Badredine Arfi - Ethnic Fear, The Social Construction of Insecurity (1998)

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Ethnic fear: The social
construction of insecurity
Badredine Arfi
a

b
a
Fellow at the Mershon Center, Ohio State
University,
b
Visiting assistant professor in the Department
of Political Science, University of Illinois,
UrbanaChampaign
Published online: 24 Dec 2007.
To cite this article: Badredine Arfi (1998) Ethnic fear: The social construction of
insecurity, Security Studies, 8:1, 151-203, DOI: 10.1080/09636419808429368
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636419808429368
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ETHNIC FEAR:
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INSECURITY
BADREDINE ARFI
F
ULL-SCALE VIOLENCE erupted between the Serbs and Croats in
the Krajina region of Croatia in June 1991. The Yugoslav Na-
tional Army played an important role in the fighting. Nonethe-
less, local warfare between neighboring Serb and Croat groups reached
very significant proportions, too. Although the Serbs and Croats in the
mixed communities of Krajina and Slavonia were not so divided only
months earlier, they took up arms against one another. Prior to the
eruption of violence, most Serbs and Croats in the region knew that
war was unnecessary and would be too costly. In a few months, how-
ever, Serb-Croat ethnic polarization emerged and reached full scale.
Many people, who had previously resisted the appeals of a minority of
extremists on both sides, finally opted for violence. A rapid homogeni-
zation of opinion in favor of ethnic violence occurred on a large scale
on both sides.
A variety of causes has recently been proposed to explain such a
puzzlethe rapid and widespread eruption of ethnic violence between
previously peacefully cohabiting, ethnic communities. Two sorts of
explanation have been particularly emphasized in the aftermath of the
Badredine Arfi is a fellow at the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and a visit-
ing assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illi-
nois at Urbana-Champaign
The author thanks Edward Kolodziej, Rick Hermann, Ned Lebow, David Laitin, Ted
Hopf, Edward Mansfield, Richard Gunther, Peg Herrman, Kimberly Zisk, Douglas
Foyle, Roger Kanet, Carol Leff, Benjamin Frankel, and the anonymous reviewers for
Security Studies, as well as the participants of the Mershon Center Monthly Seminar for
their suggestions and comments on various drafts of this paper.
1. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1992), 85.
2. For an attempt to synthesize various levels of explanations, see Stuart J. Kaufman,
"Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's Civil War," Inter-
national Security 21, no. 2 (fall 1996): 108-38.
SECURITY STUDIES 8, no. 1 (autumn 1998): 151-203
Published by Frank Cass, London.
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152 SECURITY STUDIES 8, no. 1
cold war, though. First, some works have advanced a so-called ancient-
hatreds hypothesis. These works argue that ancient ethnic hatreds and
century-old feuds, long suppressed by repressive communist regimes,
simply reerupted as the cold war waned to cause ethnic conflict and
violence. Second, others have proposed rational-choice-based explana-
tions which can be delineated into two main variants. An elite-based
approach argues that ethnic conflict is a rational strategy that threat-
ened ruling elites use to fend off domestic challengers. A group-based
perspective argues that "intense ethnic conflict is most often caused by
collective fears of the future....As information failures, problems of
credible commitment, and the security dilemma take hold, groups be-
come apprehensive, the state weakens, and conflict becomes more
likely." Neither the ancient-hatreds hypothesis nor a rationalist ap-
proach with its two main variants can satisfactorily explain the emer-
gence of ethnic fear and violence.
I argue instead that a reconstruction of the social identities of ethnic
groups can cause ethnic fear and violence. Social identitya set of
meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective
of othersdefines the actor and provides information on its interests
and behavior. Social identity endows social interactions with predict-
ability around a set of expectations, a necessary ingredient to sustain
social life. Changes in the social identities of ethnic groups destabilize
established patterns of interethnic relations, decrease interethnic pre-
dictability, and create uncertainty about future relations. As political
entrepreneurs and ethnic activists modify interethnic practices and
modes of interaction, which enact their group social identities, cur-
rently held expectations about interethnic relations increasingly be-
come unrealistic. Every ethnic group therefore seeks updated private
3. See, for example, Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History
(New York: St. Martin's, 1993).
4. V. P. Gagnon Jr., "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of
Serbia," International Security 19, no. 3 (winter 1994/95): 130-66.
5. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, "Containing Fear: The Origins and Man-
agement of Ethnic Conflict," International Security 21, no. 2 (fall 1996): 41-75, 41. For
a detailed rationalist discussion of group conflict, see Russell Hardin, One for All: The
Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
6. The ancient-hatreds hypothesis has been rebutted from many academic quarters. I
instead focus on the rationalist approach to ethnic conflict as presented by V. P. Gag-
non at the lite level and by David Lake and Donald Rothchild at the group level.
These two works are illustrative of the two main variants of a rationalist approach to
ethnic conflict. Of course, most authors using either variant of the rational-choice ap-
proach use a mixture of both variants, but do nonetheless put more emphasis on one or
the other.
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The Social Construction of Insecurity 153
information from other groups, inquires about the degree of commit-
ment of other groups to future interethnic arrangements, and reconsid-
ers its security and welfare assurances. Salient ethnic historical memo-
ries and the structure of ethnic cleavages strongly shape this dynamic
and infuse it with a potential to produce aggressive social identities
ethnic groups would define one another as an enemy.
Aggressive social identities are socially constructed through a se-
quence of four complementary processes. First, ethnic leaders selec-
tively use salient ethnic historical memories to construct a set of politi-
cal myths. Second, the propagation of the political myths and their
internalization by the distinct groups and consequent mobilization of
these groups create a climate where leaders' strategies become pivotal
elements of interethnic relations. Third, within such a climate, ethnic
leaders entertain discourses and take actions that demonize the "other."
Fourth, the "other" reciprocates by using similar discourses and ac-
tions. If the institutional arrangements of the state either remain inca-
pable of controlling the situation or inadvertently reinforce it, this dy-
namic becomes a routinized way to view and deal with the "other" as
an all-out enemy. Ethnic fear thus takes hold, creating a strong poten-
tial to ethnic violence.
The article has four sections. A first section briefly discusses some
recent attempts to understand ethnic conflict and violence within a
rationalist approach, and highlights few but important shortcomings of
such an approach. A second section presents a theory of ethnic fear
within a constructivist approach that problematizes group identity. In
a third section, I examine the social construction of fear between the
Serbs and Croats in events leading to the dissolution of former Yugo-
slavia. Finally, a conclusion summarizes the main findings of the arti-
cle, highlights the contribution of a social constructivist approach to
the research agenda on ethnic conflicts, and draws policy implications
for dealing with ethnic fear and conflict.
T:
THE RATIONALIST APPROACH TO ETHNIC CONFLICT
HE STANDARD rational-choice approach to ethnic cooperation and
conflict suggests that social actors use ethnicity to organize group
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political action if individual benefits are expected to outweigh the
costs.
7
It assumes that actors choose ethnicity as a criterion for political
organization based on predetermined interests. The approach thus
provides a consequence-driven explanation of ethnic politics and con-
flict. More generally, rationalist explanations start with the stipulation
that "a great variety of human transactions and interactions involve the
possibility of opportunismself-interested behavior that has socially
harmful consequences."
V. P. Gagnon, for example, argues that leaders channel or even cre-
ate ethnic sentiments and animosities to carry out self-serving political
agendas. Thus, "violent conflict along ethnic cleavages is provoked by
lites in order to create a domestic political context where ethnicity is
the only politically relevant identity....The elite thereby constructs the
individual interest of the broader population in terms of the threat to
the community defined in ethnic terms."
9
James Fearon and David
Laitin argue that taking individual interactions subject to opportunism
as a theoretical starting point explains how people are able to
"maintain individual reputations for cooperative behavior that are
more difficult to sustain in interethnic interactions."
10
Individuals can
do so because they interact more often with their coethnics, which
provides them with access to more information. In addition,
"decentralized institutional arrangements are likely to arise to moder-
ate problems of interethnic opportunism," because persistent violence
is costly and peaceful interethnic relations are beneficial.
7. Shaheen Mozaffar, "The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon,"
in Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa, ed. Harvey Glickman (Atlanta: Afri-can Studies Association Press, 1995), 33-69.
8. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,"
American Political Science Review 90, no. 4 (December 1996): 715-35, 717.
9. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia,"
132. Note that Gagnon's use of the term "constructs" does not imply "social construc-
tion" but rather lite single-handed manipulation of the ethnic sentiments of their co-
ethnics. In a "social construction" approach the lite's identities will also be mutually
reconstructed as they try to manipulate their followers' identities.
10. Fearon and Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation," 730.
11. This is reminiscent of the "Contact Hypothesis," which has been much debated
in social psychology. This hypothesis assumes that increased contact between different
ethnic groups gives each group more accurate information about the other and thus
reduces friction. The empirical evidence on this argument is rather mixed. For a thor-
ough examination of the contact hypothesis, see Hugh D. Forbes, Ethnic Conflict:
Commerce, Culture, and the Contact Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1997).
12. Fearon and Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation," 730.
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One problem with rationalist explanations of ethnic conflicts is that
they bracket a fundamental aspect of ethnic conflictschanges in
group identities. This is a serious shortcoming because identity clashes,
which are rooted in a breakdown of intersubjectivesocially shared,
not subjectiveunderstandings about intergroup relations, shape the
stakes in most ethnic conflicts. Therefore, to understand the out-
break of hostilities between ethnic groups one should ask whether
there is a collapse of the intersubjective understandings that under-
pinned intergroup relations before the conflict erupted between the
groups. This question is of utmost importance because there cannot be
peaceful coexistence among groups if there is no intersubjective under-
standing among them. Intersubjective meanings are a building block of
interethnic relations because they "give a people a common language to
talk about social reality and a common understanding of certain
norms."
4
Fearon and Laitin introduce in-group policing as an efficient
institutional arrangement that leads to peaceful interethnic relations. In
doing so, however, these authors are implicitly assuming that there is
an intersubjective understanding between the relevant ethnic groups,
even if the latter do not express (or perceive) it as such. The structure
of intersubjective meanings allows ethnic groups to engage in recipro-
cated in-group policing to preserve peaceful interethnic relations. Inter-
subjective understanding does not imply empathy, however. It only
implies that there are common grounds"collective knowledge that is
shared by all who are competent to engage or recognize the appropri-
ate performance of a social practice or range of practices" on which
groups can meaningfully communicate and recursively engage in social
interactions. While rationalist and constructivist theories can equally
contemplate a condition of interethnic peace that derives from instru-
mental decisions designed to advance group interests, only constructiv-
13. Intersubjective meanings are "not simply the aggregation of the beliefs of indi-
viduals who jointly experience and interpret the world. Rather, they exist as collective
knowledge that is shared by all who are competent to engage or recognize the appro-
priate performance of a social practice or range of practices. This knowledge persists
beyond the lives of individual social actors, embedded in social routines and practices
as they are reproduced by interpreters who participate in their production and work-
ings. Intersubjective meanings have structural attributes that do not merely constrain
or empower actors. They also define their social reality" (Emanuel Adler, Seizing the
Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics," European Journal of International
Relations 3, no. 3 [September 1997]: 319-63, 327.
14. Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," in Interpretative Social
Science: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979), 51.
15. Adler, "Seizing the Middle Ground," 327.
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ist explanations allow for the possibility that interethnic interactions
can transform the identities of groups and thereby induce dependable
expectations of interethnic peace.
Also, espousing a rational-choice approach, David Lake and Donald
Rothchild argue in the context of ethnic violence that "there must exist
in principle some potential bargain short of violence that leaves both
sides in a dispute better off than settling their disagreements through
the use of f orce....This holds irrespective of the breadth of the group
demands or the extent of the antagonisms."
16
This assertion fails to
account for conflicts between groups that spring from normative con-
cerns and identity antagonisms. If anything could in principle be nego-
tiated between groups short of violence, this would mean that even
group identity could be put on the bargaining table. Such a perspective
falls short of explaining, for instance, the salience and persistence of
divisive ethnic politics in many multiethnic societies. In fact, even
within a rationalist perspective one can argue, following Russell Har-
din, that "it may be rational to do what produces a particular identifica-
tion and, once one has that identification, it is commonly rational to fur-
ther the interests determined by that identification."
17
This would in-
clude, for example, settling disagreements through a use of force and
violence.
More emphatically, the basic assumption that underpins Lake and
Rothchild's assertion is the same that allowed Fearon in his rationalist
explanation of international war to argue that "there always exists a set
of negotiated settlements that both sides prefer to fighting." To dem-
onstrate this proposition, Fearon had to assume that states' utility
functions are continuous, increasing, and weakly concave. That is,
states are risk-neutral or risk-averse. Were the assumption of concavity
changed to convexity, Fearon's proof, based on mathematical deduc-
tions, would not hold. For convex utility functions (that is, risk-
acceptant states), one cannot assert that there always be in principle a
settlement short of fighting. Instead, as argued in the next section, an
actor's social identity determines whether it is risk-averse, neutral, or
acceptant. Focusing on the social identities of actors provides a better
16. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear," 45-46.
17. Hardin, One for All, 60 (Hardin's emphasis).
18. James D. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organiza-
tion 49, no. 3 (summer 1995): 379-14, 385.
19. In mathematical jargon, Fearon assumes that the state utility function u(x) x.
Had he assumed insteaa that u(x)<x, he would not have been able to make his assertion.
See appendix in Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War."
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explanation for why and how states can or cannot reach a bargain.
Moreover, explaining why group conflicts occur along ethnic lines and
persist in the face of changing conditions is part of the procesa of un-
derstanding the eruption of ethnic violence. These phenomena illus-
trate the process of social construction of identities and interests,
which rationalist approaches cannot account for since they posit iden-
tities and interests as givens. As argued below, however, ethnic con-
flicts can be satisfactorily explained only if the identities and interests
of embattled groups are problematized and considered as variables.
To sum up, rationalist approaches to ethnic conflict undoubtedly
help us understand a great deal about problems of cooperation and co-
ordination within and between ethnic groups. They help us partially
explain the strategic dilemmas of ethnic conflicts and design possible
ways to manage them. They do this by positing self-interested actors
as prime movers of the conflicts and as the sources of strategic dilem-
mas. What is left out, however, is important and should not be over-
looked. First, actors' social identities constitute their interests and
strategies. Second, the social environment is part of what constitutes
actors' social identities and interests. Whether it is the dilemmas that
arise in ethnic conflicts, the manipulation of historical myths, or the
self-serving actions of political entrepreneurs, they are all partially con-
stituted by the social environment in which the agents (individuals and
groups) are embedded. Third, group identities are in flux during ethnic
conflicts and during efforts to manage them.
Thus, the point is not that rationalist approaches to ethnic conflicts
are wrong. Rather, they should be complemented in a way to include
the variability of group social identities and interests as part of the
20. Hardin's effort is especially interesting for he attempts to account for the logic
of group conflict by analyzing group identification from a rationalist perspective. He
stops short, however, of accounting for the origin of self-interest of group members.
He instead posits that group members are self-interested. He then attempts to explain,
for example, how is it that self-interested members tend to identify with groups and
reinforce group norms. He argues that "norms that serve collective interests are
stronger when they are consistent with individual interest, and they are weaker when
they are not" (Hardin, One for All, 140). While such a statement is very helpful, it still
overlooks the fact that group norms (and identity) shape individual interest. There is
thus no wonder why Hardin arrives at his conclusion. Individuals remain "free agents,"
who act on the basis of their own preferences, as long as the group norms and shared
understandings cognitively frame these preferences.
21. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear"; Hardin, One for All; Fearon and Laitin,
"Explaining Interethnic Cooperation"; Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and
Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, no. 1 (spring 1993): 27-47.
22. Mozaffar, "The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon."
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158 SECURITYSTUDIES8.no. 1
problem to be explained.
23
This paper argues that changes in the social
identities of ethnic groups determine the dynamics of ethnic conflicts.
Transformation of the social identities of ethnic groups leads to a social
construction of ethnic fear, creating a strong potential for violence.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNIC FEAR
S
OCIAL IDENTITIES are sets of meanings that an actor "attributes to
itself while taking the perspective of others, that is, as a social ob-
ject." Individuals and groups acquire social identities from the way
others treat them and from the social practices which confirm the
treatment that they receive from others. Every social actor (individual
or group) has multiple social identities that, while always in process,
define its interests, including ethnic groups. These social identities
can be nested within, or cross-cut, each other. Ethnic identity, dividing
peoples into groups of coethnics, is one instance of social identity.
"Ethnic identity," argues Mozaffar, "is socially validated when it forms
a basis for continually realizing one's goals."
2
Social identities are social because they are created and sustained
through social practices, which are produced and continuously repro-
duced. The routinizationrepetitive enactmentof these practices is
essential to maintaining and validating a given social identity. Social
identity imbues social interactions with some degree of predictability
and by creating a sense of social orderliness. It provides information on
who the actors are (what their defining properties are) and on how the
actors would behave in social interactions. Social identity thus organ-
izes social interactions around a set of expectations. In this way, we (as
23. As put by Mozaffar, clarifying the "reciprocal relationship between institutions
and the political organization of ethnicity involves focusing on how and why political
actors choose ethnicity over other social cleavages to define and promote tneir inter-
ests, how institutions shape ethnic communities and structure the incentives (and dis-
incentives) of political entrepreneurs to articulate ethnic-based demands, and how insti-
tutions are themselves transformed as a result of ethnic politics" (Mozaffar, "The Insti-
tutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon," 45).
24. Alexander Wendt, "Collective Identity Formation and the International State,"
American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 0une 1994): 384-96, 385.
25. Note that the term "social" as used in this paper refers also to political and cul-
tural realms. That is, "social" is used to describe activities between social actors in poli-
tics, economics, and what is commonly called the social sphere (and other types).
"Social" refers to an actor's practices as part of a larger whole such as a group, a soci-
ety, a community, or the world.
26. Mozaffar, "The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon," 56.
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social actors) are able to uphold a set of expectations on how we would
like to and can interact with these actors, and on how they would like
to or can respond to our actions.
27
The very fact that social identities
depend on routinized social practices, however, makes them always
face a "risk" of change and transformation. A social identity would
cease to be effective as such if the corresponding social practices were
not reproduced. Thus, the expectations anchored in the social identi-
ties and the sense of orderliness that they confer to social interactions
are constantly at risk of change. The trust, which we invest in con-
tinuing social exchanges as indicators of a probable future, constantly
faces a potential threat of being breached. Social interactions are always
potentially under the specter of fear that they will be transformed.
The actualization of such a latent fear, however, is a process of social
construction. This neither implies that social identities are malleable,
nor that social expectations unravel easily. To the contrary, because
the social identities define the very agency of the actors, the latter
would have much at stake to lose in not attempting to preserve and
enhance their social identities.
Uncertainty about future interethnic relations arises when groups
perceive changes in the social identities of one another. Because social
identities determine the realm of intergroup expectations that mold
interethnic relations, a change in social identities creates an environ-
ment conducive to prompt new expectations about intergroup rela-
tions. As groups begin to enact new social practices, they need updated
information on each other. They also need to know each other's de-
gree of commitment to whatever bargain in which they may engage.
Each also wants to ensure its security and clarify its position on the
security of others.
31
These issues feed into the construction of new so-
cial identities, but do not assume the same form in every interethnic
27. Denis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 37-69.
28. Practice can be intentionally instituted or may emerge from habit and usage.
Nardin argues that "The essence of any practice is to be found in the conditions it rec-
ommends or imposes on the conduct of agents pursuing self-chosen ends" (Therry
Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988], 8).
29. William H. Sewell Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transfor-
mation," American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 0uly 1992): 1-29.
30. Put differently, individuals and groups always seek more ontological security
and stability. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991), 1-54; William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity, and
International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25-53.
31. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear."
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context. Depending on the opportunities and constraints that various
social structural factors provide and on the practices that political en-
trepreneurs and ethnic activists enact, three kinds of group social iden-
tity can be constructedcooperative, competitive, and aggressive.
First, groups can acquire cooperative social identities. Social rela-
tions between ethnic groups with cooperative social identities are based
on the principle of respect for the welfare of the individual group.
Each group would be interested in its welfare, and views the "other" as
being interested in its welfare, too. Noninterference in the affairs of
another group and nonobstruction of its exchanges with other groups
are norms of behavior. Although each group is interested in its welfare,
it can also be interested in the welfare of others. Groups with coopera-
tive social identities, however, prefer positive-sum to zero-sum rela-
tions in intergroup exchanges. Trustworthy private information is ex-
changed; a norm of transparency prevails. Groups have no incentive to
misrepresent private information since they trust one another about
future interethnic bargains. Commitments are also credible, and actors
are risk-acceptant. In short, ethnic groups with cooperative social iden-
tities are social partners.
Second, a group can acquire a competitive social identity, which
means that it views other groups with which it is engaged in exchanges
as rivals. Such a group seeks relative gains when dealing with others,
and thus has an incentive to withhold or misrepresent trustworthy
private information. The group fears that if it does not behave in this
way it might decrease its lot or leverage in future social exchanges.
Formally, a group A interacting with a group B would prefer an out-
come of (A,B) = (40,20) to an outcome of (A,B) = (50,40), even though
in absolute terms A gets in the second situation more than it gets in the
first one. A prefers the outcome (40,20) because the relative difference
in (40,20) is larger than in (50,40). Because they recognize each other's
security, while reserving the right to misrepresent private information,
intergroup credible commitment is contextually variable. Such a prob-
lem of variable commitment heightens the rivalries among groups. It
does not however create an intergroup security dilemma since groups
do not view each other as threats, even if there is a lack of mutual
commitment on some issues. Groups with competitive social identi-
32. The security dilemma stands for a condition vinder which what a group does to
enhance its security causes reactions that, in the end, can make the group less secure.
Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict."
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ties are social rivals, but group security is nonetheless socially taken for
granted.
Third, groups can acquire aggressive social identities. Such groups
view one another as a permanent threat, as an all-out enemy. They do
not recognize each other's welfare and security. Each group believes
that the others are committed to its harm and, thus, reciprocates or
preemptively acts by seeking to maximize the losses of other groups.
They thus have no need to seek more private information exchange.
Nor do they have incentives to misrepresent private information. In
such a milieu, ethnic groups are extreme revisionists in the sense that
each one seeks the eradication of the others. No action is seen as defen-
sive; all actions are seen as offensive. There is no problem of credible
commitment either; each group "knows" that other groups are com-
mitted to its harm. Insecurity is dominant, and ethnic violence is con-
stantly expected. Groups with aggressive social identities are social
enemies. Table 1 summarizes this discussion.
The implications of the above typology are different from what a
rationalist approach, as presented by Lake and Rothchild, suggests.
Because the rationalist approach assumes that ethnic groups are self-
interested rational actors and because it considers group identity as ex-
ogenous to social interactions and constant, it conflates the strategic
implications of competitive and aggressive social identities. It thereby
concludes that three strategic dilemmas are necessary causal conditions
of ethnic violence. In contrast, as Table 1 shows, this paper, based on a
constructivist approach that problematizes group social identity, argues
that only the security dilemma leads to ethnic violence. This is so be-
cause ethnic violence occurs when ethnic groups acquire aggressive so-
cial identities. Aggressive social identities, however, do not lead to di-
lemmas of information failure or credible commitment; every group
undoubtedly "knows" that the others are strongly committed to its
harm. No revelation of private information would change such a con-
ception of the "other." In the case of competitive social identities, the
dilemma of information failure may occur, whereas the dilemma of
credible commitment is more variable and issue-dependent. Nonethe-
less, the groups still trust one another on their respective security. The
security dilemma does not take hold, nor does ethnic violence occur.
33. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear."
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Social identity
of ethnic group
Cooperative
Competitive
Aggressive
Table 1
SOCIAL IDENTITY AND STRATEGIC PRACTICES
Conception
of the
"other"
Partner
Rival
Enemy
Private
information
Norm of
transparency
Incentive to
misrepresent
Irrelevant
Intergroup
commitment
Credible
Contextuall
y
variable
Very high
Group
security
Taken for
granted
Taken for
granted
Constantly
threatened
For the sake of focus and because of space limitations, I explicate in
the following the processes and factors that lead to the construction of
aggressive social identities only. Before doing that, however, some gen-
eral remarks on social interaction are needed. Social interaction is the
outcome of a synergetic combination of three elements: the social
structural environment, the social practices of relevant actors, and the
social identities of these actors. Social identities constitute and define
the agents. The agents are embedded within social structures, which
differentially empower or constrain their strategies. At the same time,
social structures are instantiated in agents' produced and reproduced
social practices. These three factors have the potential to combine to
create a high level of intergroup uncertainty among interacting ethnic
groups, thereby redefining intergroup expectations. I explicate this ar-
gument in the rest of this section in the case of aggressive identities. I
first discuss three social structures that mold the reconstruction of the
34. For an attempt to synthesize various sociological theories on social interaction,
see John Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988).
35. By social structure I mean "shared understandings, expectations, and social
knowledge" embedded in various patterns of social relations (Wendt, "Collective Iden-
tity Formation and the International State," 389). These social structures are not re-
ducible to individual actors and are persistent enough to withstand, though not immu-
tably, the whims of actors. They have a dynamic of their own and a logic that contrib-
utes to their reproduction. Sharon Hays, "Structure and Agency and the Sticky Prob-
lem of Culture, Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (March 1994): 57-72.
36. Giddens calls this process "structuration." Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of
Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1-40.
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social identities of interacting ethnic groups. I then consider how ag-
gressive social identities emerge under the impact of these social struc-
tures. I also consider how the security dilemma positively feeds back
on, and reinforces, the construction of aggressive social identities.
INTERETHNIC SOCIAL-STRUCTURAL ENVIRONMENT
Preexisting social structures shape the construction of a new social
identity by both empowering and constraining the actors engaged in
the construction process. Three social structures play important roles
in the social construction of social identities of ethnic groups. These
are: salient historical memories, the structure of ethnic cleavages, and
the institutional arrangements of the state. A combination of the three
factors strongly shapes the construction process.
Salient ethnic historical memories. As widely recognized in the litera-
ture on ethnicity and nationalism, historical memory plays an impor-
tant role in the definition of ethnic groups. Historical memory is the
collective recollection and interpretation of a shared past. It has its ori-
gins in the works of poets, narrators, writers, politicians, historians,
and most powerfully in the oral and written stories, and legends of
common peoples handed down through generations. Historical mem-
ory is usually imbued with quasi-sacred meanings capable of evoking
very powerful emotions. It is thus an important source of symbols and
values that lites have for mobilizing their constituencies and legitimat-
37. Historical memory possesses the three basic properties that Hays delineates for
social structures, that is, they are the creation of human beings and in turn mold the
identity of people, they are both enabling and constraining, and they have different
levels of depth. This applies to historical memories since, first, as argued by Bernard
Lewis, human beings create, remember, and rediscover their historical memory. Sec-
ond, historical memory becomes a social-psychological context that molds people's
beliefs, expectations, and actions and, therefore, may constrain or enable them in their
daily lives. Third, historical memory often provides deeply rooted rationalizations for
peoples' actions and beliefs even though these peoples might not be readily aware of
that. Hays, "Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of Culture"; Bernard Lewis,
History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975).
38. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge-
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since
1870: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul
R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (Newbury Park: Sage,
1991); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993); Ernest Gellner, En-
counters with Nationalism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994); Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities (New York: Verso, 1991); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming
National (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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ing their action.
39
By using historical memory as an explanatory vari-
able, I am attempting to capture the extent to which widely held no-
tions of the past (or interpretations thereof) come to shape the parame-
ters within which interethnic relations are defined, anchored, or chal-
lenged. These collective notions of the past contribute to determine the
values that shape people's views on, and consent to, prevailing inter-
ethnic relations. Because historical memory is inescapably interpreta-
tive, differences of interpretation of a shared past are inherent even in
the most ethnically, religiously, racially, culturally, or ideologically
homogeneous society (supposing that such a society exists). Such dif-
ferences do not, however, lead to crises in every society. In societies
where there are more than one politically active ethnic, racial, relig-
ious, or cultural community, historical memory can become a battle-
ground for politics.
Salient historical memories can become strong determinants of in-
terethnic relations when translated into political myths. By political
myths I mean political goals and beliefs construed from, or justified by,
historical memories. Political myths are often used to challenge pre-
39. On studies of historical memory, see Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered,
Invented; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time:
The Uses o f History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); George L. Mosse,
Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1990); John R. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); S. Frederick Starr, The Legacy of History
in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Yael
Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradi-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of
Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick: Transaction,
1994); Nachman Ben-Yahuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in
Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Paul Connerton, How Societies
Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); James W. Pennebaker,
Dario Paez, and Bernard Rim, Collective Memory of Political Events. Social Psychologi-
cal Perspectives (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997).
40. Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961).
41. Edelman defines a myth as "an unquestioned belief held in common by a large
group of people that give events and actions a particular meaning" (Murray J. Edelman,
Politics as Symbolic Action [Chicago: Markham, 1971], 53). Snyder and Ballentine de-
fine nationalist myths as "assertions that would lose credibility if their claim to a basis
in fact or logic were exposed to rigorous, disinterested public evaluation" (Jack Snyder
and Karen Ballentine, Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," International Secu-
rity 21, no. 2 [fall 1996]: 5-40, 10). Snyder's and Ballentine's definition is appropriate to
their approach based on a marketplace-of-ideas analogy. Had Snyder and Ballentine
defined nationalist myths differently, it would have been hard to qualify the myths as a
"commodity" in a marketplace of ideas. People would not be able to falsify or discredit
myths that do not have a variable "marketable value." Such assumptions do not exactly
fit in the social milieu within which political myths are constructed and propagated. In
such a milieu, the consumer is far from being an "economic" actor. Political myths are
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vailing intergroup power relations. Elites legitimize and imbue the po-
litical myths with a quality of "oughtness" by anchoring the myths in
salient historical memories (or interpretations thereof) of their respec-
tive communities. A political myth would lack historical legitimacy
and "moral appropriateness" were it not rooted in salient historical
memories. In this way, historical memory becomes a strong constitu-
tive element of ethnic politics, and, consequently, of ethnic fear and
violence. Although usually recognized as an ad hoc contributory factor
to ethnic violence, historical memory plays a minor explanatory role
in rational-choice approaches. Lake and Rothchild, for example, argue
that "intense ethnic conflict is most often caused by collective fears of
the future....Ethnic activists and political entrepreneurs, operating
within groups, build upon these fears of insecurity and polarize soci-
ety. Political memories and emotions also magnify these anxieties,
driving groups further apart."
42
Even though Lake and Rothchild ad-
mit that political memories "magnify" the strategic dilemmas, they
forego the constitutive role those historical memories play in generat-
ing fear. The two authors adopt a "forward-looking" perspective on
the origin of fear. They thereby minimize the impact of the "shadow-
of-the past" on intergroup and group-state relations to the level of a
magnifying factor.
As expectations about the future might lead to fear and violence,
however, so, too, do historical memories. Expectations about the fu-
ture are often simultaneously rooted in strategic calculations and in
"lessons" drawn from historical experiences. In addition, the three di-
lemmas that Lake and Rothchild advocate are often rooted in past ex-
periences. Lessons from past experiences often shape, if not cause, in-
formation failures, problems of credible commitment, and incentives
to use force preemptively. Interacting groups (especially in multiethnic
societies) do not emerge the day the conflict begins. Each group carries
a "baggage" of memories that shape its strategies. Each group thereby
faces the task of reconciling the pressure of such "lessons" of history
and forward-looking concerns. Historical memory not only magnifies
interpretative and social in nature, and their credibility arises from intersubjective
meanings constructed through public discourses and social interactions. Moreover, as
Hardin put it, "that the belief is not convincing, even patently not so in the sense that
it would not stand serious scrutiny, however, does not entail that people cannot be-
lieve it" (Hardin, One for All, 62). My definition concurs with Lake s and Rothchild's
remark that ethnic myths are "often rooted in actual events, and probably could not be
long sustained absent a historical basis" (Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear," 55).
42. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear," 41.
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group anxieties, but often contributes to create them. A forward-
looking perspective on ethnic fear and violence cannot substitute for a
shadow-of-the-past dimension; the two are complementary.
The structure of ethnic cleavages. The structure of ethnic cleavages in a
multiethnic society can also become a determining factor of interethnic
relations. Czechoslovakia's two larger ethnic groups, the Czechs and
Slovaks, were, for example, territorially segmented, especially after the
Second World War as increasingly fewer Czechs and Slovaks migrated
outside their region.
43
Similarly, the segmentation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina into regions with high concentration of Muslims, Serbs,
and Croats was quite strong. In both cases, the territorial distribution
of ethnic groups played a major role in determining the fault lines in
events that unfolded in the 1990s. Czechoslovakia split into a Czech
Republic and Slovakia, and Bosnia became engulfed in ethnic cleansing
among the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.
The theoretical literature on the impact of ethnic cleavages on inter-
group relations is rather mixed. Lijphart, for example, argues that eth-
nic territorial segmentation is a necessary condition for successful con-
sociationalism. This occurs because the resultant lack of direct inter-
ethnic contact on a daily basis enhances each community's political
solidarity. This would increase leaders' autonomy to compromise with
one another at no risk of losing the support of their respective con-
stituencies.
44
In contrast, Duchacek argues that ethnically mixed re-
gions have a potential "calming effect" in federal states. For Horow-
itz, it is more likely to find intraethnic competition in territorially
segmented multiethnic societies, than not. The structure of this compe-
tition shapes the potential for interethnic cooperation. Cross-cutting
cleavages would provide an incentive for interethnic cooperation. Such
a pattern of divisions, if it occurs, could foster intraethnic competition
over non-ethnic issues. In cases where cross-cutting cleavages are not
effectively mobilized (or are absent), however, intraethnic competition
could evolve into an outbidding on ethnic issues. This would have the
effect of limiting the freedom of the lite (including previously moder-
43. J i r Musil, "Czech and Slovak Society," Government and Opposition 28, no. 4
(fall 1993): 479-93; Henry Kamm, "At Fork in Road, Czechoslovaks Fret," New York
Times, 9 October 1992, A10.
44. Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New-
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 25-44.
45. Ivo D. Duchacek, "Comparative Federalism: An Agenda for Additional Re-
search," in Constitutional Design and Power-Sharing in the Post-Modem Epoch, ed. Dan-
iel J. Elazar (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991), 31.
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ate elements) and force it to capitalize on inflammatory interethnic
issues.
46
Despite various differences, these and other works agree that
ethnic cleavages do shape the prospects for interethnic interaction, and,
by extension, the social construction of group social identities.
Moreover, the structure of ethnic cleavages and salient historical
memories mutually reinforce one another. When the structure of eth-
nic cleavages facilitates intraethnic competition, for example, the out-
bidding faction of the lite draws on historical memory to gather more
public support. Historical memory could thereby become a battle-
ground among outbidders. Conversely, preserving the structure of
ethnic cleavages also contributes to keep the "vividness" of historical
memories through various ways, such as communal holidays, com-
memorations, songs, poetry, and a variety of social, cultural, religious,
and political rituals.
State institutional arrangements. State institutional arrangements also
contribute to the environment under which new social identities of
ethnic groups emerge. They do so either by constraining the options
or by, if most of the time inadvertently, enhancing the opportunities
before political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists. That is, "in struc-
turing politics by defining the strategic context of political interactions,
institutions constrain the choice of social actors over goals, strategies,
and behavior....They also empower social actors with prescribed po-
litical, material, and organizational (both physical and symbolic) re-
sources." . Moreover, institutional arrangements can shape, positively
46. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985); 577-600.
47. David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, & Power (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988).
48. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 563-76; Milton J. Esman, Ethnic Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1-48; Mozaffar, "The Institutional Logic
of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon."
49. Mozaffar, "The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon." The
problem is the more acute in societies where there are profound differences about the
form of the statea stateness problem. On the stateness problem during democratiza-
tion, see Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences:
Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia," Daedalus 121, no. 2 (spring 1992): 121-39;
Alfred Stepan, "When Democracies and the Nation-State are Competing Logics: Re-
flections on Estonia," Archives Europennes de Sociologie 35 (1994): 127-41; Claus Offe,
"Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition
in East Central Europe," Social Research 58, no. 4 (winter 1991): 865-92; Donald Hor-
owitz, A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Donald Horowitz, "Democracy in
Divided Societies," Journal of Democracy 4, no. 4 (fall 1993): 18-38; Adam Przeworski,
Sustainable Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 1; Juan
Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern
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or negatively, the impacts of historical memory and the structure of
ethnic cleavages on interethnic relations.
Gagnon, for example, argues that the emphasis on ethnicity in
Yugoslavia "was reinforced by a system of ethnic 'keys' within each
republic which determined the distribution of certain positions by
ethnic identity according to the proportion of each group in the repub-
lic's population. This political reification of ethnicity, along with the
suppression of expressions of ethnic sentiment, combined to reinforce
the. historical construction of political identity in terms of ethnic iden-
tity, and made ethnic issues politically relevant when the political sys-
tem opened up to include the wider population." In other words,
ethnic identity was politically relevant during the construction of
Yugoslavia, and remained so during its historical evolution. Is it a sur-
prise then that it played an important role during the phase of ethnic
violence and disintegration? Similarly, in Czechoslovakia the two ma-
jor constituent nationsCzechs and Slovakswere unable definitely to
resolve their dispute on the best state institutional arrangements. In
view of their historical aspiration and struggle for political autonomy,
if not statehood, the Slovaks would not be satisfied with any institu-
tional arrangement that did not ipso facto facilitate the achievement of
their historical goals. The Slovaks were at times forced, and at other
times lured, to accept the institutional arrangements of the state.
Nonetheless, the Slovaks did not rest until they achieved institutional
parity with the Czechs as a result of the federalization of the commu-
nist regime in the late 1960s. Establishing institutional parity between
the two nations, however, did not strengthen the socio-political cohe-
sion of the Czechoslovak polity as a whole. It instead consolidated the
underlying division of the country into Czech and Slovak sub-polities.
Establishing parity in reality institutionalized the binational character
of the country.
53
Slovak and Czech parliaments became more represen-
Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1996); Badredine Arfi, "Democratization and Communal Politics," De-
mocratization 5, no. 1 (spring 1998): 42-63.
140-41.
51. Carol S. Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a
State, 1918-1987 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
52. Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (New-
York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995), 1-10, 225-72.
53. Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State,
1918-1987.
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tative of their respective nations, while the federal parliament had to
follow whatever Czech and Slovak leaders had agreed upon.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF AGGRESSIVE SOCIAL IDENTITY
Salient ethnic historical memories, the structure of ethnic cleavages,
and state institutions shape the construction of group social identities
by prescribing, proscribing, and permitting lites' choice of strategies
and behavior. These social structures are not, as standard rational-
choice theory would contend, just tools in the hands of self-serving
lites. Although this occurs to some extent, social structures also con-
stitute the "agency" of these lites (as relevant social actors) by defin-
ing, constraining, and empowering them. Thus, social structures derive
their political potency by providing resources to the lites and, at the
same time, by constituting the lites as agents. The nesting and cross-
cutting of the multiple constraints and opportunities that the lites face
as agents shape their strategic freedom. As such, social structures shape
and animate ethnic politics and conflict. A rounded explanation of this
relationship should clarify how structures shape both the conditions
and the processes that prompt the political activation of ethnicity. The
explanation should also show how social actors rely on ethnicity to
promote individual and group interests by reconstructing the social
identity of their groups. In the following, I explicate four sequential
processes that lead to the social construction of aggressive social identi-
ties for ethnic groups. As rightly argued by standard rational-choice
theory, political entrepreneurs play a prominent role in the construc-
tion of aggressive social identities. The existence of certain types of so-
cial structures simultaneously, however, enables and constrains such a
role. Ethnicity would not be a relevant political variable without such
social structures. The latter define what is "ethnically realizable" and
what is "ethnically unrealizable."
Aggressive social identities emerge through a sequence of four proc-
esses. These are: (1) the emergence of a set of political myths that fun-
damentally challenge the status quo, especially interethnic relations; (2)
a widespread internalization of these myths by the ethnic group; (3) a
group mobilization to openly reject the interethnic status quo; and (4)
an interethnic, reciprocated process of demonizing.
First, political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists begin by construct-
ing new, or by reviving old, political myths that challenge the status
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quo of interethnic relations. Mythmaking is inherent to human socie-
ties.
5
Governments, social movements, and challenging lites often use
mythmaking to mobilize constituencies. Not every political myth,
however, can become a serious threat to intergroup relations. To be-
come a serious challenge, a political myth has to be anchored in his-
torical memories that are salient enough to evoke emotional attach-
ments and mass arousal. Political myths that lack historical legiti-
macy would not arouse strong emotional attachment from the masses.
To avoid such a problem, the lite builds its strategies around a politi-
cization of a selected set of salient historical memories. Using self-
styled selective criteria, the lite divides the group's history into major
stages, reducing complex historical events to a set of images. The lite
then presents these images as core elements of the group's historical
memory. A reification of these revived or reinterpreted images into
political goals and beliefs produces a set of political myths. Such
myths are powerful symbols through which the lite construes its
group's understanding of the current conditions and rationalizes cho-
sen goals, strategies, and courses of action.
Second, having articulated a set of political myths that challenge the
interethnic status quo, the lites move on to induce large segments of
54. Ethnic activists are individuals who genuinely advocate the group's identity and
political, economic, and social welfare. Political entrepreneurs are individuals who may
or may not be strongly committed to the views that the activists advocate, but who
seek leadership positions and political power. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear."
55. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schpflin, eds., Myth & Nationhood (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 1-35.
56. Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action; Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, & Power.
57. George Schpflin argues that "for a myth to be effective in organizing and mobi-
lizing opinion, it must, however, resonate It seems that there are clear and unavoid-
able limits to invention and imagination and these are set by resonance. This is signifi-
cant because it underpins the proposition that myth cannot be constructed purely out
of false material; it has to have some relationship with the memory of the collectivity
that has fashioned it. There has to be some factor, some event, some incident in the
collective memory to which the myth makes an appeal; it is only at that point that the
reinterpretation can vary radically from a closer historical assessment" (Hosking and
Schpflin, Myth & Nationhood, 25-26).
58. Janice G. Stein, "Image, Identity, and Conflict Resolution," in Managing Global
Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen
O. Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace,
1996), 93-111.
59. Berger and Luckmann define reification as "the apprehension of the products of
human activity as if they were something else than human products" (Peter L. Berger
and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge [New York: Doubleday, 1966], 89).
60. W. L. Bennett, "Myth, Ritual, and Political Control," Journal of Communication
30, no. 2 (March 1980): 166-79.
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group members to internalize the political myths. Internalizaron can
occur through various ways, examples of which are ritualization,
stereotyping and fear-arousing discourses, ideological indoctrina-
tion, and coercive material and psychological inducement. These
strategies are mutually supportive, and are often used simultaneously
to achieve successfully widespread internalization of the political
myths. What the lite wants to do is to make the political myths the
core of the group views on interethnic relations. The lite thus rede-
fines or reinterprets "reality"what people consider as real, possible,
and desirableon the basis of these political myths. The group mem-
bers accordingly change their beliefs on the social world. The lite can
thenceforth frame the conditions and problems of the group in such a
way that causes and effects appear simple and remedies unambiguous,
however difficult achieving them might be.
65
The vision and goals that
the lite articulates would thereby acquire a "quality of oughtness,"
leading to a consolidation of the elite's position and to acquiescence
from the group members.
Both ethnic activists and political entrepreneurs participate in the
process of constructing the social identity of the group. Political entre-
preneurs, however, aim, in addition, to create and preserve a degree of
legitimate leadership for themselves. The entrepreneurs use the politi-
cal myths to defeat in-group challengers, portraying them as threats to
the group. They can, however, become entrapped in self-legitimating
strategies that they use to rally the support of their respective commu-
nities. The political myths become in return constraints on the kind of
61. This list is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. The issue, how shifts
in group loyalty occur is still a debated one. For a review, see Daniel Druckman,
"Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty: A Social Psychological Perspective,"
Mershon International Studies Review 38 (1994): 43-68.
62. Ritualization proceeds through a repetitive use of emotionally charged symbols
in symbolically significant locations at symbolically appropriate times. Kertzer, Ritual,
Politics, & Power, W. L. Bennett, "Imitation, Ambiguity, and Drama in Political Life:
Civil Religion and the Dilemmas of Publics Morality," Journal of Politics 41, no. 1
(February 1979): 106-33.
63. Kaufman, "Spiraling to Ethnic War: Elites, Masses, and Moscow in Moldova's
Civil War"; Lake and Rothchild, Containing Fear.
64. Esman, Ethnic Politics.
65. Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action. Van Evera argues that myths come in three
principal varieties: self-glorifying myths which encourage the membership to contrib-
ute to the community, self-whitewashing myths which bolster the authority and po-
litical power of the incumbent lites, and other-maligning myths which support the
claims that the community faces external threats. Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on
Nationalism and War," International Security 18, no. 4 (spring 1994): 5-39.
66. R. Merelman, "Learning and Legitimacy," American Political Science Review 60,
no. 3 (September 1966): 548.
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strategies that the leaders can adopt to mobilize group members and
sustain the mobilization momentum. The relation between leaders'
strategies and historical memory is thus neither linear, nor purely in-
strumental; it is one of mutual dependence. Even though the lite
might have constructed the political myths to manipulate them strate-
gically, the myths can become a constraint on the elite's choice of
goals, actions and strategies. The myths could become a frame that
strongly shapes the kind of appeal to which most group members
would strongly respond. Transforming these self-legitimating strategies
can jeopardize the elite's leadership status. Many leaders would not
take such a risk and would rather resort to escalation. They do so be-
cause they fear that a deescalation might marginalize them, or reduce
their power status. Leaders might also end up believing that such a
strategy is the only effective way of changeself-fulfilling their own
"prophecies."
Third, as more and more group members internalize the political
myths, the political entrepreneurs and communal activists seek to mo-
bilize large segments of their followers to reject the status quo and
challenge their relations with other communal groups. If the lite
succeeds in mobilizing large segments of the group behind its goals, the
status quo loses its legitimacy. This prompts groups to imitate and
learn from one another as well as reciprocate each other's practices.
This is the fourth factor that contributes to a reconstruction of the so-
cial identities of ethnic groups. The construction of new social identi-
ties crucially depends on this process of mutual representation between
communal groups through recursively reciprocated practices. By recip-
rocating each other's strategies and discourses communal elites and
their followers begin in fact intersubjectively to construct new mean-
ings that ultimately redefine their group social identities. The process
of reciprocating practices is neutral as to the kind of social identities
that could result from it, however. It can produce aggressive as well as
nonaggressive social identities. It is the practices that are recursively
reciprocated which determine the type of social identity that is eventu-
ally constructed.
67. Group mobilization can be achieved through various strategies depending on the
conditions surrounding group-state and intergroup relations and on the issues at stake.
Ted R. Gurr, Minorities at Rtsk, a Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington,
D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1993), 61-88, 123-38; Jeff Goodwin, "Toward a
New Sociology of Revolutions," Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 731-66.
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Aggressive social identities emerge if the following conditions are
met. First, the political myths that are constructed from salient ethnic
historical memories (or interpretations thereof) entail conflicting po-
litical positions and actions across ethnic lines. Second, the propagation
of the political myths and their internalization by the respective
groups and consequent mobilization of the latter create a climate of
high uncertainty where leaders' actions become strongly determinative
of intergroup relations. Third, elites' discourses and actions demonize
the "other," and the "other" reciprocates in a similar fashion. If main-
tained long enough, such a dynamic becomes a routinized way to view
the "other" as an enemy, and to conceive of intergroup relations
within a threat-dominated perspective. If state institutional arrange-
ments remain incapable of controlling the situation, or reinforce it, if
inadvertently, ethnic fear henceforth dominates interethnic relations,
thereby creating a strong potential for an eruption of ethnic violence.
Although I have specifically explicated the processes that lead to a
construction of aggressive social identities and to the emergence of
ethnic fear, the implication is that ethnic cooperation and peace are
also socially constructed. From a constructivist conceptual point of
view, constructing conflict is no more difficult than constructing
peace, even though realizing them in practice might be quite different.
Moreover, neglecting or minimizing the constitutive role that social
and material structures play, one can argue that opportunistic leaders
create conflictual conditions to preserve or enhance their self-interests.
While leaders' opportunism cannot be wished away, opportunistic
leaders cannot not be embedded in social and material structures,
which simultaneously empower and constrain their actions and strate-
gies. Existing social structures constitute the agency of leaders, whose
practices instantiate the social structures. Agents and social structures
mutually constitute one another.
Therefore, from a constructivist perspective, neither Kaplan's hy-
pothesis on ethnic hatred nor rationalist arguments on opportunism
satisfactorily explain the eruption of ethnic conflict in, say, Yugoslavia
or Rwanda. A satisfactory theory should be able to explain not only
the eruption of ethnic violence but also, at the same time, the persis-
tence of preceding ethnic cooperation and peace. Problematizing iden-
tity provides such an avenue. It also contributes to a resolution of the
debate between primordialist and instrumentalist approaches to ethnic
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conflict.
68
From a constructivist perspective, the mutual constitution of
agents and social structures explains the possibility of persistence of
identities, as well as the possibility of their transformation. By relying
on the notion of social practice, constructivism can explain both per-
sistence and change. Hence, it is possible to explain why, for example,
Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims lived as peaceful neighbors for
decades, and had high rates of interethnic marriage. It is also possible to
explain why the same groups then turned to killing each other in the
1990s. A change in the social identities of these groups can go far in
explaining both types of interethnic relations and behavior.
Social identities can be very stable and persist for very long times,
but are not immutable. Nor are they easily malleable. Identities and
interests are constructed, stabilized, and deconstructed through social
practice. Doubtless, leaders (opportunistic and otherwise) play promi-
nent roles in the construction, maintenance, and deconstruction of
group identities and interests. Arguing otherwise would simply be em-
pirically wrong. As Milosevic and Tudjman played important roles in
reconstructing the social identities of their respective ethnic groups, so,
too, did Tito (and other leaders). Indeed, Tito tried, and to a large ex-
tent succeeded, to construct and maintain nonaggressive social identi-
ties for these groups for decades. The eruption of ethnic violence be-
tween the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims does not imply that the Tito
regime failed in its ethnic policy, as the ethnic-hatred hypothesis would
argue. It means that group identities are social constructions inherently
subject to transformation. Nor would a rationalist explanation of
Tito's success (or failure) be sufficient, either. Leaders' roles acquire
such a prominent position because they are embedded in social struc-
tures, which simultaneously empower and constrain their actions and
strategies.
A rationalist counterargument is that the construction of social iden-
tity depends heavily on rationalistic incentives. A strong state appara-
tus in Tito's Yugoslavia, for example, played a major role in keeping
the peace and preventing long-standing hatreds from becoming mobi-
lized. Thus, the timing of much of what happened between the Serbs
and Croats, for example, depended on rationalistic factors. For one,
such an argument is implied by a core point of this paper. Elites'
strategies and practices are "realized" only within the existing social
68. For a short summary of the primordialist-instrumentalist debate on ethnicity,
see Esman, Ethnic Politics, 9-16.
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(and material) structures. In the Yugoslav case, the transformation of
the Serb and Croat social identities occurred embedded within the ex-
isting social structures, among which are the institutional arrangements
of the federal state. Under different institutional arrangements, the
outcome might have been completely different. More precisely, the
political system of the second Yugoslavia depended in a crucial way on
the role that Tito played in it. To put it metaphorically, Tito became a
crucial "institution" of the state. The federal state depended on Tito's
role, and made Tito's role. Second, rationalistic incentives such as fears
of persecution are not outside the purview of my argument. Oppor-
tunistic leaders are always embedded in social structures, which always
shape leaders' opportunism. Tito's death represented not only the de-
mise of a strong and iron-fist leader, but also the absence of a crucial
institution of the statethe role of Tito. The nationalistic leaders of
the 1980s thus enacted their new strategic practices under different
state institutional arrangements. As argued in the next section, the ro-
tation system that Tito created within the collective presidency en-
abled the Serb leadership to stall the political process at the highest
level. Although Tito created such a system to contain nationalistic
drives in the early 1970s, this very institutional arrangement did ex-
actly the opposite after Tito's demise. The collective presidency system
crucially depended on an underpinning institution, the role of Tito. To
sum up, a reconstruction of social identities simultaneously depends on
the strategic practices of the leaders and on the existing social structural
environment. Even opportunistic leaders cannot enact their opportun-
istic strategies if the social structural environment does not empower
such strategies.
In the next section, I use the argument of the paper to discuss how
the social construction of ethnic fear between the Serbs and Croats
occurred in former Yugoslavia. Obviously, this is not a final test of the
theory. Nor is the following illustration a full explanation of the disin-
tegration of the Yugoslav federation. The main purpose of the next
section is to highlight the role of change in the social identities of eth-
nic groups in driving the social construction of ethnic fear.
69. Obviously, Tito was not operating by himself only. He had many supporters
devoted to him.
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THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNIC FEAR IN YUGOSLAVIA
T
HIS SECTION presents an account of the social construction of eth-
nic fear between the Serbs and Croats in the early 1990s. Gagnon
is right to some extent in arguing that the Serb leaders used ethnicity as
a resource to carry out self-serving strategies. He does not explain,
however, how ethnicity became such a potent force, except by recog-
nizing that it has historically been politically relevant. He does not
answer the question of why other political forces (such as the demo-
cratic lite) failed to mobilize the populace against Milosevic and like-
minded leaders.
Although this paper uses changes in identity as an explanatory vari-
able, it argues that it is not ethnic identification per se that led to eth-
nic violence in the former Yugoslavia. Rather, it is changes in the so-
cial identity of ethnic groupshow ethnic groups define themselves
while taking the perspective of othersthat determined the role of
ethnic identity in intergroup relations and politics. The relations be-
tween the Serbs and Croats were to a large extent shaped by how each
redefined its role in the federation while taking the perspective of other
ethnic groups. Milosevic's and Tudjman's self-serving strategies could
not have been as effective as they were outside such a social context of
meanings. Using changes in the social identities of the Serb and Croat
communities as an explanatory variable provides a framework that
shows the mutual constitution of lites' strategies and the social struc-
tural context of meanings.
Nor does the paper argue that material structural factors (such as
serious economic problems) did not play a role in the eruption of eth-
nic violence in former Yugoslavia. While recognizing such factors, the
paper, focuses on another type of question that the extant literature on
ethnic violence has yet to address satisfactorily, that is, the question of
how changes in the social identities of ethnic groups constituted a cli-
mate of fear and paved the way to violence. In addressing such a ques-
tion, I problematize the social identities and interests of the major eth-
nic groups. I show how a reconstruction of the social identities of the
Serbs and Croats carried out by political entrepreneurs and ethnic ac-
tivists within existing social-structural constraints and opportunities
engendered ethnic fear and a strong potential to ethnic violence.
This section, therefore, describes how changes in the social identities
of Serb and Croat ethnic groups destabilized established patterns of
interethnic relations, decreased interethnic predictability, and created
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uncertainty about interethnic future relations. As Serb and Croat po-
litical entrepreneurs and ethnic activists enacted new strategies in the
1980s, the social identities of their respective ethnic groups began to
change. Ethnic fear took hold when this dynamic produced aggressive
social identities in the early 1990sthe Serbs and Croats began to view
one another as sworn enemies. Because this dynamic became routi-
nized in Serb-Croat interactions, ethnic fear began to dominate Serb-
Croat relations and eventually led to an eruption of ethnic violence.
Salient Serb and Croat ethnic historical memories, the structure of
ethnic cleavages, and the institutional arrangements of the federal state
strongly contributed to shaping the changes that occurred in Serb and
Croat social identities. To show the importance of ethnic historical
memory in the Yugoslav context, I consider some illustrative but im-
portant ethnic historical memories of the Serb and Croat communities.
I also briefly discuss the structure of ethnic cleavages that existed in
Yugoslavia. A discussion of key federal institutions illustrates the role
that the institutional arrangements of the federal state played in shap-
ing the reconstruction of Serb and Croat social identities.
The process of constructing aggressive social identities developed as
Serb and Croat political entrepreneurs and activists began politicizing
ethnic historical memories, manipulating the structure of ethnic cleav-
ages, and using the opportunities offered by key federal institutions to
channel their respective agendas. The Serb and Croat leaders, however,
were not in control of the process of social identity reconstruction,
even if their strategies ignited it. As the discussion below shows, the
structure of ethnic cleavages in Yugoslavia provided Serb and Croat
political entrepreneurs and activists with "raw materials" through
which they enacted their strategies. The mutual feedback between the
reciprocated strategic practices of the lites, the response of the two
communities at large, and the simultaneous weakening of key federal
institutions, all contributed to sustaining the process of identity recon-
struction. By the early 1990s, it became clear that large number of
Croats pledged more allegiance to an independent and sovereign Croa-
tia than to the federation. In contrast, most Serbs still pledged alle-
giance to a Yugoslavia. The Serbs, however, wanted a federation where
they could preserve the unity of their nation (which is dispersed all
over the federation territory) and thus dominate the political system.
In other words, the Serbs wanted a federation much reminiscent of the
first Yugoslavia under King Alexander. The future of Yugoslavia
henceforth came to be viewed as a zero-sum game between the Serbs
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and Croats (as well as between the Serbs and Slovenes), who increas-
ingly saw one another as enemies, committed to each other's harm.
THE STRUCTURE OF ETHNIC CLEAVAGES
Yugoslavia was a multinational country, with no dominant ethnic
group. Out of a total population of 22.4 million in 1981, for example,
the Serbs represented 36.3 percent and the Croats 19.7 percent.
70
Sig-
nificant similarities in terms of language, ethnic origin, and customs
exist among the Yugoslav national groups. The country's overall eth-
nic makeup did not change drastically in the seventy years after the
country was founded in 1918, although the population grew by more
than 70 percent during that time. Exceptions to this pattern of stability
were a marked increase of the Albanian population and a steep decline
in the numbers of Jews, ethnic Germans, and Hungarians after the
Second World War. Most nationalities were not confined within the
borders of the country's republics or provinces, thereby complicating
the ethnic landscape. In 1981, for example, about 98 percent of all
Yugoslavia's Slovenes lived in Slovenia, and about 96 percent of its
Macedonians lived in Macedonia. In comparison, only 60 percent of
the Serbs lived in Serbia proper, and only 70 percent of the Montene-
grins lived in Montenegro. Croatia had a substantial Serb minority of
about 12 percent. For many Croat nationalists, the Serb minority in
Croatia had no real reason to claim a distinctive Serb ethnic identity.
Croat nationalists claim that the Serb minority has been living in
Croatia and speaking the same language as the Croats for many centu-
ries. They also claim that Croatia's ethnic Serbs are in no fundamental
way distinguishable from ethnic Croats. Conversely, many Serbs be-
lieve that the Croats do not originate from a distinct ethnic group, but
are Serbs who converted to Catholicism.
The widespread territorial distribution of ethnic Serbs in Yugoslavia
proved to be an asset that ultranationalistic Serb leaders capitalized on
in their bid to create "Greater Serbia," especially in the Krajina region
of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Vojvodina. The presence
70. Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy:
Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), 21-46.
71. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 21-46.
72. Aleksa Djilas, "Fear Thy Neighbor: The Breakup of Yugoslavia," in Nationalism
and Nationalities in the New Europe, ed. Charles A. Kupchan (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 85-106.
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of an important Serb minority in Croatia was a complication that
Croat leaders could not ignore, especially after Croatia launched its
drive for sovereignty and independence. Some aspects of the regime in
Croatia worsened the climate of suspicion and threat between ethnic
Serbs living in Croatia and ethnic Croats. The Serbs, for example, were
overrepresented in the police and security forces in the Titoist era, a
troubling fact for the Croats. Conversely, to the Serbs in Croatia the
real issues included the lack of their own cultural institutions and
newspapers, the relatively lower level of Serb economic development,
and that Zagreb was ruling them. To Serb demands for more auton-
omy within Croatia, the Croats usually replied that there also were
large pockets of Croats in Vojvodina and Bosnia-Herzegovina, who do
not advocate autonomy in either region.
From the time of its inception as a socialist state in 1945, Yugoslavia
had faced a nationality dilemma. It was not easy to reconcile demands
for national and ethnic recognition with the task of building and pre-
serving a strong all-Yugoslav state, and not fall into the ethnic dilem-
mas that haunted interwar Yugoslavia. Tito's nationalities policy had
mounted a multifaceted assault on the roots of domestic discord. The
system in principle recognized the ethnic particularity and full equality
of most national groups and embodied the right of cultural-linguistic
self-determination. The state was organized as a federation with exten-
sive decentralization and the right of political self-determination, in-
cluding in principle the right of secession. The communist party as-
serted the need to equalize economic conditions throughout the federal
units, and recognized the equal claim of all nationalities to economic
resources and high standards of living. Self-management at the lowest
level was purportedly defusing the tensions between various ethnic
groups. Most importantly, a dual identity was officially affirmed
national identity and Yugoslav identity, whereas separatism and unita-
rism were both considered dangerous.
The dual identity was institutionalized in Yugoslavia's federal and
republican constitutions, which guarantee equal rights for all ethnic
groups, including the right to participate in public life, government,
73. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
74. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991.
75. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia (New York: Benn, 1971); Ivo Banac, The Na-
tional Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
76. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.; Leonard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Dis-
integration and Balkan Politics in Transition (Boulder: Westview, 1995).
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and the armed forces. Minority nationalities have the right to organize
groups to preserve their cultural heritage and promote their national
interests. Article 119 of the federal criminal code, however, prohibits
propaganda and other activities aimed at inciting or fomenting na-
tional, racial, or religious intolerance and hatred. The federal and re-
publican constitutions also provide for proportional representation of
the nationalities in assemblies and commissions, at the highest levels of
the army's officer corps, and in other government institutions.
77
Con-
solidating the dual identity has proved to be difficult, however. Despite
Tito's efforts, the nationalities question was still a problematic issue at
the time of his death in May 1980.
The Serbs and Croats had different, self-styled interpretations of
what it meant to be a Yugoslav, Yugoslavism. For many Serbs, Yugo-
slavism was tantamount to preserving a unified Serb nation within a
single state. For the Croats, Yugoslavism was mainly a means to pro-
tect themselves against foreign powers. Not surprisingly, these inter-
pretations implied different forms for the Yugoslav state. For the
Serbs, a unitary Yugoslav state was the best safeguard against a future
dispersion of their nation. The Croats preferred a loose federation
within which they would be secure from Serb hegemony, and escape a
fate similar to that of interwar Yugoslavia. Absent Tito, these diverse
and conflicting views slowly, but inexorably, outdated Tito's idea of
Yugoslavism, and made their way to the political arena. By early 1990s,
the divisions dominated the political debate at the federal level.
8
These divisions, therefore, were not a creation of Serb or Croat con-
servatives as a rational strategy to counter challengers in the 1980s.
Rather, they have existed in Yugoslavia since its creation in 1918,
sometimes coming to the forefront and at other times seemingly wan-
ing. The persistence of the structure of ethnic cleavages is undoubtedly
one of the factors that contributed to sustain the Serb-Croat divisions
on what Yugoslavism meant. The ethnic cleavages never completely
waned from Yugoslavia's politics, but their political potency depended
on the social identities that the groups enacted.
78. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 45-78.
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RECONSTRUCTING THE SOCIAL IDENTITIES OF THE SERB
AND CROAT COMMUNITIES
Yugoslavia's complicated and persisting structure of ethnic cleavages is
not sufficient to explain the emergence of ethnic fear between the
Serbs and Croats in the 1990s. The major contours of the Yugoslav
ethnic map have not changed much since the country was created in
1918. Thus, there is no particular reason why these contours should
have led more effectively to violence in the 1990s. Moreover, many
other countries have similarly complicated contours of ethnic maps,
but have not witnessed the type of virulent ethnic fear that occurred in
Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Adverse changes in the international environment, particularly the
global economic recession that began in the late 1970s and the reper-
cussions of the end of the cold war in 1989-91, faced Yugoslavia with
daunting political and socio-economic problems. To address these
problems, changes to the status quo were needed which undoubtedly
threatened the position of conservative leaders. These threats, argues
Gagnon, prompted conservative Serb leaders to create a violent con-
flict to fend off domestic challengers. That is, the conflict was "a pur-
poseful and rational strategy planned by those most threatened by
changes to the structure of economic and political power, changes be-
ing advocated in particular by reformists within the ruling Serbian
communist party."
While this explanation is not wrong, it falls short of explaining three
important aspects of the emergence of ethnic fear and violence in
Yugoslavia. First, as the discussion below shows, the emergence of
ethnic fear was a multilateral construction, that is, both the Serb and
Croat (and other) leaders participated in the construction of ethnic
fear. Although the Serb conservatives may have started the process of
criticizing Tito's legacy and challenging the status quo, other ethnic
leaders quickly joined and opposed them in that endeavor. Second, the
feedback between the Serb and Croat (and Slovene) leaders within and
outside the federal institutions played an important role in stalling all
federal attempts to improve the system, and contributed to ignite the
79. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 47-113.
80. I focus somewhat on Gagnon's work because his set of hypotheses has many
aspects in common with a constructivist account of ethnic conflict, although he does
not frame his work in this way.
140.
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conflict. Third, as the example of Bosnia-Herzegovina shows, despite
high rates of interethnic marriage and good relations between neigh-
bors for many years, many Serbs, Croats, and Muslims became staunch
enemies, killing and massacring one another. In other words, an expla-
nation of the emergence of ethnic fear should be able to account for
why and how ethnic leaders succeeded in turning peaceful neighbors
into staunch enemies.
To be sufficient the explanation should also account for the shift in
social identity that occurred in both Serbia and Croatia. Gagnon is
right to argue that the process did not spontaneously begin from
within the ranks of the masses. He does not, however, explain how the
leaders were able to turn the process into an ethnicity-based conflict.
Nor does he explain how the leaders were able to turn personal fear
for political status into mass-internalized ethnic fear. Gagnon argues
that lites construct "the individual interest of the broader population
in terms of the threat to the community defined in ethnic terms," but
does not offer a satisfactory account of the construction process. He
neither specifies the mechanisms of construction, nor does he account
for the role that interethnic feedback plays in the process. While this
paper also highlights leaders' self-serving strategies, it argues that ethnic
fear did not emerge from a purposeful and rational strategy of Serbian
conservatives. Rather, it was the outcome of a social construction of
aggressive social identities of the Serb and Croat communities. Both
Serb and Croat (and Slovene) leaders actively participated in the con-
struction of identities, without, however, either controlling it, or fore-
seeing its conclusion. Explaining how such a construction of ethnic
fear occurred is the purpose of the remaining part of this section.
To begin with, the political and socio-economic problems that
Yugoslavia became engulfed in by the early 1980s played the roles of
facilitating conditions for a new brand of leadership style (but not nec-
essarily leaders) to emerge.
83
Tito's death in 1980 sent a systemic shock
into the federation's political system while the country was already
suffering from the impact of the global economic recession in the late
1970s. Tito had attempted to unify the different ethnic groups by using
the ideology of Yugoslavism and by creating a set of federal institu-
82. Ibid., 132.
83. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the cold war also
p
pirovided the context where many leaders remained in power, but transformed their
ladership style away from communist authoritarianism.
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tions. The latter should have purportedly mitigated the impact of eth-
nicity on the Yugoslav polity.
The federal constitution, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
(LCY), and the collective presidency, all faced daunting crises in the
1980s. The constitutional arrangement that Tito had implemented in
1974 came under attack from the Serb (and Albanian) quarters. A seg-
ment of the Serb lite began questioning the status quo immediately
after Tito's death, and increasingly challenged Tito's legacy of quasi-
confederal federalism. It perceived Tito's federalism as a plot, based on
the principle that a weak Serbia is tantamount to a strong Yugoslavia.
The conspiracy, the Serbs rationalized, was to keep them divided and
powerless in a state they believed they had done the most to create and
defend. The LCY became increasingly marginalized. Party members
and large numbers of citizens began losing confidence in the party's
capacity to resolve the country's difficulties. In parallel, republican and
provincial party organizations and elites became more autonomous,
unwilling to implement the decisions that their representatives had
worked out at the federal level.
85
Moreover, from Tito's death in 1980
until Milosevic's rise in 1987, regional party organizations increasingly
fragmented. The collective presidency also became entangled in the
same issues that faced the South Slavs in 1918 when they created the
first Yugoslaviathe nature of the political system.
Already in 1982 the federal government had faced harsh economic
conditions such as rising unemployment and prices, and an increasing
national debt. Beginning in 1987, austerity measures, wage freezes, and
plant closures led to industrial strikes of increasing magnitude. For the
next two years, government policy wavered between hard-line meas-
ures (such as threats of army intervention to end the strikes) and ac-
commodation (such as replacement of unpopular party and state fig-
ures). Succumbing to regional pressures, the federal government de-
layed macroeconomic reforms and resorted instead to incremental
economic renovation. Encouraged by early successes of his 1989 eco-
nomic reform program, Prime Minister Ante Markovic had believed
84. Dennison Rusinow, "The Avoidable Catastrophe," in Beyond Yugoslavia: Poli-
tics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet and Lju-
bisa S. Adamovich (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 13-37.
85. Sabrina P. Ramet, Balkan Babel: Politics, Culture, and Religion in Yugoslavia
(Boulder: Westview, 1992).
86. Ramet, Balkan Babel: Politics, Culture, and Religion in Yugoslavia; Woodward,
Balkan Tragedy, 82-145; Cohen, Broken Bonds, 79-225.
87. Cohen, Broken Bonds.
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that Yugoslavia's future could be ensured by improving the econ-
omy.
8
Neither establishing his party, however, nor postponing efforts
at macropolitical reorganization and concentrating instead on incre-
mental economic renovation increased the winning chances for Mark-
ovic's bid to salvage the country.
These difficult conditions were the context within which a new
leadership style based on ultranationalistic strategies and communal
mobilization emerged by the mid-1980s.
90
The new leadership style
was based on a revival and politicization of selected historical memo-
ries to create nationalist political myths. Simultaneously revived his-
torical memories and associated reified political myths, however,
clashed with each other. The clashing became an overriding condition,
strongly shaping intercommunity as well as community-federal rela-
tions. The lites were able to reach topmost leadership positions in
Serbia and Croatia and carry out their respective agendas. They suc-
ceeded in doing so because they were able to propagate and maintain
the perception that their views, rooted in nationalist political myths,
were the only viable solution to Yugoslavia's dire economic and politi-
cal conditions. Framing the problems in this way also contributed to
legitimating the new leadership style, and thereby defeating challenging
strategies. As a result, the political myths became lenses through which
the Serb and Croat (and Slovene) communities framed their future re-
lations with one another, as well as with the federal government.
The Serb lite. Serb political entrepreneurs and activists politicized
the memories of a selected number of important historical events, such
as the collapse of the fourteenth-century Serbian Kingdom,
91
the Serb
defeat in the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans in 1389,
92
and Us-
tasha (Croatian fascist party) and Nazi crimes against the Serbs during
the Second World War. Many Serb politicians and intellectuals drew
88. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 127.
89. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 72.
90. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy..
91. Michael B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804-1918, vol. 1 (New York:
Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1976); Stephen Clissold, A Short History of Yugoslavia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Fred Singleton, A Short History of the
Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
92. Thomas A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha Kosovo, 1389 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990); Ivo Banac, "The Dissolution of Yugoslav Historiography," in
Ramet and Adamovich, Beyond Yugoslavia, 39-65.
93. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha Kosovo, 1389; Banac, "The Dissolution of Yugoslav
Historiography"; Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
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an analogy between their struggle against the political decentralization
trend then occurring in Yugoslavia and the disintegration of the Ser-
bian medieval kingdom. The massacres committed during the Second
World War by the Nazis and the Ustasha became part of the political
struggle rhetoric between the Serbs and Croats in the late 1980s. Serb
political entrepreneurs and activists portrayed the Croats' persistent
quest for national autonomy and statehood as a conspiracy to divide
the Serb nation and eradicate its political unity.
95
Serb political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists did not create these
memories. Nor did they need to distort them. Rather, these memories
are part of what defines the identity of a Serb. Orthodox Serbs every-
where share the same idealized memory of their medieval empire,
which allegedly comprised all their ancestors in the fourteenth cen-
tury, under Tsar Dusan the Mighty. The medieval state continued to
live in the Serb memory through the ages. The Orthodox Church
sanctified it, and folk poetry idealized it. Most folk poems revolve
around two main themes: "the destruction of the Serbian empire" at
Kosovo and "the avenging of Kosovo." Every Serb is taught the epic
tales about the glories of the past and the sacred commandments to
"avenge Kosovo." The Battle of Kosovo occurred in 1389 between ad-
vancing strong Ottoman armies and a crumbling Serbian empire.
Within a very short time, the Battle of Kosovo began to be perceived
as the most important event in the historical memory of the Serbs.
98
The legendary and poetic interpretations of the Battle of Kosovo and
its martyred prince became over the centuries the core of the legend of
Kosovo. Kosovo came to be perceived as a sacred cradle of Serb cul-
ture, church, and statehood; the Serbs like to call it "our Jerusalem."
99
After the end of the Second World War and the establishment of a
Socialist Yugoslavia under Tito, there was a marked decline in public
comment on the meaning of Kosovo. Commemorations of the Battle
of Kosovo were confined to services in the Serb Orthodox Church,
thereby inflating the role that the Church had already played in pre-
94. Ivo Banac, "Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism: The Yugoslav Non-
Revolutions of 1989-1990," in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992), 168-87.
95. Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia.
96. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804-1918.
97. Ibid.; Ramet, Balkan Babel.
98. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha Kosovo, 1389.
99. Ibid.; Rusinow, "The Avoidable Catastrophe."
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serving the Kosovo legend. The historic meaning of Kosovo re-
gained tremendous value after Tito's death. The turning point came in
April 1981 when Albanian riots in the province of Kosovo stirred re-
sentment and bitterness among the Serbs. The Serb backlash was ar-
ticulated in a document under the title "Appeal for the Protection of
the Serb Inhabitants and their Holy Places in Kosovo," which several
Serb Orthodox priests prepared in 1982. On 26 February 1982, a group
of Orthodox priests from Kosovo published a letter commemorating
the events of Kosovo, accusing the Patriarchate's organ, Pravoslavlje, of
not taking proper action against the attacks. Reacting to the accusa-
tion, Pravoslavlje published on 15 May 1982 a lengthy "Appeal for the
Protection of the Serbian Inhabitants and their Holy Places in
Kosovo." Twenty-one priests signed the document. The letter asserted
that "the question of Kosovo is a question of the spiritual, cultural, arid
historical identity of the Serbian people...Kosovo is our memory, our
hearth, the focus of our being."
101
The collective memory on Kosovo received another strong impetus
from a 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. The
memorandum became a matter of creed for a variety of people and
groups, including the Serbian Writers' Association, news media, many
cultural figures, key figures in the Serbian Orthodox Church, and,
most significantly, the older generation in the Serbian countryside. In
spring 1989, Patriarch German gave an interview to the journal Poli-
tika in which he maintained that in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo the Ser-
bian army fought not only to protect the sovereignty of Tsar Lazar's
kingdom, but also to protect Christianity, human freedom, culture,
and all of Christian Europe. To arouse Serb emotions and
strengthen their attachments to Kosovo, the Orthodox Church con-
ducted an outdoor service to commemorate the Battle of Kosovo in
Bosnia in August 1989. The commemoration was rife with many na-
tionalist symbols that had dominated Serb historical memory and dis-
courses. Some 150,000 Orthodox Serbs gathered for the service, bear-
ing banners of various Orthodox Saints. Throughout Serbia, the leg-
end of Kosovo thus recaptured the hearts of Serbs. They dreamed of a
100. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha Kosovo, 1389.
101. Pravloslavlje, Belgrade, 15 May 1982.
102. Ivo Banac, "The Dissolution of Yugoslav Historiography," in Ramet and Ada-
movich, Beyond Yugoslavia, 39-65.
103. Pravloslavlje, Belgrade, 1 June 1989, 3-4.
104. Ramet, Balkan Babel.
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"liberation" of Kosovo. Bookstore shelves were full of books about
Kosovo, and musical artists dedicated their works to Kosovo. The re-
vival of the memories of Kosovo not only boosted nationalistic senti-
ments within the Serb population of Yugoslavia, but also created a
sense of insecurity for the Serb nation.
105
There was also a revived in-
terest and nostalgia for monarchs. The Serbian Patriarchate, for exam-
ple, invited Princess Jelena Karadjordjevic (who was living in Paris and
Peru) to attend the 600th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of
Kosovo. On 10 September 1989, the remains of King Lazar were cere-
moniously reburied at the Monastery of Ravanica. There was even talk
of transporting the last remains of King Peter n back to Yugoslavia, for
burial in Oplenac.
106
Similarly, the massacres committed during the Second World War
by the Nazis and the Ustasha have been engraved in the Serb historical
memory. The systematic destruction of hundreds of monasteries and
church buildings, the liquidation of hundreds of Serbian Orthodox
clergy, and the wartime deaths of at least six of the Church's top hier-
archy, all had lasting traumatic effects on the Serb clergy. Forced exile,
the liquidation, and the coercive conversion to Catholicism, of part of
the Orthodox population under the fascist Independent State of Croa-
tia deepened the identification of Serbdom with Orthodoxy in the
consciousness of the Serbian Church. Therefore, the Orthodox
Church came to view the resistance against the Axis powers' occupa-
tion as a nationalist cause of the Serb people against two evil forces:
Croats and Nazis.
1 7
These historical memories became a source for
wild charges and countercharges of past attempts at ethnic genocide
between the Serbs and Croats, and were thus used to justify new
rounds of killings. Many Serb elements in the Yugoslav army and Ser-
bia's government have often cited the wartime massacres as a justifica-
tion for their recent war against Croatia and Bosnia. Many Serbs also
interpreted the fact that Germany and Austria recently have been ac-
tive defenders of an independent Croatia as a confirmation of their
suspicion that Germans and Croats are probably targeting the Serb
people, as they did during the Second World War.
105. Sabrina P. Ramet, "The Serbian Church and the Serbian Nation," in Ramet and
Adamovich, Beyond Yugoslavia, 102-22.
106. Ibid.
108. Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia.
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Serb political entrepreneurs and activists transformed these historical
memories into political myths, especially after Slobodan Milosevic
seized power in 1987. The political myths created a sense of a besieged
Serb nation, not only in Kosovo but also in Croatia and elsewhere in
Yugoslavia. Milosevic quickly became the most visible advocate of
Serbian grievances and of the survival of Serbs as a unified nation
within a strong unitary Yugoslav state. He thereby conflated Yugosla-
via's integrity with the national security and survival of the Serbs a
threat to Yugoslavia's integrity was claimed to be tantamount to a
threat to the security and survival of the Serb nation. Milosevic used
ritualization as well as both coercive inducement and incentives to
propagate and entrench his political myths within the Serb population.
His approach was five-pronged: win the support of the Orthodox
Church, win the allegiance of Serb mobs, transform the educational
curriculum, eliminate or co-opt internal competitors and challengers,
and domesticate the Serbian press.
Milosevic skillfully channeled the yearning of the Orthodox Church
for its past status as a defender of the Serb nation. Before 1987, the
communists had suppressed the Church press, confiscated Church
land, harassed the clergy, and relegated the Orthodox Church itself to
a second-class status. The Serbian Church was conscious of its weak-
ness under Tito's regime, with only half the number of clergy it had
had before the Second World War and a tangibly diminished income.
Nevertheless, it did not allow the regime to co-opt it, and assumed an
opposition posture, openly from time to time, at least until 1987. Mi-
losevic pronounced the Church to be the spiritual component of the
Serb national identity, and extended and deepened his rapprochement
with it, granting the Serb Orthodox Church permits to build new
churches and restore old ones. The Church returned his favors and
played an active role in promoting Serb nationalism.
Milosevic also focused his attention on Serb concerns about the rise
of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo. In a visit to Kosovo in April 1987,
Milosevic assured the Serb population living there that "[N]o one will
be allowed to beat you! No one will be allowed to beat you!"
!
By
November 1988, Milosevic's message was rapidly spreading in Serbia.
He soon called for new constitutional amendments that would restore
Serbian authority over Kosovo and Vojvodina, and indeed reduced the
109. Ramet, "The Serbian Church and the Serbian Nation."
111. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 52.
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autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina by de facto annexing them to
Serbia. In 1989, he modified the Serbian constitution to reduce the de
jure autonomy status of the two provinces. The Orthodox Church
encouraged Milosevic, and published a Saint Vitus day message in its
newspaper, Glas Crkve, proclaiming that the proffered changes in the
Serbian constitution were but a restoration of state sovereignty to Ser-
bia over its natural territory.
Milosevic and his conservative coalition also used education as a me-
dium to propagate their ultranationaliste political myths. They intro-
duced the Cyrillic alphabet, ignoring years of increasingly shifting to-
ward the Latin alphabet. Encouraged by Milosevic, the Church sent a
letter to the Ministry of Education of Serbia, demanding the introduc-
tion of Orthodox religious education as a mandatory subject in all
elementary and secondary schools. In June 1990, as a gesture of good
will toward the Orthodox Church, the Serbian government replaced
Marxism in school curricula with religious instruction.
Milosevic disposed of many prominent political figures in Serbia
(such as his predecessor and long-time friend, Ivo Stambolic) to further
consolidate his power within the Serb community. He accused them of
becoming either too assertive or too compromised. To win their con-
tinuing support, however, he gave them important and lucrative posi-
tions in business as well as other nonpolitical occupations. He also
skillfully channeled the congruence of interests between his political
goals and those of the Yugoslav army.
116
At the head of his strategy,
Milosevic domesticated the news media and channeled them toward
promoting his political myths. In September 1990, for example, the
Serbian daily Politika published an article which called for a lifting of
the Titoist proscription of a nationalist role for the Church. The arti-
cle praised the Serbian Church for its service to the Serb nation, and
declared Orthodoxy the spiritual basis and most essential component
of the Serb national identity. In general, "nationalist media manipu-
lation was the centerpiece of Milosevic's successful strategy for defeat-
112. FBIS-EEU, 4 August 1989, 43.
113. Ramet, "The Serbian Church and the Serbian Nation."
115. Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolu-
tion, 1919-1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Djilas, "Fear Thy
Neighbor: The Breakup of Yugoslavia"; Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and Interna-
tional Conflict: The Case of Serbia."
116. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia."
117. Politika, 2 September 1990, 18.
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ing liberal reformers in the scramble for both mass and lite sup-
port."
118
Never completely controlling all media outlets, Milosevic had
nevertheless under his supervision the state television station and Bel-
grade's three major newspapers. More independent media were indi-
rectly coerced and constrained in their scope.
The Croat lite. Croat political entrepreneurs and activists revived
and highlighted the memories of a legendary longing for statehood,
images of their struggle against the Serb domination during the first
Yugoslavia (1919-41), and images of large numbers of Croats whom
the Serb Chetniks killed during the Second World War.
121
Croats' con-
tinuous demands for more autonomy and recognition of their aspira-
tions and self-proclaimed historic rights were legitimated by a belief in
a Serb conspiracy to establish hegemony over Yugoslavia. The threat
allegedly assumed three forms: a demographic displacement of Croats
by Serbs, an effort to split Croatia in two, and a "Serbianization" of
the Croatian language. Croat leaders transformed these concerns
into political myths to mobilize their fellow nationals against Serbian
nationalists. As in the case of Serbia, Croat political entrepreneurs and
ethnic activists of the 1980s and 1990s did not create Croats' historical
memories. Nor did they need to distort them to fit their self-serving
goals. Indeed, the Croat national question has remained a persistent
issue throughout both the Kingdom of and socialist Yugoslavia.
Tito's political liberalization of the 1960s, for example, which intro-
duced the doctrine of self-management, created an atmosphere condu-
cive to a reemergence of the Croat national question. Reform advo-
cates in Croatia used the proposed doctrine of economic self-
management to justify their demands for greater political autonomy.
Economic self-management, they rationalized, could only be achieved
through a decentralization of the economy and a simultaneous devolu-
118. Snyder and Ballentine, "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," 26.
119. Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-
Herzegovina (London: Bath Press, 1994).
120. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia";
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Thompson, Forging War.
121. Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution,
1919-1953.
122. Jill A. Irvine, The Croat Question: Partisan Politics in the Formation of the Yugo-
slav Socialist State (Boulder: Westview, 1993).
124. Irvine, The Croat Question; Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia,
1962-1991.
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tion of political decision-making power to the republics. The charac-
ter of the federal system became the focus of intense debates between
1965 and 1971 and led to a series of reforms, which fundamentally re-
structured the Yugoslav political system. The League of Communists
of Croatia (LCC) worked to increase the autonomy of Croatia's party
organizations and other institutions. LCC reformers emphasized the
primacy of Croatian statehood and the importance of placing Croatian
political interests above those of the Yugoslav state. A revision of
Croatia's constitution was carried out in fall 1971. This general atmos-
phere of reforms encouraged more demands relating to the Croatian
question.
Early in the 1970s, there was a strong Croat revival of ethnic histori-
cal memory. During 1970 a popular movement emerged, talking
openly about the grievances and claims that the communist regime had
repressed since 1945. Henceforth, the Croats began reexamining their
history, searching for lost Croat heroes whom the communist regime
had intentionally ignored. Stjepan Radie (d. 1928), for example, foun-
der of the Croatian Peasant Party, became a legendary figure. In
August 1971, the cultural committee of the League of Students of
Croatia erected a commemorative plaque in his honor on the facade of
the Zagreb house where he had lived and died. Similarly, the coastal
town of Sibenik canceled plans to erect a monument to the victims of
fascism, opting instead for a statue of the Croatian king, Petar Kresimir
IV. There also were efforts to rehabilitate a nineteenth-century Croa-
tian military governor, Josip Jelacic, and restore him to the Valhalla of
Croatian gods and heroes. An equestrian statue of Ban Josip Jelacic,
which the communists had removed from the Square of the Republic
in July 1947, was eventually restored. Accompanying this wave of re-
discovering the past, traditional patriotic songs of the Croatian home-
land were revived and could often be heard publicly in Croatia's res-
taurants. Vice Vukov became Croatia's most popular singer in 1971
because of his songs about Croatia.
When the new style of leadership emerged in the 1980s in Yugosla-
via, the Croat leaders found a set of historical memories ready to be
used as raw materials for nationalist mythmaking. As their counter-
125. Irvine, The Croat Question.
126. Ibid.
128. The regime banned at least two of his concerts. Ramet, Nationalism and Feder-
alism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991.
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parts in Serbia used ritualization, coercive inducement, and various
incentives to rally support for ultranationalistic political myths, the
Croat leaders also used various means to win the support of the Croat
community. In addition, the process of democratization was important
in the Croatian elite's bid to win popular support. The electorate in-
ternalized the ultranationalistic political myths through electoral cam-
paigns and ballot boxes.
Croatian leaders such as Franco Tudjman launched a campaign of
mobilization of the Croat nation through ultranationalistic propa-
ganda. In December 1989, Croat activists organized a petition signed
by 25,000 Croatian citizens demanding the legalization of different po-
litical parties and free elections. The communist leadership submitted
that the single-party system had exhausted its potentialities, and moved
to establish a multiparty system in the country.
129
By mid-March 1990,
Croatia had formally legalized the creation of political organizations
outside the communist fold and had scheduled competitive elections.
Holding democratic elections opened up the space of political contes-
tating, and created an opening for ultranationalistic politics. Franjo
Tudjman, leader of the Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ), built his
campaign around promises to assert the priority of Croatia's national
interests. The HDZ appealed directly to the voters' nationalist senti-
ments and to their dissatisfaction with the communist regime. Its core
program was the affirmation of Croatian national identity and sover-
eignty, though without calling for outright secession from Yugoslavia.
In addition, Tudjman called for Croats and Muslims living in Bosnia-
Herzegovina to be included in the new Croatia, thereby echoing a
widely held Croatian view. Elections held in late April and May gave
Tudjman's alliance an impressive victory. The HDZ won a total of 205
out of 356 seats in Croatia's legislature, including a majority in each of
the body's three chambers. Most Serbs in Croatia voted heavily against
the HDZ, supporting instead either the communists or an increasingly
vocal, nationalistic Serbian Democratic Party (SDS).
131
On 30 May
1990, deputies in the Croatian legislature elected Tudjman as the re-
public's president, by a count of 281 out of 331 votes cast. A byprod-
uct of the election campaign was a mobilization of the Croatian com-
130. Linz and Stepan, "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet
Union, and Yugoslavia."
131. FBIS-EEU, 26 June 1992, 18.
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munity around their long-time aspiration to national sovereignty and
autonomy.
Reciprocating interethnic strategies. Elites' interethnic strategies rein-
forced their respective intraethnic strategies, thereby strengthening the
process of mobilization of the Serb and Croat communities. The future
of Kosovo played an important role in the interethnic strategies of
both Serb and Croat leaders. Milosevic called for new constitutional
amendments that would restore Serbia's hegemony over Kosovo and
Vojvodina by abrogating the autonomous status of the two prov-
inces. In parallel, Milosevic-controlled media in Belgrade launched a
propaganda campaign against the Croats, accusing them of nurturing a
conspiracy against the Serbs because they opposed the annexation of
Kosovo. Although the nationalists in Croatia had persistently warned
of an impending "Serbianization," the leaders of the LCC nevertheless
avoided any major clash with the Serbian leadership throughout the
late 1980s. The delicate relationship of Croatia's ethnic majority with
the Serb minority in Croatia heightened the Croatian elite's prudence
regarding the Croatian question. The Croatian leaders nonetheless ac-
cused Milosevic of "Stalinist" and "unitarist" tendencies when Mi-
losevic reduced the autonomy of Kosovo and began calling for more
political centralization at the federal level. The Croat leaders alleged
that Serbian politicians were aiming to destabilize Croatia. Serb and
Croat ultranationalistic leaders increasingly engaged one another in a
rhetorical war, accusing each other while self-justifying their respective
actions and positions in historical grievances and self-acclaimed rights.
Demonizing the "other" became an interethnic routine.
Serb and Croat social identities therefore became increasingly cast in
terms of sharply opposed, self-proclaimed national historical rights and
grievances and irreconcilably construed political myths. The loyalties
of large segments of these communities were recast in such a way that
there was a conflation of individual citizenship rights and ethnic rights.
Political loyalty to the federation eroded, and nationality-defined po-
litical loyalties gradually replaced it. A public opinion survey con-
ducted in mid-1990 reveals that only 48 percent of Croats gave more
allegiance to Yugoslavia than to their republic. At the same time, 71
percent of Serbs still had strong political loyalty to Yugoslavia. This
high percentage of Serb support for Yugoslavia, however, came from a
belief that the fate of the Serb nation and Yugoslavia's integrity cannot
132. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
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be separated, a belief that Croats have resented since the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia. The same data also showed that most Croats (72 percent)
did not support the notion that federal constitutional provisions
should have precedence over republican ones, in contrast to most Serbs
(83 percent) who did.
Therefore, by 1990, the relations between Serbia and Croatia (and
between Serbia and Slovenia) were increasingly viewed from a zero-
sum perspective. Aggressive rhetoric and practices incited aggressive
responses. The more assertive each group became in its ultranationalis-
tic project, the more it intruded on politics in the other republic, and
the less prospect there was of reaching any compromise on divisive
issues. "Other republics or the federal government were increasingly
identified as external enemies to be defeated."
134
Reinforcing the role of federal state institutions. Yugoslavia possessed
an array of federal institutions such as the collective presidency, the
LCY, and the Yugoslav National Army (YNA). Why did these institu-
tions fail effectively to stall or reverse the emergence of ethnic fear?
Instead of stalling the rise of ethnic politics and fear, the institutions of
the federal state became arenas where aggressive ethnic politics was
reinforced and where the logic of ethnic fear was anchored. By increas-
ingly becoming arenas of aggressive ethnic politics, state institutions
contributed to their own weakening and eventually their complete
marginalization. The more leaders asserted their ethnic strategies
within the federal state institutions, the more the institutions became
incapable of resolving the divisive issues among the major groups
(namely, the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), and the more intransigent
the political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists became in their zero-
sum strategies. The resonance between lites' strategies and the weak-
ening of the institutions reinforced the belief that the federation could
not be trusted to protect group rights and security. Thus, each group
believed it had to take matters into its own hands. The evolution of
the collective presidency best illustrates this dynamic.
The collective presidency continued to serve as the executive head
after Tito's death. It brought together delegates of the federal units
(one per federal unit), who rotated annually in the office of president
of the presidency. The members of this body were responsible to the
assemblies of their respective federal units, which elected them. By
133. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 172-73.
134. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, 113.
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1990, the number of delegates in the collective presidency was effec-
tively reduced to fiveSerbian, Slovene, Croatian, Macedonian and
Bosnian representatives. Milosevic had transformed Montenegro, Vo-
jvodina, and Kosovo into satellites of Serbia, assuring himself the sup-
port of their delegates. Milosevic's ability to control a majority of votes
(four) in the collective presidency was one of the main factors that
paralyzed the institution.
Despite these flaws, the collective presidency nonetheless convened a
series of meetings which revolved around four divisive issues: the status
and value of maintaining the Yugoslav federation, the rights of the re-
publics to secede from the existing federation, the character of the re-
publican borders, and the most desirable type of future political ar-
rangements among the republics. Leaders from Slovenia and Croatia
proposed a confederation of sovereign republics. This proposal was
based on the principle that the future organization of the country must
preserve both the sovereignty of each republic and the inviolability of
the existing republic's borders. For Serbia and Montenegro, the Yugo-
slav federation not only remained a political reality but needed to be
strengthened, albeit perhaps in a different form. They both completely
rejected the notion that a republic could unilaterally proclaim its ad-
ministrative borders to be state borders. The Serbian leadership be-
lieved that Serbia's and Yugoslavia's interests were inextricably linked;
a dissolution of Yugoslavia was tantamount to a territorial fragmenta-
tion of the Serb nation. The Muslim leadership of Bosnia simultane-
ously advocated the principles of republican sovereignty and the invio-
lability of borders within a unified Yugoslav state. Macedonia agreed
with Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia on the issues of sovereignty and
borders, but wanted strong economic and security relations among the
republics. The result of these irreconcilable positions was a paralysis of
the collective presidency and a shunning of the federal prime minister.
The LCY did not fare any better than the collective presidency. The
reconstruction of political loyalties marginalized the LCY, especially
after the onset of democratic elections in most of the republics. Despite
all attempts to strengthen the popularity and legitimacy of the league
during Tito's life, the institution relatively quickly eroded after his
death. The competitive elections held in Yugoslavia's republics from
April through December 1990 constituted a major turning point in the
party's evolution. Already fragmented, the LCY was either swept from
power or forced to enter into a dialogue with the opposition in every
region of the country. Popularly legitimated political leaders, who
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were devoted to sharply conflicting visions of Yugoslavia's constitu-
tional and political future, were governing Serbia, Slovenia, and Croa-
tia. Democratic party politics, however flawed in itself, reinforced
what the collective presidency was doing to the federation: a shunning
of the federal institutions. Ethnic politics was thus being reinforced not
only from within the collective presidency, but also, and perhaps more
so, through democratic party politics and elections.
Nor was the YNA, a prominent symbol of the Titoist legacy and a
manifestation of the idea of Yugoslavism, spared from the devastating
dilemmas that faced other federal institutions. If the collective presi-
dency was paralyzed from within and the LCY was marginalized
through elections, the YNA became polarized and what remained of it
increasingly took sides in upcoming conflicts. Under the 1974 constitu-
tion, the army was mandated to use all necessary means to protect the
country and its system of socialist self-management. Because of this
privileged position, the YNA was slowly drawn into the crisis develop-
ing in Yugoslavia. Initially, the army was staunchly opposed to politi-
cal pluralism; the military leaders saw political pluralism as a direct
attack on the constitution. Agitation for more freedom in Slovenia in
1988, for example, prompted the army to take relatively strong actions
against Slovene dissidents. Eventually the military, if reluctantly, ac-
cepted a de facto political liberalization. The army changed its position
when it saw the federal and most regional political authorities belatedly
accepting the principle of party pluralism, in the wake of the East
European wave of democratic revolution. When the new Slovene
leadership asserted Slovenia's political sovereignty in 1990, however,
and began groundwork toward independence, the YNA strongly op-
posed such goals. The Slovene authorities categorically refused to abide
by the federal directives and saw the decision as an interference in the
republic's affairs. The standoff ultimately led to a confrontation be-
tween newly proclaimed Slovene forces and the YNA in June 1991. The
YNA failure to restore the authority of the federal government in
Slovenia was a bad precedent for the army. The army's constitutional
mandate to protect Yugoslavia's territorial integrity would soon be
challenged in Croatia too. On 25 June Slovenia and Croatia declared
135. For a comparative study of the effect of election sequencing in multiethnic
states, see Linz and Stepan, "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the
Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia."
136. James Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (New York: St.
Martin's, 1992).
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independence from socialist Yugoslavia. The YNA lost its reputation as
an impartial institution by acting without the approval of the federal
prime minister. Slovenes, Croats, and subsequently Muslims came to
perceive it as a tool in the hands of Serb ultranationalists.
The stalling of federal institutions and the construction of aggressive
social identities by the Serb and Croat communities occurred simulta-
neously, and mutually reinforced one another. Had the federal institu-
tions not reached such a state of weakness, the nationalistic leaders
would not have been able to portray their strategies as the only routes
of salvation for their respective communities. The federal institutions,
however, did not weaken independently of the lites' strategies.
Rather, the federal institutions were part of the media and resources
that facilitated the leaders' strategies. The simultaneous evolution of
the weakening of state institutions and lites' reciprocating strategies
cannot be separated from one another; they mutually constituted one
another. Ethnic leaders enacted new strategies in the 1980s that re-
duced the effectiveness and legitimacy of state institutions, increasingly
weakening them. Weakened institutions, in turn, reinforced the very
leaders' strategies. The mutual feedback between lites' strategies and
increasingly weakening institutions ultimately led to a stalling of state
institutions and to pivotal roles for ethnic leaders in interethnic rela-
tions. Because ethnic leaders defined interethnic relations as zero-sum
games (which reciprocated strategic practices reinforced) and because
their respective constituencies internalized such beliefs, the opposing
groups began to see each other as enemies. Ethnic fear took hold,
thereby weakening state institutions even more.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNIC FEAR
A
STANDARD rational-choice approach to ethnic cooperation and
conflict suggests that social actors use ethnicity to organize group
political action if individual benefits are expected to outweigh the
costs. Such an approach to the study of ethnic politics and conflict un-
doubtedly provides many insights on the strategic problems that occur
in intergroup interactions. Rationalist explanations, however, bracket a
fundamental aspect of ethnic conflicts, the variability of group identity
and its impact on interethnic interactions. This paper suggests a theo-
retical framework as a bridge between rational-choice and structural
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analyses of ethnic conflict by looking at how group social identity
changes and its impact on interethnic relations.
The argument is that social identitya set of meanings that an actor
attributes to itself while taking the perspective of othersendows in-
terethnic interactions with predictability around a set of expectations.
Changes in the social identities of ethnic groups destabilize established
patterns of interethnic relations and create uncertainty about future
interethnic relations. Such a perspective does not minimize the role of
political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists. To the contrary, the paper
argues that as political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists modify the
practices and modes of interethnic interaction, which enact their group
social identities, an ingroup-intergroup dynamic takes hold. This dy-
namic can produce aggressive social identitiesgroups consider one
another as enemies, thereby creating ethnic fear and a strong potential
for ethnic violence. Ethnic leaders, however, are not in control of the
process of reconstructing their groups' social identities. The process is
"social," and feedback mechanisms between interacting groups are es-
sential to its evolution. Nor can the leaders be effective agents outside
the realm of opportunities and constraints that existing social struc-
tures define. Salient ethnic historical memories, the structure of ethnic
cleavages, and state institutional arrangements strongly shape the in-
group-intergroup dynamic. The point is not whether leaders are op-
portunistic; they are most of the time. Rather, the issue is that the so-
cial structural environment constitutes what is "ethnically realizable."
This constructivist approach has a number of implications for the
research agenda on ethnic conflicts. First, a constructivist perspective
not only allows to formulate causal explanations as the rationalist or
structuralist approaches do, it also permits a formulation of constitu-
tive arguments that neither a rationalist nor a structuralist approach
can offer. Constitutive claims are concerned with how entities are put
together rather than with the relation between independent and de-
pendent variables. This does not, however, make these claims less
"theoretical" than causal arguments. Constitutive theories imply hy-
potheses about the world that can and should be tested. Addressing
constitutive issues is an important piece of research in itself. Any causal
explanation of ethnic conflict will be underspecified without good
theoretical descriptions of how social dilemmas and identities are con-
stituted or put together. Constitutive and causal arguments reinforce
one another.
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Second, it is important t o know from a normative and policy view-
poi nt how things are put together. This would show multiple ways t o
realize a phenomenon, some of which might be normatively preferable
or practically more feasible. More specifically, ethnic conflict is not an
immutable feature of multiethnic societies. The social practices of eth-
nic lites and their respective groups can create strategic dilemmas and
drag a multiethnic society into conflict, or alternatively build peaceful
societies. Both ethnic peace and conflict are socially constructed. Thus,
by showing how t he social identities of ethnic groups can take differ-
ent forms, we may open up desirable political possibilities that would
have otherwise been foreclosed.
Third, a constructivist approach shifts the focus from ethnic identity
per se t o t he social meanings that this identity acquires in different so-
cietal contexts. This goes a long way in helping t o explain the occur-
rence of ethnic conflicts in certain multiethnic societies and the peace-
ful relations between long-established ethnic communities in others. A
constructivist framework that focuses on t he concept of social identity
of an ethnic group can explain, for example, t he long ethnic peace in
Switzerland as well as t he genocide in Rwanda. A constructivist enter-
prise is thus "optimistic" in the sense that constructivist theorizing
opens up windows of thinking about various societal issues that a ra-
tionalist approach would foreclose.
Fourt h, a constructivist approach differs with standard rational-
choice-based explanations on another fundamental conception of eth-
nic conflict. Standard rationalist theories argue that "competition for
resources typically lies at the heart of ethnic conflict."
138
A constructiv-
ist perspective strongly qualifies this assertion by emphasizing the im-
portance of interethnic meanings more than competition for scarce
resources. Shifting the focus of study from "ethnicity" per se t o social
identity highlights t he explanatory power of t he notion of intersubjec-
tivesharedmeanings as a fundamental "unit" of analysis of ethnic
conflicts. More precisely, the eruption of ethnic conflicts crucially de-
pends on a transformation of the intersubjective meanings that under-
pin interethnic relations. Nei t her the occurrence of conflict nor
138. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear," 44; see also: Hardin, One for All, 144-
47.
139. As Gibbons put it, any "attempt to understand the intersubjective meanings
embedded in social life is at the same tune an attempt to explain why people act the
way they do" (Michael T. Gibbons, "Introduction: The Politics of Interpretation," in
Interpreting Politics, ed. Michael T. Gibbons [New York: New York University Press,
1987], 3).
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peace can be fully understood without considering such meanings. Re-
solving ethnic conflicts is essentially to change the intersubjective
meanings that underpin interethnic relations. Rationalist approaches
are agnostic about the causal role of such meanings, and, hence, cannot
fully explain various patterns of ethnic peace and outbursts of ethnic
hatreds. Emphasizing intersubjective meanings, however, does not en-
tail slighting other factors such as socio-economic issues. It means that
the intersubjective meanings define and underpin other factors. Similar
political arrangements and socio-economic conditions can have differ-
ent implications for interethnic relations under different intersubjec-
tive meanings.
A constructivist approach to the study of ethnic conflicts fundamen-
tally differs with a rationalist perspective on the issue of policy impli-
cations. For rationalist approaches, the management of ethnic conflict
has "no permanent resolutions, only temporary fixes. In the end, eth-
nic groups are left without reliable safety nets....We can only hope to
contain ethnic fears, not permanently eliminate them." A construc-
tivist perspective sees both ethnic fear and trust as socially constructed
within existing social structures, and, hence, both ethnic fear and peace
can be socially deconstructed. The dilemmas that sometimes occur
in multiethnic societies are not immutable. They are socially con-
structed. They can be contained as well as resolved. The core argument
of this paper is that ethnic fear (and by extension ethnic violence)
emerges when aggressive social identities are constructed. This leads to
two policy implications. First, ethnic fear can be preempted by revers-
ing the process of constructing aggressive identities. Second, if it is too
late to do so, ethnic fear can be alleviated by deconstructing aggressive
social identities and constructing nonaggressive ones. This can be ac-
complished by simultaneously focusing on the strategies of relevant
ethnic (state and challenging) elites and on the existing social structures
that empower or constrain these elites.
More precisely, lites' strategies of constructing and propagating po-
litical myths that challenge the interethnic status quo should be dealt
140. Lake and Rothchild, "Containing Fear," 57.
141. Fearon and Laitin, who present a much more optimistic scenario than Lake and
Rothchild, argue that "despite the greater tensions, peaceful and cooperative relations
are by far the more typical outcome than is large-scale violence" (Fearon and Laitin,
"Explaining Interethnic Cooperation," 715). As pointed out earlier, however, Fearon
and Laitin's explanation of interethnic cooperation, although very insightful, still stops
short of considering the role that group social identity plays in interethnic cooperation
and violence.
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with by discrediting the lites' bid to create and propagate conflictual
political myths and by promoting political myths that induce cohabita-
tion, toleration, and cooperation. This is a battle of constructing inter-
subjective meanings, which can be fought effectively only on the same
grounds with appropriate means. Although force and coercion might
stop ethnic lites from constructing and propagating conflictual politi-
cal myths, such a policy can be a costly one. Political myths that aim at
constructing aggressive social identities should be countered with
stronger and more appealing political myths that promote nonaggres-
sive social identities. In addition, efforts should be made to recast the
role of the three social structuressalient historical memories, ethnic
cleavages, and state institutional arrangementswhich strongly shape
the process of constructing aggressive social identities.
First, actors willing to preserve ethnic peace should reinterpret sali-
ent ethnic memories in ways that highlight toleration, cooperation,
and peace, not conflict. People and groups opposed to ethnic conflict
should engage in a battle, the purpose of which is to prevent ethnic
lites who are bidding for conflict from appropriating the interpreta-
tion of salient historical memories. Focusing only on material incen-
tives or "rationalistic" discourse would miss an important part of the
battle, and would thereby leave "the field of meanings" open to ethnic
bidders. The point is not to uncover the biased and nonobjective read-
ing of historical memory. Historical memory is inherently interpreta-
tive, and no interpretation is final. Elites opposed to ethnic conflict
and who advocate peaceful coexistence should engage in a reinterpreta-
tion of historical memory to create more integrative political myths.
Second, the role of ethnic cleavages should be addressed through
various strategies. Ethnic cleavages cannot be ignored if alleviating
ethnic fear is to succeed. Short of coercive policies that would only
enhance ethnic fear, state lites and other parties interested in changing
the conditions that cause conflict need to pay attention to the political
role of ethnic cleavages in the present, and as a structure looming over
the stability of future arrangements. Ethnic cleavages exist in most (if
not all) countries, and cannot be wished away, but their intersubjective
meanings can be recast toward more toleration and coexistence, if not
complete integration. The negative effects of ethnic cleavages can be
142. For good reviews, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 601-52; Esman,
Ethnic Politics, 216-40.
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alleviated by redefining their intersubjective meanings, not by imple-
menting some sort of an "ethnic cleansing, liberal style."
Third, state institutional arrangements play an important role in the
emergence of ethnic fear and, thus, actors opposed to ethnic conflict
cannot ignore or minimize this role. A state whose institutions are
strong can always find ways to preempt ethnic conflict, either by co-
opting challenging groups, or by minimizing their impacts on the pol-
ity as a whole. Too strong an institutional arrangement, however,
might also contribute to enhance ethnic fear. Therefore, actors op-
posed to ethnic conflict should be more aware of the intricate role that
institutional arrangements (as a structural context) play in the recon-
struction of social identities. This issue is the more pertinent in in-
stances where state institutional arrangements are in flux, such as dur-
ing democratization. Although the extant literature has dealt much
with the cost-benefit analysis that ethnic groups under conditions of
democratization engage in, there is still a need for a constructivist
"take" on these issues. A successful engineering of new state institu-
tions can be achieved only if it is socially constructed by all relevant
ethnic actors. Two contemporary cases illustrate this problem, South
Africa and Algeria. Whereas in South Africa the democratization proc-
ess was an all-inclusive social construction, in Algeria the democratiza-
tion process began as a government strategy, and remained so. Peace, if
still somewhat precarious, has been socially constructed in South Af-
rica. In contrast, a six-year-old violent conflict with a cost of tens of
thousands of human lives and billions in material destruction has been
socially constructed in Algeria. In South Africa, democratization began
as a social construction and proceeded as such. In Algeria, democratiza-
143. David Laitin introduces this expression in his Identity in Formation: The Rus-
sian Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornelf University Press, 1998),
chap. 12. Ethnic cleansing, liberal style stands for a policy which proposes that "groups
whose leaders can make credible claims to being a nation should be rewarded with
plebiscites, recognition, and aid packages to help the process of state consolidation"
ibid.). As strongly argued by Laitin, such a policy would readily encourage ethnic
cleansing and violence.
144. All these policy implications depend on a timely mixture of actors and re-
sources. Timely preempting the construction, or deconstructing, of aggressive social
identities of the major ethnic groups is crucial. Resources are also needed to carry out
the tasks. To counter a given reinterpretation of historical memories, for example,
actively involved actors need public media resources that would convey their message
to a variety of social groups.
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tion remained in the hands of one group of social actorsthe army and
its supportersand led to a social construction of violence.
145. For a comparative study of the evolution of democratization in Algeria and
South Africa, see Arfi, "Democratization and Communal Politics."
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Badredine Arfi - Ethnic Fear, The Social Construction of Insecurity (1998)

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