Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Identity politics post-1989
Most of the post-communist regimes of the former Soviet Union and former
Yugoslavia declared a determination to become, as their people often put it,
‘normal’ polities, which they understood to mean the kind of pluralist political
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systems found in Western Europe. Some have succeeded, more or less; in
2004, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and the Baltic
Republics all entered the European Union as full members whose political
systems had passed the necessary tests. Byelorussia and Ukraine are by no
means model democracies but they have, on the whole, avoided large-
scale political violence. Elsewhere the picture has been less encouraging. The
Russian Federation has survived as a quasi-democratic presidential regime
but with many violent ethnic conflicts amongst its southern republics, and
the new states to the south of Russia that emerged on the collapse of the
Soviet Union have been riven with national, ethnic and religious conflicts. In
the Balkans, only Slovenia of the Republics carved out of the Yugoslav
Federation has been more or less peaceful, and Croatia, Bosnia–Herzegovina
and Kosovo have been sites of major conflicts that have involved the UN, the
EU and NATO. Even in the People’s Republic of China, where a form of
‘market Stalinism’ has emerged based around capitalist economic forms
combined with firm party-rule, nationalism remains a serious issue in
China’s ‘Wild West’ region of Xingjian with its Muslim Uighur population
and in Tibet, while, in spite of fierce persecution, religious movements such as
Falun Gong simmer in the background as a latent threat.
Many of these ethnic/national conflicts could be seen as hangovers from
an earlier era, actually preserved by communism. The kind of national con-
flicts that were resolved elsewhere in Europe by the operation of pluralistic
politics were frozen in place by communist dictatorship; to use a common if
rather unpleasant metaphor, whereas in the West ethnic divisions were
healed by the need for different groups to cooperate in the political process,
in the East, similar divisions were simply covered over by the bandage
provided by authoritarian communist rule – take away the bandage and the
sores re-emerged, unhealed and festering. Moreover, there are features of
communism and nationalism that make it relatively simple for communist
leaders to translate themselves into nationalist leaders (as has happened so
frequently in the Balkans – most strikingly perhaps in Croatia, where a
wartime communist partisan, Franjo Tudjman, used fascist, wartime
Ustache symbols to lever himself into power, roughly the equivalent of a
Zionist adopting the swastika as a motif). Both doctrines involve thinking
in monolithic terms (whether of class or nation), which undermines the
legitimacy of the intermediate, cross-cutting groups that make pluralism
work, and both provide seemingly compelling reasons to override individual
rights in the name of the collectivity (Puhovski 1994).
All this may be true, but what it does not explain is why the 1990s also
saw a revival of this kind of politics in Western as well as Eastern Europe.
With the exception of the conflict in Northern Ireland, which has become
marginally less violent, other identity-based conflicts in the West have persisted
and their numbers have increased with, for example, the addition of a
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more virulent form of regionalism in Italy demonstrated by the rise of the
Northern League. More generally, conflicts have arisen in most of these soci-
eties revolving around immigration, refugees and asylum-seeking, and such
conflicts have been increasingly cast in religious as well as ethnic terms, with
especial reference to the problems posed by the integration of large numbers
of Muslims into Western societies. Alongside these conflicts has emerged, in
many advanced industrial countries, a strategy of conflict-avoidance based
on the politics of multiculturalism and group rights; whereas the politics of
industrial society described in the first section of this chapter worked to
lessen conflict by creating overlapping groups, this new politics takes for
granted the existence within a given society of a multiplicity of groups whose
identities will not weaken over time – and the ethos of this politics is that
conflict can be avoided if each group is recognized as having its own distinc-
tive contribution to make to the wider society (Kymlicka 1995). Old-style
egalitarians and socialists regret this development (Barry 2000).
Returning to the general issue, the revival of identity politics has not
simply rested on ethnicity or nationalism, and neither has it been confined
to Europe or Eurasia. A striking feature of the politics of the last twenty
years has been the increasing number of people who have adopted a politi-
cal identity based on religion, and, especially, on ‘fundamentalist’ religious
movements; this convenient term has somewhat misleading Christian
connotations, but the phenomenon of radical religious movements is very
widespread. The rise of radical Islam is an obvious reference point here;
Islamicist politics have posed threats to most Muslim-majority political
systems over the last decade or so, and Islamic terrorism has become a
major concern for the world as a whole – the events of 9/11 in the US
(discussed in Chapter 12) are simply the most extreme manifestation of this
issue. However, radical Hindu movements have been equally powerful in
the relevant context, going a long way to reshape the politics of approxi-
mately one-sixth of humanity in India, and, it should not be forgotten, the
rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the US is having a major impact on
that political system. In the latter case, there are very direct foreign policy
implications; evangelical Christian support for Israel on the basis that the
establishment of the Jewish state is a forerunner of the Second Coming has
added a new factor into the US–Arab–Israeli relationship, a factor which is
making that relationship more difficult to manage than ever before. Equally,
in Latin America, the rise of evangelical Protestantism as a genuine chal-
lenge to the Roman Catholic Church has been a striking feature of the last
two decades. Meanwhile, in Africa, the contest between Christian and
Islamic missionaries continues – but a striking feature of the last decade or
so has been the rising political significance of witchcraft and other tradi-
tional animist religious beliefs, which have proved surprisingly capable of
adapting themselves to the changing circumstances of their constituencies.
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It is important to note that when we examine the rise of religious
movements of this kind we are observing a phenomenon that is simultaneously
domestic and international. Consider, for example, the aforementioned rise
of evangelical Protestant Christianity in Latin America. This clearly reflects
the very well-financed missionary work of North American evangelicals,
but it also reflects features of the domestic societies in question. It has been
noted, for example, that in many of these societies Protestantism has been