March 23, 2006

Nationalism persists as a mobilizing force; ethnic and religious conflict remains the primary cause of war in the world.

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Fast Forward Weekly

These days, few people would deny the impact of religion in world politics. Yet this is something that many academics would have been reluctant to acknowledge a few decades ago.

Most 20th century social scientists embraced secularism, believing religion to be a diminishing force, something that, in the words of Philip Costopoulos, co-editor of the anthology World Religions and Democracy, "belongs to the childhood of the human race."

Today, he notes, scholars are forced to grapple with the issues raised by the challenges to democracy posed by various religious traditions.

Journalist Robert Fulford has admitted that he was one of many who failed to anticipate this development: "Of all the smug and foolish delusions that were part of conventional wisdom when I was young in the middle of the 20th century, two stand out in memory. One was the idea that nationalism was a 19th century concept, on its last legs. The other was that religion, as a force in worldly affairs, was slowly but inevitably fading away. At times I was stupid enough to believe both of these preposterous fallacies; but then, so was nearly everyone else."

A succession of analysts, Karl Marx and Max Weber among them, also postulated that ethnicity would dissipate, and ethnic and nationalist conflicts diminish, through the process of modernization.

But contrary to their predictions, the integration of ethnic populations into larger state structures and economic systems has not, in most instances, resulted in a decline in ethnic allegiance. There seems to be little correspondence between modernization and levels of ethnic group cohesion.

Instead, the role of ethnicity as a mobilizing force appears to be escalating, and the worldwide development of a sense of ethnic, national and religious consciousness constitutes one of the major political and social trends of this new century.

The persistence of such ethnic separatism in today’s world has also long confounded social scientists. For most thinkers of the modern era, ethnic nationalism is an "infuriatingly persistent anomaly," remarked Robert H. Wiebe in his book Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism.

"Nothing so thoroughly affronted the universalist values that the champions of human rights and of law and order alike used to measure the health of the world," he wrote. "It accumulated modifiers: atavistic, fanatic, xenophobic, blind, bloody."

But many scholars now recognize that the development of global markets, the disintegration of empires and the weakening of state structures do not necessarily lead to a lessening of concern with issues of national identity and territory.

On the contrary, they stimulate new demands for national recognition and new ethnopolitical conflicts arising from separatist movements within existing states, transnational ethnic linkages and, in some cases, forced migration, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

There are as many as 3,500 groups of people around the world who describe themselves in ethnic or national terms, so most of the world’s sovereign states are multinational patchwork units of different – often hostile – ethnic communities. On the other hand, there are some 77 multi-state national groups – ethnic peoples who live in more than one state. All this is a recipe for trouble.

"Myths justifying ethnic hostility, fear of ethnic extinction and the opportunity to mobilize around these themes," observes political scientist Stuart Kaufman in his book Modern Hatreds, will produce "a politics of extreme nationalist symbolism" that leads to ethnic warfare.

Since the Second World War, more people have been killed in ethnic and religious conflicts within states than have been killed in wars between states. Today, with ideologically based superpower rivalry a thing of the past, nationalist and religiously rooted doctrines are in the ascendancy, often bringing in their wake intolerance of minorities, hatred of neighbours and impatience with established frontiers.

The past two decades, especially, have seen the intensification of ethnic strife, especially in multinational states prone to such antagonisms. Indeed, friction between rival nationalities is the basis of most of today’s violence and has contributed significantly to global instability.

Of 30 major armed conflicts that are either still going on or have recently ended, 10 or 11 can be regarded as being between religious civilizations, and 14 are essentially ethnic conflicts, according to Harvard University history professor Niall Ferguson.

Since ethnic conflict remains our most intractable political problem, policies and techniques that promote ethnic accommodation ought to be of prime concern to political elites in multinational states. Yet even those political leaders who would rather place stress on economic or other issues have frequently found it easier to mobilize people along ethnic rather than class lines. This has all too often resulted in polarized and fractured societies with little overarching national loyalty.

Attempts made to ameliorate ethnic and religious discord within states through power-sharing and other forms of political accommodation have met with only mixed success. The role of international organizations such as the UN in trying to resolve such conflicts has also proved ineffective in all too many cases.

The seemingly immutable differences between communities has frustrated many. In his 1995 book, Black Sea, British author Neal Ascherson observed that this maritime crossroads between Europe, the Middle East and central Asia has always been a place where civilizations overlapped and diverse peoples intermingled.

Yet, though many groups have lived side by side on its shores, "the symbiosis has often been more apparent than real," he concluded. "My sense of Black Sea life, a sad one, is that latent distrust between different cultures is immortal." Necessity may bind such communities, but they remained "a bundle of disparate groups – not a helpful model for the multi-ethnic society of our hopes and dreams."

As Turkish political scientist Umut Ozkirimli contends in his study of Theories of Nationalism, humanity continues to be "torn apart by nationalist conflicts, cruel acts of ethnic cleansing and all kinds of fundamentalisms." Unfortunately, animosity between ethnic and religious groups remains the primary cause of armed conflict in the world.