First published 1988 by Pearson Education Limited
This edition first published 1997
Second impression 1999
First published 1997 by Routledge
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1997 Michael Banton
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ISBN: 978-0-582-29911-5 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banton, Michael P.
Ethnic and racial consciousness/Michael Banton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-29911-X (pbk.)
1. Ethnicity. 2. Ethnic relations. 3. Race relations
-Philosophy. I. Title.
GN495.6.B364 1997 96-28506
305.8-dc20 CIP
Set in Times
Armed conflicts have recently threatened the future of a series of multinational and multi-ethnic states. In some of them an ethnic dimension has been paramount, as in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda and Burundi; elsewhere the ethnic dimension has overlapped with political or religious dimensions, as in the Sudan, Kashmir, Tibet, and Chiapas in Mexico. According to the UN Report on the World Social Situation for 1993, there were in the years 1989-90 thirty-three armed conflicts that had each led to more than a thousand casualties. Just one was between nation-states, all the rest were between ethnic, religious or other groups within one and the same state. The calculation omitted smaller armed and all unarmed conflicts; it took no account of relations in Belgium, Fiji, Kenya, Malaysia, Moldova, Nigeria, Quebec, Spain, Transcaucasia, and so on. There have been continuing struggles in these places which many writers a hundred years ago would have called wars of races because the word race was then often used interchangeably with nation or people. Now they would be called ethnic conflicts.
In parts of Bosnia many people lived alongside others of a different ethnic origin for generations with very little consciousness of this difference. Then hostilities broke out elsewhere and spread to their localities. Inspired by beliefs about the importance of ethnic difference, terrible atrocities were committed. Trust was destroyed; people no longer felt safe with neighbours of different ethnicity. Why should conflict have escalated? After all, many countries have been populated by a series of immigrant groups, like the Angles, Saxons and Normans in England, and they have grown together. The number of distinctive languages spoken in the world continually diminishes as ethnic groups dissolve. Ethnic differences do not cause conflict, but conflict can make people much more conscious of ethnic difference if the conflicts follow the lines of ethnic division.
Conflicts can be managed by wise statesmanship, aided, sometimes, by international oversight. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created after the First World War in such an operation; it was a unit big enough to be divided more recently into separate states. Czechoslovakia was created at the same time and has since undergone a velvet divorce to create the separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (though very many Czechs and Slovaks regret the split and did not believe it necessary). In other instances, like the Lebanon, division is not possible; the chief causes of the conflicts between the ethno-religious groups in that small country have lain outside its frontiers in the tension between Israel and its Arab neighbours. South Africa is large enough for division, but the supporters of the new government there would regard partition as a terrible failure. They believe they can reverse earlier trends and create a non-racial society.
Sometimes ethnic relations within states are affected by changes in the relations between states. The fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989 marked a major change of this kind. The reduction in tension between East and West removed forces which had been suppressing ethnic tensions in the East. The most notable of the succeeding events was Croatias precipitate declaration of independence on 25 June 1991, followed by waves of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Further east came the ethnic conflicts in Georgia, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Tadjikistan, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and other republics whose boundaries had been drawn in Moscow with little regard for the ethnic geography. One consequence of the weakening of state controls was a flood of asylum-seekers, many of whom moved to Europe; in Germany some of them became subject to fierce attack in 1992-3. Hostility spilled over onto settled immigrants as well, but in general the ending of the Cold War did not bring ethnic conflicts to the surface in the West to the same extent as in the East.
Before trying to explain the presence or absence of ethnic conflict, it is prudent to pause over the nature of the task itself. The people who have been involved in the conflicts identify themselves as Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Hutu, Tutsi, and so on. They use proper names (in the technical sense of that expression). Serbs may say that they are caught up in a struggle with the Croats or the Muslims. They do not say that they are party to an ethnic, national, religious or racial struggle. It is a commentator from outside who imposes a definition of the nature of the struggle by adding an adjective of this kind. That is the operation over which the reader should pause because it introduces some complex issues.
