Ethnicity in International
Conflicts:
Revisiting an Elusive Issue
Professor Victor-Yves
Ghebali,
Graduate Institute of International
Studies (Geneva), 1998
Courtesy: Center for Security Studies and Conflict
Studies
Since the end of the Cold War, the
actors which currently contribute to conflict
management (major powers, intergovernmental
organizations, NGOs), have been called to cope more and
more with intra-State conflicts, in which ethnicity
plays a prominent if not an overwhelming role, and less
and less with inter-State conflicts. Both phenomena are
certainly not new. Ethnic conflicts did erupt in the
era of bipolarity : Biafra, Burundi, etc. As to the
decline in the number of inter-State conflicts, it was
already observable in the 80's. In any event, both
categories of conflicts are now taking place in a
different world-system and reveal a somewhat different
paradigm of human violence.
The litterature on the subject has already taken
considerable proportions. In most cases, existing works
address either the issue of etiology or that of
management, or some combination of both. They seldom
enter in the field of basic definitions which are
generally taken for granted 1. The importance of
definitions here is crucial not just for the intrinsic
sake of political theory. It proceeds from an
elementary need of clarification, necessary in any
serious intellectual entreprise. It is indeed important
to define the nature of a phenomenon whose complexity
is overconfused by a fuzzy and misleading terminology.
Only after attempting a dry-cleaning of the available
intellectual tools that one could hope to come
something closer to a better understanding of conflicts
waged in the name of ethnicity.
An Epistemological Confusion in Three Acts
Ethnic conflicts of the post-Cold War
era reflect the phenomenon of ethnonationalism. So, a
preliminary question arises : what is the relationship
between nationalism and ethnonationalism ? But such a
distinction requires a clear understanding of the
meaning of the basic concepts of "nation" and "ethny",
as well as their epistemological interelationships.
Both concepts are extraordinary elusive not only from a
common (or popular) angle, but also from a social
science point of view. The concept of "nation" is
interchangeably used with at least four other basic
terms : "people", "State", "race" and... "ethny" 2. As
to the concept of "ethny", it belongs to those very
notions which "nobody knows what they mean" 3. A recent
interdisciplinary debate on "Ethnic nationalism and the
World Systemic Crisis" has confirmed to what extent
scholars use the same terms with different meanings and
the impossibility of generally agreed definitions in
this field 4.
All the basic words of our contemporary political
vocabulary derive from Ancient Greece and Rome. The
Greeks used different terms to cover the concept of
"people" under its respective political, social and
anthropological angles : demos referred to the citizens
acting as political body, while laos labelled the lower
classes (or sometimes a community of warriors) and
ethnos. The latter served as an umbrella term
designating inter alia a Greek or a non-Greek community
of human beings having developed a post-tribal
collective identity and living together into some kind
of socio-political organization on the basis of (true
or imagined) common descent. On that basis, an
expanding epistemological confusion developed so to
speak in three acts.
The seeds of confusion (or Act I) can be traced back to
the Romans which, alike the Greeks, made use of
different terms to qualify the notion of "people".
Referring to the whole body of citizens, populus was by
and large symetrical to demos. In the same vein, plebs
(which designated the citizens not enjoying a status of
patricians) roughly corresponded to laos. As to the the
greek word ethnos, its counterparts were gens , natio
and even... populus itself. It is worthwile noting that
the Romans did never consider themselves as a natio (a
term reserved to non-Roman persons established outside
their homeland, i.e in the Roman Empire) 5, but as as
populus (citizens of a civitas). Later on, under
Christianity, the Fathers of the Church popularized the
term ethne to designate (in plural form) pagan persons
and groups - thus transforming the initial
anthropological meaning of ethnos into a marker of a
religious boundary.
Under the Romans, populus (etymology unknown), gens
(group of people identified by a collective name) and
natio (connoting birth) were thus undiscriminately used
to refer to a same reality 6. Of all those
interchangeable words, it was natio - leading to nation
- which finally prevailed after the fall of the Roman
Empire. Over time, the word nation signified just the
population of a given country, peoples living on the
same territory under a single political authority
irrespective of their origin. Between the XVIIth the
XVIIIth century, a narrower and aristocratical sense
however prevailed : the use of nation was restricted to
the upper classes of the society and people (a word
directly deriving from populus) to the lower classes 7.
Until the French Revolution, the concept of nation kept
its elitist connotation, beside the technical term of
State which referred to the socio-political form of
organization encompassing both the nation and the
people.
Performing Act II, the French Revolution and its
aftermath epitomized the initial confusion by
introducing four new and far-reaching parameters.
First, it created a systemic link between the concepts
of people, nation and State by upgrading the first one
as the supreme entity and considering the two others
respectively as its soul (nation) and flesh (State).
Second, it sacralized the people by enshrining in it
the exclusive source of political legitimacy. Third, it
established a direct connection between the nation and
democracy by proclaiming that the Nation represented
the whole of the people with no social exclusion.
Finally, it defined the national link as a kind of
social contract concluded between all the members of
the nation as willing individuals. As a result of this
intermingling, people, nation and State became largely
equivalent in practice : hence the claim of modern
States to portray themselves as Nation-States.
In reaction to the French Revolution's ideology, an
antagonistic conception soon emerged. Pionered by the
German philosopher Fichte, it defined the nation as a
collective entity of a biological (and not of a
contractual) nature which, by definition, could only be
superior to the will of all of its constituent
elements. It argued that a Nation is a natural grouping
composed of peoples linked by the objective, affective
and irreversible bond of common blood stemming from
mere birth.
In this epistemological space, the extraneous concept
of race found propitious ground. Initially, this
concept purported two meanings. The first was just
classificatory : sort, kind, category - of anything
(peoples, objects, etc.). The second had to do with
genetics, since it connoted the idea of family,
lineage, descent, generation and so forth. Beginning
with the XVIth century, a social dimension was injected
into the concept : race served to differentiate social
classes and to legitimize (particularly in France)
social inequality by interpreting the latter as a
consequence of the supremacy of the victorious
conquering "Germanic race" over the defeated
"Gallo-Roman race". In the Enlightment era, an
additional function was attributed to the same concept,
that of describing the subvarieties of humankind on the
basis of purely morphological differences (color of the
skin, size of the head, etc.). Following the
considerable development of philology, European
intellectual elites considered language as the
determinant factor of the "race" of nations, thus
regrettably amalgamating the two concepts. In sum, by
the XIXth century, there were two competing visions of
the nation : a contractual version praising the
subjective will of the individuals (flamboyantly
conceptualized by Ernest Renan in the 1880's) and a
biological version emphasizing the fatality of birth,
blood and genes 8.
Act III, or the acme of the epistemological mess, was
reached at the end of the XIXth century when a French
sociologist (Georges Vacher de Lapouge), forged the
term ethnie . The aim of that neologism was to qualify
nations which although composed of different races
formed, under the vissicitudes of history, coherent
entities and whose members developed a genuine national
solidarity 9. Actually, ethnie did not add any
substantial innovation in regard to the pre-existing
concepts of people, nation or race. Despite (or perhaps
because of) its fuzziness, that neologism found
different uses in the French language. Within the
framework of the disciplin of ethnology (before the
latter's transmutation into "anthropology"), it served
to describe the peoples of "primitive" or "archaic"
non-Western societies. Moreover, some authors retained
it to qualify group of peoples linked by a linguistic
bond. Others just used it as a mere synonym for race
and nowadays it represents a politically-correct
substitute for the discredited (biological) concept of
race. In the English-speaking world, ethnicity appeared
in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary .
As to ethnie, it was popularized as late as 1986, with
the works of the British sociologist Anthony Smith.
Since modern biologists have demonstrated that the
concept of race is scientifically unfit to the human
species, its equation with that of ethnie became
equally invalid. So, the remaining question is : what
are the exact difference (if any) between ethnie and
nation ? Anthony Smith defines the ethnie as "a named
human population with a myth of common ancestry, shared
historical memories, elements of shared culture, and
association with a specific homeland and a measure of
solidarity" and the Nation as " a named human
population inhabiting an historic territory and sharing
commom myths and historical memories, a mass, public
culture, a common economy and common legal rights and
duties for all members". Both definitions present
indeed considerable similarities.
Anthony Smith differentiates the two
concepts in the following way : "historically, the
nation is a sub-variety and development of the ethnie,
though we are not dealing with some evolutionary law of
progression, nor with some necessary or irreversible
sequence. While the ethnie is an historical culture
community, the nation is a community mass, public
culture, historic territory and legal rights. In other
terms, the nation shifts the emphasis of community away
from kinship and cultural dimensions to territorial,
educational and legal aspects, while retaining links
with older cultural myths and memories of the ethnie "
10. In brief, the ethnie could be considered as the
primordial form of the nation : the proto-nation. As
such, it represents the basic cultural unit of human
diversity predating the nation - the latter being the
modern version of the archaic ethnie.
Ethnonationalism : a Complex Variant of
Nationalism
Being a specific variant of
nationalism, ethnonationalism shares with it a set of
common features. However, it also presents important
qualitative differences which makes it appear as a much
more complex phenomenon than traditional
nationalim.
First, ethnonationalism reflects a clearly regressive
phenomenon. Assuming that the ethnie is the archaic
version of the nation, we have to admit that
ethnonationalism represents a revival of trends
supposedly eradicated by modernity. Indeed, in a number
of cases, those who ignite ethnic conflicts seem to
have been driven by an overwhelming nostalgia towards a
mythical era where the national community was (or just
supposed to be) a kinship group. Accordingly, they
endeavoured to deconstruct the existing Nation-State to
which they belong with no whatsoever regard to
modernity assets such as citizenship, economic
benefits, external national prestige, etc. In short,
contrary to nationalism, ethnonationalism is not the
product of modernity but a late resilience to
modernity, a counter-reaction to its most advanced
forms.
Second, ethnonationalism often presents so high a
degree of emotionality and non-rationality that it
would not be excessive to analyze it with the
vocabulary of psychiatry. A number of post-Cold War
ethnic conflicts seem to have follow a comparable
pathological general pattern. Their starting point has
been the self-overestimation of the collective identity
of a given ethnic group which asserts that its
specificity is so unique that it makes coexistence in
the same Nation-State with others not possible
anylonger, all the more that its collective identity is
lethally threatened by a coalition of internal and
external foes. In line with that creed, which has to do
with narcissism and paranoia and which allows it to
pose itself as a victim or martyr, the igniting group
demonizes one or several other ethnic groups living
with him on the same politico-territorial unit.
Resenting henceforth physical cohabitation as
intolerable promiscuity, it arrives at the imperative
necessity of restoring a mythical stage of initial
ethnic purity - thus adding phobia and delirium on the
list of symptoms 11. Two cases are particularly
illustrative in this connection : the suicide of
Yugoslavia and the deconstruction of Georgia's national
unity and territorial integrity.
The process which led Tito's Yugoslavia to
disintegration began by the ethnonationalistic
overestimation of the Serbs accompanied by a
concomitant demonization of the Albanians of Kosovo,
the Croats and the Muslims. The first group was accused
of commiting a "permanent genocide" in what represented
nothing else than the historical craddle of the Serbian
nation. The second was recalled the massacres
perpetrated by the Ustasha movement during the Second
World War and also pilloried for the "forceful cultural
assimilation" of the Serb populations now living in
Croatia. The third was charged with the dual guilt of
"islamic fundamentalism" and anti-Christian Orthodoxy.
Furthermore, the Serbs denounced a "world plot"
directed against the Serbian nation by a coalition
associating higgledy-piggledy Germany, the Holy See and
the islamic fundamentalist States. The upsurge of
Serbian ethnonationalism resulted in awakening or
exacerbating the ethnonationalistic feelings of the
others peoples and communities of Yugoslavia.
Although less complex in nature and deriving from a
different problematique, the Georgian case is by and
large comparable to Yugoslavia's. On the eve of the
collapse of the USSR, Georgia's population included
some 30% of ethnic minorities mainly concentrated in
the Autonomous Republics of Adzharia and Abkhazia as
well as in the Autonomous Region (Oblast) of South
Ossetia. The Soviet power created and amalgamated such
entities within Georgia in order to control (and
actually neutralize) Georgian nationalism. When Georgia
proclaimed independence (1991), it immediately
proceeded, under the leadership of an ethnationalist
President (Zviad Gamsakhourdia) to eradicate the
consequences of fifty years of unwanted russification
and to promote Georgian national identity at the
expense of its linguistic and religious minorities 12.
The uncompromising attitude of the Georgian leadership,
opposed to any constructive dialogue with minorities
accused of playing the game of the former coloniser,
fueled ethnotionalistic feelings (hitherto dormant or
rampant) in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Eventually, and
amidst bloodsheds including "ethnic cleansing", both
regions seceded from Georgia13.
Third, and even more importantly, ethnonationalism can
generate "total conflicts" involving a particularly
high degree of human barbarity. At the individual
level, this can be explained by the fact that in such
type of conflict "everyone is automatically labelled a
combatant - by the identity they possess - even if they
are not" 14. At the collective level, the main reason
is that the igniting group considers itself as engaged
into a life-or-death struggle, making its survival
dependent upon the total destruction of the other(s)
ethnic group(s). The argument of "salvation through
ethnic purification" helps it legitimize the inhumanity
of its war methods against harmless and helpless
civilian populations. As a general rule, conflicts
waged in the name of ethnonationalism illustrate the
appalling axiom that humankind is not supposed to exist
beyond the boundaries of the ethnie 15. Suffice it to
recall here that the "ethnic cleansing" which took
place in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) was not the
consequence but the very objective of one (and
partially two) of the warring parties.
The abovementioned considerations show that
ethnonationalism is a much more problematic phenomenon
than traditional nationalism. However, they do not help
to explain the etiology of ethnonationalism which could
be accounted for, fundamentally, to the collapse of the
Nation-State or at least to a significant weakening of
the Nation-State as the basic unit of socio-political
and cultural governance.
Ethnic conflicts of the post-Cold War period have
generally been encouraged by the inability of the
Nation-State to perform its fundamental natural
functions as the overriding source of law and order,
economic prosperity, social justice and collective
identity. Its inability can be attributable to two main
factors (or a combination of both) : on the one hand,
the side-effects of the demise of the Cold War
aggravated by the progress of world economic
globalization; on the other hand, the
instrumentalization of ethnicity by national elites in
favour of specific political agendas.
The general trend in favour of democracy and political
pluralism, generated by the end of bipolarity, raised
high expectations among the populations of many States
(especially multiethnic ) of the Third World. But,
being often artificial entities and whose main support
came from the outside world for purely strategic
reasons, those States (plagued by corruption,
inefficiency as well as political, economic and
cultural discrimination against minorities) proved
unsurprisingly unable to deliver. At the same time, the
general breakdown of law and order, following the fall
of authoritarian regimes, concurred to undermine what
was still left of the States' legitimacy and
credibility. As to globalization, it did not only
reveal the decline and structural shortcomings of the
State in a world economic system. Its actual and
high-potential homogenizing cultural effects incited
social groups to feel that collective identity was at
risk, pushing them in a quest for new "imagined
communities" : "because of its ability (even better
than the state) to mimic the kinship and thus provide
the identity, security and authority epitomised in the
family bond", the most obvious candidate for that
purpose could only be the ethnie 16. Offerring both
refuge and salvation, ethnicity plays in such cases the
role of a protective shield.
However, the manifestations of ethnonationalism are not
always spontaneous and/or highly irrational. Sometimes,
ethnic conflicts are just or basically ethnicized
conflicts, that is to say conflicts inspired by
perfectly rational purposes but waged (with the
privileged support of medias and transnational ethnic
diasporas) in the name of irrational values. Ethnicized
conflicts are easier to understand, but raise the
puzzling problem of "why do followers follow " ? 17. In
any event, ethnicity serves here as an offensive
weapon. In this connection, three cases of post-Cold
War ethnicized conflicts are worth mentioning :
Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Trandniestria.
The instrumentalization of ethnicity appears
particularly blatant in the Yugoslav case. Beyond
undeniable shortcomings and flaws, the Federal
Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia constituted a viable
political entity. Its deconstruction was not the
product of necessity but of strategy, the strategy of
political leaders less driven by irrational
ethnonationalistic feelings than by rational power
motives. Endorsing the paranoid paraphernalia of an
intellectuals' manifesto (1986 Memorandum of the Serb
Academy of Sciences and Arts), Slobodan Milosevic
deliberately ethnicized the problems of the Serbian
regions of Kosovo, Voividina and Sanjak as well the
relations of Serbia with the other Republics of the
Yugoslav Federation. To a lower degree, but with the
same devastating consequences, Franjo Tudjman practiced
a comparable game in Croatia through the ethnicization
of the relations of his Republic with Serbia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In a nutshell, Tito's Yugoslavia
disintegrated under the combined blows of
ethnonationalism and ethnicization . Partaking with
ethnicity, the conflict between Serbs and Albanians in
Kosovo is certainly of an ethnic (or preferably
inter-ethnic) nature. But in Bosnia-Herzegovina it was
rather intra-ethnic. The conflict did not oppose
different ethnies : Serbs, Croats and Muslims are
branches of a same ethnie (Slav) speaking the same
language; they only differ from the point of view of
religion - hitherto a veneer, religion as distinctive
factor was overmagnified for the circumstance.
In Rwanda, contrary to current popular beliefs, there
is just one ethnie : the Rwandans. Although initially
coming from different origins (as in the case of
practically all Nation-States), Tutsis, Hutus and Twas
speak the same language, practice the same religion and
claim the same mythical common ancestor. It must be
stressed that the basic distinction between Tutsis and
Hutus (not counting the Twas who represent 1% of the
global population) has traditionally been
socio-economic and not ethnic. The Tutsis formed the
wealthy minoritary ruling elite. Tutsis who loose their
cattle could be downgraded to a Hutu status, while
Hutus who acquire cattle could be upgraded to a Tutsi
status. In any event, mixed marriages were not
infrequent betwen Tutsis and Hutus.
For the practical purposes of colonial
administration, the Germans and more particularly the
Belgians (when they took over) ethnicized this
traditional socio-economic cleavage of the Rwandese
society. Accordingly, the Tutsis were legitimized as
proxy rulers of Rwanda on the ground of an alleged
"racial superiority" over the Hutus. When, in the
1950's the Tutsis began to claim independence, the
Belgians re-instrumentalized ethnicity in the other way
around. In order to slow down the decolonization
process as long as possible, they supported the Hutus'
claims for power-sharing and transformed a basically
political problem into a fierce ethnic antagonism.
Since then, and though forming a single ethnie, Tutsis
and Hutus have been ruthlessly hating each other in the
name of purely "imagined communities" 18.
The conflict about Transdniestria also belongs to the
category of ethnicized conflicts. It opposes the
government of Moldova to the Russian-speaking
inhabitants of the left bank of Dniestr forming, since
September 1991, a self-proclaimed Republic. The latter
includes only a small part (25%) of the total
Russian-speaking population of Moldova : indeed, 75%
russian-speaking people live on the right bank with no
real coexistence problem with the romanian-speaking
population. Actually, the separatists were
predominantly former privileged Soviet officials or
military officers. Secession took place through
bloodshed not (as they alleged) for ethnicity, but for
political and ideological motives : the initial
intentions of the Moldovan leadership (totally out of
order today) to integrate the country to Romania bore
the risk of putting an end to a cherished communist
lifestyle and a host of appreciable privileges 19.
Conclusion
Whether spontaneous or
instrumentalized, inter-ethnic or intra-ethnic,
conflicts erupting from the obscure nebula of ethnicity
raise for international collective management at least
two main sets of problems.
In such conflicts, traditional stakes (political,
economic, strategic, etc.) decisively outweigh symbolic
stakes. International mediators cannot expect to deal
here with political actors driven by fairly rational
motives, concerned by the opportunity-cost of their
goals or ready to embark in a give-and-take diplomatic
process. While this holds fully true for ethnic
conflicts, ethnicized conflicts offer however some room
for manoeuver. Provided that the mastermind is still in
charge, compromises are not totally out of reach, as
proved for instance by the 1995 Dayton agreement which
put a military end to the ethnicized conflict
devastating Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1992.
Those conflicts are also particularly difficult to
manage because their protagonists are mostly non-State
actors : paramilitary groups, factions, dissident
sub-clans, warlords, etc. Non-State actors are not
vulnerable to traditional diplomatic pressure.
Furthermore, they do not feel bound to respect not only
the most basic rules of international law, but also
those of international humanitarian law. As previously
said, humankind is not supposed to exist beyond the
boundaries of the ethnie. The present record of the
post-Cold War practice tends to suggest that
intra-ethnic conflicts (which represents the most
sophisticated form of a nations'self-destruction)
degenerate into genocides more easily than inter-ethnic
conflicts.
1 For a laudable,
although inconclusive, exception see Fred W. RIGGS :
"Glossary of Terms Used in this Issue", International
Political Science Review, Vol. 19, No 3, 1998, pp.
311-330.
2 Walter CONNOR : "A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is
an Ethnic Group is a ...", Ethnic and Racial Studies,
Vol. 1, No 4, October 1978, pp. 377-400.
3 Pierre HASSNER : "Beyond Nationalism and
Internationalism : "Ethnicity and World Order",
Survival, Vol. 35, No 2, Summer 1993, p. 49. In the
20's, Max Weber himself recognized that this concept
was "unsuitable for a really rigorous analysis" because
it simply "dissolves" when submitted to definition (The
Ethnicity Reader. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and
Migration. Edited by Montserrat GUIBERNAU and John REX.
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997, p. 24).
4 International Political Science Review, Vol. 19, No
3, 1998.
5 Guido ZERNATTO : "Nation : The History of a Word",
The Review of Politics, Vol. 6, 1944, p. 352.
6 This confusion is particularly striking in such
famous works as Tacitus' Germania.
7 In De l'Esprit des Lois (chapter XXVIII.9),
Montesquieu significantly restricted the French Nation
just to the "lords and bishops".
8 The two visions did not reflect a clear-cut
French/German opposition. Supporters of the vision
based on biology could be found in France (Joseph de
Maistre, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, etc.) as
well as in Germany (Fichte, Herder, Schelling...).
9 Georges VACHER DE LAPOUGE : Les Sélections
Sociales. Paris, Fontemoing, 1986, pp. 9-10.
10 Anthony D. SMITH : "A Europe of Nations - or the
Nations of Europe ?", Journal of Peace Research, Vol.
30, No 2, May 1933, p. 130.
11 François THUAL : Les conflits identitaires.
Paris, Ellipses, 1995, pp. 6, 39-40 and 174.
12 The Ossetians do not speak a Caucasian but an
Indo-European language. As to the the Abkhaz, they are
a Caucasian people, but partly Muslim.
13 For more details on the Georgian conflicts, see
Victor-Yves GHEBALI : L'OSCE dans l'Europe
Post-Communiste, 1989-1996. Vers une Identité
Paneuropéenne de Sécurité. Brussels,
Bruylant, 1996, pp. 271& ff.
14 John CHIPMAN : "Managing the Politics of
Parochialism", Survival, Vol. 35, No 1, Spring 1993, p.
146.
15 In his Structural Anthropology II , Claude
Levi-Strauss actually wrote that "humankind stops at
the boundaries of the tribe".
16 David BROWN : "Why is the Nation-State So Vulnerable
to Ethnic Nationalism ?", Nations and Nationalism, Vol.
4, No 1, 1998, p. 13.
17 See Michael E. BROWN : "The Causes of Internal
Conflict. An Overview", Nationalism and Ethnic
Conflict. Edited by Michael E. BROWN and others.
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997, pp. 20-23.
18 On this complex question see the standard work by
Gerard PRUNIER : Rwanda, 1959-1996. Histoire d'un
Génocide. Paris, Dagorno, 1997, 514 p (available
in english translation ).
19 For more details on this conflict, see GHEBALI :
L'OSCE dans l'Europe Post-Communiste, 1989-1996, op.
cit., pp. 289 & ff.
