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the past. The rate of ethnic civil war has THE NEW Blood for Soil fallen, too. But now, is back with a vengeance. In 2016, British The Fatal Temptations of voters chose to leave the eu out of a Ethnic Politics belief that the postnational vision of that body undermined British sover- Lars-Erik Cederman eignty and threatened to overwhelm the with immigrants from ince the French Revolution, Africa, the Middle East, and the less nationalism—the idea that state developed parts of . Donald Sborders should coincide with Trump won the White House that same national communities—has constituted year by tapping into fears that the the core source of political legitimacy was being invaded by around the world. As nationalism spread Mexicans and . And in office, from western Europe in the early Trump has not only fanned the flames nineteenth century, it became increas- of ethnic nationalism; he has also deni- ingly ethnic in nature. In places where grated and damaged the norms and the state and the nation did not match institutions designed to save human- up, such as Germany, , and most kind from such forces. of , the nation tended to Other leaders around the world have be defined in terms of ethnicity, which eagerly embraced their own versions led to violent processes of unification of ethnic nationalism. Across Europe, or secession. At the beginning of the right-wing populist parties that oppose twentieth century, ethnic nationalism the eu and immigration have gained came to disrupt political borders even greater electoral shares. In Austria, more, leading to the breakup of multi- Hungary, Italy, Norway, and Poland, ethnic empires, including the Habsburg, among others, they even hold executive Ottoman, and Russian ones. By chang- power. The brunt of ethnic nationalism ing the size of Europe’s political units, has targeted migrants and other for- this undermined the balance of power eigners, but ethnic minorities that have and contributed to two world wars. long existed in countries have been on But then came the liberal norms the receiving end of this wave, too, as and institutions established in the wake illustrated by the resurgence of anti- of World War II. Principles such as Semitism in Hungary and growing territorial integrity and universal human discrimination against the Roma in Italy. rights and bodies such as the United Brazil, India, , and Turkey, once Nations managed to reduce ethnonation- some of the most promising emerging alist conflict in most parts of the world. democracies, have increasingly rejected Today, large interstate wars and violent liberal values. They are defining their land grabs are almost entirely a thing of governing ideology in narrowly ethnic terms and giving militants more room to LARS-ERIK CEDERMAN is Professor of attack those who do not belong to the International Conflict Research at ETH Zurich. dominant ethnic group. Ethnic nationalism

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now exerts more influence than it has at and today, ethnic conflict is far less any point since World War II. common than it was three decades ago. That fact has been bemoaned for all A big reason is that governments are sorts of reasons, from the uptick in hate increasingly accommodating minorities. crimes against immigrants it has caused That’s what the political scientists to the damage it has done to the post– Kristian Gleditsch, Julian Wucherpfennig, World War II order. Yet the scariest and I concluded after analyzing a data thing about today’s ethnic nationalism is set of ethnic relations that starts in that it could bring a return to the ills 1993. We found that discrimination that accompanied its past ascendance: against ethnic groups and their exclusion major violent upheavals both within and from executive power—major drivers of among countries. Should ethnic nation- conflict—are declining globally. Out- alism continue its march, it risks fueling side the exception of the Middle East, destabilizing civil unrest in multiethnic where minorities in Bahrain, Iraq, states around the world—and even Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Syria continue violent border disputes that could reverse to struggle for influence, ethnic groups the long decline of interstate war. Politi- are increasingly being included in power- cians need to resist the electoral tempta- sharing deals. Since World War II, the tions of exclusionary politics at home percentage of the world’s population and reconfirm their commitment to the that lives in countries engaging in some norms and institutions of cooperation form of ethnic power sharing has grown abroad. Those who toy with ethnic from a quarter to roughly a half. Some nationalism are playing with fire. groups have been granted autonomous rule—for example, the Acehnese in IT’S BACK Indonesia and the indigenous Aymara At the end of the , there were and Quechua communities in Bolivia. warning signs that ethnic conflict might The un’s globe-spanning return. But at the time, any fear of that operations, meanwhile, are helping actually happening seemed unwarranted. prevent the outbreak of new hostilities As the scholar Ted Robert Gurr pointed between old belligerents, and efforts to out in this magazine in 2000, despite promote democracy are making govern- the violence in the former ments more responsive to minorities and in Rwanda, the frequency of ethnic and thus convincing such groups to conflict had actually decreased since the settle their scores at the ballot box mid-. Pointing to inclusive policies rather than on the battlefield. and pragmatic compromises that had Our data also show that the number prevented and resolved ethnic conflicts, of rebelling ethnic groups has increased he argued that the trend toward peace only in the Middle East. Outside that would continue. Gurr’s essay reflected region, the trend is moving in the oppo- the liberal optimism that characterized site direction. In the mid-1990s, about the decades after the Cold War. Global- three percent of the average country’s ization was transforming the world. population was composed of groups that Borders seemed to be withering away. rebelled against the government; today, The optimism was not simply fanciful, the share has fallen to roughly half of

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It’ll end in tears: police confront migrants in Roszke, Hungary, September 2015 that. Moreover, based on a global compari- late 2010, rather than marking an son of the concessions made to various expansion of democracy, brought ethnic groups in terms of rights, auton- instability and strife. omy, and power sharing, we found strong Throughout the nineteenth and evidence that such moves have helped twentieth centuries, nationalism tended prevent new conflicts and end old ones. to appear in waves, and it is unlikely that By and large, the post–Cold War efforts to the current one has finished washing stave off ethnic nationalism and prevent over the world. Moreover, it comes at a war appear to have worked relatively well. time when the bulwarks against conflict Yet there have long been signs that it appear to be giving way: democracies is too soon to declare victory over ethnic around the world are backsliding, and nationalism. Around the turn of the peacekeeping budgets are under renewed millennium, right-wing populist parties pressure. Ever since it first appeared, gained strength in Europe. In 2005, the ethnic nationalism has had violent

MARKO DJURICA / treaty to establish an eu constitution consequences. There is good reason to was defeated by French and Dutch worry that the current surge will, too. voters, suggesting that Europeans still cared greatly about national identity. In THE ROAD TO VIOLENCE 2008, the financial crisis started to Rising ethnic nationalism leads to undermine confidence in globalization conflict in several different ways. The (and weakened the eu). The upheavals key variable, recent research has found, that rocked the Arab world beginning in is access to power. When ethnic groups

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lack it, they are especially likely to seek These findings are not limited to it through violence. Oftentimes in multi- ethnic groups caught in power struggles ethnic states, elites of a particular group over the control of existing countries; come to dominate the government and they also apply to minorities seeking exclude other, weaker groups, even if self-rule. States usually view such the leaders’ own group represents a demands as anathema to their sover- minority of the country’s population. eignty, and so they often resist making Such is the case in Syria, where Presi- even limited compromises with the dent Bashar al-Assad, a member of the groups issuing them. They are disin- Alawite minority, a Shiite sect that clined, for example, to grant them composes 12 percent of the popula- regional autonomy. This stubborn- tion, nominally runs a country that is ness, in turn, tends to radicalize the 74 percent Sunni. That disparity has aggrieved minority, causing them to fueled widespread grievances among aim instead for full-fledged indepen- other ethnic groups and led to a civil war dence, often through violence. Look no that has so far caused at least 400,000 further than the Catholics in Northern deaths and triggered a wave of migra- Ireland, the Basques in , the tion that has destabilized Europe. Most Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, and several of the time, however, the groups strug- different ethnic groups in Myanmar. gling for power are minorities, such as Ethnic nationalism can cause conflict the Tutsis, who launched a civil war in in another way, too: by leading to calls Rwanda in 1990, or the Sunnis in Iraq, for territorial unity among a single ethnic who are still fighting to win a seat at group divided by international borders, the table there. which encourages rebels to rise up It’s not just a lack of political power against their current states. After the that can motivate ethnic groups to take breakup of Yugoslavia left ethnic up arms under the banner of nationalism; stranded in several countries, their economic, social, and cultural inequality leader, Slobodan Milosevic, capitalized can, too. Scholars have consistently found on the resulting resentment and ad- that inequality along ethnic lines increases vanced claims on territory in the risk of rebellion. The economist and Bosnia and . Fre- Frances Stewart, for example, has shown quently, nostalgia is invoked. Character- that such inequality is much more likely izing the collapse of the to lead to violent conflict than inequality as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe among individuals, because it is far easier of the century,” Russian President to mobilize people along ethnic lines. Vladimir Putin has annexed Crimea and Similarly, my own collaborative re- invaded eastern Ukraine and justified search has found that the risk of rebellion these moves by talking of the unification increases rapidly with economic inequal- of the Russian nation. Turkish President ity along ethnic lines; for example, the Recep Tayyip Erdogan has drawn average Chechen is six times as poor as heavily on the past glory of the Otto- the average Russian, which translates man Empire to extend his country’s into a tenfold increase in the propensity influence far beyond its current borders. for rebellion. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

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MA19_final.indb 64 1/22/19 10:18 AM has similarly invoked the Habsburg empire, accepting Russian help to back Hungarian-minority militias inside Ukraine that advocate . Ethnic nationalism is most likely to lead to civil war, but it can also trigger interstate war by encouraging leaders to make the sorts of domestic appeals that can increase tensions with foreign countries. That dynamic has been at play in the disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, and and Turkey. Researchers have found some evidence that politi- cal inequality along ethnic lines makes things worse: when ethnonationalist leaders believe that their kin commu- nities in neighboring countries are being treated badly, they are more inclined to come to their rescue with military force. What’s more, those ethnonationalist leaders are typically hostile to interna- tional organizations that favor minority rights, multiethnic governance, and compromise. In their eyes, calls for power sharing contradict their ethnic group’s rightful dominance. They view the protection of human rights and the rule of law, as well as humanitarian interventions, such as peacekeeping operations, as direct threats to their ethnonationalist agendas, and so they work to undermine them. Russia has explicitly sought to weaken international law and international institutions in order to create more room for its own project of occupation in Crimea. Israel has done the same thing in the service of its occupation of the West Bank. Trump, who has called for an end to U.S. sanc- tions on Russia and moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, has actively backed these ethnonationalist

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impulses, further encouraging the steady progress toward peace, the trend erosion of the postwar consensus that could soon be reversed. put a cap on ethnic conflict. If all of these are the risk factors for THE PATH TO PEACE ethnic nationalism sliding into ethnic In order to head off such destructive conflict, then where are they most preva- consequences, it may be tempting to see lent today? Statistical analysis suggests ethnic nationalism as part of the solu- that the ethnically diverse but still rela- tion rather than the problem. Instead of tively peaceful countries most at risk of trying to resist such urges, the thinking descending into violence are Ethiopia, goes, one should encourage them, since Iran, Pakistan, and the Republic of the they are likely to bring political borders Congo. These are all developing coun- in line with national borders, thus elimi- tries with histories of conflict and where nating the grievances at the root of the minorities face discrimination and problem. Some scholars, such as Edward exclusion from power. Luttwak, have even recommended that The risk of conflict in the developed ethnic groups simply be allowed to fight world is much lower, but even there, it out, arguing that the short-term pain ethnic nationalism could well threaten of war is worth the long-term benefit of peace. In Spain, the rise of the new the stability that comes when ethnic right-wing populist party Vox has put dominance replaces ethnic diversity. Yet pressure on two center-right parties, the as the case of Syria has shown, such People’s Party and Citizens, to become harsh strategies tend to perpetuate even less willing to compromise with resentment, not consolidate peace. Catalan nationalists, setting the stage Others, such as the political scientist for an enduring standoff that could turn Chaim Kaufmann, contend that the violent if Madrid resorts to even harsher best way to diffuse ethnic conflict is to repressive measures. In Northern Ireland, a state along ethnic lines and Brexit could lead to the reimposition of then transfer populations among the new customs checks on the border with the political entities so that each group has Republic of Ireland, a development that its own territory. After World War II, could destroy the agreement that has for example, Western policymakers kept the peace since 1998. In eastern supported population transfers in the Europe, the return of ethnic nationalism hopes that they would lead to, in the threatens to reawaken so-called frozen words of the historian , “a conflicts, interstate disputes that were Europe of nation states more ethnically stopped in place first by the Soviet Union homogenous than ever before.” The and then by the eu. Beyond the outbreak problem with this option, however, is of new wars, the weakening of liberal that even with large-scale ethnic cleans- pressures to share power and respect ing—which tends to be both bloody and minority rights will likely embolden morally dubious—there is no guarantee ethnonationalists to perpetuate ongoing that separation will create sufficiently conflicts—particularly the long-standing neat dividing lines. If Catalonia broke ones in Israel, Myanmar, and Turkey. free from Spain, for example, a new Across the globe, after seven decades of minority problem would crop up within

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Catalonia, since many non-Catalans will have to address its deeper causes, not would still live there. just its immediate effects. Both supply Of course, where widespread vio- and demand—that is, the willingness of lence and hatred have destroyed all governments to implement ethnonation- potential for peaceful cohabitation, alist policies and the appetite for such ethnic separation may well constitute policies among populations—will have the only viable solution. That’s why, for to be decreased. example, the two-state solution to the On the supply side, political elites Israeli-Palestinian conflict still enjoys need to reinstate the informal taboo widespread support, at least outside against explicitly discriminatory appeals Israel. Yet the problem remains that and policies. Ultimately, there is no there are no clear criteria for just how place for the tolerance of intolerance. violent and generally hopeless a situa- What is required is courage on the part tion needs to be to justify division. of centrist politicians to fight bigotry Without such a clear benchmark, seces- and defend the basic principles of sionism could destabilize interstate human decency. Multiethnic democra- borders around the world. Disgruntled cies will also have to take more forceful groups and irredentist states the world steps to resist foreign attempts to stoke over would have more cause to resort grievances among their ethnic groups to arms to boost their influence. and sow domestic divisions, such as Although there are good reasons to Russia’s interference campaign during be skeptical of these radical solutions of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, ethnic separation, nationalism cannot when, for example, Kremlin-backed be wished away. Despite the emergence operatives masqueraded as Black Lives of such organizations as the eu, supra- Matter activists on social media to stir national bodies are not going to replace up racial conflict. nation-states anytime soon, because Within international organizations, people still mostly identify with their governments must defend core liberal nation, rather than with remote and values more strenuously. In the case of unelected regional bodies. For the eu, the eu, that means cutting the financial for example, the problem is not the lack support for illiberal member states of stronger decision-making authority and perhaps even creating a new, truly but the absence of pan-European liberal European organization with solidarity of the type that would allow, more stringent membership criteria. say, Germans to see themselves as part It also means doubling down on the of the same political community as promotion of inclusive practices such Greeks. Thus, any hope of replacing the as power sharing. The un and regional nation-state is bound to be futile in the organizations, such as the eu and the near future. African Union, have done much to encourage such solutions. A weakening CONTAINING NATIONALISM of these organizations could also under- Nationalism should therefore be con- mine the norms they are reinforcing. tained, not abolished. And to truly Inclusive practices tend to spread from contain ethnic nationalism, governments state to state, but so do exclusive ones:

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just as it did in 1930s Europe, the com- Setting aside the question of whether mitment to power sharing and group and how the eu should be reformed, rights has now started to slip in eastern European political elites would do well Europe and in other parts of the world, to address their own homemade prob- including sub-Saharan Africa. lems of socioeconomic inequality and As for the demand side, ethnic regional underdevelopment. They nationalism tends to attract the most should stop pretending that draconian support from those who have been cuts to immigration levels will do the disadvantaged by globalization and trick when it comes to countering laissez-faire . Populist dema- populism and ethnic nationalism. gogues have an easy time exploiting As the violent first half of the twentieth growing socioeconomic inequalities, century recedes into history, it becomes especially those between states’ geo- harder and harder to invoke the specter graphic centers and their peripheries, of ethnic conflict. It would be tragic if and they blame ethnically distinct memories of that past were forgotten. immigrants or resident minorities. Part For what they suggest is that the jour- of the answer is to retool immigration ney from ethnic nationalism to ethnic policies so as to better integrate new- war may not be so long, after all.∂ comers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to tamp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hollowing out of welfare programs. Although the economic problems on which ethnic nationalism feeds are most acute in the United States and the United Kingdom, inequality has been increasing across western Europe, and many of the welfare states in the region have been hit hard by austerity policies. Ultimately, however, the answer to ethnic nationalism goes beyond narrow economic fixes; political elites must argue explicitly for ethnic tolerance and supranational cooperation, portraying them as matters of basic human decency and security. In Europe, politicians have preferred to use the eu as a scapegoat for their own failings rather than point out its crucial contribution to peace.

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