Power-Sharing

Empirical and Normative Challenges

Allison McCulloch, John McGarry, Allison McCulloch, John McGarry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317265764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Power-sharing is an important political strategy for managing protracted conflicts and it can also facilitate the democratic accommodation of difference. Despite these benefits, it has been much criticised, with claims that it is unable to produce peace and stability, is ineffective and inefficient, and obstructs other peacebuilding values, including gender equality.

This edited collection aims to enhance our understanding of the utility of power-sharing in deeply divided places by subjecting power-sharing theory and practice to empirical and normative analysis and critique. Its overarching questions are:

• Do power-sharing arrangements enhance stability, peace and cooperation in divided societies?
• Do they do so in ways that promote effective governance?
• Do they do so in ways that promote justice, fairness and democracy?

Utilising a broad range of global empirical case studies, it provides a space for dialogue between leading and emerging scholars on the normative questions surrounding power-sharing. Distinctively, it asks proponents of power-sharing to think critically about its weaknesses.

This text will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of power-sharing, ethnic politics, democracy and democratization, peacebuilding, comparative constitutional design, and more broadly Comparative Politics, International Relations and Constitutional and Comparative Law.

1 Centripetalism, consociationalism and Cyprus

The ‘adoptability’ question¹

John McGarry

Cyprus has been partitioned since 1974, and a political settlement there requires agreement between its two communities, the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, as is acknowledged in the explicit understanding of both communities’ leaders, and the United Nations. Any settlement must initially be agreed between the respective leaders and then ratified by both communities’ voters in separate and simultaneous referendums (Joint Declaration 2014). This equality of veto power over a settlement exists even though the Turkish Cypriots comprise around only 20 per cent of the island’s population, with the rest Greek Cypriots. The Turkish Cypriots’ negotiating clout is owing to Turkey’s backing of the Turkish Cypriots, and has existed since 1974, when Turkey partitioned the island, carved out a self-governing zone for the Turkish Cypriots in the north and stationed over 40,000 troops there.²

This chapter is concerned with the relative adoptability of two alternative models of power-sharing in Cyprus, based on centripetalism and consociationalism, respectively. The former aims to promote a politics that strengthens political moderates, seen as likely to compromise with ethnic rivals, over political hardliners, seen as likely to be intransigent, and is associated with three particular institutional forms. The first of these forms involves a presidential executive system, which centripetalists believe can produce a leader who transcends ethnicity or at least can exercise moderation on ethnic issues. The second is a ‘vote-pooling’ electoral system that gives moderate candidates for office an edge over their hardline rivals. The third is a particular form of federalism that seeks to “fragment” ethnic identities while promoting a more fluid form of cross-cutting politics that softens divisions (Horowitz 1990, 163–126; Horowitz 2007). Consociationalism, in contrast, focuses on collegial executives that are built around the existing leadership of ethnic communities. It champions electoral systems that permit the election of elites representing the salient political cleavages, and it supports segmental autonomy, i.e., cultural self-government for those communities that seek it. According to one leading authority, centripetalism and consociationalism are the two main forms of power-sharing, and the choice between them constitutes the “most fundamental” decision in institutional negotiations in deeply divided places (Horowitz 2002, 213).

‘Adoptability’ refers to the prospects of centripetal or consociational institutions being acceptable to both parties and communities in Cyprus, rather than the prospects of these institutions being ‘adopted,’ i.e., put in place. For power-sharing institutions to be adopted, a settlement is needed which may require agreement on additional matters not directly related to power-sharing institutions (in Cyprus’s case, agreement on security and property matters). Settlements also require motivational elements that are distinct from their substantive content, such as may arise from external pressures, demographic change, economic opportunities or hurting stalemates. As has often been said of the Palestine/Israel conflict, it is possible to have a reasonable consensus on what is adoptable, but not the circumstances in which it may be adopted. But clearly adoptability is a prerequisite for adoption.

Two important caveats are necessary at the outset. First, this is a single case study, an ‘N’ of one. It lacks the breadth that large-N quantitative analyses or multiple case study qualitative analyses can provide. On the other hand, it provides a reasonably in-depth study of the adoptability question in a setting where two sides need to agree. While Horowitz stands out as one of the very few political scientists to have broached the adoptability question (Horowitz 2002, 2008, 2014), his treatment is general in nature, and there is as yet no focused case study on the subject. This chapter also makes arguments that are generalizable from Cyprus to all deeply conflicted places where settlements require agreement. Quantitative and other comparative scholars are invited to examine these arguments and test them in other cases.

Second, Cyprus is a partitioned polity, which currently lacks any common power-sharing institutions. Indeed, no functioning common institutions have existed in Cyprus since its consociational arrangements collapsed in December 1963, 11 years before Turkey’s partition in 1974. Cyprus, in fact, is a clear example of the ‘primacy’ of the functionality question in academic writings: whenever Cyprus is mentioned, it is generally to illustrate the failings of consociational power-sharing once implemented (e.g., Horowitz 2014, 13; Polyviou 1975, 26). Nonetheless, there is a significant body of agreement between the two communities, and between them and the United Nations, on the sorts of institutions that are adoptable in a reunited Cyprus. There are also long-standing and clearly articulated positions from the two sides on which institutions are and are not acceptable to each of them.

This chapter proceeds by examining the position of the parties in Cyprus according to the three institutional axes identified above: (1) presidentialism vs. collegial executives; (2) electoral systems that favour moderate elites vs. those that do not; and (3) a form of federalism that fragments ethnic communities vs. a form that does not. In outlining the reasons why the parties in Cyprus adopt the positions that they do, this chapter seeks to draw lessons that may be applied elsewhere.

A presidential executive vs. a collegial executive

Donald Horowitz, the doyen of centripetal theory, prefers a presidential executive for divided polities, combined with an electoral system that requires or encourages candidates to reach out to (pool votes from) all salient communities (Horowitz 1990, 1991, 205–214; see also Brancati 2009, 16; Wimmer 2003, 122). The presidential executive he has in mind is conventional, i.e., a single-person executive comprising a strong president and a weak, dependent vice-president and cabinet. This prescription may reflect Horowitz’s provenance: the USA has such a presidential executive and an electoral college that requires candidates to appeal to different regional constituencies instead of simply trying to pile up winning coalitions on head counts alone. A presidency with its state-wide campaign plus a vote-pooling electoral system is said to make possible a pan-ethnic, moderate, political leader who can build national unity and transcend his or her own ethnic affiliations (Horowitz 1991, 206–207).

A second claimed advantage of presidentialism is that it provides for a separation of powers, which makes it “impossible” for a single ethnic group to capture the state “by merely winning a majority in parliament” (Horowitz 1991, 205; 1985, 636). The separation of powers means that minorities excluded from a parliamentary majority may become part of the president’s winning coalition, or vice versa: “who owns the state [under a presidential regime] is a question no longer answered simply by looking to ascriptively based parliamentary majorities” (Horowitz 1991, 206; see similar arguments in Roeder 2005). Horowitz’s writings are replete with the advantages of presidential systems in Nigeria and Sri Lanka, and the multiple problems attached to parliamentary regimes throughout Africa and Asia (Horowitz 1991, 205–214; 1985, 647). They have been seen as a significant corrective to Juan Linz’s influential writings on the perils of presidentialism (Elgie 2005, 110).

Consociationalists, in contrast, support collegial executives that permit power-sharing among representatives of different ethnic communities. Arend Lijphart, the leading scholar of consociational theory, supports parliamentarianism over presidentialism on the grounds that the former facilitates power-sharing coalitions of political parties that represent the polity’s different communities (Lijphart 2004, 49–51). The key difficulty with presidentialism in deeply divided places, from the perspective of consociationalists, is that it is an indivisible good (see Lijphart 1977, 56–57, 170–171; Stepan et al. 2011). The president, even if a moderate, will represent only one community, irrespective of whatever electoral system is used. Other consociationalists have pointed out that presidentialism – an institutional arrangement whereby the executive is not responsible to the legislature – is compatible with consociationalism as long as it is ‘collegial’ in nature, involving multiple persons, and not the conventional or single-person presidency supported by Horowitz. Thus, collective or rotating presidencies of the sort that are found in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Switzerland and even the European Union are consistent with consociationalism (McGarry 2013).

The main difficulty with a conventional presidency in Cyprus is that it is completely unacceptable to the Turkish Cypriots. As a minority of 20 per cent in a divided polity where voters may be expected to vote ethnically, Turkish Cypriots fear that a conventional presidency would result in them being governed for the foreseeable future by a Greek Cypriot. Turkish Cypriot politicians have consistently opposed a conventional presidency whenever it has been proposed, and they have not changed their minds in spite of recent reassurances from the Orthodox Archbishop of Cyprus that if the USA can elect an African American, then why shouldn’t Cypriots be able to elect a Turkish Cypriot?³ This is possibly because it took 200 years for Americans to elect an African American to their highest office, and because it does not look likely to be a regularly recurring phenomenon. Nor are Turkish Cypriot elites persuaded by the possibility raised by centripetalists of a compensating pivotal position for Turkish Cypriots in a legislative coalition, as they plausibly believe the legislature would also be dominated by Greek Cypriots, unless there were offsetting consociational rules (quotas and minority vetoes) of which centripetalists disapprove. While centripetalists are correct that it would be ‘impossible’ for Greek Cypriots to capture the state under a presidential regime ‘merely’ by winning a parliamentary majority, the Turkish Cypriots know that the large Greek Cypriot majority would still be easily able to capture the state by winning both the legislature and presidency and by then appointing the judiciary, bureaucracy, soldiers and police.

Turkish Cypriot opposition to a conventional presidency is clear from the historical evidence. Since Cyprus gained independence in 1960, Turkish Cypriot negotiators have consistently insisted on a formally collective, or consociational, executive, although the precise type of collective executive they have sought has varied. The Turkish Cypriots strongly supported the de facto co-presidency created by the 1960 independence constitution. This executive is usually, and confusingly, described as presidential, because it included a (Greek Cypriot) president and (Turkish Cypriot) vice-president, and because the executive was not responsible to the legislature. But unlike in the USA, for example, the president and vice-president were independent political figures, elected separately by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, rather than on a joint ticket. Each was mandated to appoint proportions of the cabinet from their respective communities, with the president able to appoint seven Greek Cypriots and the vice-president three Turkish Cypriots. Each was able to veto any cabinet or legislature decision on matters of foreign affairs, defence or security. One Greek Cypriot critic exaggerated when he described the 1960 executive as “vice-presidential” (Polyviou 1975, 26), but it was clearly not a conventional single-person presidency.

Following the partition of Cyprus in 1974, and during negotiations on the UN’s ‘Annan Plan’ (2001–2004), Turkish Cypriot negotiators proposed a formal ‘co-presidency’ of equals (UNSC 2003, para. 81). Bargaining from a stronger position after Turkey’s intervention, the Turkish Cypriots were no longer satisfied with the ‘symbolic’ subordination suggested by the 1960 Constitution’s president/vice-president model. The emphasis on equality in a co-presidency also accorded with Turkish Cypriots’ traditional view of Cyprus as a partnership between two communities, and with their then-leader Rauf Denktash’s preference for a confederation of two states. In the referendum on the Annan Plan in 2004, however, Turkish Cypriot voters overwhelmingly endorsed a settlement that included a compromise option put forward by the UN in which there was to be an indirectly elected “presidential council,” one-third of whose members were to be Turkish Cypriots, and which permitted a Turkish Cypriot member of the Council to be head of state/president for one-third of each term (UNSC 2003, para. 84).

The current clear preference of the Turkish Cypriot public is for a co-presidency of equals. Indeed, a 2009 poll indicates that a majority of Turkish Cypriot respondents see a presidential council, comprised equally of Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, as “absolutely essential” (Lordos et al. 2009). It is possible that, as in the 2004 referendum, Turkish Cypriots will in the future endorse a more proportionally comprised (collective or rotating) presidency; it is less likely that they will accept the 1960 model of a permanent and powerful Turkish Cypriot vice-president; and it is unthinkable that they will agree, in any realistic time horizon, to the conventional single-person presidency advocated by Horowitz.

The fact that the Turkish Cypriot minority prefers a consociational collegial executive to a centripetal conventional presidency will not surprise centripetalists. Minorities are likely to prefer consociational guarantees that put their representatives into positions of power (Horowitz 2014, 8). It is also not surprising that the Greek Cypriot majority, including their current Archbishop, have a clear preference for Horowitz’s conventional single-person presidency. A former Archbishop, Makarios, who was also the Greek Cypriot political leader and president of Cyprus, proposed a single-person presidency (indeed, one that even lacked the weak vice-president associated with the US or ‘conventional’ model) in 1968, during the first inter-communal talks that took place in Cyprus after the breakdown of the consociational government in 1963 (Clerides 1992, 464; Pericleous 2009, 105–106; Polyviou 1980, 69). Makarios proposed this weakening of the Turkish Cypriots’ position in the 1960 Constitution because the latter were seen as in a weak and isolated position, scattered in fortified enclaves throughout the island and dependent on the UN for food and other supplies.

Since Turkey’s intervention in 1974, the bargaining position of the Turkish Cypriot minority has improved significantly. Turkish Cypriots, comprising one-fifth of the island’s population, currently hold 36 per cent of its territory, and 60 per cent of its coastline. There is also a massive Turkish armed presence in the Turkish Cypriot part of the island, with a mere 900 UN peacekeepers separating them from the Greek Cypriots. During the partition, 160,000 Greek Cypriots, around a quarter of the total Greek Cypriot population, were forced to abandon their property in the north. Since a settlement is the only realistic way for Greek Cypriots to get some of their territory and property back, and to get Ankara’s troops out, they have come to accept that any executive in a united Cyprus must be collegial or consociational. In the ‘High Level Agreement’ of 1977, the Greek Cypriot leader Makarios accepted that “all” the political institutions of a reunified Cyprus, including the executive, must be “bicommunal” in nature, and this has since become unquestioned orthodoxy among Greek Cypriot leaders. They have generally supported a variant of the 1960 presidential-vice-presidential model, in which a Greek Cypriot president and Turkish Cypriot vice-president would appoint a cabinet, approximately 30 per cent of which would be Turkish Cypriot, but in which there would be no presidential or vice-presidential veto (e.g., National Council 1989).⁴ To address Turkish Cypriot concerns that the permanent vice-presidency of the 1960 model implies their symbolic subordination, some Greek Cypriot leaders have gone further and endorsed ‘collective’ and ‘rotating’ presidential models in which a Turkish Cypriot politician would become president of Cyprus for a set proportion of time, though not an equal proportion. In 2002/2003, Glafkos Clerides, then the Greek Cypriot leader and president of Cyprus, supported the UN’s proposal for a Swiss-style presidential council in which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Lists of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: contemporary challenges to power-sharing theory and practice
• 1 Centripetalism, consociationalism and Cyprus: the ‘adoptability’ question
• 2 Power-sharing in Kenya: between the devil and the deep blue sea
• 3 Power-sharing executives: consociational and centripetal formulae and the case of Northern Ireland
• 4 Consociationalism in the Brussels Capital Region: dis-proportional representation and the accommodation of national minorities
• 5 Mandatory power-sharing in coup-prone Fiji
• 6 Ethnic power-sharing coalitions and democratization
• 7 Lebanon: how civil war transformed consociationalism
• 8 Power-sharing in Burundi: an enduring miracle?
• 9 Mostar as microcosm: power-sharing in post-war Bosnia
• 10 Power-sharing and the pursuit of good governance: evidence from Northern Ireland
• 11 Good fences make good neighbours: assessing the role of consociational politics in transitional justice
• 12 Gendering power-sharing
• Conclusion: what explains the performance of power-sharing settlements?
• Index