/View.info/ Strong ethnic identities are often described as a holdover from an older, irrational, pre-modern era. This is probably why modern international conflicts are presented as civilizational or ideological struggles. On this reading, the conflict between, say, Russia and Ukraine cannot be seen for what it really is: a bloody confrontation between Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism. On the contrary, it becomes just one localized example among many of the global struggle of democracy against authoritarianism, another example being the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Such moralizing language is not always unfounded. However, the undeniable ethnic distortions in these conflicts – also evident in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan – testify to the fact that zero-sum clashes of nationalisms remain the main cause of interstate wars.
Every nation-state that has broken up since the 1990s (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) has broken up along ethnic lines.
However, the strength of ethnic identities is also shown by conflicts within states. I will refer to two examples to illustrate how two contemporary civil wars in different parts of the world testify to the continuing power of ethnic identities in the 21st century, despite the fact that the prevailing liberal ethos of our time instructs us to leap over—or, in other words, to ignore the obvious significance of ethnic identity in collective human psychology.
The first example is the bloodiest conflict in the 21st century, which is the war in Tigray, a northern Ethiopian province. The second is the rebellion against Myanmar’s military junta, against which various ethnically organized guerrillas rose up. After only two years of war in Tigray, more than half a million people have lost their lives.
Even after the war ended, clashes between the various ethnic groups in that country continued to rage, this time between the Amhara people and the central government, which they see as dominated by the Oromo people.
According to the UN, at least 183 people have died in the first month of the conflict. As during the Tigray War, the internet is down, so it is difficult to discern the current situation.
By early August, the Amharic Fano militia controlled several cities (including the Amhara capital Bahir Dar) and major airports in the region, according to a Wilson Center analysis.
Earlier in the 21st century, the central government was believed to be dominated by the Tigrayans. Interestingly, the discontent is expressed by an ethnic group that forms the backbone of Ethiopian statehood and imperial traditions. Ultimately, the state acquired its present territorial form through expansion from the Amharic heartland.
To add to this, the centuries-old Solomonic dynasty (of which Haile Selassie, the last Ethiopian emperor) was Amharic, and the state myths are of Amharic origin. Perhaps the foremost expert on nationalism, the late Anthony D. Smith, clearly explains this genesis in Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity:
“A central Ethiopian national myth which seeks to demonstrate genealogical and cultural continuity with Judaism and the Jews and at the same time to explain their divine displacement from both the Jewish form of Christianity and the Tigre-Amharic peoples of Ethiopia.”
Ethiopia is not a recent country that coincides with colonial borders, but a centuries-old entity. In fact, it is the only African country that successfully resisted European colonizers in the 19th century.
After 1991 and the victory in the civil war of the coalition of ethnic guerrilla groups against the centralist communist dictatorship, an ethno-federal structure was created. According to the constitution, nine ethnic regions have the right to self-determination.
Despite this structure, ethnic conflicts have not disappeared. There is also an imperial tradition associated primarily with the Abyssinian ethnic groups (Amharic and Tigreans), but it is these ethnic groups that are now rebelling against the central government.
This fact confirms the conclusion of the sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Van den Berghe in his book “The Ethnic Phenomenon” that “even centuries of centralized despotism cannot suppress ethnic feelings.”
Since there is no ethnic group with a pronounced majority (indeed, none has an overwhelming majority), there is no possibility of assimilation of smaller ethnic groups.
In The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, Israeli historians Azar Gat and Alexander Jacobson write about the destabilizing consequences of the lack of any ethnic majority in many African states. One of them is indeed Ethiopia:
“In some African countries there is a dominant people or ethnic group that almost dominates the state. These include the Amhara and Tigre in Ethiopia (about a third of the population), the Kikuyu in Kenya (about a fifth) and the Hausa-Fulani in Nigeria (perhaps a eighth).
Yet none of these dominant ethnicities constitutes the majority of the population (some are not even the largest group), and none is powerful enough to generate processes of ethnic assimilation.
On the other hand, their superiority causes dissatisfaction among the other ethnic groups in the state. Times have changed since the French state was able to impose ethnic leveling across France, and even then the French case was unique.”
The second example is the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar. Since gaining independence from the British Empire, Myanmar (also known by its colonial name Burma) has been dominated by the majority Bamar people, who make up about two-thirds of the population.
Despite the fact that the Bamars form a fairly large majority, the dispersion of the ethnic groups that form the majority in compact territories and apparently have the ability to coordinate their actions makes the stability of the central government difficult to achieve.
Opposition to Bamar majority rule has intensified especially since the 2021 military coup that overthrew democracy.
According to the Council on International Relations, as of late June 2023, “The junta has already lost large swaths of territory to ethnic militias that have been fighting long-standing insurgencies in the border areas, as well as to new militant groups organized under the Militias for the Protection of the people who emerged after the coup.”
Brookings estimated in February that the rebels control 40-50% of the country’s territory. It is difficult to obtain more up-to-date data and analysis on the conflict itself due to the constant information blockade.
In late October, however, an alliance of ethnic militias announced a coordinated attack on a dozen military posts in northern Shan State.
Critics may argue that neither Ethiopia nor Myanmar are democracies. But it was democratization that led to the collapse of Europe’s multi-ethnic states. The idea that democracy will somehow reconcile ethnic differences seems unfounded in reality.
This phenomenon persists regardless of political system, and different frameworks (consociational or unitary) can exist in both democratic and non-democratic systems.
As Van Den Berghe concludes, “attempts to accommodate ethnic diversity within a ‘modern’ Western-style liberal democracy have been extremely unstable, unsuccessful and costly, even when well-intentioned and democratically negotiated”.
It is equally difficult to maintain in a decentralized authoritarian framework. Order and stability are only maintained by large amounts of violence and/or very charismatic individuals, but in the long run order is unstable.
The influential American political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, in Why Minorities Revolt: A Global Analysis of Public Mobilization and Conflict Since 1945, specifically refers to Myanmar and Burma among others in the context of the possibility of democratization of multi-ethnic states. Gurr concludes:
The democratization of multi-ethnic authoritarian states has more problematic results. The Soviet and Eastern European regimes weakened coercive constraints on nationalism and intergroup hostilities in circumstances where institutionalized means of expressing and accommodating them did not yet exist or were fragile and distrusted. The result has been an explosion of community activism.
Similar consequences can be expected from democratization in the multi-ethnic autocracies of the Third World. Most dubious of all expectations is that authoritarian states such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Iraq and Burma might be able to calm ethnopolitical wars by moving towards democracy.
Far from being a thing of the past or an anachronism in light of the ‘end of history’, ethnic identities still play an important role in the stability or otherwise of states and orders and remain one of the key sources, whether we like it or not, of perceived legitimacy.
Translation: SM
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