Translated material
Michael Mandelbaum. The future of nationalism
Part 3
Michael Mandelbaum
Date of publication: September 26, 2000
"Community Democracies"
1The main candidate for mitigating all types of conflict is economic growth. Material prosperity is usually seen as a powerful remedy for all political ills and illnesses, as a kind of miraculous healer of social and economic ills. Of course, it has some healing properties. Prosperous countries, all other things being equal, live in greater harmony and harmony than countries stricken by poverty. When the economic climate becomes harsh, minorities, whether they contributed to the economic disaster or not, become the target of anger, discrimination and persecution by the majority. What is happening is what the Chinese faced in Indonesia when the Asian financial crisis hit the country in 1997 and 1998, and what Jews in Europe have had the misfortune of experiencing for centuries. From the point of view of social harmony, economic activity in itself is beneficial, since it requires cooperation, and therefore contributes to its development, including cooperation of an international and interethnic nature.
However, while prosperity may cause the erosion of national and ethnic divisions, it cannot eradicate conflict-generating grievances where different nations inhabit the same state. Moreover, economic growth cannot be created to order.
In the post-Cold War era, the political equivalent of prosperity is democracy: something universally seductive if not universally desirable, some source of all goods, a necessary part of the social programs of every sovereign state, new and old. The social attitudes and institutions needed to resolve conflicts in sovereign states are commonplace in Western democracies but are largely absent elsewhere. These include tolerance, ample opportunities for effective political participation and social space for the expression of cultural differences. But Western democracies are liberal democracies that combine majority rule with constitutional and cultural protection for minorities. Liberal or constitutional democracy is a system that defines how government is elected and specifies what it can and cannot do with the power vested in it. The first feature of the system empowers the majority, while the second protects minorities. However, it is quite possible to have the former without the latter, and democracies that are illiberal may exacerbate rather than alleviate ethnic tensions when those democracies lack well-established political institutions and practices. In such states, political competition is especially intense, and nationalism here becomes the most promising material from which political appeals can be modeled. Those who vie for power find it advantageous to arouse or provoke fears among the majority that their rightful goods are being diminished or destroyed, or are at risk of destruction by the minority 2 .
Even the successful establishment of liberal constitutional democracy may not ensure harmony where different nations coexist in one state. The constitutions of major Western democracies protect the political rights of individuals. However, national minorities require constitutional protection for the groups. Instead of dividing territory, they seek to divide sovereignty. The corresponding models are the small states of Western Europe (Belgium, Holland, Austria), whose constitutional structures are focused precisely on this result.
The carefully designed form of power sharing practiced in each of these countries has several distinctive features: close cooperation between elites of various groups, often carried out within the framework of a single ruling "grand coalition" in the national parliament; giving each group veto power on issues of immediate importance to them; proportional representation in parliament and government bodies; and a high degree of autonomy for each group to resolve its own internal problems.
Such institutions and norms of life took root on a special political basis, which, alas, is not widespread. Community Democracies 3 are small and rich. Within the borders of these democracies, values such as tolerance, compromise and non-violence are firmly established. Outside Western Europe, this approach to sovereignty has a poor track record: it collapsed after a period of success in Lebanon and was rejected when proposed in Cyprus. Yugoslavia, which failed to survive the end of the Cold War, had several features that explained its collapse. Establishing community democracy is like transplanting a human organ: it is a delicate and difficult operation that can only be successful if the recipient is otherwise in good health.
The chances of success do not increase much when third countries take care of protecting the political prerogatives and cultural preferences of national minorities. The Paris Peace Conference after the First World War produced relevant agreements that were applied to the new states of Eastern Europe that had significant national minorities. They obliged the governments that signed the agreements to grant minorities the right to collective organizations and respect their religious and cultural characteristics. Violations of agreements could be appealed to the League of Nations, which in theory was the agent to enforce them. But the League did not fulfill its function. Britain and France were supposed to take responsibility for implementing the agreements, but neither country was willing to do so.
The recent constitution for Bosnia, drawn up at the 1995 Dayton Conference, resembles community agreements. It provides for a very weak central Bosnian government and retains primary power in two constitutional units - the Serbian republic and the Muslim-Croat unity. Although NATO troops are stationed in Bosnia, they are monitoring the ceasefire rather than enforcing Dayton's controversial agreements, such as arresting war crime suspects or guaranteeing the safe return of refugees to their homes.
Governments of countries such as Britain and France during the interwar period, as well as NATO member states after the end of the Cold War, were and remain generally unwilling to expend their political capital or make human sacrifices in order to implement the agreements to which they are party. Of course, there is a significant difference between these two historical periods: during the first period, coercion was avoided because it was too dangerous. Fearing German revanchism, Western European powers were more interested in maintaining solidarity with Central European governments against Germany than in protecting national minorities from the oppression of those governments. During the second period, the Western powers refrained from enforcing the Dayton accords because they faced no direct threat in southeastern Europe and could therefore not justify to their publics paying any serious price for maintaining order in that region.
The 1999 NATO war in Yugoslavia may seem like an exception, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Third countries, indeed, intervened in the war between the Belgrade government and the Kosovo Ethnic Albanian Liberation Army. But the Atlantic Alliance used a military tactic that ensured a minimum of Western casualties - bombing from high altitudes. Having driven the Serbs out of Kosovo using these tactics and occupying the province itself, NATO remains in the position of securing its preferred political solution, which is regional autonomy. This is very much in keeping with the spirit of community democracy - a compromise between Belgrade's complete control over Kosovo and Kosovo's full independence. But Albanian Kosovars are seeking full independence, thereby laying the groundwork for conflict between the forces occupying Kosovo and the people living there. In the event of such a conflict, it is doubtful that NATO would be willing to pay for the defeat of the Albanians in more blood than it paid for the defeat of the Serbs. And it is completely unlikely that NATO will repeat its Kosovo experience in other places affected by a similar conflict.
This reluctance is, in a sense, good news. The clashing principles of legality that dominated international politics in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries led to three enormous international conflicts. The competition between the principles with which Europe and the world will deal in the twenty-first century - between national self-determination and the integrity of existing borders - is leading to local bloodletting that, whatever may be said about Kosovo, the rest of the world can largely afford to ignore, and therefore , and will ignore it. This, in turn, means that the prospects for resolving such local isolated conflicts will depend not on the intervention of third countries, but on their participants themselves; and these prospects, although not equally rosy, are hardly hopeless.
Fatigue... and reduced rates
Precedents that inspire optimism regarding the resolution of various manifestations of the national question in the twenty-first century can be found where third powers do not interfere in a serious way. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are moving slowly and painfully towards mutually acceptable forms of power-sharing; in the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians are moving at comparable rates, albeit with greater violence, to achieve some formula for sharing sovereignty with which each community can exist. The American government played a very significant, but still quite marginal role in each “peace process”. The impetus for agreement comes in both cases from the parties to the conflicts themselves, as was the case with the settlement of the conflict between the government of Russia and the Muslim province of Tatarstan, with the establishment of a regional parliament in Scotland, and with the conclusion of a treaty between the governments of Hungary and Romania protecting the rights of ethnic Hungarians in Romania.
The lesson of these various (and not necessarily permanent) solutions to reconcile the collective demands of national minorities is that what is most needed to resolve conflicts is not the special ingenuity of the constitutional design: after all, there are many ways to create a kind of edifice in which two or more more families could live comfortably, but separately, under one roof. A necessary, but still too rare component of solving the modern version of the national question is political will.
National conflicts are resolved by their participants when they are “ripe” for this, and perhaps the most common source of such maturity is fatigue 4 . Participants in a conflict become willing to compromise when they become exhausted from being involved in it, as is the case in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.
The exhaustive expenditure of blood and treasure will not be the only motivation for resolving national conflicts in the twenty-first century. Prudence, rationalism and consideration of what might happen in the absence of agreement cannot be discounted. These factors clearly played a role in post-communist relations between Russians and Tatars, and between Hungarians and Romanians.
At the same time, another trend in international politics of the 21st century may turn out to be the most effective mitigator of national conflicts: the obsolescence of sovereignty itself.
The national question was so controversial because the stakes seemed so high: control over the machinery of the modern state, the most important institution of the twentieth century, the product of two forces that shaped first Europe and then the world—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These forces assigned to the political societies of Europe two tasks for which a powerful instrument was needed: modern warfare and economic management. The French Revolution brought into being massive armies to fight wars; the industrial revolution created the most sophisticated, most expensive, and deadliest weapons ever available to equip these armies. Only a powerful state was able to recruit, train and support soldiers, as well as create and acquire weapons.
Modern warfare was born in the 19th century. In the twentieth century, sovereign states acquired another responsibility that required a powerful state: economic management. In communist countries, the economic responsibility of the state was total. In other countries, the economic role of the central government was more moderate, but still significant: appropriating through taxation an increasing share of the social product; provision, thanks to collected taxes, of an expanding array of services and public works; the use of fiscal and monetarist instruments to mitigate crises and reduce the duration of recessions to which a market economy is subject.
Although neither of these great challenges has by any means disappeared, the urgency of both has subsided with the end of the Cold War. Accordingly, the role of the institution responsible for their implementation, that is, the state itself, has weakened. The kind of major war that was fought by men equipped with weapons that could only be provided by a powerful state is going out of fashion. Although it is still possible, it is less likely than at any time in the last two centuries 5 . The communist economic system has been discredited: with the exception of North Korea, no sovereign state now seeks to control all aspects of economic life. In other countries, where the balance between government control and impartial market laws governing economic activity had fluctuated periodically, the balance has shifted sharply in favor of the market since the end of the Cold War.
The shift away from government control of economic activity is most noticeable where the national question arose - in Europe. Here, in the second half of the nineteenth century, societies that had previously been seen more as aggregations of politically inert peasants than as true nations began to demand the possession of their own sovereign states, creating a host of conflicting claims that could not all be satisfied. This tendency was symbolized by the Czechs, who were unwilling, as the twentieth century began, to conduct their political affairs according to German rules or to conduct their private transactions in the German language.
With the end of this century, the greatest desire of the Czechs now living in their own state is that the interest on their bank deposits should be established in Germany. Of course, if the Czech Republic succeeds in its quest to join the European Union, interest on its people's bank deposits will be set by the European, rather than the German, central bank in Frankfurt. But this is precisely the crux of the matter: even powerful Germany, economically the most powerful European state, has abandoned what was once the main feature of sovereignty - control over its own monetary policy.
The decline of the nation-state is regularly predicted. However, now, as in the past, the state is not on the verge of extinction. But his once-confident and still formidable powers are clearly, albeit slowly and unevenly, declining. It is possible that someday they will decline to a level where the boundaries of sovereign states will matter no more than the boundaries of postal zones in America, and the brutal 20th century conflicts over national boundaries will appear as distant and perplexing as they appear. for us today are theological disputes that gave rise to battles and persecutions in medieval Europe. On this day the national question will disappear. No one is fighting over the placement of mail zones. But for the unlucky regions of the planet, where the national question still remains terrible and deadly at the turn of the twenty-first century, this happy day will not come soon.
Notes:
1 "Consociation Democracy) is a concept introduced into scientific circulation in the late 70s by the famous American political scientist Lessee Leiphart, to refer to a special form of democracy that exists in some so -called multi -component societies, that is, in heterogeneous in terms of cultural , religious and national structure of societies. This form of a political structure involves balancing the centrifugal tendencies characteristic of the multi -compound company for interaction and the corresponding behavior of the leaders of various segments of the company. As A. Salmin writes, the scientific editor and author of the preface to the Russian publication of A. Lyiphart's book “Democracy in multi -comparative societies. Comparative study” (M., 1997), “Mission Democracy ... - A special form of arrangement, which suggests such an organized interaction of basic "units" (ethnic, religious or cultural communities constituting politics), in which none of them is in a state in a state that can be regarded as isolation " (p. 20) (translator note).2 On two types of democracy, see Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy" ( Foreign Affairs , November/December 1997). Relatively explosive potential of uneasied democracies, see Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Democratization and the Danger of War ( International Security , Summer 1995).
3 The term was introduced by Arendt Lijphart (Democracy in Prrangerl Societies: A Comparative Exploration. - New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
4 The authorship of the concept belongs to I. William Zartman (Ripe for Resolution. - New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Zartman, Ripence Revisited, in the Resolution of Conflict (Washington, DC: National Academy of Science, 1999).
5 See my article "Is Major War Obsolete?" ( Survival , Fall 1998)
Originally published in The National Interest , Fall 1999, PP.17-26
Translation by Grigory Weinstein