Comparative Federalism and Ethnic Conflict: A Theoretical Examination

Abstract

The twenty-first century looks likely to be as beset with conflict between religious and linguistic communities as was the twentieth. The new millennium opened with the World Trade Center attacks—for some, confirming Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” (1996). Yet any notion of inevitable conflict between different communities is superficial. Such an approach denies that identities are malleable and situational, and that individuals have more than just one. Identities therefore cannot be homogeneous, and positing the inevitability of conflict either at the international or domestic level conceals more than is revealed.

The combination of territorially distinctive segments and federalism’s grant of partial autonomy sometimes provides additional impetus to demands for greater autonomy.… [F]ederalism has not been markedly effective as a conflict-regulating practice.

(Nordlinger 1972, 32)

The question remains open as to what kinds or combinations of diversity are compatible with federal unity and which kinds or combinations are not.

(Elazar 1979, 29)

[Federalism is] significant at the beginning of a central government as a way to bring in regional governments with the promise of autonomy. Once the central government is actually in operation, however, what maintains or destroys local autonomy is not the more or less superficial features of federalism but the more profound characteristics of the political culture.

(Riker 1969, 142)