¿Por qué si hay sociedades multiétnicas no están en guerra civil permanentemente?

2) ¿Por qué si hay sociedades multiétnicas no están en guerra civil permanentemente?

In recent years we have experienced consequences of ethnic conflict all over the world. This essay will develop how, even in the most severely divided society, ties of blood do not necessary lead to permanent civil wars. Democracy has shown itself as an ally to establish a pluralistic society where ethnic differences had been driven through cohesive political organization.

Due to the fact that liberal modernization theorists and Marxists have different assumptions to analyze these ethnic conflicts, and consequently come to different conclusions. Nelson Kasfir proposes that ethnic identity should be accepted for it is both fluid and intermittent, and thus, an individual may change from one ethnic category to another. In addition the author proposes that such identity can be heavily eroded over time depending on different factors which the individual has different degrees of control.

Political participation can be based on ethnicity, when this occurs individuals are necessarily constrained by indicators of common ancestry. Nonetheless, it is crucial to point the difference between tribes, which characteristics are only in the sense of a small, distinctive and self-sufficient unit, and tribalism, which does involve certain political actions (Kasfir 1979). The concept of ethnicity is also built from perceptions both by member within the unit and by non-members; moreover, it also entails that the social solidarity, as a reaction of other political measures, can increase the feeling of belonging to a specific group, and trigger political mobilization.

Ethnicity can be a problem in the process of building a state when group identities have different interests, it creates a state-nation dilemma. Ethnicity taps cultural and symbolic issues as basic notions of identity and the self, of individual and group worth and entitlement, hence the conflicts it generates are intrinsically less amenable to compromise than those revolving around material issues which can be resolve through an easier bargaining. In the political aspect, being part of an ethnic group may define who will be granted access to power and resources and who won´t. In countries with a democratic regime, and a much divided society, elections are regarded as techniques to privilege only a certain ethnic group, coalition or party, and the rest lose it all while being excluded not only from the government but also from the larger political community.

Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner describe in their work, Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy, how democracy, more than other forms of government, is the best system to manage conflict in countries with extreme ethnic complexity. Democracy, as a system of institutionalized competition and conflict, guarantees certain boundaries of decency, order and ensures some minimal level of protection for the basic interests of every major political competitor, such that, defeat will not mean total or permanent exclusion from power and resources; tolerance of opposition is befitting to democracy.

These authors explain that some means by which democracies contain conflict is through the generation of cross-cutting cleavages. In modern industrialized countries like Canada, people who are divided along one line of cleavage interact with another and experience “cross-pressures” that tend to moderate their political views and induce them toward greater tolerance and accommodation. The explanation of why this happens in developed countries and not in others, is in part because the less economically developed countries manifest much less class and occupational complexity and therefore they do not generate other interests to cross-cut ethnicity.

The counterpart is that in many divided societies, other objective lines of cleavage cumulate with ethnicity rather than cross-cut it, so some ethnic groups are distinctly richer, better educated, and more advanced in industry and commerce than others. Thus, resulting in privileged groups which wield political power and could, officially or not, mobilize violence to pursue strategies of expulsion (“ethnic cleansing”) or genocide. The political group in turn can be constituted of a majority or a minority group; in the case of Serbia, as V.P. Gagnon Jr observes, the violent conflicts with Croatia and Bosnia did not begin from a conflict of interest between these nationalities nor ancient ethnic hatreds, but rather as a “part of a rational strategy planned and carried out by the minority of actors in Serbia who were most threatened by democratizing and liberalizing currents within the Serbian Communist party” (Diamond y F. Plattner 1994). When the conflict goes around the pursuit of political opportunities and incentives than from visceral immutable passions, it can be resolved by the restructuring of incentives.

...