Separatist wars, partition, and world order

Security Studies

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 394-415

  Fearon, James D ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20644458353     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410490945965     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Exceptions include Amitai Etzioni. "The Evils of Self Determination." Foreign Policy 89 (winter 1992/93): 21-35;
2. David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), ch. 12;
3. and Gideon Gottlieb, "Nations without States," Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (May/June 1994):100-12. Alan Kuperman and Timothy Crawford have written on how the prospect of international intervention might encourage civil war.
4. See Alan J. Kuperman, "Transnational Causes of Genocide, or How the West Exacerbates Ethnic Conflict," in Yugoslavia Unravelled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention, ed. Raju G. C. Thomas, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 55-85;
5. "Reducing the Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from Economics" (paper presented at the 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Chicago;
6. and Timothy Crawford, "Pivotal Deterrence and the Kosovo War: Why the Holbrooke Agreement Failed," Political Science Quarterly 116, no. 4 (winter 2001-02); 499-523.
7. A few examples are: John J. Mearsheimer, "The Only Exit From Bosnia," New York Times, 7 October 1997, A27;
8. Mearsheimer, "A Peace Agreement That's Bound to Fail," New York Times, 19 October 1998, A17 [regarding partition of Kosovo and Serbia];
9. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "Redraw the Map, Stop the Killing," New York Times, 19 April 1999, A23 [Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia];
10. Makau Mutua, "The Tutsi and Hutu Need a Partition," New York Times, 30 August 2000, A23 [Rwanda];
11. Thomas L. Friedman, "Not Happening," New York Times, 23 January 2001, A21 [Bosnia];
12. Peter Schweizer, "Partition Provides Best Afghan Solution," USA Today, 29 October 29, 15A;
13. Leslie H. Gelb, "The Three-State Solution," The New York Times, 25 November 2003, A27 [Iraq].
14. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "When Peace Means War," New Republic 18 December 1995, 221-42;
15. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, "The Answer: A Three Way Partition Plan for Bosnia and How the U.S. Can Enforce it," New Republic, 14 June 1993, 22-28.
16. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1.
17. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (New York: Praeger), 1.
18. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism;
19. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953);
20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verson, 1983);
21. and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
22. In Imagined Communities, Anderson relies on the idea of barriers to upward mobility in his "blocked pilgrimages" argument explaining new world nationalist movements (chap. 4, "Creole Pioneers"). In pointing to these new world movements, Anderson is also suggesting that the barriers need not be cultural - the creoles of Latin America shared the culture of Spain. Rather, the key is that upward bureaucratic "pilgrimages" be blocked by an ascriptive trait, in this case, birth in the new world. Still, in the old world that Gellner and Deutsch had in mind, the barriers to upward mobility typically fell along cultural lines (see Anderson, Imagined Communities, chap. 3, on the "linguistic nationalisms" of Europe).
23. Eugen J Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).
24. On print capitalism, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 2.
25. See, however, James D. Fearon and Pieter Van Houten, "A Return to the Theory of Regional Autonomy Movements," (presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 25 September 1998), who show that language distance helps predict regionalist parties in Western Europe.
26. Using the Minorities at Risk data set (Ted Robert Gurr, "Minorities at Risk III Dataset: User's Manual." CIDCM, University of Maryland, 1996, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/home.htm),
27. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, in "Weak States, Rough Terrain, and Large-Scale Ethnic Violence since 1945" (presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA, 25 September 1999);
28. and Ted R. Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1993), find no clear relationship between measures of cultural distance from the dominant group and a minority's probability of being involved in rebellion against the state. Using a much larger list of ethnic groups,
29. Philip G. Roeder, "Clash of Civilizations and Escalation of Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflicts," Comparative Political Studies 36, no. 5 (June 2003): 509-40, does, however.
30. Perhaps they were even greater in nineteenth century Germany than in the first Yugoslav state. Recall the Kulturkampf in Germany.
31. Many in late nineteenth-century Europe, including in the Balkans, saw Serbia as naturally playing the role of Piedmont or Prussia for the South Slavs.
32. For example, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan several times offered the U.S. and the U.N. to end poppy cultivation, a major source of their tax revenues, in exchange for international recognition (Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000]).
33. For example, John Mueller, "The Banality of 'Ethnic War'," International Security 25, no. 1 (summer 2000);
34. Chaim Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars," International Security 20, no. 4 (spring 1996): 136-75;
35. David Laitin, "National Revivals and Violence," European Journal of Sociology 36, no. 1 (1995); 3-43;
36. and James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity," International Organization 54, no. 4 (autumn 2000): 845-77.
37. Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, and Singapore are exceptions.
38. Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars."
39. See for example Radha Kumar, "The Troubled History of Partition," Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (1997): 22-34;
40. Nicholas Sambanis, "Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature," World Politics 52 (July 2000): 437-83;
41. and Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
42. Kaufmann, "When All Else Fails: Evaluating Population Transfers and Partition as Solutions to Ethnic Conflict," in Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention ed. Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
43. Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions," makes a much stronger claim, that the only appropriate and effective solution for a country beset by ethnic war is to partition it. Presumably, Kaufmann believes there is some threshold of ethnic violence such that below this, it is not necessary to partition the state; otherwise, many countries would fall under his knife. The criteria for deciding where this threshold is, however, are neither clear nor sharp (see Kaufmann's brief mention of the issue on p. 159 of "Possible and Impossible Solutions"), making the strong claim quite difficult to evaluate or apply.
44. If this example is too fanciful, imagine that the radical wing of the movement for an independent Hawaii becomes more radical.
45. Another important factor enabling the KLA insurgency (such as it was) was the procurement of weapons out of the Albanian anarchy in 1996;
46. see Kuperman, "Transnational Causes of Genocide," 81n36, on this and other factors behind the KLA escalation. On NATO's moral hazard problem with respect to encouraging violence by the KLA in Kosovo,
47. see also Crawford, "Pivotal Deterrence and the Kosovo War."
48. Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions," 170.
49. Kaufmann, "Possible and Impossible Solutions," 140-45, is aware that violence "hardens" ethnic identities, but sees violence purely as a product of mutual fears produced by a weakened central government, rather than by individuals and factions with their own ambitions and agendas.
50. Cf. John Mueller, "The Banality of "Ethnic War" on the war in Bosnia.
51. James D. Fearon, "Ethnic and Cultural Diversity By Country," Journal of Economic Growth 8 (2003): 195-222.
52. I matched the groups in Fearon, "Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country," with the Minorities at Risk (MAR) groups (Gurr, "Minorities at Risk III Dataset"), and then counted the number of matched groups that scored 4 or higher on the MAR rebellion scale (that is, "small," "intermediate," or "large-scale" guerrilla activity, or "protracted civil war") for at least one five-year period since 1945). This underestimates the number of ethnic groups in violent conflict, since the non-MAR groups are not considered. Because MAR tends to select, in effect, on violence, however, the underestimate is probably not very far off.
53. Judging by the scores of the MAR groups in my list that were coded as showing separatism on the MAR variable SEPX.
54. Compare, for instance, the one-in-seven minority-state dyads experiencing violent conflict to the 3.2-in-1000 share of the contiguous country dyads that fought an interstate war in the years from 1946-1992. This figure was calculated using data generated by EUGene (D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, "EUGene: A Conceptual Manual," International Interactions 26, (2000): 179-204).
55. A reviewer wondered if these observations were inconsistent with the argument I made in James D. Fearon, "Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict", in The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict, ed. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 107-26, against the likelihood of significant transnational "demonstration effects" of ethnic conflict. There I was arguing against the proposition that the mere presence of an ethnic conflict in one country would raise the likelihood in other countries. Here my concern is with a change in great power policies that would affect cost-benefit calculations for many different ethnic disputes.
56. Cited in David Wippman, ed.,International Law and Ethnic Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 9-10. It is ironic that the generally neorealist-influenced advocates of partition in the United States should not see the threat to the states system that the lawyers have long understood.
57. See Wippman, International Law and Ethnic Conflict, 10.
58. Also, Stephen D. Krasner. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), who sees international agreements and interventions in favor of minority rights as evidence that the norm of sovereignty is continually violated. I would argue that minority rights regimes are better understood as attempts at agreements among sovereigns to preserve or make sovereignty viable despite incentive incompatibility.
59. Wippman, International Law and Ethnic Conflict, 10.
60. To an extent this has been happening, as in the ruling of the European Court of Justice against Britain's counterinsurgency practices in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
61. Cf. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) on Hobbesian versus Lockean world orders.
62. Also, Charles Glaser, "Realists as Optimists: Cooperation as Self-Help." International Security 19, no. 3: 50-90;
63. and George W. Downs and David M. Rocke. Tacit Bargaining, Arms Races, and Arms Control, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
64. See, for examples, Steve Saideman, The Ties that Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy, and International Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Still, there might be much more support for separatists in a world without the convention of mutual recognition of sovereignty.
65. In Alexis Heraclides, The Self-Determination of Minorities in International Politics, (London: Frank Cass, 1990), Heraclides claims, for instance, that since 1945 insurgents in separatist wars have been less likely to receive international support in the form of military aid than have insurgents in non-separatist civil wars.
66. Germany's recognition of Croatia on 23 December 1991 is a plausible exception, although it might be argued that the federal government of Yugoslavia had ceased to exist by December 1991 and so there was no question of "consent." (This does not mean that recognition was a good idea in this case; see below.)
67. See Steven R. Ratner, "Ethnic Conflict and Territorial Claims: Where Do We Draw the Line?" in Wippman, "International Law and Ethnic Conflict," 112-27, on the doctrine of uti possidetis and whether it was a good idea to apply it to Yugoslavia's internal frontiers.
68. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, in "Redraw the Map, Stop the Killing" (New York Times, 19 April 1999, A23) suggest offering the Republika Srpska to Yugoslavia in exchange for agreement to let Kosovo go. They do not say if anything would be offered to the Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian government to gain their assent, or if the partition would simply be imposed on them. In general, partition advocates have been unclear about how they would manage or direct the imposition of partitions on unwilling parties.