The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict

As a glance at almost any daily newspaper reveals, perhaps the most serious challenge both to the consolidation of new democracies and to the health of well-established ones is posed by the problem of ethnic conflict. In seeking to address this issue in a reasonably comprehensive fashion in the Journal of Democracy, we turned to Donald L. Horowitz, a new member of the Journal's Editorial Board and one of the world's leading authorities on the politics of ethnicity.

Professor Horowitz graciously consented both to write an essay providing a general overview of the subject and to work with us in planning a series of case studies that would accompany his article. The three countries that we chose as the focus of these case studies are Nigeria, India, and Canada. Africa's most populous country, Nigeria has had two failed experiments with democracy and has been haltingly moving toward a third attempt, but problems of ethnic rivalry continue to beset its efforts at democratization. India has been remarkably successful for over four decades in accommodating religious and linguistic diversity, but today the world's largest democracy is under siege by a host of increasingly radical religious and separatist movements. Canada, though it is one of the world's most peaceful, prosperous, and long-established democracies, is now facing not only the threat of separatism in French-speaking Quebec, but also a host of new challenges connected with the rise of multiculturalism. The three distinguished scholars—Rotimi T. Suberu, Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., and Hugh Donald Forbes—whose articles on these countries appear below responded to a common set of questions that we posed to them regarding the effort to render ethnic conflict safe for democracy.

We are pleased to be able to add to this section two other articles that, although not planned and executed within the same conceptual framework, serve to extend our coverage of the problem of ethnic conflict to the new democratic experiments of the postcommunist world. Janusz Bugajski provides an extremely useful survey of the situation of minorities in Eastern and Central Europe, and Vesna Pešič, a courageous fighter for human rights and peace in the former Yugoslavia, offers a short and eloquent essay on the dangers of ethnocentric nationalism. We believe that, taken together, these six essays present a broad and illuminating picture of the uneasy and sometimes fatal impact of ethnic conflict on democracy, and suggest at least some ways in which it may be mitigated.

The Editors, 13 September 1993