The New Tribalism

...We look for the nearest possible arrangement to whatever was ex ante just, taking into account now what justice requires for the immigrants and colonists, or their children, who are not themselves the authors of the conquest or the oppression...

...we cannot guarantee the success of the resistance...

...There doesn't seem to be any humane or decent way to disentangle the tribes, and at the same time the entanglements are felt to be dangerous—not only to individual life, which is reasonable enough, but also to communal well-being...

...The argument is very much like that of a Puritan minister in the 1640s, defending the union of husband and wife against the new doctrine of divorce: If they might be separated for discord, some would make a commodity of strife...

...But the practice of democracy, even in its earliest stages, made it clear that there was more than one demos, and then separation became necessary if democracy was to be sustained...

...Latvians, Georgians, and Russians...

...A group that has been severely discriminated against, however, and whose access to resources is limited, does have a moral claim on the state...

...The two crucial seventeenth-century arguments against toleration sound very familiar today, for they closely parallel the arguments against national separation and autonomy...

...But that is a request that hangs more on political judgments than on moral principles...

...it has to be accommodated, and therefore the crucial universal principle is that it must always be accommodated: not only my parochialism but yours as well, and his and hers in their turn...

...The principle of self-determination is subject to interpretation and amendment...

...Centuries of sovereignty for the great states of Western Europe preceded the achievement of European community...

...but now they are not best to be contentious, for the law will hold their noses together 'til weariness make them leave off struggling...

...The separations I have already noted took place alongside constructive processes that created large nation-states with more or less identifiable boundaries and more or less committed members...

...What makes it possible— though still politically difficult and uncertain— is that the bounds need not enclose, in every case, the same sort of space...

...The case is the same in the East...

...none of them will be permanent...

...There is no single correct outcome...

...These ordinary men and women are driven to fight not by their lust for power or enrichment, not by their bigotry or fanaticism, but by their fear of conquest and oppression...

...they hope to become political authorities themselves, replacing the imperial bureaucrats who once forced them to live peacefully with their internal minorities...

...But—again—one nation's independence may be the beginning of another nation's oppression...

...Good fences make good neighbors only when there is some minimal agreement on where the fences should go...

...The parochialism that it breeds is similarly permanent...

...What is at stake is the value of a historical or cultural or religious community and the political liberty of its members...

...In fact, however, what broke the cycle, in the case of the religious wars, was not so much political absolutism as religious toleration...

...Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs—who take pleasure in acts of conquest, who aim above all to triumph over their neighbors and enemies...

...But it also, and far more importantly, lowered the stakes of religious conflict: toleration made divisiveness more tolerable...

...Cities, nations, federations, immigrant societies —all these can be and have been governed democratically...

...We will have to form an opinion about the inner strengths and weaknesses of the existing SPRING • 1992 • 167 civil society...

...The best hope for restraint lies, I think, in federal or confederal checks and balances and in international pressure...

...Certainly, toleration opened the way for a large number of new sects, though these have mostly flourished on the margins of more or less stable religious communities...

...But not many of the new nations are likely to be liberal, even if they achieve some version of democracy...

...Suppose that Russian immigrants now made up a majority of the people living in Latvia: would any right remain of Latvian self-determination...

...Self-determination for husbands and wives is relatively simple, even when important constraints are imposed upon the separated individuals...

...It is obviously an incentive to divorce if one of the partners—a nation, say, industrially advanced or in control of mineral resources—can improve its position by walking away from the existing union...

...But these can't be our only options: the dominance of one tribe or a common detribalization...

...We need to think about the political structures best suited to this multiplication and division...

...Consider now some of the more likely possibilities...

...It solved the problem of fear by creating protected spaces for a great diversity of religious practices...

...SPRING • 1992 • 171...

...Every tribe within its own modest bounds: this is the political equivalent of toleration for every church and sect...

...Or the Georgians in an independent Georgia...

...It doesn't follow, however, that every wealthy or resourceful tribe is inauthentic...

...The principle involved is the familiar one that makes aggression a criminal act...

...The world changes, not necessarily in morally justifiable ways...

...Why shouldn't the same sequence, harmlessness following upon nastiness, hold for contemporary nationalists...

...And once they have been summoned, once they have arrived, it isn't possible to do them justice within the old political order...

...It often seems as if the chief motive for national liberation is not to free oneself from minority status in someone else's country but to acquire (and then mistreat) minorities of one's own...

...This looks very much like a systematic repetition of the response of early twentiethcentury social democrats to the nationalist movements that challenged the old empires...

...All over the world today, but most interestingly and frighteningly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities...

...The division of Belgium and Holland, and the failures of French imperialism, made possible the Benelux experiment...

...This liberty is not compromised, it seems to me, by the postmodern discovery that communities are social constructions: imagined, invented, put together...

...The captivity was wrong for the same reasons that the capture was wrong...

...In practice, of course, both distinctions are really unmarked continuums, but it is best to begin with the clear cases...

...This too seems to suit the people involved, and it is politically and morally suitable...

...Often enough, separatist movements in the economically advantaged provinces or regions of some established union do not meet those 168 • DISSENT standards...

...Tribalism names the commitment of individuals and groups to their own history, culture, and identity, and this commitment (though not any particular version of it) is a permanent feature of human social life...

...I have no easy answer to these questions...

...Greeks and Turks...

...The abandonment of these identities is startling in its scope and speed, and it leaves many people who had traveled under their protection suddenly vulnerable: Serbs in Croatia, Albanians in Serbia, Armenians in Azerbaijan, Russians in the Baltic states, Jews in Russia, and so on, endlessly...

...The tribes have returned, and the drama of their return is greatest where their repression was most severe...

...Faced with their contemporary resurgence, the first response is to argue for their containment within established multinational states—democratically transformed, of course, but not divided...

...Consider, for example, a minority community with a highly distinctive history and culture and a strong territorial base—like the Albanians in Kosovo, for example...

...The Swedes could have held Norway indefinitely under one or another form of authoritarian rule...

...They cannot claim any absolute protection against the pressures and attractions of the common life—as if they were an endangered species...

...Long-established patterns of cooperation cannot be abruptly terminated to the advantage of the most advantaged partners...

...Or the Poles in Poland...

...Something more than equal citizenship is due them, some degree of collective self-rule, but exactly what this might mean in practice will depend on the residual strength of their own institutions and on the character of their engagement in the common life of the larger society...

...In Eastern Europe today, and in Caucasia, and in much of the Middle East, the prospects don't seem bright, given the sheer number of suddenly raucous tribes and the radical entanglement of their members on the same bits and pieces of land...

...What has been called "the national question" doesn't have a single correct answer, as if there were only one way of "being" a nation, one version of national history, one model of relationships among nations...

...Put them in a world where they are not threatened, and for how long will they think it in their interests to threaten others...

...They will contest the divorce, but what they are probably entitled to, it seems to me, is the international equivalent of alimony and child support...

...and the politics that results will be noisy, incoherent, unstable, and deadly...

...With the end of imperial and totalitarian rule, we can at last recognize this commonality and begin the difficult negotiations it requires...

...History reveals many ways, versions, and models, and so it suggests the existence of many (more or less secure) stopping points along the slippery slope...

...Their rights too are eroded with time, not because the wrong done to them is wiped out (it may well grow greater, with increasingly deleterious effects on their communal life), but because the possibility no longer exists for the restoration of anything remotely resembling their former independence...

...Similar efforts in Eastern Europe seem to have failed: there aren't many committed Yugoslav or Soviet citizens...

...Confronted with modernity, all the human tribes are endangered species...

...Feudalism is the name of a regime, and regimes can be replaced...

...In fact, the forms are historically negotiated, and they depend upon shared understandings of what such negotiations mean and how they work...

...at least, it is capable of division and even thrives on it...

...Demagogues exploit the hopes for national revival, linguistic autonomy, the free development of schools and media—all supposedly threatened by cosmopolitan or antinational minorities...

...These are doubly hard questions...

...In cases like these, some sort of minimalist regionalism seems both to suit the people involved (small numbers of them—political, not ethnic or religious, minorities—always excepted) and to be politically and morally suitable...

...What this also means is that our common humanity will never make us members of a single universal tribe...

...And so there are also cases in which resistance to secession is not justified and should not be internationally supported— so long as some agreement can be negotiated that meets the interests of the people left behind...

...Each of them will have its usefulness and its irritations...

...they are painful and they are difficult...

...they are trapped on the wrong side of the border as a result of some dynastic marriage or military victory long ago...

...The humane solution to their difficulty is to move the border...

...But the greater number by far are differently motivated: they "would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds...

...The effort to include the Irish failed miserably...

...By and large, the experience of marginal difference and territorial dispersion gives rise to very limited claims on the state— a good reason for doubting the dangers of the slippery slope...

...the negotiation of difference will never produce a final settlement...

...And by a kind of imaginative extension, we can grant the same rights to nations that ought to have been independent, where the solidarity of the group is plain to see and the crime of the ruling power is national oppression rather than conquest...

...As the examples I have cited from Western Europe suggest, choices are more likely to be determined by circumstances than by abstract principles...

...It seems to me that we should aim at something very much like this today: protected spaces of many different sorts matched to the needs of the different tribes...

...Democracy has, of course, no natural units...

...Since the nature and the number of our identities will be different, even characteristically different for whole populations, a great variety of arrangements ought to be expected and welcomed...

...A genuinely equal citizenship and the freedom to express their differences in the voluntary associations of civil society: this is what the members of such minorities commonly, and rightly, ask for...

...The best example is the Katangan secession of 1961, inspired, it appears, by Belgian entrepreneurs and corporate interests, without locally rooted support or, at least, without any visible signs of national mobilization...

...But weren't the zealots of the religious wars equally nasty...

...So we have to think about divorce, despite its difficulties...

...Multinationalism as it has existed there is a function of predemocratic or antidemocratic politics...

...Arrangements of these sorts should always be allowed, but they can't be imposed...

...What it requires now is the restoration of independence and sovereignty—which is to say: what principle requires is what practice in this case has achieved...

...Hence the impulse of the left, uncomfortable in any case with particularist passions, to cling to whatever unities exist and make them work...

...Imagine a similar multiplication of identities around the world, and the world begins to look like a less dangerous place...

...Except . . . unless . . . . Conquest and oppression are not merely abstract crimes...

...the brutal solution is to "transfer" the people...

...No doubt there are men and women in every tribe—Serbs and Croats...

...The case is the same with small or dispersed but significantly different populations, like the Amish or like orthodox Jews in the United States, who commonly aim at a highly localized and apolitical separatism: segregated neighborhoods and parochial schools...

...In fact, there are many conceivable arrangements between dominance and detribalization and between dominance and separation—and there are moral and political reasons for choosing different arrangements in different circumstances...

...They may also seek some kind of subsidy from state funds for their schools, day-care centers, old-age homes, and so on...

...and second, between minorities radically different from and those that are only marginally different from the majority population...

...Secession, border revision, federation, regional or functional autonomy, cultural pluralism: there are many possibilities and no reason to think that the choice of one of these in this or that case makes a similar choice necessary in all the other cases...

...Religious toleration, however, was enforced by the state, and the godly zealots were disarmed and disempowered by the political authorities...

...The other partners are left worse off, though some of them, at least, were never involved in any sort of national oppression...

...Constructed communities are the only communities there are...

...The price of recognition and aid is accommodation...

...or we might want to design a regime of cultural autonomy instead of the political sovereignty that once seemed morally necessary...

...I see no reason to deny the justice of separation in all such cases...

...We might want to argue for partition in cases like the ones I've just described, leaving the "natives" with less than they originally claimed...

...Suppose that French colonists had come (by 1950, say) to outnumber the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria: would the right of "Algerian" self-determination reside with the French majority...

...Who will protect the Serbs in an independent Croatia or the Albanians in an independent Serbia...

...For the second of the two, if it isn't a mere cover for the first, would require coercion of a sort that, as I have already suggested, is neither morally permissible nor politically effective...

...The tribes—most of them, at least, and all the minorities and the subject nations—were for several generations denied access to the official organs of social reproduction: the public schools and the mass media...

...Hobbes argues that only an absolute sovereign can free them from this fearfulness and break the cycle of threats and "anticipations" (that is, preemptive violence...

...But I don't mean to argue that the religious differences crucial in all these cases necessarily make for separation...

...nor will they be identical...

...But there is a general principle, which we can think of as the expression of democracy in international politics...

...That at least is the Hobbesian argument...

...Neutrality is likely to work well only in immigrant societies where everyone has been similarly and in most cases voluntarily transplanted, cut off from homeland and history...

...sometimes they will be territorially grouped...

...But this line of argument repeats again the left's misunderstanding of the tribes...

...And if they do worse, that is no reason to come to their rescue...

...sometimes it will be expressed publicly...

...Sometimes cultural pluralism will be expressed only in private life...

...In such cases, it is entirely justifiable for unionist forces to resist the secession and to seek (and receive) international support...

...This experimental work is certain to be complicated by the unequal economic resources of the different tribes...

...The "internationalism" of the left owes a great deal to Hapsburg and Romanov imperialism, even if leftists always intended to dispense with the dynasties...

...some will be nation-states, with minority autonomy...

...And if there turn out to be political or economic disadvantages in their departure, they will find a way to reestablish connections...

...In such cases—America is the prime example— tribal feelings are relatively weak...

...they have a claim, indeed, to physical but not to cultural security...

...Hence their ready adjustment to parliamentary politics...

...And then, surely, the political unit has to be territorial, not cultural: all the tribes and fragments of tribes that live here —noses held together 'til they leave off struggling—must come under the authority of a neutral state and share a characterless citizenship...

...There are always a few people, he writes, who "take pleasure in contemplating their own power in acts of conquest...

...The just treatment of national minorities depends on two sets of distinctions: first, between territorially concentrated and dispersed minorities...

...The left has never understood the tribes...

...What form this accommodation might take is not a matter to be determined in any a priori way (I have to keep saying this because so many people are looking for a quick theoretical fix...

...But if the descendants of these people, forgetting ancient indignities, regard themselves now as fellow members of a "community of character," within which they find identity, self-respect, and sentimental connections, why should we deny them democratic self-government...

...Perhaps the bureaucracies collapsed too soon, before they could complete their "historical task...

...For wasn't this repression undertaken in the name, at least, of universalism...

...Locked into an independent Croatia, Serbs believe (not implausibly) that they will live in insecurity...

...They may well be struggling to survive themselves, caught up in a common competition against commercialism and international fashion...

...We have to work slowly and experimentally toward arrangements that satisfy the members (not the militants) of this or that minority...

...It is important to note that what was achieved first, before community, was not only sovereign statehood but also democratic government...

...The nationality treaties of the interwar period were notable failures, but some measure of success in protecting minorities ought to be possible if nation-states are sufficiently entangled with and dependent on one another...

...Except . . . unless . . . were it not for the fact that the self-government of tribe A, happily divorced, makes tribe B a vulnerable and unhappy minority in its own homeland...

...Their fear of impoverishment must be weighed against the fear of oppression or exploitation on the part of the seceding group or against its desire for cultural expression and political freedom...

...And their latter-day descendants seem harmless enough—not particularly attractive, most of them, but also not very dangerous...

...When my parochialism is threatened, then I am wholly, radically parochial: a Serb, a Pole, a Jew, and nothing else...

...What has made Great Britain possible is probably the common Protestantism of its component nations...

...All of them, whether or not they possess sovereign power, have been significantly transformed...

...The differences are different in each case...

...We see it today, for example, in the geographically concentrated but only marginally different nations of Western Europe — Welsh, Scots, Normans, Bretons, and so on— whose members have consistently declined to support radical nationalist parties demanding independence and sovereign power...

...And then we would look back and say that just as the absolutism of early modern monarchs was necessary to defeat the aristocracy and eliminate feudalism, so the absolutism of imperial and communist bureaucrats was necessary to overcome tribalism...

...But this is an artificial situation in the modern world (and perhaps in the past too...

...Under conditions of security, I will acquire a more complex identity than the idea of tribalism suggests...

...Hobbes was thinking of the internal wars of late medieval "bastard feudalism" but also—more pertinently for our purposes—of the religious wars of his own time...

...This is in many ways a heartening picture, for it suggests the inevitability of totalitarian failure...

...It is some help that divorce among nations needn't have the singular legal form of divorce in families...

...I don't mean to underestimate the nastiness of tribal zealots...

...But these people will not rule in their own tribes if we can make it possible for their compatriots to live "at ease within modest bounds...

...But there is no guarantee of satisfaction, and, sometimes, watching the tribal wars, some of us may yearn for the uniform repressiveness of imperial or even totalitarian rule...

...And the second is the slippery slope argument: that the dissidence will prove endless and the new sectarianism endlessly divisive, split following split until the social order crumbles into incoherence and chaos...

...and the best practical possibility is some strong version of local autonomy, focused on cultural and educational institutions and the revenues that support them...

...It is no one's "historical task...

...The independence of Sweden from Denmark and, centuries later, of Norway from Sweden (and of Finland from Sweden and Russia) opened the way for Scandinavian cooperation...

...It is now apparent that the popular energies mobilized against totalitarian rule, and also the more passive stubbornness and evasiveness that eroded the Stalinist regimes from within, were fueled in good part by "tribal" loyalties and passions...

...And mightn't it have produced, had it only been sustained long enough, a genuine detribalization...

...In the West, powerful states were created before the appearance of nationalist ideology, and they managed to repress and incorporate many of the smaller nations (Welsh, Scots, Normans, Bretons, and so on...

...The contemporary tribes most certain of their singular identity and culture (the SPRING • 1992 • 165 Poles or Armenians, say) are in fact historical composites...

...These won't be unitary structures...

...Some states will be rigorously neutral, with a plurality of cultures and a common citizenship...

...But the series will be endless—so we are told—each divorce justifying the next one, smaller and smaller groups claiming the rights of self-determination...

...Suppose that the leaders of the European Community of the World Bank or even the United Nations were to say to every nation seeking statehood: we will recognize your independence, trade with you or provide economic assistance—but only if you find some way to accommodate the national minorities that fear your sovereign power...

...There is room for maneuver...

...What is required is an international consensus that validates a variety of choices, supporting any political arrangement that satisfies the tribes at risk...

...So many nations lived together in peace under communist rule: why . . .? When Western Europe is forging a new unity, how can anyone defend separation in the East...

...Their members, then, have the rights that go with membership...

...Once again, majorities have no obligation to guarantee the survival of minority cultures...

...We can recognize what might be called a right to resist transformation, to build walls against modern culture, and we can give this right more or less scope depending on constitutional structures and local circumstances...

...In a liberal democracy, national minorities can seek constitutional protection...

...they 166 • DISSENT have consequences in the real world: the mixing up of peoples, the creation of new and heterogeneous populations...

...And then the only way to avoid domination is to multiply political units and jurisdictions, permitting a series of separations...

...and rights can be lost or, at least, diminished through no fault of the losers...

...They ought to be allowed to govern themselves—insofar as they can do that, given their local entanglements...

...The case is the same with anciently incorporated nations—aboriginal peoples like the Native Americans or the Maori in New Zealand...

...Borders provide only minimal protection in the modern world, and minorities within borders, driven by their situation to a preternatural closeness, may do better in sustaining a way of life than the more relaxed majority population...

...The dominant feeling that makes for national antagonism, the most important cause (not the only cause) of all the tribal wars, is fear...

...But bring the "people" into political life and they will arrive, marching in tribal ranks and orders, carrying with them their own languages, historic memories, customs, beliefs, and com164 • DISSENT mitments...

...Self-determination has no absolute subject...

...On the other hand, the partners are not bound to stay together forever—not if they are, in fact, different tribes, who meet the democratic standards for autonomy or independence...

...But how can one create a neutral state in France, say, where the anciently established French rule democratically over the new immigrants from North Africa (even though the immigrants, many of them, hold "French" citizenship...

...The problem, then as now, is that justice, whatever it requires, doesn't seem to permit the kinds of coercion that would be necessary to "hold their noses together...

...How these were sustained and reproduced over time is a tale that waits to be told...

...Here I mean to follow an old argument first made in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, where it forms part of the explanation for the "war of all against all...

...Their fellow nationals hold the adjoining state...

...Obviously, there is such a thing as inauthentic tribalism: here, the manipulation of potential but not yet politically realized differences for economic gain...

...Many of them won't go all that far...

...I will identify myself with more than one tribe...

...But unity in the West is itself the product of, or at least the historical successor to separation...

...they can't be less real or less authentic than some other sort...

...The crucial commonality of the human race is particularism...

...It can't be overcome...

...The easiest case is that of the "captive," that is, recently and coercively incorporated, nation —the Baltic states are nice examples, since these were genuine nation-states, the nationality ancient even if statehood was only recently achieved and briefly held...

...Today's European Community is a powerful example, which other nations will approach at their own pace...

...Rather than supporting the existing unions, I would be inclined to support separation whenever separation is demanded by a political movement that, so far as we can tell, represents the popular will...

...The self is more naturally divided...

...some will be federations...

...Maybe it's not possible to do them justice at all...

...Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't...

...It is 170 • DISSENT no doubt true that particular tribes can be destroyed by repression, if it is cruel enough and if it lasts long enough...

...Tribal zealots, by contrast, aim precisely at empowerment...

...The Welsh and Scots have had a hand in the development of British political culture, even if this is not quite the hand they think they ought to have had...

...Both the Amish and the Jews have learned, and added to, the repertoire of American pluralism...

...I doubt that we can find a single rule or set of rules that will determine the form of the separation and the necessary constraints...

...I want to argue that this is a slippery slope down which we need not slide...

...If we go back far enough in their history, we will find people's noses being held together (that's one of the methods of social construction...

...Today, the inclusion of the Slovenes in greater Yugoslavia seems to have failed for similar reasons...

...In such circumstances, it is hard to say what justice means, let alone what policies it might require...

...But what are we to make of the songs and stories, often as full of hatred for neighboring nations as of hope for national liberation...

...The first of the two is the claim of the dominant religious establishments to represent some high value—universal truth or the divine will—that is certain to be overwhelmed in the cacophony of religious dissidence...

...The destruction of tribalism itself, however, lies beyond the reach of any repressive power...

...Arguing for liberation, I have largely ignored the consistent failure of SPRING • 1992 • 169 new nation-states to meet the moral test of the nation that comes next, to recognize in others the rights vindicated by their own independence...

...I will be an American, a Jew, an Easterner, an intellectual, a professor...

...And other demagogues exploit the fears of the minorities, defending ancient irredentisms and looking (like the Serbs in Croatia) for outside help...

...We would not be worrying about Croatia and its Serbs, after all, if Yugoslavia had succeeded in imposing itself upon its constituent nations...

...The opposite case is that of a marginally differentiated and territorially dispersed community, something like the ethnic and religious groups of North America (though there are exceptions in both categories: the ethnic French in Quebec, say, and the religious Amish in Pennsylvania...

...Self-determination for the many different kinds of tribes (nations, ethnic groups, religious communities) is bound to be more complicated, and the constraints that follow upon separation more various...

...I imagine tens of thousands of old men and women whispering to their grandchildren, singing folk songs and lullabies, repeating ancient stories...

...What imperial, bureaucratic, or international authority could detribalize the French...

...The case is the same for the failure of communist internationalism in Poland and pan-Arabism in Lebanon...

...it was, in theory at least, the very model of a neutral state...

...Indeed, if some sort of union—federation or confederation—is our goal, the best way to reach it is to abandon coercion and allow the tribes first to separate and then to negotiate their own voluntary and gradual, even if only partial, adherence to some new community of interest...

...They have more to do with memory and feeling than with any objective measure of dissimilarity...

...Who will restrain them after independence...

...When identities are multiplied, passions are divided...

...Let the people go who want to go...

...The adjustment of claims to circumstances is often a long and brutal business, but it does happen...

...The standard rule of intertribal relations is: do unto others what has been done to you...

...Sometimes different tribes will be mixed on the ground...

...So many nations lived together in peace under imperial rule: why couldn't they continue to live together under the aegis of social democracy...

...They stand somewhere between a captive nation and a national, ethnic, or religious minority...

...But no theory of justice can specify the precise form of these arrangements...

...That's why models like my own, based on such factors as territorial concentration and cultural difference, can never be anything more than rough guides...

...It will depend on the character of the new states and on a process of negotiation...

...Or the Croats in Croatia...