After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States

2. Nationalism in Postcolonial States

2. Nationalism in Postcolonial States JOSHUA B. FORREST In most countries that experienced some form of direct colonial rule, nationalism emerged as a political and intellectual movement embraced by a broad spectrum of social elites. Nationalist leaders of varying backgrounds shared a common interest in extricating the nation from colonial rule and in establishing an independent nation-state with a distinct, uni‹ed national identity. In most cases, however, the common bond that had been crafted during the course of the independence movement was subsequently challenged by divisive tendencies—some new, some historically entrenched—after national independence had been achieved. This, in turn, made the erstwhile unifying bond of nationalism dif‹cult to sustain. An increasingly common type of divisive force has been the rise of multiple internal nationalisms, often within a common ethnic frame, calling for special rights or secession. Indeed, consistent with the analysis presented by Lowell Barrington in the volume’s introduction, we may suggest a broad analytical division between those postcolonial nations that have been able to continue to forge nationalist unity and those nations marked by internal ethnic nationalist challenges. In the ‹rst case, political systems continue to be characterized by the consolidation (however uneven) of a strong civic nationalist spirit, which, as Barrington indicates, generally re›ects ties among political elites from divergent political and ethnic backgrounds who share a commitment to common political rules and institutions. Here we may suggest that in the cases of Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius, and possibly South Africa, such elites have created inclusivistic polyarchical regimes, nearly consociational in structure, based on accommodation, negotiation, and the fundamental acceptability of autonomous social interests.1 33 The second pattern in postcolonial nations has been marked by the degeneration of civic nationalist unity in the wake of parochial, “ethnic nation-protecting”2 political claimants, while narrowly based patrimonial regimes cling to power by relying on a praetorian, centralist, and exclusivist pattern of rule.3 In the worst cases, including Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,4 the nation-state breaks apart (formally or de facto) into either separate communal movements with ethnonationalist aggrandizing goals or mixed interethnic movements with separatist goals, in both cases with suf‹cient social support and military resources to ensure the perpetuation of relatively circumscribed ethnopolitical , territorial goals.5 The three countries examined in detail in part 2 of the book—Malaysia, Somalia, and Rwanda—provide particularly dramatic examples of each of these two development lines. Malaysia exempli‹es a torturous road toward a relatively successful polyarchical regime construction (in recent years), while Somalia and Rwanda are cases in which nationalism became diffused into a multitude of highly parochial interests that assumed a zero-sum, nonnegotiable political stance. In Somalia, this led to the eventual breakup of the nation-state, and in Rwanda it led to genocide.6 The Malaysian case has been paralleled by the postcolonial polities of Suriname, Singapore, and Mauritius, where long-term policies of inclusion in ethnically plural social contexts eventually produced cross-segmentary ties and political cooperation among ethnic elites.7 In the eyes of some observers, the South African case suggests the recent emergence of suf‹cient cross-ethnic accommodation to generate a similar type of polyarchical , cooperative nationalism.8 However, it should be noted that this effort at interelite accommodation in South Africa has not proven entirely successful, as some leaders have used their entry into national politics to play an ethnic political card, leading one analyst to claim that instrumentalist ethnic mobilization and intercommunal strife intensi‹ed in the midto -late 1990s.9 Still, it does appear that a relatively substantial segment of political leaders from most of the key social groups remains strongly committed to building civic nationalism in South Africa, and no serious effort at ethnic secession has as yet been initiated (Zulu nationalism brokered by some instrumentalist leaders remains a serious problem, but secession has not emerged as a realistic proposition). Malaysian nationalist evolution provides a possible role model for South Africa, as ethnic accommodation, A F T E R I N D E P E N D E N C E 34 following an early postcolonial history of exclusion, has thus far succeeded in keeping extreme interethnic strife at bay. This contrasts starkly with the cases of postcolonial Somalia and Rwanda. There, the social fabric of the nation-state has been shattered in the past decade by intensive internal warfare, the...