Independence Day in Nigeria, October 1, 1960, arrived accompanied by neither woolly, optimistic predictions of tranquility nor pessimistic predictions of imminent disaster. The centrist versus regionalist disagreements between the major, tribal-based parties on the shape of the state during the writing of the independence Constitution had been troubling; however, the former British colony of Ghana (the former Gold Coast) had achieved independence a few years before, and had seemingly developed a stable government under the leadership of the former pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. Certainly independence in Nigeria carried none of the political drama existing in Algeria, where independence came only after a civil war with France, or the aura of pending doom surrounding decolonization in the Belgian Congo, notoriously underprepared for self-government. More importantly, Nigeria seemed to possess the institutional and human resources necessary to overcome tribal rivalries and establish a stable democracy.

The hopes for Nigeria's future were pinned on four components of its planned political order. The first and most important was the federal formula adopted in Nigeria, which gave each of its three federal states (regions) considerable independent authority and left each under the control of one of Nigeria's dominant tribal communities. As a result, the Ibos, Yorubas, and Hausa-Fulanis each enjoyed a power base in the system and hence each had a stake in the regime's survival.

Second, the constitutional provisions governing representation and the amendment process were designed to make any reconfiguration of the regime difficult. As before independence, the central parliament continued to have a house whose membership was based on population, thereby giving the Northern Region, with its majority of Nigeria's people, the ability to block action prejudicial to its interests. To allay southern fears of the North using the central government to dominate the Eastern and Western Regions, a second house was added at the 1957 London Conference on the Constitution. Each region was to be represented equally in it, and a two-thirds majority there would be required before the central government could intervene in any region's affairs.

Third, and complimenting this regional balancing act, there was to be an ethnic balancing arrangement in the allocation of the principal offices of the state. The symbolic head of state was to be the father of Nigerian nationalism, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe ("Zik" to his countrymen). The head of government was to be drawn from the more populous Hausa-Fulani North, initially the NPC's leader, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Finally, the leader of the Action Group, Chief Awolowo, was to serve as both the leader of the Western Region and leader of (along British lines) the "Loyal Opposition" in the federal parliament. All enjoyed countrywide fame, and "Zik" enjoyed a trans-tribal respect when independence arrived.

Finally, confidence in the new state also resided on the professional (i.e., neutral) nature of the Nigerian Civil Service and the army officer corp, despite the disproportionate representation of southerners in both. The former was modeled on India's civil service, which in the more than dozen years that had passed since India achieved independence had not disappointed its British mentors. The Nigerian army had proven itself shortly after independence as the leading African contingent in the UN forces in the civil war-torn, former Belgian Congo.

Shortly after independence, hopes for democracy in Nigeria began to fade fast, and largely for the reasons perceived by the architects of Nigeria's constitution. The great divide between North and South had worried British parliamentarians both before and after Nigeria received independence. More basically, as befits a country that relies on a trust in the reasonableness of the government and governed alike rather than constitutional details to safeguard democracy, the British Colonial Office had worried about the commitment of Nigeria's politicians to democratic government. In the words of the Commission on Nigeria's independence constitution in rejecting the demands of the small tribes for states of their own to protect themselves from the majority tribes in Nigeria's three regions:

The whole structure of the proceedings leading to independence is based on the belief that Nigeria means to follow the road to liberal democracy and parliamentary government; to base parts of the structure on the opposite assumption is to invite governments to do their worst. .. (Report of the Commission  Appointed to Enquire into the Fears od Ninorities and the Means of Allyin Them.,London: H.M.S.O., 1958, section 10.)

Yet beyond Zik, Balewa, and a handful of other Nigerians who were to hold key positions at independence, this belief was not only untested but soon to be disappointed.

Independent Nigeria's descended first into political instability, then political violence, and finally civil war. In the end, no amount of political manipulations or tactical bargains between the spokesmen for the major tribes could peacefully preserve either the regime or the country.

The breakdown began in 1962 with the unraveling of the ability of each of the dominant tribal-based parties to control one of Nigeria's three regions. Insofar as each of these regions contained minority tribes fearful of domination by the majority tribal coalition, the environment was ripe for an electoral raiding of votes by the dominant parties in the other regions. Particularly vulnerable were the tribes in the East, given the lbo's educational, economic, and numerical advantages over them. Shortly after independence many of these minority tribes, as well as several non-Hausa-Fulani areas in the North, were already being actively wooed by Chief Awolowo's Action Group party.

In response to Awolowo's action, in 1962 the NCNC and NPC, partners in the coalition government at the center, tacitly agreed to neutralize the Western Region's AG, an especially formidable opponent of the NCNC in non- Yoruba, "Midwest" Nigeria-that is, the eastern-most portion of the Western Region. The opportunity came in May, when the leader of a breakaway faction of the AG and his followers caused disorder in the Western Region's Assembly. With the delegates from the Eastern and Northern Regions supporting action by the central government, the Western Region was declared to be in a state of emergency and placed under central control. By the time the "emergency" ended, the AG was in disarray, Chief Awolowo was in prison charged with sedition, and his rival who had led the demonstrations in the Western Region, Chief Akintola, had been installed as regional premier even though he had very little popular support in the region.

Shortly thereafter the NCNC received its quid pro quo for opportunistically collaborating with the Northern Peoples' Congress: the Midwest was surgically removed from the Western Region to become Nigeria's fourth state in a move designed to further weaken the AG and enhance the NCNC's strength in Nigeria's south, Having at least momentarily dispatched the AG, the NPC and NCNC then turned on one another. The roots of the clash were buried deeply in the already noted ethnic, religious, and developmental differences separating the Hausa-Fulanis from the Ibos. The immediate cause was Nigeria's efforts to hold a census preparatory to redistributing among the regions the seats in the central parliament before the 1964 general election. Southern Nigerians hoped that the count would conclude that they constituted a majority of Nigeria's population and hence were entitled to the majority of seats in the federal legislature then held by the Northern Region. And they tried hard to make their wishes come true. The first counts turned in by the Eastern and Western Regions, taken before the AG's demise in the West, were so inflated that even politicians from the South quickly agreed to abandon the first census. The figures produced by the second count were even more inflated, and a compromise-parity came too late. Perhaps because of his own all-Nigeria orientation lronsi had already drifted too far out of touch with the country's political realities. The leaders of all of Nigeria's principal ethnotribal groups viewed regional power as essential to their community's welfare and to their personal status.

On July 29, 1966, the country's second coup occurred-this time a military mutiny by northern troops. Although defended by its architects as pro-federalism in nature, it was primarily an anti-Ibo coup, and widely perceived as such despite the fact that the man who took charge of the government, Lt. Col. Yakuba Gwon, was a Christian from Nigeria's denied the right to register, to hold meetings and, frequently, even to meet in public. Ballot boxes disappeared from the AG's stronghold in heavily Yoruba areas, only to reappear in police headquarters nearly overflowing with anti-AG ballots. In the end, the ruling party announced patently false results and declared itself the victor. Insurrections erupted in much of the Western Region.

As the rioting spread, the central government-which had been so quick to respond in 1962 to a few unruly demonstrators disrupting the Western Region's Assembly-forfeited most of its remaining legitimacy by doing nothing. It was thus the army that eventually acted as disorder fed by frustration with the corrupt nature of the government spread throughout the South, reinforced by traditional southern fears of domination by the Hausa-Fulani North. On January 15, 1966, a band of officers struck with Sandhurst-trained precision in the Northern and Western Regions and the federal capital of Lagos. Among the casualties were the central religious leader and the regional premier in the Northern Region, Chief Akintola in the West, and Prime Minister Balewa.

The coup that ended the First Republic was initially greeted with enthusiasm in much of the country, being interpreted as an attack on corruption and provincialism rather than on a particular region or tribe. Its popularity, however, was short-lived. The fact that most of those killed were northerners, combined with the predominantly (27 out of 32) Ibo nature of those staging the coup and the fact that the subsequent regime of General lronsi, an lbo, was almost entirely composed of Ibos, kindled northern fears of southern domination both in the Northern Region and among the northerners in the Nigerian army. Their worst suspicions were seemingly confirmed a few months later by General lronsi's May, 1966, decree eliminating all existing political parties and terminating the country's system of regional autonomy.

Anti-Ibo riots in the North ensued immediately, killing numerous Ibo civilians living there and prompting Ironsi to retreat politically. In June he indicated that the May decree was only temporary and that the final form of Nigeria's new constitution would be determined by a constituent assembly and popular referendum. As a balm to northern anxieties, his promise came too late. Perhaps because of his own all-Nigeria orientation lronsi had already drifted too far out of touch with the country's political realities. The leaders of all of Nigeria's principal ethnotribal groups viewed regional power as essential to their community's welfare and to their personal status.

On July 29, 1966, the country's second coup occurred-this time a military mutiny by northern troops. Although defended by its architects as pro-federalism in nature, it was primarily an anti-Ibo coup, and widely perceived as such despite the fact that the man who took charge of the government, Lt. Col. Yakuba Gowon, was a Christian from Nigeria's"Middle Belt." Some 200 Igbo officers and rank-and-file soldiers were clearly sought out by the coup leaders and swiftly executed. The dead included General lronsi. Taken together, the coups of January and July, 1966, not only ended Nigeria's First Republic but irrevocably shattered most of the institutions and arrangements upon ·which it rested. The always brittle, three-region federal formula for soothing the fears of the Ibos, Yombas, and Hausa-Fulani of domination by the other tribal fellow became a political football once GO\von justified the military mutiny in the name of restoring Nigerian federalism. The anti-Ibo nature of the second coup also cast a dark shadow over the lbo-dominated civil service as a durable, Nigeria-oriented investment for governance, and tribalized the military to the point of ending its utility as an "instrument of [ domestic] conflict resolution." (Martin Dent, " The Task of Cont1ict Resolution," World Today, 24, 1968: 273-27-1.)

 And as for the unifying value of the politicians who inherited political power at independence, Balewa was dead, Awolowo had become so associated with Y omba interests that he had little value as a voice of Nigerian unity even though one of Gowon's first acts was to free him from prison, and "Zik" was soon forced to live in exile out of fear for his safety.

These events did not end the interethnic, interregional politics that led up to the 1966 coups. Northern Muslims continued to attack the Ibos living in their region to the point that, even as Colonel Gowon was reaffirming the country's commitment to the rule of law, Ibos in the North began to trek back to eastern Nigeria. Their migration took on wholesale proportions in September of 1966, when a massive attack claimed at least 30,000 lives.

As inter-tribal violence mounted, the Ibo officer who had been appointed to take charge of the Ibo East, Major Ojukwu, urged Gowon to create a loose, confederate system in which eastern Nigeria would have far greater autonomy than under the former system as the only means of assuring Ibo security. The idea, however, was totally unacceptable to Gowon and the military council ruling the country. As a result, Ojukwu's proposals swiftly escalated into an ultimatum: that the East would take steps of its own to guarantee the safety of its people if the central government failed to adopt the proposed system. In response, Lagos did loosen some of its control over the regions, but retained the ultimate power to assume direct mle should an emergency develop. On May 20, the last compromise effort failed when Ojukwu refused Gowon's offer of withdrawing all northern soldiers from the East in return for Ojukwu pledging to keep the East in a centralized Nigerian federation. Ten days later, the East seceded, declaring itself the independent Republic of Biafra. Thus began the Nigerian civil war (May 1967-January 1970), which claimed over 600,000 lives before Biafra's surrender brought the fighting to a close in January, 1970.

Although no formula could be found for preventing the East's secession, in the final days of May, Gowon made two decisions which contributed significantly to preserving the country. First, to secure support from the remainder of Nigeria in his stand against Ojukwu, Gowon declared a state of emergency and reorganized Nigeria into a system of twelve states, three of which were carved from the Eastern Region. The result was that minority tribes in the North and West had something to fight for in the approaching civil war and non-Ibos in the East were given an incentive to revolt against that area's majority or-at least-not to fight wholeheartedly in Biafra's defense. Second, civilians from eleven of these areas were integrated into Gowon's government, providing it with direct linkages to the peoples of the new states. In the bargain, Chief A wolowo was co-opted into supporting the center when he was selected to lead one of the Yoruba states in the West and promised the post of prime minister after the war-a move that guaranteed the West would not follow the East in seceding. Consequently, the Ibos of Biafra had to stand alone against most of Nigeria when the war came, unsure of support even within their own region.

Cynics argue that Biafra's decision to secede was resisted by Gowon largely because oil had recently been discovered in Nigeria's East; however, the country's leaders were also, perhaps primarily, motivated to act because of the chaos that might have ensued in Nigeria and elsewhere if Biafra had successfully seceded. Given the multinational nature of so many of the states constructed by the departed colonial powers, there was a danger that a successful secession an)'\vhere might trigger a separatist epidemic throughout Africa. Winning the civil war, however, was only Nigeria's first step back toward restoring the system-wide stability it possessed, however tenuously, at independence. In a very real sense, Nigeria is still traveling that path, sometimes aided and sometimes handicapped by the other developments that have shaped its political process since the surrender of Biafra.

By 2005, the search for stability had taken Nigeria through fifteen different regimes since the July, 1966, toppling of Ironsi's government. Of these, seven have been military, one a military-civilian transitional system (1998-99), and only three civilian, with one of those lasting only months. Ethnoterritorial conflict was rarely the primary cause of this change, but it has remained both a prism through which politics continue to be viewed in the country and a persistent presence in Nigerian politics. Meanwhile, the tribal communities occupying centerstage since the First Republic have often been other than those three that dominated politics in newly independent Nigeria and whose members still represent approximately 60 percent of the country's population.

Unlike in many developing areas as seen in the following list, no communities of ethnically distinct outsiders were imported into Nigeria during the era of British rule. Except for a scattering of peoples from tribes outside of Nigeria who traveled there for work in its developing South, no immigrant or foreign worker community emerged in Nigeria before or after independence, unless the managerial layer from the outside world involved in the country's oil industry is counted. Consequently, Nigeria has not experienced instances of ethnoclass politics analogous to that involving foreign worker and immigrant communities in Western Europe, the US immigrant communities, or the Romany and pre-World War II Jewish communities in Central Europe(our next case study). Yet Nigeria has experienced a type of ethnoclass conflict-one involving its Ibo community and other educated southern tribes working outside their home regions in northern Nigeria.

Because of the already noted, uneven manner in which Britain "modernized" Nigeria, the much rTlore educated southerners formed the backbone of its administrative system during the early days of independence. Commercial opportunities also often led the more entrepreneurial southerners to the Northern Region, where they lived ethnically and religiously apart from the Muslim communities, and usually in a more affluent manner. And it was this status of the Ibos and other southerners in northern Nigeria that exposed them to the violent wrath of Muslim northerners in the mid-1960s, including the massacre of tens of thousands of them as they tried to return to the South It was perhaps the inevitable fallout of the different trajectories of politics in independent Nigeria. For the southern tribes, Nigerian politics revolved, at least initially, around an ethnoterritorial axis. The Y orubas always wanted maximum territorial autonomy.

After the 1966 coups essentially disenfranchised the Ibos at the center, the lure of territorial autonomy intensified within their community as well, and when that goal was frustrated, secession followed. For the northern tribes, however, politics centered on the threat to their way oflife posed by the more educated as well as economically prosperous South, and hence focused on Nigeria's territorialized ethnoclass cleavage. Fear of the "South" had become a code word for the danger of Nigeria being dominated by a more educated, Christian community with whom northern Muslims had little in common.

In a similar fashion, although the contemporary clashes between Christian southerners working in the more fundamentalist areas of the Muslin North on the one hand, and local officials and citizens on the other are most visibly along religious lines (an ethnocultural cleavage), this divide continues to be substantially reinforced by the higher socioeconomic status of the southerners compared to their northern hosts.

 

The dominant form of government in the developing world has been some variant of nondemocratic rule. Typically these have included: direct military rule, as in Nigeria, organized either in terms of one-man rule or under the auspices of a governing council; single- or domineering-party rule, as in Mexico; and rule by a civilian dictator backed by the army.

In many instances, military rule has begun with good intentions. Usually the most modern force in developing societies, the military often sees its mission as one of rescuing its country from political upheavals, be they the product of communal conflict, ideological warfare, weak parties unable to govern, countryside resistance to land reform, or  rioting. Sometimes continuing disorder has made it difficult for the military to withdraw from politics. On other occasions, military regimes have assumed the long-term mission of playing savior to their countries. And sometimes various forms of strong man rule have lingered because of the personal profits to be made from controlling political power.

By the 1960s a pattern of military officers seizing control of the democratically structured governments left behind by departing colonial authorities had become commonplace. Military officers would intervene to restore order, suspend constitutions, promise new elections at an unspecified future date, and commence to rule. Within this framework, or the similar arrangements emerging in civilian dictatorships, the modal response to dissent has been repression, sometimes tempered (as in Nigeria) by the co-optation of spokesmen for potential centers of opposition and/or concessions of limited autonomy to territorialized minorities.

Where ethnopolitical minorities have remained centers of militant opposition to the regime, violent conflict has frequently resulted. In some instances, civil wars have yielded new states: for example, the emergence of Bangladesh from Pakistan and East Timor from rule by Indonesia. In other instances, secessions have decisively failed and the issue of the permanency of the state's borders has been resolved, as in the case of Nigeria. In many cases, however, conflicts between the center and territorialized minorities have evolved into prolonged, civil wars. Sometimes with international attention but more often without, conflicts thus continue in the Sudan, the Western Sahara, Burma, and elsewhere in Africa and Asia, and are likely to persist because neither side seems weak enough to lose or strong enough to win.

Given federalism's general failure to fulfill the lofty expectations many had for it as a means of holding together postcolonial states, its presence in the contemporary developing world is usually in a qualified form. Instead of the nonrevocable constitutional authority to legislate independently of the center in specified areas, territorialized minorities have been given a measure of autonomy as "states" within the unitary framework of military or strongman civilian rule. Still, because federalism remains an attractive idea to territorialized minorities nearly everywhere, the return to democracy in the current (Third) Nigerian Republic has necessarily been federal, just as federalization was a necessary step toward democratization in post-Franco Spain in order to gain Basque and Catalonian support for the new regime.

Federalism has also, for the same reason, been a primary option considered by third parties who have found themselves in the business of writing constitutions for countries rift with contentious ethnoterritorial communities. The case for federalism as a means of accommodating restive territorial minorities does not rest purely on theoretical grounds or its history in the older federations of the Western world. There is a case in the developing world where federalism has played a major role in democratically preserving the state, India, albeit as one part of a congruence of factors whose combination has been to India's great advantage but rarely approximated elsewhere.

India's original provinces were formed in a haphazard manner by British conquest and administrative systems. When territories were conquered, they were frequently grafted onto adjacent areas already under British control, producing provinces composed of numerous peoples with different tongues and cultures. As in the case of imperial state-making in general, no care was taken to form ethnically or linguistically homogeneous provinces, and when they did emerge it was as a byproduct of Britain's pursuit of other goals. The partition of the linguistically homogeneous province of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu parts, for example, was generally motivated by the British desire to insulate its Muslim community from the strong anticolonial nationalism embedded in Bengal's Hindu-dominated west.

Britain's decision to divide Bengal along communal lines was opposed by India's Congress party on the grounds that it violated Bengal's linguistic unity. After independence, when Congress controlled India's government, many leaders were to regret that stance because the risks of redrawing the boundaries of India's states along linguistic lines seemed high. The action was certain to encourage other territorialized communities to press for states of their own, as well as provide recipients with an institution from which to project additional ethnopolitical demands at the expense of India as a whole. Gandhi, in particular, was fearful that such linguistic units would unleash a storm of competing nationalism long before the officiallanguage policy emphasizing. Hindu and English could provide the necessary link languages for the development of durable, all-India consciousness. Nonetheless, in mobilizing the country for the independence struggle, the party of Gandhi not only advocated redrawing India's internal administrative boundaries along linguistic lines but often organized its own grass roots machinery on that basis.

Once in power, Congress quickly began to equivocate, although there were probably comparatively fewer risks in India manipulating federalism to accommodate the demands of territorialized separatist groups in the early years of independence than has been true of most multinational developing world states. India had an underlying cultural unity (Hinduism) shared by the vast majority of its peoples. India also had a handy and serious enemy at its doorstep in Pakistan until the early 1970s, when the successful secession of East Pakistan, aided by India, resulted in Pakistan's dismemberment. When internal threats to India's unity appeared to be getting out of hand, wars with Pakistan (1956, 1962) often diverted attention to the common foe, still vilified for its role in dividing India and the tragedies associated with the migration of Hindus from Pakistan to India at partition.

More importantly, India enjoyed the presence of the Congress Party itself, an all-India political organization under the direction of skillful leaders who blended a commitment to democracy with tight control over governmental machinery all the way down to the district level for nearly two decades. Even later, the party still provided a means by which the central government could exercise substantial influence over states under Congress governments, as well as quasi-consociational machinery for keeping federal-state quarrels within the confines of the party and beyond the ears of the less politically sophisticated public. Only after Congress' mystique as the party of Gandhi, Nehru, and independence faded and a new generation of politicians emerged inside and outside of Congress with roots in their own localities did its integrative value diminish. Until then, a fourth asset enjoyed by India during its first two generations of independence was the continuity of not just the Congress Party but a broadly trusted ruling dynasty in first, Prime Minister Nehru, then his daughter Indira Gandhi, and finally her sons.

Nevertheless, the immediate reaction of India's leadership at independence was to stall on implementing the long-promised reorganization of India's states. On the other hand, insofar as Congress had also accepted the principle of universal suffrage while challenging colonialism, it was understood that given the popularity of the linguistic reorganization issue, Congress would have to reorganize India once it honored that commitment. In the meantime, its leaders adopted the option of democratic politicians everywhere who find themselves on the spot. They appointed a handpicked committee to examine the matter, and in December, 1948, the commission dutifully concluded, "The formation of provinces on exclusively or even mainly linguistic considerations is not in the larger interests of the Indian nation and should not be taken in hand."(Report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission, Government of India Press, 1948, paragraph 152-2)

Although that committee concerned itself with only four of India's states, its conclusions were meant to silence the almost countrywide demand for linguistic provinces. Instead, dissatisfaction with the committee's findings spread throughout India. The decisive moment came in 1953, when yet another commission was considering the reorganization of an Indian state (in this instance, the carving of a new unit out of Madras), with the self-immolation of an advocate of creating the proposed Telegu-speaking state. His death led to widespread disorder and bloodshed in the area, forced Nevi Delhi to create the separate state of Andhra based on the linguistic principle, and eventually led to the comprehensive reorganization of India's federal system along linguistic lines. Three years later, the internal structure of India was halved to fourteen federal states, plus six autonomous territories. Of the fourteen, only two-Bombay and Punjab-were deliberately established on a multilingual basis. Each of the others had a dominant ethnolinguistic community.

In those twelve states where reorganization produced relatively unilingual provinces, the States Reorganization Act of 1956 proved to be a highly successful use of federalism as a means of defusing the centrifugal demands of India's largest linguistic conmmnities. Moreover, in reorganizing India, the Congress Party validated its leadership position and slightly increased its share of the vote at both the state and central levels in the following year's general election. In the large and multilingual/multi ethnic states of Bombay and Punjab, though, pressures for reform remained strong, as they did in the minority areas of many of the dominant-community states.

In 1960, Congress decided to end the experiment in multilingual coexistence in Punjab and split the state into the Gujarati-dominant state of Gujarat and Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra. That decision began a pattern of accommodation vis-a-vis India's ethnolinguistic minorities, which has continued into the twenty-first century. In spite of the party's reluctance to create a non-Hindu state in northern India, in 1966 Punjab was divided into the state of Punjabi-Suba for the Punjabi-speaking Sikhs and Haryana for the majority of the Hindi-speaking peoples of the area. Concessions to the ethnolinguistic minorities in those states with dominant linguistic majorities followed, beginning with the creation of the separate state of Nagaland to calm separatist demands among some of Assam's non-Assamese. Shortly thereafter, India employed the rather unique device of creating a "federation" out of the remainder of Assam in order to accommodate the desire for autonomy of the non-Assamese-speaking peoples in the state's hill districts. Forty subsequent years of bargaining over separatist demands and boundaries in India have resulted in numerous concessions to the demands of India's smaller as well as larger ethnolinguistic communities, with the accommodation of one encouraging demands by others. The accommodation process, however, has not been an uninterrupted one, or one that has always worked to the advantage of the central government. Indian governments essentially followed this accommodation approach to separatist demands from 1956 until the late 1970s, and have again during the past decade; however, the intervention of outside governments in Indian affairs during the 1980s revived fears that India might disintegrate and resulted in New Delhi taking a hard stand against the demands for autonomy in the northeast as well as those of Kashmir's Muslims for merger with Pakistan. Separatism and calls for new states thus remain a part of politics in India.

Still, as Myra Chadda has noted, "Ever since India gained its independence in 1947, scholars of India have regularly predicted India's demise. India not only survives but increasingly offers some evidence of a less turbulent future. For more than a half-century, its governments have done more than concede states to ethnolinguistic minorities to prolong India's existence. They have used that time to build an all-India economy and within it a large, well-educated middle class, which transcends ethnolinguistic borders. The process began as early the first Five Year Plan (1951-56), under which national income increased 18 percent and per capita income rose 11 percent even when adjusted to the country's imposing population increases. A half century later, in raw numbers the Indian population contains the largest middle class and holders of advanced degrees in the world-a still growing, system-wide contingent that lives in the Indian and/or global economy, not the regional arenas where separatist agendas find their greatest appeal.

A not so successful mix-and match devise, have been  consociational arrangements in which leaders with system-wide orientations have sought to prevent ethnoterritorial issues from gaining ground on the public agenda, Consociational government is always tenuous in multinational states, As occurred in Belgium during the 1970s, once an ethnoterritorial issue becomes salient-and they were usually salient before independence in the developing world-containing them becomes very nearly a lost cause. Ethnoterritorial organizations invariably spring up as ambitious political leaders seek to increase their influence by mobilizing the ethnic factor, and their co-optation into consociational systems is highly unlikely because their influence rests on keeping the ethnoterritoriallines of segmentation in their countries salient. Furthermore, if co-opted, the likelihood is high that they, in turn, will be rhetorically outbid by more regionally attuned political organizers in the next round of elections.

Example Lebanon

Personal ambitions have also eroded, either quickly or over time, efforts to control ethnopolitical divisions through ethnic balancing and representation schemes. The division of significant national offices in Nigeria among the leaders of its principal tribal communities during its First Republic, and the rotation of government offices among spokesmen for a wider network of tribal communities during the Second Republic (" Zoning") have had parallels elsewhere, most notably in Lebanon. There, a "National Pact" allocating the principal offices according to ethnic identity provided the foundation for interethnic/intersectarian rule from the time Lebanon became independent in 1943 until its breakdown more than 30 years later. Under its terms, the president was to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies a Shia Muslim, and the chief of staff to the (Maronite) commander of the military was to be a Druze. As in the case of Nigeria's original leaders, there was a quasi-consociational presumption that Lebanon's leaders would have a system-wide [all-Lebanon] identity and try to minimize ethnic and sectarian divisions, even though they held their own offices by virtue of their affiliation with those identities. In the end, again as in the case of Nigeria, political leaders who saw more advantage in emphasizing their communal roots than defending the cause of Lebanon toppled the arrangement.

The unraveling began in the aftermath of the 1970 civil war in Jordan between Jordanians and the Palestinian refugees there . Under the terms of the settlement brokered by Egypt's President Nasser, the Palestinians moved into Lebanon, where they simultaneously injected the Arab-Israeli conflict into Lebanon policies and changed the balance of numbers in the country between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim communities. Previously, no group had represented a significant majority. Suddenly the Muslims did, and when they demanded that political power be redistributed to reflect this changing balance and the Maronites refused, the Pact broke down, unable to adapt to the changing Forld around it (the growing Israeli-Palestinian conflict) or the changing environment of politics inside Lebanon, including politicians who saw greater personal opportunities in cultivating the ethnic division in their country than by trying to manage it.

Proportionality formulas for distributing government power, resources, and jobs overcome many of the weaknesses of consociational and ethnically balanced governments in managing ethnic conflict; however, given the disproportionate access to education of some groups in the developed world, proportionality and parity systems received relatively little consideration when the multinational states of Asia and Africa received independence. Instead, governments have tended to speak more in terms of "equitable" or "fair" distribution of resources, not the more inflexible principle of proportionality as a basis for allocating political rewards. Thus one device that has gathered currency involves the deployment of peacekeeping forces by outside parties as a means of controlling communal violence.

Peacekeeping

The UN alone undertook more peacekeeping missions between 1990 and 1995 (nearly 30) than during the previous 45 years. To be sure, not all of these operations involved ethnic conflict-for example, the mission in a Haiti where law and order had broken down;13 however, most of those undertaken by the UN, NATO, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), and other international bodies have, and a growing number have involved the developing world. 14 Of the latter, the most instructive as well as complex and well known remains India's failed peacekeeping operation in neighboring Sri Lanka during the late 1980s.

The crucial events involving both the development of communal conflict in Sri Lanka and the deployment there of a peacekeeping force of approximately 80,000 Indian troops can be summarized easily. Sri Lanka is an essentially bicommunal state composed of a 72 percent Sinhalese majority, concentrated in the island's south, and an indigenous, 12 percent Tamil minority concentrated in the north and east, where they are the local majority and plurality respectively. 13 During the struggle for independence in the 1920s, Sinhalese leaders talked of the country's future in federal terms, with regional autonomy for the Tamils. Only eight years after independence in a still unitary Sri Lanka, however, its government passed the 1956 "Sinhala Only Act," ending the official status of English in the country and placing Tamils at a disadvantage in obtaining employment in the civil service, where they had previously held a disproportionate share of the jobs. Tensions abated momentarily when the prime minister agreed to devolve some form of regional autonomy to the territorialized Tamil minority, but when communal violence it} 1958 prompted the prime minister to disavow the federal option, Sinhalese-Tamil relations begin their longterm dawnward slide.

In 1976, with laws favoring the Sinhalese majority growing in number, Tamil spokesmen redefined their objectives. Instead of federal astronomy they nmv demanded a country of their own. Running on a separatist platform, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) won all seats in the north and eastern areas, only to forfeit them when those elected refused to take the required oath against secession. Elsewhere, the Sinhalese United National Party won 8 percent and, using its control of parliament, in 1978 it assured Sinhalese control of government by abandoning the Westminster model of cabinet government in favor of a president-centered system. Although violence continued to grow, the only sop offered to Tamil spokesmen over the next several years was the promise to hold legislative elections on a proportional representation basis, but in 1982 President Jayawardene used a referendum (overwhelmingly rejected in the Tamil areas) to postpone the implementation of that pledge. Interethnic relations nosedived thereafter, and in that context, between 1983 and 1989, India's role in the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict evolved from that of an outside mediator operating in its sphere of influence, to interventionist under the terms of the July 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord (which promised the Tamils regional astronomy) to participant-policemen in the growing conflict between Tamil groups during the period between its intervention and its July 1989 decision to withdraw its peacekeeping contingent.

By the time India's peacekeeping force (IPKF) was deployed in July 1987, both the Sri Lankan police force and army had lost their capacity to function as neutral law and order agencies, given the government's previous efforts to "Sinhalize" them and their post-1983 reputation for conducting excessive reprisals against the Tamil community. Even the British-trained Special Air Services had become so identified with wanton retaliatory massacres of Tamil civilians that it was useless as a device for conflict resolution. Moreover, extremist elements in the Sinhalese and Tamil communities had joined or eclipsed the more moderate spokesmen for these groups by the time the IPKF touched ground. The ruling Sinhalese party was under pressure from a nationalist-religious party in its own community, and the extremist, Tamil Tiger guerrilla organization (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE) was in open warfare against the moderate Tamil leaders who had negotiated the autonomy-for-peace Accord with the Sinhalese that the IPKF was sent to enforce. Consequently, India's peacekeeping operations required both the deployment of troops and the harmonization of dual levels of mediation: diplomatic mediation between spokesman for the minority and majority communities in Sri Lanka (Tamil moderates and the Colombo government), and mediation between the moderates and the extremists in each community. It was a multitask challenge probably beyond the ability of any peacekeeper to achieve.

A successful peacekeeping operation (as opposed to side-taking) requires that the third party maintain an image of neutrality, but from the beginning India had image problems within the Sinhalese community because of its prior, semi-open support of Sri Lankan Tamils. 17 Further, the terms of the Accord did not win India much favor among the Sinhalese insofar as it seemingly gave India a veto over several portions of Sri Lankan foreign policy. However, as the IPKF began to operate against the more radical Tamil organizations and to pressure their leaders to accept local autonomy instead of fighting endlessly for a separate state, New Delhi was able to develop an image of fair-mindedness, at least within the government in Colombo.

Unfortunately for the operation, the actions that gave India credibility in Colombo deprived it of the aura of neutralism necessary to broker the conflict between moderate and extremist Tamil factions. Given its opposition in principle to separatism because of the separatist groups in India itself, New Delhi inevitably sided with the Tamil moderates in Sri Lanka. Hence, from the outset within Sri Lanka's Tamil community, the Indian troops received a cool reception. Once the IPKF focused on pacifying the internecine conflict between Tamil extremists and moderates, and engaged the Tamil Tigers' liberation army, India's ability to mediate the conflict disintegrated. The Tigers closed their bases in India and returned to their camps in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. Once entrenched there, the insurgents not only refused to disarm, as required by the Accord, but began to fight both moderate Tamil factions and the IPKF for control of the land that they had previously gained in battles against the Sri Lankan military. Gradually, Tamil opinion became as polarized on whether to trust India as on the issue of trusting Colombo, and the longer that normal life had to be suspended, the less popular the IPKF became. Meanwhile, India became increasingly frustrated with the Tigers' unwillingness to disarm, the IPKF's inability to defeat them decisively, the declining support for its policy among southern (Tamil) Indians and the perceived unwillingness of Sri Lanka's government to offer enough concessions to satisfy most Tamil groups and thus permit a political settlement of the conflict.

In the end, Colombo's frustration with India's inability to install a stable, moderate Tamil administration in the island's north and east prompted Colombo to request the IPKF's withdrawal. India troops were evacuated from the country the following year, leaving behind a country to this day ravaged by ethnic conflict that continues unabated despite the frequent international condemnation of the Tigers' use of children as soldiers.

In the end Ethnoclass conflict in the developing world has predominantly involved prejudice and policies directed against minorities who either arrived during, or profited from, a colonial era that left them with a higher socioeconomic status at independence than their respective country's population as a whole. Thus, ethnoclass politics in the developing world more closely parallels the discriminatory policies aimed at Europe's Jewish community than the ethnoclass politics involving such economic underclasses as Europe's Romany. (See next case study)

One dimension of developing world ethnoclass politics centers on the problems faced by communities such as Nigeria's more educated southern tribes when working in Northern Nigeria. A similar ethnoclass element characterized Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka before it escalated. Hence the discriminatory nature of the language and education laws enacted by the Sinhalese that, over time, resulted in the movement of large numbers of Tamils to Sri Lanka's already heavily Tamil areas. Similar patterns of ethnoclass conflict involving indigenous minorities can be found throughout much of the developing world. The major exception is Latin America, where ethnoclass politics more often favors those with the bloodlines of the European settlers than the indigenous people who fell under their rule.

Second, and more often the recipient of headlines, there is that category of ethnoclass politics that focuses on those minorities who originated elsewhere and prospered in their new homelands during the colonial era. In many instances they achieved greater economic status than the host populations, and their visibility often made them a despised upper tier of their countries' socioeconomic ladders at independence. Although numerous immigrant communities £111 into this category (including the Ibos and Lebanese in much of West Africa), by far the largest two groupings are the Asians from the Indian subcontinent, who spread across East and South Africa, the Pacific islands, and even into the West Indies, and the Chinese of Asia. 211 Though only between 1 and 3 percent of the population in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Burma (now Myanmar), 14 percent of the population in Thailand, and a third of Malaysia's people, the Chinese in particular have come to be an affluent element of the population who constitute both a significant influence beyond their numbers and a convenient target for possible ethnic conflict.

Frequently, these ‘foreign’ communities, who are often citizens of the states in which they now live, are far from cohesive. The Chinese of Malaysia, for example, are divisible on the basis of the geographical and linguistic areas of China from which they came. In addition, the various Chinese immigrants tended to drift into different occupations upon arrival. Cantonese and Hakkas, at Malaysia's independence, tended to be miners, Hokkiens were usually storekeepers or traders, and Hailmans were to be found in the more menial areas of farming, domestic employment, and laboring on the rubber estates. Similarly, within Malaysia's Indian community, caste differences reinforced by occupational differences have tended to break down any all-Indian cohesiveness in normal times, despite their high degree (90 percent Tamil speaking) of linguistic unity; however, these internal differences fade quickly when these 'outsiders' feel threatened by the majority community, And as in the case of the more educated Tamils in Sri Lanka, discrimination and political violence are often parts of their lives. The most egregious act of discrimination against them remains Uganda's decision to expel its Asian community in the early 1970s, shortly after Idi Amin gained control of the government. In times of economic adversity, however, the transplanted Asian and Chinese communities of Africa and Asia are still often singled out as scapegoats for the economic woes and targets for local frustration-a fact of ethnoclass political life underscored by the riots directed against the Chinese in Indonesia and elsewhere during Southeast Asia's economic crisis of the late 1990s.

Finally, although developing states since the 1950s have been more donor countries than recipient countries in global immigration patterns, regional wars, catastrophic acts of nature, and the lure of better economic opportunities have propelled refugees and unwanted illegal immigrants from one developing state to another, where the short supply of jobs in the domestic market has usually kindled ethnocIass conflict between them and their hosts. Thus, tensions are reportedly high between Libyans and the refugees who have migrated there from war torn areas in Africa (especially Chad), and until it bowed to international pressure, deportation was Malaysia's response to the political tensions created by the arrival there of thousands of refugees from Indonesia who had lost their homes when a tsunami ravaged the Indian Ocean region in December, 2004. In short, in the developing world, as in the advanced democratic and democratizing postcommunist worlds, ethnoclass minorities are most often the target of popular dissatisfaction and political processes, not the initiators of proposals or participants whose objectives receive accommodation-oriented hearings.

 

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