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Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics Democracy, Governance and Citizenship

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Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics Democracy, Governance and Citizenship Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics Democracy, Governance and Citizenship: A Comparative Perspective of Conceptual Flow A special issue Edited by Jivanta Schoettli Working Paper No. 59 February 2011 South Asia Institute Department of Political Science Heidelberg University HEIDELBERG PAPERS IN SOUTH ASIAN AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS ISSN: 1617-5069 About HPSACP This occasional paper series is run by the Department of Political Science of the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. The main objective of the series is to publicise ongoing research on South Asian politics in the form of research papers, made accessible to the international community, policy makers and the general public. HPSACP is published only on the Internet. The papers are available in the electronic pdf-format and are designed to be downloaded at no cost to the user. The series draws on the research projects being conducted at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, senior seminars by visiting scholars and the world-wide network of South Asia scholarship. The opinions expressed in the series are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the University of Heidelberg or the Editorial Staff. Potential authors should consult the style sheet and list of already published papers at the end of this article before making a submission. Editor Subrata K. Mitra Deputy Editors Clemens Spiess Malte Pehl Jivanta Schöttli Siegfried O. Wolf Anja Kluge Managing Editor Florian Britsch IT Consultant Radu Carciumaru Editorial Advisory Board Mohammed Badrul Alam Barnita Bagchi Dan Banik Harihar Bhattacharyya Mike Enskat Alexander Fischer Karsten Frey Partha S. Ghosh Hans Harder Julia Hegewald Karl-Heinz Krämer Apurba Kundu Peter Lehr Christian Wagner Wolfgang-Peter Zingel Contents Title/Author Page Introduction & Acknowledgements: Jivanta Schöttli 1 I. II. Section I: Religion and the State: implications for democracy, 4 governance and citizenship Valentine Zuber: Where are the limits to secularism in France? 5 Xabier Itçaina: Religion and nationalism in secular Europe. Lessons 10 from the Basque case. Section II: Governance in post-conflict and post-colonial states. 32 1. Daniel Bach: The African neopatrimonial state as a global prototype 33 2. Mohamed Sesay: Brokering Democratic Governance in Africa: The 42 Reconversion of Former War Commanders in a Post Conflict Society (Sierra Leone). Lionel Baixas: Identity Politics, Federal Governance, and Electoral 79 Democracy in South Asia: Historical and Comparative Analysis of Centre-States Relations in India and Pakistan Section III: Managing diversity: legal and institutional 103 arrangements. Ayelet Banai Diversity and Minority Rights: Two Models. 104 Ndubueze O. Nkume-Okorie: Affirmative Action in Developing 120 Countries: the Federal Character Principle and diversity management policies in Nigeria III. IV. ‘Exporting’ institutions: the limits to promoting democracy 135 and regional integration. Vera Axyonova: European Democracy Promotion in Difficult 136 Environments: the case of Central Asia. 3. Clarissa Dri: Building the Mercosur Parliament: integration on 155 European patterns? Jivanta Schöttli Introduction & Acknowledgements Jivanta Schöttli1 This special issue of Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics is the result of a two-day colloquium that took place in Heidelberg at the Internationales Wissenschafts Haus during October 2009. Thanks to funding through the project, Citizenship as Conceptual Flow : Asia in Comparative Perspective, part of the Heidelberg University, Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, doctoral candidates and post-doctoral scholars were invited from universities across Germany and France to present and discuss papers and on-going research. A few core questions were posed as a basis for the proceedings, linking the three common themes of democracy, governance and citizenship: - Do definitions and perceptions of democracy vary according to context and historical experience? - Can governance be compared across time and space? - How has the concept of citizenship ‗travelled‘? The papers that were presented, amended and submitted have been divided into four sections. The first, ―Religion and the State: implications for democracy, governance and citizenship‖ contains two articles by Valentine Zuber (Paris) and Xabier Itçaina (Bordeaux) that discuss the nature of secularism in Western Europe, emerging as it did within a historical context of state and nation-building projects. Both highlight challenges to western understandings and practices of secularism. Zuber‘s paper touches upon the rise of Islam, initially considered to be an issue related solely to immigration and which, today as France‘s second largest religion has provoked critical discussions about the limits to pluralism, equality and tolerance. Placing his analysis also in terms of the historical development of secularism within Europe, Itçaina, examines the role of religious actors in ethno nationalist conflicts that continue to fester and challenge the state, as in the case of the Basque movement. In the second section titled, ―Governance in post-conflict and post-colonial states‖, each of the three papers examines conceptual and institutional arrangements developed to cope with conflict and transition. Daniel Bach (Bordeaux) proposes the term, ‗neo-patrimonalism‟ to convey the coexistence of patrimonialism with legal- bureaucratic elements, drawing examples from Kenya and Côte d'Ivoire, where impersonal rules coincided with neo-patrinominal practices to alleviate the risks that political competition might engender for the newly formed nation-state. This, he 1 Dr. Jivanta Schöttli is lecturer at the Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Gemany. The author can be contacted at: [email protected] HEIDELBERG PAPERS IN SOUTH ASIAN AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS http://hpsacp.uni - h d . d e / W o r k i n g P a per No. 59, F e b r u a r y 2011 1 Jivanta Schöttli argues, and demonstrates, is a useful concept to explain why the challenge of institutional under-development plagues so many African states. Focusing on Sierra Leone, where he has conducted extensive fieldwork, Mohamed Sesay (Bordeaux), in his paper draws upon original interviews to explore and portray the role that ex- combatant cadres have played in post-conflict, democratisation efforts. Serving as middlemen and brokers during fragile periods of transition, Sesay provides evidence for hypotheses about why some cadres are more successful at reconversion than others. Lionel Baixas‘ (Paris) contribution brings the South Asian experience into the picture by comparing the trajectories of India and Pakistan in terms of centre- state relations. All three papers identify processes of democratisation and transition that draw upon imported institutions as well as local and indigenous practices. Section three, ―Managing Diversity: legal and institutional arrangements‖ approaches the subject from a theoretical and empirical angle. Ayelet Banai‘s (Frankfurt) piece on minority rights traces the discussion on multiculturalism through the prism of the Minority Treaties in inter-war Europe, part of the Versailles settlement, and the Indian Constitution as passed by the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1949. As an alternative to the cultural understanding of minority rights, Banai explores a political approach that challenges the assumption of predetermined identities and instead emphasises legal equality amongst citizens. As his entry point, Ndubueze O. Nkume-Okorie (Bordeaux) takes the decision to opt for affirmative action as a diversity-management mechanism. Examining various strategies undertaken by the Nigerian state, Nkume-Okorie offers an assessment of their success and proposes a comparison with India‘s attempts to manage cultural and religious diversity. The final section, ―Exporting Institutions: democracy promotion and regional integration‖ consists of two papers that explore the degree to which European institutions can be transferred, either as deliberate policy (democracy promotion) or through processes of emulation (regional integration). Vera Axyonova (Bremen) studies the European Council‘s 2007 strategy for a ‗New Partnership with Central Asia‘ that aimed at increasing the EU‘s political role in the region by declaring the active promotion of human rights, rule of law, good governance and democratisation. Drawing upon the rationalist-constructivist debate on democratization, Axyonova identifies the interests behind and limits to the European Union‘s normative goals. In the second contribution to this section, Clarissa Dri (Bordeaux) explores the reasons behind the creation of a parliamentary division of Mercosur to argue that the European ideal played a central role. In her paper however, she considers the degree to which an institution such as the European Parliament can act as a model or blueprint for a region with such different historical and political conditions. While most of the papers in this collection are one-country studies or region-focused, there are strong comparative insights into processes of democratisation and transition that cut across time and space. Each of these studies allude to the importance of transfers between Europe and Asia, Europe and Africa, Europe and Latin America, the counter-flow between them, and perhaps increasingly, a dispersion of flow, as African countries, for example, begin to look to Asian counter-parts
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