WORKING PAPERS IN NATIONALISM STUDIES
No. 3, 2011
Erin E. Hughes Nation Rebuilding in Rwanda and South Africa:
An Assessment of Identity Formation, Governance, and Economic Growth
ISBN: 1 900522 88 8 Our Working Papers in Nationalism Studies present the finest dissertation work from students on the MSc Nationalism Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh.
Erin E. Hughes graduated with distinction from the programme in November 2007.
Abstract
Rwanda and South Africa suffered extraordinary efforts to cleanse their societies on the basis of ethnicity; Rwanda through a horrifically efficient genocide and South Africa through the protracted exclusion and oppression of apartheid. The regimes perpetuating such malignant ethnic nationalism both collapsed in 1994 against opposition movements representing the ethnicities they hoped to expel. The new governments have constructed instead a non-ethnic, state-centered national identity around which to unite their divided populations; they have strived for political systems able to withstand, if not preclude, any remaining extremism in the polity; and they have embraced the pursuit of economic growth. This paper assesses the confluence of these undertakings as they transition each society to an inclusive nation: Rwanda to an ethnically-void civic nation, South Africa to a multiethnic, multilingual civil nation. I find the ability of the state to perpetuate economic growth, provided growth extends to individuals of all ethnicities, is most able to support this process. By restructuring society, it facilitates cross-ethnic interaction while constraining illiberalism. Growth is thus imperative to the stabilization of social relations, the substantiation of the new government, and the sustainability of the new, multiethnic, nation.
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Nation Rebuilding in Rwanda and South Africa
INTRODUCTION
The historical trajectory of the contemporary nation-state seemingly belies belief in harmonious multiculturalism. Theorists as prominent as John Stuart Mill and Ernest Gellner opined that the preferred condition of modernity is a state homogeneous in its culture, language, and ethnicity. Their idea has gained credence, in no small part because of the wars of genocide and ethnic cleansing that scarred the twentieth century and persist to today. Yet as modernity progressed, so with it did an appreciation for the protection of minority peoples and cultures. Politicians and theorists have responded by engineering systems of multicultural democracy and constitutions that partition power in effort to encourage the possibility of interethnic accommodation.
Rwanda and South Africa have each felt the countervailing pull of both trends, the former found in the forceful cleansing of their societies; the latter found in the inclusive systems they are now constructing. The incorporation of both victims and oppressors into a single state following conflict is a practical acknowledgment that the commixture of ethnic groups precluded another arrangement. Each state is challenged to cultivate commonality within a deeply fragmented society whose cause of fragmentation is unalterable. At the core of this transition is a realignment of the nation, a redefinition of its membership and values, into a state-centred nationalism. Rwanda thus endeavours to create an ethnically-blind state after enduring the most horrific example of contemporary ethnic turpitude; South Africa strives to balance a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic populace while struggling to rectify apartheid‘s legacy of systematic oppression.
The objective of this paper is to assess that which enables a nation overcoming ethnic conflict to be redefined, rebuilt, and sustained for longevity. I consider three interconnected conversions that support this process: a national identity predicated on shared citizenship rather than ethnic identity; a political system that obviates the ethnic extremism, or the potential for political leaders to again conjure the ethnic extremism, of the polity; and an ascendingly affluent economy whose growth is not exclusive to an ethnicity. It is the last factor, in my opinion, that provides an impetus
to transcend ethnic divisions by fundamentally altering the structure of society, and is therefore most able to affect the sustainability, and substantiation, of the new nation.
THE INESCAPABLE IMPULSE OF HOMOGENIZATION
Before commencing, it is important to first stress the difference between a state and a nation, a distinction which underlies the analysis of this paper. A ”state‘ is a political construct, a territorially-defined and externally-recognized area over which a functioning government presides; as Weber famously offered, it is the unit that holds a legitimate monopoly over violence as well as legislatively-sanctioned authority over the residents and actions within its jurisdiction (Weber 1947: 156). A ”nation,‘ in Benedict Anderson‘s celebrated coinage, is an —imagined political community,“ conceived of by its members as limited in scope but sovereign over their —deep, horizontal comradeship“ (Anderson 1983: 6-7). Nationalism, then, is the push of a nation to attain sovereignty as its own state, either through border modification or governmental change. Or, as Ernest Gellner proposed in what is perhaps the most succinct and lasting definition of nationalism: it is the belief that —the political and the national unit should be congruent“ (Gellner 1983: 1).
Utilizing a distinction offered by David Miller, the states I examine are more accurately described as multiethnic than multinational (Miller 2001: 302). Miller differentiates between an ethnic group, which does not seek political autonomy nor possess a historical claim to territory over which to express its autonomy, and a nation, which, as reflected in Anderson‘s definition, holds both such claims. In neither South Africa nor Rwanda do the ethnic groups credibly claim an exclusive territory of their own nor have a legitimate claim to secession.
Modernity and the Intolerant State
The blended heterogeneity of Rwanda and South Africa, without the potential for division into multiple smaller states, is considered by several theorists to be an inherently unstable arrangement. The inevitable condition of the modern state, they believe, is uniformity, compelled to be so by the demands of efficacious governance and industrial society.
John Stuart Mill is perhaps one of the first theorists to delineate the infeasibility of a composite state within the contemporary framework of nation-states. Writing in Considerations on Representative Government , Mill surmised that —free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling…the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist“; nationalism, moreover, —can never, in the present state of civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same government“ (Mill 1865: 120-121). The state is risked as the stability and participation required for legitimation are undercut by preoccupation with cross-ethnic relations. He predicts that ultimately one nationality will come to dominate, and often assimilate, the other. Separation is therefore best whenever possible; the right circumstances may render federalism a feasible, although rare, solution (Mill: 124).
Mill found pause, however, with the intermixed complexity of Hungary, from whom no secondary state separation was possible as the geographical segregation of language and ethnicity did not exist. He deducts that —there is no course open to them but to make a virtue of necessity, and reconcile themselves to living together under equal rights and laws“ (Mill: 122). After his ominous proposition that such an existence is unsustainable, even under the guise of liberal institutions, one is unfortunately left to guess how this enforced togetherness might be made possible. The closest offering of a prescription is found in his observation that third-party authoritarian rule may, over the course of several generations, catalyze unification amongst the subjected groups, so long as no single group is elevated in favouritism (Mill: 124). History, however, has conclusively proven this suggestion untenable: the fundamental nature of nationalism is of self-rule and the struggle for its attainment. Two World Wars, furthermore, have violently discredited Mill‘s solution for Hungary.
It is pertinent to emphasize that the belief in a tenuous plural state predates the world‘s wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide that coloured the twentieth century. Mill‘s assessment, as such, was not a pessimistic recoil to violent homogenization; it was a recognition of the desire of peoples to self-govern and the inherent difficulty posed to a representative state in the balancing of competing nationalities. Charles Taylor expanded upon this idea to suggest it is incumbent upon the modern state to
develop a collective identity that supersedes ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or religious identification. State-directed homogenization is necessary, he believes, because modern democracy makes requests of its citizens, of its taxes, blood, and participation, unprecedented in previous governmental systems. Identification with the collective polity, and the state itself, is essential for citizens to be willing to perpetuate and legitimize the state; without —homogeneity of identity and allegiance,“ a patriotism of sorts, the democratic state could not survive. Nationalism, then, seeks a state as much as a state strives to create a ubiquitous nationalism. (Taylor 1998: 200-202)
Whereas Mill and Taylor base their forecasts on the evolution of liberalism and effective governance, the theoretical offerings of Ernest Gellner are rooted instead in the demands the industrial economy places upon the state. Unlike Mill, Gellner, himself of German-Czech-Jewish descent, witnessed firsthand the volatility of multiethnic East-Central Europe and the genocide, population transfers, and border redesign within the region. It is unsurprising then that Gellner‘s qualified depiction of nationalism, less celebrated but no less poignant than his definition cited above, opens to a bleak characterization of this contemporary phenomenon:
—…Very many of the potential nations of this world live, or until recently have lived, not in compact territorial units but intermixed with each other in complex patterns. It follows that a territorial political unity can only become ethnically homogeneous, in such cases, if it either kills, or expels, or assimilates all non-nationals. Their unwillingness to suffer such fates may make the peaceful implementation of the nationalist principle difficult“ (Gellner 1983: 2).
He echoed this sentiment a decade later when he wrote:
—Men either had two options…they could change their own culture, or they could change the nature of the political unit, either by changing its boundaries or by changing its cultural identification…The surface result of all of this was both the widespread centralizing cultural assimilation and the nationalist turbulence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries“ (Gellner 1994: 108).
Gellner theorized that such homogenization arises not from the simple intolerance of men but the dictates of an industrial economy (See Gellner 1983). The transition to a modern, industrial economy fundamentally and irrevocably alters both the structure of society and the relationship between the state and society. Linguistic and cultural differences formerly irrelevant in the agrarian world become hindrances to industrial development: mobile and interchangeable workers are the cornerstone of the new economy, necessitating the preset knowledge of fundamental skills and a common language. It was found that only the state stood capable of delivering this single and ubiquitous ”high culture‘ through mass generalized education. Nationalism was thus born in two forms: within the recipients of this shared culture, homogenized and assimilated, and within those outside this shared culture, marginalized and excluded. The former is dependent upon the state for the continued provision of cultural adaptation and economic growth; the latter seeks a political unit of its own in protection of its culture and in production of comparable economic opportunity. Gellner‘s repeated belief in the fatality of heterogeneous states is not his desired outcome nor a prescription to the nationalist dilemma, but rather what he considered the pragmatic acknowledgement of this social condition.
Alternative Theories of Inclusion
Gellner‘s prediction for modern, industrial society has not realized widespread fruition, circumvented in part by the hegemony of an international climate that favours ethnic inclusion and liberal democratic principles. The Wilsonian democracy launched in the wake of the First World War induced assertions of ”national self- determination‘ predicated on the presumption by American political elites that assimilation to liberal practice would supersede cultural identity; this assumption failed to appreciate the potential voracity of nationalism that would soon perpetuate another war (Riga and Kennedy 2006). The Second World War‘s aftermath consequentially saw the creation of the United Nations and the passage of the Genocide Convention, attempts to prevent a reoccurrence of ethnically-motivated murder. The United States and Soviet Union, despite their political-ideological divide that shaped the remainder of the century, shared an aversion to overt expressions of ethnic nationalism and the desire for its containment. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ”defeat‘ of communism again lead to a resurgence of democracy as former bloc states, like their post-authoritarian counterparts in Latin
America and Africa, were inundated with new constitutions, political parties, and elections, effectively positioning liberal democracy as the default political system for new governments.
Politicians and scholars alike, recognizing both that nationalism persists and that the Gellnerian prediction of assimilation or separation is mutually impractical and dangerous in a world with a limited possibility of realized states and a multiplicity of possible competitors, have summarily embraced theories of nationalism that either accommodate multiple identities or are removed from ethnic identity altogether. Such comparably innocuous nationalism prioritizes citizenship and individual liberty in an effort to marginalize or surpass instinctual ethnic identification. Coined civic nationalism, such theory commonly references the form witnessed in France or the United States. Therein, the building of a national identity was directed by the state as it cautiously sought to imbed civic identification into the popular mind and incorporate differing cultures into a single state. In essence, this type of nation determines its membership through territorial residence, enabled through birth or sanctioned immigration, and the accedence to democratic practice and civic participation. The emphasis of participation is on the individual, irrespective of background, rather than cultural groups or shared linage. This is intended to contrast the ethnic nationalism, characterized as the championing of kinship and the cultural, linguistic, or historical uniqueness of an ethnic group, which was blamed in part for the bloody displays of European intolerance (Brown 1999, Brubaker 2004: 132-146).
In practice, nation and category do not often coincide seamlessly. As Rogers Brubaker observed, if terms such as ”civic‘ and ”ethnic‘ are defined too strictly, a large middle ground forms of cases that fit neither; if they are defined to loosely, the middle ground is instead saturated with cases that fit both (Brubaker: 139). Despite the ambiguity that appears with any theoretical observation, ideal types still provide a useful structure from which to consider core differences. These distinctions are presented as a way to contrast the character of the nationalisms that perpetuated ethnic conflict in Rwanda and South Africa with that of the nationalisms that are since being constructed.
The civic-ethnic typology considers the structural features of the nation: who may or may not become a member and under what conditions. As has oft been noted, there are obvious shortcomings to this categorization (See Hall 2003; Brubaker 2004; Yack 1996 for further commentary). Foremost is the reality that rarely is a nation chosen: nationality is, by and large, an accident of birth; membership within civic nations, who themselves discriminate in deciding onto whom to pass citizenship, consequentially remains as much a matter of chance as does membership in ethnic nations. The substantial difference, despite the relevance of this criticism, is that it nonetheless remains possible for an outsider to join the civic nation. More importantly, for the purposes of this paper, it does not differentiate between those born into its borders in determining membership; ethnic nationalism, theoretically, does.
My intent is not to value one nationalism over the other, a common critique of the civic-ethnic division. John Hall‘s statement that —civic nationalism may be as resolutely homogenizing as is ethnic nationalism“ underscores the inherent purpose of nationalism, whatever its form: it fashions unity through commonality (Hall: 28). France and the United States permit immigration but only extend citizenship on the condition that the immigrant has embraced the values and cultural practices of the nation. Despite the paradox this poses, as states that aspire to be non-ethnic have not avoided a quasi-ethnic dimension, it is reflective of Taylor‘s theory that cultural ascription is a fundamental need of democratic states. To compensate for this deficiency in true plurality, Hall adopted a third categorization permissive of multiculturalism. Civil nationalism, defined as —cultural diversity within a shared commitment to minimal liberal political norms,“ is Hall‘s preferred society, although he recognizes, as Mill foresaw, the resultant strenuousness of balancing competing civic and ethnic allegiances (Hall: 30). The concept of officially accommodating cultural variance is also termed liberal nationalism, insinuating that less culturally inclusive nations are illiberal in nature (Kymlicka 2001: 53-60).
Each ideal type holds limitations and virtues. Civil, or liberal, nationalism is ideal in the abstract, but in reality brings the constant challenge of cultural accommodation that may be difficult to sustain without giving rise to divisive ethnically-based political rallying. The ethnic variant, while quick to be coloured illiberal or intolerant, nevertheless seeks the protection and preservation of a distinct culture.
Civic nations likewise practice varying degrees of exclusivity and cultural restrictions. Yet, despite this last fault, I believe civic nationalism suggests the most practical paradigm for managing diversity without hazarding an inefficacious state.
The distinction to which I will most frequently refer, however, is that from Michael Mann of the demos and ethnos states, which I prefer for its correlation to governance, political choice, and state actors as those factors are central to this paper (Mann 2005: 55-69). Mann suggests the demos-ethnos distinction arises from two contrasting interpretations of whom ”the people‘ are that substantiate the state. The demos state believes itself to represent a collective of individuals - the citizenry and its myriad interests. The need for mediation between these competing interests contains the state into the role of mediator. Civic and civil nationalisms, which seek to balance the interests of civil society or cultural groups, fall under categorization of the demos state. The ethnos state, conversely, believes itself to represent the interest and perpetuation of a single ethnic group, often, but certainly not necessarily, the majority group within the state. Risked in this understanding is the exclusion of ancillary groups through the denial of political rights or the physical removal of non- ethnics. The further radicalized the leaders and members of an ethnos state become, the greater the risk is that such exclusion will take increasingly violent forms, particularly as the state that comes to possess such an understanding also possesses the means to enforce its vision. In essence, this is extreme ethnic or illiberal nationalism holding the controls of the state.
Conflicts in Brief
The nationalism at the time of turpitudes in Rwanda and South Africa clearly matches the definition of an extreme, perverted ethnos nationalism. Although the efforts to force an ethnically homogeneous society were politically manufactured, they succeeded nonetheless in becoming part of the state vision and their virulent objective widely embraced. This section offers a synopsis of the ethnic dimensions and conflicts of both countries to expand upon the notion that the conflicts arose from jingoism rather than endemically.
Rwanda
Rwanda is a bi-ethnic but monocultural society; while the differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi is historic, hatred is not: both share a language, religion,
neighbourhoods, cultural practices, frequently intermarried, and have lived together since Tutsis are believed to have migrated to the area in the fifteenth century (Straus 2006: 19-20). Prior to colonization, ethnic labels were benign markers of livelihood; however, under colonization, Belgian administrators permanently affixed ethnicity to power through the favouritism of the paler, taller, more ”European-looking‘ Tutsis in positions of employment, education, and local governance at the exclusion of the far more numerous, darker, ”African-looking‘ Hutus. The Hutu Revolution, occurring from 1959 until independence in 1962, was fueled by the quest for majoritarian self- government. The congruence at independence of state boundaries and a Hutu-pride ideology, coupled with the sudden relief of oppression, was easily radicalized and culminated in the expulsion of approximately half a million Tutsis, who had come to be seen as colonial allies, over the next decade (Mann: 438; Straus: 177-191). The 1973 coup by Juvenal Habyarimana and his subsequent twenty-one year rule instituted a détente in ethnic hostilities within the country. Two competing claims to the Rwandan state, however, fermented from his continued exclusion of the expelled Tutsi community: the first of a Hutu right to govern as victors of the revolution and the largest ethnic group; the second of exiled Tutsis, primarily the Ugandan-based Rwandan Patriotic Front militia, seeking the right of return and the reclamation of their homes (Sehene 1999: 133). Neither group asserted a historic right to a pre- colonial territory, but instead expressed its claims to the confines of the imperially- designed state.
The majority-rule dynamic was radicalized in the early 1990s to propagate a jingoistic alternative to the national imagination, one which championed a Rwandan state inhabited solely by Hutus and faulted the government for enabling Tutsi command over private business. As Sehene noted, the Rwandan government since independence has always been based on a perceived right to Hutu rule as the majoritarian ethnic group: the difference witnessed in the movements of the 1990s was a militancy of this idea, a prolonged effort to depict the Rwandan state in its totality as the exclusive right of Hutus. The eventual receptiveness of factions of the Habyarimana regime to this ideology, as its officials grew increasingly insecure from democratic advancement and a new power-sharing agreement with the exiled Tutsi community, ultimately aligned this vision with the capacity to attempt its fruition.
Rwanda, in the end, produced —the most rapid and complete genocide the world has ever seen“ when its Hutu majority murdered somewhere between 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsis, approximately seventy-five percent of the entire Tutsi population, over the course of eleven weeks in 1994 (Mann: 430). The greatest tragedy of the genocide is perhaps the precipitance and scale at which ordinary Hutus participated in killing their Tutsi neighbours. Scott Straus, in his thorough study of local culpability, calculates there were 175,000 to 210,000 active génocidaires, approximately fourteen to seventeen percent of the adult male Hutu population (Straus: 115-118). As he comments, this is not as overwhelming a number as might have been expected, yet rarely do governments succeed in mobilizing fourteen to seventeen percent of a population to participate firsthand in state directives.
The ubiquitous culture between ethnic groups demonstrates that the genocide was not rooted in intractable differences. Any combination of malicious leadership, war, poverty, and ideological and partisan extremism can aptly offer cause 1: I find most convincing the argument that successful invasions by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and increasing Hutu impoverishment gave birth to an environment saturated with fear, uncertainty, and ethnic suspicion; state leaders, heading a well-organized state and fearing a crisis of power, and ordinary Hutus, insecure and inundated with slogans of the radicalized ”Hutu Power‘ ideology, became culpable in the orchestration and enactment of the genocide. The role of the government was paramount as it efficiently manipulated rising political-economic unrest and actively stroked social fears, allowing the militarization of ethnic paranoia to carry to its logical conclusion.
The genocide and its aftermath consequentially produced a massive social restructuring. The native Tutsi population was decimated; an estimated two million Hutus fearing retaliation fled into neighbouring states and a French protectorate zone, most of whom have since been repatriated to Rwanda; and exiled Tutsis returned to Rwanda in the trails of the RPF, whose martial victory ended the genocide and whose leadership governs Rwanda today. It is difficult to approximate the current demographics as the new government has unsurprisingly prohibited the use of Hutu or Tutsi labels; however, it is recognized that the population remains predominately Hutu governed by a small Tutsi elite.
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South Africa
South Africa, by contrast, was at its conception of statehood a territorial battleground between indigenous Khoi and San societies, 2 settled Bantu kingdoms, Dutch colonialists, and British imperialists. Wars between frequently shifting national boundaries persisted for centuries, developing early ethnic hostilities and protracted by British and Afrikaner competition for gold and diamond reserves. British victory in the Boer War facilitated the incorporation of the area‘s four dominant regions into the Union of South Africa under the British Crown in the early twentieth century, which became an independent republic in 1961. From the Union‘s beginning, the African populations were marginalized, prohibited from voting or skilled employment in the Afrikaans-controlled regions. The power structure was dominated instead by the white minority as state politics were a balance between English authority and Afrikaner resentment of British political and economic supremacy. After Afrikaans political parties prevailed in 1948, they ushered in an official, state-wide policy of apartheid. Forcibly assigning the population into racial categories of White, Coloured, Asian, or Black, political leaders pursued the creation of a totally white society, a fantastical aim in a country that, like today, was approximately ten to twenty percent Caucasian, ten percent Asian or of mixed ethnicity, and seventy to eighty percent black African (CIA 2007). The treatment of all non-whites that resulted was not a momentous yet momentary bloodbath, but rather a complete oppression that stubbornly persisted for half a century.
Bantustanization, the stripping of South African citizenship from Africans as they were forcibly relocated to ten arbitrarily-constructed ethnic ”homelands,‘ was an abject failure, unable to sustain overcrowded populations and fostering no national attachments. The pretense that bantustans were native, independent states was initially purported by the Afrikaner government in attempt to justify African exclusion under the apartheid system, and later in attempt to exclude the reincorporation of bantustan residents into the post-apartheid state. Official rhetoric withstood the rejection of independence by six bantustans; their multiethnic and sometimes volatile composition; poverty rates that exceeded seventy percent; and the dishonesty inherent in forcibly confining over half the country‘s population to fourteen percent of the country‘s largely non-arable territory (Egan and Taylor 2003:
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100-106). Such notions finally ceased following the collapse of the four ”independent‘ bantustans in the early 1990s as constitutional negotiations opened between the ruling National Party (NP) and Nelson Mandela‘s African National Congress (ANC). The goal of apartheid to create a prosperous Afrikaner class, moreover, could not escape the reality of economic dependence on under-paid Black labourers, and so the cleansing of society was hampered by businesses‘ demands for African workers and the creation of a work permit system for non-whites.
It has been suggested that the only benefit of the apartheid system was its twofold effect on national imagining: despite the means, South Africa became for the time a nation-state, achieving Dutch and British unity through their mutual status as beneficiaries of the socioeconomic system; and non-white unity through shared victimization under the state‘s policy of —ethnic cleansing by another name“ (Marx 1998: 107-119; A.J. Christopher cited in Egan and Taylor: 103). A 1983 constitutional proposal to provide Asians and Coloureds with their own chambers in the national parliament, again without providing for Black representation, was fiercely rejected by all minority groups and sparked a massive social outcry that resulted in a decade- long ”state of emergency,‘ the eventual release of Nelson Mandela and other ANC members from prison, and the reluctant start of negotiations. The precipitance with which the white South African population abandoned apartheid in the 1990s, voting with a two-thirds majority in 1992 to proceed with the system‘s dismantling, displayed a shared acknowledgement that the Afrikaans nation-state was illegitimate (Davenport 1998: 11-12).
With the advent of a multicultural post-apartheid state, far-right Afrikaans nationalists pushed for the creation of an independent volkstaat; however, they were curtailed from offering any concrete proposal because an exclusively Afrikaans territory did not exist (Egan and Taylor: 111). Comparably, Zulu nationalism, voiced by the Inkatha Freedom Party which claimed a legacy of Zulu kingship and controlled the KwaZulu-Natal bantustan, dissipated with the end of apartheid and the incorporation of the IFP into the new government. The underlying intent of its nationalist claims, which never represented a united Zulu front, appears to have been to secure its inclusion in the new South African state, rather than a real desire for exclusion (Piper 2002). The preservation of a single state, instead of a Hapsburg- or Soviet Union-style break-up that could have been suggested by the state‘s early
beginnings, is indicative that there were no such nation-states into which South Africa could be dissolved. A 1996 survey found that more than one-half of whites, Asians, and Coloureds and more than one third of Blacks already defined themselves first as ”South Africans‘ before citing their racial or ethnic identity (Gibson and Gouws 2000: 279).
Hence, the conflicts which transpired involved ethnic groups who came to believe the state was theirs exclusively, thereby concocting a national claim to the entire state to the exclusion of all non-nationals contained within. The belief in ethnic entitlement was neither primordial nor derived from historical precedent, but rather promoted by opportunistic political leaders and subscribed to by a population that saw the need to amend the wealth, utility, or proximity of the other ethnic group. The gauntlet has thus been thrown for the new leaderships, in their demos-based interpretations of governance, to somehow forge cohesive states out of the rancorous factions ethnos nationalism created.
Throughout the course of the paper, it is important to be mindful that while Rwanda and South Africa endured extraordinary efforts to cleanse their societies, and while both governments came to power the same year, a disparity in the ruthlessness of their conflicts has influenced the way and speed at which the states have since developed. Apartheid was unconscionable and inhumane and its transition violent, but did not equate the destructive, murderous, terrifying rampage of genocide. The Rwandan state was ruined in the wake of war and genocide and possessed very little foundation upon which to rebuild, constraining the new government to a markedly different starting point than that of South Africa.
While substantial literature exists on the search for social justice and national healing (see, for example, Gibson 2004, Rigby 2001, Sarkin 2001), this paper considers instead the structural changes necessary to building a state that will not again fracture along ethnic lines. There are three dimensions to which the strength of a modern state is typically credited: an external war; a participation in democratic governance; or a prosperous economy. Whereas the first factor is minimal to post- conflict Rwanda and South Africa, and will be discussed briefly in the next section, the latter two are of substantial importance and will be considered at length over the next two chapters.
State Rationalization
It has been suggested by prominent theorists, most notably Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, that interstate war was indispensable to the creation of powerful European states. Tilly‘s oft-quoted phrase —war made the state, and the state made war“ encapsulates the cause-and-effect between warfare and political centralization, territorial consolidation, and state bureaucratic expansion (Tilly 1975: 42). Hall also proposed the lack of war has negatively shaped post-colonial states:
—[They] have often been content to rest on top of differential segments rather than to rationalize their societies. In a horrible sense, Third World countries have not had enough war, or, perhaps not enough war of the right type. They are quasi-societies, not nation-states.“ (Hall 1993: 21)
Jeffrey Herbst likewise applied Tilly and Mann‘s theories to Africa, noting the prevalence of intrastate wars and the dearth of interstate ones (Herbst 2003). He extrapolates that the absence of cross-border violence in Africa has left boundaries uncontested; left weak and nonviable governments unchallenged; and left states without a clear-cut motivation to consolidate internal control, strengthen their bureaucracy, make demands of their citizens, or legitimize their existence through a fight for survival.
Herbst further suggests that cross-border war gives rise not only to a stronger, more proficient state, but also to a stronger, more prevalent nationalism. As Afrikaners in pre-union South Africa demonstrated, the nationalism the polity, particularly a defeated, unassimilated polity, rallies around is not necessarily in support of a liberal or democratic state, and may instead be racist, exclusionary, and illiberal. The influence of war does not determine the type of state it builds. Such influence is limited in applicability to Rwanda and South Africa as war either did not popularize leadership or simply did not occur. The RPF was able to successfully overtake the Rwandan government forces and its martial organization has facilitated the management of a new government; yet its status in the wake of genocide as an external, non-state entity sharing ethnicity with Rwanda‘s oppressed minority has circumscribed its popular acceptance. The limited militia attacks by an extreme ANC faction into South Africa and the massive social riots that persisted throughout the
1980s did not constitute a wartime environment nor an external threat, and did not alone end the apartheid regime. Such was brought by a carefully-negotiated settlement and democratic elections that, for the first time, included the oppressed majority.
The hindrance in Herbst and Hall‘s proposed dilemma is that for an interstate war to transpire, a bellicose external state must first exist; for a bellicose state to exist, it must contain at some level a united backing willing to support the coordination and costs of a war effort. One might suggest that African states, often lacking internal linguistic, cultural, and ethnic consistency, have been preoccupied in constructing a domestic arrangement that they have not had the opportunity to focus on external aggrandizement. David Laitin similarly recommended African states require state- building measures rather than nation-building (Laitin 1992). He concluded, by contrast, that it is entirely possible, and often necessary, for African states to endorse multilingualism and govern atop a plural society. Rationalization, Weber‘s term for the composition of an efficient and orderly state structure, is not contingent upon homogeneity but a state‘s particular linguistic, social, and bureaucratic structures (Laitin: 9-10). Hall cites the absence of interstate war as delaying rationalization in African states; Laitin proposes that, as most Africans comfortably use multiple languages, rationalization will not necessarily look the same in Africa as it does elsewhere.
Although written before their transitions, his appraisal of both Rwanda and South Africa remains particularly relevant. He predicts Rwanda to be one of the unique African states to end with a single language because a common vernacular, Kinyarwanda, prevails underneath the colonial French spoken by elites (Laitin: 18). Regime change has furthered this development as the French-speaking members of the Habyarimana regime fled and control has gone to the RPF who, raised in Uganda, learned English as a colonial language. In Rwanda today, Kinyarwanda, English, and French are mutually designated official languages, but knowledge of a particular language is not connected to employment or political advancement.
Laitin further predicted South Africa would find a ”2-language outcome,‘ wherein individuals maintain their own vernacular but communicate with those outside their language group through a common international language. He observes this
outcome will be the product of the lack of any one language understood by more than a quarter of the population; the hostility of black Africans to Afrikaans; the state‘s inability to promote a single indigenous language without fueling resentment; and bantustan policies that actually standardized indigenous African languages, preventing a common lingua franca or the blending of languages into a more widely- understood hybrid (Laitin: 135-137). English remains as the only acceptable ”link language,‘ acceptable to Afrikaners because of an almost universal Afrikaans-English bilingualism and to black Africans because of its association with advancement for their children and disassociation with oppression (Laitin: 137, 56). In the current state, education, civil service, and government are accessible in any of the eleven official languages. Zulu, spoken by twenty-four percent, is the most common language; however, English tends to prevail in business, reflecting both the position of Afrikaners and the increasingly internationalism of business ventures (CIA 2007; Handley 2005: 212-213). In some areas, collective interests have emerged between Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds and Afrikaners upset by their language‘s loss of prominence. As will be discussed in the third chapter, the relevance of language issues across ethnic lines is a favourable development in social relations.
War made states, but war also made empires whose existence were precarious and burdened the past century with the turmoil of their fragmentation. Although war was undeniably vital to bolstering a handful of states in Europe, it also created overextended political conglomerates that were inherently weak and ultimately collapsed. The nature of imperial dissolution pushed by nationalist demands is not terribly different from many of the civil wars of African states, with the notable exception that national claims seek separation from the empire while civil wars usually seek dominance of the state. There is resonance in stating states in Africa are under-contested, but it is not clear the alternative would have been more stable. The quest now is to find an arrangement that allows for stability, conciliation, and reconstruction.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION
In the absence of war ”making‘ the states of Rwanda and South Africa, the retention of the state borders by the new governments and the publics at large substituted as the state‘s reaffirmation; the dire economic and social circumstances instead compelling rationalization. Perhaps here we do see a ”virtue of necessity‘ being made from acknowledgement that no subdivision nor other arrangement was possible: the task at hand became laying the groundwork for peace, stable political institutions, economic growth, and a succeeding identity œ in short, laying the groundwork for a redesigned nation. It must be stressed that the processes discussed below are developmental, most often painstaking, controversial, and requiring of time to be popularly accepted. The decade and a half that has passed is ephemeral to national memory and the political process: it is too soon to expect unhesitant cross-ethnic harmony or that portions of the political process will not be tweaked as society evolves.
National Identity Redefined
National identity is in many ways malleable, a product of social and political circumstances. The construction of a new national vision was central to informing individuals and groups highly conscious of their identities of their place in the incipient state. The underlying hope of such a pursuit is that a superseding loyalty will ameliorate tensions, as proposed by Arend Lijphart:
—Overarching loyalties are even more important if they provide cohesion for the society as a whole and thus moderate the intensities of all cleavages simultaneously. Nationalism is potentially such a cohesive force. Not only is strength important, but also the question of whether it truly unites the society or instead acts as an additional cleavage by providing a loyalty to a ”nation‘ that is not coterminous with the state“ (Lijphart 1977: 82).
Clearly the risks inherent to nation-building under these circumstances are the rejection of the new ideal, the resort of political leaders on any side to ethnic lobbying, and the reemergence of hostilities. An inclusive, successfully reconstituted national identity, properly supported, has the potential to begin redirecting ethnic sentiments into an overriding entity, which is imperative to promoting a stabilizing effect on society and asserting the primacy of the central government.
Fundamentally, as Charles Taylor wrote, —when leaders want to unite a country, and lift people out of their warring partial allegiances, they appeal to a broader national identity“ (Taylor: 202).
Successful nation-building elsewhere demonstrates the variety of feasible possibilities: the Indonesian ”ethnic‘ model of assimilation to a dominant culture, the French ”civic‘ model of integration into a shared polity, and the Indian ”civil‘ model of multicultural practices contained within the broader state. Indonesia began as a liberated Dutch colony anchored by two islands, Java and Sumatra, that spent the next three decades annexing neighbouring islands and incorporating their populations into its state through military coercion, economic exploitation, and cultural integration (Mann: 492). Although Indonesia is officially secular and multiethnic, the seventy-five percent of its population that resides on Java and Sumatra developed relative linguistic and cultural homogeneity during the colonial period. The outer islands, however, have resisted assimilation into what they view as Javanese imperialism. This view comes in part from the force with which the state attempted assimilation and in part from the forced relocation of Java and Sumatra residents to the outer islands in attempt to both spread cultural homogenization and reduce the population density of the core islands, consequentially provoking ethnically-based riots and separatist movements where these groups clashed or where the indigenous population ardently resisted integration (Anderson: 117-134; Mann: 490-498).
France conversely began as a polyglot without a meaningful sense of commonality outside the nobility. The state‘s intent, after the Revolution, was to integrate all territorial residents into the nation based upon a shared belief in the natural liberties and rights of man rather than a favoured ethnic culture. John Breuilly suggests that embodied in the French Constitution was the message that —this idea of the nation did not refer to a special group of people with a common cultural identity;“ instead, —the nation was the sum of the citizens, whose rights were based upon their common humanity“ (Breuilly 1982: 60). France, recognizing a single language and identity facilitated the running of the state and civic participation, created a universal education system to teach both a standardized language and students of their French identity (See Weber 1977). The unavoidable assimilation to a dominant language might suggest a contradiction of the civic definition and align France‘s state
formation more with that of Indonesia. The inherent difference is the slow, politically-directed construction of the French nation through civic institutions; whereas Indonesian identity preexisted in an overwhelming majority of the population and those outside were often marginalized or exploited by the state depending on political whim. Admittedly, a normative judgment lies within this distinction: forceful coercion and suppression are objectionable; de facto coercion through education is more acceptable. Many theorists observe that a reoccurrence of the French model would be internationally condemned today because the eminence of cultural accommodation both makes states hesitant to act in this fashion and provides a basis for minority grievances (Stepan 1998: 224-225; Beissinger 1998: 181).
India presents a model of unhomogenized state incorporation, a France without assimilation. India houses multiple ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities: the most dominant language, Hindi, is spoken by only forty percent of the population, and while the Hindu religion, practiced by eighty percent, on the surface has the potential of a unifying force, the approximately fifteen-percent Muslim population today translates into more than 100 million people (Mann: 474). Thus, to efficaciously confront British colonizers, Indian nationalism necessitated cross- ethnic, linguistic, and religious unity. Jawaharlal Nehru‘s Congress Party succeeded in dominating the politics of an independent India for three decades by virtue of its embrace of a secular, plural state. Sub-state boundaries were drawn to accommodate linguistic needs while avoiding religious lines. Hindu nationalist movements, the product of a weakening Congress Party and the expansion of voter participation to rural regions, have arisen over the past few decades and gained popularity by targeting Muslims as foreign and unwelcome in India (See Van der Veer 1994). The most successful has been the BJP, who held the majority of seats in parliament from 1996 until 2004, when Congress Party‘s resurgence relegated the BJP to the role of leading opposition, embodying both the risk of ethnic factionalism and the potential for its containment.
Anthony Smith, a disavowed proponent of the primordialist theory of nations, assessed the difficulty of creating nations without a core ”ethnie‘ from colonial territories and suggested two approaches to the creation of an inorganic ”territorial nation‘ were possible: the integration of all members into a dominant ethnic culture
or the construction of a —supra-ethnic political culture“ into which all members participate while retaining personal cultural practices. He concluded —it is where the new state is built up around a dominant ethnie…that, paradoxically, the best chance of creating a ”territorial nation‘ and political community exists“ (Smith 1991: 116). For him, Indonesia had better odds of success than India; yet today, although both experience religious fundamentalist movements, India‘s economic growth is the envy of developing states and the violence it suffers, outside of Kashmir, is tempered, confined, and fleeting. Indonesia, on the other hand, holds a collapsing government, has exploited the native populations of its outer islands, marginalized its Chinese minority, met secessionist movements with extreme violence, and recently been forced to mitigate its practice by offering local autonomy to select regions (Mann: 474-498). Instead, one deducts that the approach to national integration is most prudently determined by ethnic realities: it is as difficult to enjoin intolerant, warring ethnic groups into a civil state respective of cultural difference as it is to assimilate racial difference into a homogenous ethnic state. The three preceding examples are intended to collectively highlight the crux of the nation-building process: even without a history of ethnic cleansing, it is not uniform; it is contentious and imperfect; it is often neglectful of popular opinion in favour of the long-term interests; and it is seemingly impossible, in any approach, to placate all sectors of society.
Rwanda and South Africa faced the additional, far more precarious dimensions of deeply embedded ethnic consciousness and justified resentment. A state that favoured or excluded the guilty in the national vision risked illegitimacy in the eyes of the aggrieved or the egregious. It is interesting that, in both cases, the new state was designed by leaders who were prohibited from membership within the previous state, formerly oppressed, imprisoned, or exiled by the governments they replaced. Yet from their exclusion and atrocities against their ethnic groups, the allure of reverse hostility, most recently witnessed in a Kosovo that quickly became Albanian and an Iraq that collapsed under anti-Sunni reprisal, was sidelined. Whether the Rwandan and South African approaches were to appease international financial lenders, tenets of a progressive ideology, or simple pragmatism, each is concurrent with social possibilities: in Rwanda, the civic emphasis on territorial citizenship and avoidance of ethnicity were both safest and logical in a monolingual and culturally
uniform society; in South Africa, the extreme linguistic and ethnic plurality rendered a civil state the most practical outcome. Thus, ”One Rwanda‘ and the ”Rainbow Nation‘ of ”the New South Africa‘ were borne.
Civic Rwanda
The RPF‘s formula of ethnic inclusion is likely modeled after the ideology Yoweri Museveni, a mentor and ally to RPF leadership, promoted to successfully unite multiethnic, multilingual Uganda (Prunier 1997: 331; Herbst 2000: 254). While this approach was perhaps the only approach feasible for a group who shared ethnicity with just fifteen percent of the Rwandan state, as opposed to the eight-five percent Hutu majority, its adoption by the RPF stood in stark contrast to the aforementioned Hutu Power ideology. Of course, the idea of ”oneness‘ does not entrench overnight and the ethnicity of the RPF government does not go unnoticed. Divisions are present between ethnic groups and within ethnic groups, such as Hutus who retain belief they have a right to majoritarian government and resent the absence of any true political power, or native Tutsis who resent returned Tutsis from Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi that did not suffer the genocide but have come to dominate politics and business (Prunier: 326; Reyntjens 2004: 180). It is hard to imagine how a post- genocide climate, in which victim and oppressor must still live together, could forego such divisions.
Rwanda is challenged in the acceptance of a non-ethnic national identity. Issues of ethnically-defined guilt and victimization compound this difficulty. Prohibitions of overt displays of ethnicity, of ethnically-charged language in media, and of ethnically-based political parties provide a moratorium on ethnic lobbying; public information campaigns and the education system instruct students and returning refugees on patriotism and citizenship, indicating that, like France, the hope is for a Rwandan identity to take root over the next generations (Economist 2004). As France —kept away from history“ in building national memories because of its history‘s divisive nature, Rwanda struggles to find a way to teach its own ethnically divisive history. As Mahmood Mamdani noted, in reference to the Hutu Revolution of 1959 that liberated the country but excited violent retaliation against Tutsis, —reconciliation will also require the construction of a shared history, and in this there is no more difficult task than arriving at a shared interpretation of 1959“ (Hobsbawm
1983: 271-272; Mamdani 1996: 32). This challenge extends to a teaching of the genocide that does not diminish the tragic fate of the Tutsi community but also does not perpetuate permanent blame upon every Hutu. At present, the country appears to have arrived at a narrative that, despite a Tutsi-slant of events, places blame at Belgian colonists for dividing a once peacefully coexistent society and the Habyarimana regime for maliciously propagating mass hysteria in an effort to retain power. Blame is allocated while remaining general enough that it will not irrevocably wedge future generations (Fisher 1999). The ability of the country to integrate over a million returned Hutu refugees without the violence anticipated by outsiders demonstrates an acceptance that, in the midst of contempt and blame, both Hutus and Tutsis share the Rwandan state. Rwanda may be aided further in this process by the lack of ethnic-territorial concentration and the presence of linguistic and cultural homogeneity between the ethnic groups. Official repression of ethnic identity receives criticism from human rights organization and scholars; however, such repression is not done out of favouritism to a particular ethnicity and is confined to ethnic labels, not cultural or linguistic practices. As such, the state is uniquely positioned to follow the French civic model without the uncomfortable question of forced cultural assimilation.
Civil South Africa
ANC ideology was likewise cultivated from outside the state, but evolved through partnership with numerous ethnic, cultural, and labour organizations. Apartheid‘s arbitrary social categorization incorporated multiple ethnic and linguistic groups under the banner of ”Black,‘ ”Coloured,‘ or ”Asian.‘ The exclusion shared by each of these groups advanced cross-ethnic unity. The ANC, like the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the United Democratic Front, championed this unification, striving to show the apartheid regime was illegitimate not just because of its human rights violations, but because its basic premise œ that races cannot coexist œ was sophistic. Analogous to India‘s Congress Party, the ANC has unceasingly dominated post-apartheid politics. Its role in the liberation and its broad base has precluded, for the time being, the rise of a viable challenger; indeed, it has been commented that the greatest representation of cross-ethnic collaboration in South Africa is found within the ANC (Sisk and Stefes 2005: 306). As will be discussed below, socioeconomic equality is far from achieved, racial animosity lingers, and
various language groups worry they are not properly recognized; accepted, however, is that other racial and ethnic groups are also part of the state, and in that regard the state has thus far been remarkably successful.
—The central difficulty of ”nation-building‘ in much of Africa and Asia,“ Anthony Smith commented, —is the lack of any shared historical mythology and memory on which state elites can set about ”building‘ the nation“ (Cited in Herbst 2003: 177). Intrastate conflict renders the creation of unifying symbols and common memory particularly difficult. South Africa is further challenged by eleven official languages and more than ten actual ethnic groups. Symbols strive to promote unity while celebrating multiculturalism and respecting individual grief. These aims have been enveloped in the idea of a national rebirth. The refashioned national crest and motto utilize the art and language of an extinct group of peoples, thereby ensuring no individual group or dialect is implicitly favoured while commemorating national antecedents (Barnard 2004). Historical events have been repackaged, allowing the remembrance of events such as the Sharpeville Massacre as the country‘s Human Rights Day (Sisk and Stefes: 306). Government rhetoric idealizes the uniqueness of South Africa‘s cultures and histories and of its cultural and economic importance to the African continent as a whole. President Mbeki‘s vision of an African Renaissance is underscored by the idea that South Africa is the root of the Renaissance. Critics who deride Mbeki‘s rhetoric miss its nationalistic effect, its evocation for the national imagination of the country‘s greatness, potential, and duty as a nonracial democracy to serve as a model to fellow African states (See Mbeki 1998).
At first glance, the government‘s widespread use of sub- and trans-state identities would appear to limit the development of a South African identity, much as some theorists suggest the growth of the European Union may diminish state nationalism. Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz counter the notion that multiple political allegiances are infeasible in finding that political identity is —highly changeable and socially constructed“ and that most people prefer to hold —multiple and complimentary identities“ to use interchangeably dependent on the social circumstance (Linz and Stepan 1996: 35). Stepan and Linz utilize their observation to explain how democracy in a multinational state can succeed: the inability to assimilate culturally does not necessitate the inability to integrate politically, and is aided by governmental models that provide a modicum of cultural protection united under a
strong central state (Linz and Stepan: 33-35, 414). Comparatively, their observation offers that which makes a civil state possible: an overreaching national identity can coexist with sub-identities, so long as no sub-identity mobilizes around a misguided belief in its entitlement to possess the state exclusively.
National identity is by no means concrete and may further evolve with social and political changes, modifying whom the nation considers a member or who considers himself a member of the nation. South Africans may define themselves by ethnic or linguistic group on a daily basis, but as South Africans at times of national events, elections, sporting contests, or international interaction. Likewise, Stepan and Linz‘s proposal suggests hope that as ”Hutu‘ and ”Tutsi‘ were reshaped into connotations of inferiority and superiority, they can over time be reshaped once again into something more benign.
Past events teach that an economically marginalized ethnic group and a political structure that represents that ethnic group or enables its ascension to power can potently combine to exacerbate ethnic tensions. The likelihood of preventing a reoccurrence can thus be reduced to two factors: the design of an inclusive political system capable of withstanding and circumventing the ethnic extremism of the polity, and the delivery of widespread economic growth.
Political Representation
History offers no proven model of a universally, or even a usually, successful post- conflict system. Today both Rwanda and South Africa are recipients of criticism that their governments are inadequately liberal. The question of democracy, however, is a sensitive topic when placed to ethnically divided societies. For many politicians, democracy is axiomatic; for political theorists, it is increasingly thought poorly- designed or poorly-implemented democracy risks ethnic lobbying by power-seeking opportunists.
Post-conflict states have shied away from a simple majority-takes-all system. Donald Horowitz advocates such avoidance, asserting that —ordinary democracy œ that is, democracy heedless of the special needs of divided societies œ is inadequate to produce inter-ethnic conciliation“ (Horowitz 2004: 250). Jack Snyder has proposed that a threat to power, or conversely the opportunity to gain power through ethnic mobilization, incentivizes a resort to exclusivist rhetoric; the narrow appeals of
politicians are left unchecked by underdeveloped civic institutions and civil society (Snyder 2000: 37). For him, this highlights the perils of nationalism emerging during the democratization process: power-seekers align themselves to the broadest and most readily defined social groups at the expense of social cohesion. Ethnically- defined politics chance a reprisal of conflict. For Mann, the motive of politicians appealing to such aims may be opportunistic or altruistic, but the end result is the same: the opportunity for an ethnos state to be voted into office and thus legitimized (Mann 2005: 61-68).
Fareed Zakaria echoes Snyder in opining the presence of stable, independent institutions prior to democratization is the best predictor of democracy‘s success. He argues the most successful transitions to democracy have come from autocratic regimes that first developed a liberalized economy and an active civil society (Zakaria 2004). Suggesting the definition of democracy has become so convoluted with associated features that the word has lost meaning, he differentiates between constitutional liberalism, —a particular catalogue of social, political, economic rights,“ and the free, fair, and consistent elections that designate a democracy. The former seeks the protection of personal liberties; the latter is a procedural matter of leadership selection. He quotes from Samuel Huntington to underscore this point:
—Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic“ (Huntington in Zakaria 2004: 18-19).
The rush to implement elections in post-conflict societies often neglects the development of creative constitutions and effective checks on the executive while increasing the possibility that voters may elect a reactionary, authoritative, or hostile government (Zakaria 1997). As does Snyder, Zakaria recommends civil liberties, civic institutions, and a liberal economy should first be entrenched before opening the government to state-wide elections.
The problem in post-conflict development is not the absence of models for —creative constitutions“ or power sharing systems, but their efficacy. One such frequently cited model, consociational democracy, is designed to carefully incorporate the
splintered factions of a state into one cohesive government. Best advocated by Arend Lijphart, it is a power sharing system in which cultural matters are guaranteed to the jurisdiction of each ethnic group while group representatives share cabinet positions, hold veto power, and allocate resources and lower-level positions in accordance with ethnic proportions (See Lijphart 1977). The rarity that one group can achieve the continuous united backing of its constituency is a common criticism of consociational democracy; if ethnic representatives do exist, the system‘s rigid style often prevents adjustment for changing demographics as few representatives would vote to diminish its own group‘s returns. Two pessimistic outcomes from this situation appear possible: the group representative will be unwilling to concede power or economic control and veto policy to that effect, or the representative will act with moderation and cause extreme factions within its group to separate and pursue an independent ethnic agenda. In a severely contested society in which one group sought an ethnos state to the oppression, exclusion, or murder of another group, it is difficult to justify an equal share of power or the grant of a controlling veto to the group associated with perpetuating atrocity.
In states with intermixed populations, the territorially-blind nature of consociational systems is undeniably practical. Because this model both recognizes and maintains ethnic divisions, however, its utility is limited in a civic state, such as Rwanda, attempting to transcend such divisions. The use of ethnicity is well suited to a civil state that strives for an equal balance of power. South Africa, despite its plural objectives, did not strive for an equal balance of power but to correctly redistribute power. Afrikaners facing a loss of power tactically favoured the consociational system as a way to perpetuate a controlling voice in government; it was for these same reasons the ANC rejected it as a fixed model. Moreover, while the ANC champions cultural diversity in private life and public celebrations, it has steadfastly held that the state must be a —nonracial democracy“ (Alexander 2003: 55). Only through obliterating state-sanctioned racial distinctions could the new South African state be the antithesis to its predecessor. A permanent consociational system would have rendered this impossible.
An equally championed power sharing model is federalism, which separates powers between a central government and local governments, assigning some matters to the sole jurisdiction of local administrative units and other matters to the sole
jurisdiction of the national government (Dahl in Linz, Stepan, Yadav 2003: 7). Advocates of federalism such as Michael Hechter propose local cultural control dampens the lure of independence: in essence, it quiets nationalist demands by meeting some of those demands (Hechter 2000: 134; 140). Hudson Meadwell has argued that increasing the autonomy of a separatist region fuels the demand for separation, not quenches it. Accommodation —is a second-best compromise“ wherein —anything that increases feasibility [of independence] destabilizes the political accommodation“ (Meadwell 1999: 265-266). Their analyses, like the typical use of territorially-based federalism, are applicable only to multinational states or states with a territorial-ethnic congruence.
Donald Horowitz, contending that ethnically-based representation dangerously keeps society divided along ethnic lines, recommends a federal model wherein states carefully draw local representative units to contain multiple ethnic, linguistic, or religious constituencies. Formerly competing factions will be lead to build mutual interests and act together in furtherance of shared policy objectives. The checks-and- balances of a federal system, either between branches of a central government or between central and local units, disperse anger over unpopular policy from a single governmental body to several. At the same time, he acknowledges a heterogeneous state requires a powerful center capable of regulating competition and allocating goods (Horowitz 2000: 598-599; 617).
Political Representation in Practice
South Africa and Rwanda alike built strong centers to democratic states, although the degree to which each practices democracy is contested. Such criticism can be illuminated through Zakaria‘s distinction between constitutional liberalism and democracy. South Africa considers itself to have the most progressive constitution in the world, and certainly a case can be made as rights extend to gender equality, protection of same sex couples, minority language rights, and a slew of commissions tasked with safeguarding human rights and cultural and religious practices. Both states provide in their constitutions for equal treatment under the law; the protection of individual liberties, academic freedoms, and workers‘ rights; allow freedom of assembly and religious practice; and guarantee female representation in parliament
(Freedom House 2007). In Rwanda, curtailment of press freedoms and repression of those critical of the government has derailed its progression to a liberal society.
The question of democracy in Rwanda is more tenuous than the question of liberalism. Officially, both South Africa and Rwanda are multiparty democracies. An immediate distinction, instructive to the way each practices or fails to practice democracy, must be underscored: the ANC wanted a majoritarian democracy; the RPF feared it. The apartheid regime had already institutionalized for itself a democratic system, into which the ANC sought inclusion, not overthrow. Full membership within the state and political incorporation, central goals of the anti- apartheid movement (besides the obvious abolishment of apartheid), necessitated that elections, open to political contestation and universal adult participation, occur regularly. The RPF, by contrast, believed the volatile composition of its society necessitated the avoidance of popular mobilization. It correspondingly delayed for half a decade any elections, which were then limited in scope and public campaigning. South Africa has been resoundingly successful in improving the quality of its elections each cycle and is considered a —free“ state; Rwanda, as it has since independence, remains labeled —not free“ (Freedom House 2007).
Majority Dominance in South Africa
Any institution that averted a full break with the apartheid system would have been marred by duplicity. At the same time, the white population controlled business and finance. The new government could not alienate this sector and risk the flight of capital or the loss of investment. The ANC was constrained further by its status in the constitutional negotiations. While it morally defeated the National Party, it had not done so militarily or, until 1994, politically. The NP thus managed the state throughout the brunt of negotiations and tried to avoid negotiating itself out of power while the ANC was trying to negotiate itself in. The end product, a two-phase transitional process that provided for an elected interim power-sharing cabinet and permanent majoritarian democracy thereafter, was the result of such constraints (Sisk and Stefes: 293). At the same time, negotiators feared the country could not withstand an ethnic-partisan climate without further exacerbating violence. Containing party leadership into a single cabinet headed by elected President Nelson Mandela, with Thabo Mbeki and former President FW de Klerk as Deputy
Presidents, was intended to facilitate cross-ethnic compromise, build public trust, and generally offer the most stable transition to a full-fledged democracy (Marx: 212- 213). This form of soft consociationalism, absent an equal share of power and mutual vetoes but incorporating leaders of the ANC, NP, and Inkatha Freedom Party, sunset after five years when the permanent constitution, signed in 1996, took effect in 1999. 1996 also saw the NP withdraw from the coalition government to the role of an opposition party. Depending on one‘s interpretation of events, the NP left either in frustration over ANC hegemony or with satisfaction that protections of minority language rights and private properties and investments, its primary objectives, had been achieved (Szeftel 2004: 194; Sisk and Stefes: 295).
General elections in 1999 and 2004, held under the new constitution, were won by the ANC with approximately sixty-six percent and sixty-nine percent of the vote respectively, securing Mbeki‘s position as Mandela‘s successor (Alvarez-Rivera 2006). The NP‘s attempt to refashion itself ultimately collapsed by 2004 and the party was disbanded. ANC dominance has lead critics to insist the country is not a full-fledged democracy (Tilly 2007:130; Southall 2001). Given the continued conduct of fair elections and victories of minority parties at the local level, such criticism seems disingenuous: the ANC does not win because it wrote the constitution to its advantage or corruptly manipulates the system, but because it is a popular, well organized, broad-based party. The idea that a state cannot be a democracy without vibrant opposition parties is circular: political opposition is only as effective as its popularity. If popular discontent with the ANC were to mobilize, there is a reasonable expectation that rival parties would gain support, a member of the Tripartite Alliance - the parliamentary allegiance of the ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions whose roots stem to their anti-apartheid allegiance - would withdraw, or factions of the ANC itself would break with the party. As it is designed, the ANC is in part so popular because competing interests within the party have the potential to mediate policy: demands of COSATU‘s workers, for example, provide some limitation to the neoliberal proclivities of Mbeki.
Minority Domination in Rwanda
Rwanda, by contrast, was never a free state. The Habyarimana regime was corrupt, nepotistic, and built no democratic institutions or practices. Gradual introduction of democracy in the early 1990s at the bequest of international lenders arguably instigated ethnic extremism. After the genocide, the RPF was constrained by the want to hold power, an entitlement it believed itself to have following the actions of the previous government and its own martial victory, and the foresight that the international community, still unable to grasp the dynamics of the genocide, would demand more comprehensive political inclusion. Its temporary solution was to return to the Arusha peace accords negotiated between itself and the ruling Habyarimana regime months prior to the genocide and modify the power-sharing agreement to exclude the political parties that perpetuated the atrocity, assigning itself seats allocated to the former-ruling MRND and creating a Vice President position for RPF General Paul Kagame to —place him in a position of general oversight and control of the government without making him President“ (Prunier: 300). The attempt to build legitimacy through the appearance of ethnic cooperation led the RPF to appoint the presidency to a Hutu member of the RPF, the positions of Prime Minister and Finance Minister to members of moderate Hutu parties, and allot fourteen of twenty other cabinet posts to moderate Hutus. Actual Hutu power, however, was superficial, reflecting both the RPF‘s want to govern, the murder of most moderate Hutu politicians in the genocide, and the country‘s devastation that left the RPF as the only ones in the country who possessed automobiles, weapons, or phones, resulting in a —total material dependence of the cabinet on the RPF“ (ibid).
The long-term political plan appears to attempt a balance between a distrust of the Hutu community with resigned acceptance of Hutu membership in the state. The government, to pursue massive rebuilding and reconciliation objectives, did not hold local elections until 1999 nor presidential and parliamentary elections until 2003, following the implementation of a post-transitional constitution that retained the prohibition of references to ethnicity and limits on political campaigning. The latter election was tarnished by the sudden ban of the leading opposition party, the Hutu- based Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), for ethnic divisionism (Lemarchand 2006: 7). René Lemarchand concludes from this that the state, now formally led by an ”elected‘ RPF majority and Kagame as President, has become a
—full-fledged Tutsi-dominated dictatorship, which denies altogether the existence of ethnic identities“ (Lemarchand: 4). While Lemarchand‘s complaint is not unfounded, he is perhaps overly exacting. If the aforementioned goal of a political system withstanding of ethnic extremism is to be achieved, it is fair to question how free a post-genocide state, whose genocide was marked by the rampant participation of ordinary people, should actually be. Democratization is widely credited with facilitating the rise of radical Hutuism in the early 1990s: from this, it is not unreasonable that the government, or the citizenry, might fear its return upon a reopening of the political system. Political parties and movements advocating Hutu- rights have intermittently arisen within the country and the Hutu diaspora. Such organizations, some comparable to India‘s BJP in their rhetoric of majority entitlement and minority foreignness, have been terminated by the government, precluding the potentially disastrous risk of success; others that pursue a liberal, non-tendentious campaign for greater Hutu inclusion have met the same result. This may be illiberal, but the argument that Hutu-rights movements risk radicalization is not gratuitous.
Aside from the politically-motivated ban of MDR and arbitrary arrests of political detractors, which taint the notion that a rudimentary democracy exists, it is not clear what would have been a better transitional system. Tutsi fears could never have been assuaged under a regime in which Hutus truly possessed power, rather than the symbolic but limited display of power sharing favoured by Kagame. To the Tutsi community, Hutu rule would have been unconscionable in the immediate aftermath and morally questionable a decade later. Hutus, conversely, fairly contend that power, both at the national level and local institutions, cannot continue to remain inaccessible to the majority of the population. The 1999 elections prohibited candidates from associating themselves with a party and parties in general were prohibited from campaigning; nonetheless, the RPF was accused of manipulating elections to lay the foundations for a party cadre (Reyntjens: 183). The new constitution, passed by national referendum after two years of —reasonably transparent debate,“ does provide some limitation on party dominance by mandating that no one party can occupy half the positions in the federal cabinet and that the President, Prime Minister, and President of the Lower House represent separate parties (Economist 2003; UNDP 2007: 70). Displaying reasoning similar to
Horowitz, boundaries of local governments were redrawn and renamed in 2006 to augment each area‘s multiethnic constituency, strengthen local administrative capabilities while decentralizing state bureaucracy, and symbolize a break with the pre-genocide system (BBC 2006). The state cannot be dismissed as having no inclination to democracy, but it cannot be embraced as having such either.
From this, one must ask: is it coincidence that both states have given the pretence of proclivity to informal power sharing agreements while effectively becoming one party states? Perhaps the answer is resolutely simple: leaders of states that require massive social restructuring find alluring the ease of uncontested policy making; certainly leaders of states without such needs find allure in this. Moreover, the role of both parties in liberating their countries presents a strong case for their vested interest in the state‘s future and, consequentially, for their continued popularity. Alternating arguments can be made that a lack of competition undermines liberal democracy or that, under good leadership, it builds lasting democracy by allowing civil society and the economy to first develop.
Here, I am inclined to agree with Snyder and Zakaria that, given the unenviable situation in Rwanda, democracy is not the foremost prerogative, nor is it the most practical. Security and stability must take precedence, accompanied by institutions that allow for cross-ethnic relations to normalize. But if a transition in national identity is to take place, democracy, at some point, becomes necessary. Civic nationalism determines membership by participation in the polity. If no open sphere exists for civic issues to be discussed and if state institutions are closed to select members of the state, the civic definition is negated. Likewise, a demos state, by its definition, is a state of the people. Lacking the capacity to accurately gauge public support, usually measured through political contestation, a state cannot be a demos state.
The presence of competing interests among which the government mediates is also obligatory in such a state. South Africa fairs well in this regard. My concern with Rwanda is not a trend towards authoritarianism nor the tenuous existence of political parties, but the criticism that civil society‘s growth is restrained, abating the lobby of interests on the state. Economic development and the growth of a middle
class are imperative to dually promoting democracy and substantiating the state, and in this civil society is consequential.
THE LEGITIMIZING INFLUENCE OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
As can be inferred from the previous chapter, political systems are messy, ideology is contentious, and a national vision is more an aspiration than something easily achieved. If these were the only indicators of a state‘s legitimacy, it would be a wonder that any state could survive a transition in government. Rather, states succeed, according to Ernest Gellner, because the contemporary measure of a state‘s legitimacy is not democratic governance, but the ability of the state to provide continuous economic growth.
Beginning in Thought and Change , Gellner defined modernity‘s new social order as the state‘s capacity in —bringing about, or successfully maintaining, an industrial affluent society“ (Gellner 1964: 33). He stresses that such affluence or its synonym, economic growth, is not a quantitative goal but qualitative: not a rate of growth, an average GDP or buying power, but a new, nonagricultural lifestyle. For members of industrial society —there is a general demand of sustained improvement, based on the belief that this is possible, and somehow a human prerogative, and that failure to satisfy this requirement is socially pathological“ (Ibid: 45). In Nations and Nationalism , Gellner observed that industrial society —invent[ed] the concept and ideal of progress“ and the state‘s provision of such has come to be the litmus test of effective governance (Gellner 1983: 22).
Is Gellner wrong? Is there more to substantiating a state than economic policy? Using Weber‘s earlier definition, one might propose a state must ensure the rule of law and provide security. If one favours liberal democracy, one might also suggest the protection of personal rights and liberties is an equal measure of legitimacy. The genius of Gellner‘s proposal is its implicit requirement: to grow an economy, society must possess a litany of socioeconomic indicators and practices that expand beyond basic law and order to the protection of intellectual and personal property; regulated
financial institutions; transparency; and a competent workforce. These frameworks must first be in place to create a climate conducive to financial investment and industrial development. The state is the only body with the authoritative capacity to act in furtherance of these objectives.
As previously discussed, Gellner also observed a need for a uniform culture in the workforce and offered this as an explanation to modernity‘s quest for homogeneity, a requisite contradictory to the interests of Rwanda and South Africa. It would appear that if industrial society presupposes ethnic cleansing or assimilation, states that retain their heterogeneity face a dubious choice between the pursuit of legitimization via economic development and the repression of either industrialization or society in preservation of stability. One might suspect, owing either to political necessity, popular demand, or momentum, the former will prevail.
Perhaps Gellner presents us with a false dilemma. An oft-cited critique of his theory is its inability to explain why Switzerland, with its multiple languages, has avoided the push to assimilate or separate (Wimmer 2002: 49); comparably, it does not accurately explain why Rwanda, with its relatively homogeneous culture and universal language, could not. The Gellnerian dichotomy overlooks the mitigatory effect of cross-ethnic cleavages centred on mutual economic and political interests. A growing economy, provided it reaches all ethnic groups, affords the best opportunity to ascend from the ethnic divide to a cohesive society by promoting interethnic interaction and shared aspirations.
Indeed, an evolution can be witnessed in Gellner‘s later writings, in which he concedes that advanced industrialism may possibly diminish the salience of ethnicity (Gellner 1994: 122-123). Noting the successful East Asian transitions to an industrial economy without concurrent transitions to liberal government or monolingualism, Gellner suggests an authoritarian state may circumvent the aforementioned fates; moreover, he finds the cultural convergence of industrial societies, met by common access to the new economy, diminishes interethnic resentment. Meaning between languages becomes homogenized as different words become used to describe the same industrial concepts. As every sector increases its lot, economic jealousy subsides. The distance between the affluent and the very affluent is much smaller than the distance between the poor and the affluent, and accordingly less invocative
of hostility (Gellner 1994: 123). He remains, however, weary of the true prospects for reconciliation, observing that ethnic associations are foremost to appear under a new government while civil society often lingers in the developmental stages. Modernity, he comments,
—Makes possible civil society, the existence of countervailing and plural political associations and economic institutions, which at the same time are not stifling; and it also makes mandatory the strength of ethnic identity…This is a fact, whether or not we like it“ (Gellner 1994: 127).
Yet, if a civil society is able to emerge and an economy is able to grow, it can be surmised that these two confluent forces can temper ethnic hostilities. The challenge, then, for new governments is to promote the growth of civil society and cross-ethnic organizations while curbing the growth of ethnic ones. We are thus returned to Snyder and Zakaria, who advocate restraining democracy until civil society can be properly developed, and Horowitz, who advocates manipulating interethnic collaboration and intraethnic fractionalization.
If a prosperous economy is determinative of a state‘s legitimacy, it is also determinative of societal relations. Nowhere is the outcome more important than in a post-ethnic conflict state. Economic growth builds a middle class and civil society; amongst civil society associations and class interests, cross-ethnic cleavages develop; a demos state becomes necessary to mediate between competing interests. The hope, from this, is that a mild nationalism, tied to the state and beyond any particular ethnicity, will follow.
The Indispensable Middle Class
Barrington Moore‘s pithy statement, —no bourgeoisie, no democracy,“ identifies an incontrovertible role of the middle class in social development (Moore 1966: 418). Contrasting societal transitions to democracy, communism, and fascism in the power-making states of the twentieth century, Moore concluded the relationship between the nobility and the state appeared as the single biggest determinant of the system to later emerge. An independent nobility must exist to pursue its own economic agenda; when it is a capitalist agenda, the appearance of the bourgeois and the commercialization of society soon follow. Moore notes that —the English experience tempts one to say that getting rid of agriculture as a major social activity
is one prerequisite for successful democracy“ because a conversion from agricultural dependence signified both commercial diversification and employment of former farm labourers in the commercial economy (Moore: 429). The shrinking of the peasantry precluded appeals to communism; the counterbalance of the bourgeois on the nobility precluded appeals to fascism.
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Stephens, and John Stephens fault Moore for neglecting the role of the working class in democratic transition, which they believe has served as the most pro-democratic force (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, Stephens 1992). They observe the bourgeois to act opportunistically, championing democracy in principle but opposing its extension to the lower classes when workers are perceived as a threat to bourgeois interests or economic stability. However, the authors‘ prioritization of the working class is challenged by their acknowledgement that, first, the working class alone could not achieve democratic rights and, second, the working class was typically excluded from political process even after the introduction of democratic governance. The point they concede œ that alliance across class is really what matters œ is instructive to the cases studied herein: overall advancement of position, specifically movement away from agricultural dependency, is the ultimate precursor to interests in democracy. Their proposal that democracy is really about distribution of, and competition for, limited social power presumes that growth in the employed classes increases the power of these classes at the expense of the elite, in part because of their proclivity to form social organizations. A government‘s legitimation matters only when the people have social power; social organizations claim social power for members of the working and middle classes while countering state power (Rueschemeyer et al: 6, 59, 66).
Rejecting the functionalist position that ethnic divisions inescapably doom democracy, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens support the pluralist proposal, advocated by theorists like Lijphart, that it is only when ethnic and class cleavages concur that they pose danger. Gellner‘s later commentary that class and nationalism must conjoin to become a political force invokes this same principle (Geller 1996: 141-142). Again we find the idea that pervasive economic growth helps to transcend ethnic divisions.
Civil society is an important ally in this process. It is defined by Gellner as distinct from the government and economy, —a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely“ (Gellner 1994: 103). He comments that civil society and liberalism have ridden the coat-tails of economic success: they are, as Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens also convey, inherently linked to industrial society, and thus have a vested interest in continued economic growth (Gellner 1994: 198). Civil society‘s potential for mobilization gives it the capacity to influence policy; civil society itself is regulated by the competing agendas, beliefs, and organizations that broadly comprise it. Moreover, its mediatory influence and association with liberalism theoretically counters trends of extremism and ethnos nationalism. Exclusion from association on the basis of ethnicity is contrary to the tenets of a civil society.
The middle class and civil society often fill complementary roles, particularly in their influence of nationalism. In his assessment of social power in Europe, Michael Mann finds the middle class, specifically government employees and highly educated professionals, has historically been the chief proponent of nationalism (Mann 1993: 568-590). Its loyalty to the state stems from its reliance upon the state for education, business regulation, and employment. Because a strong state equates better life opportunity, the middle class acts as a force in support of the state, and against it only when the state fails in this capacity.
Consequently, a middle class and civil society are vital, first because they are liberal and nationalistic and, second, because their emergence fundamentally restructures society in a way that ideology cannot. The choice of a civil or civic state model and the implementation of that ideal are top-down processes, selected by state leadership and inundated to the public at large; the design of the new government is likewise done so by state leaders before it is brought to the public for varying degrees of participation. Civil society, contrariwise, originates within society: its existence, by its very definition, signifies a public affirmation of free association and cross-ethnic cooperation independent of state control. This change is supplemented by the ascension of a middle class, which contends for social power while introducing a new stratum in which ethnicities can coexist and interact. For South Africa and Rwanda, having been largely absent these demographics prior to and throughout their conflicts, the addition of a middle class and civil society creates a tangible difference
between their former, conflict-enabling social structures and the structure of their post-conflict states.
Economic Change in South Africa and Rwanda
Civil society in South Africa and Rwanda will not yet resemble the vibrancy found in stable Western democracies, particularly as an entrenched middle class is not fully in place for its cultivation. Social organizations were first connected more to crisis recovery than industrialization, as witnessed by the profusion of non-governmental organizations, development agencies, and human rights groups into both countries. One must be careful not to define civil society through these groups alone as they are often international organizations that entered into the state, as opposed to domestic or grassroots movements. International workers are not dependent on the state, are not constituents, and do not affect nationalism in the manner that domestic organizations can.
Middle class development is likewise a protracted process. Both governments inherited societies deeply fragmented by ethnicity and class, with small, wealthy segments sitting above massively rural populations. Given that reconstruction was required of the economic structure, the middle class will appear only as the economy‘s need for it materializes and as increased wealth and upward mobility elevate workers to this position. To reasonably assess its prospects, it is best to consider indicators that accompany middle class emergence, such as decreasing reliance on agriculture, diversification of industry, and overall growth. Sustained economic expansion over the past decade, favourable foreign investment, and proactive government leadership in both states have yielded simultaneously encouraging and taxing results: wealth is expanding while the poorest sector has become poorer. Still, new business and industry increasingly mandate a role for middle class workers, and those who are able to enter the new labour market, or who accumulate enough land and productivity to return a profit on agricultural production, are gaining affluence.
South Africa: a wealthy state, if not for the poverty
Observers of South Africa express concern that deepening and persistent poverty has created a time-bomb ripe for explosion among the poor, the product of unmet expectations and neoliberal economic policies. It is significant to note that, while
this is a concern that cannot be diminished, the fretting over South African society has progressed from a racial time-bomb to a class-based one. This is disappointing for development policies, but is encouraging for ethnic conciliation. If, as Mann has proposed, ethnic conflict occurs only when ethnicity trumps class as the primary divide in society, the rising salience of class issues may, in some twisted way, stabilize society by reducing the salience of ethnicity (Mann 2005: 5-6). Socioeconomic statistics certainly infer that the poverty issue will become prime: an estimated twenty-nine to forty percent of black workers are unemployed, whites retain control over eight-five percent of the economy, and two-thirds of farms are owned by 60,000 white landlords while fourteen million blacks labour as subsistence farmers (Iheduru 2004: 21). Some analysts suggest such an outcome was unavoidable: when the ANC took office, —the economy had suffered stagnant or negative growth for more than a decade but now needed somehow to generate the highest growth rates anywhere in the world“ to immediately meet employment demands and lift blacks out of poverty, an undertaking further compounded by white economic control and a black population deskilled by inferior schooling and outright school closures in some areas during the turbulent 1980s (Szeftel: 194; Davenport: 29).
Although the economy is not growing fast enough to meet this need, it is growing nonetheless. Mineral wealth and the quasi-industrial economy of the apartheid era laid the foundation for the new government to continue industrialization, developing one of the ten largest stock exchanges in the world and obtaining regional prestige as the largest economy in Africa. Its industrial capacity has expanded to include automotive assembly, chemical manufacture, iron and steel production and metalworking, so that industry now comprises almost a third of GDP and employs a quarter of the labour force; the service sector comprises an additional two-thirds of GDP and employs almost half of the labour force (CIA 2007). Development, investment, and affirmative action policies, including a Black Economic Empowerment initiative specifically targeted at black middle class development, have created a supremely wealthy black elite and a nascent black bourgeois. Charles Tilly‘s observation that black communities have witnessed —the departure of a small but prosperous new bourgeoisie“ is supported by figures that confirm the material inequality of the apartheid era has undergone a redistribution: Asians, after
apartheid, have doubled their per capita income in relation to white income; the number of Africans in the highest income quintile by 2000 was almost on par with that of whites, a number still disproportionate to social composition but perhaps unimaginable ten years prior (Tilly 2007: 128-130). Mbeki‘s expressed goal of creating a multiracial middle class —has become a reality“ (Iheduru: 1). If, as Gellner, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens propose, ethnic unrest occurs when ethnic and class cleavages align, the rise of blacks into the ranks of upper and middle classes hinders such an alignment.
This latter sector of society is industrialized, educated, and upwardly mobile. Its interest in protecting economic gains coincides with concerns of wealthy Afrikaners. Economic and employment associations assiduously lobby the government, who mediates amongst the elite, the black business class, white capital, corporations and investors, and organized labour (Hentz 2005; Handley 2005). Middle class and business interests have become a vital, autonomous component of society, and grassroots organizations, ranging in concern from language and cultural rights to HIV/AIDS advocacy to electrification and clean water campaigns, are active and pervasive (See Ballard et al 2005). Individuals previously united in the fight against apartheid are able to pursue their own agenda, seeking assistance from the state, for example, in recognizing a particular culture or developing a rural area; or working against the state in disagreement with its policies of medical provision or land redistribution. Equally as relevant, individuals from groups previously in conflict have found cause to interact, such as Coloureds and Afrikaners in the interest of the Afrikaans language, a cooperation pushed further by the ANC‘s intermittent neglect of concerns specific to the Coloured constituency (Tilly 2007: 127-128). Such cross- ethnic interactions and intraethnic divisions are the epitome of free association.
Rwanda: an industrial economy, if not for the agriculture
Unlike South Africa, whose economy was stagnant but developed, rebuilding the Rwandan system required a massive undertaking. Continuity was impossible as most involved with state and business administration carried out the genocide, were killed in the genocide, or fled the country, and all physical capital, including almost seventeen billion Rwandan francs and the Central Bank‘s entire foreign currency reserve, left the country in the hands of former regime officials (Prunier: 306-307,
321). The RPF government was entirely dependent on international donation to provide even basic services.
Further unlike South Africa, whose tremendous mineral wealth invites the development of complementary industries, ninety percent of the Rwandan population was reliant on agriculture, particularly coffee and tea, as a primary source of income, the value of which plummeted throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Storey 2001: 366; Prunier: 84). Before middle class growth can be conceivable, overdependence on raw materials and agricultural goods must be abated. To industrialize, the economy first needed repair: it has since been resuscitated, famine averted, inflation curbed, average income returned to or in excess of pre-genocide levels, and average GDP growth approximated six percent per year for the past decade, positioning Rwanda as one of the best performing economies in Africa (UNDP 2007: 94; 5). International funds have been well-invested in education, infrastructure, health care, and technology. Development objectives now focus on specialization in information technology and tourism; industry and services each account for almost forty percent of GDP (CIA 2007). The government has displayed extreme transparency in its economic strategy, as demonstrated by its completion of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and its progress towards meeting the UN‘s Millennium Development Goals, including status as a ”middle income country,‘ by 2020, signifying that recovery has been achieved and the pursuit is now sustainable development (UNDP 2007: 2-3). This presupposes that a middle class is likely to become an integral part of the economic structure.
Much like South Africa, however, growth has primarily reached the top of society. Socioeconomic statistics overall have improved to a degree: these figures are daunting but favourable in contrast to their preceding numbers. Poverty has decreased from its peak of seventy-seven percent in 1995 to approximately 57 percent last year; agricultural dependency has decreased from ninety percent of the population to seventy-one percent, although the employment of another nine percent remains linked to agriculture (UNDP: 10). Observers of democratic indicators, such as Freedom House, suggest the state is not fairing well; diminishing rurality and an embryonic middle class suggest, per Moore‘s model, that preconditions to a successful democracy are progressing deliberately.
Civil society, for now, confines its advocacy primarily to development and economic issues, whilst the government synthesizes additional interethnic cooperation. State officials display little tolerance for NGOs who criticize the government for failing to met, or actively repressing, democratic and liberal objectives; these groups in turn question how free a state can be that orchestrates complex permit requirements and bureaucratic difficulties to register civic organizations and that has banned several human rights organizations (Reyntjens: 185; Straus: 243). Thwarting NGOs, however, is not the same as thwarting civil society, and such criticism confuses the difference between the two. Arguably, there is an extent to which state limitations preserve the integrity of civil society‘s development by precluding the emergence of uncivil, ethnically divisive organizations that civil society itself is not yet strong enough to forestall. It is a misnomer to suggest the state is universally discouraging of social activity. Domestically-driven activities, including labour unions, professional organizations, development assistance programs, and women‘s groups, are omnipresent, enjoy good or improving relationships with the government, and function independently (Freedom House). Such groups complement the government‘s preference for policy and economic issues and are able to establish themselves within that framework; still, many organizations are —organizationally, financially, conceptually, and managerially weak“ (Unsworth and Uvin 2002: 8). The continued, autonomous generation of ethnically-inclusive organizations is imperative in allowing civil society to develop the capacity to restrain both extremism and, ultimately, the state.
As Rwandan society still lacks the affluence and urbanization that traditionally precede vibrant civil activity, the government supplements interethnic association by other means. State officials have literally engineered cross-ethnic relationships through housing and land redistribution policies. Although it is too recent to assess the outcome, under the state‘s controversial program, displaced villagers, returned Hutu refugees, and Tutsi immigrants were relocated into new housing developments built on arid land. The aim was to maximize the availability of arable land, allow easier administration of state services, improve access to schools and business, and force a closer proximity of neighbours to cultivate interethnic relationships (Van Hoyweghen 1999). Restructuring neighbourhoods minimized the risk of embittered, ethnically-defined territorialization that would have made any reconciliation
difficult; yet, Hutus and Tutsis who lived together before the genocide know firsthand that proximity and interethnic relationships are not enough to make ethnicity irrelevant. Limited, however, was their economic interaction, as the small upper class was largely considered exclusive to members and friends of the Habyarimana regime and wealthy Tutsis. Accordingly, their experience supports the potential volatility of an ethnicity and class perceived as congruent. A fundamental alteration of the social structure, to be found in rising Hutu affluence and a multiethnic middle class, offers the most complete break with the former national structure. The redistribution of social power and reinterpretation of social relationships that follow offers hope that former understandings of ethnicity and nation will be liberalized.
Prospects for Rwanda and South Africa
The asymmetric distribution of wealth before each transition rendered carryover inequality inescapable. For this challenge, there is no best answer: no one has solved the problem of poverty in Africa or found an uncontroversial way to grow the economy without the social strain currently witnessed. Both governments have wholeheartedly embarked on the neoliberal path; it is of course too soon to know if this model will prove to have been the best decision. Assessed in conjunction with the theories cited above, statistics showing that populations are gradually moving away from agriculture are positive indicators for successful growth and democratic foundations, even if the reason behind this movement reflects the scarce availability of fertile land as much as the opening of new industries. Optimistically, increases in affluence are continuously making inroads. For these recipients, the state works, and for the next generation, beneficiaries of universal education and expanding businesses, the potential for opportunity will be more prevalent. Pessimistically, the number of those still excluded from this trend is much greater than those included, and to them the state‘s efficacy is questionable. It remains to be seen if the poor will tolerate slow development given the acknowledged social obstacles or if embitterment will cause unrest. In South Africa, ethnicity is not foreseen as the cause of this potential unrest: society has thus undergone a partial transition that has succeeded in minimizing the predominance of ethnicity. In Rwanda, basic redevelopment needs have delayed progress; however, if the economic success to
which the state is aspiring takes hold, it can be reasonably expected that class will prevail as the primary, and less pernicious, social wedge.
This chapter addressed several outcomes which substantiate the importance of increasing affluence. It modifies cleavages and limits synonymy between ethnicity and class, a condition thought to breed animosity, if not conflict. It develops a middle class, which develops civil society, which collectively realign social power and temper extremism. Widespread economic growth is therefore decisive to state stability and sustainability.
CONCLUSION
To review, the Rwandan government pursues a civic nation in which the Rwandan identity supersedes ethnic identification. It does this by removing references to ethnicity from the public discourse. Policy towards governance and civil society further enforces this ban, at times to legitimately preclude the manipulation of ethnic identities and emotional attachments, at times unnecessarily so. Advocates of multiculturalism find this approach questionable; however, the outcome the state is attempting - the stable coexistence of victims and perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities of the past century - is unprecedented. As French nation-building demonstrates, even without obstacles of anger, guilt, and psychological scarring, the realization of civic identification is slow and challenging. The Rwandan effort is assisted by a relatively universal language: the cultural shift the state seeks is agrarian to industrial. The greatest hindrance to long-term stability may be a failure to loosen restrictions on civil society as it proceeds from middle class development, potentially limiting the constraints civil society can place on illiberalism. This may ultimately be counteracted by the state‘s greatest asset: its commitment to development, education, and industrial growth, all which make a middle class, and thereafter civil society, and thereafter true democracy, possible.
South Africa‘s ethnic diversity and multilingualism facilitated the development of a civil nation, which is bolstered by expansive constitutional liberties and protections. There is an innate difficulty in balancing a majoritarian democracy with minority cultural protection, particularly while rectifying the injustice committed against most of society. For its part, both the state and society have displayed remarkable
tolerance and accommodation, reinforced perhaps by the notion that all groups are without an alternative nation and thus share reliance on the South African state. The inclusive rhetoric of the ANC both encourages such an understanding and reinforces its own popularity. South Africa‘s greatest potential is its economy, and the management and growth thereof. Its greatest challenge is the sheer number of people on the periphery of, or excluded altogether from, economic gains and its capacity to meet the developmental and bureaucratic demands of the citizenry. The industrialization and policy initiatives achieved thus far have enabled the ascension of a black elite and a black middle class, symbols of the long-awaited, but still incomplete, national integration.
In summary, this paper has identified three developments which temper ethnic hostility as they mold a demos state: an inclusive national ideology, a cautious movement to democratic governance, and a pervasive rise in affluence. At the heart of these undertakings lies the assumption that national identity is somewhat tractable; that civic ideology can transcend fervent and embedded ethnic identification. It is fallacious to assume democracy alone is enough to build a coherent state. Without a reinterpretation of who is a member of the nation, democratic elections may simply be a measure of which ethnicity has more numbers. Democracy must be preceded by a reconstruction of the national definition and a fostering of cross-ethnic ties. This is best provided by economic development because the middle class and civil society offer a new stratum wherein multiple ethnicities coexist and interact. They cause palpable change in the economic and social structures, engender liberalism, and lay a foundation for a civic-based nationalism. It is from this that the new state is legitimized and ethnic nationalism sidelined.
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