PART I
ETHNICITY
AND VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD TODAY
An
Overview of the Problem
The
political salience of ethnicity as a factor in the global community. The nature
and conditions of ethnically-inspired or exacerbated violence. Preliminary notes
on the religious dimension of eth-nicity and ethnic conflict; and of conflict
avoidance and resolution. Some representative cases and issues. Preliminary
conclusions.1
Editorial Introduction
Ethnicity
is a plastic, variegated, and originally ascriptive trait that, in certain
historical and so-cioeconomic circumstances, is readily politicized. Such
fertile circumstances abound in modern and transitional (modernizing) societies.
-Joseph Rothschild2
We
begin with a glimpse at a few representative ethnically-entangled conflicts
around the world today. Fortunately the sym-posium was able to draw on work in
progress at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on "Religion,
Nationalism and Into-lerance," with a presentation by David Little,
director of that Project. A response follows by an independent scholar from each
of the three faiths: for Judaism, Sidney Schwarz; for Christianity, Alex F. C.
Webster; and for Islam, Mustafa Malik. Finally, in this section, in a paper
originally presented in another session of the sym-posium, David Walsh
challenges the secular reading of the liberal paradigm offered as solution by
Little by unpacking the "intimations of transcendence" implicit in
that paradigm.
These
writers readily agree that religion as such is not directly or inherently
conflictual, that religion as such does not directly "cause" conflict.
But this is true of ethnicity as well. Both are highly complex realities,
fundamentally different from each other, yet overlapping. Thus while religious
and ethnic claims may conflict with each other, more commonly they coalesce
against competing ethnic and/or political (national) claims.
Appropriately
enough, ethnicity has been described as kinship writ large, and nationalism in
turn can be described as ethnicity writ large. Transition of the first two to
the next higher level is situation-interactively determined. And just as kinship
groups are far more numerous around the world than ethnic groupings, so the
latter groupings are far more numerous than nations. Additionally, while
statehood is linked to nationhood in the modern experience, not all nations have
been permitted to achieve statehood in the modern context.
Beginning,
as it were, at the hearth, religion in some form has been a formative energy
among all peoples. As larger groupings transcended elementary family groupings,
additional religious claims served their consolidation. As empires and
federations were formed, embracing and transcending lesser groupings of kinship,
ethnicity, and place (region), religious claims could well come into conflict.
Eventually, in the Western experience, the solution to such conflict was sought
in the disengagement of religion from the political compact.
The
disengagement of religion from the political compact is a kind of double-edged
sword. It means, on the one hand, that the compact itself must exclude any
particular religious sanction, while the participants in that compact, are
required, as it were, to park their religion at the door when they enter the
political arena. To widely varying degrees, most modern polities (states) are
"plural-istic;" that is, they embrace both ethnic and religious
diversity. Thus "tolerance" of such diversity is an essential feature
of citizenship in modern states, and by extension, internationally and globally
as well.
As
David Little recounts at the outset, the United Nations in 1981 issued a Declaration
on the Elimination of All Forms of Into-lerance and Discrimination Based on
Religion and Belief. Corres-pondingly the USIP Intolerance project focuses
on "the set of human rights norms that guarantee `the freedom of religion
or belief.’" Thus "religiously-related ethnic conflicts" in the
half dozen countries in the USIP project are analyzed against the tolerance
norms thus articulated. Effectively the UN Declaration seeks to universalize the
disengagement of religion from the political compact that emerged in the Western
experience.
Little
nonetheless underscores the complexities and ambi-guities that arise. In any
event he identifies two rather distinct modes of nationalism,
"liberal" and "illiberal," a distinction long noted in a
variety of terms. In the former instance the conception of nation is based on
citizenship, and thus effectively on individuals rather than on groups. The
national "whole" is in that respect merely an incoherent aggregation
of individual citizen equals. In the latter instance the nation, at least
generically, precedes the state of which it becomes the vehicle. The state is
idealized as the em-bodiment of the preexisting natural community. Insofar as
religion and ethnicity are little differentiated or not at all, tolerance tends
to be in short supply.
On
one level ethnicity does for human aggregates what re-ligion does
cosmologically, namely provide coherence, meaning and order in the face of
unpredictability and chaos. Indeed, human arrangements appear as mythically
grounded in the cosmos. Though "natural" and "founded"
religions differ importantly, once established, functionally the latter highly
resemble the former. Intellectually, the Enlightenment, and constitutionally,
the sepa-ration of church and state (the American paradigm), disengage any
particular religion from the political compact. That disengagement, however,
entails uneasiness for both religion and politics. States cannot survive without
myth, and religion excluded from political destiny appears emasculated. Because
of what sometimes has been called "American exceptionalism,"3 the
USA often is effectively viewed as the paradigmatic "liberal" nation.
At the end of Radojan Gandhi’s 1995 Cynthia Wedel Lecture at The
Churche Center for Theology and Public Policy in Washington, DC, when asked what
distinguishes the American system, Gandhi replied: "Nation without the
blood line;" that is, "liberal" nationalism. While there may be
reason to laud the achievements of the Founding Fathers of the American system,
historical circumstance or ac-cident may have been more decisive.
Even
so, the pot of the American experiment in the separation of church and state
continues to boil. And the responses from the three "Abrahamic faith"
traditions indicate why that is the case. Beyond that, if one assumes that the
separation of church and state is a pre-conditon to societal and inter-societal
peace, the journey to that destination has scarcely begun in many lands. The
rapidly growing global interdependence obviously accelerates the flow of
history. Hence predictions as to outcomes, whether pessimistic or optimistic,
are essentially speculative. In any case, doubts appear throughout this volume
as to the viability of the American solution, even if it were generalizable.
It
is at this juncture that the introduction of David Walsh’s paper,
"Liberal Initimations of Transcendence," is of seminal im-portance. In
a sense, this paper turns the liberal Enlightenment vision on its head.
Effectively, Walsh maintains that the very transcendent claim that secular
liberalism believes to have sur-mounted makes the liberal vision possible.
Walsh’s
thesis offers a striking parallel to Emile Durkheim’s journey into his study
of the "division of labor" in society.4
Distin-guishing between traditional and modern societies ("mechanical"
and "organic" solidarity in his terms), Durkheim proceeded initially
on the assumption that the latter would supplant the former, only to discover
enroute that in reality the latter was in fact dependent in some manner on the
former. That is, modern "contract"-based organization presupposes some
degree or modes of "pre-con-tractual" solidarity, perhaps what James
S. Coleman more recently has called the "informal social capital"5 that contract-based social organization tends to dissolve.
Walsh,
however, somewhat surprisingly citing Dostoevsky, turns in another direction. He
links "faith in the transcendent value of freedom" to "faith in
the participation in transcendent reality." Walsh presumably is not
offering transcendence as an answer to what we might call Durkheim’s problem,
but rather calls attention to another poorly understood aspect of the
transformation we call modernization. Ernst Troeltsch, writing a generation
later than Dostoevsky, and in a different milieu and idiom, underscored the same
point.
The
Christian Ethos (here we night substitute "Abrahamic Faith) alone
possesses, in virtue of its personalistic Theism, a conviction of personality
and individuality, based on metaphysics, which no Naturalism and no Pessimism
can disturb. That personality which, rising above the natural order of life, is
only achieved through the union of will and the depths of being with God, alone
transcends the finite, and alone can defy it. Without this support, however,
every kind of individualism evaporates into thin air.6
Paul Peachey
Rolling Ridge Study Retreat
Community
NOTES
1.
Original assignment to Little, Schwarz, Webster and Malik.
2.
Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 1.
3.
The notion that America (the USA) is unique or somehow "chosen" arose
early in the American experience. Seymour Martin Lipset recently subjected the
concept to updated analysis in a book entitled American Exceptionalism: A
Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
4.
The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe,
1964); original 1983, with subsequent revised editions.
5.
James S. Coleman, "The Rational Reconstruction of Society," American
Sociological Review 58.1 (February, 1993).