The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural” Violence

The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural” Violence Edited by Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz Description: In the last decade, discourses of economic and political liberalization and globalization have swept the world. Yet during this same period and all across the globe, many states are fragmenting and more than 30 ethnic and sectarian conflicts have displaced or killed millions of people — and far more civilians than soldiers. The authors in this volume argue that much of this violence is closely linked to those globalizing forces and demands for economic liberalization which have weakened states' capacities, both political and financial, for redistributing resources. As a result, many states have been forced to break established social contracts, often dramatically changing power relations in heterogeneous societies that previously had been relatively stable. Drawing on case studies from Asia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, the authors demonstrate how these distributional issues and power shifts have been experienced as ethnic and religious discrimination and are often at the root of identity politics and violent, so-called “cultural,” conflicts. RESEARCH SERIES / NUMBER 98 The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural” Violence Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Editors UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The myth of “ethnic conflict” : politics, economics, and “cultural” violence / Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87725-198-3 1. Social conflict. 2. Culture conflict. 3. Ethnic relations. 4. Race relations. 5. Political violence. 6. Violence. 1. Crawford, Beverly. II. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. HM136.M96 1998 305.8—dc21 98-28697 CIP ©1998 by the Retents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America CON TENTS I. Theory and Arguments The Causes of Cultural Conflict: An Institutional Approach BEVERLY CRAWFORD Seeking a State of One’s Own: An Analytical Framework for Assessing Ethnic and Sectarian Conflicts RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ Liberalization and Ethnic Entrepreneurs in the Soviet Successor States PHILIP G. ROEDER National Conflict Internalized: A Discourse of the Fall of the First Russian Republic MICHAEL URBA N Nationalism: Rethinking the Paradigm in the European Context ANDREW V. BELL-FIALKOFF and ANDREI S. MARKOVITS II. Evidence Explaining Cultural Conflict in the Ex-Yugoslavia: Institutional Weakness, Economic Crisis, and Identity Politics BEVERLY CRAWFORD The Tale of Two Resorts: Abkhazia and Ajaria Before and Since and the Soviet Collapse GEORGI M. DERLUGUIAN Islamist Responses to Globalization: Cultural Conflict in Egypt, Algeria, and Malaysia PAUL M. LUBECK Cultural Conflict in India: Punjab and Kashmir NIRVIKAR SINGH Reemerging Ethnic Politics in Germany: Far Right Parties and Violence JOHN C. LESLIE From “Culture Wars” to Shooting Wars: Cultural Conflict in the United States RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ Muting Inter-Ethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain: The Success and Limits of a Liberal Political Approach ELAINE THOMAS Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims MARIA TODOROVA III. Conclusions The Causes of Cultural Conflict: Assessing the Evidence BEVERLY CRAWFORD AC KNOWL EDG MENTS The chapters in this volume are drawn from the work of a study group on the polit i cal economy of “ethnic and sectar ian” conflic t convened by the co-editors, Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, on be half of the Center for German and Euro pean Studies at UC Berke ley and the Adlai Stevenson Program on Global Secu rit y at UC Santa Cruz. The pro ject received gener ous funding from the Pew Chari table Trusts, the Center for German and Euro pean Studies, the UC Systemwide Insti tute on Global Conflict and Co op era tion, and the Stevenson Program; to all we wish to express our grati tude . For comments and criti cism, stim ulat ing discus sions, and gruel in g questions at the meetings where these pa pers were pre sented, we would like to thank Nick Biziouras, Daniel Deudney, Gail Kligman, Steve Krasner, Michael Kimmel, and those countless indi vidu al s who of fered comments on the chapters in their vari ous states of de - vel opment. In partic u lar, we would like to thank Steve Del Rosso of the Pew Char ita ble Trusts, who not only provided valu able crit i cism, but also helped shape the direc tion of the project as a whole. We also thank Robert Price, direc tor of the Collo quium on the Poli tics of Cul - tural Identity at UC Berkele y, funded by the Mac Arthur Foun da tion, and the World Affairs Coun cil of Monterey for the oppor tu nity to present drafts of these chapters in pub lic fora. For sup port of the publi ca tion of this project we thank David Szanton, ex ecu tive di rec - tor of Inter na tional and Area Studies at Berkele y. Caroline Arnol d expertly prepared the in dex, and we gratefully aknowledge her as - sis tance. A finer ed itor than Bojana Ristich cannot be found; we are also most grate ful to Ste phen Pitcher, who type set the manu script, and Lisa M. Bryant who, to gether with Stephen Pitcher, de signed the cover. vii THE CAUSES OF CULTURAL CONFLICT: AN INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH Beverly Crawford As the cold war came to a close, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the rhetoric of economic and political liberalization swept the globe, there were more than thirty violent conflicts raging around the world, most of these ethnic and sectarian in nature.1 Indeed these conflicts are not new. Some estimates suggest that cultural conflicts have inspired over half of the violent struggles within states between 1945 and 1960. The proportion increased to three quarters from 1960 to 1990.2 What marks these conflicts, separates their effects from those of interstate wars, and thus makes them an important subject for inves- tigation on their own is that they have been significantly more dev- astating to civilians. In World War I, 14 percent of all deaths were civilian. That figure rose to 67 percent in World War II. And in the 1990s, where most wars were within rather than between states, civilian deaths totaled 90 percent of all deaths.3 By 1995 deaths in the war in the former Yugoslavia reached over 200,000; over half the population of Bosnia became refugees, and virtually all of the Serb population of Croatia was forced to flee.4 By 1993 civilian deaths in the war in Abkhazia were estimated at between 25,000 and 30,000. More than half of the prewar population became refugees.5 Five thousand people have been killed in Kashmir since 1990; over 30,000 have died in Algeria, and 18,000 have died in Punjab since the storming of the temple in 1985. While war between states seems to be on the decline, ethnic and sectarian conflict within them is on the rise. Why? The causes of these conflicts are not immediately obvious. Some minority ethnic and religious groups assimilate and are eventually accommodated in a unitary nation-state. Bulgarian Muslims (Po- maks), unlike Muslims in Bosnia, are peacefully integrated. Malaysia 3 4 Beverly Crawford in recent years has maintained interethnic peace under a moderate unitary Muslim majority state, while secular Egypt is coping with rising violence perpetrated by more radical factions of “political Is- lam.” Among liberal democracies, England has achieved relative political integration of minority ethnic groups, while Germany eschews such integration and has experienced relatively high levels of violence in the form of hate crimes against non-German immigrants. Other Western democracies, such as Switzerland and Belgium, main- tain federations that separate ethnic and religious groups into political entities with limited autonomy that peacefully coexist with one another. And the breakup of Czechoslovakia demonstrates that se- cession does not have to be violent. Among our cases to be consid- ered here, Ajaria has peacefully insulated itself from the Georgian turmoil and gained a separate and more autonomous constitutional status within Georgia, while neighboring Abkhazia was ravaged by war. Why is it, then, that some ethnic and religious problems are resolved peacefully, others remain unresolved but do not erupt in violence, and still others seek resolution in violent conflict? We argue here that the current round of ethnic and sectarian violence is ironically linked to the apparent triumph of economic globalization and institutional transformation—the opening of new markets for goods, services, capital, and people; the construction of new democracies; and the implementation of “state-shrinking” ide- ologies that have swept the globe. While, with some important ex- ceptions, developed market economies have experienced relatively low levels of cultural conflict, they have experienced that conflict nonetheless, as they have begun the state-shrinking process of economic liberalization. And transition to the market and the pressures of globalization—increased demands for industrial competitiveness and rising external debt that weakens the state’s capability and will- ingness to allocate resources—are associated with high levels of conflict and even violence. While many analysts suspect that there is a link between economic globalization and the current round of cultural conflict, few have investigated potential causal forces that might explain that relationship.6 In this study we assess alternative explanations for cultural conflict and attempt to discover the causal mechanisms that might explain its relationship to economic globalization and liberalization. Taken together, the essays in this volume argue that cultural Causes of Cultural Conflict: Institutional Approach 5 violence erupts most vociferously where secular economic decline, neoliberal economic reforms, and institutional transformation have broken old “social contracts”—that is, where they have broken the rules and norms by which access to political and economic resources was once granted.

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