Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Population censuses have symbolic and instrumental importance for ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups and their political representatives. This is particularly apparent in deeply divided societies, where political institutions are designed to accommodate groups through forms of power sharing. Existing literature posits that consociational power-sharing institutions, which are commonly employed to manage inter-group conflict, are likely to incentivise contestation and mobilisation in relation to the census, but this claim has not been tested empirically. Employing the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, this article tests a proposition about the relationship between consociationalism and the politics of the census: that it is corporate consociational designs that are likely to result in contestation of the census and mobilisation of groups during enumeration, whereas liberal consociational designs will not. The analysis offers support for this proposition, but also suggests that other features of power-sharing settlements, such as the federal nature of the Bosnian state and the majoritarian provision for a ‘border poll’ in the Northern Irish settlement, also play an important role in shaping census politics. These insights contribute to political geographic debates about the census by highlighting the influence of institutional design on struggles over how and where populations get counted, which are applicable beyond the immediate context of deeply divided societies.     

The politics of conflict: a constructivist critique of consociational and civil society theories*

ABSTRACT. This article presents a (critical realist) constructivist critique of both consociational and civil society/transformationist approaches and their crude understandings of politics and the prospects for political change. Consociationalism's primordialist or essentialist foundation leads it towards a world‐weary, pessimistic, conservative realism about how far ‘divided societies’ may be transformed. Advocates of the civil society approach, in contrast, take an instrumentalist view of identity and are optimistic that a radical transformation can be achieved by mobilising the people against ‘hard‐line’ political representatives. The constructivist approach can provide a framework in which a more complex and nuanced understanding of identities is possible. This better equips us for understanding the prospects of bringing about desirable political change. The first part of this article is a critique of Nagle and Clancy's consociationalism. The second part provides a brief outline of a constructivist critique of both the consociational and civil society understandings of politics and their contribution to understanding the politics of managing conflict.     

Constructing a shared public identity in ethno nationally divided societies: comparing consociational and transformationist perspectives

ABSTRACT. In order to bolster sustainable peace building in violently divided societies, a normative suggestion is that efforts should be made to construct a shared public identity that overarches ethnic divisions. A number of different centripetal/transformationist processes are identified as engineering a shared identity in comparison to consociational arrangements, which are accused of institutionalising ethnic differences and perpetuating conflict. These transformationist approaches essentially rest on the premise that because ethnicity is constructed it can be reconstructed into new, shared forms. Looking at Northern Ireland, we argue that there are limits to the extent that ethnicity can be reconstructed into shared identities. By analysing consociational and centripetalist/transformationist approaches to division, we conclude that although consociationalism will probably not deliver a common identity, it does provide a robust form of conflict regulation.     

Consociationalism under examination: Is consociationalism the optimal multiculturalist approach for Turkey?

Some scholars maintain that the Republic of Turkey should construct a consociational model to manage its ethno‐cultural diversity. This article suggests consociationalism is not the optimal multiculturalist approach for Turkey, where there is some degree of interethnic moderation between ethnic Kurds and Turks at the grassroots level. In the presence of this mass‐based moderation, a consociational formula is unlikely to provide Turkish political leaders with political incentives that urge them to cooperate and enter into consociational power‐sharing arrangements with their Kurdish counterparts. This renders consociational power‐sharing arrangements difficult to promote or enforce in Turkey. In the absence of such incentives, any multicultural reform of the consociational formula would not be sustainable in Turkey. There would simply not be enough popular support for such reforms. There are some electoral strategies that offer both majority and minority leaders political incentives to move toward the moderate middle, form interethnic coalitions, foster interculturalism, and increase the number of intercultural citizens. These strategies are offered by centripetalism, another multiculturalist approach to managing ethno‐cultural diversity.     

‘Democracy’ in Northern Ireland: experiments in self–rule from the Protestant Ascendancy to the Good Friday Agreement

Pierre van den Berghe has argued that democracy in divided societies can take five different forms: Herrenvolk democracy, ethnic democracy, liberal democracy, multicultural democracy and consociational democracy. My article argues that each of van den Berghe’s five versions of democracy, or relatives of them, has been experimented with in pre–partition Ireland and Northern Ireland. While all have clear limits, the one that is most suited to Northern Ireland’s conditions is consociational democracy. The article discusses some limits of the consociational approach in Northern Ireland but also defends it against common criticisms.     

Political Theology,Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how citizenship is not just a legal status that entails certain rights and duties, but also denotes an identity, a performance of politics, and a shared rationality. Third, I identify the dominant ways in which citizenship is understood in the contemporary context, namely, through either a nationalist or cosmopolitan framework, contrasting these with a consociational conception of citizenship. And lastly, I lay out how a consociational framework provides a more generative basis for conceptualizing religious diversity.     

How do western democracies cope with the challenge of societal diversity?

In the modern era, the grand forces of modernism, liberalism and nationalism have opposed and minimized societal diversity in Western states. The Civil Rights Movement in the USA and the flow of millions of unassimilable immigrants, mostly Muslims, to Europe opened Western societies to cultural diversity. But liberal multiculturalism in the West consists mainly of endorsement of subcultures, non‐discrimination and inclusion. It falls short of instituting consociational components like cultural autonomy and power‐sharing. Fear and unease in the West increasingly give priority to majority over minority rights. While all Western democracies object to societal diversity, they differ in the way they handle it: liberal democracies deny it, consociational democracies institutionalize it and ethnic democracies partially allow and partially subordinate it. These three different strategies are evident in the way representative cases of Western democracies, namely the USA, Switzerland and Estonia, respectively, cope with societal diversity.     

Faith,Ethics, and Communication: Some Recent Writing in Philosophical Theology

Four very different books on the relationship between faith and ethics are reviewed from the point of view of coping morally and intellectually with difference. Marty focuses on the stranger in pluralist societies and finds that more than mere tolerance is needed as a response to religious difference. Humility and hospitality draw more deeply on the resources of the religions as a basis for true civility. Muers explores the communicative possibilities of silence: how can one speak of God's self‐communication without silencing others? She draws conclusions for sensitive questions such as the right to privacy. Schweiker identifies “spaces of reasons” in which the religions can be moral resources in a “time of many worlds.” Burrell sets up an inter‐religious dialogue across the ancient world, bringing thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, al‐Ghazali, and Maimonides into conversation about the relationship between creator and creature.     

Territorializing Armenians: geo‐texts,and political imaginaries in French‐occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922

This article examines the petitions, letters, opinion pieces and scholarly works that Armenian intellectuals generated to convince French decision‐makers to carve an Armenian nation‐state out of Cilicia (present‐day southern Turkey). This colonial encounter took place within the process by which European powers dismembered the defeated Ottoman state following the First World War. These “geo‐texts”—textual representations of territory and population—were strategic attempts at adjusting the parameters of French imperialism, and thus tapped into French notions of history and ethnology to make a case for an Armenian state. First, I show how Armenians adopted and inflected French epistemologies to depict their ancient homeland. Then, I trace the shift from a representation based on historical commonalities between the Armenians and French to one that stressed the ethnological specificities of Armenian nation and territory. Finally, I argue that the static notions of territory, text and population that lobbyists produced continue to fuel scholarly debate over the confessional and ethnic make‐up of Cilicia. This study on “geo‐texts” provides insights into how, at a certain historical moment, differences and similarities among people, both within a society and between societies, are established in text.     

‘Participatory consociationalism? No,but South Tyrol's Autonomy Convention is evidence that power‐sharing can transform conflicts’

South Tyrol is an autonomous, predominantly German‐speaking province in Italy, and one of the most successful cases of power‐sharing in the world. Nevertheless, the Province recently conducted a participatory‐democratic process known as the ‘Autonomy Convention’ to debate and draft a proposal for revising the 1972 Autonomy Statute. It is the first such process with the stated intent of amending a power‐sharing arrangement, and our research questions are whether this represents a new type of consociational negotiation, and what made it possible. The answer to the first question is ‘no’, and the Convention is best seen as a ‘participatory‐ish consultation’ which had no formal power. But the problems that it faced, and the fact that it occurred at all, are evidence of consociational democracy's potential to transform conflicts. The Convention, we argue, is the result of ‘normal’, not ‘ethnic’ politics, and two generations of successful power‐sharing made that possible by desecuritising the relationship between South Tyrol's three official linguistic groups.     

Obeying,Believing and Rebelling

Abstract

This article offers a decisive alternative to a growing consensus within public theology that political liberalism represents the pro-Pelagian, atomistic and un-ecclesial face of modernity. Through a careful reappraisal of the sceptical theology of Michel de Montaigne I claim that contemporary Christian advocates of liberalism can develop a deeply Augustinian counter-account which has the ability to reconcile notions of individual autonomy and conscience with a strong sense of ecclesial authority. At the centre of this innovative settlement, I point to the value of Montaigne’s theological anthropology, which, in its sensitivity to human fragility and sin, offers a rich validation of pluralistic and tolerant societies by contesting absolutist claims to both knowledge and power. In framing political liberalism in these explicitly theological terms, such an account comes into sharp confrontation with the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, which has defined the liberal tradition as intrinsically anathema to an authentically Christian understanding of politics. In contrast, this article claims that political liberalism, far from being automatically antagonistic to Christian theological commitments, can be justified by them.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

Tourism,leisure and work in an east African pastoral society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article investigates what happens with leisure experience between cultures when the Mursi of southwestern Ethiopia meet with international tourists. I propose that instead of regarding leisure as a fixed human condition within one society, it might fruitfully be approached as a process that evolves when different societies meet, i.e. as a constantly emerging (and disappearing) practice in cross‐cultural encounters. Tourism, studied broadly from an anthropological point of view, offers an excellent field for this investigation. The Western ideology of leisure, mobilized by tourists in non‐Western settings, is a good entry point to make tangible how societies understand leisure pursuits in intercultural encounters.     

Zooarchaeology in Complex Societies: Political Economy, Status, and Ideology

The zooarchaeology of complex societies provides insights into the interrelated social and economic relationships that people and animals created. I present a synthesis of zooarchaeological research published since the early 1990s that addresses political economy, status distinctions, and the ideological and ritual roles of animals in complex cultures. I address current approaches and applications as well as theoretical shifts in zooarchaeological practice. Research indicates there is great variability across space and time in how past peoples used animals to generate economic surplus, to establish status differentiation within societies, and to create symbolic meaning through sacrifices, offerings, and in feasts. The study of human/animal interactions in complex societies can contribute to fundamental questions of broad relevance regarding political and social life.     

Beyond “unwinding”: Constitutional review strategies in consociations

This article contributes to the emerging literature on the role of constitutional courts in consociational democracies. While most works have approached the topic from the perspective of regime dynamics, this analysis focuses on how courts relate to the constitutions they are mandated to enforce. Beyond addressing the empirical question of what choices courts make in their balancing between universal values and stability, this article also investigates how courts do this balancing. Through the analysis of seven cases from two consociations, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, I argue that courts embrace specific interpretive approaches (proportionality analysis, purposive interpretation, and the political question doctrine) to reconcile the ideas of constitutional supremacy and respect for political agreements. The analysis also demonstrates how—by their nature political—framework agreements establishing consociational settlements become primary reference points for interpreting constitutional documents.     

Seduction and gesture in ancient imagery

For the Greeks, the body, and especially the body of youths, is one of the principal themes in visual representation. By studying the system of attitudes towards seduction as shown on a number of Attic vases, I intend to show how red‐figure representations reveal an aesthetic view of homosexuality different from the black‐figure one. Corporal expression is the key in the opposition between these two systems of representation where a dynamic gesture gradually replaces a static gesture through the creation of a “conversational art”; which was unknown in the earlier genre.     

Postmodern patriotism: Canadian reflections

Canada is an evolving human geography that has nurtured difference and made a unitary state impossible. In this short essay I allude to the historical-geographical construction of Canada and the type of confederation it encouraged. I show how deeply different identities are ingrained in the fabric of this country. As the state cannot provide equally for all these identities, I consider the special claims of Native peoples and French speakers, particularly in relation to those of multiculturalism, and argue that the country has a particular responsibility to those societies that were here before the Canadian state, and found it superimposed upon them. Overall, I try to show that Canadian patriotism, based less on an overriding meta-narrative (which the country had never found) than on an appreciation of difference and the responsibilities of citizenship, provides a welcome alternative to either an exclusionary ethnic nationalism or a borderless electronic postmodernity.     

A Switzerland of the north? The Nationalistes and a bi‐national Canada*

Abstract. Nationalism is frequently associated with the break‐up of states. This article seeks to demonstrate that nationalism, through the guise of bi‐nationalism, can be compatible with the creation and maintenance of a multinational state. The political vision of the Nationalistes of Québec provides the focus. In the early twentieth century these individuals believed that Canada could emulate states such as Switzerland and Belgium, which were marked by a degree of power‐sharing. They sought the adoption of practices which have since become associated with the doctrine of ‘consociationalism’. The research suggests that these nationalists were conscious that federalism, on its own, is not sufficient to accommodate a significant national minority.