18 Globalization, ethnic conflict, and nationalism Daniele Conversi
This chapter begins by tracing a parallel: the advent of modernity lies at the very heart of nationalism, while both modernity and nationalism are related to the expansion of warfare. A similar relationship can be said to apply to globalization and its close links with ethnic conflict, civil strife, and militarism. The case studies which follow illustrate the direct and indirect consequences of both modernization and globalization in instigating the explosion of nationalism. More substantially, the overlap between globalization and Americanization is addressed as a recurrent phenomenon in the explosion of ethnic conflict.
Modernity, globalization, and nationalism The idea that nationalist conflicts erupted as a consequence of social changes brought about by modernity has remained an incontrovertible paradigm in the study of ethnic conflict and nationalism. However, many also argue that nations as such could not exist before the modern age. This approach is often referred to as ‘modernism’ (Smith 1996, 1998, 2004). Some authors go as far as saying that nations are entirely ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm 1983, Gellner 2006) or ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1993) by modern elites and reading publics. The force of nationalism has spread well over the nineteenth century into the age of globalization. There are thus parallels between modernization and globalization as stimulating factors for nationalism and ethnic conflict. Although the reach of globalization is historically unprecedented, some of its features accompanied the rise of modernity and the advent of the modern nation state. In particular, both resulted in the demise of older boundaries and the construction of new ones. Whereas industrialization destroyed local and regional boundaries by superimposing national boundaries on them, globalization destroyed national boundaries by superimposing a plethora of supra-national and corporate networks on them, including mafias, organized crime, and multi-national corporations (MNCs), none of which are as easily identifiable on a political map as ‘sovereign’ countries still are. The adoption of planetary rules to comply with the standards set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has unsurprisingly resulted in global disempowerment, at least according to the perception of influential NGOs activists (Korten 2001). 346
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Has all this also led to a decline in national identities? Not at all. Partly because national cultures have been seriously damaged or reshaped by globalization, we have seen a global intensification of ethnic belligerence. Moreover, the formation of new elites and the spread of capitalist wealth have led to nationalist self-assertion, while cultural impoverishment spurred a generalized need for compensatory ethnic assertiveness. Despite some divergence over the nature and time-span of modernity, modernism has continued to inform scholarly accounts of nationalism and ethnic conflict. On the other hand, longstanding assumptions of modernity as founded on a historical rupture have been challenged by the exploration of continuities with the past: Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach argues that, although nationalism is a modern phenomenon, nations are not necessarily modern creations and are indeed based on ancient, premodern ethnic roots which became re-activated by adapting to the new political climate (Smith 2004, Leoussi and Grosby 2006). The challenge of modernity constrained ancient ethnies or ethnic groups to find ways out to ensure their survival and protect their millennial identity. Only through nationalism could they find a new ‘security’, and via national mobilization could they hope to ensure their survival by attaining either powersharing or separate statehood. It should be noted that Smith’s ethno-symbolism emerged primarily as a critique of extreme forms of modernism postulating that nations are wholly fabricated (Gellner 2006) or that many institutions we often call ‘traditions’ are simply modern inventions (Hobsbawm 1983). In general, both modernists and anti-modernists (of which, more later on) could not fail to recognize that modernity, however one defines it, provided the main incentive and stimulus for nationalist conflict. Therefore, both ‘modernists’ and ‘anti-modernists’ share the view that modernity was the catalyst, although the latter would not describe modernity as leading to ethno-genesis. In fact, given that their focus was on persistence and longue-duree, anti-modernists also anticipated the fact that globalization could not lead to the demise of nations and the erosion of nationalism (Leoussi and Grosby 2006). On the contrary, it would provide a further boost to ethno-national mobilizations (Smith 1996). Globalization has been described as either a deepening of modernity or as a wholly new departure, often celebrated as ‘postmodernity’. Whether one stresses continuity or rupture, the shared view is that both industrialization and globalization were characterized by massive change and the breakdown of ancient boundaries. In this way, the advent of industrialization contained and anticipated most of the problems faced in the era of globalization. Later on, the history of Basque nationalism provides a telling example to illustrate this relationship. If nationalism cannot be explained independently from the onset of modernity and modern state-making, both are enmeshed in the expansion of warfare. Nationalism manifested itself in an era of inter-state competition, the collapse of boundaries, economic expansion, mass migration, general insecurity, political centralization, obsessive law-making, societal policing, and drastic militarization, finally leading to war. In the meanwhile, the Pax Britannica ensuing Waterloo provided the impetus for colonial expansion while fomenting inter-imperial rivalries and competition (Conversi 2007). Thus, just as Europe was accumulating wealth, power, and armaments in anticipation of the unprecedented conflagration, its global economic reach affected broader and broader areas of the world. Economic competition and destructive warfare were just being exported beyond European borders. Linda Colley notes: ‘the profit and the price of this hundred-year partial European peace was unprecedented Western, and especially British, freedom to concentrate on global empire. In 1800, the European powers, together with 347
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Russia and the United States, laid claim to some 35 percent of the globe’s total land area. By 1914 … [their] proportion of the globe … had risen to 84 percent’ (Colley 2002: 311). By 1914, the West had also accumulated enough economic wealth and weapons of mass destruction to unleash the greatest manslaughter in human history. The totalitarian era following the First World War has been described as the culmination of a pattern of mass dislocation founded on modernity (Arendt 1958; Bauman 1989). As we shall see later, the emergence of totalitarianism in Europe coincided with the first wave of ‘deep Americanization’, including the triumph of Hollywood, cigarette consumption, the car culture, and other US products meant for mass distribution.
Nationalism as Westernization Most modernists argue that nationalism is historically specific and set its origins with surgical precision in the year 1789. For instance, the political scientist Walker Connor (2004) clearly situates its sources in the advent of the French revolution. The overwhelming majority of historians and social scientists agree with this periodization. Although the final partition of Poland in 1795 is occasionally indicated as an alternative date, its bearing upon European developments was negligible in comparison to the French Revolution. Arguably, not even the American Revolution (1776–83) had such an immediate impact on European cultural, political, and military affairs. Finally, a few scholars see nationalism as manifesting itself first in England (Greenfield 1992, Hastings 1997) or the Netherlands (Gorski 2006). The expansion of nationalism throughout the globe is hence the spreading out of a Western idea. In other words, nationalism is an essential component of Westernization. As I have argued, nationalism cannot be understood outside the devastating impact of modernity, particularly industrialization, with its demise of traditional lifestyles, skills, cultures, and communities (Gellner 2006). Such a devastation was sufficiently all-pervasive to argue that the victory of nationalism represented the victory of a surrogate sense of community, which for some was a colossal ‘fraud’ (Gellner 2006) or an ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm 1983). Thus, for Gellner the nationalists spoke in defence of a hypothetical Gemeinschaft, but actually practiced the construction of a novel Gesellschaft, the two being largely incompatible. For both Gellner and Hobsbawm nationalism was not much less than a form of cultural ‘brainwashing’. For others, the whole process was not only counterfeit, it was based on the conspiracy of emerging rapacious economic and political elites, which used selected elements of popular tradition while invoking nationhood, just as populists often invoke the defence of the people. For instance, the role of secret societies like the Italian carbonari is a widely known and omni-present feature of nineteenth-century century mobilization. Secret paramilitary groups of patriots played a pivotal role in the spread of most nationalist movements. Karl Marx’s characterization of nationalism as a form of ‘false consciousness’ manipulated by the bourgeoisie is a well-known example of this conspiracy approach. Traditionalist, anarchical, conservative, and even liberal approaches often share similar views of nationalism as a strategy of elites. The broader trend is often known as ‘instrumentalism’ (Smith 1998), because it emphasizes the mere instrumentality of nationhood. Nations do no exist as such; they are simply cultural tools in the hands of elites or proto-elites who seek to mobilize the masses on the basis of an emotional appeal to a common but fictitious nationality. 348
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The staunchest critic of instrumentalism has again been Anthony D. Smith, who identified its opposite view as ‘primordialism’ (Smith 1996, 1998). For Donald Horowitz (2004), the ‘primordialists’ have become ‘the straw men of ethnic studies’, indeed ‘the most maligned for their naiveté in supposing that ethnic affiliations are given rather than chosen, immutable rather than malleable’ (Horowitz 2004: 72–73). By accentuating the explosive, unpredictable nature of ethnic bonds, primordialists seem to discourage further scholarly enquiry, particularly into the causes of, and possible solutions to, ethnic conflict. However, it is necessary to point out that this bad reputation is relatively recent. Before the Second World War, primordialism was à la mode and provided the dominant way of presenting one’s own nation, while history books were crammed with reminiscences of the nation’s primordial bonds, glories, and grandeur. In fact, the heyday of nationalism also saw the zenith of primordialism. Once nationalism fell into disrepute, so primordialism fell into disrepute. Although nationalism as an ideology is quintessentially modern, it remains very difficult to identify a precise date and location when and where one can begin to speak of nations. A necessary tautology would say that nations in the modern sense could not exist before modernity. The central point here is that, whenever one dates it, nationalism was a Western phenomenon fully originated and developed in the West. As such, it is possible to extrapolate parallels with globalization, which also fanned out from the West to the wider world. Most nationalist movements appropriated the West’s hierarchy of values and adapted effortlessly to it. Hence, Westernization went hand in hand with the spread of nationalism. The view that the national idea spread out from a Western core to the rest of the globe is called ideological diffusionism. For Ellie Kedourie (1993), nationalism consisted in a series of imitations and mimicking acts carried eastward from its European core by the spread of ideas. Accordingly, nationalism is a form of Westernization in itself, because it incorporates a model of governance and state legitimacy originally envisioned in Western Europe – although Kedourie incorrectly argued that Kant’s idea of individual self-determination was at the core of nationalism’s political career. In international relations, this worldshattering process has been associated with ‘the Westernization of the political order through the imported state system’ (Badie 2000). On the other hand, nationalism is perfectly compatible with broader processes of past and present homogenization, occurring either under industrialization or globalization. The competition in emulating the ‘superior’ West became an intrinsic part of the eastward expansion of nationalism. Thus, ethnic nationalists and patriots participated in a perverse game centred on mutual humiliation. In a downward spiral of resentment, they often inflicted humiliation on their own victims, usually neighbours and minorities, which in turn acted similarly against their victims. As we shall see, in its current shape cultural globalization is often understood as a oneway importation of standardized cultural items and icons from a single country, the United States of America, to the rest of the world – regardless of the fact that most of the items are actually ‘made in China’. For many, globalization is synonymous with Westernization (la Branche 2003, 2005, Latouche 1996) or, more accurately, Americanization. The international consequence of Americanization is a widespread sense of ‘cultural insecurity’ vis-à-vis an unfathomable force that nobody seems capable of containing (Amin 2004). Because this perception has been so far unable to produce organized, rational and universal responses, it tends to express itself through visceral, rudimentary, and unpredictable forms of anti-Americanism (Barber 1995). 349
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In the two cases studies, I will explore the role of modernization and globalization in engendering ethno-national conflicts through the example of two nationalist movements, one leading to the rise of Basque nationalism, the other to the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Industrialization and the rise of Basque nationalism As I have argued elsewhere (Conversi 1997), the inception of Basque nationalism can be dated back with some precision as a consequence of Spanish industrialization, following the end of the Carlist wars (1876). Unlike other types of nationalism, Basque nationalism was specifically born in those areas most affected by industrialization, which first saw the collapse of traditional community bonds and vernacular culture. Indeed the founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), was the son of a small semi-rural industrialist whose fortunes were dramatically reversed by industrialization. Arana’s birthplace, Abando, was soon absorbed into greater Bilbao, its popular neighborhoods demolished and swamped by immigrants. Throughout the industrial areas of Euskadi (the Basque Country), traditional culture was mostly erased by modernity in the form of urbanization, industrialization, and occupational de-skilling. The rise of a rich bourgeois class was accompanied by the destitution of previously rural labourers, small holders and lesser industrialists, and by the growth of a newly dispossessed urban proletariat. Basque nationalism was born as an attempt to restore order and tradition out of this chaotic scenario. Therefore, one can hardly speak of Basque nationalism before the advent of industrialization and no serious scholar of Basque nationalism would deny that industrialization, as a consequence of the globalization of capitalism, was the main catalyst in the conflict. The movement rapidly expanded from its inner core of radical activists to larger portions of the middle classes and the impoverished urbanized labourers. For a long while, it remained peaceful and unwilling to use violence, despite its uncompromising separatism and virulent anti-immigrant ideology – although one can doubt whether Arana was a fully-fledged racist (see Douglass 2004). This nonviolent attitude continued throughout the early evolution of Basque nationalism. However, several years later the peaceful radicalism of the early pioneers was slowly transformed into a virulent form of terrorism. In practice, two main changes had occurred: the advent of a centralist Spanish dictatorship (1939–1975), which took away the remaining Basque liberties and banned most of its cultural expression; and a second phase of massive industrialization pushing into the area new waves of immigrants (1960–1973). Owing to the resulting profound crisis of regional identity, nationalism was no longer a response to industrialization. Now it was a matter of the very survival of the Basque nation. While most Basques had to deal with a ferocious dictatorship which did not hesitate to use torture in order to extort confessions from militants, Basque culture appeared to be under a final threat. The crisis could be seen above all in the rapid decline of the Basque language (Euskara), now spoken by a small minority and virtually unknown among city-dwellers. This predicament prompted the foundation of ETA (Euskadi ‘ta Askatasuna) in 1959. Although the organization was initially non-violent, its radicalization increased with the intensification of the two factors, namely the escalation of state repression and the spiraling destruction of Basque traditional culture. Moreover, the immigrants happened to be Spanish-speakers, hence using the oppressor’s tongue. The first political murder committed by ETA dates back to 1968. It immediately gained 350
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the popularity and attention of the Basque youth from most social classes and backgrounds, including many immigrants. ETA rejected Arana’s obsolete ethnicism and fully committed itself to build a ‘civic’ form of nationalism which would encompass militants from all social milieux, beyond their ethnicity. Recurrent internal splits characterized ETA’s pre-violent phase. In fact, ETA began to compensate for potential fragmentation and internal conflict by strategically using violence as a community-building device (Conversi 1997). This functioned to mobilize a significant spectrum of public opinion, mostly because violence was the only means of breaking through the curtain of censorship at a moment when no distinctive markers of Basque identity, such as language or religion, could be shared any longer. The national homogenization plans established by the Francoist dictatorship made it impossible to establish sustained inter-cultural dialogue. As I have demonstrated (Conversi 1997), this was a key factor in the rise and expansion of conflict. All forms of intercommunications being squashed by a conspiracy of silence, only violence was able to lift the veil of secrecy. Violence became a tool of communication and a language per se, while a popular counter-culture slowly coalesced around it. As inter-cultural dialogue had practically closed down, terrorism provided the voice that nobody could fail to hear. As most Basques could only judge ETA by the violent actions it committed, violent attacks increased in tandem with ETA’s popularity. It seemed that the more terrorism was used, the more popular ETA became. This trend continued until 1980, when the Basque Country was finally granted autonomy. By then, the dictator Francisco Franco had long been dead (1975) and a new Constitution had been passed in 1978. Therefore, the concession of autonomy was the first effective measure to end violence and the Statute of Autonomy (1980) was particularly important since it addressed the core concern of many Basques, that is, their survival as a distinctive people and culture. Like in other areas of Europe during the late 1970s, de-industrialization saw the simultaneous ‘diversification’ and ‘homogenization’ of the socio-economic structure. In the meantime, ‘McDonaldization’ and other forms of Americanization affected Basque culture not differently from other regions around the globe. Moreover, nationalist rock music (rock nacionalista vasco) became popular among the youth. It remained Anglo-Saxon in form, but was easily adapted to the conflictual logic of the area as a ‘localized’ variety of ‘global’ culture. Of course, one of the key factors in the de-escalation of violent activity was that Basque culture was finally able to recover some of the ground lost in the preceding century. In a variety of areas, there was a revival of selected aspects of regional culture, both at the elite and the popular levels. Although this revival affected only a minority, there was a broader consensus that Basque culture was now being revitalized. What did really change with globalization? In general, the bipolar conflict had become triangular: a broader conflict was superimposed on the ancient Basque-Spanish one, with ‘cultural globalization’ (or, to many, ‘Americanization’) providing a new source of discord. Paradoxically, the same antagonism towards the emulation of American consumerist models was diffused among both Spaniards and Basques, and was shared by both nationalists and non-nationalists. However, neither Basque nor Spanish nationalisms have been able to halt Americanization, while both seem to have found ways of accommodating to it. Within the Basque cultural scene, the term ‘McGuggenization’ has been used to explore the popular resistance to US-inspired forms of retail and cultural franchises (McNeill 2000). Local analysts, opinion-makers, and social scientists used this and 351
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similar terms to describe a phenomenon which was not only exemplified by the Guggenheim’s Bilbao venture, but also affected numerous other areas from the all-pervasive shopping mall to the destruction of small-scale businesses in the local economy.
Globalizing and fragmenting Yugoslavia The creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 was at heart US President Woodrow Wilson’s gift to Serbian elites, although in the long-term it proved to be quite a poisoned one. After lengthy negotiations, the ‘Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs’ with its capital in Belgrade (1918) was set up as a loose alliance between several nationalities in common defence against Italian irredentism. By 1929 this Kingdom was rechristened ‘Yugoslavia’, the land of the South Slavs. In a very short time, it was transformed into a centralized state under rigid dictatorial Serbian control. In the 1920s, Belgrade’s drift towards the centralization of power reflected a general European movement towards authoritarianism, elsewhere accompanied by mega-projects of cultural and social engineering culminating with National Socialism. During the Second World War, the great powers chose to support the socialist Partisans, abandoning the monarchic nationalists, who in Yugoslavia were mostly Chetniks, that is hard-line Serbian ultranationalists. The post-war socialist state took on a progressively more federal structure. The power of the constituent units, the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, increased with every new constitutional re-arrangement (Ramet 2006). Only the Socialist Party and the army remained highly centralized, at least under the charismatic leadership of Marshall Tito (1945–1980). The strengthening of internal pluralism corresponded to an opening to foreign markets in the form of economic liberalization. Departing sharply from the strong centralizing patterns common to most socialist ‘federations’, Tito’s Yugoslavia reached a unique level of self-determination for its constituent Republics. Since 1974, Serbia’s two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, also gained a high degree of self-government. When Tito died in 1980, he left a precarious legacy, a union of semi-sovereign republics and provinces whose continuity as a single entity heavily depended on checking incompatible forces of nationalism, particularly Serbian irredentism. Given its autonomy from the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia was the first socialist country to yield to the pressures of globalization, well before these developments became truly global phenomena. However, liberalization did not result in the long-term increase of general domestic product, or in enduring welfare among ordinary citizens. An economic recession was particularly dramatic in the 1980s. Economic globalization came to Yugoslavia in the form of significant loans from the IMF, which were characteristically attached to stringent political and social conditions (Blitz 2006: 1–2). These included an unprecedented request by the IMF to re-centralize the country, particularly in financial matters. Such a historical turn-around was promptly seized on by Serbian elites who embarked on a plan to recentralize Yugoslavia apparently assisted by the ‘international community’. Since the beginning, Slovenia (and subsequently Croatia) had opposed any international plan to dilute or re-open any discussion of Yugoslavia’s federal structure, which had been achieved through decades of lengthy and strenuous negotiations (Ramet 2006). Given its resistance, Slovenia was henceforth described by both the state-run media and many international observers as an outcast. As scholars of nationalism could have easily anticipated, re-centralization backfired and the Slovenian government, tacitly supported by 352
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other Republics, presented a counter-plan to co-federalize the country. In practice, this meant that most non-Serbs had begun to feel insecure within the current federal arrangements and no longer accepted a plain federation: Confederation was now a prerequisite, which to all intents and purposes meant a kind of ‘sovereignty-association’ agreement for all Republics. In other words, nobody was any longer in favour of the status quo, but each side was tearing the country apart in opposite directions. In the era of globalization, no key player except the army was any longer interested in keeping Tito’s federation intact. Once it was recognized that Slovene and Croat elites were not willing accomplices to any plan for re-centralization, Serbian nationalists embarked onto a unique path of ethnic secession. This strategy was destined to become ruthless because the Serbs, a minority within Yugoslavia representing only around thirty-seven per cent, were both territorially dispersed and inter-mixed with many other groups. Any attempt to separate Serbs from non-Serbs would inevitably require violence. With increasingly hesitant support from the US and a few European countries, the new Serbian leadership under Miloševic´ posed as saviour of the country’s unity, while moving fast ahead with its undeclared, violent politics of dissolution. Such a conjuncture between national and international interests was so peculiar as to deserve a new concept: ‘secession by the centre’ or ‘central secession’ (Conversi 2003). Of course, this development cannot be the only explanation for the country’s violent disintegration. For many scholars, the way in which Western-style democracy and liberalization were ‘imposed’ on Yugoslavia was more important. Other scholars argue that when democratization is not preceded by institution-building and the protection of minorities through the creation of liberal-civic institutions, then free elections are likely to result in the explosion of violent conflicts. Political leaders are thus ‘elected to fight’ (Mansfield and Snyder 2006). In contrast with the previous section, this brief excursus into the background of the Yugoslav tragedy has served to highlight how globalization directly impacted upon the precarious balance of a country which had achieved a high level of decentralization within a socialist framework through decades of arduous political negotiations. Yugoslavia’s modernization was largely carried out at the time of socialism and included industrialization, urbanization and the expansion of the welfare state. However, differently from Franco’s Spain, socialist rule was able to create a supranational, quasi-cosmopolitan, framework, which in all good faith attempted to promote harmony, inter-connectedness and mutual respect among its constituent peoples, while cultivating the existing culture(s) of each republic. In contrast, economic liberalization implied a considerable degree of one-way, unilateral measures under the catchall banner of Westernization. Initially, this was a slow incursion and most official media were allowed to continue broadcasting national, regional, and local productions, while taking great care to avoid any form of discrimination against specific groups. For instance, radio broadcasts were articulated at both the republican and regional levels, their programmes championing the diffusion of popular art forms from each recognized nationality. In theory, all groups had equal access to their own cultural traditions and the same chance to know the traditions of all other groups. This situation was possible insofar as cultural Westernization remained less significant. Tito considered intercultural dialogue as a prerequisite for good citizenship and a prelude to the consolidation of a multinational state independent from both East and West. Despite authoritarian rule, for many decades the prevailing feeling was one of security and self-preservation, while citizens could share equal access to a common pool of information and cultural traditions. However, such a solidaristic framework began to unravel once globalization set off to erode Yugoslavia’s federal structure. The crisis deepened in the 1980s following Tito’s death. While the rising nationalist tide made inter-ethnic dialogue increasingly difficult, 353
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Americanization and westernization made major inroads through neighbouring Europeanbased radio and TVs stations (Italian, Austrian, and, most important, various US Cold War propaganda stations directed towards the Eastern Bloc and interspersing news with rock music). These gained large audiences and Americana soon began to permeate all aspects of youth ‘culture’ (Ramet and Crnkovic 2003). The ‘invasion’ was initially welcomed by the local youth and identified as a new ‘wave of freedom’. Such a common terrain offered an apparent patina of formal uniformity, mistakenly embraced by many as an alternative kind of openness and prelude to cosmopolitanism. In fact, it better concealed the germs of reactive nationalism, while voices of dissent against the unstoppable invasiveness of US cultural domination were soon to be heard among intellectuals, artists, and members of the public in all republics – although some felt more victimized than others. For instance, Belgrade’s studios and media productions, until then market leaders in the Balkans, began a slow drift towards decline. In order to survive, they had to depend increasingly upon the regime. Thus, while Miloševic´’s regime was not particularly interested in the preservation of Serbian culture, it was happy to finance movies, which subtly presented the ultra-nationalist viewpoints portraying non-Serbs as aggressors, therefore diametrically inverting years of positive discrimination efforts. The personal trajectory of the Bosnian director Emir Kusturica will be compared later on with Russian’s patriotic build-up as extreme defence against Americanization. Finally, once reciprocally hostile nationalisms had seized the state, inter-ethnic dialogue became virtually impossible, as mutual recriminations made it unworkable to reconstruct the texture of inter-connectedness that had finely preserved the country’s unity.
Global Islam, Americanization, and ethnic conflict The previous two sections have addressed the impact of modernization, particularly industrialization and globalization, in the explosion of ethnic conflict. We now briefly explore how this impact has affected a much broader area which, trespassing state boundaries, is also a contributing factor to globalization. Oliver Roy’s (2005) path-breaking work on global Islam joins a large body of literature exploring the links between ethno-religious conflict, fundamentalism, and globalization. For Roy, neo-fundamentalism is simultaneously a product and a vehicle of globalization: ‘Religion, conceived as a de-contextualized set of norms, can be adapted to any society, precisely because it has severed its link with a given culture and allows people to live in a sort of virtual, de-territorialized community that includes any believer’ (Roy 2005: 287). He then advances some intriguing thoughts about the substantial Americanization of radical fundamentalism. Roy begins by stressing the decline of traditional cuisine under the encroachment of the fast-food industry, which has been fully assumed by neo-fundamentalists: ‘Food versus cuisine is a good example of the opposition between code and culture. Neofundamentalists care nothing for cuisine. Anything that is halal is good, whatever the basics ingredients and the recipe. When they open a restaurant it never promotes Ottoman or Moroccan cuisine, but halal food, and more often than not will simply offer the usual Western fast-food products. Similarly, halal dress can be based on Western raincoats, gloves, fashionable scarves (cha-Dior, as the Iranians joke), and so on. Halal is thus a code that is adaptable to any culture. Objects cease to have a history and to be culturally meaningful; once chosen they meet a normative requirement and do not refer to a specific culture. … For the 354
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neo-fundamentalist the hamburger is seen as culturally neutral a long as it is made along the lines of their religious norm (halal) (Roy 2005: 271). In fact, global Islam appears to be more culturally neutral than Americanization. Whereas the latter is based upon the imposition of a global cultural matrix (and hence on a process of de-culturation), global Islam is more interested in establishing new codes, norms and values, irrespective of their cultural forms. The launching of Mecca-Cola in France during the apex of global anti-Americanism (2002–2003), with exactly the same ingredients as Coca-Cola bar a different name, confirms that symbolic opposition to Americanism is compatible with deeper, and perhaps more substantial, forms of ‘Americanization’ (Roy 2005: 271–2). This seems to go partly against Benjamin Barber’s (1995, 2008) view that ‘global jihad’ is a reaction against McWorld and Americanizing globalization. It also differs from George Ritzer’s argument about the symbolic anti-consumerist nature of the pro-jihadist world-view (Ritzer 2002; Ritzer and Ryan 2004; Seidler 2004). However, certain aspects of neo-fundamentalism are also a war waged against US domination. In order to win this war, it has to appropriate the globalizing tools of McDonaldization, including its rigid, de-territorialized and global bureaucratic functioning. This includes the ‘replacement of culture by code’ and of traditional community by para-military groups. With some notable differences, such a déjà vu experience reminds us of the early twentieth-century drift towards totalitarianism as a result of industrialization and the end of traditional communitarian relations. As we have seen, most scholars link modernization with the rise of nationalism. In this sense, Islamic fundamentalism or non-traditional Islam can be described as a form of ‘supra-national’ nationalism (see Gellner 1981). Mary Kaldor also points out how the ideology of global Islam should be seen as a new variant of nationalism, insofar as the ‘ideologists of the movement talk about the “Islamic nation” and the basic idea of uniting around a common culture, Islam and a religious language, Arabic, is a nationalist idea’ (2004: 171). Whether nationalist or not, the most violent fringes of radical Islam have been identified as an aspect of Westernizing modernity (Gray 2003). Global Islam has found an ideal terrain amongst the conflicts erupting along Islam’s civilizational fringes. In fact, many contemporary conflicts emerge when political Islam meets other religious traditions associated with dominant ethnicities in control of specific states. In these cases, Muslims are contextualized as oppressed minorities in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, southern Thailand, Ambon/Moluccas, Azerbaijan, Palestine, Mindanao, and Xingjian. These regions have witnessed the reactive politicization of Islamic communities as a response to the resurgence of dominant nationalism/state patriotism. They have found in global Islam a handy package offering unique organizational support and new networks of international solidarity.
The failed communication approach So far, we have implicitly recognized throughout our case studies that inter-cultural dialogue remains an essential component for safeguarding peace and stability. In both the Basque and Yugoslav cases, the breakdown of inter-cultural dialogue was a contributing factor in the resulting conflicts. The key argument to be developed here is that, despite the internet and other multi-directional flows of communication, the current ‘cultural world order’ retains a vertical communicational structure, where groups have few opportunities to inter-communicate or interact in meaningful ways and know each other’s traditions. This may appear to be counter-intuitive, if one considers the information revolution 355
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bringing previously disconnected individuals ‘together’ and enabling unprecedented flows of multi-directional information (see Castells 2000). However, such a technologicallyoriented view is limited. With the exception of specifically designed EU policies aimed at cultural exchange, there are few incentives for neighbouring regions, groups and nationalities to establish sustained and systematic inter-cultural exchanges. Outside the EU framework, inter-cultural dialogue remains extremely difficult, its place being often taken over by Americanization. As we know, most ethnic conflicts occur precisely among neighbouring groups and are not ‘long-distance conflicts’. This contrasts with policies adopted under Communism, at least at a discursive level. In the early post-Soviet years, cultural Americanization has hampered any such attempt at inter-ethnic, inter-state, and inter-cultural exchange. Once the Soviet imperial communication network was dismantled, its place was immediately filled by its victorious rival, which had already made significant inroads into Soviet cultural audiences by the distribution of US pop icons (Lucas 1999). The message systematically proposed ‘America’ as the only reference model and Americans as the only ‘reference group’, to use a sociological concept from the 1950s (see Williams, 1970). The pervasiveness of US consumerist iconographies may be considered normal today, just as nationalist homogenization was considered normal in the heydays of nationalism. McDonaldization has been broadly driven by a thrust towards profit at the expenses of culture. The result has been more profit and less culture, notably less inter-cultural communication, hence a greater potential for conflict. On the other hand, if cultural globalization can be simply identified as naked Americanization, then it may well be associated with a new type of colonial or imperial domination (Barkawi 2005). Has this awareness stimulated some genuine forms of global resistance? In fact, nationalism and ethnicity have sometime been spurred by attempts to mobilize noncompliance to globalization. Sentiments of hostility towards global Americanism can be appropriated by both popular movements of local resistance and more aggressive forms of state-led patriotism. In those rare instances where Americanization has been accompanied by territorial intervention, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, the unintended consequence is to create broader nationalist discourses and frameworks. These may transcend the boundaries of ethnicity, although in Iraq the opposite effect was initially visible. In addition, powerful authoritarian states, like China and Russia, have already capitalized on state patriotism by mobilizing widely shared anti-American attitudes. On the other hand, an apparent acceptance of US iconography, such has the kilometric queues at the opening of McDonalds’s in Moscow (1990) and Beijing (1992), is no proof that either the surface or the substance of Americanism will be passively accepted in the long term. In fact, anti-Americanism is particularly widespread in the above countries, both at the elite and popular levels. The implication of this for global Islam (and its intersection with ethnic conflict) has been addressed earlier on. Concomitantly, the McDonaldization of Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia was followed by a reassertion of anti-American ‘revanchism’ at all levels of society. These anti-American sentiments were being expressed oddly enough just while McDonald’s were opening new outlets.
Americanization and globalization Despite a considerable body of literature describing globalization as different from Americanization (see Turner and Khondker 2010), this section sets out from the opposite 356
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premise. It shows that, insofar as globalization is grounded upon American fashions and norms, it directly instigates national and ethnic conflicts at both the state and sub-state level. The linkage between Americanization and globalization is moreover assumed by many ethnic and patriotic groups, as well as by alternative universalistic movements. Therefore, it should be treated more rigorously and systematically in the globalization literature, rather than being dismissed as over-simplification or trivialization. To many, the very patterns through which globalization spreads appear to be moulded by American cultural domination. Thus, George Ritzer’s (1996) neo-Weberian description of McDonaldization as the bureaucratic regulation of society at a global level begins by analyzing the functions of a brand name that stands as the symbol of American consumerism in its most contested and aggressive forms. How should ‘Americanization’ be defined for the purpose of analyzing its effect on ethnic conflict? Ritzer and Stillman (2003) identify it as a ‘powerful one-directional process that tends to overwhelm competing processes’. In contrast, Ulrich Beck’s (2003) argument is that the concept of ‘Americanization’ implies a narrower ‘national understanding’ of globalization that substantially limits its utility. However, this makes it even more relevant to the study of ethno-national conflicts. Moreover, Americanization has been a driving force throughout the previous century and can only be ignored at the risk of adopting an a-historical perspective. According to Schörter (2008a), Europe experienced three main waves of Americanization. These were firstly in the 1920s, coinciding both with the rise of fascism and the adoption of economic rationalization aimed at increasing competitiveness and efficiency (Taylorism, Fordism, the mass media, and so on); the second wave took place in the period of economic expansion of 1949–1973; and the final wave lasted from about 1985 until the present, when the idea of globalization became dominant and all-pervasive. In each phase, Americanization deepened, encountering less and less resistance, until it became a normal feature of the European scene. The above tripartite division applies to both the cultural and the economic spheres, including an account of why Hollywood and the US film industry became dominant in the 1920s and 1930s (Schörter 2008a). The process of Americanization should not be understood as the substantial incorporation or espousal of American values. The term should more often serve to describe a superficial, incoherent, fractional, and flawed appropriation of external items and ephemera. In particular, Americanization does not automatically mean exporting American ideals, but rather more trivial US mass-consumer products, often through superficial imitation. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright showed insights about the US’ ‘fullspectrum dominance’ cultural policy when she said that ‘Cultural factors play a pivotal role in many of the international challenges we face … our cultural programs are central—and I underline that—central—to the success of American foreign policy’ (Albright 2000). Once out of office, she adopted a more cautious position, considering the risks and damages inflicted by extreme forms of Americanization. For Bacevich (2002), the economic ‘openness’ implicit in neo-liberalism produces a form of globalization that is inevitably synonymous with Americanization, since it is predicated on a national security approach founded on global dominance. How far has Americanization contributed to the disintegrative trends described in this chapter? If so, how did it? In recent years several studies have been devoted to the critical analysis of ‘Americanization’ in various areas (see Barber 2008, de Grazia 2006, Stonor Saunders 1999, Wagnleitner 1994). Some of these have explored the response to Americanization either as the enthusiastic embrace of, or as the embittered rejection of, 357
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Americanism. But the consequences of cultural Americanization remain among the least studied, yet most critical, aspects of globalization. In many countries, unrestrained Americanization has led to an all- devouring introduction of consumerist homogenization in which thousand-year old cultures have been replaced by serially crafted ephemera destined for rapid consumption. For some authors, Americanization seems to be increasingly challenged by Indigenous practices and products through processes of vernacularization, domestication, and hybridization (Appadurai 1997: 81). However, the latter have customarily had to Americanize their products in order to survive in the market. The neo-liberals’ populist rhetoric of ‘let’s give to the people what they really want’ articulates an ideology specifically wrought to tear down the traditional barriers of both local cultures and national communities. Yet, indigenized forms of ‘Americana’ have been even more ‘effective’ in destroying local cultures as they could be more easily camouflaged behind a mask of national Indigenousness. For instance, despite claims that it heralds a national assertion of Indian identity, the very designation ‘Bollywood’ visibly echoes, and originates from, its American namesake. Its cultural content increasingly impersonates American tastes, rules, behaviour, norms, customs, and fashions (Rao 2007). As for the globalization-nationalism nexus, Hindu ultra-nationalist and globalist ideologues fully converge in granting ‘Bollywood’ a patent of ‘Indianness’ (Rajadhyaksha 2003, Ranganathan and Lobo 2008). Militant Hindutva groups use it to promote an image of India ‘among the most powerful nations in global modernity’ in an effort to subvert, essentialize, and homogenize contemporary Indian culture (McDonald 2003: 1563). At the same time, recent ethnographic works have shown that the artificiality and elitism of the highly Westernized, consumerist, urban middle class portrayed in these films is entirely grasped by non-elite audiences, who discern in them ‘the brand logic of transnational capital which is redefining the meaning of the masses’ (Rao 2007: 57). Similarly, Egyptian marketers promoted the infitahs as an attempt to ‘glocalize’ international business in order to twist local economic conditions by ‘Egyptianizing’ (or ‘mediating’) imported goods, brands, and logos as promoted by global MNCs (Shechter 2008). Corporate populism upholds the need to ‘indigenize’ profit-making transnational flows. This approach has long been flagged by multinational business while adopting a rhetoric of ‘respecting’ local values in the very act of dispensing with them. Rather like the ‘green’ credentials assumed by environmentally destructive mega-corporations, a populist rhetoric defending the people’s ‘spontaneous’ attractions to global logos and brands is often accompanied by a discourse claiming that the company is striving to incorporate ‘Indigenous values’. Can this be simply discounted as ‘glocalization’? The philosophy of contemporary marketing is anthropologically rooted, sociologically informed, and conveyed by a pseudo-pluralistic parlance which promotes an ‘understanding’ of local and national cultures so that the corporation can better penetrate new foreign markets. Similar processes have been reassuringly referred to as ‘creolization’ or as forms of contamination of non-dominant cultures by Western consumption models spread by mass media. Critics of globalization agree that large portions of ‘national sovereignty’ have to a great extent been seized by multinational corporations (see Barnet and Cavanagh 1994). As mentioned earlier, this demise of national sovereignty has directly or indirectly contributed to boost nationalism and other boundary-building practices (Conversi 1999). However, some institutions seem to have remained immune from it. For instance, despite rapidly increasing legal uniformity throughout the world, the leniency or severity in which global laws are applied across countries varies widely (Lacey 2008). Thus, the 358
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US-led global securitization framework has steered various state laws to incorporate a rash of illiberal legislations (see Bowring 2008). While countries like Uzbekistan have arbitrarily used the original US template to eliminate political opponents (Kendzior 2007, Murray 2007, Scheuer 2004: 12 and 263), countries such as Italy use a similar securitization discourse against various internal ‘others’ with more leniency (Sigona 2005), and China exploits the global ‘war on terror’ more systematically against a host of religious and ethnic groups, notably the Tibetans and the Uygurs of Xinjiang (Steele and Kuo 2007).
New cultural hierarchies and ethnonationalism Contrary to the globalists or ideologues of globalization (Steger 2005), both Marxists and liberals have highlighted the ‘pyramidal’ structure underlying globalization. This metaphor applies well to cultural dissemination. An elite of corporate, media, and governmental agencies sits at the pyramid’s top level, small regional intermediary elites sit immediately below, while the overwhelming majority of humans are pushed well down towards the pyramid’s bottom. In the realm of ‘global culture’, this looks like a master-servant relationship with much of the world at the boot-licking end. Whether such a relationship really exists, or is even practical, this metaphorical dramatization can nevertheless help to understand collective self-perceptions. The consequences in the area of ethnic conflict are significant. Such a hierarchical structure makes it impossible for global exchanges to turn into egalitarian relationships based on evenly balanced inter-cultural communication and dialogue. On the contrary, cultural globalization is not reflected in a genuine increase of inter-personal, inter-ethnic and inter-cultural contacts. As I shall argue, in most public areas ‘cultural globalization’ really means the unreciprocated, one-way flow of consumerist items from the US media and leisure machine to the rest of the world. This top-down distribution ensures that a few individuals and groups, nearly all in the USA, firmly establish the patterns of behaviour and taste to be followed by the rest of mankind. Is this congruent with the view that there is a form of ‘global centralization’ in culturallegal matters leaning towards Washington, DC? As for a supposed ‘global culture’, the symbolic capital would ideally be located in Hollywood, rather than Washington. In fact, the term ‘Hollywoodization’ insinuates a media-enforced hierarchical structure with immediate symbolic resonance. It also offers a more cultural, perhaps less sociological, focus than the Weberian concept of bureaucratic ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 1996). Competing terminologies include ‘Disneyfication’/’Disneyization’, with its stress on extreme predictability and the infantilization of leisure (Bryman 2004), ‘Walmarting’ as the streamlining of the retail sector (Fishman 2005, Morrow 2004), or earlier Cold War terms like ‘Coca-Colonization’ (Wagnleitner 1994). We previously saw how the term ‘McGuggenization’ has been used to indicate art-related cultural franchising and other forms of Americanization in the Basque Country (McNeill 2000). All these equally refer to socio-economic trends originated in the USA and are hence forms of Americanization. However, ‘Hollywoodization’ has broader implications for ethnic relations and nationalist conflicts. In practice, Hollywood-inspired simplifications have become the daily staple for millions of peoples around the world in their leisure time. In the area of ethnicity, ‘Hollywoodization’ has been elevated to the only known reality and the unique source of information about the outside world for increasing numbers of people, not only in the USA. Thus, the world is more likely to get its stereotypes of the Brits 359
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from US movies like The Patriot or Saving Private Ryan than via British productions. Similarly, most of the world is likely to see Scotland through the lenses of US-made Braveheart, as the larger public can barely afford any access to Scottish cultural productions. This monopoly of global stereotyping and ethnic imagery has serious implications for the spread and continuation of ethnic conflict. The tools of primary socialization were once under firm control of the family, either nuclear or extended. They were subsequently assumed by the state in the industrialization ‘phase’, notably with post-1789 mass militarization and compulsory schooling (Conversi 2007, 2008). Under neo-liberal globalization, primary socialization has been seized by unaccountable cash-driven corporations and media tycoons. This has further reduced the space of inter-generational transmission and family interaction. If a community can no longer socialize its children according to its culture and traditions, then the very bases of local, regional, and national continuity are all visibly at stake. This threat to a group’s survival is often seized upon by patriots and ethno-nationalists, whose political programs are founded on providing a new sense of social cohesion and security – even if the targets are often hapless and unprotected minorities. That is partly how nationalism and xenophobia have expanded in tandem with globalization. Ethno-nationalism not only persisted through change, but is perceived by many as a response to the growth of globalization, providing a prêt-à-porter hope for national resistance and resilience. By depending on Hollywood as unique conveyor of ‘globalization’, inter-ethnic interaction is inevitably undermined. In some instances, international communication has practically evaporated. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the explosion of chauvinism, racism, neo-fascism, and xenophobia seems to go hand in hand with a blind faith in mass consumerism (Hockenos 1993). Under socialism, it was relatively common to see on cinemas and television film masterpieces from France, Yugoslavia, Russia, Italy, or Britain until about 1989. Ensuing the Comecon’s dismantling and its absorption into the free market area, this was no longer possible. Only the full panoply of Hollywood and MTV-inspired products could then be seen every day on every post-socialist TV channel and in every movie theatre. The same phenomenon recurs in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Mongolia, and nearly all other post-communist societies. Here, by the early 1990s the local film industry had collapsed with little hope of recovery. In Russia, thousands of actors, directors, screenwriters, players, producers, writers, editors, musicians, consultants, sceno-graphers and other artists became jobless virtually overnight. The political trajectory of one of the greatest living film directors, the multi-award winner Nikita Mikhalkov, conveys an important lesson about the impact of Americanization on the rise of Russian nationalism. Born into a family of distinguished but moderate patriots, Mikhalkov moved from global masterpieces like Oblomov (1980), Chekhov’s transposition of Dark Eyes (1987), Burnt by the Sun (1994) and his world-acclaimed epic on the Mongols, Urga (1992) (Tavis 1994), to increasingly patriotic movies destined for domestic audiences. These were accompanied by growing involvement into nationalist politics. Mikhalkov became more and more vocal in his claims that the West had launched a ‘war against Orthodoxy’, endorsing the latter as ‘the main force which opposes cultural and intellectual McDonald’s’ (Foglesong 2007: 204 and 215–216, Hashamova 2007, Larsen 2003). A militaristic extravaganza like The Barber of Siberia (Sibirskij tsiryulnik, 1999) (Siefert 2006: 208–9) reads like an act of defiance against the neo-liberal obliteration of Russian culture. Moreover, under invitation from his Serbian colleagues, Mikhalkov travelled to Belgrade in support of Serbia’s claims over Kosovo, becoming furthermore involved in 360
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genocide denial. Before neo-liberal globalization, Russian and Serbian studios were home to some of the world’s most prolific and rich cinematic productions. Now both cultures shared a common fate, the global neo-liberal devastation of the domestic and independent film industry. Finally, Mikhalkov championed Serbian nationalism as a form of resistance against American aggression. Americanization was no doubt the prime crime – and he went as far as comparing the effects of McDonaldization to Stalinism.1 The theme of humiliating McDonaldization resurfaces in the movies and interviews of another Russian director who converted to patriotism, Aleksei Balabanov (Larsen 2003). A similar trajectory from cosmopolitanism to ultra-nationalism was experienced in Yugoslavia by another world-famous cinema director, Emir Kusturica (b. 1954). While shooting his Underground (1995), partly financed by the state-owned Belgrade Radio Television, official Yugoslav army equipment was employed in the set. Mixing grotesque irony with surrealistic war drama, the film was accused of propagating the Serbian nationalist tale just as genocide was taking place. Kusturica allegedly defended Slobodan Miloševic´, rebuking Western media as the real cause of the war. A recurrent slogan appearing in the Russian daily Pravda (Truth) reads verbatim: ‘McDonald’s had killed more Americans in 2001 than Osama bin Laden & al Qaeda’; another reads ‘McDonald’s food demoralizes the globe’. Pravda has become the talking head for Russia’s anti-American audiences and its global popularity has correspondingly amplified in tandem with the spread of anti-Americanism ensuing Guantánamo and the ‘war on terror’. The case of Russia seems to confirm Barber’s thesis: the slow build-up of an ‘Eastern Jihad’ first revealed itself in a chaotic, implicit, nearly secretive way. Then, it gradually began to be channelled and harnessed under the authoritarian banner of Russian patriotism, as this gained inroads into most institutions. In post-communist countries, the collapse of national cultures was assisted by the legacy of totalitarianism which had already turned whole societies into a cultural tabula rasa, preparing the ground for the onslaught of cultural globalization. In all these cases, economic, political and cultural Americanization has substantially replaced Sovietization. While McDonalds, MTV, and Hollywood triumphed eradicating potential Indigenous rivals, the ancient régime’s political structures were inherited almost intact by Western-led corporate power and simply ‘accommodated’ to the new rules of the game.
Conclusion This chapter has focused on the political and cultural dimensions of globalization, relating it to ethnic conflict, patriotism, and nationalism. In short, one of the long-term legacies of the era of globalization is the global spread of oppositional ethnic and religious conflict. I have described, and subsequently dismissed, the profit-oriented ideology that globalization, intended as Mcdonaldization and Hollywoodization, can contribute to better international understanding. On the contrary, it has ushered in a process of planetary cultural and environmental destruction, while hampering inter-ethnic communication and fostering human conflict. The notion of cultural security, so central to international relations and peaceful coexistence, has undergone unprecedented challenges. We began by addressing parallels between modernity, particularly industrialization, and globalization as harbingers of ethno-national conflict. We then explored three main cases (the Basque Country, Yugoslavia, and global Islam) and two minor ones (India and Russia) 361
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through the lens of the movie industry. Insofar as cultural globalization is understood as uni-dimensional import of standardized cultural icons, symbols, practices, values, and legal systems from the United States, it can simply be re-described as Americanization (rather than Westernization in the broad sense), or ‘globalization by Americanization’ (Hilger 2008). This is of central importance for the study of ethnic conflict. In fact, the outcome is scarce hybridization, amalgamation, and metissage. Rather than providing an inter-cultural bridge, this unilateral drive has often eroded the basis for mutual understanding, impeding inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and international interaction. Given the current vertical, pyramidal structure of the ‘cultural world order’, the opportunity of distinctive groups to communicate directly and appreciate each other’s traditions has decreased, except in the virtual area of long-distance communication. For an increasing number of individuals, an American mass consumer culture remains the only window on the world. Hence, to know and appreciate one’s neighbours has become an ever-arduous task. To recapitulate my point, wherever cultural globalization appears as synonymous with Americanization, it engenders conflicts on a variety of levels. Because the process is oneway and unidirectional, the result is unlikely to be a fusion between cultures or, even less, the blending of ethnic groups. Contrary to the globalist utopia, the imposition of more and more American icons means less and less possibility for direct inter-ethnic encounter and communication among nations. Together with the collapse of state legitimacy, this substantially contributes to the spread of ethnic conflict and nationalism. Despite the internet, the crucial factor remains the reduction of real, effective, interethnic, and international communication outside American direction and control. After years of mimicking the successful US model, many local entrepreneurs have been spurred into beginning their US-inspired ventures, in a sort of ‘self-Americanization’. However, globalization qua Americanization is not simply a matter of ‘free choice’. The reach of US cultural propaganda has been driven by the need to manage a host of regional conflicts (Hixson 1997, Snow 2003, Snyder 1995, Sorenson 1968), such as the Korean war (Casey 2008), or the building of post-Cold War European order (Wagnleitner 1994). The resulting sense of cultural insecurity has hence spread onto a planetary scale, increasingly accompanied by the reassertion of hurt pride and a rise of patriotism which can easily seize anti-American themes, whenever elites chose to use these in order to gain popular consensus. As convincingly argued by Dennis Smith, the ‘stirring up a tide of global resentment’ has so far been ‘held back by fear of American military power. When that power falters, the revenge of the humiliated world will strike the West’ (2006: 1). Moreover, owing to globalization, the legitimacy of the state and even the rule of law have declined in many affected countries. In several areas, organized crime is more powerful than central governments. This is particularly true for countries ravaged by ethnic conflict: In fact, when ethnic conflict and globalization merge, the result is often the empowerment of ‘McMafias’ (Glenny 2008). Central governments in various countries, including Serbia under Miloševic´, Italy under Berlusconi, and Russia under Putin, have sought to consolidate their powers by simultaneously reaching deals with both organized crime and ethno-nationalist forces. In other areas, given the lack of state authority, rulers have attempted to claim back legitimacy by using the easiest mobilizing tool which they can still muster up: patriotism imbued by fear, that is, the double-faced politics of terror and ‘national security’. Dialogue remains essential as peace itself is made up of a plurality of co-existing visions. Yet, ‘globalization produces conflict because the different conceptions of peace prevalent 362
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in each society are unable to enter into dialogue with each other’ (Gasparini 2008: 27). Whether the idea of a ‘global civil society’ has anything to do with globalization as described in these pages will remain an issue of contention. In all, the impact of globalization is clearly linked to the spread of ethnic conflict, patriotism, and nationalism. This chapter has contested optimistic visions of globalization, insofar as the latter remains hetero-directed, deeply in-equalitarian, environmentally unsustainable, and culturally self-destructive.
Note 1 See www.runewsweek.ru/theme/?tid=150&rid=2326; www.sentieriselvaggi.it/articolo.asp?sez0=3& sez1=33&art=26452.
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This chapter begins by tracing a parallel: the advent of modernity lies at the very heart of nationalism, while both modernity and nationalism are related to the expansion of warfare. A similar relationship can be said to apply to globalization and its close links with ethnic conflict, civil strife, and militarism. The case studies which follow illustrate the direct and indirect consequences of both modernization and globalization in instigating the explosion of nationalism. More substantially, the overlap between globalization and Americanization is addressed as a recurrent phenomenon in the explosion of ethnic conflict.
Modernity, globalization, and nationalism The idea that nationalist conflicts erupted as a consequence of social changes brought about by modernity has remained an incontrovertible paradigm in the study of ethnic conflict and nationalism. However, many also argue that nations as such could not exist before the modern age. This approach is often referred to as ‘modernism’ (Smith 1996, 1998, 2004). Some authors go as far as saying that nations are entirely ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm 1983, Gellner 2006) or ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1993) by modern elites and reading publics. The force of nationalism has spread well over the nineteenth century into the age of globalization. There are thus parallels between modernization and globalization as stimulating factors for nationalism and ethnic conflict. Although the reach of globalization is historically unprecedented, some of its features accompanied the rise of modernity and the advent of the modern nation state. In particular, both resulted in the demise of older boundaries and the construction of new ones. Whereas industrialization destroyed local and regional boundaries by superimposing national boundaries on them, globalization destroyed national boundaries by superimposing a plethora of supra-national and corporate networks on them, including mafias, organized crime, and multi-national corporations (MNCs), none of which are as easily identifiable on a political map as ‘sovereign’ countries still are. The adoption of planetary rules to comply with the standards set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has unsurprisingly resulted in global disempowerment, at least according to the perception of influential NGOs activists (Korten 2001). 346
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Has all this also led to a decline in national identities? Not at all. Partly because national cultures have been seriously damaged or reshaped by globalization, we have seen a global intensification of ethnic belligerence. Moreover, the formation of new elites and the spread of capitalist wealth have led to nationalist self-assertion, while cultural impoverishment spurred a generalized need for compensatory ethnic assertiveness. Despite some divergence over the nature and time-span of modernity, modernism has continued to inform scholarly accounts of nationalism and ethnic conflict. On the other hand, longstanding assumptions of modernity as founded on a historical rupture have been challenged by the exploration of continuities with the past: Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach argues that, although nationalism is a modern phenomenon, nations are not necessarily modern creations and are indeed based on ancient, premodern ethnic roots which became re-activated by adapting to the new political climate (Smith 2004, Leoussi and Grosby 2006). The challenge of modernity constrained ancient ethnies or ethnic groups to find ways out to ensure their survival and protect their millennial identity. Only through nationalism could they find a new ‘security’, and via national mobilization could they hope to ensure their survival by attaining either powersharing or separate statehood. It should be noted that Smith’s ethno-symbolism emerged primarily as a critique of extreme forms of modernism postulating that nations are wholly fabricated (Gellner 2006) or that many institutions we often call ‘traditions’ are simply modern inventions (Hobsbawm 1983). In general, both modernists and anti-modernists (of which, more later on) could not fail to recognize that modernity, however one defines it, provided the main incentive and stimulus for nationalist conflict. Therefore, both ‘modernists’ and ‘anti-modernists’ share the view that modernity was the catalyst, although the latter would not describe modernity as leading to ethno-genesis. In fact, given that their focus was on persistence and longue-duree, anti-modernists also anticipated the fact that globalization could not lead to the demise of nations and the erosion of nationalism (Leoussi and Grosby 2006). On the contrary, it would provide a further boost to ethno-national mobilizations (Smith 1996). Globalization has been described as either a deepening of modernity or as a wholly new departure, often celebrated as ‘postmodernity’. Whether one stresses continuity or rupture, the shared view is that both industrialization and globalization were characterized by massive change and the breakdown of ancient boundaries. In this way, the advent of industrialization contained and anticipated most of the problems faced in the era of globalization. Later on, the history of Basque nationalism provides a telling example to illustrate this relationship. If nationalism cannot be explained independently from the onset of modernity and modern state-making, both are enmeshed in the expansion of warfare. Nationalism manifested itself in an era of inter-state competition, the collapse of boundaries, economic expansion, mass migration, general insecurity, political centralization, obsessive law-making, societal policing, and drastic militarization, finally leading to war. In the meanwhile, the Pax Britannica ensuing Waterloo provided the impetus for colonial expansion while fomenting inter-imperial rivalries and competition (Conversi 2007). Thus, just as Europe was accumulating wealth, power, and armaments in anticipation of the unprecedented conflagration, its global economic reach affected broader and broader areas of the world. Economic competition and destructive warfare were just being exported beyond European borders. Linda Colley notes: ‘the profit and the price of this hundred-year partial European peace was unprecedented Western, and especially British, freedom to concentrate on global empire. In 1800, the European powers, together with 347
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Russia and the United States, laid claim to some 35 percent of the globe’s total land area. By 1914 … [their] proportion of the globe … had risen to 84 percent’ (Colley 2002: 311). By 1914, the West had also accumulated enough economic wealth and weapons of mass destruction to unleash the greatest manslaughter in human history. The totalitarian era following the First World War has been described as the culmination of a pattern of mass dislocation founded on modernity (Arendt 1958; Bauman 1989). As we shall see later, the emergence of totalitarianism in Europe coincided with the first wave of ‘deep Americanization’, including the triumph of Hollywood, cigarette consumption, the car culture, and other US products meant for mass distribution.
Nationalism as Westernization Most modernists argue that nationalism is historically specific and set its origins with surgical precision in the year 1789. For instance, the political scientist Walker Connor (2004) clearly situates its sources in the advent of the French revolution. The overwhelming majority of historians and social scientists agree with this periodization. Although the final partition of Poland in 1795 is occasionally indicated as an alternative date, its bearing upon European developments was negligible in comparison to the French Revolution. Arguably, not even the American Revolution (1776–83) had such an immediate impact on European cultural, political, and military affairs. Finally, a few scholars see nationalism as manifesting itself first in England (Greenfield 1992, Hastings 1997) or the Netherlands (Gorski 2006). The expansion of nationalism throughout the globe is hence the spreading out of a Western idea. In other words, nationalism is an essential component of Westernization. As I have argued, nationalism cannot be understood outside the devastating impact of modernity, particularly industrialization, with its demise of traditional lifestyles, skills, cultures, and communities (Gellner 2006). Such a devastation was sufficiently all-pervasive to argue that the victory of nationalism represented the victory of a surrogate sense of community, which for some was a colossal ‘fraud’ (Gellner 2006) or an ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm 1983). Thus, for Gellner the nationalists spoke in defence of a hypothetical Gemeinschaft, but actually practiced the construction of a novel Gesellschaft, the two being largely incompatible. For both Gellner and Hobsbawm nationalism was not much less than a form of cultural ‘brainwashing’. For others, the whole process was not only counterfeit, it was based on the conspiracy of emerging rapacious economic and political elites, which used selected elements of popular tradition while invoking nationhood, just as populists often invoke the defence of the people. For instance, the role of secret societies like the Italian carbonari is a widely known and omni-present feature of nineteenth-century century mobilization. Secret paramilitary groups of patriots played a pivotal role in the spread of most nationalist movements. Karl Marx’s characterization of nationalism as a form of ‘false consciousness’ manipulated by the bourgeoisie is a well-known example of this conspiracy approach. Traditionalist, anarchical, conservative, and even liberal approaches often share similar views of nationalism as a strategy of elites. The broader trend is often known as ‘instrumentalism’ (Smith 1998), because it emphasizes the mere instrumentality of nationhood. Nations do no exist as such; they are simply cultural tools in the hands of elites or proto-elites who seek to mobilize the masses on the basis of an emotional appeal to a common but fictitious nationality. 348
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The staunchest critic of instrumentalism has again been Anthony D. Smith, who identified its opposite view as ‘primordialism’ (Smith 1996, 1998). For Donald Horowitz (2004), the ‘primordialists’ have become ‘the straw men of ethnic studies’, indeed ‘the most maligned for their naiveté in supposing that ethnic affiliations are given rather than chosen, immutable rather than malleable’ (Horowitz 2004: 72–73). By accentuating the explosive, unpredictable nature of ethnic bonds, primordialists seem to discourage further scholarly enquiry, particularly into the causes of, and possible solutions to, ethnic conflict. However, it is necessary to point out that this bad reputation is relatively recent. Before the Second World War, primordialism was à la mode and provided the dominant way of presenting one’s own nation, while history books were crammed with reminiscences of the nation’s primordial bonds, glories, and grandeur. In fact, the heyday of nationalism also saw the zenith of primordialism. Once nationalism fell into disrepute, so primordialism fell into disrepute. Although nationalism as an ideology is quintessentially modern, it remains very difficult to identify a precise date and location when and where one can begin to speak of nations. A necessary tautology would say that nations in the modern sense could not exist before modernity. The central point here is that, whenever one dates it, nationalism was a Western phenomenon fully originated and developed in the West. As such, it is possible to extrapolate parallels with globalization, which also fanned out from the West to the wider world. Most nationalist movements appropriated the West’s hierarchy of values and adapted effortlessly to it. Hence, Westernization went hand in hand with the spread of nationalism. The view that the national idea spread out from a Western core to the rest of the globe is called ideological diffusionism. For Ellie Kedourie (1993), nationalism consisted in a series of imitations and mimicking acts carried eastward from its European core by the spread of ideas. Accordingly, nationalism is a form of Westernization in itself, because it incorporates a model of governance and state legitimacy originally envisioned in Western Europe – although Kedourie incorrectly argued that Kant’s idea of individual self-determination was at the core of nationalism’s political career. In international relations, this worldshattering process has been associated with ‘the Westernization of the political order through the imported state system’ (Badie 2000). On the other hand, nationalism is perfectly compatible with broader processes of past and present homogenization, occurring either under industrialization or globalization. The competition in emulating the ‘superior’ West became an intrinsic part of the eastward expansion of nationalism. Thus, ethnic nationalists and patriots participated in a perverse game centred on mutual humiliation. In a downward spiral of resentment, they often inflicted humiliation on their own victims, usually neighbours and minorities, which in turn acted similarly against their victims. As we shall see, in its current shape cultural globalization is often understood as a oneway importation of standardized cultural items and icons from a single country, the United States of America, to the rest of the world – regardless of the fact that most of the items are actually ‘made in China’. For many, globalization is synonymous with Westernization (la Branche 2003, 2005, Latouche 1996) or, more accurately, Americanization. The international consequence of Americanization is a widespread sense of ‘cultural insecurity’ vis-à-vis an unfathomable force that nobody seems capable of containing (Amin 2004). Because this perception has been so far unable to produce organized, rational and universal responses, it tends to express itself through visceral, rudimentary, and unpredictable forms of anti-Americanism (Barber 1995). 349
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In the two cases studies, I will explore the role of modernization and globalization in engendering ethno-national conflicts through the example of two nationalist movements, one leading to the rise of Basque nationalism, the other to the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Industrialization and the rise of Basque nationalism As I have argued elsewhere (Conversi 1997), the inception of Basque nationalism can be dated back with some precision as a consequence of Spanish industrialization, following the end of the Carlist wars (1876). Unlike other types of nationalism, Basque nationalism was specifically born in those areas most affected by industrialization, which first saw the collapse of traditional community bonds and vernacular culture. Indeed the founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), was the son of a small semi-rural industrialist whose fortunes were dramatically reversed by industrialization. Arana’s birthplace, Abando, was soon absorbed into greater Bilbao, its popular neighborhoods demolished and swamped by immigrants. Throughout the industrial areas of Euskadi (the Basque Country), traditional culture was mostly erased by modernity in the form of urbanization, industrialization, and occupational de-skilling. The rise of a rich bourgeois class was accompanied by the destitution of previously rural labourers, small holders and lesser industrialists, and by the growth of a newly dispossessed urban proletariat. Basque nationalism was born as an attempt to restore order and tradition out of this chaotic scenario. Therefore, one can hardly speak of Basque nationalism before the advent of industrialization and no serious scholar of Basque nationalism would deny that industrialization, as a consequence of the globalization of capitalism, was the main catalyst in the conflict. The movement rapidly expanded from its inner core of radical activists to larger portions of the middle classes and the impoverished urbanized labourers. For a long while, it remained peaceful and unwilling to use violence, despite its uncompromising separatism and virulent anti-immigrant ideology – although one can doubt whether Arana was a fully-fledged racist (see Douglass 2004). This nonviolent attitude continued throughout the early evolution of Basque nationalism. However, several years later the peaceful radicalism of the early pioneers was slowly transformed into a virulent form of terrorism. In practice, two main changes had occurred: the advent of a centralist Spanish dictatorship (1939–1975), which took away the remaining Basque liberties and banned most of its cultural expression; and a second phase of massive industrialization pushing into the area new waves of immigrants (1960–1973). Owing to the resulting profound crisis of regional identity, nationalism was no longer a response to industrialization. Now it was a matter of the very survival of the Basque nation. While most Basques had to deal with a ferocious dictatorship which did not hesitate to use torture in order to extort confessions from militants, Basque culture appeared to be under a final threat. The crisis could be seen above all in the rapid decline of the Basque language (Euskara), now spoken by a small minority and virtually unknown among city-dwellers. This predicament prompted the foundation of ETA (Euskadi ‘ta Askatasuna) in 1959. Although the organization was initially non-violent, its radicalization increased with the intensification of the two factors, namely the escalation of state repression and the spiraling destruction of Basque traditional culture. Moreover, the immigrants happened to be Spanish-speakers, hence using the oppressor’s tongue. The first political murder committed by ETA dates back to 1968. It immediately gained 350
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the popularity and attention of the Basque youth from most social classes and backgrounds, including many immigrants. ETA rejected Arana’s obsolete ethnicism and fully committed itself to build a ‘civic’ form of nationalism which would encompass militants from all social milieux, beyond their ethnicity. Recurrent internal splits characterized ETA’s pre-violent phase. In fact, ETA began to compensate for potential fragmentation and internal conflict by strategically using violence as a community-building device (Conversi 1997). This functioned to mobilize a significant spectrum of public opinion, mostly because violence was the only means of breaking through the curtain of censorship at a moment when no distinctive markers of Basque identity, such as language or religion, could be shared any longer. The national homogenization plans established by the Francoist dictatorship made it impossible to establish sustained inter-cultural dialogue. As I have demonstrated (Conversi 1997), this was a key factor in the rise and expansion of conflict. All forms of intercommunications being squashed by a conspiracy of silence, only violence was able to lift the veil of secrecy. Violence became a tool of communication and a language per se, while a popular counter-culture slowly coalesced around it. As inter-cultural dialogue had practically closed down, terrorism provided the voice that nobody could fail to hear. As most Basques could only judge ETA by the violent actions it committed, violent attacks increased in tandem with ETA’s popularity. It seemed that the more terrorism was used, the more popular ETA became. This trend continued until 1980, when the Basque Country was finally granted autonomy. By then, the dictator Francisco Franco had long been dead (1975) and a new Constitution had been passed in 1978. Therefore, the concession of autonomy was the first effective measure to end violence and the Statute of Autonomy (1980) was particularly important since it addressed the core concern of many Basques, that is, their survival as a distinctive people and culture. Like in other areas of Europe during the late 1970s, de-industrialization saw the simultaneous ‘diversification’ and ‘homogenization’ of the socio-economic structure. In the meantime, ‘McDonaldization’ and other forms of Americanization affected Basque culture not differently from other regions around the globe. Moreover, nationalist rock music (rock nacionalista vasco) became popular among the youth. It remained Anglo-Saxon in form, but was easily adapted to the conflictual logic of the area as a ‘localized’ variety of ‘global’ culture. Of course, one of the key factors in the de-escalation of violent activity was that Basque culture was finally able to recover some of the ground lost in the preceding century. In a variety of areas, there was a revival of selected aspects of regional culture, both at the elite and the popular levels. Although this revival affected only a minority, there was a broader consensus that Basque culture was now being revitalized. What did really change with globalization? In general, the bipolar conflict had become triangular: a broader conflict was superimposed on the ancient Basque-Spanish one, with ‘cultural globalization’ (or, to many, ‘Americanization’) providing a new source of discord. Paradoxically, the same antagonism towards the emulation of American consumerist models was diffused among both Spaniards and Basques, and was shared by both nationalists and non-nationalists. However, neither Basque nor Spanish nationalisms have been able to halt Americanization, while both seem to have found ways of accommodating to it. Within the Basque cultural scene, the term ‘McGuggenization’ has been used to explore the popular resistance to US-inspired forms of retail and cultural franchises (McNeill 2000). Local analysts, opinion-makers, and social scientists used this and 351
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similar terms to describe a phenomenon which was not only exemplified by the Guggenheim’s Bilbao venture, but also affected numerous other areas from the all-pervasive shopping mall to the destruction of small-scale businesses in the local economy.
Globalizing and fragmenting Yugoslavia The creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 was at heart US President Woodrow Wilson’s gift to Serbian elites, although in the long-term it proved to be quite a poisoned one. After lengthy negotiations, the ‘Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs’ with its capital in Belgrade (1918) was set up as a loose alliance between several nationalities in common defence against Italian irredentism. By 1929 this Kingdom was rechristened ‘Yugoslavia’, the land of the South Slavs. In a very short time, it was transformed into a centralized state under rigid dictatorial Serbian control. In the 1920s, Belgrade’s drift towards the centralization of power reflected a general European movement towards authoritarianism, elsewhere accompanied by mega-projects of cultural and social engineering culminating with National Socialism. During the Second World War, the great powers chose to support the socialist Partisans, abandoning the monarchic nationalists, who in Yugoslavia were mostly Chetniks, that is hard-line Serbian ultranationalists. The post-war socialist state took on a progressively more federal structure. The power of the constituent units, the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, increased with every new constitutional re-arrangement (Ramet 2006). Only the Socialist Party and the army remained highly centralized, at least under the charismatic leadership of Marshall Tito (1945–1980). The strengthening of internal pluralism corresponded to an opening to foreign markets in the form of economic liberalization. Departing sharply from the strong centralizing patterns common to most socialist ‘federations’, Tito’s Yugoslavia reached a unique level of self-determination for its constituent Republics. Since 1974, Serbia’s two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, also gained a high degree of self-government. When Tito died in 1980, he left a precarious legacy, a union of semi-sovereign republics and provinces whose continuity as a single entity heavily depended on checking incompatible forces of nationalism, particularly Serbian irredentism. Given its autonomy from the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia was the first socialist country to yield to the pressures of globalization, well before these developments became truly global phenomena. However, liberalization did not result in the long-term increase of general domestic product, or in enduring welfare among ordinary citizens. An economic recession was particularly dramatic in the 1980s. Economic globalization came to Yugoslavia in the form of significant loans from the IMF, which were characteristically attached to stringent political and social conditions (Blitz 2006: 1–2). These included an unprecedented request by the IMF to re-centralize the country, particularly in financial matters. Such a historical turn-around was promptly seized on by Serbian elites who embarked on a plan to recentralize Yugoslavia apparently assisted by the ‘international community’. Since the beginning, Slovenia (and subsequently Croatia) had opposed any international plan to dilute or re-open any discussion of Yugoslavia’s federal structure, which had been achieved through decades of lengthy and strenuous negotiations (Ramet 2006). Given its resistance, Slovenia was henceforth described by both the state-run media and many international observers as an outcast. As scholars of nationalism could have easily anticipated, re-centralization backfired and the Slovenian government, tacitly supported by 352
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other Republics, presented a counter-plan to co-federalize the country. In practice, this meant that most non-Serbs had begun to feel insecure within the current federal arrangements and no longer accepted a plain federation: Confederation was now a prerequisite, which to all intents and purposes meant a kind of ‘sovereignty-association’ agreement for all Republics. In other words, nobody was any longer in favour of the status quo, but each side was tearing the country apart in opposite directions. In the era of globalization, no key player except the army was any longer interested in keeping Tito’s federation intact. Once it was recognized that Slovene and Croat elites were not willing accomplices to any plan for re-centralization, Serbian nationalists embarked onto a unique path of ethnic secession. This strategy was destined to become ruthless because the Serbs, a minority within Yugoslavia representing only around thirty-seven per cent, were both territorially dispersed and inter-mixed with many other groups. Any attempt to separate Serbs from non-Serbs would inevitably require violence. With increasingly hesitant support from the US and a few European countries, the new Serbian leadership under Miloševic´ posed as saviour of the country’s unity, while moving fast ahead with its undeclared, violent politics of dissolution. Such a conjuncture between national and international interests was so peculiar as to deserve a new concept: ‘secession by the centre’ or ‘central secession’ (Conversi 2003). Of course, this development cannot be the only explanation for the country’s violent disintegration. For many scholars, the way in which Western-style democracy and liberalization were ‘imposed’ on Yugoslavia was more important. Other scholars argue that when democratization is not preceded by institution-building and the protection of minorities through the creation of liberal-civic institutions, then free elections are likely to result in the explosion of violent conflicts. Political leaders are thus ‘elected to fight’ (Mansfield and Snyder 2006). In contrast with the previous section, this brief excursus into the background of the Yugoslav tragedy has served to highlight how globalization directly impacted upon the precarious balance of a country which had achieved a high level of decentralization within a socialist framework through decades of arduous political negotiations. Yugoslavia’s modernization was largely carried out at the time of socialism and included industrialization, urbanization and the expansion of the welfare state. However, differently from Franco’s Spain, socialist rule was able to create a supranational, quasi-cosmopolitan, framework, which in all good faith attempted to promote harmony, inter-connectedness and mutual respect among its constituent peoples, while cultivating the existing culture(s) of each republic. In contrast, economic liberalization implied a considerable degree of one-way, unilateral measures under the catchall banner of Westernization. Initially, this was a slow incursion and most official media were allowed to continue broadcasting national, regional, and local productions, while taking great care to avoid any form of discrimination against specific groups. For instance, radio broadcasts were articulated at both the republican and regional levels, their programmes championing the diffusion of popular art forms from each recognized nationality. In theory, all groups had equal access to their own cultural traditions and the same chance to know the traditions of all other groups. This situation was possible insofar as cultural Westernization remained less significant. Tito considered intercultural dialogue as a prerequisite for good citizenship and a prelude to the consolidation of a multinational state independent from both East and West. Despite authoritarian rule, for many decades the prevailing feeling was one of security and self-preservation, while citizens could share equal access to a common pool of information and cultural traditions. However, such a solidaristic framework began to unravel once globalization set off to erode Yugoslavia’s federal structure. The crisis deepened in the 1980s following Tito’s death. While the rising nationalist tide made inter-ethnic dialogue increasingly difficult, 353
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Americanization and westernization made major inroads through neighbouring Europeanbased radio and TVs stations (Italian, Austrian, and, most important, various US Cold War propaganda stations directed towards the Eastern Bloc and interspersing news with rock music). These gained large audiences and Americana soon began to permeate all aspects of youth ‘culture’ (Ramet and Crnkovic 2003). The ‘invasion’ was initially welcomed by the local youth and identified as a new ‘wave of freedom’. Such a common terrain offered an apparent patina of formal uniformity, mistakenly embraced by many as an alternative kind of openness and prelude to cosmopolitanism. In fact, it better concealed the germs of reactive nationalism, while voices of dissent against the unstoppable invasiveness of US cultural domination were soon to be heard among intellectuals, artists, and members of the public in all republics – although some felt more victimized than others. For instance, Belgrade’s studios and media productions, until then market leaders in the Balkans, began a slow drift towards decline. In order to survive, they had to depend increasingly upon the regime. Thus, while Miloševic´’s regime was not particularly interested in the preservation of Serbian culture, it was happy to finance movies, which subtly presented the ultra-nationalist viewpoints portraying non-Serbs as aggressors, therefore diametrically inverting years of positive discrimination efforts. The personal trajectory of the Bosnian director Emir Kusturica will be compared later on with Russian’s patriotic build-up as extreme defence against Americanization. Finally, once reciprocally hostile nationalisms had seized the state, inter-ethnic dialogue became virtually impossible, as mutual recriminations made it unworkable to reconstruct the texture of inter-connectedness that had finely preserved the country’s unity.
Global Islam, Americanization, and ethnic conflict The previous two sections have addressed the impact of modernization, particularly industrialization and globalization, in the explosion of ethnic conflict. We now briefly explore how this impact has affected a much broader area which, trespassing state boundaries, is also a contributing factor to globalization. Oliver Roy’s (2005) path-breaking work on global Islam joins a large body of literature exploring the links between ethno-religious conflict, fundamentalism, and globalization. For Roy, neo-fundamentalism is simultaneously a product and a vehicle of globalization: ‘Religion, conceived as a de-contextualized set of norms, can be adapted to any society, precisely because it has severed its link with a given culture and allows people to live in a sort of virtual, de-territorialized community that includes any believer’ (Roy 2005: 287). He then advances some intriguing thoughts about the substantial Americanization of radical fundamentalism. Roy begins by stressing the decline of traditional cuisine under the encroachment of the fast-food industry, which has been fully assumed by neo-fundamentalists: ‘Food versus cuisine is a good example of the opposition between code and culture. Neofundamentalists care nothing for cuisine. Anything that is halal is good, whatever the basics ingredients and the recipe. When they open a restaurant it never promotes Ottoman or Moroccan cuisine, but halal food, and more often than not will simply offer the usual Western fast-food products. Similarly, halal dress can be based on Western raincoats, gloves, fashionable scarves (cha-Dior, as the Iranians joke), and so on. Halal is thus a code that is adaptable to any culture. Objects cease to have a history and to be culturally meaningful; once chosen they meet a normative requirement and do not refer to a specific culture. … For the 354
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neo-fundamentalist the hamburger is seen as culturally neutral a long as it is made along the lines of their religious norm (halal) (Roy 2005: 271). In fact, global Islam appears to be more culturally neutral than Americanization. Whereas the latter is based upon the imposition of a global cultural matrix (and hence on a process of de-culturation), global Islam is more interested in establishing new codes, norms and values, irrespective of their cultural forms. The launching of Mecca-Cola in France during the apex of global anti-Americanism (2002–2003), with exactly the same ingredients as Coca-Cola bar a different name, confirms that symbolic opposition to Americanism is compatible with deeper, and perhaps more substantial, forms of ‘Americanization’ (Roy 2005: 271–2). This seems to go partly against Benjamin Barber’s (1995, 2008) view that ‘global jihad’ is a reaction against McWorld and Americanizing globalization. It also differs from George Ritzer’s argument about the symbolic anti-consumerist nature of the pro-jihadist world-view (Ritzer 2002; Ritzer and Ryan 2004; Seidler 2004). However, certain aspects of neo-fundamentalism are also a war waged against US domination. In order to win this war, it has to appropriate the globalizing tools of McDonaldization, including its rigid, de-territorialized and global bureaucratic functioning. This includes the ‘replacement of culture by code’ and of traditional community by para-military groups. With some notable differences, such a déjà vu experience reminds us of the early twentieth-century drift towards totalitarianism as a result of industrialization and the end of traditional communitarian relations. As we have seen, most scholars link modernization with the rise of nationalism. In this sense, Islamic fundamentalism or non-traditional Islam can be described as a form of ‘supra-national’ nationalism (see Gellner 1981). Mary Kaldor also points out how the ideology of global Islam should be seen as a new variant of nationalism, insofar as the ‘ideologists of the movement talk about the “Islamic nation” and the basic idea of uniting around a common culture, Islam and a religious language, Arabic, is a nationalist idea’ (2004: 171). Whether nationalist or not, the most violent fringes of radical Islam have been identified as an aspect of Westernizing modernity (Gray 2003). Global Islam has found an ideal terrain amongst the conflicts erupting along Islam’s civilizational fringes. In fact, many contemporary conflicts emerge when political Islam meets other religious traditions associated with dominant ethnicities in control of specific states. In these cases, Muslims are contextualized as oppressed minorities in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kashmir, southern Thailand, Ambon/Moluccas, Azerbaijan, Palestine, Mindanao, and Xingjian. These regions have witnessed the reactive politicization of Islamic communities as a response to the resurgence of dominant nationalism/state patriotism. They have found in global Islam a handy package offering unique organizational support and new networks of international solidarity.
The failed communication approach So far, we have implicitly recognized throughout our case studies that inter-cultural dialogue remains an essential component for safeguarding peace and stability. In both the Basque and Yugoslav cases, the breakdown of inter-cultural dialogue was a contributing factor in the resulting conflicts. The key argument to be developed here is that, despite the internet and other multi-directional flows of communication, the current ‘cultural world order’ retains a vertical communicational structure, where groups have few opportunities to inter-communicate or interact in meaningful ways and know each other’s traditions. This may appear to be counter-intuitive, if one considers the information revolution 355
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bringing previously disconnected individuals ‘together’ and enabling unprecedented flows of multi-directional information (see Castells 2000). However, such a technologicallyoriented view is limited. With the exception of specifically designed EU policies aimed at cultural exchange, there are few incentives for neighbouring regions, groups and nationalities to establish sustained and systematic inter-cultural exchanges. Outside the EU framework, inter-cultural dialogue remains extremely difficult, its place being often taken over by Americanization. As we know, most ethnic conflicts occur precisely among neighbouring groups and are not ‘long-distance conflicts’. This contrasts with policies adopted under Communism, at least at a discursive level. In the early post-Soviet years, cultural Americanization has hampered any such attempt at inter-ethnic, inter-state, and inter-cultural exchange. Once the Soviet imperial communication network was dismantled, its place was immediately filled by its victorious rival, which had already made significant inroads into Soviet cultural audiences by the distribution of US pop icons (Lucas 1999). The message systematically proposed ‘America’ as the only reference model and Americans as the only ‘reference group’, to use a sociological concept from the 1950s (see Williams, 1970). The pervasiveness of US consumerist iconographies may be considered normal today, just as nationalist homogenization was considered normal in the heydays of nationalism. McDonaldization has been broadly driven by a thrust towards profit at the expenses of culture. The result has been more profit and less culture, notably less inter-cultural communication, hence a greater potential for conflict. On the other hand, if cultural globalization can be simply identified as naked Americanization, then it may well be associated with a new type of colonial or imperial domination (Barkawi 2005). Has this awareness stimulated some genuine forms of global resistance? In fact, nationalism and ethnicity have sometime been spurred by attempts to mobilize noncompliance to globalization. Sentiments of hostility towards global Americanism can be appropriated by both popular movements of local resistance and more aggressive forms of state-led patriotism. In those rare instances where Americanization has been accompanied by territorial intervention, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, the unintended consequence is to create broader nationalist discourses and frameworks. These may transcend the boundaries of ethnicity, although in Iraq the opposite effect was initially visible. In addition, powerful authoritarian states, like China and Russia, have already capitalized on state patriotism by mobilizing widely shared anti-American attitudes. On the other hand, an apparent acceptance of US iconography, such has the kilometric queues at the opening of McDonalds’s in Moscow (1990) and Beijing (1992), is no proof that either the surface or the substance of Americanism will be passively accepted in the long term. In fact, anti-Americanism is particularly widespread in the above countries, both at the elite and popular levels. The implication of this for global Islam (and its intersection with ethnic conflict) has been addressed earlier on. Concomitantly, the McDonaldization of Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia was followed by a reassertion of anti-American ‘revanchism’ at all levels of society. These anti-American sentiments were being expressed oddly enough just while McDonald’s were opening new outlets.
Americanization and globalization Despite a considerable body of literature describing globalization as different from Americanization (see Turner and Khondker 2010), this section sets out from the opposite 356
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premise. It shows that, insofar as globalization is grounded upon American fashions and norms, it directly instigates national and ethnic conflicts at both the state and sub-state level. The linkage between Americanization and globalization is moreover assumed by many ethnic and patriotic groups, as well as by alternative universalistic movements. Therefore, it should be treated more rigorously and systematically in the globalization literature, rather than being dismissed as over-simplification or trivialization. To many, the very patterns through which globalization spreads appear to be moulded by American cultural domination. Thus, George Ritzer’s (1996) neo-Weberian description of McDonaldization as the bureaucratic regulation of society at a global level begins by analyzing the functions of a brand name that stands as the symbol of American consumerism in its most contested and aggressive forms. How should ‘Americanization’ be defined for the purpose of analyzing its effect on ethnic conflict? Ritzer and Stillman (2003) identify it as a ‘powerful one-directional process that tends to overwhelm competing processes’. In contrast, Ulrich Beck’s (2003) argument is that the concept of ‘Americanization’ implies a narrower ‘national understanding’ of globalization that substantially limits its utility. However, this makes it even more relevant to the study of ethno-national conflicts. Moreover, Americanization has been a driving force throughout the previous century and can only be ignored at the risk of adopting an a-historical perspective. According to Schörter (2008a), Europe experienced three main waves of Americanization. These were firstly in the 1920s, coinciding both with the rise of fascism and the adoption of economic rationalization aimed at increasing competitiveness and efficiency (Taylorism, Fordism, the mass media, and so on); the second wave took place in the period of economic expansion of 1949–1973; and the final wave lasted from about 1985 until the present, when the idea of globalization became dominant and all-pervasive. In each phase, Americanization deepened, encountering less and less resistance, until it became a normal feature of the European scene. The above tripartite division applies to both the cultural and the economic spheres, including an account of why Hollywood and the US film industry became dominant in the 1920s and 1930s (Schörter 2008a). The process of Americanization should not be understood as the substantial incorporation or espousal of American values. The term should more often serve to describe a superficial, incoherent, fractional, and flawed appropriation of external items and ephemera. In particular, Americanization does not automatically mean exporting American ideals, but rather more trivial US mass-consumer products, often through superficial imitation. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright showed insights about the US’ ‘fullspectrum dominance’ cultural policy when she said that ‘Cultural factors play a pivotal role in many of the international challenges we face … our cultural programs are central—and I underline that—central—to the success of American foreign policy’ (Albright 2000). Once out of office, she adopted a more cautious position, considering the risks and damages inflicted by extreme forms of Americanization. For Bacevich (2002), the economic ‘openness’ implicit in neo-liberalism produces a form of globalization that is inevitably synonymous with Americanization, since it is predicated on a national security approach founded on global dominance. How far has Americanization contributed to the disintegrative trends described in this chapter? If so, how did it? In recent years several studies have been devoted to the critical analysis of ‘Americanization’ in various areas (see Barber 2008, de Grazia 2006, Stonor Saunders 1999, Wagnleitner 1994). Some of these have explored the response to Americanization either as the enthusiastic embrace of, or as the embittered rejection of, 357
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Americanism. But the consequences of cultural Americanization remain among the least studied, yet most critical, aspects of globalization. In many countries, unrestrained Americanization has led to an all- devouring introduction of consumerist homogenization in which thousand-year old cultures have been replaced by serially crafted ephemera destined for rapid consumption. For some authors, Americanization seems to be increasingly challenged by Indigenous practices and products through processes of vernacularization, domestication, and hybridization (Appadurai 1997: 81). However, the latter have customarily had to Americanize their products in order to survive in the market. The neo-liberals’ populist rhetoric of ‘let’s give to the people what they really want’ articulates an ideology specifically wrought to tear down the traditional barriers of both local cultures and national communities. Yet, indigenized forms of ‘Americana’ have been even more ‘effective’ in destroying local cultures as they could be more easily camouflaged behind a mask of national Indigenousness. For instance, despite claims that it heralds a national assertion of Indian identity, the very designation ‘Bollywood’ visibly echoes, and originates from, its American namesake. Its cultural content increasingly impersonates American tastes, rules, behaviour, norms, customs, and fashions (Rao 2007). As for the globalization-nationalism nexus, Hindu ultra-nationalist and globalist ideologues fully converge in granting ‘Bollywood’ a patent of ‘Indianness’ (Rajadhyaksha 2003, Ranganathan and Lobo 2008). Militant Hindutva groups use it to promote an image of India ‘among the most powerful nations in global modernity’ in an effort to subvert, essentialize, and homogenize contemporary Indian culture (McDonald 2003: 1563). At the same time, recent ethnographic works have shown that the artificiality and elitism of the highly Westernized, consumerist, urban middle class portrayed in these films is entirely grasped by non-elite audiences, who discern in them ‘the brand logic of transnational capital which is redefining the meaning of the masses’ (Rao 2007: 57). Similarly, Egyptian marketers promoted the infitahs as an attempt to ‘glocalize’ international business in order to twist local economic conditions by ‘Egyptianizing’ (or ‘mediating’) imported goods, brands, and logos as promoted by global MNCs (Shechter 2008). Corporate populism upholds the need to ‘indigenize’ profit-making transnational flows. This approach has long been flagged by multinational business while adopting a rhetoric of ‘respecting’ local values in the very act of dispensing with them. Rather like the ‘green’ credentials assumed by environmentally destructive mega-corporations, a populist rhetoric defending the people’s ‘spontaneous’ attractions to global logos and brands is often accompanied by a discourse claiming that the company is striving to incorporate ‘Indigenous values’. Can this be simply discounted as ‘glocalization’? The philosophy of contemporary marketing is anthropologically rooted, sociologically informed, and conveyed by a pseudo-pluralistic parlance which promotes an ‘understanding’ of local and national cultures so that the corporation can better penetrate new foreign markets. Similar processes have been reassuringly referred to as ‘creolization’ or as forms of contamination of non-dominant cultures by Western consumption models spread by mass media. Critics of globalization agree that large portions of ‘national sovereignty’ have to a great extent been seized by multinational corporations (see Barnet and Cavanagh 1994). As mentioned earlier, this demise of national sovereignty has directly or indirectly contributed to boost nationalism and other boundary-building practices (Conversi 1999). However, some institutions seem to have remained immune from it. For instance, despite rapidly increasing legal uniformity throughout the world, the leniency or severity in which global laws are applied across countries varies widely (Lacey 2008). Thus, the 358
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US-led global securitization framework has steered various state laws to incorporate a rash of illiberal legislations (see Bowring 2008). While countries like Uzbekistan have arbitrarily used the original US template to eliminate political opponents (Kendzior 2007, Murray 2007, Scheuer 2004: 12 and 263), countries such as Italy use a similar securitization discourse against various internal ‘others’ with more leniency (Sigona 2005), and China exploits the global ‘war on terror’ more systematically against a host of religious and ethnic groups, notably the Tibetans and the Uygurs of Xinjiang (Steele and Kuo 2007).
New cultural hierarchies and ethnonationalism Contrary to the globalists or ideologues of globalization (Steger 2005), both Marxists and liberals have highlighted the ‘pyramidal’ structure underlying globalization. This metaphor applies well to cultural dissemination. An elite of corporate, media, and governmental agencies sits at the pyramid’s top level, small regional intermediary elites sit immediately below, while the overwhelming majority of humans are pushed well down towards the pyramid’s bottom. In the realm of ‘global culture’, this looks like a master-servant relationship with much of the world at the boot-licking end. Whether such a relationship really exists, or is even practical, this metaphorical dramatization can nevertheless help to understand collective self-perceptions. The consequences in the area of ethnic conflict are significant. Such a hierarchical structure makes it impossible for global exchanges to turn into egalitarian relationships based on evenly balanced inter-cultural communication and dialogue. On the contrary, cultural globalization is not reflected in a genuine increase of inter-personal, inter-ethnic and inter-cultural contacts. As I shall argue, in most public areas ‘cultural globalization’ really means the unreciprocated, one-way flow of consumerist items from the US media and leisure machine to the rest of the world. This top-down distribution ensures that a few individuals and groups, nearly all in the USA, firmly establish the patterns of behaviour and taste to be followed by the rest of mankind. Is this congruent with the view that there is a form of ‘global centralization’ in culturallegal matters leaning towards Washington, DC? As for a supposed ‘global culture’, the symbolic capital would ideally be located in Hollywood, rather than Washington. In fact, the term ‘Hollywoodization’ insinuates a media-enforced hierarchical structure with immediate symbolic resonance. It also offers a more cultural, perhaps less sociological, focus than the Weberian concept of bureaucratic ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 1996). Competing terminologies include ‘Disneyfication’/’Disneyization’, with its stress on extreme predictability and the infantilization of leisure (Bryman 2004), ‘Walmarting’ as the streamlining of the retail sector (Fishman 2005, Morrow 2004), or earlier Cold War terms like ‘Coca-Colonization’ (Wagnleitner 1994). We previously saw how the term ‘McGuggenization’ has been used to indicate art-related cultural franchising and other forms of Americanization in the Basque Country (McNeill 2000). All these equally refer to socio-economic trends originated in the USA and are hence forms of Americanization. However, ‘Hollywoodization’ has broader implications for ethnic relations and nationalist conflicts. In practice, Hollywood-inspired simplifications have become the daily staple for millions of peoples around the world in their leisure time. In the area of ethnicity, ‘Hollywoodization’ has been elevated to the only known reality and the unique source of information about the outside world for increasing numbers of people, not only in the USA. Thus, the world is more likely to get its stereotypes of the Brits 359
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from US movies like The Patriot or Saving Private Ryan than via British productions. Similarly, most of the world is likely to see Scotland through the lenses of US-made Braveheart, as the larger public can barely afford any access to Scottish cultural productions. This monopoly of global stereotyping and ethnic imagery has serious implications for the spread and continuation of ethnic conflict. The tools of primary socialization were once under firm control of the family, either nuclear or extended. They were subsequently assumed by the state in the industrialization ‘phase’, notably with post-1789 mass militarization and compulsory schooling (Conversi 2007, 2008). Under neo-liberal globalization, primary socialization has been seized by unaccountable cash-driven corporations and media tycoons. This has further reduced the space of inter-generational transmission and family interaction. If a community can no longer socialize its children according to its culture and traditions, then the very bases of local, regional, and national continuity are all visibly at stake. This threat to a group’s survival is often seized upon by patriots and ethno-nationalists, whose political programs are founded on providing a new sense of social cohesion and security – even if the targets are often hapless and unprotected minorities. That is partly how nationalism and xenophobia have expanded in tandem with globalization. Ethno-nationalism not only persisted through change, but is perceived by many as a response to the growth of globalization, providing a prêt-à-porter hope for national resistance and resilience. By depending on Hollywood as unique conveyor of ‘globalization’, inter-ethnic interaction is inevitably undermined. In some instances, international communication has practically evaporated. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the explosion of chauvinism, racism, neo-fascism, and xenophobia seems to go hand in hand with a blind faith in mass consumerism (Hockenos 1993). Under socialism, it was relatively common to see on cinemas and television film masterpieces from France, Yugoslavia, Russia, Italy, or Britain until about 1989. Ensuing the Comecon’s dismantling and its absorption into the free market area, this was no longer possible. Only the full panoply of Hollywood and MTV-inspired products could then be seen every day on every post-socialist TV channel and in every movie theatre. The same phenomenon recurs in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Mongolia, and nearly all other post-communist societies. Here, by the early 1990s the local film industry had collapsed with little hope of recovery. In Russia, thousands of actors, directors, screenwriters, players, producers, writers, editors, musicians, consultants, sceno-graphers and other artists became jobless virtually overnight. The political trajectory of one of the greatest living film directors, the multi-award winner Nikita Mikhalkov, conveys an important lesson about the impact of Americanization on the rise of Russian nationalism. Born into a family of distinguished but moderate patriots, Mikhalkov moved from global masterpieces like Oblomov (1980), Chekhov’s transposition of Dark Eyes (1987), Burnt by the Sun (1994) and his world-acclaimed epic on the Mongols, Urga (1992) (Tavis 1994), to increasingly patriotic movies destined for domestic audiences. These were accompanied by growing involvement into nationalist politics. Mikhalkov became more and more vocal in his claims that the West had launched a ‘war against Orthodoxy’, endorsing the latter as ‘the main force which opposes cultural and intellectual McDonald’s’ (Foglesong 2007: 204 and 215–216, Hashamova 2007, Larsen 2003). A militaristic extravaganza like The Barber of Siberia (Sibirskij tsiryulnik, 1999) (Siefert 2006: 208–9) reads like an act of defiance against the neo-liberal obliteration of Russian culture. Moreover, under invitation from his Serbian colleagues, Mikhalkov travelled to Belgrade in support of Serbia’s claims over Kosovo, becoming furthermore involved in 360
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genocide denial. Before neo-liberal globalization, Russian and Serbian studios were home to some of the world’s most prolific and rich cinematic productions. Now both cultures shared a common fate, the global neo-liberal devastation of the domestic and independent film industry. Finally, Mikhalkov championed Serbian nationalism as a form of resistance against American aggression. Americanization was no doubt the prime crime – and he went as far as comparing the effects of McDonaldization to Stalinism.1 The theme of humiliating McDonaldization resurfaces in the movies and interviews of another Russian director who converted to patriotism, Aleksei Balabanov (Larsen 2003). A similar trajectory from cosmopolitanism to ultra-nationalism was experienced in Yugoslavia by another world-famous cinema director, Emir Kusturica (b. 1954). While shooting his Underground (1995), partly financed by the state-owned Belgrade Radio Television, official Yugoslav army equipment was employed in the set. Mixing grotesque irony with surrealistic war drama, the film was accused of propagating the Serbian nationalist tale just as genocide was taking place. Kusturica allegedly defended Slobodan Miloševic´, rebuking Western media as the real cause of the war. A recurrent slogan appearing in the Russian daily Pravda (Truth) reads verbatim: ‘McDonald’s had killed more Americans in 2001 than Osama bin Laden & al Qaeda’; another reads ‘McDonald’s food demoralizes the globe’. Pravda has become the talking head for Russia’s anti-American audiences and its global popularity has correspondingly amplified in tandem with the spread of anti-Americanism ensuing Guantánamo and the ‘war on terror’. The case of Russia seems to confirm Barber’s thesis: the slow build-up of an ‘Eastern Jihad’ first revealed itself in a chaotic, implicit, nearly secretive way. Then, it gradually began to be channelled and harnessed under the authoritarian banner of Russian patriotism, as this gained inroads into most institutions. In post-communist countries, the collapse of national cultures was assisted by the legacy of totalitarianism which had already turned whole societies into a cultural tabula rasa, preparing the ground for the onslaught of cultural globalization. In all these cases, economic, political and cultural Americanization has substantially replaced Sovietization. While McDonalds, MTV, and Hollywood triumphed eradicating potential Indigenous rivals, the ancient régime’s political structures were inherited almost intact by Western-led corporate power and simply ‘accommodated’ to the new rules of the game.
Conclusion This chapter has focused on the political and cultural dimensions of globalization, relating it to ethnic conflict, patriotism, and nationalism. In short, one of the long-term legacies of the era of globalization is the global spread of oppositional ethnic and religious conflict. I have described, and subsequently dismissed, the profit-oriented ideology that globalization, intended as Mcdonaldization and Hollywoodization, can contribute to better international understanding. On the contrary, it has ushered in a process of planetary cultural and environmental destruction, while hampering inter-ethnic communication and fostering human conflict. The notion of cultural security, so central to international relations and peaceful coexistence, has undergone unprecedented challenges. We began by addressing parallels between modernity, particularly industrialization, and globalization as harbingers of ethno-national conflict. We then explored three main cases (the Basque Country, Yugoslavia, and global Islam) and two minor ones (India and Russia) 361
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through the lens of the movie industry. Insofar as cultural globalization is understood as uni-dimensional import of standardized cultural icons, symbols, practices, values, and legal systems from the United States, it can simply be re-described as Americanization (rather than Westernization in the broad sense), or ‘globalization by Americanization’ (Hilger 2008). This is of central importance for the study of ethnic conflict. In fact, the outcome is scarce hybridization, amalgamation, and metissage. Rather than providing an inter-cultural bridge, this unilateral drive has often eroded the basis for mutual understanding, impeding inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and international interaction. Given the current vertical, pyramidal structure of the ‘cultural world order’, the opportunity of distinctive groups to communicate directly and appreciate each other’s traditions has decreased, except in the virtual area of long-distance communication. For an increasing number of individuals, an American mass consumer culture remains the only window on the world. Hence, to know and appreciate one’s neighbours has become an ever-arduous task. To recapitulate my point, wherever cultural globalization appears as synonymous with Americanization, it engenders conflicts on a variety of levels. Because the process is oneway and unidirectional, the result is unlikely to be a fusion between cultures or, even less, the blending of ethnic groups. Contrary to the globalist utopia, the imposition of more and more American icons means less and less possibility for direct inter-ethnic encounter and communication among nations. Together with the collapse of state legitimacy, this substantially contributes to the spread of ethnic conflict and nationalism. Despite the internet, the crucial factor remains the reduction of real, effective, interethnic, and international communication outside American direction and control. After years of mimicking the successful US model, many local entrepreneurs have been spurred into beginning their US-inspired ventures, in a sort of ‘self-Americanization’. However, globalization qua Americanization is not simply a matter of ‘free choice’. The reach of US cultural propaganda has been driven by the need to manage a host of regional conflicts (Hixson 1997, Snow 2003, Snyder 1995, Sorenson 1968), such as the Korean war (Casey 2008), or the building of post-Cold War European order (Wagnleitner 1994). The resulting sense of cultural insecurity has hence spread onto a planetary scale, increasingly accompanied by the reassertion of hurt pride and a rise of patriotism which can easily seize anti-American themes, whenever elites chose to use these in order to gain popular consensus. As convincingly argued by Dennis Smith, the ‘stirring up a tide of global resentment’ has so far been ‘held back by fear of American military power. When that power falters, the revenge of the humiliated world will strike the West’ (2006: 1). Moreover, owing to globalization, the legitimacy of the state and even the rule of law have declined in many affected countries. In several areas, organized crime is more powerful than central governments. This is particularly true for countries ravaged by ethnic conflict: In fact, when ethnic conflict and globalization merge, the result is often the empowerment of ‘McMafias’ (Glenny 2008). Central governments in various countries, including Serbia under Miloševic´, Italy under Berlusconi, and Russia under Putin, have sought to consolidate their powers by simultaneously reaching deals with both organized crime and ethno-nationalist forces. In other areas, given the lack of state authority, rulers have attempted to claim back legitimacy by using the easiest mobilizing tool which they can still muster up: patriotism imbued by fear, that is, the double-faced politics of terror and ‘national security’. Dialogue remains essential as peace itself is made up of a plurality of co-existing visions. Yet, ‘globalization produces conflict because the different conceptions of peace prevalent 362
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in each society are unable to enter into dialogue with each other’ (Gasparini 2008: 27). Whether the idea of a ‘global civil society’ has anything to do with globalization as described in these pages will remain an issue of contention. In all, the impact of globalization is clearly linked to the spread of ethnic conflict, patriotism, and nationalism. This chapter has contested optimistic visions of globalization, insofar as the latter remains hetero-directed, deeply in-equalitarian, environmentally unsustainable, and culturally self-destructive.
Note 1 See www.runewsweek.ru/theme/?tid=150&rid=2326; www.sentieriselvaggi.it/articolo.asp?sez0=3& sez1=33&art=26452.
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