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Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, (editors)
International and Area Studies Research Series/Number 98
University of California, Berkeley
1998
The Causes of Cultural Conflict: Assessing the Evidence
The argument that has unfolded in these stories suggests that differences in identity transformation, institutional legitimation of political relevance, and response to globalization and liberalization explain differences among states with regard to cultural conflict. These factors also explain variation in the intensity of violence. In this chapter, I summarize the evidence for these claims. As in any cursory summary, the presentation of evidence is greatly simplified. Despite this qualification, however, it will become clear that countries that should have experienced similar levels of cultural conflict—given their level of development, population composition, and strength or weakness of the central government—did not do so. And countries that should have experienced different kinds and degrees of conflict were hit by similar levels of violence. These differences can be traced directly to institutional structure and strength.
Taken together, the essays in this volume illustrate the strength of this institutional argument in two ways. Some of the essays have examined societies that are different in most respects, save preferential political institutions, to see whether and how much institutions matter to the intensity of politicized cultural identity. Abkhazia, Yugoslavia, Germany, and India can be roughly compared in this way. In addition, we look to societies that may be similar in important respects, but one is lacking these preferential institutions. Bulgaria and Bosnia, Abkhazia and Ajaria, and Germany and England suggest comparisons along these lines.
Our first set of institutional propositions suggests that if political institutions historically provided preferential benefits to ethnic or religious groups whose political relevance had been previously established, then politicized ethnicity and religion would continue, but it would not necessarily lead to violent conflict. Malaysia illustrates this proposition. Alternatively, if cultural identity had not been previously politicized, institutions could create that political relevance or prevent its initial emergence. The Soviet case is a good example. To the extent that those institutions were strong, they could channel identity politics in nonviolent political competition. Both the Soviet case and the case of Malaysia illustrate.
Alternatively, institutional rules and procedures could be structured in ways that prevented cultural identity from becoming politically relevant at all. To the extent that these institutions are strong, political competition takes the form of class or interest group conflict. The United States and England provide appropriate case material for an exploration of this claim. Our institutional approach leads to the expectation that ethnic and religious differences will not be politically relevant in those societies lacking strong preferential institutions—such as England and the United States. But it will be relevant in those societies where such institutions prevail.
The presentation of the evidence for this first stage of the argument is in three steps: the first is a description of the process of identity transformation in the cases under examination. The second is a description of how the political relevance of cultural identity is either weakened or intensified by two institutional factors: the rules of political membership—that is, nationalist ideologies and citizenship laws—and institutions that allocate political and economic resources. The third step is a discussion of the relevance of institutional strength to the reduction of violence.
How Cultural Identity Becomes Politically Relevant
As noted in the introduction to this volume, not all social divisions become politically relevant. The stories told here concentrate on how cultural identities and divisions became politicized. In all cases, where cultural conflict has been most intense, cultural identities were transformed into political identities. But they did not become politically relevant in the same way in each case. The strategies of colonial rulers provided one source of identity transformation. The institutions of new states provided another. And religious precepts provided yet another avenue for the politicization of cultural identity. In the stories told here, if one of these factors was present and provided a means for interpreting cultural grievances, that interpretation became the “raw material” that political entrepreneurs could mold in their political mobilization efforts.
The Indian case illustrates how cultural identity was transformed into political identity through the preferential policies of colonial rulers. Sikh political identity was created as early as the seventeenth century with Mughal repression; it became entrenched with eighteenth-century Sikh political autonomy and further fixed in the nineteenth century with British colonial policies of divide and rule.
In both Germany and the Soviet Union, the institutions of the state itself politicized cultural identity. Soviet ethnofederalism infused cultural identity with political relevance, even in places where it had never been relevant before. In Germany, cultural identity became politically relevant in the process of “nation-building,” and that relevance was codified in the Reichs- und Staatsburgergesetz of 1913, which specified that German citizenship was passed by descent from parent to child, excluding anyone who was not biologically “German.”
In Muslim-majority states, cultural identity was fused with political identity through the precepts of religious beliefs. Despite Islam’s universalizing and transnational tendencies, the enforcement of Islamic law requires a territorial state. Malaysia, for example, emerged from colonialism under the leadership of elites who created an Islamically legitimated state, which, Lubeck argues, “was much less likely to disturb civil society with overtly modernist ideology and development projects that disrupted community cohesion.” Thus the state’s legitimacy was never questioned by adherents of political Islam, and it could effectively block incentives for Islamic movements to become politically radical. After all, Muslims in Malaysia had a state of their own. In contrast, the rise of a more radical political Islam was assured in Egypt and Algeria when secular states weakened and could no longer meet their obligations to society. Indeed the Islamic faith contains the seeds of politically relevant cultural identity which are more likely to sprout and thrive in the more fertile ground of Muslim-majority states than in Muslim-minority regions like Bulgaria or the Soviet Union, where language rather than religion became the national identity marker. Because language marked national identity in both countries, religious difference lost much of its political relevance.
The case of Pomaks in Bulgaria provides a good example of the weakening of the political relevance of religious identity in Muslim minority states. Like the Bosnian Muslims and the Hindus in India, many Bulgarian Muslims had converted to the religion of Muslim rulers to gain political and economic advantage. In Bulgaria, the process of nation-building in the nineteenth century saw a political struggle between those who wanted language and those who wanted religion to be the national identity marker. Bulgarian Christian nationalists wanted to exclude Bulgarian Muslims from the nation they tried to construct, and grievances resulting from their exclusion began to etch themselves on the Pomak collective memory. But when language became the dominant national identity marker in independent Bulgaria, religion lost much of its power as a rallying point for political mobilization. After 1945, the unitary Bulgarian state under communism was characterized by universal and inclusive laws of citizenship and policies of indiscriminate political repression. These factors diminished the political relevance of Bulgarian Muslim identity. In contrast, in Yugoslavia, where language did not become a political identity marker, religious identity became a benchmark for national identity and thus became relevant in the political arena.
In all the cases above we saw how culture was politicized to some degree through both discrete and prolonged historical episodes of discrimination and privilege. And the liberal democracies were not immune. Recall that in the early history of the United States, only white immigrants had easy access to citizenship. The abandonment of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and segregation marked much of post-civil-war U.S. history. In Britain, the Alien Restriction Act of 1914 strengthened the restriction of non-Commonwealth foreigners that began in 1905 in an effort to curtail Jewish immigration. That act was renewed annually until 1971. Immigration from the Commonwealth was also restricted in the 1960s; in March 1965, the Conservative Party issued a document in which it explicitly rejected the viability of a multiracial state “not because we are superior to our Commonwealth partners but because we want to maintain the kind of Britain we know and love.” 1
In all cases, then, cultural grievances became more or less embedded in historical memory, and ethnic or sectarian political entrepreneurs always had episodes of discrimination and privilege to call upon in their efforts to gain support from distinct cultural groups. But in some places, identity politics came to define the logic of the political game, and in other places, it did not. In those places where it did, the odds of violence were higher. And in those places where the logic of identity politics was weaker, the odds of cultural conflict decreased. The incentives and constraints offered by political institutions, and the strength of those institutions to follow through, largely determined those odds.
Creating and Cementing Political Identity: The Role of Institutions
Once cultural identity is politicized, the sustained intensity of that political relevance depends on state institutions. Those institutions define the rules of political membership, representation, and resource allocation. When these institutions structure membership, representation, and resource allocation according to previously established cultural criteria, “identity politics” dominates the political game. When other criteria are used, cultural identity is less relevant in the political arena. Where identity politics is practiced, states can channel it in peaceful political competition as long as they can make credible commitments to shape and uphold agreements made among culturally defined political actors. It is when the state can no longer make those commitments credible that security dilemmas can begin to shape political competition and permit it to take a violent turn.
Inclusive and Exclusive Nationalism. As the Bulgarian case noted above aptly illustrates, the most critical historical juncture in which dominant and enduring political identities are formed and cemented is the nation-building process. In that process, social contracts are constructed in which the terms of citizenship and inclusion in the political community are forged and embedded in state constitutions, legal systems, and political practices. “Nationalism,” replete with its dominant identity markers, becomes the ideological justification for the terms of inclusion in or exclusion from the political community; its ideas and symbols provide the logic for a legitimate “national” political identity that both encompasses and transcends ethnic, religious, linguistic, clan, caste, or family identities. These more parochial cultural distinctions can indeed become politically relevant within the framework of a “national” political identity, but the national political identity comes to dominate all others when nation-states are strong. This is because national identity defines who is a member of the political community and who is not. For example, in the relatively homogeneous societies of Germany and England, religious identity was politicized in the seventeenth century, but its political relevance was attenuated over the next two centuries by the rise of the secular state. In both countries, alternative, nonreligious political markers were created in the critical process of nation-building. This was supposed to be the case in Algeria and Egypt as well; the growing weakness of the secular state, however, opened a political contest over the particular cultural content of national identity in both states, and religion became an important contestant.
Although many varieties of nationalism have been analyzed in the literature, 2 the distinction between two alternative forms has often been cited as crucial to a full understanding of communal conflict: exclusive nationalist ideologies, which make intrinsic identities and cultural attributes of race, religion, or language the criteria for membership in the political community, and inclusive nationalist ideologies, which make individual civic behavior the criteria for membership. Inclusive nationalism is thus blind to cultural difference in its criteria for political membership.
Inclusive nationalism is based on the principle of individual incorporation; membership is open to any individual, and acceptance into the nation is open to all, regardless of ethnic origin or religious belief. Inclusive nationalism is associated with secular states; thus membership in the political community is not dependent on religious belief. All else being equal, inclusive nationalism weakens the political relevance of cultural identity. The British case illustrates. As Liah Greenfeld writes, “English national consciousness was first and foremost the consciousness of one’s dignity as an individual.” 3 As the British empire grew, this inclusive concept of membership grew as well. Membership in the political community included Commonwealth immigrants but excluded other aliens. Immigrants to England from the UK were thus British nationals with all the rights and obligations of citizenship. Furthermore, under inclusive nationalism, membership in the nation became a function of civic behavior, not ethnicity; immigrants could legally seek and obtain political rights, and British citizenship remained relatively easy for them to obtain.
Exclusive nationalism, in contrast, restricts membership in the nation to persons of a particular cultural origin, making descent the principle of incorporation into the political community. Often, when groups are excluded from membership in the political community because of their cultural origins, they organize to fight for inclusion or autonomy. The resulting struggles have historically led to cultural conflict. Obviously, in homogeneous societies, exclusive claims to national identity and territory will not trigger these fights. In multicultural societies, however, ideologies of exclusive nationalism can justify the expulsion of those from the political community that do not meet the criteria. Conventional wisdom has it, for example, that Germany’s exclusive form of national identity and the citizenship laws based on ethnic exclusion largely explain the current rise in the violence against “foreigners” there. The same argument can be made about Croatia. By the same logic it can be argued that relatively low levels of violence against immigrants in England can be attributed to inclusive nationalism and citizenship laws there. It follows that inclusive membership in the political community would create a disincentive for those political entrepreneurs who would foment nativist sentiments and mobilize support with the politics of exclusion. 4
The problem with this argument is that inclusive nationalism and resulting universal citizenship laws characterize all of our cases except Germany and parts of the former Yugoslavia, and yet considerable variation in cultural conflict and violence can be found among those inclusive nations. The United States followed England in its inclusive national idea, and India’s universal citizenship laws are based on British principles. In Muslim-majority states, citizenship laws are based on British and French colonial statutes of inclusion, and although Islam has the privileged status as the official religion, one does not have to be a Muslim to be a citizen. And former Communist countries espoused inclusive nationalist ideologies and extended universal citizenship in order to reduce the salience of ethnicity as a source of political identity. 5 In short, because most of our cases have inclusive citizenship laws and yet there is much variation in levels of conflict, we can conclude that exclusive nationalism does not fully explain how the political relevance of ethnicity and religion is created, perpetuated, and can lead to violence. We must therefore look more deeply than distinctions among nationalist ideologies and the membership institutions built upon them to find the causes of cultural conflict. It is thus to an examination of other institutions and social practices that the discussion now turns. Rules of Participation and Allocation. Without strong supportive institutions to uphold and protect the rights of minorities, inclusive national ideologies as a basis for citizenship—characteristic of Western liberal democracies and Communist systems alike—do (and did) not offer a panacea for communal conflict. In democracies, institutions that ensure minority participation in political competition, a police force that protects minority rights, and institutions that play an allocative role in disadvantaged minority communities can bolster inclusive citizenship rights, increase social integration and peaceful political participation, and strengthen minorities’ identification with the state. As minority “national” identity with the state increases, state legitimacy and thus state strength increase as well. For example, the consensual politics of both the United States and Britain have long been held as a model of political participation that fosters the social and political integration of distinct cultural groups. Majoritarian political systems push debate to the center of the political spectrum. Political change comes about through compromise among ideological, cultural, and interest groups. Because of high barriers to entry into the political system of new, small parties, the political systems and electoral laws in both countries have encouraged two-party alignments and discouraged extremist politicians. Parties engage in catch-all strategies, through which platforms are formulated to attract floating centrist voters. 6 This system discourages extreme forms of cultural conflict and fosters social integration.
But consensual politics can foster social integration only if legal institutions protect minority rights and if other institutions allocate resources without cultural discrimination. In the United States, for example, as Lipschutz argues, the institutions supporting an integrative political system were equal economic opportunity, procedural legal equality, and welfare programs intended to foster national allegiance. Without supportive institutions, the power of consensual politics and inclusive citizenship to weaken the political relevance of cultural identity is reduced, and the probability of protest and violence on the part of excluded minority communities increases. Furthermore, without broadly representative allocative institutions, ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs in majority populations have the political space in which to inflame and exploit nativist sentiments.
England provides an example of the importance of supportive institutions to the strength of an integrative political system. As Elaine Thomas’s contribution to this volume shows, until the mid-1970s, broad citizenship rights for Commonwealth minority immigrants were bolstered by majoritarian party politics and a network of Community Relations Councils (CRCs) designed to mitigate racial tensions. In order to maintain party unity, both Labour and Conservative leaders kept issues of race off of the political agenda. Furthermore, both parties aimed to capture centrist voters, and depoliticizing race was part of the catch-all strategy to avoid “ideological” issues in that effort.
These efforts, however, fell short of their goal. Although the CRCs were intended to improve the economic conditions of new immigrants, newcomers often suffered from housing and public service shortages. Competition for a limited housing stock between native workers and immigrants provoked racial tensions, and by the 1970s, the efforts of the police to enforce the depoliticization of race were weakened. Police officers, who had lived in those areas in which they worked, began to move out, and they placed more emphasis on apprehending criminals than providing assistance. As these institutions supporting an integrative political system were weakened in the 1970s and 1980s, incidents of cultural conflict increased.
Our cases also suggest that just as exclusive nationalism can provide an affective and symbolic resource for political entrepreneurs to begin the process of communal conflict, that conflict can be attenuated by strong state institutions that have other attributes of inclusion and protection of cultural minorities. Germany provides an example. Germany’s constitution explicitly obligates the state to protect the individual rights of residents without regard to citizenship. The right of individual immigrants to political asylum in Germany was particularly strong. Furthermore, the Federal Republic’s institutional norms and legal structures reduce the opportunity for extreme right-wing politicians to espouse claims of German racial and cultural superiority. These institutions weaken the role of exclusive citizenship laws in fomenting violence.
These examples suggest that those states who decide to remove culture struggles from the political arena must do so through a network of strong and supportive institutions. In many cases, however, culture long ago entered that arena and was so intensely politicized that it could not be removed. In those cases, cultural claims were settled in nonviolent political competition, and institutions were constructed to do the job.
In democratic systems, when cultural identities were historically transformed into political identities and when past grievances and institutional barriers prevented minority groups from being fully assimilated into the “nation,” some liberal democracies attempted to bring minorities into the political community by providing for collective as well as individual political representation and protection. They did this by constructing rules of political competition that avoided winner-takes-all outcomes, guaranteeing that minorities had a political voice, and by proportional representation, coalition governments, political guarantees for the divisions of key offices among ethnic and religious groups, and reciprocal vetoes. These rules ensured that identity politics would define the political logic, but as long as political entrepreneurs acted within the rules and as long as political institutions were strong enough to ensure that they did, political conflict did not become violent and social stability was enhanced. The problem of cultural conflict emerged when cultural identity was politicized and some cultural groups were excluded from the system of privilege.
The case of India illustrates. Linguistic difference provided the criteria for the division of independent India into a system of federal states—each state privileged its majority culture, often to the detriment of minorities. Most minorities in those states, however, had states of their own, and direct cultural conflict was diffused in this way. But the Sikhs, who had long spoken their own language and whose political identity had been established through historical persecution and encouraged under British rule, were denied the privilege of statehood. Sikhs saw themselves as a politically relevant cultural group, excluded from an important and accepted form of political participation. The result was a struggle for territorial independence.
Obviously Communist systems eschewed this pluralist mode of national incorporation of minorities. Indeed the division of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia into “ethnic” republics was an attempt to gain loyalty to the central state by providing universal citizenship and transforming ethnicity into a cultural/administrative identity, thereby preventing its reemergence as a dominant political force. At the same time, central authorities provided those administrative units with some autonomy and collective representation to ensure their loyalty to the socialist system. This system intensified the political relevance of ethnicity, negating the effect to depoliticize it, but channeled it in nonviolent political competition.
As Philip Roeder’s essay elaborates, this Communist system of ethnofederalism created ethnically distinct political elites in the Soviet Union. These elites, who were accountable to central authorities in Moscow, also controlled access to scarce resources, such as education, the media, and entrance into coveted professions. That control facilitated the creation of what Roeder calls Soviet “ethnic machines” and what Derlugian calls ethnic and religious “patronage networks,” whose leaders exchanged resources for loyalty from the titular ethnic group. Although the leaders were accountable to Moscow, the machines and networks made it difficult for Moscow to alter those local practices and thus gave local leaders wide-ranging autonomy. It was in this way that ethnicity became politically relevant; titular ethnic groups came to believe that they had unique political rights and unique access to resources distributed in the political arena.
The contrasting cases of Ajaria and Abkhazia are apt illustrations of how this system created and maintained politicized cultural identity in the Soviet Union. As I will discuss below in this essay, they also illustrate how such systems are prone to violence once state institutions begin to fail. Ajarian elites once made a bid to become a titular nationality, but Georgian authorities could block this effort with Moscow’s support because it was seen as a Communist struggle against a religious political movement; Moscow’s goal, of course, was to rid the new state of religion’s political power. When Ajarian elites thus lost the battle over their status as a titular nationality, Ajaria became an integral part of Georgia, subordinate to Tbilisi, and Ajaris began to identify themselves politically as Georgians.
As Derluguian argues, the Abkhazes, in contrast, won the status of a titular nationality over Georgia’s objections. That status, in turn, made Abkhazia a republic and thus made it equal in rank with Georgia. Because local Abkhazian political elites were now accountable to Moscow and not to Tbilisi, they gained enormous access to power resources and economic benefits. Abkhazes came to occupy a disproportionate number of administrative and political positions and gained control over much of the agricultural production of the most lucrative crops. The “ethnic machine” fought to prevent Abkhazian farms from being collectivized, thus allowing them to remain autonomous, while the land cultivated by the majority Georgian population came under collective and centralized control. Derluguian’s comparison suggests that divergent allocative institutions weakened Ajarian political identity and strengthened Abkhazian political identity.
There are striking similarities between the Yugoslav case and that of Abkhazia, and between Bulgaria and Ajaria, in both the levels of communal violence after the fall of communism and the institutional structure created under communism. In Yugoslavia, ethnically defined republics legitimated the political relevance of cultural identity. Although ultimately accountable to the central government in Belgrade, political elites found that they could use funds distributed from the center to the republics to build a political power base at the local (republic) level in order to mobilize and gain the political loyalty of their culturally defined populations.
Bulgaria, in contrast, was a unitary state, and the Pomak population was fully integrated into the nation. Because historically there had been only a weak and ultimately failed effort to construct a Pomak political identity, there was no need for the Communist regime to single out the Pomaks for either special repression or privilege. If anything, the Pomaks were coincidentally privileged because they enjoyed “border benefits”—that is, development funds that were granted to the border regions of the Rhodopes in which they lived. They thus attained a higher than average standard of living for the region. Nonetheless, because Bulgaria was a small and unitary state, these border benefits were doled out directly from the central government to the border populations; unlike in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, there were no intermediary political entrepreneurs who could control the distribution of those benefits in order to enhance their own power base. In short, Pomaks identified themselves first and foremost as Bulgarians.
Like India, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, Malaysia constructed rules of collective representation, allocation, and participation. Of course, as noted above, Malaysia’s citizenship laws are inclusive, based on British colonial statutes. These laws prevented Malaysia from becoming an Islamic state. Nonetheless, Islamic political elites made certain that Islam would become a state religion, defining educational and dominant cultural practices. The codified dominance of Malay culture and religion led minority Chinese citizens to organize and struggle for collective political representation, thus intensifying the political relevance of cultural identity. The Chinese created their own political party, the MCA, and won electoral victories. 7 But when radical Islam threatened to polarize the Malay community, it was absorbed by UNMO, the moderate Islamic catch-all party, in much the same way that Germany’s Christian Democrats and England’s Conservative Party absorbed right-wing extremists. Thus while the political relevance of ethnic identity was legitimated in the political arena, the political relevance of religious identity was minimized.
Malaysia also implemented policies of collective resource allocation. After the pivotal riot of 1969, in which Malays violently opposed a Chinese election victory, a New Economic Policy (NEP) was initiated. It was intended to eliminate absolute poverty, especially among the Malay peasantry, and create an “affirmative action” program guaranteeing quotas for Malays in education, employment, and government contracts to counterbalance Chinese economic dominance. The system was considered relatively fair by all cultural groups because all were provided access to resources and representation.
In sum, in all of our cases, cultural identity became politically relevant in historical struggles over resources. But in some cases, that relevance was deeper and more widespread than in others. What matters most to our puzzle of cultural conflict and its intensity, however, is whether modern institutions “cemented” the logic of identity politics, enabling it to define the logic of the political game. In most places where violence was high, the institutions of central authority, despite inclusive nationalist ideology, legitimated and thus cemented that political relevance of cultural identity through the rules of allocation and participation.
Germany and the Muslim-majority states are exceptions to these findings. Of the industrial societies, Germany’s exclusive nationalism and citizenship laws are associated with higher levels of cultural violence than those found in other industrial countries, but those levels are much lower than in Egypt and Algeria, which both have inclusive citizenship and nonpreferential resource allocation. And Malaysia, with its preferential policies of resource allocation, has low levels of violence.
These exceptions suggest that while preferential institutions may cement the practice of identity politics, that practice will not automatically lead to cultural conflict. And though they may try to block that practice, they are not always successful. Institutions must be strong enough to channel cultural conflict in the political arena in peaceful competition or to create other incentives for political competition that weaken the political relevance of culture. The key to the peaceful practice of competitive identity politics—the intervening variable between identity politics and violence—seems to be institutional legitimacy and strength. Nonetheless, cultural conflict still arises in areas, like Germany and England, where institutions have remained strong. And communal conflict has been absent in many multicultural societies, like Bulgaria, whose institutions have collapsed. Thus institutional weakness must work together with other factors in order to trigger cultural conflict. In the pages to follow, therefore, I assess the weight of institutional strength, transformation, decline, and collapse in relation to the incentives and constraints provided by institutional legacies in our general explanation of communal violence.
Institutional Legitimacy and Strength
The most enduring institutions upholding the social contract are found in the Western industrial democracies. Their political institutions are resilient, their bureaucracies efficient, their economies robust, and loyalty to the nation strong. State institutions in industrial democracies are stable enough to cushion society against shocks imposed by changes in the international economy; they possess the capabilities to withstand the international economic vacillations that have severely weakened the allocative institutions in less developed countries. When allocative institutions are strong, they sustain the state’s commitment to uphold the social contract. When those institutions are weakened or even when their rules are changed, the credibility of those commitments is reduced, and it is then that political entrepreneurs have the opportunity to propose alternative social contracts and mobilize support in their favor.
England’s political institutions were capable of countering efforts to undermine citizenship rights, maintaining majoritarian electoral laws, and creating allocative institutions to mitigate racial tensions. Germany’s political institutions protected individual rights of residents, regardless of whether they were citizens or not. And constitutional constraints created and perpetuated widespread social norms that weakened the political appeals of the far right, and even threatened their very existence, should they challenge those norms. In the 1970s and 1980s, these institutions were disrupted in both countries, but the norms they created were resilient, and the conflict that did emerge was sporadic and short-lived.
The Communist institutions of inclusive membership and ethnofederalism combined with the repressive apparatus of the state to mitigate ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. All political elites were accountable to Moscow and Belgrade. According to Derluguian, these institutions played a successful stabilizing role during the 1920s and continued to support Soviet state order for almost seven decades. Indeed the institution of ethnofederalism provided a much more important “glue” to hold the USSR together than did Communist ideology. Until the fall of communism in Yugoslavia, the institutions of ethnofederalism, though weakened by economic pressures and policies of decentralization, prevented succession turmoil and the outbreak of violent ethnic conflict. Bulgaria, in contrast, was a unitary state with a strong Communist government until 1989. Allocative institutions privileged party members and functionaries rather than particular ascriptive groups. Pomak cultural identity thus remained depoliticized under strong institutions of universal citizenship and nondiscriminating resource allocation.
In Egypt and Algeria, the political relevance of Muslim identity was initially weakened by a network of institutional arrangements that accompanied formal independence after World War II. These institutions privileged interest-based political competition in a democratic framework, state-initiated economic development, and import-substitution industrialization. In both states, secular governments upheld a social contract which did not privilege any religious group, despite the existence of Muslim-majority populations. Although the institutions that upheld that nonsectarian social contract were weak in Algeria and Egypt, that weakness was masked by the oil boom of 1971–74, which initiated a surge of state-centered development, leading to rising incomes. Rising incomes, in turn, bolstered secular nationalism and kept political Islam at bay.
These examples and our overall findings suggest that institutional strength plays an important role in mitigating violence in societies where identity politics dominates the political process. And it provides an important firebreak to the practice of identity politics in those societies where cultural identity has not become politically relevant and where institutions structure the logic of the political game to promote class and interest group competition. As long as ethnofederalism remained strong in former Communist countries, identity politics was peacefully channeled through patronage networks. As long as the secular state remained strong in Muslim-majority states, political Islam was held at bay. As long as the secular state in India remained strong, cultural competition and conflict remained relatively nonviolent and repressed. And Germany’s strong liberal institutions prevented the far right from mobilizing the population with extreme nativist sentiments.
But institutional weakness alone cannot fully explain the outbreak of cultural violence and variation in its intensity. Communism collapsed in Bulgaria and Ajaria, yet cultural conflict did not turn violent. In part, we believe, this was because previous institutions had not politicized cultural identity. Conflict did break out in Germany, where institutions were relatively strong. The evidence suggests that this was because cultural identity is politicized in Germany by citizenship laws. And conflict erupted in Egypt and Algeria, where institutions had attempted to inhibit the practice of political Islam. We believe that those institutions were always fragile and that given the precepts of Islamic faith, where Islam was considered a political force, a secular state would have had to be much stronger than it actually was if religion were to be removed from the political arena. Indeed in Malaysia, elites did not even try to construct a secular state, and the moderate Islamic state that they built was able to coopt political Islam and block extremist elements. Thus we must conclude that cultural violence is not only a function of institutional weakness, but also results from a confluence of institutional legacies and current incentives, openings for cultural conflict that emerge in institutional transformation and overall institutional strength. Table 1 summarizes the argument.
Table 1
Institutional Legacies and Current Incentives as Factors of Cultural Violence
| Country/Region | Identity Transformation | Membership | Resource Allocation | State Strength | Politicized Identity |
| Yugoslavia | World War II atrocities | Inclusive | Ethnofederalism | Eroding until 1991 | Ethnic machines |
| Abkhazia | Created by Soviet state | Inclusive | Ethnofederalism | High until 1991 | Ethnic machines |
| Algeria | Latent political Islam | Inclusive | No cultural preferences | Weak | Secular state briefly weakens political Islam |
| Punjab (Sikhs) | Mughal repression, eighteenth-century autonomy, British divide and rule | Inclusive | Sikh exclusions from cultural preferences in independent India | Central state strong until oil crisis | High |
| Kashmir | British divide and rule | Inclusive | Secular vs. religious parties | See Punjab | High |
| Egypt | Latent political | Inclusive | No cultural preferences | Strong until after 1974 | Secular state briefly weakens political Islam |
| Germany | Nation-building | Exclusive | Welfare state, obligation to protect individual rights | High until 1990, after 1991 | Ethnic Germans vs. foreigners; high |
| United States | Nation-building | Inclusive | Majoritarian | High | Limited | Nation-building | Inclusive | Majority catch-all parties | High | Weak identity politics |
| Bulgaria (Pomaks) | Language weakens Muslim political identity | Inclusive | Equal repression, collective farms | High until 1989 | |
| Malaysia | Islamic state, political minorities | Inclusive | Cultural preferences | High | Democratic identity politics |
| Ajaria | Weak, reversible conversions | Inclusive | No ethno-federalism< | High until 1991 | No identity politics |
Institutional Weakness, Political Entrepreneurs, Ethnic Bandwagoning, and External Alliances
In all of the states under consideration here, ethnic and sectarian violence was absent or minimal when state institutions that either upheld the social contract or repressed dissent were strong. This is true of states that legitimated the political relevance of cultural identity and states that did not. Thus state strength is often mistaken for the cause of cultural peace, and state weakness and collapse is mistaken for the cause of cultural conflict. The importance of this variable is captured in commonplace, intuitive, and partly correct accounts of the rise of ethnic and sectarian conflict after the collapse of communism and the end of the cold war. 8 Most of these accounts, however, are unreflective of deeper causes or roughly linked to primordial explanations. The tendency is to ascribe these conflicts to the vanished “lid on the pot” once provided by central authority. But an overemphasis on the lid obscures the importance of the ingredients in the pot and the intensity of the heat.
The thrust of this book’s argument is that the causes are more complex and have to do with the terms of the social contract and how changing, weakening, and collapsing institutions affect them. As the stories told here have suggested, institutional strength is relative and sometimes ephemeral. Some states collapse without being revived before violence sets in. Others collapse but are transformed in ways that renew an acceptable social contract. Others are gradually weakened and slowly withdraw from support of the social contract. Others are simply disrupted and are flexible enough to revive their commitments to social order. Still others are actually strengthened over time. The puzzle is that while all strong states maintained social peace—hardly a puzzle at all—some multicultural states that experienced a total collapse of their institutions also remained at peace. And some strong states undergoing marginal institutional transformation began to experience cultural conflict, even though they were subsequently able to contain it. Our stories suggest that state weakness and collapse must be combined with other forces to cause cultural conflict.
Our second set of propositions suggests that when state institutions are weakened, transformed, or simply disrupted by internal or external forces, cultural violence will erupt and become more violent in those places that had previously politicized culture. Violence is less likely—even where states have collapsed—in those places where culture had not been previously politicized. The odds of violence increase when institutions either encourage bandwagoning effects or are too weak to stop them and when alliances form across borders with cultural “brethren” who encourage violence.
Weakened and transforming institutions seem to always create an opportunity for the emergence of political entrepreneurs who wish to shift the changing and uncertain distribution of power in their favor. Whether those political entrepreneurs decide to politicize culture in their bid for power depends upon their calculations of the surest strategy for success. Usually, they decide to politicize culture only if they believe that they will gain a following in targeted groups. The stories told here have suggested that belief is bolstered if at least one of two conditions holds: if previous institutions cemented the logic of identity politics so that resources are available for cultural mobilization, or if economic hardships have fallen disproportionately on distinct cultural groups, providing a concrete justification for political grievances that the political entrepreneur can transform into a resource for support. In this section, I review our cases in light of the institutional incentives that might create a demand for the goods that political entrepreneurs fomenting cultural conflict have to offer; in the last section, I examine economic conditions in the cases under review to assess the extent of the “demand” for those political goods that economic hardships create.
Recall from Lipschutz’s conceptual essay that political entrepreneurs are “well-placed individuals who are able to develop or carry plausible ‘stories’ of how and why particular social conditions have come to pass.” They draw on collective memories of victimization and heroism to specify those who bear “responsibility for those conditions—and what must be done to rectify them.” Their central goal is to mobilize populations to seize the institutions of the state or to create states of their own. They can draw on cultural grievances inherited from the past, but as Michael Urban reminds us here, these grievances “admit to varying, even opposing, interpretations.” The power of the interpretation, he argues, depends on the discursive practices of the political entrepreneur—that is, on the power of the language that he uses and the way that he deploys the “past” as a weapon against his opponents.
Our cases show, however, that whether the language “works” and whether political entrepreneurs will have the material and symbolic resources to mobilize significant support depends significantly on the institutional legacies that continue to shape the political game. Institutional legacies can either intensify or attenuate the impact or the political entrepreneur’s story and the collective memories that support it. These legacies vary with the intensity of conflict, as we shall see below.
In Abkhazia and Yugoslavia, where violence has been intense and protracted, the institution of ethnofederalism deeply politicized ethnic and religious cleavages and provided resources to political entrepreneurs in their effort to mobilize support, initiate bandwagoning effects, and create cross-border alliances. In Ajaria and Bulgaria, on the other hand, where cultural identity had not been so deeply politicized, institutional collapse did indeed create space for the rise of political entrepreneurs, but they had fewer resources with which to politicize cultural identity. The relative absence of politicized identity in these regions and lack of tangible resources to mobilize support weakened those political entrepreneurs who would perpetrate violence.
Singh’s account of Punjab and Kashmir suggests that slow institutional erosion correlated with increasing Sikh and Muslim demands for autonomy in both regions. When resources from the center trickled to a halt, local elites in both regions attempted to gain control of territory and resources that would enhance their power base, much like they did in Abkhazia and Yugoslavia. The Indian case differs, however, in that the repressive apparatus of the central state retained the ability to contain bandwagoning effects, even when Sikh emigres pressured Punjabi Sikhs to fight harder and when alliances were made between extremists in Kashmir and Pakistan. The state’s repressive apparatus was strong even while central allocative institutions disintegrated. Because the army was able to suppress violence, the violence that did erupt was less intense.
Lubeck’s account of Egypt and Algeria suggests that state institutions in these two countries were riddled with corruption and marked by patronage systems that weakened democratic practices and perpetuated social and economic inequality. Algeria was the weaker state, but its weakness was masked by the oil boom of the 1970s. The debt crisis of the 1980s, however, created a fiscal crisis in both states that exposed their weaknesses. The exposure of the weakened state in both countries, their desperate international alliances, and their inability to meet the needs of their populations led to a decline in secular nationalism and created a ripe opportunity for entrepreneurs promoting political Islam to gain a foothold in both societies. Islamic groups seeking political power were able to provide welfare services to those groups that the state had abandoned and the market had defeated. They also provided these groups with a messianic vision that promised them a “non-Western and distinctly Islamic path to modernity and development.” Bandwagoning effects followed the path described in the introduction to this volume: acts of violence and civil disobedience on the part of extremists created social pressure to join the bandwagon; the disaffected joined in as well, and the ranks of groups promoting political Islam swelled.
The contrast between Egypt and Algeria highlights the important role of institutions in either encouraging or inhibiting bandwagoning effects that political entrepreneurs set in motion. While the Egyptian state was able to repress mounting violence, the weaker Algerian state was not. When, in 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won a majority in the national assembly, the army took the reigns of government, outlawing the FIS. With democratic alternatives closed in a state much weaker than that of Egypt, the FIS took up arms, and civil war was the result.
In contrast to Egypt and Algeria, Malaysia maintained a strong state in the wake of the oil boom and the debt crisis. This strength was founded partly on Malaysia’s flexible political institutions. Elite bargaining created alliances between ethnic groups that encouraged political compromise. The compromises were credible because elites had ample resources to distribute to those loyal to the alliance. And a strong and flexible party system absorbed and thus neutralized extreme Islamicist movements. Malaysia, with a diverse cultural population, remained at peace. Nonetheless, if our argument to this point is correct, a weakening of the Malaysian state in the future is likely to lead to intense cultural conflict there because its political institutions have indeed cemented the political relevance of cultural identity.
In all of these cases, cultural violence was highest where states that had previously politicized culture had collapsed. Violence was lowest where states did not politicize culture, whether they collapsed or not. Malaysia provides the exception, suggesting that state strength and, more important, state legitimacy can keep the peace where culture has been politicized. A comparison of Egypt, Algeria, and India, however, still leaves an unsolved puzzle: Algeria had a high level of violence, while Egypt and India had medium levels of violence when states weakened. Yet Egypt and Algeria had not previously politicized culture, while India’s institutions had exacerbated cultural divisions. The state’s ability to repress violence in all three states and the extreme roughness of our measurement limits our ability to positively correlate the intensity of cultural conflict with institutional legacies. The comparison of these three cases in light of the others suggests only that where legacies of institutional discrimination and privilege prevail, cultural conflict in a weakened or collapsing state takes the form of successionist tendencies and is likely to be higher; where those legacies were absent, political entrepreneurs mobilize to capture the existing state, and the intensity of conflict is likely to be lower unless the state is too weak to prevent its violent capture.
England, Germany, and the United States provide examples of industrial states that experienced a rise in right-wing nativist rhetoric and popular sentiment that correlated directly with a significant weakening of the party structure in all three countries. Nonetheless, in all three states, institutions providing legal protection of minorities were able to inhibit the bandwagoning effects that political entrepreneurs and their inflammatory rhetoric initiated.
In all three countries, the changing structure of the party system created space for the rise of the extreme right, while the presence of immigrant communities in the face of increasing unemployment made some populations receptive to extreme right appeals. Bandwagoning effects could take hold because in all three countries the large integrating political parties experienced a “crisis of ideology” that led to their decline in popularity. 9 In England, the two major parties, which had captured over 90 percent of the popular vote in 1959, received only 75 percent in 1974. Germany’s party fragmentation began a decade later. In the 1970s, the SPD and CDU/CSU could collect over 90 percent of the vote, but in 1987, their share had declined to 81.3 percent. In the 1990 elections, their share fell to 77.3 percent. In the United States, the percent of the population that actually voted decreased from a high in 1976 of 53.3 percent to 52 percent in 1980 to 50.1 percent in 1988.
Recent studies of shifts in party structure suggest that if political parties begin to weaken or fragment, with larger catch-all parties losing votes, those large parties attempt to recapture lost constituencies by incorporating the smaller parties’ positions into their own platforms. Smaller parties can espouse a “pure” ideological rhetoric, often by creating sensational issues, since they expect to capture only a small fraction of the vote or none at all; larger parties respond by incorporating radical positions in digestible form to retain their traditional voters. Left-right dichotomies are diluted, and class-based voting is replaced by issue-based voting. 10 Larger parties are tempted to embrace the extreme positions in order to retain the constituencies that could be attracted to extremist parties.
In England, the structural weakening of the majoritarian electoral system fanned the flames of National Front extremism, leading it to espouse more extreme rhetoric than it would have if it had a chance of winning a national election. Bandwagoning effects took hold. The rise of the National Front, in the face of a declining constituency, struck fear in the hearts of conservatives and encouraged right-wing sentiments within conservative ranks. As a result, the anti-immigrant Monday Club in the Conservative Party was born. As Thomas writes, “The club opposed all nonwhite immigration and became the primary voice for illiberal, anti-immigration sentiment in Parliament.”
Conservatives thus took up race as an issue in order to snatch it from the National Front. And Margaret Thatcher began to pander to the prejudices of National Front supporters. She further proceeded to destroy channels for effective political expression and representation in poor communities. Police were increasingly removed from the areas in which they worked, and they placed more emphasis on apprehending criminals than providing assistance. By the 1980s, police brutality, racial discrimination, and abuse of police authority played an important role in triggering violence in minority communities; that violence, in a political milieu of rising extreme right rhetoric, was characterized in the media as “racially motivated,” even though it was not. In fact, these riots were motivated by the frustrations of unemployment and by the increasingly harsh measures taken by the police in immigrant neighborhoods. Institutional changes contributed to frustration and the motivation to retaliate against the police. But because dominant institutions had not politicized cultural differences, the violence was not stimulated by the racism and xenophobia that the extreme right had tried to cultivate.
Nonetheless, England’s flexible institutions were able to respond to some of the grievances that had brought on the violence. The central state responded with the offer of resources to deprived urban neighborhoods. It also increased the number of minority-led projects and increased funding for the Urban Programme. The extreme right was subsequently neutralized and violence was attenuated.
Bandwagoning effects triggered by party fragmentation and successful institutional efforts to halt them were evident in Germany as well. The rise of the extreme right in a fragmenting political system led the conservative CDU to take an anti-foreigner stance in order to capture lost voters. “Ethnic Germans” were still permitted to enter Germany from abroad with full citizenship rights. Conveniently, these “ethnic Germans” were traditional right-wing voters, and the CDU was eager to capture their support. But because they were granted generous material benefits, tensions over immigration rose, and the CDU’s interpretation was that the problems were caused by “foreigners”—that is, nonethnic German immigrants. The CDU thus moved to change the constitution to restrict immigration of nonethnic Germans. The SPD opposed this amendment, and political gridlock was the result.
This gridlock, Leslie argues, opened space for the far right to shape the political rhetoric and focus it on anti-foreigner sentiments. And when the Republikaner exploited nativist frustrations with foreign residents, exclusive citizenship laws channeled that frustration and the increasingly hostile rhetoric toward non-German immigrants. As Leslie writes, “The [CDU and CSU’s] choice to frame issues according to the formula of ‘misuse of asylum’ . . . created the polarized and deadlocked environment” in which the appeal of far right parties on “foreigners” found resonance with voters.
The rise of the far right increased the hostility of anti-foreigner rhetoric and thus created an atmosphere in which the odds of violence against foreigners increased in typical bandwagoning fashion. But the far right did not cause the violence. Before 1989, strong liberal institutions shaped far right behavior to the rules of parliamentary institutions and competitive politics in the FRG. And in the GDR, strong state institutions upheld social controls that blocked all dissent. It was the collapse of those institutions and Germany’s unification that opened the door to violence. The near absence of political institutions and social cohesion in the East led to the spontaneous formation of skinhead groups whose members looked to one another for identity and community. When the stipulations of the unification treaty on immigration were implemented, large numbers of immigrants moved East; the confluence of right-wing rhetoric, the absence of institutions to ensure social order, large numbers of dislocated and unemployed youth organized in skinhead groups eager to jump on the nativist bandwagon, and an influx of immigrants ensured a violent explosion. And violence fed on itself as it strengthened social bonds in skinhead groups. As noted above, however, Germany’s political institutions protected individual rights of residents, whether or not they were immigrants. And constitutional constraints on extremist parties prevented them from obtaining real political power. Thus when institutional strength in the East was restored, violence abated, and liberal norms in the West, bolstered by constitutional constraints on extremist activity, further weakened the far right and inhibited the political mobilization efforts of its political entrepreneurs.
Finally, in the United States, a decline in discipline and cohesion in the major parties weakened their capacity to govern because they could not ensure enough party solidarity to push through assertive policies. Political gridlock resulted at the federal level, exacerbating the crisis of legitimacy brought on by the policy failures of the 1960s.
Indeed the 1960s brought a surge of activist state efforts to achieve greater social integration of diverse cultural groups. But because of the weakness of federal institutions—designed deliberately to be weak through the separation of power and other features of the Madisonian system—these programs could not be successfully implemented. Central institutions simply did not have the capabilities to carry out interventionist policies. The result was a series of policy disasters that began to undermine public support—particularly the support of moderates—for federal intervention. Those disasters created an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to draw on the institutional legacy of decentralization and the limited state to mobilize support for a sustained effort to dismantle federal institutions. 11
By the 1970s, federal government gridlock and the absence of party discipline in a political atmosphere of declining federal legitimacy permitted political mavericks to rise within the party system. 12 Political victory went to those entrepreneurs who offered increasingly extreme positions on the dismantling of the central government. Indeed Reagan, like Thatcher, was able to mobilize support by polarizing politics and promising increasing federal government decentralization. 13
Ronnie Lipschutz argues here that political opportunity for the rise of extremist proponents of nativist policies was created by party mavericks who had launched this attack on federal government and who were increasingly supported by the more moderate political elements. As public doubt about the continuing legitimacy of central authority spread, an atmosphere was created in which mainstream political entrepreneurs could attack federal welfare policies that transferred shrinking national resources to the poor—including large numbers of immigrants and ethnic minorities. And politicians’ attacks on central authority and federal policies, as well as their increasing practice of divisive identity politics, created an atmosphere that nourished the growth of more extreme right-wing militias, the Patriot Movement and the Northwest Imperative. But in the United States, as in England and Germany, liberal institutions were able to block widespread influence of these groups. The relatively strong inclusive institutions of citizenship and participation inhibited bandwagoning effects and prevented the opening for extremist violence against foreigners that emerged in Germany. Right-wing militias have yet to become involved in violence against ethnic and religious minorities. Instead, violence has been directed against the central government, most notably in the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building in 1995.
Lipschutz argues, however, that this lack of systematic cultural violence does not mean that it will not erupt in the future if the institutions of central authority continue to lose their legitimacy. Ethnic and religious minority rights continue to be protected by governmental institutions. This protection of collective rights, intended to bolster other social integration efforts, has ironically triggered a backlash, with increasing calls for protection of the individual against collective minority rights and privileges. Those calls can become a pretext for political entrepreneurs in a transforming institutional environment to espouse xenophobic and racist ideologies in an effort to mobilize support for the “protection” of an ethnically defined majority.
A comparison of the three industrial democracies reveals the importance of institutional incentives, legitimacy, and strength to the reduction of violence. Nonetheless, the weight of each of these factors is difficult to measure. Of the three cases, only the German story suggests that institutional legacies provided an incentive for political entrepreneurs to espouse nativist sentiments and politicize culture. Nothing in the stories told so far tells us why entrepreneurs in England and the United States decided to politicize culture as opposed to other potential social divisions. To understand that decision and why it was a useful tool to mobilize support, we must turn to the political economy of cultural conflict. Comparisons among all our cases, however, roughly suggest a set of general causes of ethnic and sectarian conflict. In all of our cases, the weakening of some or all key state institutions that upheld the social contract opened a window of opportunity for political entrepreneurs who mobilized popular support by exploiting cultural divisions. Whether they succeeded in getting their bandwagons rolling depended on three things: institutional legacies of discrimination and privilege, the strength of their cross-border alliances, and the strength of institutions that could block their progress. But it was institutional strength and the absence of a legacy of the practice of identity politics that mattered the most to the absence of intense cultural conflict.
The cases suggest that bandwagoning effects and the formation of cross-border cultural alliances leading to cultural violence are highest in collapsed states that had deeply politicized cultural identity. Where cultural identity was not previously politicized, bandwagoning effects and cross-border alliances were weaker, and collapsed states did not experience cultural violence. Table 2 summarizes this argument. The two problems of similar levels of violence in states that had politicized culture and states that did not, and the motivations of political entrepreneurs to play the ethnic card in states with relatively weak legacies of identity politics, still remain. I turn to a discussion of the political economy of cultural conflict in order to seek solutions to these problems.
Table 2
Strength of Institutions and Cross-Border Cultural Alliances as Factors of Cultural Violence
| Country | State promotes | Institutions | Cultural Alliances | Bandwagoning | Level of Violence |
| Yugoslavia | Identity politics | Collapse | Yes | Yes | High |
| Abkhazia | Identity politics | Collapse | Yes | Yes | High |
| Algeria | Secular politics/social integration | Collapse | Yes | Yes | High |
| Punjab | Identity politics/social integration | Decline | Yes | Yes | Medium |
| Kashmir | Identity politics/social integration | Decline | Yes | Yes | Medium |
| Egypt | Secular politics/social integration | Decline | Yes | Yes | Medium |
|
|
Identity politics/social integration | Collapse and transformation in the East | Few | Yes but halted | Low/medium |
| United States | Social integration | Disruption | No | Halted | Low |
| England | Social integration | Disruption | No | Halted | Low |
| Bulgaria | Social integration | Collapse and transformation | No | No | None |
| Ajaria | Social integration | Collapse and transformation | No | No | None |
| Malaysia | Identity politics | Growing strength | No | None |
The Political Economy of Cultural Conflict
Until this point, our assessment has suggested that the kind and degree of institutional collapse combined with degree of politicized cultural identity explain the outbreak of violence and its intensity. The final leg of our argument proposes that variations in legacies of economic discrimination and privilege largely contribute to the intensity of the political relevance of cultural identity. And the kind and degree of institutional transformation—collapse, decline, or disruption—can largely be explained by the state’s position in the international economy, its ability to withstand the negative forces of globalization, and the economic disruption of liberalization. Further, the more intense the legacy of politicized cultural identity, the more material resources available to ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs when central states weaken. Political entrepreneurs with the most material resources will be the winners in political competition. Finally, economic hardships that fall directly and disproportionately on culturally defined social groups create the demand for the goods that ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs promise to deliver. I now turn to the evidence for these final propositions.
Post-Communist regions varied significantly in their legacies of economic discrimination and privilege along cultural lines. We saw above that in Abkhazia and Yugoslavia, the institution of ethnofederalism cemented the political relevance of cultural identity, and it was most clearly associated with cultural violence after communism’s collapse. What perpetuated that institution was the flow of material resources allocated according to ascriptive “ethnic” criteria. Abkhazian farmers received more subsidies and experienced less central control than Georgian farmers in Abkhazia; ethnic machines provided a disproportionate share of jobs in the government bureaucracy for Abkhazes. In Yugoslavia as well, ethnofederalism took the form of distinct ethnic republics; investment funds were provided to these republics by the central state partly according to political and ascriptive criteria rather than economic rationality. Ascriptive allocation fostered both resentment and perceptions of intrinsic “rights” to further resources from the center. This system fostered mutual resentments and suspicions of other republics; resentments, suspicions, and belief in one’s own collective intrinsic rights to resources solidified ethnic identity, weakened loyalty to the central government, and reinforced the dominant logic of identity politics at the federal level. In both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, however, as long as the central state was relatively strong, ethnofederalism functioned as a channel for effective if not efficient resource distribution, despite the resentments and fears that it nourished. It was when the central state weakened and finally collapsed that those resentments and fears became resources for mobilization in the hands of political entrepreneurs espousing violent secession and capture of territory.
The roots of collapse can be traced to the beginning of the cold war and the position of these countries in the international economy. In the Soviet Union, Stalin refused to become part of the new postwar international economic order and attempted to steer the Soviet Union in the direction of economic autarky. 14 But Soviet growth rates fell—not only because of the distortions of central planning, but also because of the inefficiencies of autarky. The Soviet bloc found itself on the sidelines in the race for economic prosperity as its technical expertise in commercial industry began to lag far behind the industrial capitalist nations. Throughout the cold war, technology gaps between the USSR and the West widened and multiplied. 15 Only when Gorbachev came to power did the Soviet regime open the floodgates to the international economy and begin the process of creating internal markets. 16 These moves were initially widely supported by Soviet economic elites, who (it would now appear rightly) believed that the USSR would not remain a great military power unless it could raise the technological level of its industry to meet the standards of global competition. Opening to the West was one of the many strategies of renewal constructed to meet this goal.
Domestic reforms and market ties with the West, however, obviously failed to shore up the declining economy. Because internal economic rigidities still persisted, Western technology was purchased as a substitute for economic restructuring; Soviet planners knew that if they tried to compete in the international economy with sales of oil, timber, furs, and other commodities, they would never be as competitive as states that produced computers, advanced components, and new materials. If Soviet industries were to compete in the world market, innovative technology would have to be imported. But the hard currency that was required for the technology purchases necessary to the production of these goods could be earned only through increased exports. Export earnings, however, were subject to the vagaries of commodity markets, and when they could not cover imports, technology had to be purchased with Western credits.
Growing internal economic weakness meant that the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries were eventually plunged into debt to purchase technology and consumer goods and raise wages to stave off domestic unrest. East European and later Soviet debt to the West reached dangerously high levels in the 1980s, only to be reduced by drastic cuts in Western imports and massive rescheduling. Subsequent decreases in economic growth rates and decline in living standards squeezed populations who could no longer be mobilized by ideological appeals. The collapse of the central state was inevitable.
Yugoslavia experienced a similar path of debt-led institutional decline. After 1973, the fourfold increase in the price of oil combined with a decline in the economic growth rate to trigger expanded borrowing on international markets. Western banks and their governments were only too eager to provide balance of payments financing and additional export credits. The accumulation of petrodollars in Western banks, combined with the l974 recession, freed loan capital as lenders scrambled to compete for business. Like most other borrowers, Yugoslavia had little difficulty in arranging loans on excellent terms in a financial environment marked by excessive liquidity and overcompetition among lenders. Borrowing created an artificial sense of economic well-being. Consumers became increasingly dependent on imports, and exports became increasingly uncompetitive. As imports grew faster than exports, repaying the debt in convertible currency became increasingly difficult. New loans were needed to service old ones.
As the external debt exploded and as the global recession closed export markets, regional conflicts over the distribution of economic resources contributed to economic decline. Recall that the regionally based allocation of resources in Yugoslavia increased local power and the political strength of local political entrepreneurs at the expense of the central state. As the various regional political elites gained increasing autonomy from the federal government, they began to follow self-protective import substitution policies, leading to important losses in economies of scale. Furthermore, the regional governments did not coordinate foreign exchange stockpiles. The absence of coordination led to fragmentation of economic activity and the reduction of the stock of available capital for new investment. The resulting losses of revenue to the central government helped to undermine its ability to resist further regional encroachments on its effort to coordinate economic activity.
In the period after the collapse of the central state, the Yugoslav situation differed from that of Abkhazia in that the disintegration of federal control over resources created opportunities for regional officials in ethnic republics to seize assets and gain political support. Local Abkhazian officials, on the other hand, were cut off from their patronage networks in Moscow with the Soviet collapse. Bereft of internal resources, they looked outward to potential alliances and received enough military support from Russia and trans-Caucusus alliances to defeat the Georgians.
In contrast to both of these areas, Bulgaria and Ajaria had not developed a system of ascriptive resource allocation. Therefore, the collapse of central control in the face of economic crisis did not leave ethnic or sectarian political entrepreneurs with internal resources to exchange for political support. Nonetheless, in Bulgaria, given the “cultural division of labor” under which Pomaks and Turks were largely employed in uncompetitive and inefficient tobacco industries and farming, a transition to a market economy left a disproportionate number of Muslims unemployed. Economic hardship made them available for reassignment to a new political identity, and sectarian political entrepreneurs—like Kamen Burov—attempted to cash in on the discontent in an effort to gain political support. With only a Pomak identity and no material resources to offer, however, Burov’s efforts were less than successful. Economic factors thus explain the political entreprenereurs’ decisions to exploit cultural grievances for political advantage, but institutional incentives and constraints explain whether they can get the bandwagon rolling or not.
With no system of preferential resource allocation in Egypt and Algeria, political Islam was relatively weak, particularly during the Fordist period of state-led development and the oil boom that provided an expanding economic pie and full employment. Although the seeds of political Islam were planted much earlier and although Islam has an important political component, Paul Lubeck argues here that Islamic activism was transformed into a movement capable of seizing state power only with the breakdown of Fordism.
For Egypt and Algeria, as for many other economies around the globe, the Fordist period from 1945 to 1971–74 was associated with steady economic growth and rising incomes. Fordism encouraged state intervention in the economy, its direct and indirect control of basic industries, and import substitution industrialization. It was during this period that elites in Muslim-majority states successfully subordinated political Islam to state-led developmental goals.
But the Fordist era ended with the oil shocks of the 1970s, and at the same time, these states became increasingly integrated into the international economy. Oil rents were consumed rather than invested. When these oil rents were spent, political elites in Egypt and Algeria began to borrow on world markets and eventually had to implement structural adjustment programs mandated by international lending institutions. These programs initially led to a drop in aggregate income, reduced state subsidies, and forced government withdrawal from welfare programs. In this environment, political Islam could thrive, and the state had nothing to offer in order to entice potential recruits away. Indeed, as Lubeck notes here, the groups who were most successful in gaining adherents were the FIS and the Muslim Brotherhood. With their transnational networks of Islamic groups as a resource base, they were able to create charitable associations, welfare services, schools, and hospitals, offering tangible benefits to needy populations.
Egypt and Algeria thus conform to our predictions about the role of economic factors in cultural conflict. At the outset, the secular state made no cultural distinctions with regard to economic discrimination and privilege; indeed these were states where Islam was the state religion. But widespread hardship brought on by a flawed policy response to the oil boom and the effects of increasing external debt weakened the political institutions that upheld the secular social contract. Widespread unemployment and rising poverty were the unavoidable marks of a broken social contract in both countries. Political space was thus opened for sectarian entrepreneurs promoting the goals of political Islam to mobilize support in opposition to the secular state. Those with tangible resources to offer gained the most support for their efforts.
In contrast, Malaysia experienced steady economic growth and rising incomes between 1945 and 1974 and stable investment patterns during this period. Rather than attempting to construct a secular state, elites created a program for economic distribution along cultural lines. A system of equitable income distribution and export-oriented industrialization increased loyalty to the state. Cultural conflict was thus contained by a growing economic pie and the channeling of cultural disputes into arenas of legitimate political competition.
India’s system of ascriptive allocation had historically led to conflicts among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Economic discrimination exacerbated these conflicts. When the central government separated Punjab into two states—a Sikh-majority state of Punjab and a new Hindu-majority state of Haryana—there was no clear decision on how river waters were to be split. Both Sikh and Hindu politicians used the grievance over river waters to mobilize the support of their respective populations for their political platforms.
Sikh grievances focused not only on valuable and contested water rights, but also on long-term issues of perceived economic discrimination. The Green Revolution had made Punjab the breadbasket of India, but the central government controlled crop procurement, and Sikh farmers, believing that they could gain more if their crops were sold in a free market, resented state control. Sikhs further resented Hindu dominance in trade and commerce in Punjab. Finally, the central government had starved Punjab of funds for industrial investment in order to promote it as an agricultural region. Each of these grievances deepened the relevance of Sikh political identity and made the Sikh population available for mobilization by political entrepreneurs seeking autonomy.
Although Kashmir historically enjoyed more autonomy from India than Punjab, it was a Muslim-majority region with a powerful Hindu minority that demanded full incorporation within India. While Pakistan pushed for Kashmir’s incorporation as a Muslim-majority region, Kashmir’s leader, Abdullah, attempted to steer a middle course by seeking autonomy within India and holding to secular principles that would place him above religious cleavages. The central Indian government, however, seemed to favor the Hindu minority, and when Abdullah attempted to implement land reform that would benefit the majority Muslim population, Hindu landlords resisted and the central government came to their aid. Religious cleavages were thus deepened by perceived economic injustice, and intense conflict was the result.
The conflicts in both Punjab and Kashmir intensified as the allocative resources of the central Indian government declined. The oil crisis of the early 1970s affected India in roughly the same way that it affected Yugoslavia. Exploding oil prices and the increasing demands for fertilizer brought on by the Green Revolution led to expanded borrowing on international markets. Export markets contracted under the weight of the global recession, but petroleum-based imports continued to expand. With growing deficits, foreign debt skyrocketed as well. In this environment of shrinking resources, unrest mounted. Indira Gandhi distributed spoils to those who demonstrated personal loyalty to her and abandoned general welfare policies that would benefit the Indian population as a whole.
Economic factors, therefore, worked in much the way we predicted to exacerbate cultural conflict in India. Economic discrimination and disproportionate hardships suffered by both Sikhs in Punjab and Muslims in Kashmir provided widespread incentives for secession. International oil shocks and the resulting debt crisis in India withdrew resources that the state could have used to promote social stability. Political entrepreneurs were able to mobilize support for secession on the basis of economic grievances, and violence erupted as the central state resisted secession. The state’s repressive resources, however, remained intact, and chronic violence has been regularly suppressed.
The consequences of the trend in economic liberalization in India, however, do not appear to conform to our predictions. We suggested that by further shrinking state resources, liberalization policies would exacerbate conflict. In Punjab, liberalization may well have the opposite effect: restrictions of the central state on industrial investment are being lifted under liberalization policies; new industrial investment funds will erase discriminatory policies practiced in the past and, as Singh suggests, “defuse some of the conflicts over how to slice the economic pie.” By depriving the population of grievances, liberalization policies may also deprive Sikh political entrepreneurs of the resources they need for social mobilization. Thus the effect is likely to be the opposite of that in Egypt and Algeria, where Islamist political entrepreneurs were able to offer tangible goods in exchange for support. And it is likely to be the opposite of that experienced in the former Soviet Union: Sikh leaders in Punjab and Muslim leaders in Kashmir did not gain the political control over resources that local officials in the Soviet Union had gained; they therefore have not been well positioned to convert the local state apparatus into a mechanism for the distribution of patronage.
We are now in a position to partially solve the puzzle of the sources of cultural conflict in the comparison of the Muslim-majority states and India. Recall that levels of violence in Egypt and India were similar, although Egypt had not politicized culture, while India had. And violence in Algeria was more intense and prolonged than in India, despite the construction of a secular state there after independence. Our discussion of economic factors sheds some light on this problem. In the Muslim-majority states, the political relevance of cultural divisions was latent, and it was the weakening of the state and its refusal to deliver on the secular social contract that was the root cause of cultural conflict. In India, in contrast, it was the initial institutional cementing of ascriptive policies that lies at the heart of cultural conflict. Institutions of allocation and representation—perceived as unjust—provided a motivation for Sikh and Kashmiri claims for secession. Economic grievances intensified that motivation. The weakening of the state only provided the opportunity for intensified demands on the part of these two groups for autonomy.
From the stories told here, then, we can generalize that the propensity for cultural conflict was higher in India than in either Egypt or Algeria because identity politics was cemented in political institutions and was perceived by secessionist groups as unjust. Sikh and Kashmiri autonomy demands long predated the oil crisis that crippled the central state. In contrast, in Egypt and Algeria, the weakness of political Islam would have been assured had Fordism succeeded. State strength and the economic factors that bolster it can act as a firebreak to the practice of identity politics in states that strive for social integration and eschew ascriptive allocative and representative policies. State strength in countries where identity politics is practiced and where resentment over discrimination and privilege is rising can only reduce the opportunity for intense conflict.
The Western industrial democracies have the fewest institutional characteristics associated with cultural violence among the cases under investigation here. On the whole, their institutions have not promoted identity politics to the extent practiced elsewhere in the cases under review; although they have experienced some institutional disruption since the early 1980s, that disruption and even shifts in the structure of party politics do not compare to the institutional erosion and collapse experienced in our other cases. The violence that has occurred has been sporadic rather than chronic or prolonged. Nonetheless, the Western democracies have all experienced a rise in right-wing nativist sentiment, cultural conflict, sporadic riots, and hate crimes, all in the absence of political institutions that would politicize culture, especially in the United States and England. Economic factors provide a powerful explanation for both the response to right-wing extremism and violent conflict that appears to be racially motivated and thus greatly influence the political entrepreneur’s decision to exploit cultural divisions for political gain.
First, although the political institutions of the United States, England, and Germany have acted as a firebreak against the practice of identity politics, they have not prevented economic discrimination along ethnic lines that produced social conflict among distinct cultural groups. In the United States, immigration controls have always been biased in favor of North and West European immigrants, and economic discrimination against African Americans has been deep and prolonged. Indeed in the 1950s, while whites moved to the suburbs, the inner cities became the ghettos of blacks, Latinos, and Asians; by the 1960s, 80 percent of blacks in the United States lived in ghettos. Forty-four percent of black families had incomes of less than $3,000 per year, and the black unemployment rate has steadily remained more than double that of whites. 17 Indeed in the early 1980s, while the unemployment rate for whites was close to 8 percent, for blacks it was 20 percent. Economic discrimination and privilege in the United States have clearly caused cultural identity to become politically relevant despite increasing efforts to encourage social integration.
In Britain, cultural identity was similarly politicized by economic factors. Disproportionate numbers of blacks in Britain were unemployed; as noted, the great majority of blacks and Asians in the Handsworth district of Birmingham were unemployed. Discriminatory measures and economic hardship made the political relevance of race unavoidable in Britain.
Liberal governments in both England and the United States attempted to eradicate the effects of discrimination with government welfare policies. In England, unemployed immigrants had access to national assistance and public housing. Partnership schemes, urban training programs, and a youth training scheme were introduced in the early 1980s as a response to the 1981 riots. In the United States, the Great Society and War on Poverty programs were initiated in the 1960s, also as a response to race riots and social unrest. These programs were designed to increase the earning capacity of cultural groups who had been clearly marginalized in the economy. Affirmative action programs were launched that were designed to provide benefits to ethnic groups who had been the victims of economic discrimination in order to aid policies of social integration. As Lipschutz notes here, these programs focused on individual rather than group access and opportunity, in keeping with the institutional bias against the politicization of cultural identity.
State measures to weaken the political relevance of cultural identity caused by economic hardship and discrimination initially appeared to be headed for success. In the United States, the educational and employment opportunities of ethnic minorities greatly improved after 1970. For a while it appeared that income transfers and subsidies to the poorest in America would reduce the income gap between whites and ethnic minorities. 18 In England, as noted above, the CRCs helped to diffuse racial tensions.
These policies and programs may have continued to encourage social integration, limit identity politics, and mitigate economic discrimination had it not been for flawed implementation efforts, a reduction of resources available to the central state caused by economic recession and decline, and political backlash triggered by rising unemployment. Both countries, as noted above, faced political obstacles to the expansion of institutions that would support a wider reach for government programs of economic allocation. And both faced institutional obstacles to state intervention in the economy to reverse the effects of economic decline when it occurred. 19
Indeed it did occur. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, both England and the United States experienced low levels of unemployment, tight labor markets, and rising wages. The economic growth that characterized this period increased revenues to the state that could be used for social programs and increased overall per capita income. But after 1973, both countries experienced the shocks of economic decline and deep recession. While England was suffering from the growing unemployment effects of long-term industrial decline, the United States too was beginning to show the signs of industrial weakness, evident first in the economy’s response to the oil shocks of the early 1970s. In England, the nation’s unemployment rate during the first two years of the Thatcher government doubled to top 11 percent, the highest level in Britain since the 1930s. In the United States, the unemployment rate went from 4 percent in 1980 to over 11 percent in 1984, almost a threefold increase. In both countries, the budget deficit ballooned and interest rates skyrocketed.
In response to the effects of the oil shocks and recession of the 1970s, the Reagan and Thatcher governments of the early 1980s drastically reduced the allocative role of the central state in society, squeezing the economic programs that bolstered social integration. As Lipschutz argues in his theoretical essay here, the commitment to economic liberalism and efficiency put pressure on government to balance budgets and reduce welfare expenditures. Services then deteriorated. Reagan passed on social expenditures to the states to distribute, and he cut some programs altogether. 20 Thatcher initiated a painful austerity program, raising taxes and cutting government spending. She rewrote the labor code, delivering a powerful blow to the trade unions, thus reducing the availability of an important channel for the expression of economic grievances. She introduced dozens of new laws limiting the spending powers of local governments and abolished a number of local authorities and programs such as the CRCs.
These cuts in the institutional support for the integrative social contract in both countries did not help race relations in either. Where services were withdrawn, loyalty to the state and the political system weakened. Where Thatcher had abolished local governments with large immigrant populations in London and Handsworth, some of the most serious riots broke out. Indeed through their negative impact on the employment rate, Thatcher’s neoliberal policies played a role in setting the stage for violence, seen in the series of riots that erupted in 1981 and 1985. The weakening of the trade unions as a channel for the expression of grievances, Thomas argues, was particularly significant to Britain’s minority residents, especially since there were no other minority interest groups at the national level or within the Labour Party. And it was during Reagan’s presidency in the United States that black unemployment soared. In 1980, 75 percent of blacks questioned in one poll believed that there was little racial tension in their own neighborhoods. But by 1989, 75 percent believed that whites were obstructing blacks in their efforts to achieve equality.
Although these neoliberal policies did indeed exacerbate racial tensions, it was the effect of long-term economic decline on employment combined with the state’s efforts to mitigate the effects of culturally biased economic discrimination that triggered the practice of identity politics in both countries. And identity politics was not practiced primarily by minority populations hurt by economic decline (although affirmative action in the United States did lead to the politicization of cultural identity groups claiming entitlements from the state). Ironically, identity politics was practiced most vociferously by white political entrepreneurs like Enoch Powell and Pete Wilson, who attempted to gain political support from white majority populations experiencing increasing economic hardship resulting from long-term economic decline. They attempted to gain that support by scapegoating nonwhite immigrants and other ethnic minorities and attacking the central state for providing entitlements to those minorities.
Both minorities and the central state provided an easier target for blame than the structural economic conditions that had led to unemployment and widespread economic dissatisfaction. Indeed economic recession decreases state revenues and simultaneously increases demands on state resources. It also causes more direct economic competition between native and immigrant labor over scarce resources than in periods of economic prosperity. In England, for example, declining industries had relied on immigrant labor for their competitive advantage in international trade, directly reducing the native workforce. Although immigrant workers bore the brunt of economic recession, as indicated by higher than average unemployment rates, native workers were not protected from rising unemployment by the immigrant buffer. 21
Political entrepreneurs took advantage of the explosive combination of widespread economic dislocation and the presence of immigrant communities, placing blame on immigrants for taking the jobs and housing of the white workforce. They also blamed affirmative action, welfare, and housing programs for protecting minorities from the vicissitudes of the market. In England, for example, the immigrant community invariably had higher levels of unemployment than the native workforce and was gradually pushed into the slums of the cities where it had worked. But slum removal projects required that slum occupants be housed in public housing. Thus unemployed immigrants living in the slums leapfrogged over natives who were on the waiting list for public housing. 22 Enoch Powell took advantage of these rising tensions in his political rhetoric, in which he stigmatized “immigrants as strangers, as objects of justifiable fear and hatred, and as a source of future division in the nation.” 23 He received overwhelming support for his position from the native population. And Pete Wilson openly supported a proposal that would ban all affirmative action in the state of California.
In Germany a similar story can be told. As noted above, Germany was saddled with a set of political institutions that openly politicized cultural identity and legitimated economic discrimination against non-German immigrants. Although the German economy remained much more robust after 1974 than the economies of the United States and Britain, Germany experienced a fourfold increase in the rate of unemployment between 1975 and 1979, and a fivefold increase between 1987 and 1991. Although the supporters of right-wing extremist parties closely reflected a cross-section of the West German electorate as a whole in the 1980s, the majority felt pessimistic about the economic situation and felt that their financial situation was bad. During the same period, over 2 million immigrants streamed into Germany; 1 million were ethnic Germans from the East, about 500,000 were East Germans fleeing west, and about 600,000 were asylum-seekers. As in England, foreign workers were more likely to become unemployed and eligible for social services than natives. Given the institutional incentives discussed above, political entrepreneurs targeted asylum-seekers as the foreigners who undermined German social stability.
The economic situation was much worse in East Germany, where violence against foreigners was the most severe. Leslie notes that the “shock therapy” that introduced the West German mark into the East after unification produced an official 18 percent unemployment rate by 1991. Public housing and the provision of consumer goods and social and leisure activities by the socialist enterprises vanished. The East after unification was characterized by a scarcity of not only institutions, but also material resources.
Nonetheless, in all three countries, the availability of resources to political entrepreneurs outside of mainstream politics was minimal. Political entrepreneurs promoting violence had the fewest resources to offer in exchange for support. While mainstream parties moved to the right as a result of the rise of nativist extremism on the part of a few political entrepreneurs, they stopped short of promoting violence. Indeed the National Front in England lost its following even in a period of high unemployment. Right-wing extremist groups in Germany lost much of their following after stability was restored in the aftermath of unification. Economic grievances can influence the political entrepreneur’s decision to exploit cultural grievances, but institutional incentives and constraints best explain whether he will succeed.
We can now draw some brief conclusions regarding the role of economic forces in cultural conflict. In the cases of conflict we have examined here, economic factors have been crucial magnifiers of the forces that create politically charged cultural identities. In some cases economic discrimination and privilege caused groups to organize and fight against discrimination in the political arena.
Lipschutz argues that trends in economic globalization and liberalizing policy responses to those trends explain the kinds of institutional transformation that can promote cultural conflict. Our cases show that states which opened themselves to international economic forces and pursued liberalizing policies with the weakest economies experienced the most dramatic reduction of resources in the period of transition to the market. Where those resources had been allocated to various cultural groups according to ascriptive criteria, vulnerability to cultural conflict was highest. The case of India is illustrative.
The combination of a drastic reduction in state resource distribution and direct economic hardship engendered by market forces worked to make populations available for reassignment to new political identities. Political entrepreneurs who had tangible material resources to offer in exchange for political support were the winners in political competition. If they promoted a violent resolution to cultural conflict, the odds of violence increased. Evidence from Yugoslavia and Abkhazia supports this claim.
Where institutions were merely disrupted by globalization and liberalization but did not collapse and where institutional legacies largely promoted social integration, political entrepreneurs promoting cultural violence had fewer resources to offer in exchange for support. England and the United States provide the examples. Germany experienced greater institutional disruption and economic dislocation in the East than England, and cultural identity was more deeply politicized, but the economy and state resource base remained relatively strong. There the odds of violence were higher, but political entrepreneurs promoting violence had few tangible resources to offer in exchange for support. They were therefore able to promote violence but unable to sustain it when institutional strength was restored.
Where institutions were severely weakened by globalization and liberalization but where identity politics had not previously been dominant, cultural groups promoting a political agenda were able to offer alternative channels for resource allocation, thereby politicizing cultural identity in the liberalization process. In Algeria, where the state was less deeply rooted and the crisis most severe, political entrepreneurs promoting violence (often with outside economic support) were able to gain the most support. Egypt, with a relatively stronger state capable of repressing violent groups and their leaders, experienced less violence. Table 3 summarizes the argument.
Table 3
Economic Hardship, State Resources, and Entrepreneurial Resources as Factors of Cultural Violence
| Country/Region and Violence Level | Economic Factors Cause Cultural Discrimination | State Attempts to Mitigate Discrimination | Economic Factors Affect State Capacity | Resources Available to Political Entrepreneurs |
| Yugoslavia High |
Yes | Yes | Erosion and collapse, oil shocks, debt | Resources for regional and former party officials, yes |
| Abkhazia High |
Yes | No | USSR erosion and collapse | Transnational resources for Abkhazian officials |
| Algeria High |
Not during Fordist period | Yes | Oil boom, debt, and rapid decline | FIS, yes;transnational resources |
| Punjab Medium |
Yes | No | Oil shocks, debt crisis, rapid decline | Few resources for sustained violence |
| Kashmir Medium |
Yes | No | Oil shocks, debt crisis, rapid decline | Few resources for sustained violence |
| Egypt Medium |
Not during | Yes | Oil boom, debt, rapid decline | Muslim Brotherhood, Fordist period yes |
| Germany Low |
Yes | No | Rising unemployment in 1980s | Few resources for sustained violence |
| United States Low |
Yes | Yes | Economic decline rising unemployment | Few resources for sustained violence |
| England Low |
Yes | Yes | Economic decline, rising unemployment | Few resources for sustained violence |
| Bulgaria None |
No | — | Economic collapse, debt | No resources for sustained violence |
| Ajaria None |
No | — | Economic collapse of USSR | No resources for sustained violence |
| Malaysia None |
Yes | Yes | No; high economic growth | No resources for sustained violence |
Conclusion
The evidence presented in these cases points to a relatively simple finding: countries whose political institutions politicize cultural identity are more vulnerable to cultural conflict than countries whose political institutions promote social integration of diverse cultural groups. Economic discrimination and privilege outside of those institutions can perpetuate or trigger the political relevance of cultural identity, but strong political institutions promoting social integration can act as a firebreak and reduce the political “charge” on culture.
Vulnerability to cultural conflict does not automatically bring on cultural violence. The legitimation of identity politics creates incentives for political entrepreneurs to mobilize populations along exclusive cultural lines. But if states provide a legitimate arena for entrepreneurs to compete and if resources available for allocation are abundant, identity politics, like other kinds of political competition, will be legitimate and stable. It is when demographic and economic changes undermine the rules of the game, undermine the legitimacy of political institutions, and lead to perceptions that the balance of political power is unfair that identity politics, like other forms of political competition, can escalate to cultural conflict and violence. Institutions must be strong and flexible if identity politics is to be stable. When institutions fail, previous incentives promoting social and political divisions along cultural lines are likely to persist and ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs may have a stash of resources to distribute in exchange for support.
Just as vulnerability to cultural conflict does not automatically bring on cultural violence, states whose institutions promote social integration are not immune to cultural strife. Historical, ideological, and sectarian legacies can provide incentives to politicize culture. And economic discrimination and advantages can push cultural leaders into the political arena to protest grievances or protect privilege. State institutions must provide ample resources and rules to make social divisions like class, interest, or ideology more relevant than culture in the political arena if they wish to avoid political conflict along cultural lines. And they must distribute resources in ways that promote social integration and redress past grievances if they wish to reduce the influence of ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs and ensure loyalty to the state. If the institutions of allocation and distribution weaken where historical legacies of cultural conflict persist in the form of economic discrimination, ethnic and sectarian political entrepreneurs may be ready to provide alternative resources to deprived populations and thus garner political support and weaken the legitimacy of the state even more.
Inability to compete in an increasingly globalized economy causes the institutions protecting social order to erode, weaken, and even collapse. Globalization means that even stronger states entering global competition must give up their control over the production and distribution of goods within their territories and let the market, rather than political institutions, allocate resources. Despite the seeming impersonality of the market, when these resources are distributed in ways that privilege some cultural groups and discriminate against others, those who lose in the market will lose their loyalty to the state that may have once tried to redress the effects of discrimination.
Sustained and organized violence erupts where the logic of identity politics was cemented in state institutions and where those institutions collapsed and loyalty to the central state disappeared. It also erupts where historical legacies perpetuate the idea that cultural distinctions are politically relevant and states that resisted that idea have weakened and collapsed, losing what loyalty they might have had. Chronic violence appears in areas where states have practiced identity politics and in states whose ability to allocate political and economic resources has severely declined but whose military apparatus is strong enough to repress efforts by cultural groups to secede or capture the state for themselves. Sporadic violence occurs where identity politics is permitted, where liberal institutions penalize attacks on human rights, but where those institutions are disrupted. It also occurs in states with strong institutions promoting social integration but where a legacy of economic discrimination prevents some cultural groups from achieving full citizenship rights.
Endnotes
Note 1. See Jeanette Money, “No Vacancy: The Politics of Immigration Control in Advanced Industrial Democracies” (Berkeley: Center for German and European Studies), pp. 22–23. Working Paper.
Note 2. See, for example, the contribution by Bell-Fialkoff and Markovits in this volume. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Press, 1983); Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism and the First Era of Global History (New York: Harper, 1962); Emerich Francis, “The Ethnic Factor in Nation-Building,” Social Forces 46, 3: 338–46; R. D. Grillo “Nation” and “State” in Europe: An Anthropological Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Note 3. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 86.
Note 4. See, for example, how the different conceptions of citizenship rights in France and Germany (i.e., based on jus sanguinis versus jus solis) affected the growth of exclusive nationalism in Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Note 5. That identity was to be shaped by a “cosmopolitan” socialist ideology. Public debate on ethnic issues was largely forbidden, and the grievances of particular ethnic groups had to be articulated in economic and social terms since these were the only terms viewed by the state as legitimate. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Maria Todorova, “Language in the Construction of Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Bulgarian Case” (Berkeley: Center for German and European Studies, November, 1992); Working Paper Series No. 5.5. Michael Urban in this volume shows that the “imperialism” of Russian national identity in the process of consolidation before the socialist revolution transcended cultural differences. Thus in the current period, political conflict in Russia—though hardly a homogeneous society—is played out among culturally homogeneous elites, each advancing their own particular interests by making exclusive claims to national identity. By unmasking their opponents as “Communists,” for example, the new “democrats” in Russia present themselves “as defenders of the nation, as bearers of the national interest.” By using the language of identity, they then demonize their opponents by declaring them culpable for the discredited past.
Note 6. See Otto Kirchheimer, “The Catch-All Party,” in Political Parties and Political Development, ed. Joseph La Palombara and Myron Wiener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Note 7. On the struggle between inclusive and exclusive definitions of citizenship in Malaysia, see Lowell W. Barrington, “Citizenship and the ‘Nation-Builder’s Dilemma’: Ethnicity, Nation-Building, and State-Building in Newly Independent States”; paper prepared for annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 31 August–3 September 1995, pp. 8–11.
Note 8. See, for example, David Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Ethnic Fears and Global Management: The International Spread and Management of Ethnic Conflict” (January 1996), p. 15; IGCC Policy Paper No. 20.
Note 9. See Wolfgang G. Gibowski and Max Kaase, “Auf dem Weg zum politischen Alltag,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 11, 12 (1991): 3; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the United States, 1994, p. 288.
Note 10. For these arguments, see Richard Rose, Voters Begin to Choose (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1986), and Russell Dalton, Scott Flanagan, and Paul Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On “digestibility,” see Ulf Mintzel, “Grossparteien im Parteienstaat der Bundesrepublik,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 39 (March 1989): 3–14.
Note 11. The hallmark of the American political system had been the limited Madisonian state, designed to divide political power. The design was etched in the constitution: separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights. Allocative institutions reflected the laissez-faire tradition in economic life, and they gave rise to institutions that were incapable of successfully implementing an interventionist allocative economic policy. See Jonah Levy, Robert Kagan, and John Zysman, “The Twin Restorations: The Political Economy of the Reagan and Thatcher ‘Revolutions’” (Berkeley, October 1995); unpublished manuscript.
Note 12. James L. Sundquist, “Party Decay and the Capacity to Govern,” in The Future of American Political Parties: The Challenge of Governance, ed. Joel L. Fleischman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982).
Note 13. Levy, Kagan, and Zysman, p. 20.
Note 14. See Christopher Mark Davis, “The Exceptional Soviet Case: Defense in an Autarkic System,” Daedalus 120, 4 (Fall 1991): 113–20.
Note 15. See Beverly Crawford, Economic Vulnerability in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), ch. 4.
Note 16. For example, by 1 January 1991 there were 2,905 Soviet joint ventures with Western firms, and some of these involved the transfer of dual-use technology over the entire life of the project. Of those registered, 1,027 were operational. See John Lloyd, “Joint Ventures Gleam amid Economic Gloom,” Financial Times, 27 April 1991, p. 2.
Note 17. Ernst Haas, “Nationalism in the United States” (Berkeley, 1995), p. 49; unpublished manuscript. See also Figure 1 for unemployment rate differences between blacks and whites.
Note 18. Ibid., p. 62. Haas cites Hugh Heclo, “The Political Foundations of Antipoverty Policy,” in Fighting Poverty, ed. Sheldon H. Danziger and Daniel H. Weinberg (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 314.
Note 19. This is the argument of Levy, Kagan, and Zysman. They argue that in both countries, historical legacies and institutional structures mitigated against aggressive state intervention in the economy, reducing the resources that are necessary for effective policy, resources that are available in France or Japan. They argue that while the Madisonian legacy and federal system impeded state intervention efforts in the United States, external forces, such as the City of London and trade unions, constrained the ability to undertake aggressive intervention in England. If, for example, England were to have initiated policies of deficit spending to stimulate domestic demand, trade deficits would have resulted and the value of the pound would have been threatened. The position of financial institutions in the City would have been undermined by a devaluation of the pound; therefore the political strength of the City prevented Keynesian demand stimulus.
Note 20. Levy, Kagan, and Zysman argue that social expenditures were not cut but simply passed on to the states to administrate.
Note 21. Money, pp. 13–14.
Note 22. Ibid., p. 25.
Note 23. Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 121; cited in Elaine Thomas’s contribution to this volume.
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