The Politics of Majority Nationalism: Framing Peace, Stalemates, and Crises
272
The Politics of Majority Nationalism: Framing Peace, Stalemates, and Crises
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Overview
What drives the politics of majority nationalism during crises, stalemates and peace mediations? In his innovative study of majority nationalism, Neophytos Loizides answers this important question by investigating how peacemakers succeed or fail in transforming the language of ethnic nationalism and war. The Politics of Majority Nationalism focuses on the contemporary politics of the 'post-Ottoman neighborhood' to explore conflict management in Greece and Turkey while extending its arguments to Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Drawing on systematic coding of parliamentary debates, new datasets and elite interviews, the book analyses and explains the under-emphasized linkages between institutions, symbols, and framing processes that enable or restrict the choice of peace. Emphasizing the constraints societies face when trapped in antagonistic frames, Loizides argues wisely mediated institutional arrangements can allow peacemaking to progress.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804796330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Politics of Majority Nationalism
Framing Peace, Stalemates, and Crises
By Neophytos Loizides
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9633-0
CHAPTER 1
The Politics of Majority Nationalism: Regional and Global Perspectives
While studies of contentious ethnic politics generally focus on minority issues, few have attempted to provide a theoretical account of majorities as their primary unit of comparative political analysis. Alexander Motyl's Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2001), for example, includes no entry on majority groups, while only a handful of studies have focused on majorities per se. Yet national majorities deserve scholarly attention, given the impact of destructive actions by numerically dominant groups on their ethnic antagonists. Unlike minorities, which rarely have adequate resources to harm their opponents, majorities can choose to engage in both grassroots and state-level mobilizations. By controlling the state apparatus, including the army and the police, politically and numerically dominant groups can engage in some of the most threatening actions against peace. Many of the worst crimes against humanity have been triggered by majority-group actions, in the late Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany, and more recently, Rwanda and Sudan.
Majority politics, particularly the evolving nature of modern nationalism, offer opportunities for theoretical innovation. As Kaufmann and Haklai (2008) argue, the world has been in the midst of a long-term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority rule has been common in premodern societies, modernity and the waves of democratization of the past two centuries have engendered a shift to dominant majorities. As demonstrated recently in the Arab Spring revolutions, majorities have become increasingly eager to risk even civil wars in addressing their grievances. The post-2011 civil war in Syria is a sad manifestation of an attempted and badly managed transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity.
Before continuing, it is necessary to clarify the book's definitions of majority groups and majority nationalism. Dominant majorities (simply referred to as majorities in the rest of the book) are groups that enjoy effective control of a sovereign state and have a demographic numerical advantage. Unlike mobilizing minorities, whose objectives often include the creation of a new state or autonomous unit, dominant majority nationalism is usually (but not exclusively) manifested in the maintenance of already-achieved state sovereignty, the protection of ethnic kin across the border, the safeguarding of majority-group national culture, and, increasingly, the protection of majority-ethnicity civilian populations from terrorism. Majority nationalism could, therefore, be defined either as an ideological schema that defends the legitimacy of these objectives, or as a feeling of frustration resulting from the failure to advance them.
For instance, Turkish nationalism has been manifested in the denial of Kurdish ethnocultural rights, hostile policies toward countries perceived to sympathize with the Kurdish PKK, preserving territorial disputes with Greece, and more recently confronting Israel in the Middle East. Likewise, Greek nationalism in the past decades has been demonstrated in denying the legitimacy of ethnic Macedonian nationalism, blocking Turkish-EU relations, and joining with Turkey in dangerous escalations of tensions over the Aegean. In both countries, majority nationalism has also targeted international organizations, such as the IMF, NATO, or the EU, seen as treating the countries unfairly or failing to deliver on their commitments and promises. For instance, following the post-2008 sovereign debt crisis, the terms of the EU Commission/European Central Bank/IMF rescue package for Greece became the major cleavage and source of contention within Greek society.
But we should avoid narrowing nationalism as a concept to include only its contemporary manifestations. Several theorists of nationalism studying the formation of nations in modern times offer insightful definitions, including Gellner (1965, 1983), Anderson (1983), and Hobsbawm (1983, 1990). For instance, Gellner relates nationalism to the needs of modern industrial societies. With the division of labor brought about by industrialization, societies become more mobile and more equalitarian. Modern states, just like modern armies, provide a thorough training for their recruits: literacy, numeracy, basic work habits, and familiarity with basic technical skills. The result is a process of homogenization with a twofold effect: a core majority group becomes a united homogeneous population or/and reactionary nationalism is developed by minorities who face various forms of cultural/ethnic humiliation and/or see their opportunities for upward social mobility blocked (Gellner 1983).
Drawing on Gellner, O'Leary argues that "nationalism, so far the most potent principle of political legitimacy in the modern world, holds that the nation should be collectively and freely institutionally expressed, and ruled by its co-nationals" (1998: 40). To achieve this sense of collective expression, nationalizing elites have historically attempted to eliminate national and ethnic differences. According to McGarry and O'Leary, this has been done through genocide, mass-population transfers, territorial restructuring through partitions/secessions, and cultural engineering through integration or assimilation (1993). In a recent synthesis of these expressions of nation-building, Mylonas (2013) focuses on the making of conationals, refugees, and minorities in the Balkans, probing, in particular, the impact of regional and international environment in the state's choice to assimilate, accommodate, or exclude ethnic groups within its territory.
While drawing on earlier work in the field, The Politics of Majority Nationalism integrates historical and contemporary manifestations of nationalism in an attempt to expand the theoretical, empirical and public policy scope of contemporary nationalism studies. This chapter presents the major typologies of minority and majority nationalism, main definitions of stalemates and peace settlements, and relevant puzzles in Greek-Turkish crisis behavior.
TYPOLOGIES OF MINORITY VERSUS MAJORITY NATIONALISM
The dichotomy between minority and majority nationalism is not always unproblematic or uncontested. For instance, Fearon suggests a complex pattern of "double minorities" or nested minorities among Serbs and Croats, Azeris and Armenians, Catholic and Protestant Irish, Sinhalese and Tamils. Nested minorities are groups whose majority-minority status varies according to the administrative, state, or regional level (1998: 125). Yet distinguishing between minorities and majorities often serves to make an empirical distinction between qualitatively different forms of nationalism and confrontational action.
To begin with, majority mobilization in established majority-ethnicity states is almost always safer than minority activism, especially for such issues as treatment by "in-group" army and police authorities. As mentioned above, the state or parts of the ruling elite might actually encourage participation in popular events, such as, for instance, nationalist rallies, to serve domestic political interests or to force concessions from third actors (see also Haklai 2007). State institutions, media, political parties, religious authorities, and civic groups are usually instrumental in the success of nationalist protests, popular boycotts, and petitions. Moreover, because of this interconnection between states and dominant majorities, resources are generally available (or constant), and, therefore, resource mobilization theories cannot adequately explain the variation in the responses of majorities during conflictual situations. When members of majorities want to mobilize, it is easy for them to draw upon domestic resources, while minorities are often held hostage to uncertain external support and mobilizing opportunities broadly defined (see Romano 2006).
Finally, majorities confront a number of issues (not always ethnic) that can provide the basis for mobilization. Unlike minorities, who usually have to confront one state on one issue (autonomy/sovereignty), majorities deal with many different ethnic issues and antagonists (as highlighted below in the chapter's revised version of Brubaker's typology of non-state-seeking nationalisms). The variation of issues and responses among majorities make the latter particularly interesting in terms of theorizing and testing alternative hypotheses, not only in the fields of nationalism and ethnic politics but also in theorizing about comparative politics more generally.
Drawing on Brubaker (1998: 272–307), three broad categories of ethnopolitical crises seem relevant for majority-groups. The first is the "external national homeland" crisis, which erupts when a majority in one state tries to "rescue," usually across a historically contested border, an ethnically related minority perceived to be threatened or severely repressed. In the period 1983–2003 there were several such episodes between Greece and Albania concerning the status of the Greek minority, and between Turkey and Bulgaria (or Greece) over the status of Thracian Turkish minorities. Despite some dire predictions, none of these crises led to major interstate crises comparable, say, to the events in the former Yugoslavia (Krajina and Bosnia), or the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, or the Transdniester region of Moldova). In fact, Greek and Turkish foreign policy gradually adapted to the constraints of the new world order, limiting the role of external homelands and emphasizing those of international bodies and nongovernmental organizations (Christou 2004; Anagnostou 2001). EU enlargement on its eastern frontier had a catalytic effect. As shown in Chapter 5, even the hitherto intractable Cyprus conflict showed signs of declining "external homeland involvement" in April 2004, after the endorsements of the Annan plan by the governments of Turkey and Greece (Ker-Lindsay 2007, 2011).
The second type of crisis stems from state and social responses to internal minorities. Here, the majority sees itself as the legitimate "owner" of the state, which in turn is expected to become the embodiment and defender of its distinctive character (Brubaker 1998: 277–78). Preventing secessionism is the cornerstone of majority nationalism, and where potentially secessionist minorities exist, majorities may mobilize to defend the integrity of the state. In practice, however, majorities may also create repressionist or even eliminationist policies affecting small minorities who lack any strategic importance or who pose no threat to the majority group. For instance, in the 1950s and 1960s, Turkish nationalists targeted the tiny urban minority of ethnic Greeks in Istanbul, leading to the virtual elimination of this historic community (Alexandris 1983). Similarly, Greece has denied official recognition for the remaining ethnic Macedonians in northern Greece after World War II, not to mention repatriation rights for civil war refugees of non-Greek descent, even though no evidence has ever been provided to demonstrate that they pose a direct threat to Greek security, particularly since the 1990s.
Relatively secure majorities could be defined as those dominant majorities whose numerical status is not threatened; they are dominant economically, politically (represented by a majority in the national parliament), and culturally (with their language taught in state-sponsored educational institutions). More important, secure majorities have primary control of the army and police, and even though they might face occasional terrorist or other attacks, they control a particular territory militarily. Yet as the examples above demonstrate, even "relatively secure" majorities might, on occasion, opt for confrontational policies against minorities, primarily because of the way the concepts of "fear" and "security" are constructed in conflict-ridden societies.
The third type of crisis relates to interstate conflicts over territory, cultural property, and sovereignty. Disputes over inhabited islets and territorial waters fueled nationalist passions and even risked war between Greece and Turkey twice, in 1987 and again in 1996. Despite the influence of the European Union and NATO, the conflict between Greece and Turkey has not been resolved yet. In the specific case of the Aegean disputes, it is very unlikely that anticipated oil or natural gas revenues would ever recompense the defense budgets of Greece and Turkey, or make up the lost income from bilateral investments, tourism, and trade between the two neighbors (ICG 2012).
Besides territory, interstate crises might occur over cultural issues, the economy, and, more broadly, questions of sovereignty. The Balkans offer multiple examples of interstate conflicts over cultural property, symbols, and history. For instance, in the early 1990s, the name "Macedonia" or "Macedonian," and the heritage and symbols of the ancient Macedonian Kingdom became issues of contention between Greece (and its northern province of Macedonia) on the one hand, and the Macedonian Republic (officially FYROM) on the other. More recently, Greece has been embattled with its European allies and the IMF over highly contentious issues on managing its economy and social unrest resulting from the post-2008 financial crisis. As with minorities, majorities might find themselves vulnerable in the face of the pressures of a globalizing and interdependent world.
And as mentioned above, the distinction between majority and minority groups or dominant and nondominant groups could be contested. Admittedly, numerical majorities are not always politically dominant, as suggested by the cases of Apartheid South Africa or Assad's Syria. Likewise, majorities are not always ethnic; they may be cultural or political. As noted, unless otherwise stated, the book uses the term "majority" for those ethnic groups enjoying the effective control of a sovereign state of their own, with an effective numerical superiority. The literature of nationalism offers synonyms or related terms, such as Laitin's titular nationalism (1998) or Brubaker's non-state-seeking nationalism, assuming the group already has a state (1998). For dominant groups, O'Leary uses Staatsvolk to define "the national or ethnic people, who are demographically and electorally dominant" (2001a).
In the definition used throughout this volume, majority groups comprise more than two-thirds of the population of a country; they are politically dominant (that is, more than two-thirds majority in the parliament and domination of the economy) and culturally dominant (that is, the language of the group as the only one taught in state-sponsored educational institutions). Some of the findings may be relevant outside these thresholds, depending on other factors, such as the size of the group, military power, geographic distribution of minorities, and level of economic development. The term "demographic majorities" applies to demographically superior groups that do not have control of the state, such as Sunnis under Assad in Syria and blacks in Apartheid South Africa. Likewise, "dominant minorities" refers to groups that are not numerically superior but do have effective control of a state, such as Shiites in Syria and whites in Apartheid South Africa.
ETHNOPOLITICAL CRISES AND PROTRACTED STALEMATES
The ethnopolitical crises discussed in this book feature, on the one hand, states and their dominant majorities, and on the other, ethnic antagonists such as minorities or neighboring countries. Drawing upon the Brecher and Wilkenfeld definition of foreign policy crises (1997), ethnopolitical crises involving majority groups are defined here as comprising the following: a perceived threat to the basic values of the majority group; a limited time for response to the threat; and a heightened probability that the majority will respond with military threats, economic reprisals, or alternatively with massive human rights violations against its ethnic antagonists. The dependent variable, crisis behavior, is dualistic in nature: it includes majority-driven state policies as well majority nationalist mobilization at the grassroots level. State policies, such as the closure of ethnic Kurdish parties, official embargoes against neighboring countries, and dangerous escalations in the Aegean, are often supplemented or accompanied by citizen-led boycotts, voting for nationalist politicians or parties, and popular mobilizations in the form of street rallies. For instance, both the Greek mobilization over the Macedonian issue in February 1992 and the Turkish mobilization over the Öcalan extradition trial in November 1998 drew the support of more than a million people in rallies, petitions, and informal boycotts (Alexandri 1992; TRT TV 1998). State policies led to a near-war situation: twice between Greece and Turkey, in 1987 and 1996, and once between Turkey and Syria, in 1998.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1Politics of Majority Nationalism: Regional and Global Perspectives chapter abstractChapter 1 situates Greek and Turkish nationalism within the broader picture of conflict-ridden national majorities. It provides key definitions and typologies; it integrates theories of nationalism, social movements and ethnic conflict, aiming to demonstrate major gaps in these literatures. It argues that majority nationalism and the variations in the response of majorities cannot be adequately explained simply by history or long-standing ethnic and religious rivalries. Moreover, theories of ethnic mobilization, which focus on single factor explanations, such as group status, relative (or actual or unexpected) deprivation, fear, and repression, offer an inadequate explanation of the politics of majority nationalism. Following McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow (1997:152), this chapter argues for an integrated perspective in the study of majority nationalism, noting the conditions and constraints that shape protest, the institutions and mobilizing structures that support it, and the framing processes around which action is perceived and acted out.
2Frames of Peace, Stalemates and Crises chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the study of pre-crisis framing (i.e. framing before the advent of a crisis or mediation). It asks how framing processes are contributing to subsequent crises, stalemates or peace processes. It addresses in more detail the following issues: the conceptualization of frames in general and their pre-crisis features in particular; the key differences between framing and the broader conceptual category of perception; the debate on the limits of plasticity of frames, or to what extent frames should correspond to pre-existing "perceived realities"; the two necessary component frames relating motives and opportunities; the detailed coding procedures of adversarial and non-adversarial frames. Drawing on the post-Ottoman successor states as a case study, the chapter also argues that the framing of false analogies with the past explains why societies in the region have generally failed in accommodating diversity through federalism and power-sharing.
3Trapped in Nationalism? Symbolic Politics in Greece and the Macedonian Question chapter abstractChapter 3 examines how adversarial framing on the Macedonian issue constrained a moderate government in Greece from capitalizing on its peace potential in the early 1990s when major demonstrations in Thessaloniki and Athens attracted at least a million people each. At the same time, it asks why conflicts related to Turkey or Albania received little attention despite ethnic antagonisms and an alleged "civilizational divide" between Greece and its predominantly Muslim neighbors. Drawing evidence from the Hellenic Parliament, this chapter demonstrates that on Turkish and Albanian issues, a sizeable moderate camp championed reconciliation and compromise, maintaining a balance between hardliners and moderates in Greece. Even so, hardliners monopolized the framing of Greece's Macedonian policies, thus shaping an early nationalist consensus. By adopting this hegemonic frame, mainstream Greek political elites prevented adaptation to new realities in the 1990s, obstructing a feasible peace agreement between the two nations.
4Europe and (non) Accommodation in Turkey: Framing the Kurds, Greece and Syria chapter abstractChapter 4 focuses on Turkey and the Kurdish question particularly in relation to the country's neighbors. It highlights the 1998 Öcalan incident when hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens joined mass nationalist mobilizations to protest against third countries (Syria, Italy and Greece) (allegedly) supporting the PKK (Kurdistan's Workers Party). It examines how Turkish elites framed foreign governments and the PKK as the parties solely responsible for the Kurdish uprising, making any potential compromise unimaginable for the next two decades. At the same time the chapter examines the progress made by Turkey in reaching better relations with Greece leading to the Helsinki compromise in 1999. The chapter looks at parliamentary records and political discourse in the years preceding this crucial 1998-9 period to identify the framing of Turkey's foreign policy, explain variation in foreign policy outcomes and Turkey's subsequent reactions to the civil wars in Iraq and Syria.
5Transforming Stalemates into Opportunities for Peace: Four 'Success' Stories chapter abstractChapter 5 takes a different direction to the rest of the book by considering positive transformation in protracted conflicts. Theoretically informative cases of peace transformation are those which initially demonstrated high levels of entrenched ethnocentric framing, majority nationalist mobilization and human rights violations yet actors have nonetheless managed to catalyze a process of transformation. The chapter focuses on four examples of partial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean region namely the Macedonian name dispute (i.e. the 1995 Interim Agreement), the 1999-earthquake diplomacy between Greece and Turkey; the 'democratic opening' of the AKP government in Turkey and finally successful confidence building measures in Cyprus. It argues that intelligently designed and mediated institutional frameworks could neutralize the impact of ethnonationalist frames or co-exist with them in a stable symbiotic relationship, allowing ethnic communities to adapt narratives at their own pace and in their preferred direction as the peace process evolves.
6Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine: Post-Communist Transitions and Beyond chapter abstractChapter 6 provides a broader comparative analysis of contentious politics and majority mobilization. The chapter summarizes the previous findings on Greece and Turkey and then goes on to apply the book's arguments to three new cases from the Western Balkans, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe: the rise of Slobodan Milošević and Serbian protests over the status of Kosovo in 1987, the Georgian mobilization against its breakaway territories leading to the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 and the Ukrainian revolution of February 2014, ending with the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych and Russian's military interventions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. It demonstrates how pre-crisis framing had comparable effects in the five countries, despite differences in the economic performance, levels of democratization, military capacity, geopolitical alliances, cultural traditions (e.g. religion), and approaches to human rights.