Review article: Arresting the post-Cold War sisyphean quandary: Ethnonationalism, internal conflicts, and the quest for conflict resolution

REVIEW ARTICLE

ARRESTING THE POST-COLD WAR SISYPHEAN QUANDARY. ETHNONATIONALISM, INTERNAL CONFLICTS, AND THE QUEST FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION]

David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, (eds.). The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 392 pp.

Donald Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Pressures and Incentives for Cooperation (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 343 pp.

Iftekharuzzaman, (ed.). Ethnicity and Constitutional Reform in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), 190 pp.

Krishna Kumar, (ed.). Postconflict Elections, Democratization and International Assistance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 265 pp.

Krishna Kumar, (ed.). Rebuilding Societies After Civil War: Critical Roles for International Assistance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997), 329 pp.

Ethnonationalism's sometimes atavistic, latent, and protean nature has led scholars and policy-makers to underestimate its potential for destruction. Thus Marx and his acolytes evinced faulty prescience when they completely disregarded ethnonationalism's primordial and instrumental capabilities and dogmatically emphasized class consciousness as the mechanism necessary to usher in peaceful and egalitarian societies.2 Contrariwise, nearly a century later, modernization scholars predicted industrialization would lead to democratization and future societies devoid of serious ethnic fissures3 only to see ethnic conflicts proliferate in many newly-democratized countries. Somewhat similarly, Francis Fukuyama claimed the Cold War's end proved that liberal democracy had discredited all other political systems to become indispensable to the future global order,4 though the reality worldwide suggests ethnonationalism is now a potent ideological competitor to the liberal democratic orders How can states and the international community counter ethnonationalism's destructive capabilities?

First, they must seek to understand how and why such conflicts spread and how societies now destabilized by internal conflicts may be directed toward the peaceful resolution of conflict. Second, they must seek after the mechanisms that need to be instituted in order to prevent a recrudescence of conflict. Third, indigenous elites and third parties must fathom the inherent opportunities and constraints conflict resolution entails, given that there exists no panaceas and quickies in this department. Finally, it is also imperative to determine the optimum structural requisites societies must cultivate as prophylactics against renewed or future divisions, violence, ethnic cleansing, secessionist movements, and refugee flows. The five books reviewed in this article deal with all these issues and together cover a substantial portion of the world's most volatile countries.

In what follows, I discuss three theoretical positions used to explain ethnonationalism and argue that none alone captures this phenomenon's complexities in their totality, focus on ethnically diverse Africa and South Asia to evaluate the possibilities for conflict resolution and constitutional reform, and specify the opportunities and constraints facing those seeking to implement lasting peace in post-conflict societies. The books reviewed here together present numerous essays, making it infeasible to comment on every single one of them. I have consequently critiqued each work as a whole while making exceptions to essays I have found especially provocative.

EXPLAINING ETHNONATIONALISM

The theories used to explain ethnonationalism may be placed within three overarching categories. While each adopts a unique perspective and while one may be better suited than another to explain a particular conflict, the primordialist, modernist, and instrumentalist positions, taken individually, are hardly all-encompassing.

For primordialists, ethnic identity is congenital and therefore immutable. Thus the inherited language, culture, race, religion, pigmentation, and physiognomy are considered organizing principles that determine one's grouping as well as the group's historical and societal experiences.6 The sociobiological extension of primordialism claims that ethnicity, tied to kinship, promotes a convergence of interests between individuals and their kin group's collective goals. Consequently, even racism and ethnocentricism can be viewed as extreme forms of nepotistic behavior driven by feelings of propinquity and consanguinity.7 Primordialists thus see nationalism as a natural phenomenon. The problem, however, is the theory's determinism, for it implausibly suggests that a sole independent variable (primordialism) dictates the outcome of various dependent variables. Another major shortcoming is the theory's inability to explain ethnicity's protean nature.

If primordialists view ethnicity and its potential for nationalism as a determined construct, modernists see nationalism as an eighteenth century ideological construct. Variegated modernist views suggest that the desire to mobilize armies and improve military capabilities, industrialization and its subsequent failure to transform the agro-literate structure into a homogeneous cultural structure that promoted nation-state congruence, standardized communication codes that enabled print capitalism and the possibility to imagine and invent communities, and the phenomenon of arrogated and ascribed national character as part of the nation building process were some of the reasons that promoted nationalism.g The modernist position, however, is essentially Eurocentric, and it is questionable if its claims equally pertain to nonwestern societies. While colonialism's divide-and-rule policies, census taking, the promotion of ascriptive identities, and codification procedures enhanced, if not created, cultural and ethnic distinctions in colonial societies, these processes by themselves hardly account for the nationalistic conflicts unleashed in the post-colonial era. If this fact is disregarded, it is because modernists at times assume a Utopian view of inter-ethnic relations prior to colonization. They thus fail to account for many cultures' "nationalistic" tendencies in the pre-industrial world.9