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State "Identity" Politics in the Domestic Ethnic Arena: A Multi-Level Approach
International Studies Association
March 1998
Abstract:
Most studies of ethnic conflict assume that the state is, by nature, ethnically neutral. On the same grounds, many studies assume that the state is a key neutral mediator or moderator of ethnic conflict, whose role should therefore be central to conflict resolution. By contrast, I argue that the state itself is not neutral, but rather can play a key role in fostering ethnic conflict due to its unique function in connecting international security concerns to the domestic ethnic environment. The state does this routinely by translating international norms regarding nation-building into domestic nationalist discourses that are invariably imbued with ethnic logics. Moreover, the state itself can take on an effectively "ethnic" identity in crafting its security community, a tactic which then informs state policy negatively toward any domestic ethno-diversity at odds with its external profile. By identifying how "ethnic" interests are built into the state itself, this paper contributes to demystifying the theoretically troublesome failure of the modern state system to mitigate ethnic conflict. Finally, I propose four hypotheses for further research on how state identity politics affects domestic ethnic relations.
In the post-Cold War era, ethnic conflict has proved the most numerous and destabilizing among the world's social and political conflicts. Headlines in the 1990s have tracked an array of appalling confrontations: cycles of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and of genocide in Rwanda; the Chechyna war; the Chiapas crisis; tortuous reform in south Africa; and the grinding decline of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Not so prominent in the headlines are a host of other conflicts, some small and localized, others startlingly large-scale: myriad hostilities and rivalries in sub-Saharan Africa; the state-wide uprisings by Ecuador's indigenous peoples in 1990, 1991 and 1994; and of course the simmering and shifting ethnopolitics of the post-Soviet states. Some conflicts are old, with histories trailing back through centuries; other seem fresh, unprecedented, almost contrived. Many seem like revivals of ancient troubles thought to be laid to rest, old feuds in new clothing, like the global wave of indigenous peoples' self-determination movements.
A central theoretical contradiction is raised by the sheer numerical scope of these conflicts. Taken individually, each is certainly unique in regard to the its history (short or long), its evolving configuration in national politics, and how it articulates with local socio-economic change. Taken together, however, ethnic conflicts are manifesting as a kind of global phenomenon, one that has inspired a general consternation about their apparent "revival" as a destabilizing force in the modern world. Of course, the fresh attention by scholars, politicans and journalists may reflect only a sudden ability to see them, now that the glaring light of the cold War has been removed. But whether the current array of ethnic conflicts represent a "revival" or only a continuation of earlier ethnic tensions, their ubiquity raises a basic theoretical dilemma and disturbs observers with an apparent cognitive dissonance: that that the modern state--the quintessentially "modern" political institution of the world system--has so dramatically failed to mediate and reconcile such contests over time.
The modern nation-state, after all, is considered by most analysts to be instrinsically an ethnically neutral entity or forum. It is on this presumption that many scholars have placed such faith in its capacities to mediate, moderate and ultimately obviate ethnopolitics. The very premise of civic nationalism is that the state provides an impartial framework in which governance, if designed and pursued properly, can be blind to "private" matters like ethnicity. To be sure, its institutions may be captured by an ethnic group and used to prejudicial ends. And clearly, within the body of many nations, racial and ethnic prejudice is rife in the effect, if not the intent, of governance: biases persist in bureaucratic recruitment even where laws provide for equality; old racial caste structures linger, feeding local tensions. The world's proudest democracies must admit as much. And yet the state itself--that abstract legal entity--has seemed an entirely neutral entity. Surely (one might think), the answer to ethnic strife is simply to find the right arrangement of domestic institutions, which can secure such fundamentals as free and fair elections, accountable representation, checks and balances within government, and an impartial judiciary. The only remaining task would then be to overcome engrained human biases: to break the cycles of ethnic hostility through a gradual socialization into a harmonious society which can (one hopes) eventually celebrate the condition of ethnic diversity as a welcome and enriching environment.
These hopeful assumptions have sometimes born fruit, but their shocking disappointments are many. Ethnic hatreds and conflict have indeed confounded all mid-century predictions of their imminent demise. Such an extensive failure of theory might suggest a need to re-evaluate the theory, but this is not what we see. Instead, theorists continue uncritically to sustain the fundamental assumption of the neutral state and to treat ethnic conflicts, for all their great number, as deviations--departures from the theoretically predicted. Most studies then concentrate on explaining why a particular "deviation" has occured. Policy prescriptions then often (logically) advocate building more effective state institutions; indeed, many studies trying to explain the emergence of ethnopolitics cite "state weakness" as a key factor (e.g., Lake and Rothchild 1996).
Are these assumptions adequate? I argue that they are not. The state is not an inherently neutral player in ethnic conflict, but constitutes an arena imbued with ethnically loaded norms. Moreover, states can obtain quite urgent "ethnic" agendas of their own in pursuing their foreign relations, which render domestic ethnic diversity problematic to state foreign policy. In this case, the state becomes an ethnic actor in its own arena, in that its interests generate certain "logics" which inform state policy toward ethnic diversity.
In this paper, I will trace several political avenues by which a state can become complicit in fostering ethnic conflict. My focus will be on how the state acts as a channel between international and domestic norms. Focusing on theory-building, this paper will cite case studies only as illustrations; it is designed, however, to guide empirical research, and in the conclusion I will offer several hypotheses toward this agenda.
In the following section, I will use constructivist theory of ethnicity and of the state to lay a foundation for discussing how the state can take on ethnic "logics" of its own.
Constructivist Theory of the State and of the Modern State System
Neglect of the state in studies of ethnic conflict is not surprising. First, as noted above, the ethnically sterile state (considered independently of its possible "capture") does not draw attention for any intrinsic role in ethnic tensions. Its only contributing role would appear to be its function in bringing groups under one government, in which they find cause to compete for resources, but this is a problem which tends to bring focus on the performance of government rather than the role of the state.
Second, and contributing to the first reason, the "state" is an elusive animal to describe. Looking from within, people (including scholars) are rarely in agreement even about what the state is. It might be understood as the governing bureaucratic apparatus; it might be understood as those people who occupy bureaucratic positions; it may be claimed to consist essentially of mechanisms of coercive force, centralized authority over legitimate violence which recognizes no higher authority within the territory--Max Weber's famous formulation (see Nettl ). It is indeed in this domestic perspective that most analysts of ethnic conflict consider it both central and inherently "neutral."
Third, neglect of the state often reflects the low esteem in which many analysts hold it. Power in many countries is so diffused and localized among local strongmen or business interests that the "state" in any centralized sense seems a mere fiction. Outside of the disciplines of political science and international relations, students of ethnic conflict in some areas of the so-called Third World often grow testy at the mere mention of the "state" for this reason.
There is, however, another level on which the state exists, which superficially seems irrelevant to ethnic conflict but which is actually quite crucial: that is, in its international guise. Juridically, the modern state is largely a creature of the modern international system, a conceptual entity sustained by a matrix of mutual agreements regarding sovereignty over territory and over populations, ideas no less powerful for their historical fluidity and constant renegotiation (Krasner). Strong or weak, even when surviving only on the prop of a powerful ally, the state has borders, a currency, a citizenship, a diplomatic and juridical presence in the international system.
Once we recognize the state's existence in this international sense, the "Janus-faced" quality of that international presence becomes clear: the state's externally endowed existence demands, in turn, some genuine domestic performance. In order to survive in its risky international environment, the state must generate and sustain institutions that have some genuine governing capacity, if only over the financial and diplomatic institutions (not to mention the ports and roads) which link it to other states.
Moreover, that external/internal linkage has a socializing effect; relevant state institutions must be more or less congruent with those of other states--with, for example, the norms and rules of transnational financial, security and diplomatic regimes 2 --or the state risks a breakdown of relations with (and possibly invasion or annexation by) other states. Some states may have little more than this bare presence, but rarely is the state so minimally manifest. Far more frequently, the state has been linked via elaborate institutions, developed through decades or centuries of political endeavor and/or internal social engineering, to a "nation": the population within its territory, supposedly unified by a common heritage or at least by the common desire to be under one government, which the state (purportedly) exists to serve. Representation of a "nation" is indeed the state's domestic raison d'ętre. But it is also the state's international raison d'ętre, and the linkage between these two functions is crucial to the state's ethnic role, as will be discussed in more detail below.
By considering this Janus-faced character of the state we find a groundwork from which to consider how the state, as an institution of the international system, can become concerned with the domestic construction of ethnic identities, even obtaining an "ethnic" quality of its own. For states face a number of imperatives that pertain to their very existence and survival, at least three of which can generate what I call "ethnic logics": that is, ideas, norms and values which derive from the likely consequences of ethnopolitics for state interests and which establish what kinds of ethnopolitics are therefore acceptable to the state. Two of these imperatives arise in the state's construction of its domestic arena: first, the imperative of emulating international norms including standards of "civilization"; and second, the imperative of national unity which inspires doctrines of nationalism. The third mode of ethnic logic and the primary focus of this paper, state identity politics, is developed through the state's external relations, and can render the state an ethnic "actor" in its own arena. In the following two sections I will discuss these dual functions of the state in turn.
I. The State as Arena: embedded ethnic logics
The state comprises an ethnic arena in ways both obvious and subtle. Clearly, the state exists to provide an arena for the management of domestic interests; indeed, it creates the "domestic" and "foreign" by providing the juridical boundaries of the society, even as it creates the "public" and the "private" (Mitchell 1991). From a domestic perspective, the state functions as the sovereign institutional shell for the development of political institutions designed precisely to channel (or contain) domestic contests like ethnic competition. As a shell, it does obtain the sterile look that obviates any scrutiny for ethnic bias.
But that sterility is only superficial. In generating a political arena, the more subtle contribution of the state is to constructing an ideational environment, most basically by establishing that essential condition of modern state politics: a territorial polity. That condition alone contributes crucial logics to the ethnic cognitive terrain: especially, via the nation-building mission, which so heavily shapes related fields of knowledge, political ideologies, social values and economic interests. Nation-building contributes to defining ethnic actors and their essential natures, to determining the legitimacy of their claims, and to prescribing policy. Much of this conceptual activity is pursued by elites and various actors within the state. But in the resulting ideational matrix, the state contributes logics of its own--especially the logic of territorial integrity, which becomes embedded in socio-political thought as an a priori concept from which all other logics derive (or which, at least, they must not assail).
Yet that basic logic too, as well as others, derives also from transnational norms. How such logics derive from international norms and interests requires some elaboration, and some consideration of the state as a constructed entity, in order to clarify their connection to ethnic conflict.
Constructing the Domestic Arena: International Norms and Ethnic Logics
Before discussing how the state is constructed by international norms, it may be helpful to offer a brief theoretical portrait of ethnicity in order to establish the vector through which state interests and ethnic conflict can intersect.
In scholarly studies of ethnic identity and conflict, it has become commonplace to treat ethnic identities not as givens but as fluid and socially constructed. In any deep historical study of ethnic identities, we find that the criteria for membership change over time, reflecting ethnicity's adaptive and contingent nature. Ethnopoliticians also sometimes invent, "reconstruct" or adapt existing ethnic profiles to support particular claims for group rights or privileges (A. Smith 1991, Tilley 1997). Their claims may then embed in popular consciousness, shaping social perceptions (and altering political behavior). But ethnic identities are not entirely malleable by the ambitious ethno-architect. While they are fluid, they are not infinitely so; they are attached to myriad social experiences, collective memories and norms, that carry their own logics and inertia. Accordingly, most analyses of ethnic identities assume that ethnic identities are socially constructed by their constituencies even while debating the extent to which they are the tools of instrumental politics and/or derive from deep cultural ("primordial") group traits or cognition. 1
But ethnic identities are constructed not only internally, by the group; they are also "imagined" by other groups, who generate differing and sometimes contradictory understandings of their nature and definition. Hence a dominant ethnic group, controlling the government, may seek to define the ethnic identity of a secessionist or insurrectionary group as intrinsically "backward" or even specious. The subordinate group will then consider that demeaning discourse in constructing some counter-discourse. For example, the non-Indian (ladino) elite of Guatemala generally understands "Indian" as an ethnic identity wedded to the peasantry; thus, viewing a Mayan Indian who has gained a university degree and seeks to represent Indian interests to the government, they may deny that person's legitimacy as a "representative" because she is no longer "Indian." The Mayan response, of course, is to reject the conflation of "Indian" and "peasant" and to draw instead on ancient Mayan art and civilization for evidence of the modern Mayan identity's intrinsic capacity to embrace multiple class strata. We also see in such contests the voices of various "authorities" who are enlisted to bolster competing definitions, ranging from canonical histories to social science to religious texts.
The arena of ethnic construction and contest, viewed in this light, may superficially appear to be poles apart from the sterile, unitary aspect of the state. But in a sense, as a growing body of IR theory asserts, states too are socially constructed. The very stuff of state sovereignty is based on an international fabric of rules and norms about sovereignty and security: unwritten norms of action which signal threat or its absence, and more formally codified conventions like the rules of engagement and international law. Taken together, these norms and rules provide a form of order that mitigates the international condition of anarchy and that is violated by any state only at peril of isolation, retaliation or ruin. In most theories of international relations, that system of order has been understood as the product of state relations, generated by states through centuries of negotiations and practices (e.g., Bull 1977, Watson 1988). Carried only a step farther, however, the international order can be understood to define the state itself (Wendt 1992).
In this view, modern states are not analogous to independent Lockian individuals who developed separately and later joined to form a set of rules for their interactions. Rather, the modern state is itself a conceptual and legal creation of an evolving system whose rules and norms have been developed and sustained through practice. For example, the bedrock principle of the state, the concept of sovereignty, is no more than an idea, or set of ideas, which reflects centuries of negotiation about the state's rights and responsibilities regarding its territory and population, and the rules of its engagement with other states (Biersteker and Weber 1996).
From this perspective we can see that state-building has entailed exigencies derived from the state's international conditions: an environment ordered by rules and norms which provides for the existence and recognition of the state itself. The state must abide by those rules and norms or risk annihilation. From this essential condition of states, we can proceed to consider how those international norms inform state policies toward ethnic diversity and conflict, and even affect the construction of ethnic identities themselves.
One such set of transnational norms is the set of criteria once known as the"Standard of Civilization": a set of behaviors reflective of European cultural norms, postulated by European imperialist philosophers as the antithesis of the barbarity, paganism and "savagery." Failure to meet this "standard" rendered lands sin política and therefore (politically if not demographically) terra nullius, opening them by the terms of European international law to legal seizure. Through the threat of such seizure, the same "standard" became powerful leverage for compelling local political elites to adopt it by developing those governing institutions which facilitated European trade (a global process sometimes innocuously called "socialization"). Thus the European "standard of civilization" was enforced in much of the world through the iron fists of military and economic pressure, and those who resisted and/or followed divergent paths generally lost territory, power, and even a place in history. 3 Late nineteenth century Latin American elites' efforts to modernize state institutions and economies were charged by apprehension of such a fate; in similarly anxious climates we find the Chinese bureaucratic reforms, the Japanese Meiji Restoration and the Ottoman tanzimat reforms, all also in the late nineteenth century.
This global process resulted in the homogenization what was previously a much more diverse array of political types, through the simple effect that, by the mid-nineteenth century, alternatives to the European template were not identified as "states." We can trace historically how this typological dimension of the emerging state system had a direct impact in generating ethnic tensions and conflicts by demoting and subordinating other types, particularly nomadic peoples, to the status of "ethnic groups." For example, in the first two centuries of European settlement in North America, several indigenous peoples and confederations were understood by European states to be sovereign powers and were indeed formally recognized as "nations" in European diplomacy (Berman 1992). But by the late eighteenth century the criteria for "nationhood" had narrowed significantly, identified ever more rigidly with European governing institutions (a centralized government, a parliament, ministries) as well as cultural attributes (rectangular buildings, chairs, particular dress). As the imperatives of US state-building intensified with advancing settler-colonialism, North American native "nations" were demoted to the newly conceived status "domestic dependent nations." 4 Within a few decades after US independence, they were considered to have entirely lost all sovereign claims to any territory in the United States; still later they were retroactively redefined as having been "wandering tribes" and were deemed never to have been nations. Earlier diplomatic recognition of their sovereignty was recast as cynical ploys to pacify the natives and facilitate white settlement.
Thus, for many states, not only prestige but the very ability to resist conquest has depended on presenting a "civilized" aspect on the European model--a project which may readily be seen as "ethnic" in itself. But the impact goes further. Since any serious deviation from "civilized" standards manifests as corrosive to the state's international standing (and therefore security), European standards have had a range of observable effects on state policy toward domestic ethnic diversity: e.g., as mentioned above, in the tropes of "backwardness" and "primitiveness" that have characterized Latin American perceptions of indigenous cultural practices. Thus we have seen, historically, considerable tension and debate among state elites in Latin America and Africa about their "backward" peoples, and an especially lively disownment of any "primitive" elements in the nation. Such concerns have historically translated into marginalization policies or forced assimilation projects that have left a legacy of bitter resentments and resistence, particularly among American indigenous peoples but also within many African states. If we consider that latter-day "universal" human rights norms have largely taken over the nineteenth century "civilization" discourse, the ongoing connection of international standards to late twentieth century ethnocidal policies toward "backward" peoples becomes apparent.
Thus the state translates international norms into "standards" which inform not only state policies toward ethnic diversity but the very "construction" of ethnic identities themselves. By contributing to how ethnic identities are understood and valued (as beneficial or detrimental to state interests), the state helps to establish the domestic criteria and perceptions by which state policy toward ethnic diversity is guided.
Such constructions are not, however, developed in an ideological or ideational vacuum. The larger context is the cognitive terrain of nation-building, in which, again, we can identify neglected contributions by the state.
B. The Onus of National Unity
Nation-building and nationalism is usually studied for its profound domestic dimensions. But nation-building also reflects crucial international concerns of the state. First, the international standing of the modern state indeed rests partly on its basic ability to manifest as a "nation-state"--that is, to represent a unified nation, or a population bound together at least by the common will to be under one government. Second, nation-building is so prone to ethnic logics that the two are often considered synonymous. Both these principles deserve brief review for how they impact the domestic "national" ethnic arena.
First, I immediately acknowledge that to assert an onus of national unity for states is a controversial point, since many states lack such unity and the international system is notoriously uninterested in such lack. Indeed, quite a few states rest heavily on international recognition to override their internal incohesion (Jackson & Rosberg). But a state's diplomatic claim of unity remains key, because that claim underlies the basic diplomatic premise that the state government truly can represent, defend and advocate for its territory's population in international forums. In most IR literature, this representative function is indeed assumed, and a presumption (often extraordinarily uncritical) of underlying national unity is tacitly attached.
Moreover, those states for whom domestic unity is indeed more myth than matter are widely understood to suffer seriously for such weakness. Given the risks of its international environment, a state gains vital benefits from its own domestic hegemony, such as popular cooperation with military service and tax levies. Both are crucial to the state's capabilities for survival and standing in the international system. 5 Concommitantly, a lack of national unity directly erodes state strength.
Thus the Janus-faced dimensions of nation-building have inspired states to pursue nation-building with particular vigor. And around the world, a burden of grappling with ethnic diversity has been more the rule than the exception to such projects. Rare is the state that has not had to craft its "nation" to some degree; hence the (now often forgotten) history of ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation projects in some of today's most respected and venerable "nation-states," like France (E. Weber 1976). But even the most venerable states, like France, still sustain some tenacious remnant of ethnic resistance to that history: hence we anticipate no imminent demise of Basque separatism, and we recently see a fresh Breton ethnic revival. In states where nation-building has been less thorough, dissent is correspondingly more grave.
Accordingly, we can admit that the international onus of national unity generates a repressive logic for the state if ethnopolitics carries sufficient force to erode an effective claim to such unity. Again, nonexistent is the nation-state that can truly demonstrate complete national unity, and some degree of disunity is normal and internationally acceptable. But if domestic national division (including ethnopolitical schisms) is sufficiently severe to imply a significant lack of consensus about the fundamental national integrity of a state, then the state may appear internationally as an illegitimate voice, unqualified to make decisions for its population and perhaps incapable of enforcing them (as did, for example, South Africa in the last years of apartheid).
In such a case, internal ethnic divisions actually threaten the state's international standing and impel state elites (who otherwise might be uninspired to care) to seek some "solution." Solutions are often sought rhetorically, through attempts to establish certain hegemonic truths favorable to the unity claim; for example, facing a genuine inability to effect true ethnic accord (or an entrenched aversion to trying), state elites may deny that ethnic divisions actually exist, or argue that they are actually inconsequential (Lemarchand). Alternatively, a government may even exaggerate ethnic hierarchies, by defining some secessionist group (possibly coupled with a class fraction) as backward, irrational, or otherwise unqualified to challenge the state's legitimacy. 6 Only in the last resort will most states resort to violent suppression, expulsion or extermination, but such cases are of course very painful: Turkey's expulsion and genocide of the Armenians in ______, Bulgaria's expulsion of the Turks in ____; Serbia's latest repressions in Kosovo.
Given this onus of national unity, we immediately confront a second ethnic logic built into the state's domestic arena: that nationalism--whatever its architects' ambitions--cannot avoid incorporating ethnic components. Minimally, some common language or languages must be established as official, a logistical onus which inevitably biases the national identity toward a particular ethnohistory or histories. More often the bias is not minimal; the nation-building mission usually inspires state elites to propose their own ethnic symbols and traditions as central to the national ideology and mythicohistory, in order to secure the nationalist ethos safely around the core of their own ethnic norms (thereby granting themselves an ethnic or cultural centrality to the nation not incidental to their continuing political centrality). Other ethnic groups, viewing such ethnonationalisms in formation or suffering permanent marginalization under their sway, are understandably loathe to accept them, and resulting competition can be deadly, as we continue to see in the Balkans.
Of course, here we may call for a civic nationalism that can mediate and overcome ethnonationalist ambitions. But those nationalisms which have seriously tried to minimize their ethnocentric biases are few, and only partially successful, as we see in the heavy persistence of Anglo-Saxon imagery in the self-consciously civic nationalist traditions of the United States. Even where such explicit ethnic attachments are undesireable and expressly prohibited, the very exclusion of ethnonationalist amibitions can feed them: hence we see Christian and Islamic fundamentalist movements, albeit driven by many non-ethnic grievances, challenging secular governments around the world on grounds that their structural anti-religious posture fails to represent the will of the people. Repression of such movements, on the grounds that they contradict civic nationalist measures to suppress or repress ethnopolitical expression is not perceived as "neutral" by the group under assault--particularly as the state elite almost invariably belies the "neutrality" claim by clinging to the kind of unadmitted ethnic privileges mentioned above.
Much of this ethnic quality to nation-building has been discussed extensively elsewhere. Here, however, we examine nation-building for its attachment to state interests. The onus of national unity is intrinsic to and incumbant upon the state, forcing it to comprise a domestic political arena, in accordance with international norms. It then channels international norms into that arena in order to emulate international standards for its domestic character, and the above discussion has illustrated how ethnic logics are attached to those norms. Thus simply in constructing the "domestic," the Janus-faced state is an ethnic actor, constraining the range of possible ethnic choices within the nation and so generating a selection mechanism that, if not entirely successful, generates ethnic conflict.
In the above discussion, the specific ethnic construction of the national "identity" (with its implications for corollary ethnic logics) has been treated as though informed solely by domestic conditions. Again, however, nation-building is Janus-faced. Construction of the specific "identity" of the "nation," including its ethnic qualities, is also informed by ideas circulating transnationally and by what kind of "identity" is advantageous to the state's external posture. This linkage brings us to consider the state in a more classically realist sense, as an "actor" in the international system--and then in its own arena.
II. The state as ethnic actor
Today, thanks to advancing constructivist IR theory, it is not a new assertion to point out that states form identities. Facing the intrinsic "security dilemma" of the anarchic international system, states form national "identities" to stabilize their alliances with other states, even forming identity "communities" by affirming some kind of deep commonality. Such an "identity" may be built on any concept or set of principles. For example, in the post-Cold War period, an identification with liberal economic policy and democracy has helped some former Soviet states to reorient and solidify their alliances toward western Europe and the United States. Such "identities" go beyond mere policy choices because they are less malleable; once linked ideologically to the state's intrinsic character, and embedded in the national consciousness, they help to stabilize a domestic orientation toward a particular foreign policy and overarch any vagaries or vicissitudes of domestic politics. In the international arena, they help to glue over any temporary differences of interest, reassuring allies of long-term commitment. Indeed, a state identity even compels a government to hold to a particular foreign policy, again because of both their domestic embeddedness and the longer term international obligations they accrue.
When such state "identities" are linked to the nation's "culture," however, or when the state's international profile is tied to traits like race, language and religion, state identities become more explicitly "ethnic." Such ethnic identities build stable alliances out of some (purportedly) shared cultural values and collective history: hence the Latin American identity examined here, but also such collective state identities as "African" and "Arab," both propounded in various ideological formulations to craft regional solidarity after decolonization. Some "ethnic" (or culturalist) identities help state alliances to jump over substantial geographic distances; for example, to secure its autonomy from Muslim Arab and Turkish forces, the Maronite Christian community in Lebanon has professed a religious/cultural commonality with France since the fourteenth century, an alliance of kind which the French eventually rewarded by creating the Maronite-centered Lebanese state in 1918 (Meo 1985, Petran 1987). Similarly, the much-vaunted "western" (non-Arab) identity of Israel has helped to secure its foreign relations toward Europe and especially its US alliance, which might otherwise be more variable in light of Israel's geographic distance and conflictive regional relations with Arab oil states (Tillman 1982, Green 1984). Some such ethno-culturalist state-community identities are in their infancy today, like the "Asianization" discourse of Malaysia's president Muhathir. Identities with more shallow histories tend to have less binding power, but the generation of a binding power is precisely their motive. Thus today we see Australia modifying its immigration laws to permit more Asian immigration, and retooling its national ideology to emphasize its Aborigine "roots," both measures designed to mitigate its historical "white" identity and to affirm its natural membership in an emerging "Asian" Pacific Rim trading bloc. Accordingly, preventing the gelling of such an identity around culturalist criteria can also become a state agenda: hence the present insistence by the United States on being a member of APEC (the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group), thereby preventing APEC from becoming a "Asian" culturalist organ and polarizing the Pacific trading zone along an east-west "cultural" axis.
All this state "ethnic" behavior is expressed rhetorically through nationalist doctrine, but represents a state concern for power in the classic realist sense: the formation of alliances that can secure the state against assaults on its sovereignty or prerogatives. For these reasons, a state "identity" is of significant importance to its security and trade relations. We accordingly find moments of tense debate about the internal construction of such "identities": for example, the question of whether "Asian" truly exists as a cultural category, or whether "Arab" statehood can accommodate peace with Israel.
On what basis is a state's international "identity" constructed? For any individual state, the design of its international "identity" depends on many factors: first, the actual ethnic composition of the society--although such identities are themselves constructed in light of transnationally flowing ideas. One source of input may be the state's enduring ties to regional powers or former colonial hegemons (thus the connections within French West Africa and the British Commonwealth); another source, as in the Asianization discourse noted above, may be bonds to established trading partners which comprise the state's economic lifeline.
How then are such diverse elements brought into a coherent "identity" discourse? Here authorship becomes crucial: not only how and why identities are crafted, but who crafts them. Clearly, the ethnic composition of the state's population determines the range of options elites might "imagine" about its international "ethnic" profile; elite claims about the state's purported "ethnic" identity is unlikely to be persuasive (either domestically or internationally) if that identity is entirely imaginary. But within those limits, in practice the state's international identity is usually designed by those who represent the state in international forums: e.g., heads of state, diplomats, ministers or department secretaries, central bank officials, those business interests who dominate the state's international trade, and the literati or intelligentsia. Of course, the state's identity discourse is typically filled out and enriched by a corpus of supporting literature, art, myths and folklore, expressive forms which explore and give texture to the national identity. Individual artistic expressions may well diverge from discourses consonant with the state's international posture, but state patronage may here be crucial to selecting which literary expressions gain public influence. Thus in many countries the state elite, through the power of the national purse and press (if not also the police), is a major player in determining the content of popular nationalist doctrine.
This subtle connection of the international to the domestic realm can be illustrated in the pan-Latin American construction of "Indian." Historically, each Latin American state constructed the ethnic character, political position and socio-economic niche of the indigenous peoples in its own local arena, but it was not alone in this project. Policy-makers and intellectual elites throughout Latin America have shared ideas about "Indians" for five centuries, and adapted those ideas when "imagining" nations and building states in ways reflective of European norms. One method of resolving the dilemma of nationalizing the conquered and subordinated people was through a doctrine of racial mixing, or mestizaje, an early twentieth century concept which sought to erase persistent racial barriers (and their nationalist contradictions) by defining them out of existence. But mestizaje was designed only partly to describe and affirm actual miscegenation of Indian and Spanish. More broadly, mestizaje developed as a regional anti-imperialist discourse to dignify less-than-white Latin America relative to the much celebrated "Anglo-Saxon"-- a racial identity attached in contemporary thought to the spectacular successes of England and the United States (e.g., Vasconcelos 1926). Yet, as I argue elsewhere, 7 an ethnocidal logic was imported into this doctrine. In affirming universal racial mixing, mestizaje implicitly rejected indigenous ambitions to a continuing distinct ethnic existence. Despite their rhetorical celebration, actual native peoples became a seditious category, because their existence impeded the fullest expression of that racial unity considered fundamental to Latin America's international posture. Since their "backward" presence also eroded Latin America's claim to "civilization," they were doubly unwelcome. The "Indian problem" accordingly plagued nationalists in any state where they remained demographically significant.
This interest of the state in crafting the national identity, in the interests of its foreign relations, is precisely the neglected conjunction that I find significant. I can now offer four hypotheses with which to test that significance. My first and fundamental hypothesis is a simple logical corollary of state identity construction: a state's international identity informs government responses to domestic ethnic dissent. In other words, the "Janus-faced" project of state identity construction works in both directions. If the state has built international alliances based on its sociological accord with a particular ethnic profile--"Latin American," "Asian," "Turkish," "Arab"--then a domestic challenge to that profile will implicitly threaten the state's membership in its identity bloc, by suggesting that the state's claimed commonality with its allies is not intrinsic or stable after all. Governments are therefore strongly motivated--in the interest of state security, beyond any purely domestic reasons--to lay such dissent to rest, through negotiation if possible and by repression if necessary. In this study, Latin America's exhaustive consideration of the "Indian problem" partly reflected perceptions of such a "threat," but examples are myriad:. e.g., the Kurdish challenge to the uniformly "Turkish" character of Turkey, perceived by Turkish elites to impact negatively the state's claim to unified (and "superior") national culture fundamental to its efforts to gain admission to the European Union--a matter of no small importance to Turkey. Similarly, Israel's "Jewish" identity (vital to securing foreign investment, continuing immigration and various global support networks) is undermined by Israeli Arab efforts to define the state as "secular democratic," and serious Arab attempts to do so have been suppressed (as in the 1989 banning of a political party supporting that platform). Clearly, purely domestic forces are heavily influential in such cases. But I propose that a state's external "ethnic" identity informs domestic policy to the extent that domestic ethnic division actually implicates the state's international interests. The actual mechanism is straightforward: if the state's domestic ethnic character informs state elites about how to construct the state's identity, then the state's international identity profile feeds back to require that the domestic ethnic character remain consistent with what is being propounded.
While focusing on the domestic impact of a state's international "identity" as a neglected component of ethnic meta-conflict, I must avoid any impression of arguing that state hegemony is the sole or even the determining motive affecting domestic ethnic perceptions. It is by no means clear that the ideas held, for example, by Latin American elites about the "Indian," or the ascendant mestizo character of the nation, all trace to logics deriving from concerns for state hegemony. Elite ideas flowing within a region like Latin America include broader cultural beliefs and values shared by the society, which reveal themselves in a plethora of social ideas convincingly independent of political concerns. Still, my point is that such ideas must be consonant with state hegemony or they will be demoted or selected out. Such selection processes are often veiled; as discussed in the first section, the very power of ethnic ideas convenient to state hegemony resides in the natural quality they obtain, which seems to divorce them from instrumental political interests.
One task, then, is to recognize how and why the specific component ideas of state identity are selected. To do so, we must recognize the importance of a related question: how authority over the construction of the state-nationalist ideology is granted to certain voices and not to others in the society. In Latin America, authoritative nationalist voices typically include politicians, social scientists, novelists, poets, and "experts" of all types, but drawn primarily from an elite intelligentsia with stronger connections to their cohorts in other states than to the popular classes (and certainly Indians) in their own. Sharing scientific knowledge and philosophical debates through transnational elite networks, they arrive at ideas workable (or in fact not so workable) in their own societies but also consonant with regional norms. Here we arrive at my second hypothesis of the state as an ethnic actor: that state elite understandings of the state's "identity" are informed not solely by the actual ethnic constitution of the country, but also by flows of ideas circulating among elites in other countries within the state's (possibly multiple) identity blocs. For example, this study has shown that Salvadoran elite ideas about Indians were not taken so much from empirical observations of the Salvadoran population, but from ideas about backwardness and primitivity flowing from Europe, and from local derivations of those ideas that were circulating regionally, particularly that "Indians" were antithetical to nation-building. This hypothesis does not imply that bloc norms automatically carry hegemonic weight. But as illustrated in this study, the hypothesis does explain how regional idea flows contribute to the sometimes strained disjunction between state "identity" rhetoric and social realities.
This second hypothesis illuminates another dimension of international idea flows: that "identity" criteria can constitute a kind of latter-day "standard of civilization." Once identified with a particular identity carrying international or regional force (e.g., "western," "democratic," "mestizo"), state elites are pressured to conform with norms shared among the pertinent identity community regardless of their own views or perceptions. In other words, internationally hegemonic ideas about the internal constitution of a given state "identity" can constitute a form of policy pressure by suggesting that a true participant in a given "identity" would adhere to them. State elites' adoption and implementation of such norms might therefore be inspired neither by security concerns nor by sincere elite belief in their intrinsic merit--or not by these alone--but by recognition that they constitute a set of international standards by which the state is judged. Ideas about "modernity" fit here: for example, the idea that certain practices (like low-tech agricultural techniques, or even entire peoples) are "backward," and that new practices (like high-tech methods, or ethnic assimilation) are "modern." And hegemonic ideas about what actually constitutes a "Latin American" (or "Arab," or "European") identity fit here. Typically flowing from the regional intellectual centers (e.g., Cairo, Mexico City, Paris), such ideas as "correct" domestic policy toward minorities may become bloc "norms" (in the sense of standards) before all members have fully incorporated them. In this study, pressure on El Salvador by an international community scandalized by the 1932 massacre significantly embarrassed the government, and prompted some measures to conceal and smooth over the state's gross deviation from the emerging (Mexican) doctrine of benevolent Indian assimilation. In the 1990s, the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mayan spokeswoman Rigoberta Menchu contributed to forcing the Guatemalan government to recognize indigenous rights and standing, although the Guatemalan ladino elite was hardly ready for such a move. This brings me to my third hypothesis: that ethnic policies pursued by state elites may be informed by the concern to match standards sustained by the larger "identity" bloc/s of which the state is a member.
The authority of state elites over the state's international "identity" is of course not monolithic. On the contrary, the very power of the "identity" concept to shape and legitimize state policy tends to provoke internal dissent. Accordingly, in some cases domestic voices may disagree considerably about definitions of the nation, and this leads to my fourth hypothesis about the state: that international influences which inform a state's international "identity" discourse also foster rival discourses. This hypothesis of course returns us to the phenomenon of meta-conflict. Competing discourses about ethnic identity and claims are, to some measure, also competing discourses about the state: how exactly the nationalist premise of its hegemony should be understood or how it might be revised; to what extent the state can embrace cultural pluralism; and how (or whether) ethnic division impacts its international dignity and mission as a "nation-state."
Yet that same ubiquity daunts the theorist. Ethnic conflict is a broad term for a great variety of political phenomena, diverse not merely in their political goals and in the degree of their violence, but in their very character as conflicts. In their interplay with state governments, international events and shifting transnational identities and movements, they each represent unique historical interplays of ethnic and racial formations, born of evolving socioeconomic relations and ethnic and racial formations. No field of theory seems well placed to address that variety: the international relations theorist is derailed by local specificities, while the country or area specialist is discombobulated by cross-regional discrepencies.
Furthermore, ethnic identities take on different qualities in different venues. Even internally, at the level of popular thought, concepts of ethnic identity derive from many sources relevant in different settings: from particular behaviors (religion, language, dress, food) that signal the individual's membership, to the intersubjective worldview or "hermeneutic web" shared by the group in religious ritual, to the simplified models expressed symbolically in political fora (see also C. R. Hale 1994:18-28). It is indeed this multivalent quality that renders ethnic identities adaptable and therefore durable, permitting them to sustain some sense of connection to ancestral generations even while altering into forms unimaginable by those ancestors.
Therefore, to understand ethnic conflict we need to understand ethnicity itself as a body of concepts, drawn from diverse and even otherwise unrelated fields of knowledge, and connected both directly and indirectly to a network of interests. Indeed, many ideational realms contribute to ethnic identity: economic relations, the physical environment, local histories, and specific vectors of interaction between groups.
One such realm is the body of ideas and interests generated by the nation-state: sometimes overtly, as in explicitly ethnic elements promoted by the nationalist ideology, and sometimes less overtly, as in concepts of modernity. That nationalism is a regular if not necessary tool of a state's international strategies is not a new assertion, if nationalism is understood to mean primarily national integration (Anderson 1983). But that Ethnic conflict typically concerns such questions as the distribution of resources or political representation within a national society. We frequently recognize how political opportunities supplied by the nation-state's governing mechanisms can inspire ethnic entrepreneurial ambitions, and we observe the stresses that emerge from the state's "capture" by some ethnic group. Legacies of colonialism, that historically incorporated disparate groups uncomfortably under one government, can be blamed for much ethnic strife. Vast literatures examine transitions of regime type and electoral reform.
Still, all these variables concern the domestic realm: the engrossing complexities of ethnic sentiment and entrenched biases, economic interests, ideological battles and political shifts within the domestic arena. As a consequence, most analyses of ethnic conflict tend to adopt the geographic boundaries of the state territory as the boundary of the study.
Sheltered in its aura of ethnic sterility, the state remains absolved of any complicity in the current global scenario of ethnic politics and strife. But I argue that, in the world today, a key actor contributing to ethnic conflict is indeed the state, in its international dimension. State sovereignty clearly comprises the principal socio-political arena for ethnic conflicts, by constituting the boundaries within which the normative, juridical and political (national) environment is constituted for their emergence and resolution. Yet the state is not merely an arena; it is also an actor, contributing its own interests and logics to the domestic ethnic "environment"--the prevailing ideas about ethnic identities that shape the options available to ethnic movements. To clarify how this international dimension of the state affects the construction of ethnic conflict, I will use constructivist theory of both the state and ethnicity to identify how state identity politics shapes domestic ethnic conflict.
B. The State as Ethnic Arena and Ethnic Actor
Moreover, the interaction of nationalism with ethnicity is an old topic of study, explored extensively for decades (and now enjoying a renaissance in new journal forums like Nationalism and Ethnic Politics). Such studies usually treat the national identity as a political commodity which ethnic groups seek to control in order to secure or improve their own domestic political position: for example, ____'s recent study of competing ideas about Cyprus. Some comparative studies have indeed identified a more active, actor-like role for the state, particularly in abetting ethnic or racial systems and hierarchies (see especially Marx 1996). But these studies, too, do not consider the state itself to be an actor, but rather draw on an institutional approach to identify how the state's domestic institutions are enlisted by the ethnically dominant sector to serve a particular racial order.
However, even in studies of its essentially domestic guise, disagreements continue about the state's role, whether past or potential. Many studies are highly critical, particularly of the "nation-state" formula. Some scholars have pointed out that nation-building actually constitutes an effectively "ethnic" discourse, since national institutions and ideologies incorporate ethnic features like an official language, religion, and nationalist mythico-history (A. Smith 1986). Accordingly, a nationalist doctrine--fundamental to nationhood and nation-states generally--can exclude the symbols of other ethnic constituencies and, by implication, their unique experience and needs, and so contribute to resentment and conflict. Other scholars blame the nation-state as an institution for generating ethnic conflict because it provides the framework for sovereign government, and therefore provides for a centralized power system which offers political opportunities that "ethnic entrepreneurs" can exploit. (For example, Charles Anderson has affirmed that ethnic conflict is actually a product of the political-institutional environment provided by the nation-state and does not really arise elsewhere.)
By contrast, many liberal theorists see the state as the logical forum for resolving ethnic conflict: especially, in its capacity to generate civic nationalism (based on purportedly universal principles like individual civil liberties) that can overarch ethnic differences and defuse the conflictive potential of ethnic diversity (e.g., Steinberg 1989). 8 Related approaches argue that poly-ethnic political claims can be dignified, legitimized and incorporated into state politics under the rubric of cultural pluralism, where hopefully they will find reconciliation and eventually lose public force (e.g., Young 1976, Horowitz 1985, Vail 1989). "Civic nationalist" approaches assume that, while the state might be "captured" by a particular dominant ethnic group, the state at root represents a neutral framework in which competitive group claims can be fairly negotiated. Certainly a large number of successes can support faith in the nation-state in this respect. Those successes stand as models or exemplars for students of ethnic conflict elsewhere, and may inspire analysts to cite state "weakness" for the exaggeration of ethnic fears and the outbreak of ethnic conflict (e.g., Lake and Rothchild 1996).
Less explored is how this constructed quality of the state informs domestic political dynamics, although some explorations have been made in socialization approaches: examining, for example, how international criteria for "nationhood" constitute hegemonic norms which are necessarily adopted, but also adapted, by local elites engaged in state- and nation-building (Ikenberry & Kupchan 1990). Elite policy choices therefore represent not only local economic and power interests but also their "socialization" into (emulation of, or forcible subordination to) a model externally given
Such a fundamental disjunction of prediction and outcome might suggest that some reconsideration is warranted: that the character and nature of the modern system state might require some careful reassessment. Yet the state and the international system remain outside the purview of most analysts, unexamined for any role in ethnic passions and violence. I suggest, however, that the state is more complicit in the prevalence of ethnic conflict than is generally presumed, and that our understanding of such conflict suffers for neglect of its study.
In this paper I argue that the state's role is not so circumscribed. Even from the perspective of local ethnopolitics, the state is not only a domestically oriented shell. Rather, it is a gatekeeper between the domestic and the international, and is moreover an entity of the international system with interests of its own. As a gatekeeper, the state faces inward to constitute the domestic ethnic environment while simultaneously looking out on an international environment which contributes ideas and incentives to its behavior. The state's strategic posture in this environment can then translate inward to define the domestic political and social position of ethnic groups--even to their formation and definition as groups. When the international environment engages "ethnic" ideas of its own, as I will argue that it does, the gatekeeper state's translation of those ideas into domestic policy can be immediate and urgent.
In the following sections, I will utilize constructivist theory of the state to demonstrate how the international system can generate "ethnic" interests for states, anate can obtain ethnic interests of its own and then translate those interests into domestic policy.
The dominant group's common fusion of its own cultural norms with modernity, rationality and even ethnic neutrality may render supposedly "neutral" state policies ethnically biased by obstructing the expression of any alternative cultural patterns--never openly rejected as "ethnic," but rather denounced as "backward," "irrational," "tribal" or some other attribute arguably disadvantageous, negative or destructive, not only to the national interest but to human progress itself.
Furthermore, again as noted above, the state's international claim to represent a "nation" must have some actual empirical grounding. Accordingly, where the territorial population is actually divided in regard to loyalty to the state, nation-building (national integration) of the population has been pursued by state governments with vigor. But since the "nation" concept is one which imports a wealth of norms and experience from states' experiences around the globe, the nationalization project also opens a gateway for a throng of ideas circulating throughout the international system about what a "nation-state" is, how it behaves, and from what principles it derives its legitimacy. Essential questions--how is the nation defined? what are its origins, collective will, mission and destiny?--are therefore not answered in a vacuum, but in a transnational context which provides standards or criteria for a respectable and convincing national profile, as well as hard lessons from past successes and failures. In other words, even the specific national template, generated within a state by political elites, poets, journalists and other creative national thinkers, is also Janus-faced.
These effectively "ethnic" logics reflect the state's vulnerability in the international system, and the need to make its domestic conditions support its international posture. Thus the state faces imperatives that transcend the preferences of any particular government, and which concern the survival of the state itself. 9 The primary domestic interest of the state--its own hegemony--is intimately bound to that primary international interest. Hence all logics--including ethnic logics--must support state hegemony directly or indirectly, or at least not be detrimental. Thus we can say that, to the extent that state hegemony is impacted by ethnic ideas, the state itself is effectively an ethnic actor: not only in comprising an environment, but by its nature and situation also embodying a set of imperatives that inspire, constrain and motivate its elites, and that inform them as to the significance and permissible parameters of domestic ethnic claims.
Recently, a growing group of scholars has noticed that a state's international alliances may entail the crafting of an international "identity": some set of basic qualities affirmed to be intrinsic to the state and so beyond the casual reach of any member state's domestic politics. Such "identities" can include general political orientations, like "communist" or "democratic," or even some explicitly ethnic identity like "Arab" or "Asian." Through such an "identity," states can add ideological and conceptual coherence to a security community and/or trading bloc. Because external security and trade are both vital state interests, any domestic deviation from a member state's international "identity" which actually undermines or threatens that membership will require suppression.
While bringing attention to such international concerns of the state, I must quickly clarify that I do not ascribe any ultimate causal force to the international level, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. Rather, my interest is to identify international ideas as one source of domestic ethnic thought which, at certain junctures, may carry considerable force. On this agenda, I do not treat international, state and local levels as discrete and insulated realms, but rather as nested political environments whose interactions are key to their respective construction. This approach avoids the common distortions that emerge in overly localistic and insular studies, which treat ethnicity as a social phenomenon bounded by the state territory. For all their sensitivity to domestic interactions, such approaches actually distort domestic dynamics by ignoring how the larger (international) ethnic environment also contributes to the local construction of ethnic identities and may even be key to the rhetoric, timing and outcomes of ethnic movements. Conversely, overly internationalist (structural) frameworks carry their own hazards; studies that consider ethnic conflict to be the epiphenomenal product of monolithic global forces such as "capitalism" or "colonialism" fail to explain unique local arrangements and ideological adaptations (e.g., Wallerstein 1984; see critique by Stern 1993).
To summarize, I argue that the state's own interests make it an "actor" in the very ethnic arena that the state itself embraces and comprises. As noted above, the state constitutes the juridical and normative expression of international and domestic logics; yet it also comprises a permeable boundary and a selective agent regarding the articulation of those two realms. To the extent that state sovereignty creates an ideational arena insulated from international considerations, domestic ethnic conflicts may pursue local solutions. But to the extent that ethnic conflict affects the state's dialectic with regional and international norms, the state may require an ethnic solution compatible with its external profile and interests as a member of a regional and international community. Its strategic response to ethnic claims will be affected accordingly, whether toward accommodation or repression.
To summarize, the state generates an ideational realm in which a bias toward state hegemony is inherent. The actual logics that emerge from this bias, including ethnic ones, are crafted by human beings trying to reconcile various interests, including state and moral imperatives. These logics contribute to the discourses that comprise the ethnic environment: the conceptual framework that defines what ideas are permissible and politically viable. Once we recognize these connections, we can resurrect the a priori assumptions and reconsider how embedded ethnic logics were formed--the first step toward finding alternatives that might, simply by redefining the terms of state hegemony, resolve certain ethnic conflicts.
To clarify how state hegemony can be redefined, we need to understand how the state also constitutes an actor in its own arena by contributing interests of its own.
Notes:
Note 1: On international regimes, see Ruggie (1982) and the collection of essays in Krasner (1983). Back.
Note 2: I use the term "primordial" in the cognitive or epistemological sense offered by Clifford Geertz (1973) in his descriptions of "deep culture" and "webs of meaning." I have discussed my approach to terminology and to constructivist theory of ethnicity extensively elsewhere, in my "Terms of the Debate: untangling language on ethnicity and ethnic movements," Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 20 no. 3 (July 1997). My approach is derived primarily from theoretical frameworks on cultural pluralism provided by Crawford Young (1976, 1993), and in this study has strong affinity with that of Charles R. Hale (1994). Back.
Note 3: On the historical development and international function of the standard of "civilization," see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of 'Civilization' in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Zhang (1991) offers a closer look at China's entry into the family of nations, finding the standard of "civilization" less important than Gong suggests. See also Strang (1996). Back.
Note 4: On the progressive loss of standing by native Americans in international law, see especially Berman (1992) and Hauptman (1992). Back.
Note 5: Cite Crawford Young's state theory here…. Back.
Note 6: The international importance of state unity is, of course, debateable, as we can find many instances where the international community has shown a marked lack of interest in such matters. International relations indeed tend to support states whatever their internal cohesion (Jackson and Rosberg 1982). The degree to which national unity actually matters internationally remains to be explored; still, states show demonstrable concern about the representation of their own unity in their international relations, and the implications for domestic policy (the point emphasized here) accordingly remain salient. Back.
Note 8: On optimistic views of civic nationalism, see, e.g., Steinberg (1989). On the difference between civic and ethnic nationalisms, see A. Smith (1986). On the ascendence of civic nationalism as a conceptual corollary of the post-World War II concept that state legitimacy rests on territorial rather than ethno-national cohesion, see Barkin and Cronin (1994). Back.
Note 9: On the interests or "imperatives" of states, see Young (1994:35-40), for whom hegemony is also a priori to all other imperatives, such as security, legitimacy and revenue. Back.
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