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Ethnic Conflict
| Article
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21913 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
4,421 Words |
| Author
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Andrew Bell-Fialkoff
Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, a former associate of the Center for the
Study of Small States at Boston University, is completing his
Ph.D. in ethnic conflict studies. |
Lately one cannot open a newspaper or view the TV news without finding an item describing an attack on refugees in Germany or presenting the horrors of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Events such as these have stunned the civilized world. Aren't we supposed to have left such barbarity behind?
There is a common, widely held assumption that there is no place for ethnic nationalism in the modern world. Modernity and the concomitant urbanization, industrialization, and social mobility are deemed inimical to primordial attachments.
Clifford Geertz defined "primordial attachments" as those that "stem from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language ... and following particular social practices."1
In other words, all attachments engendered by ethnicity--those of kin, language, and custom--will gradually recede, lose their importance under the relentless assault of the all-pervasive modernity.
This assumption is based partly on the "liberal principle that people should be treated as individuals, and not as members of racial, religious, and other groups. ... [Eventually] membership in ethnic groups must become increasingly irrelevant" and partly on the mistaken belief that increased economic and cultural integration of the global economy will diminish primordial attachments.2
Crudely put, if Serbs and Croats both like hamburgers they are less likely to kill each other.
That is why the recent explosion of nationalist passions in Europe and elsewhere caused such a shock. In fact, modernity is highly conducive to ethnic tensions. Nationalism was not an explosive issue when most people lived in small rural communities where everybody belonged to the same ethnic group. But in the modern world, people of different ethnic backgrounds are increasingly concentrated in huge urban agglomerations, and compete against each other in a presumably meritocratic society in a Hobbesian all against all.
The very fact that mobile society offers a way to the top leads to fierce competition in which any weapon, but especially ethnic differences, lends itself to effective use. As Kautsky put it, "railways are the greatest breeder of national hatreds."3 And airlines work even better, we may add.
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