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Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Arguments
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MORAL, NORMATIVE, AND POLITICAL ARGUMENTS OVER CONSOCIATION Anyone who has followed the debates over consociation will be familiar with how widespread and heated is the abuse that often displaces argument in this field. Proponents of consociation are regularly accused of racism, anti-enlightenment thought, institutionalizing fallacious ethnicity, promoting apartheid, and even of condoning ethnic cleansing. What follows endeavours to provide a dispassionate account of the arguments – and the passions that underlie them. The Counsels for the Prosecution: Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy, and Denial Consociational prescription and explanation are attacked by conservatives, liberals, socialists, and feminists. Conservatives detect a hint of utopianism in consociational thinking. They are right to detect “rationalism,” meaning the belief that it is at least sometimes possible to engage our reason in benign political engineering. Conservatives tend to condemn consociational ideas as futile: such ideas will have no (or no long run) impact on deeply rooted, zero-sum identity based conflicts. This we may say is the archetypal conservative anti-consociational argument: consociations make no difference. They don’t work; ergo they are not a remedy. A more sophisticated variation of this position holds that consociations are only likely to work well where they are not needed, or are redundant (i.e., in moderately rather than deeply divided societies). Donald Horowitz maintains that consociations “are more likely the product of resolved struggles or of relatively moderate cleavages,” and that they are “inapt to mitigate conflict in severely divided societies.”
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Critics of consociational ideas are especially prominent in the liberal, socialist, and feminist traditions. They pride themselves on their universalism and their democratic dispositions. They often argue that consociations are perverse, achieving the opposite of their ostensible purposes. Their standard objection that consociation is perverse follows a proverbial piece of advice: “when holes have been dug, don’t entrench them.” Consociation, such critics reason, reinforces the presumed sources of conflict. It freezes and institutionally privileges (undesirable) collective identities at the expense of more “emancipated” or more
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Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 256.
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| | Authors: O'Leary, Brendan. |
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MORAL, NORMATIVE, AND POLITICAL ARGUMENTS OVER CONSOCIATION
Anyone who has followed the debates over consociation will be familiar with how
widespread and heated is the abuse that often displaces argument in this field. Proponents of
consociation are regularly accused of racism, anti-enlightenment thought, institutionalizing
fallacious ethnicity, promoting apartheid, and even of condoning ethnic cleansing. What
follows endeavours to provide a dispassionate account of the arguments – and the passions
that underlie them.
The Counsels for the Prosecution: Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy, and Denial
Consociational prescription and explanation are attacked by conservatives, liberals, socialists,
and feminists. Conservatives detect a hint of utopianism in consociational thinking. They are
right to detect “rationalism,” meaning the belief that it is at least sometimes possible to
engage our reason in benign political engineering. Conservatives tend to condemn
consociational ideas as futile: such ideas will have no (or no long run) impact on deeply
rooted, zero-sum identity based conflicts. This we may say is the archetypal conservative
anti-consociational argument: consociations make no difference. They don’t work; ergo they
are not a remedy. A more sophisticated variation of this position holds that consociations are
only likely to work well where they are not needed, or are redundant (i.e., in moderately
rather than deeply divided societies). Donald Horowitz maintains that consociations “are
more likely the product of resolved struggles or of relatively moderate cleavages,” and that
they are “inapt to mitigate conflict in severely divided societies.”
5
Critics of consociational ideas are especially prominent in the liberal, socialist, and feminist
traditions. They pride themselves on their universalism and their democratic dispositions.
They often argue that consociations are perverse, achieving the opposite of their ostensible
purposes. Their standard objection that consociation is perverse follows a proverbial piece of
advice: “when holes have been dug, don’t entrench them.” Consociation, such critics reason,
reinforces the presumed sources of conflict. It freezes and institutionally privileges
(undesirable) collective identities at the expense of more “emancipated” or more
5
Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 256.
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