Confederal Solutions to Ethnic Problems
Daniel J. Elazar
Confederal Solutions to Ethnic Problems
During the past 350 years, the international order has been founded on the principle of homogeneous nation-states. The modern nation-state was founded on modern principles of secularism, universalism and cosmopolitanism, designed to replace the melange of separate socioeconomic corporations and estates in Europe and the multitude of territorially overlapping ethnic and tribal groups in Central and Western Europe, Asia and Africa. The so-called "universal" principles of the nation-state were designed to overcome the "fragmenting" forces of religion, ethnicity, and tribalism through reacculturation either by education or by force.
Yet, after 300 years of effort, ethnic communities and ethnicity have persisted as vital forces in the composition of humanity. In the last generation, both have undergone political resurgence and have begun to seriously undermine the nation-state based world order through their demands and, perhaps more potently, through the conflicts among ethnic groups with conflicting demands. As the late Ivo Duchacek pointed out in "Federalism and Ethnicity" and a special issue of Publius, of the approximately 160 politically sovereign states in the world, some 90 percent are multi-ethnic in the sense that they have at least two ethnic groups comprising at least 15 percent of the population. Of the remaining 10 percent ethnically homogenous states, most have substantial segments of their ethnic group in neighboring countries where they are minorities. He cites the classic case of Ethiopia and Somalia. Ethiopia is a state with a multiplicity of ethnic groups that until recently engaged in civil war with one another, while Somalia is 99.9 percent Somali. However, 50 percent of all the Somalis in the world live in neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya and Somalia has from time to time sought to annex the territories of its neighbors to "reunite the Somali nation." Since Duchacek's death, matters have become even more complex as Somalia itself has become riven with quarrels between Somali tribes that have led to a bloody civil war that presently continues.
When the political expression ethnicity takes the form of ethnic nationalism, it can only be rivaled by religion as a source of total commitment under certain conditions. Since the fall of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the once Soviet Union, there has been a surge in the violent expression of this commitment to ethnic nationalism in that part of the world. This surge has led to the break-up of the Soviet Union into ethnically-based independent republics. Clashes between ethnic majorities and minorities within those republics promise to intensify. Clashes between the ethnic republics are occurring where populations of their respective ethnic origins overlap (as between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Ngorno-Karabach) national rights (as in Chechen- Ingush within Russia).
In the smaller states of Eastern Europe the same problems of ethnic group intermixture that Woodrow Wilson and the Allies in World War I so blithely ignored in their efforts to grant the nations of Eastern Europe self-determination, has once again come to the fore. Slovaks are seeking to separate from the Czechs and Czecho-slovakia. The Czech federated state has also been forced to consider the claims of prior existence by Bohemians and Moravians, the two peoples and regions from which it is constituted. Hungarians who live in the territories annexed to Romania under Soviet pressure after World War II, continue to be under Romanian government pressure to assimilate to Romanian culture. They are now fighting back and ar turning to neighboring Hungary for support. Bulgaria, which under its communist regime persecuted its. Turkish minority, is now trying to reach an accommodation with them, while at the same time it continues to covet the territories of Macedonia, now within Yugoslavia (if it still exists) and Greece. Yugoslavia, which attempted to solve its multi-ethnic problems through the federation of six ethnic republics, has been plunged into civil war as two of those republic (Slovenia and Croatia) have sought either to break away or to transform Yugoslavia into a very loose confederation, while the largest, Serbia, has sought to impose centralized control over all areas of Yugoslavia where there are Serbian minorities.
What is happening in Eastern Europe is headline material attracting the attention of the world. But that should not obscure similar developments taking place elsewhere in the world. Somalia and Ethiopia have already been mentioned. Other examples range from religious-based ethnic communities such as the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, to the religiously homogeneous but ethnically different Kurds in Iraq.
A New World Order
While this resurgence of ethnic conflict is transforming the globe on one level, the international system is also being transformed on another. During the heyday of the politically
sovereign state, the international system was a kind of anarchy, controlled by the Great Powers of the time who functioned within some kind of balance of power based on interlocking alliances that carefully preserved the political sovereignty of each partner state and which consequently were of limited value in establishing a peaceful world order. Today the situation has been transformed by the exponential growth in world economic interdependence, and the development of international functional authorities which, while formally established by treaty, are of such a nature that no member-state can think of leaving them, whether we are speaking about the International Postal Union or GATT. All this has occurred within the environment of a nuclear threat that has substantially limited the political sovereignty of even the United States of America, the world's surviving great power at this time.
Thus the resurgence of ethnicity takes place within an embryonic world order that seems likely to gain strength in the coming years. This has had two consequences. On one hand it has encouraged ethnic groups to assert their own independence while at the same time seeking admission to the supernational bodies that form the core of the new world order and, on the other, the strengthening of these bodies as part of the response to the problems of ethnic conflict.
Another consequence of this has been the merging of the world's two state systems: the system of politically sovereign states that once dominated the international arena, and the system of federated states within those politically sovereign states that are also federations. If there are over 170 (since the breakup of the USSR) of the former, there are over 350 of the latter. Once all but precluded from international relations, these federated states have become increasingly active in transborder relations and in international economic relations to the point where the operational distinction between the two sets of states has in certain spheres all but disappeared in recent years.
Federalism and a Means of Managing Ethnic Conflict
Since at least the nineteenth century, one of the means developed to try to manage potential and actual ethnic conflict has been federalism, initially in the form of federation and subsequently in other forms of federalism, especially asymmetrical relationships such as federacy and associated state arrangements. Among the federations designed to prevent or channel ethnic conflict (other than those in Eastern Europe discussed previously), Canada stands out as the oldest and Belgium the newest. Examples of federacy include the United States and Puerto Rico and the Netherlands and the netherlands Antillies. Examples of associated statehood include the United States and the three states of Micronesia. These forms all have their uses and each has been successful in certain situations. Today, yet another form of federalism has emerged in the effort to provide federal solutions to ethnic conflict -- the old-new form of confederation.
From the time of the adoption of the United States Constitution in the 1780's until the founding of the European Community in the 1950's the historical trend in the world for those seeking federal solutions to their regime problems was federation, that is to say, the establishment of a strong general government uniting constituent governments, all subject to a common constitution as supreme law of the land. Federations gave important functions in foreign affairs, defense, the management of the economy, taxation, among others to the federal government which exercised the powers granted it directly upon the citizenry of the federation.
In confederations, on the other hand, the constituent units are the principal exercisers of the sovereign powers of government. Together they delegate limited powers to a general government, which has to work through them in order to reach the public. After 1789, existing confederations either disappeared (as in the case of the Netherlands) or were transformed by the people into federations (as in the case of Switzerland and Germany). Throughout the nineteenth century democratic republics large and small found federation a useful way to achieve democratic unity, a trend that continued through the immediate aftermath of World War II. New federations were established in Latin America, Canada and Australia. After World War II, formal federations were established in Central and Eastern Europe as well.
A major reason for the triumph of federation was the need to reconcile constitutional powersharing with the overpowering thrust of statist nationalism whereby the nation-state became the accepted tool of political organization and expression throughout the West. European-originated statism and nationalism meant that the kind of division of powers that made confederation a useful way of linking polities in medieval times could not longer sustain itself. A federation could appear to be a single state in the international arena and could satisfy the aspirations of a common nationalism, while "inside" it maintained diversity. The fact that federalism was preserved at all as a device for political organization in the modern years of statism and nationalism, to better allow the democratic organization of political power through the combination of self-rule and shared rule, was due to the great invention of the American Founding Fathers. Their task was made easier by the fact that the people of the United States saw themselves as sharing a common American nationality which increasingly superseded local ties, but even the United States had to fight a civil war before the issue was deemed settled and a common American citizenship given preeminence.
The excesses of statism and nationalism revealed by the Fascist and Nazi movements of the interwar years weakened the Western World's commitment to nationalism per se and raised the questions about the kind of exclusivist statism that had been a feature of the modern epoch. As the world moved into a postmodern epoch, the states of Western Europe, exhausted by two world wars, sought new forms of unity in diversity, beginning tentatively with a set of treaties establishing economic linkages so that Europe could better compete in the world market. Over the next 40 years there evolved an European community, a new-style vision which consisted of a new-style confederation, as much a new political invention as the U.S. invention of federation in 1787. From the first, the vision for European unification was a federal one, crating a United States of Europe. Thus, the development of a new- style confederation has been overlooked by many. The EC was understood by functionalists and federalists alike as a way to avoid a federal solution.
The EC was designed strictly with its own needs in mind, as was the United States in 1787. In fact, it has become a pacesetter for a world in transformation where the simultaneous desire to maintain small polities, either for nationalistic or democratic reasons, and the need to be united in larger political communities for security and economic reasons had to be reconciled. The result was the emergence of tentative efforts at confederation outside of the Ec as well.
Yugoslavia, established by Tito after World War II as a Communist-dominated federation, drifted from federation to confederation after Tito's death. The unwillingness of the Serbs to acknowledge the change and embody it in a new constitution has led to the present crisis in that country whose "seceding" republics have all indicated that they are prepared to remain liked through confederation but not federation. The Islands of the West Indies, particularly the former British colonies, tried federation in the 1960's. It failed because islands are by definition insular. However, as it failed, those same islands established or preserved a series of functional authorities that united them for the purposes of economics, education, currency, administration of justice, defense and foreign relations and are slowly evolving into a confederation. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) while today still more a league, developed in response to the trends in South Asia of the 1960's, is another potential confederation.
Now in the aftermath of break-up of the Soviet Union as a centralized dictatorship masquerading as a federation, it seems that the only possible solution for it is confederation (masquerading as a commonwealth) in a form developed especially for that empire turning democratic. The overt discussion of confederation as an alternative to federation among the Soviet republics has forcefully drawn our attention to the revival of confederation as an option in the postmodern epoch. It is still too early to predict whether these arrangements will succeed as confederations, but the chances are, that the development of worldwide, multilateral linking institutions to which all nations will have to be attached in one way or another offers the opportunity for smaller nationalisms and localisms to find their place int he sun through clearcut political arrangements, still called "statehood" and "sovereignty" but with a very different meaning than those terms had during the modern epoch. The modern terms may survive but implicit within them will be federal limitations of one kind or another, somewhere between the constituent states of federations and the sovereign states recognized by modern international law.
The revival of confederation as a viable option seems to have been made possible by the development of a new constitutional technique. Federations and confederations alike must rest on written constitutional agreements that establish the terms of the federal bargain and the rules of the game; in the past, founders of both have written single comprehensive constitutional documents to do just that. New-style confederations, on the other hand, have been established through limited constitutional agreements among the partners on specific topics. The European Community pioneered this technique, beginning with the various Treaties of Rome, first establishing a coal and steel community, and then adding other areas economic and political integration, culminating thus far in the Single Europe Act. In this way, the constituting states needed only to agree on which functions they wanted to provide in common as they reached consensus, enabling them to maintain more reserved powers than in a federation. The same arrangement holds true for the West Indies Federation. The Soviet republics have embarked on the same course, initialing an agreement on economic union, that now has to be fleshed out constitutionally, and entering into negotiations with regard to some kind of defense or military unions as well. On the other hand, Yugoslavia, which tried to build confederation without establishing the necessary constitutional arrangements in this manner, has slid into civil war. This "functional" technique seems to resolve the problem of constitutional design i confederations. We have yet to see whether it can solve the problem of governance
The other difference between earlier and contemporary confederations is that the primary purpose of earlier confederations was military security, while in postmodern confederations it is economic. This shift from a concern with peace to a concern with prosperity reflects the change in the world's security situation whereby security umbrellas are provided through separate leagues and alliances, that usually embody certain confederal arrangements, though, because they are not perpetual, are not confederations. The Soviet experiment may be the exception to this. Even there, the economic issue has been placed first in the confederation process, with security second.
We are at the beginning of an exciting era of political innovation and transformation of the kind we have not seen since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The efforts to revive confederation may only prove to be steps to bloody local wars between aggressive nationalities, or they may turn out to be the first steps toward building a truly new democratic world order based on the widest possible extension of the federal principle of self-rule and shared rule.
Advances in the Political Science of Conflict Resolution
At one time these various solutions were advanced as constitutional-structural solutions first and foremost, yet in an environmental vacuum, that is to say, without any consideration of local cultural, historic or geographic factors that could substantially effect he possibilities of their success or failure. In the past generation or two political and social science have concentrated on the study of those environmental characteristics, at times even to the exclusion of constitutional and structural considerations. As a result, we have a much better sense of what constitutes ethnicity; how ethnic identities are formed or transformed; the impact of culture, particularly political culture, on political organization and behavior.
In any study of ethnicity and conflict, the concept of "ethnic community" must be defined. One such definition which provides a broad understanding is offered by Vernon Van Dyke. He defines an ethnic community as:
"A group of persons, predominantly of common descent, who think of themselves as collectively possessing a separate identify based on race or shared cultural characteristics, usually language or religion; they may or may not think of themselves as a nation a concept with stronger implications for political autonomy or independence."
This definition recognized that the roots of ethnic conflict inevitably can be traced to this condition under which different ethnic communities are forced to coexist. In most instances, existing institutions and practices have ameliorated interstate and intrastate tensions. However, with the breakdown of authoritarian regimes and the command structures that were able to successfully stifle any expression of ethnic identity, the new wave of ethnonationalism has often been expressed violently.
Cynthia Enloe has identified the most prevalent ethnic conflict management techniques. They include:
Divide and rule, an imperial technique in which the central political authority encourages various groups to consider themselves different in an attempt to minimize interaction between them. This technique was employed by the British Empire in Nigeria and Malasia.
Displacement, which, taken to an extreme, amy mean genocide, but usually entails the coercive physical movement of one group by a dominant political center. The treatment of native American by European settlers is a prime example. Sub-machines may be found at various local levels in which the leader of an ethnic community serves as the lieutenant of a larger machine boss. The ethnic community exchanges its electoral support for some particularistic reward without gaining any significant increase in power or status. Such politics have been practices in the United States, the Philippines, Malaysia and China.
Consociational democracy has similar goals as sub-machines. This device assumes an internal coherence among the various ethnic groups which allow them to select leaders to represent the group in the larger nation-state affairs. Its success is based upon cooperation among the communal leaders. Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands are often associated with this type of conflict management.
Vanguard assimilation or discriminatory regulation has been practiced by the People's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union. This strategy identifies one of the nation's ethnic community as superior in its cultural attributes. Other groups in society are encouraged to emulate the vanguard group with the promise that all will eventually share in any state-wide advances.
Federalism in one of its many forms is usually present in many states where such techniques are employed. The territorial aspects of federal arrangements usually allows explosive ethnic issues to be quarantined. The danger of such an arrangement is that the federal units may develop the resources that encourage independence movements resulting fragmentation of the nation-state. This is especially true when federal arrangements parallel ethnic population distributions. However, for a number of reasons this practice, which can be described as ethnoterritorial federalism, is rare. In many states, ethnic communities are so dispersed, so highly mobile, or so small that territorial self-rule is impossible. In other states boundaries that deliberately divide strong ethnic groups are designed to reduce smaller groups' fears.
In place of purely federal solutions, many nation-states have turned to the quasi-federal solutions of unitary grants of territory for self-rule and confederal association. The unitary grants allow states to accommodate compact ethnic communities with some measure of self-government on a less than permanent basis. The confederal association is usually applied to an asymmetrical association between a major state and a micro-territory. This arrangement ensures the junior partner some measure of home rule which might otherwise become an unviable micro-state.
One other factor that is often neglected in the attempt to explain ethnic conflict is political culture. The degree to which an ethnic community is committed to the rule of law and has developed a public or civic culture will often determine its ability to peacefully coexist or tolerate the different ethnic communities is contacts. In this regard, similarity may not be a sufficient measure. Convergence of the two or more cultures may be necessary to ensure coexistence.
Based upon this cursory examination of the elements involved in limiting ethnic conflict, it is clear that a comprehensive analysis of this issue will require some clarification and identification of the most significant practices that have succeeded or failed in reducing the incidence of ethnic violence.
Methodology
A study of the efforts to use confederation as a means of managing ethnic conflict could involve the examination of six cases of attempted use of confederation and/or confederal principles in that connection in light of the social and political environment and, most particularly, the political culture(s) involved in each case.
1) The European Community, formed by treaty between the world's original modern sovereign states, whose striving for national integration and homogeneity has served as a model for the rest of the world, but who, in the wake of World War II concluded that they had to create a supranational structure to keep the peace among them. From its treaty-like beginnings, in the course of time the EC has developed into the very model of a new-style confederation organized around functional solutions to specific problems of governance rather than an overarching general government but in that manner extending its authority so that no member-state can conceivably secede from it and survive unless all its member-states were to agree on the community's dissolution.
2) The West Indies and most especially the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean that Britain tried unsuccessfully to federate as the West Indian Federation but that, in the aftermath of the collapse of that federation, have developed a number of joint functional authorities that have brought them into a very substantial confederal relationship in all but name.
3) The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), originally established as a defensive alliance against Communist expansion via Vietnam into Southeast Asia, it has been moving slowly toward closer ties that take ont he appearance of confederal arrangements but have not yet crossed the line between a multi- national league or alliance and an institutionalized confederal union.
4) Senegambia, a formal confederation between Senegal and Gambia established in 1982 that has since broken up (1990), to be replaced by a looser set of trans-state connections.
5) The Commonwealth of Sovereign States, once the USSR, an effort on the part of 11 of the 15 former union republics of the USSR to gain both independence and a measure of unity through confederation in such a way that here will be common institutions but no center.
6) Yugoslavia, formally founded in 1944 as a federation under Communist rule, it developed into a de facto confederation of Communist-led republics by replacing one authoritarian ruling party with six. With democratization, an effort was made to constitutionalize this change but it was resisted by the old guard, especially in Serbia, leading to an entire breakdown of the federal system and civil war between the ethnic republics and the ethnic groups within several of the republics.
These cases include one great success (the EC), one partial success (the West Indies), one possible future success (ASEAN), one apparent failure (Senegambia), and two in doubt -- one (ex-USSR) seeking more integration and one Yugoslavia) engaged in limited civil war. Each of these cases will be studied following a common outline, design, and methodology to try to understand the degrees of their success or failure in managing ethnic conflict. The design will include an examination of the ethnic realities in each; the nature, extent and duration of the ethnic conflict; the environmental elements shaping that conflict; the political cultures influencing the political behavior of each of the ethnic groups involved and of the conflict as a whole; the constitutional and structural devices developed in an attempt to deal with the conflict, with special emphasis on innovative devices and the political behavior that has developed within them and in response to all the aforementioned factors.
