Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict

4. Assimilation and its Alternatives: Caveats in the Study of Nation-building Policies

I would like to thank Kristin Fabbe, Erica Chenoweth, Keith Darden, Stathis Kalyvas, Jackie Kerr, Matthew Kocher, Adria Lawrence, George Th. Mavrogordatos, Karen Motley, Elpida Vogli , Elizabeth Saunders, Konstantinos Tsitselikis, and James Raymond Vreeland for their helpful comments. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Junior Faculty Workshop , George Washington University, Washington, D.C., October 22, 2009; the Georgetown University International Theory and Research Seminar, co-sponsored by the Department of Government and the Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington , D.C., September 14, 2009. I would like to thank the participants at these events for their thoughtful comments. Assimilation and its Alternatives: Caveats in the Study of Nation-building Policies Harris Mylonas Chapter 4 This chapter explains how states choose nation-building policies. Speci fically, I focus on the strategic choice to use exclusionary state-planned nation-building policies toward non-core groups1 instead of assimilating them or granting them minority rights. I define nation-building as the process whereby ruling political elites attempt to make the political and the national units overlap.2 To achieve this overlap, these elites construct and impose a common national identity on the population of the state. Legitimacy in the modern state is connected to popular rule and thus majorities . Nation-building is the process through which these majorities are constructed. Some countries are, or are at least thought of as, more homogeneous than others. For example, Japan is more homogeneous along ethnic and religious lines than Bosnia-Herzegovina or Nigeria. We know that countries that are considered homogeneous today were not necessarily so in the nineteenth century. For example, in Italy during the 1860s, “only 3 per 1. Any aggregation of individuals that is perceived as an ethnic group (the relevant marker can be linguistic, religious, physical, ideological) by the ruling political elite of a country at the beginning of the period analyzed, I call a “non-core group.” For a more detailed discussion of this definition, see Harris Mylonas, Assimilation and its Alternatives : The Making of Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2008, pp. 50–52. 2. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 84 | rethinking violence cent of the population spoke the north Italian version elevated to official status, and no more than 10 per cent understood it.”3 Things in Italy are quite different today. The consensus in the literature is that this homogeneity has been constructed.4 Within existing state borders, a wide range of possible strategies can lead to a more homogeneous country. Once a government of a modern nation-state decides who constitutes the core group and what the criteria of inclusion are, it pursues policies to construct a homogeneous nationstate . But how do ruling elites choose among these policies? What explains variation in nation-building policies across groups and over time? Many arguments, ranging from ethnic antipathy, racism, and ethnic dominance to strictly security considerations, have been proposed to explain aspects of this variation.5 Many of the existing theories, however, focus on explaining the occurrence of the most violent state policies such as genocide , mass killing, or ethnic cleansing.6 As a result, they end up over-aggregating the different “peaceful” outcomes under the residual category of “non-violent.” As Stevan Pavlowitch notes, “There is a fascination with victims: the massacre of populations is more interesting than their daily 3. Crawford Young, ed., Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy: A Comparative Inquiry (St. Martin’s Press and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1998), p. 18. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organization , Vol. 54, No. 4 (2000), pp. 845–877. 5. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Roger Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001); Roger Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence : Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27–47. 6. Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder Since 1955,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 97...