1

Does Globalization Breed Ethnic Violence?

Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant professor,
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
gderlug@Northwestern.edu

The tragic events like the September 2001 attacks on the monumental embodiments of
American superpower or the capture of hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002
forced wide-ranging public debate on the darker aspects of globalization.1 A direct
causal link between globalization and ethnic/religious violence is assumed on all sides,
albeit in a highly polemical fashion, as the result of either Western cultural arrogance
and capitalist domination or the maladjustment of Third World societies to market
discipline and liberal cosmopolitan modernity.
The focus on globalization and ethnic violence suggests that, after a hiatus of
nearly a quarter century the problems of world underdevelopment and its discontents
once again emerge centrally on the agenda. And once again we are confronted with
essentially the old question: does modernization breed revolutions and the dangers of
totalitarianism? Today, after the market optimism of the nineties has receded, it is
phrased like this: does globalization breed violent anti-Enlightenment reactions? Can
democracy take a root in non-Western societies? Nasty questions indeed.

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Alternative Explanation
My main proposition is that the violent ethnic politics of recent years did not
arise in a direct reaction to globalization. Rather, these were desperate and particularist
attempts to cope with the world-wide wave of dismantling the developmental regimes
(see Evans 1995 Ch.10) which in the extreme examples amounted to the collapse of
states (Bunce 1998). These states became impossible to sustain because they could no
longer deliver on the main legitimating promise of progress and national development,
i.e. the fairly rapid equalization of socioeconomic conditions in their countries with
those of core capitalist states.
To put it differently, the peoples of former Yugoslavia, the Chechens and
Abkhazes in the Caucasus, the warlord factions in the Congo, or the Islamist radicals in
Algeria went into fighting not over the ancient animosities or in defense of their
cultural identities challenged by the new big MacWorld (see Barber 1996; and its
critique by Beck, Greer, and Ragin 2000). They all fought, fight, and will fight, in
different ways, over what to do about their suddenly delegitimated states and the
drastically devalued modern economies that these states have once nurtured and
sheltered. Moreover the conflicts are fought over the gravely serious issues of who will
profit, who will bear the costs, and who will support whom in the new system of
capitalist property rights (Stinchcombe forthcoming, pp. 10-11).
My further claim is that ethnic violence is neither an automatic reaction rooted
in the historically consecrated collective identities nor, in fact, is it the first choice of the
people who might get involved in such violence. The likelier first choice would be
democratization, albeit not the shallow democratization limited to the electoral

3
procedure and competition among the elite actors. It is rather the deep a hardnosed realist would say utopian social democratization that seeks to open a broadly
equitable access to the flows of power and goods, give voice and ensure the selfmanagement rights of the work, residential, and cultural communities. Historically,
this has been a predominantly proletarian agenda of democratization in modern
Western states (see Tilly 1997). In the past, it could coalesce in some political form in
the situations where the wage labor, from manual workers to the educated wageearning specialists, found themselves in a position to effectively lay claims on modern
states. This became structurally possible in the late nineteenth century and especially
after the depression of the 1930s and the world wars, when proletarians came to
prevail among the core states military recruits, employees, and voting citizens
(Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Steinmetz 1993; Tilly 1997).
Even more than in the core capitalist states, analogous structural conditions for
proletarian democratization were created in the Soviet Union and later in many other
revolutionary industrializing states. Arguably for the time of their duration these states
remained

the

evolving

post-revolutionary

dictatorships

that

practiced

the

propagandistic dissimulation of peoples democracy. Nevertheless the shortage

economy of rapidly industrializing states also created constant need for worker
enthusiasm and micro-group autonomy to overcome anarchy in production (or, for
that matter, in fighting serious wars), while the party-state apparatus at the point of
production rendered transparent the actual exercise of power and class inequalities
(Burawoy and Lukcs 1992; Lee 2002).

4
It has been a long-standing Trotskyist expectation that socialist proletarians will
eventually rebel against the state bureaucracy (Deutscher 1953). This prediction,
though not entirely wrong, willfully overlooked two other possibilities. First, that the
less ideologically committed fractions of technocratic managers could dump the
defunct ideology, turn the state assets that they administered into privately or
corporate owned capital, and seek profitable alliances with the global capitalist
partners (see Eyal, Szelnyi, and Townsley 1998; Solnick 1998; Woodruff 1999; and
King 2001). Secondly, that the industrializing state can simply collapse, which removes
the main object of proletarian claim-making and the key condition of democratization.
State breakdown makes likely lateral struggles among shifting coalitions of locallyembedded contenders. These are commonly viewed as ethnic conflicts because
enterprising patrons, emerging from all ranks of society, advertise their intention to
protect a particular community. This did the Serbian communist apparatchik Milosevic
at the famous 1987 rally in Kosovo (Glenny 1999), the rogue Soviet General Dudayev in
1991 in Chechnya (Lieven 1998), and various rag-tag warlords in Africa (Reno 1998). It
is a central message in Al-Qaedas propaganda of global jihad.
Still, why are these conflicts ethnic? Few alternatives remain after the agenda of
state-bound democratization became pointless because of the evident erosion of state
institutions; because the state-created industrial assets and bureaucracies, which
embedded the existence of proletarian groups, turned into liability in the face of global
markets; and because structural unemployment now verges on permanent
lumpenization. The Serbs, Chechens, Algerians or, for that matter, the presumably
quiescent Chinese, do not have much in common except that they all live in the world

5
locales that are incompletely industrialized and only partially and recently urbanized,
and thus where the modern formal institutions are often superficial or downright
superfluous (Woodruff 2000). In such locales they know from daily practice how much
ones life chances depend on the access to various patrons and informal networks
(Migdal 1988; Parish and Michelson 1996). And when these people get convinced that
they face the prospect of marginalization in the new, competitive-restrictive set of
arrangements, they sometimes fight back given they can find a mobilizing platform.

Marxist-Leninist Developmentalism
The Soviet trajectory presents the original and the longest sequence of
antisystemic developmentalism. A strong tendency toward democratization first
emerged after the death of Stalin. It was the paradoxical extension of the two
concurrent processes of class formation that have originated with industrialization. The
first was the growth of state-managing bureaucracy and its self-normalization achieved
against the terroristic Stalinist regime.1 The second was the historically rapid
emergence of a large and well-educated industrial proletariat including the intellectual
specialists. In addition, the Soviet industrialization exerted a powerfully homogenizing
effect in the fields of gender or inter-ethnic relations.
The orphaned children of peasants were not the hapless human material of
Stalinist industrialization. Education and urbanization offered to them the best way to

The peculiarity of state socialism was that the threat to civilian control was not the traditional military,

but rather the secret police.

6
advance in the new industrial setting. In fact, expanding industry and state
bureaucracies rewarded skilled labor. Taking the official communist ideology at its
word,

the

Soviet

proletarians

obtained

cultural

framework

for

their

institutionalization as class and for laying claims on the ruling bureaucracy. Thus the
Soviet proletarians became an active class despite the harsh ban on independent
organizing. The process occurred mostly through the micro-initiatives that sprang up
during the late 1950s. The younger Soviet proletarians sought to keep educational
mobility open and material distribution broadly egalitarian. In effect it was the diffuse
struggle of new proletarians against the formation of a new ruling class.
Still, as Perry Anderson (1974, p. 11, italics in the original) reminds us, "the
secular struggle between classes is ultimately resolved at the political not the
economic or cultural level of society". On this count, the diffuse power of the Soviet
workers and specialists regularly proved weaker than the bureaucratically
concentrated power of nomenklatura. The surges of Soviet proletarian contention were
made possible by the conflicts within the reigning bureaucracy during de-Stalinization
in the 1956-68 period or Gorbachevs perestroika of the late 1980s.
The ruling classs major weakness was the scandalous contradiction between the
official ideology and its practice. The ruling communist parties could not afford an
open class confrontation with their workers. Instead they prevented the emergence of
politics through symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Urban 1997), which
consisted of censorship, hypocritical dissimulation of mass politics, and the cultural
and administrative controls on workers consumption. Nevertheless this created a
durable, very broad, and homogenized structure of contention. The object of claim-

7
making was hypocritical bureaucracy; the key demand was to live up to the ideological
promises of social justice, welfare, and rational regulation.
Thus Stalinist terror and industrialization followed by bureaucratic deStalinization created a broad and relatively equal citizenship (Deutscher 1953; Lewin
1988). The next step was the emergence of what Tilly (1997, p. 199) considers the two
crucial aspects of democratization: a) binding consultation of citizens in regard to state
personnel and policies, as well as b) protection of citizens from arbitrary state action.
Already in the 1960s both criteria were met most of the time, albeit tacitly. The
nomenklatura felt reluctant to use overt repression which could have re-empowered
the secret police. Therefore they avoided provoking conflicts with proletarians because
contentious meetings, letters of complaint, dissidence, strikes against unpopular
officials and policies were not uncommon even in the tightly policed USSR, let alone in
satellite Poland (Zaslavsky 1982; Ekiert 1996; Urban 1997).
A linear extrapolation of this historical trend suggested the institutionalizion of
democracy probably within the lifetime of a generation, the one that became politically
aware and active in the 1960s. Instead, the outcome was the totally unexpected
implosion of Soviet state. In the beginning of Gorbachevs reform, the Soviet state
acquiesced to all sorts of demands for social autonomy and tried to defuse them by
using the standard tactic of promising an increased flow of material and symbolic
benefits to the contentious groups. But the dramatic escalation of claims from all sides
overwhelmed the Soviet state, whose legitimacy still depended on its redistributive
power. As a result, the state lost its legitimacy, along with its ability to deliver on its
promises and/or threats. In late 1989 the social-democratizing politics of perestroika

8
lost its relevance. The breakdown of Soviet state suddenly removed the key conditions
for waging the class-based politics. Henceforth the contention became not only
localized but predominantly ethnic.
The national awakening movements thus far operated only in the cultural fields
of Soviet republics where they stayed firmly within the limits prescribed by the
communist nationality institutions. These movements became political not due to the
intrinsic evolution of their discourse or the ambition of national intellectuals, but
because a possibility appeared to use these national mobilizations to influence the
distribution of bureaucratic portfolios and the flow of goods through the state. In the
USSR, such opportunities were pre-structured by the mechanisms of ethnoterritorial
affirmative action (Brubaker 1996; Suny 1993; Martin 2001). And still it took the
breakdown of central governance to void the intra-lite taboo on the use of nationalist
politics.
The Soviet Union was not taken apart by the national intelligentsia who only
served in the ideological vanguard. The actual destruction was carried out by midranking nomenklatura who sought to escape the looming collapse of the centralized
state by grabbing whatever assets lay close to them, whether they were economic
enterprises or the ethnic-territorial governments of republics (Bunce 1998; Solnick
1998). This process relied heavily on the existing networks of local patronage that had
to be reconfigured en marche: extended to include select intelligentsia ideologues and
sub-proletarian violent entrepreneurs, and insulated to bar interventions from Moscow
and from the local competitors.

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Once the disintegration of the USSR undermined the all-Soviet economy and
citizenship, the focus of contention shifted to membership in the polities of successor
states. These struggles were acute because, in the zones that re-emerged with
peripheral status, the existing ruling elites sought to reduce membership in the new
polities. The political survival of dominant patronage networks hinged on their ability
to control the flow of power and goods and to dispense privileges to a hierarchy of
clients. There were no longer central adjudicating authorities and very few traditions of
the rule of law. Therefore, sharing power appeared too dangerous, and the loss of
power amounted to the loss of everything: economic privileges, clients, and personal
security. For the excluded minorities caught in such struggles, secession appeared the
best way to preserve their status and privileges.
If this analysis is correct, then we may expect that a robust theory of ethnic
conflict would emerge from the more general theory of contemporary state-making
and, given the observable trends, state-breaking. First of all, it will draw on the new
understanding of revolutions and mass mobilizations (see Goodwin 2001). The readers
probably noticed that this paper made no reference to the recent theorizing on
nationalism. Since the late 1970s this has been a very active intellectual field dominated
by such towering figures as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom
Nairn or John A. Hall (whose 1998 edited volume provides a good summary of the
field). But the theories of nationalism are predominantly concerned with historical
lineages and conditions that gave rise to modern national forms. My focus was on
something quite different: the emergence of ethnic conflicts as default option in the
struggles over the eroding states whose industrializing achievements have been

10
drastically devalued. Further research on ethnic wars might prove me wrong but this
remains to be seen.

Future Prospects
The overall conclusion should now be clear. Globalization was not the direct
cause of ethnic violence in the newly emergent post-Soviet peripheries. The common
cause of post-Soviet ethnic conflicts was the breakdown of central governance
occurring in the state that had historically institutionalized nationality in its affirmative
action practices and used to operate through the layers of ethnically-formulated
networks of bureaucratic patronage. But if market globalization was not the cause,
further down the road it does become the major structural condition for the
perpetuation of contention in the ethnic and fundamentalist forms.
The immediately obvious effect of globalization is to shift the wrath of the masses
from their increasingly irrelevant national or local governments to the worlds
dominant group construed as American plutocrats. The latter, due to the enormous
social and physical distance, assume mythical proportions in popular imagination.
Such distance makes the usual forms of contention impossible. Nonetheless, a strongly
negative emotional background remains and is expressed in the recent spread of antiAmericanism and, by implication, anti-Semitism. These generally remain at the level of
impotent feelings, but on September 11, 2001, a daring group of conspirators showed
how ideological fantasies could materialize.
The second effect of global market restructuring on the character of peripheral
contention is perhaps more consequential. The connection, however, seems less evident

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because of its deeply structural nature. Additionally, it is buried under the weight of
ideological clichs. I mean the social and political effects of de-industrialization in the
former developmental states. Post-communist transitions were widely assumed to
result in democratization by liberating the latent civil societies and creating new
property-owning middle classes. This is one of the central tenets of neo-liberalism (see
Eyal, Szelnyi, and Townsley 1998, Ch. 3). Indeed, in past epochs the middle classes
artisans, petty bourgeoisie, entrepreneurial farmers, or autonomous professionals
often were found in the forefront of democratization in Western countries. In the
capitalist core, historical conditions favored the existence of large middle classes in the
first place. Yet even there, as Tilly (1997, pp. 210-211) can attest with the authority of
detailed expertise, the success of democratization alliances often depended on the
active support of proletarians.
In post-Soviet countries the new middle classes turned out to be not as big and
autonomous.2 Not surprisingly, they feel very ambiguous about democratization in
locales where wealth is linked to political patronage and foreign connections, where
income disparities are large, and where the presence of underemployed workers and
sub-proletarian masses perennially threatens with social problems and political
unpredictability. The persistent fantasy of post-communist middle classes has been
Pinochet rather than Jefferson. So far, the hegemonic vision of neo-liberalism imposes

Today many educated and well-placed Muscovites who, on the basis of comfortable wages paid in

dollars, claim to be middle class are, in fact, privileged proletarian clerks employed by banks and other
firms directly connected to global capital flows. But since their wages stand far above the low average,
the dispositions of this group are very un-proletarian.

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political conformity on the peripheral states. The result, however, is only a shallow
emulation of electoral procedures and capitalist transaction technologies. David
Woodruff (2000) provides an illuminating discussion of disjuncture between the veneer
conformity to the hegemonic project of globalization and the profoundly different
bases of social power in the realms of peripheral neo-patrimonialism.
This poses the question: what has been actually achieved by the latest world-wide
wave of democratization in the 1980s and the 1990s? We need to know what the
relationship was (negative, positive, or none existent?) between the actual structures of
domestic politics in various countries and the new geoculture of human rights,
internationally monitored elections, and their effects on the credit ratings of
governments. Does the globally-induced form of democratization continue or subvert
the older-running structural trends that have been engendered by developmentalist
proletarianization? Can the global democratization eventually grow deeper local roots,
and if so, by what social mechanisms? Or will the veneer peel off when the global
climate changes again? As well, we might ask whether de-industrialization and the
resulting social marginalization of the populations in so many countries makes likelier
a global confrontation between the neo-nativist political forces, drawing their support
from angry masses, and acting in opposition to the global capitalist forces and the
peripheral compradors. In other words, through what processes the Clash of
Civilizations could become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

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