RACE AND ETHNICITY
What is race and ethnicity?
When we talk about a person’s race, we refer to that specific person’s physical appearance such as hair color, skin color, eye color, bone/jaw structure and the likes. On the other hand, ethnicity relates to cultural factors like culture, ancestry, nationality, language and beliefs.
How does race and ethnicity represent a challenge to democratization?
It is true that societies that are substantially ethnically diverse are less likely to form stable democracies than those that are homogeneous. When viewed in separation from other casual factors, it seems that the more ethnically divided a society is the less likely it is for it to support a stable democracy.
Ethnicity is not a powerful explanation for democratization but its impact exists essentially in how it interacts with other well-known factors that shape the outcomes of democratization. Instability and violence are major among these. Democracy is we know it is the form of government that is based on conflict resolution without resorting to violence. Ethnic violence and conflict with respect to democratization have more to do with how regime change interacts with differences in culture. Regime change can turn into ethnic violence, but it can also settle into institutionalized forms of multi-ethnic engagement and this outcome depends on the obstacles and opportunities to mobilization that groups face, choices made by politicians, and the way in which groups are included or excluded in the democratization process.
Most authoritarian regimes in ethnically plural societies are dominant because of a particular ethnic group. The problem now becomes how democratization affects the interests of cultural groups. Democratization empowers majorities and potentially disempowers minorities as it is a system that is fundamentally rooted in the power of numbers. In an ethnically plural society, the stakes involved in any widening of political control over the state revolve around issues such as the division of wealth among groups, the status of the groups, their life chances for upward mobility, the opportunities members face for cultural expression and education, the definition of citizenship, and representation within the state. Thus, democracy contains an inherent minority problem.
By contrast, in minority-dominant authoritarian regimes, where an ethnic minority has been traditionally favored at the expense of an ethnic majority, motivating regime transition is achieved by the important role played by ethnic mobilization from below. In this case, regime change as a threat due to democratization assumes the character of a direct threat to the larger social system of ethnic relations and makes it harder for elites to engage themselves in democratization without affecting the wider or larger minority social base on which the regime rests. In such contexts, democratization is more than just a circulation of elites because it involves the restructuring of the social order, engaging of interests, passions and fears of large numbers of people. In such regimes, democratization pressures tend to emerge from below so that they are vulnerable to revolutionary paths of democratization with ethnicity as the basis for mobilization.
Authoritarian regimes within a multi-ethnic context find it difficult to start democratization processes because any shift in power in a multi-ethnic society engages larger social stakes. In these regimes, where an ethnic majority has been traditionally favored by the regime itself over ethnic minorities, ruling elites are unlikely to view democratization as a threat to the larger social order of ethnic stratification. It is in these circumstances that ethnic mobilization from below plays a small role in democratic transition and motivation political opening. In such cases, as a result of political opening, the altered opportunity structure facing minorities stimulates the use of the occasion to place previously denied grievances onto the political agenda by the pressing of demands by the minority groups. The stability of a democratization project even in these circumstances depends on the power of leadership to make arrangements that include minorities into newly reconfigured political institutions and also to marginalize separatist tendencies that may arise.
Democratization tends to focus on the ways in which ethnic passions potentially unsettle democracy. This has favored civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism as the foundation for a stable democracy by fomenting radicalism and instability. Surely, within liberalism there has been a large amount of discomfort when it comes to the phenomenon of ethnic nationalism more generally. The latter revolves around the rights of cultural communities in ways that can constrain the right s of individuals and the former focusing on the rights of individuals which are conceptualized outside of cultural communities.
When we acknowledge and value the experiences and thoughts of those who have been excluded, we might see the world differently as we will learn from their experiences and be able to choose the desired path in the process of democratization.
The above mentioned challenges affect me personally and professionally in that as the world is moving more and more towards a democratic state, it is these challenges that I will face both on a personal level and also on a professional level.
References
Mark R. Beissinger, Ethnic identity and democratization (December 2007)
