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Does Modernization Breed Ethnic Political Conflict?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Saul Newman
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Abstract

Until the early 1970s many scholars believed that the process of economic modernization would result in the decline of ethnic political activity throughout the world. This melting pot modernization perspective failed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. After its collapse, scholars promoted a new conflictual modernization approach, which argued that modernization brought previously isolated ethnic groups into conflict. Although this approach accounted for the origins of ethnic conflict, it relied too heavily on elite motivations and could not account for the behavior of ethnic political movements. In the last five years, scholars have tried to develop a psychological approach to ethnic conflict. These scholars see conflict as stemming from stereotyped perceptions of differences among ethnic groups. This approach fails to analyze the tangible group disparities that reinforce these identifications and that may serve as the actual catalysts for ethnic political conflict. The conflictual modernization approach is reinvigorated by applying it to the cases of ethnic conflict in Canada and Belgium. In both of these countries the twin processes of economic modernization and political centralization intensified ethnic conflict while stripping ethnic movements of the romantic cultural ideologies and institutional frameworks that could provide these movements with some long-term stability. Thus, by integrating the modernization approach with a resource mobilization perspective we can develop theories that can account for ethnic conflict throughout the world.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , April 1991 , pp. 451 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1991

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References

1 Although there were ethnic politics theories that did not come under the modernization rubric, they were certainly in the minority. In this review article I will focus on this dominant strain within the literature.

2 For a detailed discussion of these cases, see Newman, Saul, “The Ethnic Dilemma: The Rise and Decline of Ethnoregional Political Parties in Scotland, Belgium, and Quebec” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989).Google Scholar

3 Marx writes about the larger issue of consciousness flowing from the material conditions of existence; see Marx, , “The German Ideology: Part I,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 158, 159, 164, 165.Google Scholar

4 Durkheim discusses the relationship between modernization and ethnicity; see Durkheim, , The Division of Labor in Society, trans. Simpson, George (New York: Free Press, 1933)Google Scholar, chap. 6.

5 There are two caveats to this statement. Later on we will discuss one of them: the survival of dysfunctional identifications during the process of achieving a mechanically integrated society. The second relates to the possible tension between Durkheim's early writing in The Division of Labor in Society and his later The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In this second work Durkheim is less willing to predict the disappearance of a collective conscience. Nevertheless, the historical development of the ethnic politics literature has been largely dependent on Durkheim's earlier conclusions in The Division of Labor in Society.

6 The mainstream of American political science also began to reevaluate the modernization perspective as it related to the economic modernization and political development of the Third World.

7 The term “strain theory” comes from the writings of Clifford Geertz. See Apter, David E., ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964).Google Scholar

8 This version of strain theory, prevalent in the 1960s, was delineated in Neil J. Smelser, “Mechanisms of Change and Adjustment to Change,“in Hoselitz, Bert F. and Moore, Wilbert E., eds., Industrialization and Society (The Hague: UNESCO and Mouton, 1963), 41.Google Scholar

9 Melting pot modernization theorists such as Geertz had hinted at the role that modernization might play in the enhancement of ethnic conflict. Nevertheless, it was up to other scholars to state this explicitly; Geertz, , ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963).Google Scholar

Some people began to develop newer interpretations of ethnic political conflict that did not depend on the modernization paradigm. Some focused on the role of business or labor rivalries in determining ethnic conflict, while others developed a cultural pluralist model that emphasized the isolation of ethnic groups in maintaining ethnic peace. Yet the dominant interpretation of ethnic political activity remained firmly rooted in the modernization perspective.

10 A key article in this series is Connor, , “The Politics of Ethnonationalism,” Journal of International Affairs 27 (January 1973), 1—21.Google Scholar

11 See Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, chap. I.

12 Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Geertz (fn. 9).

13 Young, , The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 65.Google Scholar

14 A whole new set of theories arose out of this reformulation. Arend Lijphart lists eight approaches to explain the existence of ethnic political activity in the Western world. See Lijphart, , “Political Theories and the Explanation of Ethnic Conflict in the Western World: Falsified Predictions and Plausible Postdictions,” in Esman, Milton J., ed., Ethnic Conflict in the Western World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

15 Such explanations might logically have been derived from the rise of ethnic nationalism in the United Kingdom and Belgium. Both these states saw a rise in ethnic conflict as their empires dissolved.

16 Survey data from Scotland and Belgium indicate that the bureaucratic intelligentsia is actually underrepresented in ethnic political parties compared with the population at large. See Ivor Crewe and Bo Sarlvik, Scottish Election Study, October 1974, available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research; and Delruelle, N. et al., Citoyen belge dans le système politique (AGLOP) (Brussels: Institut Belge de science politique, 1975).Google Scholar

17 There is one notable work that avoids all of the weaknesses of the modernization approach while highlighting many of its strengths. Young (fn. 13) addresses most of the issues not analyzed by the modernization theorists. He emphasizes the role of re-created identities in politicizing ethnicity in the Third World, mobilizing mass support, and defining the direction and scope of ethnic political activity. In addition, Young also borrows from cultural pluralist arguments in highlighting the social, economic, and political relations of subordination and domination among ethnic groups in defining the direction of ethnic conflict.

The weaknesses of the ethnic modernization approach and of modernization theory in general fed the heated intellectual debate that surrounded the internal colonialism approach of Michael Hechter; see Hechter, , Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar Despite its novel approach to the relationship between modernization and ethnicity, Hechter's arguments suffer from the same weaknesses as the more mainstream modernization approaches.

18 Drucker, and Brown, , The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution (London: Longman, 1980)Google Scholar; McRoberts, Kenneth and Posgate, Dale, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crises, rev. ed. (Toronto: McClelland Stewart, 1980).Google Scholar

19 Furnivall, , Colonial Policy and Practice (London: Cambridge University Press, 1948)Google Scholar; Smith, , The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).Google Scholar

20 Relations of subordination and domination among ethnie groups had been an important component of the cultural pluralist and Marxist writings on ethnicity, as well as of the writings of Crawford Young. In the early 1980s scholars sought to categorize these relationships in the hope that they would determine the resources and strategies of new ethnic political movements. The earlier theorists had used these relations mainly to determine the conditions for the existence of ethnic political identities.

21 For a critical analysis of this school, see Rochon, Thomas R., “Political Movements and State Authority in Liberal Democracies,” World Politics 42 (January 1990), 299–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 The volume by Tiryakian and Rogowski is divided into a theoretical/methodological part and comparative case studies. Many of the theoretical articles bear little relation to each other or focus only on certain specific aspects of ethnic movements. The case studies differ in their examination of religious, ethnic, and economic factors in Catalan, Scottish, Welsh, and Quebec nationalism. Rogowski's contribution is one of the few that lays out a parsimonious theory to account for the behavior of all ethnic movements in the developed West.

23 Later in the volume Jack Brand argues that even electorally successful ethnic parties have trouble acquiring access to selective incentives. In his study of the rise of the SNP, Brand argues that the SNP could not have transformed governmental outputs into selective incentives for party members. All governmental programs were executed by the Scottish Office, an office over which the SNP had no control (Tiryakian and Rogowski, 282–83).

24 In Parts II-V of the book Horowitz uses his typology of advanced and backward regions and advanced and backward ethnic groups in unranked systems to calculate the disposition of ethnic groups to secede, the possible patterns of ethnic party conflict, the militarization of ethnic conflict, and public policy alternatives for decreasing ethnic conflict.

25 Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Mailing of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 486.Google Scholar

26 There is a large literature on the resurgence of Islam in politics since the Iranian revolution. See, for example, jomand, Said Amir Ar, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

This process of re-creation and redefinition also occurred among fundamentalist Protestants in the United States. See Speer, James A., “The New Christian Right and Its Parent Company: A Study in Political Contrasts,” in Bromley, David G. and Shupe, Anson, eds., New Christian Politics (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 19–20.Google Scholar

27 At least in the industrialized world most ethnic political movements over the last twenty-five years have not politicized religious symbols. The forthcoming pages will elaborate on this point.

28 The recent upsurge in demands for ethnoregional autonomy—the single focus of many ethnic movements—reinforces this observation. Once autonomy is considered by the national electorate, whether it is granted or not, the issue tends to lose its salience. This was the case with the autonomy movements in Scotland, Wales, Belgium, and Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s. Ethnicity did not provide a rich political agenda beyond the demand for regional autonomy.

29 Rudolph, Joseph R. and Thompson, Robert J., “Ethnoterritorial Movements and the Policy Process: Accommodating Nationalist Demands in the Developed World” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 29-May 2, 1982), 1.Google Scholar

30 See Newman (fn. 2), chap. 5.

31 Of the five parties mentioned above, the PQ and FDF serve as the most striking examples of this re-creation, which affected all five parties.

32 “Masters in our own house” was the slogan of the Parti Liberal du Quebec during the key Quiet Revolution election of 1962.

33 Brussels, the Belgian capital, is geographically located in Flanders and during the nineteenth century was a predominantly Dutch-speaking city. However, by the 1960s, 80% of the city's residents spoke French as their first language. Nevertheless, Brussels has always been legally recognized as a bilingual city. Since the 1950s the Francophone suburbs of Brussels have been extending into the countryside of Flanders, creating an “oil stain” that Dutch speakers have tried to limit through a linguistic “iron collar” around Francophone Brussels.

34 In the Third World, the paucity of opposing institutional networks and integrated ideological systems has meant that even newly re-created ethnic movements might be able to survive the obstacles that bring down ethnic political movements in the developed world.