Erin E. Hughes Nation Rebuilding in Rwanda and South Africa

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. See our blog at: http://nationalismstudies.wordpress.com/ 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. odernity 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. 4ohn 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,“

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