Tribalism and the State: Replies
Walzer, Michael
Jim Rule's passionate attack on "tribalism" raises more questions than I can possibly address in a brief response. Since I by no means disagree entirely with what he writes, I want to begin by...
...Scots, Catalans, Copts, and Druse, for example, probably don't need states of their own...
...Local elites can easily assimilate into the diffuse and open (and in many ways attractive) cosmopolitanism fostered by imperial rule, and that is exactly what they did in the great empires of the past and, more recently, in the communist empire...
...Welfare, immigration, and employment policies all make for discriminations of this sort...
...With regard to our (no doubt inadequate) program of Aid to Dependent Children, the children of Bangladesh are the wrong kind of people...
...Unless you deny them admission to the political arena, they will dominate the arena in most parts of the world...
...524 • DISSENT...
...Only immigrant societies have produced a genuinely democratic multiculturalism...
...But what does he propose to do with them...
...My argument, which owes a great deal to the research of Karl Deutsch (see his Nationalism and Social Communication, 1953), is that democracy is the "facilitator" of tribalism...
...He would prefer that Jews fight for equal rights in the diaspora, Armenians in Turkey or the Soviet Union, Kurds in Iraq, and Palestinians, though I am less sure here, in Greater Israel...
...Political tribalists are his version of the wrong kind of people...
...Rule wants to legislate against the dangers, but he seems to favor statelessness, at least for peoples like these, for whom it is or was a historical condition (I assume that he thinks it all right for the French to have a state...
...At least, Rule says, we can refuse to support them...
...The struggle for democracy, even before the actual experience of democracy, opens the way for the expression (and the political exploitation) of these particularisms, which imperial rule had everywhere repressed...
...I do not believe—and, of course, nowhere say—that "the tribe is an indispensable . . . facilitator of democracy...
...Even when we generously take in political refugees, we choose those with whom we have political affinities: opponents of tyranny (or so we like to think...
...But the resulting patterns of cultural co-existence and interpenetration depend on the continuing authority of the emperor and his bureaucrats...
...Since I by no means disagree entirely with what he writes, I want to begin by clearing up one misunderstanding...
...I suspect that Jim Rule would rather not (have to) cope...
...If it doesn't, then it has to cope with tribalism in some nonrepressive way...
...But the tribes are a motley lot, and if the four I have just listed need states, there are many that don't...
...His preference would not be supported, however, by a majority of any of these people, if they were free to decide their own fate: and what would he say then...
...Since Rule recognizes the artificiality of all national identities, especially in their politicized versions, he ought to be sympathetic...
...Everywhere else, popular mobilization against imperialism gives rise to tribal politics —for the simple reason that it is among the people, ordinary men and women, living where they have always lived, sustaining a customary existence, that particular languages, historical memories, and religious beliefs most strongly survive...
...It is not as if they are a small number...
...It is the revolt of "the wrong kinds of people" against the conditions of their wrongness...
...People with the wrong kind of politics are the wrong kind of people...
...And I would like to accommodate them, not in one way, according to some fixed ideological formula, but in many different ways...
...Rule's comments on Israel suggest that he finds this intolerable.* But if he really wants to abolish national and cultural favoritism root and branch, he won't be able to accommodate any of the tribes—not even the ones most likely to benefit from the politics he otherwise prefers: those that are already commodiously established, their tribal wars only a memory...
...There can't be a political community of any sort that doesn't favor some particular people, members of the community, over all others...
...How else can we help them defeat their own zealots except by removing, so far as we can, the dangers that make zealotry seem a necessary, even a positive force...
...There are also, obviously, internal discriminations —as when we choose what language to privilege, what history and civics to teach in the public schools, what holidays to celebrate...
...One last point: Rule's reiterated refrain about "the wrong kind of people" points toward a more radical universalism than he acknowledges...
...Hence tribal politics can and does take many different forms...
...But they, too, will ask for some sort of political accommodation in the postimperial world...
...His quote from Golda Meir is inaccurate—a sad and entirely avoidable mistake: her argument had to do with the identity, not the existence, of the Palestinians...
...It follows that the first question for the Left FALL • 1992 • 523 is whether it supports and wants to continue this repression...
...If Jews, or Armenians, or Kurds, or Palestinians demand statehood, it is because they know the dangers of statelessness...
...This certainly doesn't mean that we have to condone the crimes committed in the name of tribalism, any more than we have to condone, because we are social democrats, the crimes committed in the name of the people or of socialism...
...This is what it means to share a common life...
...But that is not easy for leftists to do, since political tribalism is very often a response to imperial repression or to the more frightening kinds of persecution (associated with empires on the rise or in trouble) that he so eloquently describes...
...As Rule says, and as I said, tribal identities are neither total nor final...
...Though he acknowledges that men and women feel "special affinities" for particular other people, and grants the legitimacy of these feelings, he would prefer that they play no part in our, or anyone's, politics...
...The whole point of my article was to defend the moral necessity and the political possibility of coping...
...In every nation-state in the world, choices like these turn national minorities into the wrong kind of people...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
