"Blood" and "Culture" - Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right, CornerHouse
CornerHouse Briefing 11
January 1999
stelling.nl
Excerpt:
"Blood" and "Culture" have long provided people the world over with seemingly "commonsense" explanations for civil conflict. When confronted with the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, it is often taken for granted that the cause must lie in fixed, implacable, ingrained and ancient antagonisms. How else can the sheer horror of neighbours hacking each other to pieces be explained - neighbours who had previously lived together in apparent harmony? Hatred between Muslim and Serb or between Hutu and Tutsi must be "in the blood" - let the two sides at each others' throats and genocide is inevitable.[1]
Yet scratch below the surface of inter-ethnic civil conflict, and the shallowness and deceptiveness of "blood" or "culture" explanations are soon revealed.[2] "Tribal hatred" (though a real and genuine emotion for some) emerges as the product not of "nature" or of a primordial "culture", but of "a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity".[3] As Fergal Keane, a BBC Africa correspondent, writes of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994:
"Like many of my colleagues, I drove into [Rwanda] believing the short stocky ones had simply decided to turn on the tall thin ones because that was the way it has always been. Yet now, two years later . . . I think the answer is very different. What happened in Rwanda was the result of cynical manipulation by powerful political and military leaders. Faced with the choice of sharing some of their wealth and power with the [insurgent] Rwandan Patriotic Front, they chose to vilify that organisation's main support group, the Tutsis . . . The Tutsis were characterised as vermin. Inyenzi in kinyarwanda - cockroaches who should be stamped on without mercy . . . In much the same way as the Nazis exploited latent anti-Semitism in Germany, so did the forces of Hutu extremism identify and whip into murderous frenzy the historical sense of grievance against the Tutsis . . . This was not about tribalism first and foremost but about preserving the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the elite."[4]
This is not to deny that ethnicity - be it in Rwanda or anywhere else in the world - is a very real social force, a force whose outcome can be as positive as it can be murderous. It is to insist, however, that the shared values, histories, customs and identities that generate "ethnicity" are socially constructed. At root, ethnic conflicts result not from blood hatred, but from socially, politically and economically-generated divisions.[5]
Ethnicity is grounded in social imagination. Moreover, the "imagined communities"[6] which result, though defining particular groups as distinct and unique at any one given moment and in any one given context, are not unchanging.
On the contrary, they are constantly being reimagined, as relationships within and between groups are reworked through everyday social interaction. Who is "us" and who is "them" is forever being subtly redefined as histories are told and retold; traditions invented and denied; statuses ascribed and challenged; allegiances forged and broken; and identities claimed and rejected.[7] "Culture" thus provides no better explanation for ethnic conflict than "blood". In fact, it is the form that a culture takes at any given moment in history which is what needs explaining.[8]
In many instances, that form is influenced decisively by the active manipulation of ethnicity by certain political and social actors, for whom "ethnic identity" provides a fertile political terrain on which to mobilise. In some cases, such mobilisation may be directed towards liberatory ends - for example, the challenging of oppressive cultural hegemonies: in others, towards ends that are repressive, xenophobic, murderous even. In either case, conflict may be the outcome.
Recognising the ways in which ethnicity is used - crucially, by whom , for what (un)stated political aims and from what position of power[9]- is thus a critical first step to understanding the roots of what are often portrayed as "blood" conflicts. It is also key to exposing - and challenging - those who would harness ethnicity to racist and authoritarian ends.
This briefing looks specifically at the mobilisation of ethnicity in support of authoritarian, discriminatory and racist political agendas. It does not claim that the same politics are present wherever and whenever ethnicity becomes a terrain for political organising: rather, that such politics are all too easily rendered invisible by facile explanations of "blood" and "culture".
Indeed, it is the shroud that such explanations throw over the discriminatory politics underlying many expressions of "ethnic identity" that makes ethnicity such an attractive mobilising tool for the racist groups of the Right. Unsurprisingly, the last decade has seen the authoritarian New Right in Europe consciously reframing its politics of exclusion in the beguilingly progressive language of "cultural difference" - a language which permits racist to project racism as a socially-acceptable act of "loyalty to people of one's own kind" or as legitimate "cultural self-defence".[10]
Allied to a politics of cultural essentialism[11] and exclusion, the Right's defence of "cultural difference" becomes a politics of cultural apartheid.
It is a discourse, moreover, that is by no means restricted to the Right: amongst groupings that are generally viewed as progressive, there are those whose views on ethnicity chime in disturbing harmony with the views of the New Right. Within the Greens, for example, a preoccupation with "authentic cultures" and "ancient traditions" frequently lends itself to a politics of authoritarian cultural essentialism. Not surprisingly, the New Right has actively singled out leading "traditionalist" Greens as potential political allies.
Such alliances - although often overtly focused on a shared opposition to globalisation - inevitably lend support to the New Right's authoritarian agenda and raise critical questions about the politics of those involved. The need for progressive groups to distance themselves - in action as well as in theory - from the Right's "cultural" agenda is urgent.
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