/or refugees who more often than otherwise are the target of political debate rather than effective advocates for their interests.

For those actively involved in a negotiating process, other obstacles loom. Because it is or is likely to become a negotiating process, merging the minimum gains that ethno-political groups will accept with the maximum points on which governments will compromise can be a long, tense process constantly on the edge of breaking down. Those making demands are apt to ask for more than they candidly want in order to give themselves room for compromise. Similarly, governments are hesitant to offer too much, lest they encourage an escalation in the demands confronting them. On the other hand, governments need to be mindful of the dangers of stonewalling moderate bargainers who are pressing ethno-political agendas. Ultimately the ability to accommodate spatial and nonspatially distributed groups depends on them accepting that the offers they receive are being made in good faith by majorities whose previous adherence to the rule of law, equality of rights, and civil liberties may not always have been above suspicion. Finding a middle ground with ethno-regionalists and nationalists has proven to be even more difficult. As Walker Connor posited more than 40 years ago,

ethnonationalism appears to feed on adversity and denial (the Jewish and Kurdish movement). It also appears to feed on concession: permissive perpetuation of the cultural manifestation or of political structures that reflect the nation’s distribution become constant reminders of separate identity and rallying points for further demands (Franco-Canadians, Ibos, and the nations of the Soviet Union). (Connor 1973: 21)

Conclusion

Finally, and with specific reference to the matter of accommodating ethno-political demands, a distinction must be drawn between the demands of ethno-political movements and their leadership on the one hand and the durability of ethno-political sentiment on the other. Inevitably the accommodation process addresses the former, and studies for decades have shown that it has often been successful, at least in the short term, in abating if not deflating the momentum of ethno-political movements. Affirmative action programs and wars on poverty for minorities, symbolic concessions, the right to teach regional languages in regional schools, parity arrangements, and the cooptation of ethnonational parties into governing coalitions have all paid dividends in reducing the salience of ethno-politics at various juncture of time and place.

Muting ethnic identity and sentiment is another matter. This most primal basis for social association and political organization has continued to exert its influence in multicultural and multinational states in spite of the efforts of the nation-builders who would create new, post-civil war societies based on a civic identity superseding the ethnic and national identities of their diverse peoples. Seventy years of Moscow’s intense efforts to displace national identities in its non-Russian Soviet Socialist republics in favor of the “New Soviet Man” did not even slow the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the winter of 1991–1992, the legacy of slavery continues to haunt racial relations in the United States, Muslim and African refugees remain unwanted in large parts of the European Union, and tribal warfare continues to infect the countries of Africa six decades since independence. Sometimes managed and sometimes accommodated, ethnic identities, sentiment, and goals continue to shape state and society alike around our early twenty-first-century globe.

Cross-References