ethnic conflict and international security

Nations and Nationalism 1 (3), 1995, 285-95. 0 ASEN 1995 285

Ethnic conflict and international security

MICHAEL HOWARD International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 Tavistock Street, London

WC2E 7NQ. UK

EDITORS’ NOTE: The Editors are grateful to Professor Sir Michael Howard for allowing them to publish verbatim the text of the inaugural Nations and Nationalism Annual Lecture, which he gave in the Old Theatre, The London School of Economics and Political Science, on 20 March 1994.

As an historian I feel honoured to be invited to address an audience consisting primarily of political and social scientists, but also rather intimidated. I know that I am entering a minefield in which every step I take is likely (if I may mix my metaphors) to spread egg all over my face. The precise meaning of every term that I use will have been analysed and contested for the best part of a century in learned works and articles by scholars of whom I have not even heard, let alone read. Every hypothesis I present will be tediously familiar to most of you as first-year undergraduate stuff, long ago discounted by the professionals. But I have to start somewhere, and in any field of learning it is best to begin by defining one’s terms. I do not expect you necessarily to agree with my definitions. My policy is that of Humpty-Dumpty: words will mean what I intend them to mean. So let me begin with my intentions.

First, the term ‘ethnic’. By this I mean a community that is, or has come to perceive itself, primarily on grounds of language, religion, culture or ‘race’ (however defined) as distinct from its neighbours, and wishes to assert and maintain that distinction by some form of political organisation. How and why this perception should have arisen is of course a very important question indeed, and I shall have something to say about it later on. Such groups are today likely, in the West at least, to see themselves as ‘nations’, since this is the term that has for the past two centuries been used to confer on them both dignity and legitimacy. But in the normal parlance of international relations they will not be accepted as ‘nations’ until they have established themselves as independent states. In consequence it is to this status that they tend to aspire. The term ‘ethnic conflict’ is thus normally used to indicate either conflicts between ethnic groups that have not yet

286 Sir Michael Howard

achieved statehood, or those arising when such groups are trying to resist assimilation into, or to seek independence from, larger groups which they see as threatening their cultural or political identity.

Only some such distinction can justify the use of the term ‘ethnic’ as distinct from ‘international’ in describing their conflicts. The word ‘international’ is a notoriously slippery and inaccurate way of describing relations between states, but it is too late to do anything about that. In spite of the development of transnational and supranational organisations, the term ‘international’ is still normally taken to indicate relations between independent states. It is indeed less inaccurate today than it was when Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase some two centuries ago. Nowadays, as Elie Kedourie reminded us, ‘any state which is not a nation-state has its title and existence perpetually challenged’ (Kedourie 1960: 79). So there exists a certain symbiosis: if ethnic groups seek to legitimise themselves as nations by becoming states, states in their turn seek to legitimise themselves by aspiring to the moral dignity of ‘nations’. This is the central paradox that links the two questions we are here to discuss; ethnic conflict and international security.

‘Nationalism’ I would define, Humpty-Dumpty-wise, as ethnic aspiration to statehood; aspiration, that is, to the status of what has been called ‘the terminal community’. The leaders of such a community have to be treated as its plenipotentiaries in their dealings with the rest of the world, since only they can command, or are assumed to command, the ultimate allegiance of all its members, exercising undisputed powers of domestic jurisdiction, taxation and, above all, of life or death over them. Leaving the vexed issue of ‘sovereignty’ aside, the state is the only authority that can convincingly persuade or legitimately compel all its members to place their lives at risk on its behalf. It is thus ‘terminal’ in every sense of the word. The yielding of such powers, especially the last, demands from those concerned a degree of social identification and self-abnegation well beyond the normal contractual obligations on which the thinkers of the Enlightenment based their principles of political obedience. Rationality of that kind provides only slender threads to hold large communities together. A deeper sense of identity is needed, such as is normally to be found only in ‘ethnic’ roots, whether real or imagined.

Political scientists helpfully distinguish between ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ nationalism. About the first of these I shall have something to say in a moment, so let me concentrate on the second. ‘Cultural nationalism’ can usually be identified with the kind of ‘ethnic’ self-consciousness that I have described, basing itself as it does on the distinctiveness of a culture which has by its language and its history been formative for the mentality of its people. For the cultural nationalist, the ideal model of the world-community will be one of true ‘nation-states’, every member of which is a distinct and homogeneous ethnic body making its distinctive contribution to the common weal. This was the vision of Mazzini, which Woodrow Wilson tried to realise

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in the aftermath of the First World War. This indeed is the political myth - or one of the two contradictory political myths, as we shall see - on which the United Nations, and indeed the whole contemporary international system, is founded. It has signally failed to produce the kind of international security that Mazzini promised and for which Wilson hoped. Why?

There is one reason that is a great deal more apparent to us than it was in the days of Mazzini. Very few states are, or can be, ethnically homogeneous, and even fewer of those that are, are economically viable. Even apparently ethnically homogeneous communities have normally been created by a dominant, or ‘hegemonial’ culture absorbing or eliminating subordinate cultures and consciously fashioning the community in its own image. For older nations in Western Europe this was initially achieved by successful dynasties, who first imposed their own version of law and order and then extended the ‘high culture’ that went with it to the literate classes they required to run their state. This culture, common throughout Western Europe, was communicated largely in Latin until the seventeenth century, when it was increasingly replaced by French. In the post-dynastic age the governing elites extended their culture more broadly by education in the vernacular, since cultural homogeneity was, as Ernest Gellner has reminded us, an intrinsic element in the political mobilisation required for the effective running of modern states. In the delightful phrase of Tom Nairn, ‘The new middle class intelligentsia had to invite the masses into history, and the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood’ (Hutch- inson & Smith 1994: 75). Language thus became above everything else the criterion for ethnic identity.

But everywhere there still remained rock-pools of older cultures with sufficiently distinctive historical experiences and dialects to provide raw material for those who wished, for whatever reason, to assert their historic and linguistic identity. Scots and English elites had combined fairly successfully to create a common identity known as ‘British’, but even that was only partially successful in absorbing the Welsh and totally failed to absorb the Irish; both of whom virtually reinvented their languages in the course of the nineteenth century. The French did rather better, thanks to a ruthless policy of political and cultural centralisation carried out, first by their monarchs and then by their revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes; but even there, Bretons and Basques remained slumbering sources of discontent. Spain only partially succeeded in absorbing Catalans and totally failed to absorb the Portuguese. The Austrian Habsburgs, once their dynastic high culture was outgrown, found nothing acceptable to put in its place and their empire disintegrated in consequence. The Russians, whatever their partial success in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, completely failed to assimilate Poles and Balts. In Italy a common linguistic high culture failed to impose effective social or political unity on the peninsula - Sicily remaining the focus of an alternative government to this day.

As for Germany, it is true that its internal differences are now regional


rather than ethnic; but its homogeneity has been bought at the price of extensive withdrawals from Slavic territories in the East which were for long depicted as its cultural heartland. So even the most stable of so-called ‘nation-states’ are, if not ‘imagined’ communities in Benedict Anderson’s striking phrase, then certainly ‘learned’ communities - and what is learned can always be unlearned. When a state fails to deliver the goods to its citizens in terms of external peace, internal order and general prosperity, ethnic identities, sometimes long-forgotten, can be revived like smouldering embers as the foci of opposition and revolt.

One further and very obvious point must be made about cultural nationalism. It is almost by definition combative. Its sense of identity is normally rooted not only in a consciousness of difference from its neighbours, but in memories of conflicts with them that national celebra- tions keep perpetually green. Irish, Welsh and Scottish identities were all forged in conflict with the English, and were only merged, in so far as they were merged at all, in a new ‘British’ identity in the course of a century-long conflict with France. Even today I find it difficult to hear the term ‘British’ used without catching a faint echo of ‘the battle and the breeze’. The German identity was likewise to be forged in conflicts with France; Italian in conflicts with Austria; Greek and Serb in conflicts with the Turk. As for the identity of the United States, that, whatever believers in a ‘special relationship’ may avow, was developed primarily in a fifty-year conflict with Britain, the memory of which is refreshed whenever Americans sing The Star-Spangled Banner; something which they do, to my mind, far more often than is strictly necessary.

The sad fact is that ethnic groups tend to define themselves in terms of the Other. They maintain their identity by conflict and memories of conflict - usually, alas, armed conflict. For evidence of this we need look no further than Northern Ireland. It is no coincidence that the triumph of the idea of the nation-state in Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was a preliminary to the most terrible war that that continent had ever waged.

If then the homogeneity even of the historic nation-states of Western Europe was so artificially constructed, and so dependent for its continuance on increasingly destructive war, what hope could there be for the post- Versailles creations in Eastern Europe? The story there is too melancholy to need re-telling. The failure of the Serbs to maintain their hegemony over the South Slavs except by a deeply resented dictatorship; the failure of the Czechs to endear themselves either to their Slovak neighbours in the East or the Sudeten Germans in the West, making them an easy prey to Hitler’s subversion; the obvious unviability of the post-191 8 Polish frontiers with either Germany or Russia; the unstable frontiers and irredenta of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece; here were ethnic conflicts whose impact on international security was only too evident, and was ultimately to be lethal. When ethnic minorities are struggling in isolation for recognition or independence, as are the Basques, the impact on the international system


may be minimal. But usually such minorities have blood relations or sympathisers beyond the national border, often themselves already formed into powerful states. Their cause then becomes a matter for international concern and a fruitful source of international conflict.

This phenomenon has been greatly intensified by the very existence of the United States. Here we have a country whose population is very largely made up of refugees from ethnic persecution, and whose leaders in consequence find it almost impossible to remain indifferent to the plight of those remaining at home. For dissatisfied minorities the United States has for a hundred years past provided a powerful sounding board, if not physical and economic support; and again we need look for illustration today no further than Northern Ireland.

Time, and the narrow limitations of my own knowledge, have compelled me to concentrate on Europe; but it was after all in Europe that the concept of the nation-state originated, and if it is not viable there, what hope is there for the rest of the world? Beyond Europe we find the disorder which invariably accompanies the collapse of empires, when peoples have to grope their way through the ruins of the past to new patterns of political organisation. Usually they have to do so within state frameworks imposed to suit the convenience of the former imperial rulers with little reference to ethnic identity. It is hardly surprising that in many parts of the world today ethnic conflict is the rule rather than the exception.

The impact of such conflicts on international stability varies. Other powers may, if they see it in their own interests, or under pressure from interested elements within their own communities, espouse contending causes and so both widen and intensify the scope of the conflict. Palestine is of course a case in point. They may also recognise that it is in their common interest to constrain them, as have the British and Irish governments in Northern Ireland and as have most major powers in the former Yugoslavia; or they may feel it best to ignore them altogether. For those on the spot, both great-power involvement and great-power neglect may prove equally injurious. It may be argued that without great-power involvement there need have been no civil wars in Angola or Mozambique. It may equally be argued that more attention from the ‘international community’ - normally a euphemism for the prosperous West - might have pre-empted the current horrors in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda-Burundi and other regions as yet unvisited by the cameramen of CNN. I would only suggest that ethnic conflicts seldom need outside intervention to cause them, and such intervention will be at best of marginal value in resolving them. They will escalate to international conflict, as they did in 1914, only when other states see it in their interests that they should do so.

But there is another category of ethnic conflict which is a yet greater and less easily avoidable threat to international security. To explain this we need to consider that other kind of nationalism - the so-called ‘political’. This is the nationalism of the Enlightenment which evolved in Britain and North


America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and received its epiphany in France during the early years of the Revolution. Such nationalism is in principle at the opposite pole from ethnic; indeed it abhors cultural distinctions and assumes the universal homogeneity of rational men. It was, and indeed still is, in John Hutchinson’s words, ‘a cosmopo- litan, rationalist conception of the nation that looks forward ultimately to a common humanity transcending cultural differences’ (Hutchinson & Smith 1994: 122). In this the state is simply the creation of rational individuals who, to suit their mutual convenience, have agreed to yield to it such sovereignty as is needed to protect their innate and inalienable rights, however these rights may be defined. The basis of political obligation is thus not feudal allegiance or divine mandate or ethnic identity but individual consent - the coming together of free men to assert and preserve their freedom. For them the Other is (at least in principle) not another people, but oppressive and undemocratic authority - initially monarchical authority - wherever it is to be found. The principles on which their state was founded were universal and so of universal applicability. Sooner or later the light of reason would spread throughout the world, bringing with it political freedom and all the spiritual, social and economic benefits that this entailed. Meanwhile, those who were already liberated had the duty to lend a helping hand to those who were not.

The consequence of this was what I would call ‘Enlightenment Imperi- alism’; the missionary activity of those who have freed themselves from oppression extending that freedom to others less fortunate. It originated during the wars of the French Revolution, and is still alive and well. And here we come to the other great political myth of our time. It flatly contradicts the first to which I referred a few moments ago - that of the essential, if harmonious difference between the cultures of distinct nations. This is the belief in the essential homogeneity of mankind; the conviction that everyone has the same basic needs, aspirations, potentialities and rights by virtue of their common humanity, irrespective of cultural differences, and that if they do not realise this, then it is high time that they should. In this view cultural differences are archaic and obsolescent: interesting perhaps for the ethnologist and the anthropologist, and worthy of preservation as ‘heritages’ valuable for tourism, so long as they do not impede the spread of Western-style rationality, the triumph of which will be the Hegelian ‘End of History’ - an end that Mr Fukuyama assures us we have already reached.

But such ‘political’, or ‘rational’ nationalism is seldom if ever to be found in pure solution. As I indicated earlier, and as Burke argued even more powerfully two centuries ago, something stronger than pure rationality is needed to bind complex communities together. Indeed such rationality becomes part of their distinctive culture: ethnic distinctiveness and rational universalism paradoxically blend. Ever since the eighteenth century the British have seen ‘Freedom’, however understood, as an intrinsic component of their cultural identity, initially forged in resistance to an oppressive

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monarchy but hardened by conflict with foreign tyranny, whether Spanish or French. Even in the two world wars the motivating force of the war effort in this country was not so much the desire to uphold the principles of international order and to right the wrongs inflicted by Germany on her neighbours - much less on her own minorities - as a sense, rightly or wrongly, that our very national identity was under threat. The same feeling - if we are to accept the evidence of the Marseillaise - inspired the French armies at the beginning of the revolutionary wars, rather than any widespread desire to liberate their neighbours from monarchical tyranny and to share with them the blessings of the Revolution. The tricolore, rapidly became a symbol, not so much of democratic universalism, as of the identity of a reborn and glorious France.

As for the United States, the paradox here is still stronger. Nowhere is the consciousness of rationality or the belief in the universality of their values more widespread and legitimate: after all, the United States really - and almost uniquely - was created as a state by rational individuals coming together and forming it by an act of common will. (The only other example that comes to mind is that of Switzerland - a case that is all too often overlooked). But this very uniqueness, or rather, perception of uniqueness - has itself become part of American culture. That culture almost by definition is not and cannot be based on any consciousness of ethnic homogeneity; indeed, Americans today pride themselves on its absence. There is, or until recently has been, a powerful historical myth, but it is largely an Anglo-Saxon myth, and one that has little resonance for black and Hispanic elements in the population. Increasingly, American identity has been seen to consist neither in ethnic homogeneity nor shared historical experience but in aspiration; the American Way of Life, the American Dream. It is this that makes the United States truly exceptional and provides the basis for their cultural nationalism. Yet at the same time Americans retain the Enlightenment belief in the universality of their values, their applicability to the whole of mankind, and the duty of the United States, so far as it lies in its power, to uphold and foster them wherever in the world they may appear. In fact, the ‘rational or political nationalism of the Enlightenment has always needed to be powerfully reinforced by cultural nationalism if it were to be extended beyond the narrow ranks of a highly cultured elite.

Nevertheless, Enlightenment imperialism was to be the most powerful instrument of social change that the world has ever seen, for it was this, initially in the hands of the European empires of the nineteenth century, that made possible global modernisation. It was quite distinct from earlier imperialisms fuelled by a desire for trade, settlement, security or glory. Such empires had accepted indigenous cultures much as they found them. They may have found it convenient to destroy them altogether, as the Spaniards destroyed the culture of the Aztecs: genocide is not an invention of the twentieth century. They may have absorbed, or recruited, the elites of the


conquered communities and used them as instruments of their own rule; but on the whole they left their traditional cultures intact, as the British did for the first century of their presence in India and the Turks did throughout their dominions for the best part of 500 years. But the imperialists of the Enlightenment saw it as their duty not just to subordinate but to transform and convert their subjects; to bring to them the benefits of modern civilisation; to wean them from superstition; to guide their footsteps along the paths of progress; in short to destroy, whether deliberately or unconsciously, their traditional cultures, even if they preserved a simulacrum of them in a kind of ethnic museum.

Karl Marx was of course quite right in his perception that traditional cultures had to be destroyed to create the conditions for market capitalism. The European empires were only the conduits for forces of change that, given the growth of global communications, would sooner or later encompass the world. But it was only when traditional cultures were under threat from the forces of advancing modernisation spearheaded by Enlight- enment Imperialism that people realised that they had such a thing as a traditional culture at all. And although the more ‘enlightened’ members of those societies realised that it was in their best interests, rationally considered, to embrace the new principles brought to them by the West, a great many did not. The fact that rational processes had enabled the intruders to devise the Maxim gun and similar aids to modernisation usually settled the matter, but seldom in a permanent or satisfactory way.

Part of the problem, and perhaps the greater part, was that, however benevolent the intentions of the modernisers and however beneficent their actions, both they and the principles that inspired them were still seen by those to whom they brought these blessings as alien - as an ethnic Other; and this otherness created conflicts that, like all such conflicts, promoted a new and higher degree of ethnic self-awareness.

For this, the paradigm - if I may revert to Europe itself - was the evocation of German nationalism by the French Revolution. ‘Enlightened’ figures in Germany, a Goethe or a Hegel, could welcome the Napoleonic transformation of Germany as a long-overdue cleansing of historical rubbish out of the Augean stables according to the best rational principles, from which everyone would ultimately benefit. But more Germans were conscious only that the work was being done in French, by French officials who were not always paragons of honesty (the people at the cutting-edge of Enlightenment Imperialism are not necessarily the most enlightened members of their communities), backed by French bayonets and French martial law. It was thus easy for publicists like Fichte and Arndt to tap deep wells of resentment, and out of that resentment to create a consciousness of a German identity based on a perception of the past that was none the less powerful for being largely mythical. The Germans thus found themselves launched on a Sonderweg of which the principal characteristic was its rejection of the universal ‘Western values’ proclaimed by their


neighbours. ‘Enlightenment imperialism’ had created its first back-lash; it was not to be the last.

A century later this revolt against ‘Western values’, with their emphasis on both internationalism and on individual human rights - a kind of pincer attack on the solidarity of the traditional ethnic community - was to develop in Europe into the far more formidable movement of fascism; more formidable since it accepted the technology of modernisation while rejecting the values that had produced it. Fascism was to be defeated in Europe, but the sentiments that gave rise to it were repeatedly to reappear elsewhere in the world.

This was to be effectively masked for half a century. To all appearances the defeat of the Axis powers left the field clear for a straightforward global conflict between the two rival branches of Enlightenment Imperialism, communism and pluralistic democracy. Each offered a different path to the same goal: a world of secular values and economic plenty in which national differences would be transcended and all mankind would be brothers - the aspirations voiced in almost identical terms in the Znternationale and Schiller’s Ode to Joy, which has been adopted as the anthem of the triumphant West.

Although the promises of communism were shown to be fallacious within a couple of generations and the wealth-creation capacity of market capitalism was to succeed beyond the wildest dreams of Adam Smith, nationalist leaders in the Third World were to find in communism the more valuable tool of social mobilisation, as well as an ideology that embodied their own hostility to Western colonialism. The West - or more particularly the United States - remained for far too long blind to the extent to which ideological concepts were used to mask conflicts that were basically ethnic; Chinese resentment at foreign intrusion whether Western or Russian; Algerian reaction against a modernising French culture; Vietnamese dislike of Western imperialism whether French or American (combined with equal dislike of the older imperialism of the Chinese); Cuban and other Hispanic- American dislike of overbearing Yankees even if they came bearing gifts: these were the ethnic conflicts that fuelled international instability during the post-war era. (I leave it to those more expert than myself to consider how far the hostility of Soviet Union to the West and the cold war itself was rooted in the Slavic resentment of Enlightenment culture so powerfully voiced by Dostoievsky). Only the failure to recognise this made it possible to believe that with the collapse of communism the last obstacle to Enlightenment Imperialism had been demolished, and that a New World Order based on the secular, rational and universal values of the West was now about to dawn.

This was, alas, not to be. The Soviet Union had succeeded in keeping its subject peoples in awe, but its disappearance only revealed the intensity of ethnic rivalries that their rule had concealed. Conflicts that had previously been problems only for Soviet internal security were now orphans dumped


on the doorstep of the international community, to join those other orphans left by the retreat of European empires in Africa and the Middle East. In all these regions the discontents arising from the process of modernisation and state-building, from the attempts to create effective state bureaucracies and organisational infrastructures and to integrate local economies into a single global system; these discontents could no longer be laid at the door of exogenous colonial powers, whose eviction through ‘wars of national liberation’ could itself be used for the purpose of nation-building. The agents of modernisation were now the new states themselves, and their rulers became the targets for the backlash against the values that they had inherited. Where the new states failed - as most of them have failed - to fulfil the expected aspirations of independence, their peoples emigrate if they can, and if they cannot, are easily recruited to movements which rediscover ‘traditional’ ethnic roots, denounce the alien values that have destroyed the old order recreated in their minds as a golden age, and target everyone and everything that is seen as their agents. For the fascists of Europe, these had been the Jews. In Africa and parts of the Middle East it could well be anyone with a white skin.

This reaction is not so apparent in the cultures of the Far East as it is in those of Africa and the Middle East, and one of the points that might profitably be discussed is why this should be so. In part, clearly, it is because the societies of the Pacific Rim, in particular, have found their own alternative path to modernisation without abandoning their ethnic identities, and feel able to meet the West on its own terms. Much of the anti-Western feeling elsewhere is perhaps rooted in a recognition of the impossibility of preserving traditional cultural patterns; of the undoubted benefits accruing from modernisation and frustration at their own incapacity to handle the gigantic problems of transition; and in resentment against the West that has caused these problems and seems incapable of curing them, except at the price of continuing cultural hegemony.

There is also perhaps a sense of desperation at the apparent inevitability of that hegemony, for the West has a new, subtle, and apparently irresistible weapon. Previously, imperial hegemonies spread and sustained themselves by the imposition of an elite culture, leaving popular ‘low’ cultures largely intact. Now the West not only extends a ‘high culture’, if its scientific and technological expertise can be so-called, but, more important, a mass low culture of pop music, film and sport, which carries with it a gospel of embourgeoisement, secularisation and hedonism that challenges traditional values at their very roots, and which can be excluded only by measures of social control that turn the communities concerned into pariah states. Neither the Soviet Union nor, now, the Peoples’ Republic of China have been able to resist this cultural tidal wave. What hope for North Korea, Libya or Iran?

Historians must not prophesy, but it seems to me that the forces of modernisation are now for better or worse irresistible, and that the heroic


pockets of ethnic resistance will gradually be eliminated. The children of the freedom fighters will listen to pop-stars on their walkmen, if they are not doing so already, get scholarships to Berkeley or the London School of Economics, and end up as the regional managers for multinational corporations. It is the fate against which romantics have protested since the time of William Blake. Whether such a global community will be morally superior to that it replaces is a matter of judgement. Whether it is likely to be a peaceful one, and really bring about The End of History might provide a good topic for another conference. But one thing is certain. A global community, like a nation-state, will be peaceful only if its economy can perform what it promised. If it can not - if large groups anywhere in the world feel themselves excluded, victimised or dispossessed - then they are likely again to discover their ethnic roots, and provide fertile ground for international instability, and History will continue to provide us with unpleasant surprises.

References

Hutchinson, John and Smith, Anthony D. (eds.) 1994. Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University

Kedourie. Elie. 1960. Nationalism. London: Hutchinson. Press.

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