Nationalist Passions

Stuart J. Kaufman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501701320
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nationalist and ethnic conflict can take many forms, from genocidal violence and civil war to protest movements and peaceful squabbles in democracies. Nationalist Passions poses a stark challenge to extreme rationalist understandings of political conflict. Stuart J. Kaufman elaborates a compelling theory of ethnic politics to explain why ethnic violence erupts in some contexts and how peace is maintained in others. At the core of Kaufman's theory is an assertion that conflicts are initiated due to popular "symbolic predispositions"—biases of all kinds—and perceptions of threat.Kaufman puts his theory to the test in a range of conflicts. He examines some highly violent episodes, among them the Muslim rebellion in the southern Philippines beginning in the 1970s; the civil war in southern Sudan that began in the 1980s; and the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Kaufman also analyzes other situations in which leaders attempted to tame the violence that nationalist passions can generate. In India, Mahatma Gandhi mobilized an overtly nonviolent movement but failed in his efforts to prevent the rise of Muslim-Hindu communal violence. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk ended apartheid, but not without terrible cost—more than fifteen thousand people died while the negotiations were under way. In Tanzania, however, Julius Nyerere led one of the few ethnically diverse countries in the world with almost no ethnic violence. Nationalist Passions is essential reading for policymakers, international aid workers, and all others who seek to find the best possible outcomes for future internal and interstate clashes.

CHAPTER 1

Symbolic Predispositions and Ethnic Politics

The introduction explains the basic outlines of my reformulated theory of symbolic politics. The starting point of the theory is the best available evidence from psychology about how people think and what motivates them to act. The evidence shows that in politics as in everything else, people rarely act “rationally” to pursue their material interests; instead, they act intuitively and in knee-jerk fashion on the basis of their values and biases. For example, U.S. liberals often vote for candidates who promise to raise their taxes, while U.S. conservatives often vote for candidates who propose to cut government programs that benefit them. In short, U.S. citizens tend to vote on the basis of ideology and partisan identity—their symbolic predispositions—not their material interests.

More broadly, if we want to understand or anticipate anyone’s political behavior, we should not ask what we think their interests are; we should examine what their biases are. If we want to understand people’s attitudes and behavior across ethnic lines, the first bias to look for is prejudice. This last proposition—that prejudice is important in interethnic relations—is so obvious only an academic could doubt it. To answer these doubters, this chapter begins with a survey of the nature of ethnic and national identities. Before we begin, however, we need to consider the nature of this “best available evidence” about human behavior—namely, that most of it comes from studies of the psychology and political behavior of U.S. citizens. Evidence that people in other countries behave similarly is less systematic. Is it a problem to generalize based on these mostly U.S. data?

I think not, for two reasons. First, it is not hard to distinguish behaviors that should in principle be universal from those that are not. All we have to do is define our focus carefully enough so we can explain why we expect that reactions to a sunny day will be fairly universal but reactions to seeing a U.S. flag will not be. To take a more relevant example, I expect that like U.S. citizens, people elsewhere vary in the degree and kind of prejudices that they feel and that any strong prejudices that they have will prove politically consequential.

Second, this book goes beyond theorizing to test the resulting hypotheses in six very different cases. As with any hypotheses, we should begin with skepticism, but to the extent we find evidence that the processes predicted by the theory occurred in cases in the Philippines, in India, and across much of Africa, we can have some confidence in the theory. If people do not behave as the U.S. citizens studied lead me to expect, my hypotheses will fail when put to the test.

In this chapter, I explain in detail how I put my version of symbolic politics theory together and how the theory works. After a bit of definitional spadework, the main presentation begins with a discussion of neuroscientists’ “two-systems” theory of decision making, which explores the mental tug-of-war between intuition, emotion, and reason that determines how people make decisions. I turn next to social psychological theories of group behavior, which show more specifically how factors like prejudice and feelings of threat can shape individual and group behavior. The next section examines how groups get from attitudes to action, focusing on the roles of leaders and organizations in mobilizing people for political action, whether peaceful or violent. I then put all of these pieces together into a complete statement of the theory, summarizing the factors that make ethnic politics peaceful in most times and places but contentious in some and extremely violent in a few. This chapter closes with a brief explanation of methodology and how this theory relates to other approaches, especially constructivism.

More on Definitions

Despite its distinguished pedigree going back to Max Weber, the notion of the ethnic group as an imagined family, as discussed in the introduction, has always been controversial. Scholars of ethnicity have identified three main schools of thought for explaining ethnic identity.¹ The first account, the primordialist one, emphasizes that ethnicity is usually ascriptive—people are typically born into an ethnic group—and then argues that ethnicity is more or less a fixed, family-like relationship. Instrumentalist and rational-choice approaches, in contrast, see ethnicity mostly as a political tool often manipulated by elites. Constructivism, the third approach, emphasizes that ethnicity is socially constructed, a “social fact” created by the repetition of group myths or narratives. After much debate, scholars have increasingly recognized that the three approaches are really compatible: even primordialists do not really think ethnic identity is fixed; it is an imagined family. Similarly, when Weber talks about a kinlike relationship, he adds, “whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.”²

Clifford Geertz, who is often taken as the founder of the primordialist school, includes in his thinking a caveat very similar to Weber’s, asserting, “As culture is inevitably involved in such matters, [a primordial attachment is based on] the assumed ‘givens’ of social existence.”³ Leading instrumentalists also agree that their theories “are all constructivist” because they accept that ethnic identities are “produced and reproduced by specific social processes.”⁴ Realizing that most so-called primordialists see ethnicity as culturally determined, not genetically fixed, therefore allows us to construct a middle ground reconciling all three schools of thought about ethnicity.

This approach also defines a middle ground on the question of how malleable ethnic identity is. On the one hand, we know that ethnic identities are changeable. Intellectuals and political leaders can reinterpret history and culture to “reconstruct” ethnic identity; in some cases, the new identity becomes widespread and established through the process of socialization. For example, Francophone elites in Quebec redefined the highly religious French Canadian identity of the early twentieth century into the more secular nationalist Quebecois identity of later decades; generations of Quebecois grew up with this new identity and felt no connection to the older French Canadian one. On the other hand, leaders cannot stray too far from existing beliefs and real group needs, or they will fail. Identities with weak cultural roots do not survive, even if, as in the case of the Yugoslav and Soviet national identities, they are promoted for decades by powerful governments. The result is that ethnic identities are usually quite stable: while people can sometimes change their ethnic identities, most of them stay with the language, religion, and ethnic identity that they are born with.

Combined through the concept of the imagined family, the three approaches to understanding ethnicity offer a convincing explanation of why it is so powerful and so widespread a political force. The contribution of the primordial approach is to note the cultural and psychological power of ethnic attachment, which comes from its kinlike appeal and importance for members’ self-esteem. The instrumentalist view points out that tangible interests such as land, economic goods, and political power are also often at stake in ethnic conflicts.⁵ Also, once it is formed, the ethnic identity does become a useful tool for elites to use for seeking popular support. Constructivists, finally, point out that the group is a social construction, created through not only people’s beliefs but also their practices, so that if beliefs and practices change, so do ethnic identities. Additionally, the core of an ethnic identity is another social construction, the “myth-symbol complex”—the combination of myths, memories, values, and symbols that define not only who is a member of the group but what it means to be a member.⁶ Thus ethnic symbolism is at the heart of this conception.

From this point of view, religious, sectarian, and racial groups can all be seen as “ethnic,” as can ethnic groups distinguished by language, as long as they are imagined by their members as families. It does not matter what binds the imagined family together; all that matters is that its members believe in it, which often leads them to refer to each other as “brothers” or “sisters” and to their territory as the “fatherland” or the “motherland.”

A final definitional question is what I mean by ethnic conflict. I begin with Lewis Coser’s classic definition of conflict: a “struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources.”⁷ Ethnic conflict is any conflict that is defined by those involved as pitting one ethnic group—one imagined family—against nonmembers of the group. Ethnic conflict is thus the dependent variable in this book, and it has four possible values. First, ethnic conflict may be suppressed by an authoritarian government, resulting in repressive peace. Second, it may be low, so that contests between ethnic groups are few and easily managed by political routines, resulting in an inclusive peace. Third, ethnic conflict may be moderate, with contending ethnic groups represented by clashing social movements that lead to contentious politics, perhaps involving raucous mass political rallies but not massive violence. Fourth, ethnic conflict may be extreme, leading to war or even genocide.

The Psychological Basis of Symbolic Politics Theory

Neuroscientists have identified two different processes of human decision making based on different neural systems. The first system is intuitive, and is located in an evolutionarily older portion of the brain. Its decisions are unconscious or preconscious and extremely fast; it considers information that is not even consciously noticed, responds strongly to a person’s emotions, and works primarily based on learned associations between different objects. The second system, for “reflective” decision making, is more logical and is carried out by parts of the human brain that evolved later. It works consciously but much more slowly than the intuitive system, and it has much less capacity.⁸ Neuroscientists consider the intuitive system so much more powerful that psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to the relationship as one between an elephant and its rider, with the reflective rider often acting not as the intuitive elephant’s controller but as its “public relations firm.”⁹

Rational choice theorists focus all of their attention on the rider. I think it is wise to listen to the neuroscientists and consider the elephant first.

INTUITIVE REASONING

One of the most famous experiments in neuroscience was carried out by a team led by Antonio and Hanna Damasio. In the experiment, participants were offered two sets of cards: the red cards yielded high rewards but even higher penalties, while the blue cards offered a steadier stream of lower rewards. The Damasios found that after choosing about ten cards, people started showing stress responses (sweaty palms) to the red cards, and they unconsciously shifted toward preferring the blue cards. After fifty cards, on average, they reported a hunch that the blue cards were better; after about eighty cards, people understood the game.¹⁰ In other words, what the Damasios found was that emotional response and reaction come first, conscious intuition second, and conscious understanding later.

The intuitive system is powerfully effective for a variety of reasons. First, the human senses collect a million times more information than is registered consciously, and the intuitive system considers it all; the reflective circuits, in contrast, rely mostly on the tiny fraction of information that is consciously noticed.¹¹ Second, the intuitive system is fast, reacting in some cases within one-tenth of a second.¹² The power of the emotionally charged intuitive circuit means that experiences that involve emotional content produce stronger and more vivid memories than emotionally neutral ones.¹³ The intuitive system also uses emotion to evaluate experiences: if something feels good, then it is good.¹⁴ The intuitive system therefore steers our most basic actions: it guides our attraction to food and good-looking potential mates, while preparing us to react to danger, seek social status, and pursue other needs and wants.

Some intuitive abilities are universal: people in every culture learn to read emotional expressions on other people’s faces within a few months of birth, and many of these expressions are recognizable by cultures all over the globe.¹⁵ Others are the result of training or education: art experts, for example, can often spot a forgery immediately, long before they can articulate how they can tell.¹⁶ This is why Haidt refers to the reflective system as the “public-relations firm” for intuition: people often do not know the reasons for their decisions, though they are often good at rationalizing whatever decision they make after the fact.¹⁷

The way the intuitive system works is through “networks of association, bundles of thoughts, feelings, images and ideas that have become connected over time.”¹⁸ Again, emotions are critical: as Drew Westen explains, “The fact that someone or something holds any significance to us at all means that it has emotional associations.”¹⁹ New networks of associations can be created in two ways, either by repetition or as the result of some traumatic experience. Either way, “neurons that fire together, wire together,” so once a network of associations is created, evoking one image in the...