Extremism and Ethnicity Part II - The Challenge: Institutional Arrangements That Accompany Political Participation
In the second part of this six part series, Roland Benedikter claims that fighting extremism worldwide needs institutional solutions for ethnically problematic areas that regulate the rights of minorities by law and support their participation in the political processes.
ISIS is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rise of the political intersection between ethnic and religions factors. Ethnicity and ethnic nationalism continue to be decisive factors in global conflicts. As was presented at the 20th Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) World Convention at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute on April 23-25, 2015, ethnic nationalisms will continue to be major shaping force of conflicts and the respective processes around the world seeking political solutions, including the fight against ISIS and the subsequent and crucially necessary reconciliation process between Sunnis and Shiites.
However, the ethnic problem in Iraq is not limited to the Sunni-Shia divide, but even more multifaceted and complex. Iraq features not just two ethnic and religious groups, but around twenty, as well as hundreds of tribes partly related and partly opposed to each other, with some groups living close together and sometimes even mixed into each other as is the case in the greater Mosul area. This close proximity challenges conflict solution and policy approaches to become even more multidimensional and inclusive. If, as Singapore National University’s Walker Connor has pointed out following Max Weber, a community is not merely an economic or political construct, but rather a matter of group psychology,
“a vivid sense of sameness or oneness of kind, which, from the perspective of the group, sets it off from all other groups in a most vital way, (and) this sense or consciousness of kind is derived from a myth of common descent (where) members of a nation feel or intuitively sense that they are related to one another,”
then most of the more than a dozen ethnic minorities living on Iraqi soil will have difficulties to feel to be full part of an Iraqi nation dominated by centralistic mechanisms and the Shia majority who – in accordance with democratic rules - controls them. Connor’s colleague Huang Wei has pointed out that there is an intricate relationship between state-building and the rise of separatist ethno-nationalism:
“(There are) dynamics between state-building and ethno-nationalism... State-building, which intends to assure and expand its power, provides opportunity for ethno-nationalism to grow, and even more, for ethnic political movements to occur. The shift in the state policy affects the cognitive framework of the minority people, provides sustainable resource to the movement, and offers space for social movement organizations to surface. (In this sense), state-building produces some unintended results.”
This is exactly what happened after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, the attempt of the West, other democracies and international bodies like the U.N. to build a “new Iraq” by betting on individualistic democracy, and the unintended result of a rather unilateral seizure of power by the Shiite majority under the al-Maliki government who didn’t take sufficiently into account the rights and needs of other ethnic groups, in particular the Sunnis. The failure of the al-Maliki government to integrate other ethnic groups and to reconcile tribes and central government in the framework of state-building has in the meantime been generally recognized by the majority of international analyses as one key factor in the rise of ISIS.
In response, there have been varying approaches of the West to address the ethnicity issue—with rather poor results so far. The West mainly attempted to stress the ideas of individualism, citizenship and equal personal rights of all citizens under the rule of law guaranteed by the state, independent of ethnic affiliation, for pacifying tribal and group conflicts—thus consciously and unconsciously transferring its own model of individualistic democracy to a widely different context like Iraq. Such an approach might be successful in urban areas to some extent. But it is too weak to overcome century-old tribal, ethnic and religious animosities in the areas outside the big centers. Here, the institutionalization of group rights in addition to individual rights has to be taken into consideration. This is something that hasn’t been considered sufficiently, let alone practically implemented, in the past. Why?
One problem in the failure of ethnic reconciliation in Iraq was and remains to the present day that the democratic powers of the West have one of their blind spots exactly in how to implement, institutionalize, and legally protect group rights, i.e. ethnicity. This is because modern Western democracy—on its own soil, in the foundations of its culture, and in the heart of its civil religion—is all about overcoming group logics and interests, as well as group histories and affiliations, for the sake of forward-oriented individuality, equality and freedom. As Patrick J. Buchanan rightly already commented years ago,
“The larger issue here is the enduring power of ethno-nationalism—the drive of ethnic minorities—to break free and create their own (structures and spaces), where their faith, culture and language are predominant…. (But) (the Western) elite regard(s) (ethnic nationalism) an irrelevancy, an obsession only of the politically retarded.”
While the whole story is much more complex and multifaceted than this, the “natural” aspiration of the modern Western democracies to overcome group rights in favor of individual rights is without doubt one of the greatest assets achieved in the history of mankind. But in Iraq, it is paradoxically also a part of the problem, because modern democracy has an almost instinctive – and perfectly understandable - reluctance to institutionalize ethnic rights as basic parts of the constitution and as pillars of the functioning of the state. The conviction of the West that ethnic nationalism is essentially a thing of the past that has to be overcome by modern free nations, while in principle right and progressive, also has its shortcomings under certain settings and viewpoints. These problems are not only, but also not least due to the (again, perfectly understandable and in principle positive) removal of ethnic issues from the Western social and (as far as possible) political agenda in favor of individual rights. The large territories for which thousands of soldiers have bled and died in Iraq, the longest war in U.S. history after Afghanistan, have been lost within just a few months to open democracies worst enemy also because of the notorious incapacity of modern individual-centered democracies to deal with ancient tribal logics (and thus ethnicity issues) in more effective ways.
Indeed, it may be a side note of history, but ethno-nationalism has been without doubt one of the few blind spots of the more recent democratic international policy. And it remains an under-developed field of expertise among its elites. The reason is that the whole modern democratic mindset, as well as its founding mythology, is about overcoming ethnic provenance and affiliation in order to build nations made of basically all the ethnic groups that exist in the world, and thus necessarily individuality-centered. Modern democracy is an experiment, a first in history, in overcoming ethnic and cultural heritage, an experiment of a society that conceives itself as a “united humanity.” This has made - with good reasons - Western leadership somewhat hesitant to help ethnic groups develop autonomies within existing nation states, and in post-dictatorial Iraq it has contributed, together with the remembrance of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-centered regime and the trend to avoid its return, to the negligence of Sunni interests by Western leaders.
One example of Western problems when dealing with ethno-nationalism was the emblematic essay by Catholic University’s Jerry Z. Muller, “Us and Them” (2008), hailed by some Western critics and experts as the “new article x” for the multipolar global era. According to Muller the best solution for ethnic conflicts, particularly in areas where different ethnic groups live mixed in a confined space, is to make a clean cut in order to divide the groups. The goal, according to Muller—to some extent still echoing Woodrow Wilson’s idea of “self-determination” from the era following World War I—should be to create an as much as possible ethnically “clean” nation state for each and every group for itself by moving numbers of population, if necessary, thus splitting existing ethnic “aggregates” in the hope of ending conflict once and for all. Muller clearly prefers an end in terror to a terror without end. Ethnic partition, in his view, may prove to be the smaller evil in the end than ethnic groups mixed into each other and thus in permanent micro- and meso-conflict with each other. Or in his own words:
“Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue. The challenge for the international community in such cases is to separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption. The bill for all of this will be huge, but it will rarely be greater than the material costs of interjecting and maintaining a foreign military presence large enough to pacify the rival ethnic combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing.”
That doesn’t mean that Muller’s to some extent highly problematic approach is sustained by the U.S., Western or democratic governments in any way. The contrary – explicitly and actively – is the case, and has always programmatically been. It means though that there has been a trend in Western theory that reflects the limits of Western policy with regard to the outstanding complexities of ethnic nationalisms on the ground.
Truth is that, while of good intentions, Muller’s is an approach that is contra-productive and has produced no good in history. Most important, such an approach wouldn’t solve the problems of ethnicity in Iraq. Actually, it would just transfer the existing problem to a smaller level, splitting the nation into pieces of which each and every one would then have its own new minorities. Partition of ethnicities has led to the multiplication of states during the past century without necessarily improving the overall conflict situation. And while, when it comes to ethno-nationalism, every single case is different and lessons from one case can’t simply be transferred to another, it is hardly imaginable that the ideas of “partition” could lead to any progress in today’s Iraq, let alone help to defeat ISIS. Since Muller’s solution is certainly not applicable on the ground, the only alternative such a theoretic approach would suggest in practice would be be to leave everything as it is, since a “once and for all” policy rarely foresees intermediate perspectives. Yet the motto: A “clean home” for everybody is not appropriate to ethnically mixed and conflicting areas, and to think only within the parameters of ethnically unified spaces, be they large (Iraq) or small (the Sunni areas around Tikrit), is not helpful to find more complex differentiation and integration mechanisms.
Not few in the West in the past years seemed to share this in reality simplistic and reductionistic approach to ethno-nationalism. It manifested in poor information collection and occasionally in disinterest for the seemingly over-complicated details of ethnic conflict areas on the ground. It is not surprising, then, that many “gurus” of political anticipation broadly overlooked the ethno-nationalism issue not only with regard to Iraq, but in their overall analyses; in any case underestimated its practical importance for the future of the fight against extremism.
To find more appropriate approaches, what is needed to pacify former ISIS areas, to keep them peaceful after the victory, and to develop them towards greater participation in national issues is to emancipate, protect and status-upgrade the over twenty ethnicities in Iraq (and potentially Syria) not only diplomatically, but also institutionally. This means to do exactly what the Pentagon Report on ISIS of July-November 2014 suggested: to give them local and regional self-administration and territorial—not purely ethnic!—autonomies of varying degree, extent and quality according to the different concrete individual contexts on the ground. Local and regional cultures as a mix of habits and beliefs have eventually to be taken seriously by institutionalizing aspects of them in a reformed Iraqi constitution more inclined to integrate those who are not part of the majority, and to respect tribal and group logics alongside individual rights.
This could occur according to what internationally is probably best proven model of ethnic pacification through local and regional autonomization: the model of the autonomous province of South Tyrol in Northern Italy on the border of Austria. The model was presented by Italy’s minister of Foreign Affairs Paolo Gentiloni on February 11, 2015 as an universal model for ethnic conflict resolution and by Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi on March 5, 2015 as the best model for ethnic conflict areas. The South Tyrol model of ethnic pacification is currently also under discussion to be adapted for areas as different as East Ukraine, Chechnya, the West Sahara in Marocco, or Tibet. This broad discussion on the other hand suggests that the South Tyrol model can’t be simply taken as it is and transferred to other realities, but that it should be studied carefully in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and then customized in a process involving those directly affected by it, in order to fit specific local context.
To be continued…
Roland Benedikter is Research Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara. The author thanks Victor Faessel, Phd, Program Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), for advising on this text. Part 1 can be found here.
