Half a millennium after Columbus realized the world was round, his discovery is just now sinking in. That we're perched on a small piece of an enormous globe is a fact that only people living now have really known--known with the steadiness of pictures beamed to us from satellites. With the clarity of a voice on a cell phone, calling from the other side of the earth.
That awareness can be heady--and for some, unbearably frightening. The great irony of our time is that just as the horizons of globalization are opening wide, so many people are retreating to the dim, close caves of ethnic identity.
They have been "re-tribalized," in the phrase Daniel Chirot, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University Washington. He believes that the staggering size and unnerving fluidity of a globalized culture are causing some societies to run for cover, to seek safety.
But that hunger for security can quickly turn ugly, as in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in other places where populations have drawn bloodlines that bind them to some and separate them from others.
From a distance, these ethnopolitical conflicts seem to be one frantic, chaotic blur. But is there order to this apparent anarchy? Chirot believes that such conflicts have a logic of their own. He has identified five stages of social organization--from a peaceful, integrated society, to all-out civil war--and has described the conditions that catapult a nation from one stage to the next. His theories could help explain how these conflicts begin--and how they might end.
IDENTITY RUN AMOK
Chirot looks first to history, noting that some or the fiercest ethnic conflicts have occurred in nations that were until recently under the sway of Soviet domination or European colonialism. The withdrawal of these foreign powers left persistent problems, as well as an often-frightening freedom, in its wake.
In some cases, such as the former Yugoslavia, one country split into hostile minority groups. In others, such as Armenia and Azerbaijan, long-standing national enmities re-emerged in the absence of a shared oppressor. "Not only have such passions not lessened, they are now played out on a much larger scale, and involve far more people than in the past," says Chirot.
Many of these repressive regimes imposed a uniform national identity on those they ruled. Russians told members of their republics that they were Soviets first, Latvians or Chechens second. European conquerors in Africa ignored tribal distinctions, seeing only skin color.
Now that these imperialists have packed their bags, their former subjects are asserting their distinctiveness--with a vengeance. The exaggeration and valorization of difference can reach absurd heights: though the language differences between Croats and Slovenes are slighter than those between Sicilians and Venetians in Italy, for example, the former Yugoslavs believe that they speak different tongues--and each group is convinced that theirs is far superior.
It's no surprise that these long-dominated peoples should choose ethnicity as the vehicle for their newly-liberated identities, says Chirot. Their former, often resented, personas were imposed from without, while ethnicity springs from our very genes.
But the emergence of distinct ethnic groups isn't enough to set off ethnic war, he says. That happens only when people feel that their ethnic group is competing with another one for limited resources--jobs, food, cultural clout. When people feel threatened by radical change, they seek safety in numbers, and any attack on the group is perceived as a personal affront.
Once people are looking through this lens, a crisis is all that is needed to inflame ethnic war. Sometimes the emergency is economic: Chirot observes that a severe recession in Germany in the 1930s propelled the Nazis into power. Fifty years later, economic hard times helped turn Yugoslavia into an ethnic battleground.
But Chirot also notes that other Eastern European countries had rocky economies during the same period, yet did not erupt in civil war. "Economics are a precipitating event, but not a long-run cause," he says. Financial distress simply touches a match to an already brittle political situation.
More often, the crisis is political, a shift in the balance of power between groups that makes both sides nervous. A study that attempted to tie outbreaks of violence in Northern Ireland to the ups and downs of its economy, for example, found no connection between the two. Rather, bloodshed invariably followed changes in the power relationship between Protestants and Catholics.
Ethnic conflict is most likely to occur, Chirot concludes, "when people believe that the other group is going to take power away from them, and that they'll be the long-term losers, in every way: culturally, politically, economically"
WARS WITHIN AND WITHOUT
As Chirot's investigation of ethnopolitical war moves from such historical and structural conditions into the realms of the mind, certainties are harder to capture. How people think and feel about their ethnicity, about their leaders, about opposing groups, are questions that remain at large.
Psychology would seem to be a natural place to look for answers. But they are surprisingly scarce. Few psychologists have studied either the causes or consequences of ethnic war.
Tags:
anarchy,
bloodlines,
daniel chirot,
ethnic cleansing,
ethnic conflict,
ethnic conflicts,
ethnic identity,
global village,
nazis,
psychological shock,
racial,
social organization,
soviet domination,
terror management,
War
