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| Subject Index | 361 | (18) | |||
| Name Index | 379 |
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Chapter One
Transitions to Democracy and the Rise of Nationalist Conflict
The centerpiece of American foreign policy in the 1990s was the claim that promoting the spread of democracy would also promote peace. Noting that no two democracies have ever fought a war against each other, President Bill Clinton argued that support for democratization would be an antidote to international war and civil strife. Yet paradoxically, the 1990s turned out to be a decade of both democratization and chronic nationalist conflict.
While the world would undoubtedly be more peaceful if all states became mature democracies, Clinton's conventional wisdom failed to anticipate the dangers of getting from here to there. Rocky transitions to democracy often give rise to warlike nationalism and violent ethnic conflicts. Since the French Revolution, the earliest phases of democratization have triggered some of the world's bloodiest nationalist struggles.
Spreading the benefits of democracy worldwide is a worthy long-run goal. However, strategies for accomplishing this must be guided by a realistic understanding of the politics of the transition. Naively pressuring ethnically divided authoritarian states to hold instant elections can lead to disastrous results. For example, international financial donors forced free and fair elections on the leaders of the small central African country of Burundi in 1993, and within a year some 50,000 Hutu and Tutsi were killed in ethnic strife there. And yet many other democratic transitions succeed without triggering nationalist violence. Understanding the conditions that permit such successful transitions should be the first step toward designing policies to pave the way toward democracy. To that end, this book explains why democratization often causes nationalist conflict, and why it sometimes does not. Drawing on that analysis, I prescribe ways to make democratic transitions less dangerous.
Liberal Optimism Confronts the Nationalist Revival of the 1990s
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a euphoric vision briefly captured the American imagination. Liberalism had triumphed over its two ideological competitors in the twentieth century, communism and fascist nationalism, and no new challengers were in sight. Empires and dictatorships were collapsing. Democratization was sweeping formerly authoritarian countries in Latin America, southern Europe, and Eastern Europe, and even making inroads in East Asia. Virtually everywhere states were adopting market economies. Global economic interdependence was continuing to deepen. Liberal, American-based mass news media and popular culture were achieving global reach. This victory of liberalism, it was claimed, would usher in "the end of history."
Believing that all good things go together, liberal commentators argued that war was becoming obsolete, at least among the liberalizing countries that were establishing the dominant global trend. A learned tome published in 1990 concluded that nationalism, commonly defined as the doctrine that each cultural group should have its own state, was rapidly heading into the dustbin of history because states organized around single nations could no longer cope with an increasingly interdependent, globalizing world. Residual stumbling blocks in the path of triumphant liberalism could be overcome with the help of an energetic set of international institutions--United Nations troops to keep the peace, and International Monetary Fund experts to lure countries into the liberal fold and to enforce the rules of fiscal prudence. In keeping with this vision, President Clinton explained that promoting democratization would be a watchword of U.S. foreign policy--because democracies never fight wars against each other, they trade freely with each other, and they respect the human rights of their citizens.
This vision tarnished quickly. War has been endemic since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Nor have these been trivial wars at the periphery of the international order: the world's oil supply was at risk in the 1991 Gulf War; in June 1991 the Yugoslav army battled Slovenian separatists scarcely a hundred miles from Vienna, and NATO's air forces mounted a sustained bombing campaign throughout Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Nationalist rhetoric, far from being discredited, came back into vogue. A quarter of the electorate in Russia's fledgling democracy voted in 1993 for the party of a neofascist anti-Semite, Vladimir Zhirinovsky (only a third voted for Hitler in 1932). In civil wars from Somalia to Bosnia, the armed forces of the liberal international community were bedeviled, attacked, and held hostage by local thugs. Ethnic mayhem in 1994 caused over half a million deaths in Rwanda, after Belgian peacekeepers were killed on the first day of the genocide campaign against the Tutsi minority.
As a result, the conventional wisdom was soon turned on its head: The Atlantic Monthly relabeled the post-Communist world as "the coming anarchy," and the eminent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington announced that the future would hold in store a "clash of civilizations." In the view of such pundits, cultural conflicts, whether along the fault lines of whole civilizations or simply among intermingled ethnic groups, would become the defining cleavages of international relations in the coming era. News media and political leaders commonly attributed these grim developments to "ancient hatreds" between inimical cultures, simmering for centuries and boiling over as soon as the lid of the cold war was lifted off the pot. This account was simple, intuitive, and reinforced daily by the justifications offered by perpetrators of ethnic slaughter. For Western politicians looking for an easy excuse to limit their involvement in unseemly struggles, the story of ancient hatreds also had the advantage of portraying these disputes as hopelessly intractable. But even those who retained the vision of spreading liberal democracy to unaccustomed corners of the globe considered age-old ethnic prejudices to be liberalism's major foe. President Clinton, in his 1993 presidential inauguration speech, remarked that "a generation raised in the shadows of the cold war assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds."
The good news is that this view is largely incorrect. Most of the globe's recent strife is not due to ancient cultural hatreds. In some cases, the warring groups had experienced no armed conflict until relatively recently. Serbs and Croats, for example, never fought each other until the twentieth century, and then largely because the Nazis installed an unrepresentative regime of murderers in Zagreb. In other cases, occasional conflicts between cultural or ethnic groups have been interspersed with long interludes of amicable relations, therefore cultural differences cannot in themselves be a sufficient explanation for the recent fighting. Few serious scholars attribute nationalism and ethnic conflict primarily to ancient cultural hatreds.
The bad news, however, harbors a deep irony: the very trends that liberals saw as bringing the end of history have in many instances fueled the revival of nationalism. The end of the authoritarian Soviet empire spurred the aspiring leaders of many of its intermingled nations to establish their own national states, whose conflicting claims to sovereignty and territory often gave rise to disputes. Elections often sharpened these ethnic and national differences. Nationalist demagogues exploited the increased freedom of the press in some newly democratizing states to hijack public debate for illiberal ends. Painful adjustments to a market economy and to international interdependence provided further opportunities for nationalist politicians who promised protection in a strong state, or who distributed a shrinking economic pie along ethnic lines. At the same time, the globalization of media and culture often repelled rather than attracted those who failed to prosper in a Westernized world. Moreover, as some critics argue, international organizations sometimes caused more conflict than they averted with their inept strategies of peacekeeping and their strict philosophies of economic reform.
Though surprising to liberal optimists, these developments of the 1990s actually echoed long-standing patterns in the history of nationalism, which I explore in subsequent chapters. Far from being an outmoded throwback, nationalism is largely a reaction to the social changes of the modern era. Western Europe went through these changes between the French Revolution and the Second World War, an age that saw the rise of modern nationalism and of popular warfare. During that period, democratization, economic development, and a revolution in the means of communication fueled nationalism, which often took a militant form. States being dragged by social change into a transition to democracy have been more likely to participate in wars and more likely to start them than have states whose regimes did not change. The end of the cold war increased the prevalence of nationalism by unleashing this dangerous transition toward democratic, market societies in the post-Communist states.
Though democratization heightens a state's risk of war, historical evidence shows that three out of four democratizing states nonetheless avoided war in the decade after their democratization. Moreover, once liberal democracy became entrenched, no mature democracies have ever fought wars against each other. In those countries where transitions to democracy were fully consolidated during the 1990s, the rights of ethnic minorities tended to improve, and ethnic conflicts were rare.
The central message of this book, consequently, constitutes a paradox. On the one hand, the successful unfolding of a global, liberal-democratic revolution might eventually undergird a more peaceful era in world politics. On the other hand, the transition to democratic politics is meanwhile creating fertile conditions for nationalism and ethnic conflict, which not only raises the costs of the transition but may also redirect popular political participation into a lengthy antidemocratic detour. The three most nearly successful attempts to overturn the global balance of power through aggression--those of Napoleonic France in 1803-15, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany in 1914-18, and Adolf Hitler's Germany in 1939-45--all came on the heels of failed attempts to democratize. Popular nationalistic energies, unleashed and perverted by the miscarriage of democratic reforms, created the conditions that made possible these bids for global hegemony. Thus, the process of democratization can be one of its own worst enemies, and its promise of peace is clouded with the danger of war.
To promote democratization without heeding these risks would be self-indulgent idealism. Yet to try to hold back the global social processes that may stimulate nationalism--including demands for increased mass participation in politics, the collapse of outworn empires, and the globalization of the economy and communications--would be equally unrealistic. Instead, one of the key tasks for the international community will be to distinguish the circumstances that make for a safe transition to liberal democracy from those that lead to backlash, nationalism, and war. Insofar as astute policy choices can help to create the more favorable conditions, understanding the pitfalls of democratization is the first step toward avoiding them. This is an analytical task for everyone who is engaged with the seminal issues of our day: political leaders in the advanced democratic states and in transitional states, journalists, human rights activists, scholars, citizens, and even nationalists themselves, insofar as they want to avoid costly missteps in the pursuit of their nations' goals.
In this introductory chapter, I will first define what I mean by the terms nationalism and democratization; second, summarize the evidence that nationalist conflict correlates with the early phases of democratization; third, challenge the view that ancient popular rivalries explain this correlation; fourth, briefly sketch my own alternative explanation, which highlights the role of persuasion by nationalist elites; fifth, discuss the practical implications of this theory for policy choices; and finally, provide a road map to the historical and contemporary case studies that constitute the bulk of the book.
What Are Nationalism and Democratization?
Nationalism
In everyday usage, a variety of very different phenomena may all be labeled as manifestations of nationalism, including ethnic riots, aggressive foreign policies of fascist states, patriotism in democracies, and the peaceful seeking of special rights for cultural groups. To avoid confusion, social scientists typically like to define terms more narrowly and precisely than is common in everyday discourse.
The most widely used scholarly definition of nationalism is by Ernest Gellner, who defines nationalism as the doctrine that the political unit (the state) and the cultural unit (the nation) should be congruent. According to this view, nationalism holds that the state, which is the organization that exercises sovereign authority over a given territory, should rule on behalf of a particular nation, defined as a group of people who feel they share a common culture. This formulation is theoretically clear and historically plausible. Many self-proclaimed nationalist movements have had as their central aim the acquisition of a state by a culturally distinct people (like Croatian nationalists did in 1991), the inclusion of cultural brethren in an existing state (Hungarian nationalists in the 1930s), or the domination of an existing state by a single cultural group (Estonian nationalists in the 1990s). Indeed, in an age when conflicts rooted in ethnic nationalism are such a dominant concern, it is tempting to highlight cultural distinctions in the very definition of nationalism.
Yet this definition would seem to leave out phenomena that common usage, including usage by self-described nationalists, normally calls nationalism. For example, defining nationalism strictly in terms of shared culture would seem to exclude militant loyalty to a state's political institutions or other principles not based on culture, such as the universalistic principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, defining the aim of nationalism as achieving a sovereign state would seem to exclude the seeking of political rights short of sovereign statehood by cultural groups, such as those Québecois nationalists who seek a form of autonomy within the Canadian federal state. Moreover, nationalists often do not stop at getting their own state. They frequently attempt to enshrine distinct cultural values in that state, discriminate in favor of coethnics living within its borders, try to incorporate ethnic brethren and historic national territories into the state, and militantly guard against encroachments by historic enemies of the nation. In some cases, the nation-state adopts a "nationalistic" view of neighboring nation-states as inferior, hostile, and deserving of domination. Everyday usage assumes that these broader meanings are an integral part of the thing people call nationalism. I will try to show that common parlance links these phenomena not out of confusion but because they have related causes, dynamics, and consequences, which a theory of nationalism and nationalist conflict ought to try to capture. To accommodate this, Gellner's definition, though a useful starting place, needs to be broadened.
I define nationalism, therefore, as the doctrine that a people who see themselves as distinct in their culture, history, institutions, or principles should rule themselves in a political system that expresses and protects those distinctive characteristics. A nation is, therefore, a group of people who see themselves as distinct in these terms and who aspire to self-rule. Nationalist conflict is defined as organized, large-scale violence motivated or justified by a nationalist doctrine.
By this definition, not all ethnic groups are nations; nor are all nations ethnic groups. There are many peoples who consider themselves to be culturally or historically distinct, for example the Cajuns of Louisiana, but who lack a doctrine that claims a right to self-rule for the group. Based on wide-ranging historical research, Anthony Smith distinguishes between an ethnic group, or ethnie (which has a distinctive consciousness based on a common language or culture, myths of common ancestry, or a common historical experience), and a nation (which seeks self-rule for such a group). Ethnic conflict involves nationalism only when a goal of the conflict is to establish or protect self-rule by the ethnic group.
Although nationalist doctrine derives political authority from the right of a distinct people to rule themselves, nationalists do not necessarily hold that legitimate political processes require democratic voting. Rather, the right to self-rule means that the national group should not be ruled by an alien people or alien institutions. It also means that the nation's rulers, no matter how they are chosen, must justify their policies in terms of the welfare, security, and fulfillment of the national aims of the sovereign people. This ambiguity between rule by the people and rule in the name of a people constitutes one of the main attractions of nationalist doctrine to elites who seek to rule undemocratically in an era of rising demands for a mass role in politics.
Nations may distinguish themselves from each other not only on the basis of distinctive cultural traditions, but also on the basis of distinctive political traditions, political institutions, and political principles. Thus, scholars commonly divide nationalisms into two types, ethnic and civic, based on the nature of their appeals to the collective good and on their criteria for including members in the group. Ethnic nationalisms, like those of the Germans and the Serbs, base their legitimacy on common culture, language, religion, shared historical experience, and/or the myth of shared kinship, and they use these criteria to include or exclude members from the national group. For example, German law offered citizenship to people of German ancestry who reside in Russia, while it denied it to many Turks who have lived in Germany all their lives. Civic nationalisms, like those of the British, the United States, and for the most part the French, base their appeals on loyalty to a set of political ideas and institutions that are perceived as just and effective. Inclusion in the group depends primarily on birth or long-term residence within the nation's territory, though sufficient knowledge of the nation's language and institutions to participate in the nation's civic life may be a criterion for the naturalization of resident aliens.
This distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is especially crucial in countries like contemporary Ukraine, where ethnic Russians and Ukrainians live intermingled. In those conditions, basing political loyalties on cultural or linguistic differences would be intensely divisive. Consequently, Ukraine's leaders have for the most part prudently promoted a civic-territorial form of national loyalty.
These categories are ideal types: no actual nation is purely civic or purely ethnic. Ethnic groups that seek political goals normally set up administrative institutions that function at least partly according to legal criteria, not just cultural norms. Conversely, civic states are often built on some discernible ethnic core, and over time, civic nations generate their own civic culture and shared historical myths. Nonetheless, nations can be placed on a continuum between the civic and ethnic ideal types depending on whether loyalty to and inclusion in them is based primarily on institutions or on culture. A definition of nationalism that is broad, yet distinguishes between ethnic and civic variants, permits the investigation of the causes and consequences of both types.
In short, this definition of nationalism highlights popular self-rule as a universal goal of nationalists but avoids smuggling democracy into the very definition of nationalism. It also allows the exploration of the cultural basis of political loyalty but avoids the mistake of equating nationalism with ethnicity. Thus, it features some of the elements of nationalism that are central to understanding the causes of nationalism and its consequences for violent conflict.
Democratization
The term democratization distinguishes between mature democracies and democratizing states. In mature democracies, government policy, including foreign and military policy, is made by officials chosen through free, fair, and periodic elections in which a substantial proportion of the adult population can vote; the actions of officials are constrained by constitutional provisions and commitments to civil liberties; and government candidates sometimes lose elections and leave office when they do. Freedom of speech, freedom to organize groups to contest elections, and reasonably equitable representation of varied viewpoints in the media are presumed to be preconditions for a free and fair election. I define states as democratizing if they have recently adopted one or more of these democratic characteristics, even if they retain important nondemocratic features.
The category of democratizing states is a very broad one. It includes states like the Czech Republic in the early 1990s, which made a transition from complete autocracy to virtually complete democracy. However, it also includes the former Yugoslavia just before its breakup in 1991, when elections were contested for the first time in circumstances of somewhat freer speech, yet electoral fairness and the rule of law were hardly well established.
At what moment does a successfully democratizing state become a mature democracy? When can its democracy be termed consolidated? Some scholars use the "two turnover rule" to define democratic consolidation: that is, a democracy is considered consolidated when power has changed hands twice as a result of free and fair elections. Others say that democracy is consolidated when it is "the only game in town": that is, when no significant political party or group seeks to come to power by means other than winning a free and fair election. Finally, others measure the degree to which the country has achieved the institutional and legal characteristics of a mature democracy, using indicators such as competitive politics, regular elections, broad participation, constraints on arbitrary use of executive power, free speech, and respect for civil liberties, including minority rights. When a country achieves a high enough score on almost all of these dimensions, it is said to have consolidated its democracy. States that have crossed this line by any of the above criteria are mature democracies, no longer democratizing states.
(Continues...)
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