Referendums and Ethnic Conflict

Referendums and Ethnic Conflict

National and Ethnic Conflict in the Twenty-First Century

Brendan O’Leary, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Referendums and Ethnic Conflict

Matt Qvortrup

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Qvortrup, Matt.

Referendums and ethnic conflict / Matt Qvortrup.

 pages cm.— (National and ethnic conflict in the twenty-first century)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4580-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Referendum. 2. Ethnic conflict—Political aspects. 3. Ethnic conflict—Government policy. I. Title.

JF491.Q95 2014

328.2'3—dc23

2013038046

The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite.

—Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?

Lex est quod populus iubet atque constituit.

—Gaius, Institutiones

The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony,—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.

—G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History

A Citizen in general is someone who is capable of being a ruler and a subject.

—Aristotle, Politics

Contents

Introduction

1.  The History and Logic of Ethnonational Referendums, 1791–1945

2.  Difference-Managing Referendums

3.  Secession and Partition

4.  Ethnonational Referendums in Constitutional Law: A Case Study of Scotland

5.  Right-Sizing Referendums

6.  Difference-Eliminating Referendums: E Pluribus Unum?

7.  EU Referendums: Nationalism and the Politics of Supranational Integration

8.  Regulation of Ethnonational Referendums: A Comparative Overview

Conclusion. Patterns and Tendencies in Ethnonational Referendums

Appendix. Legislation and Litigation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The core problem in political theory is that fundamental and equally axiomatic principles often collide. A paradox can almost be defined as a clash of two equally incontestable maxims of truth. Two such truths are (1) that each nation has a right to determine its own affairs and (2) that the majority has a right to govern. Admittedly these rights are tempered by the recognition that no nation and no majority may ride roughshod over minorities. But this caveat notwithstanding, national self-determination and majority rule are principles to which few fundamentally object. Indeed, defending the reverse positions would appear politically absurd. But the problem is that the two principles often are incompatible. To understand why, it might be useful to consider a distinction used in ancient Greek. The Greeks make a distinction between the people as a nation (ethnos) and the people as a body of citizens (demos).¹ In the classical city-state—or polis—the two were congruent, and in some present-day nation-states, such as Norway and Luxembourg, the same is broadly true. But more often than not, the two concepts are in conflict. To take an example, small-town English politician, the Conservative councilor Rob McKella from Corby in Northamptonshire, believes that people in England should be given a right to vote on Scottish independence.² After all, he argues, the voters are citizens in the United Kingdom and collectively constitute the demos. However, most people in Scotland, by contrast, believe that only people living north of the border should be allowed to vote as these people—perhaps alongside Scots living in the diaspora—constitute the ethnos and hence have a right to self-determination. As will come to be obvious, these two worldviews, both based on solid arguments, do not combine.

This book is about this conflict between the ethnos and the demos, and about the problems that are raised when solutions to ethnic and national issues and conflicts are sought through referendums. Our main focus is to determine when different kinds and types of referendums on ethnonational issues occur and also to determine if they lead to exacerbation of conflict or the opposite—if balloting can stop bullets.

Referendums have often been perceived to be incompatible with nationalism. William Sumner Maine—a conservative writer from the end of the Victorian age—once mused that democracies are quite paralyzed by the plea of nationality. There is no more effective way of attacking them than by admitting the right of the majority to govern, but denying that the majority so entitled is the particular majority which claims the right (Maine 1897: 88).

This book looks at these conflicts through a comprehensive study of all the referendums held on ethnic and nationalist issues from the French Revolution to the 2012 referendum on statehood for Puerto Rico.

It’s a controversial topic. Some scholars have supported these referendums on the basis of philosophical conviction and because they believe that they confer legitimacy upon decisions made by elites. Jürgen Habermas, for example, took this view. In light of resentment following new boundaries after the Cold War he found that referendums on sovereignty issues—given certain safeguards—could be "a way of proceeding which permitted a broader discussion and opinion formation as well as a more extensive—and, above all, better prepared—participation, which would give the voters the eventual responsibility for the process (Habermas 1996: 12). If the people were given the responsibility through referendums they would not be able to complain later on, as it would have been the people’s own mistake that they would have had to cope with" (Habermas 1996: 12). These issues are interesting and important from a philosophical point of view, but they are ultimately issues for political theory and not the primary concern of the comparative and empirical political scientist. Hence these normative issues are not the focus of this study. The questions we look at are positive issues of when and why referendums on various national and ethnic issues occur.

These polls have played an important role in attempts to resolve ethnic conflicts for centuries. But it is fair to say that scholars of ethnic and national conflict—as well as political scientists—have had reservations about these plebiscites and referendums. Michael Gallagher, writing about the experience in Europe, concluded that the referendum is least useful if applied to an issue that runs along the lines of a major cleavage in society (Gallagher 1996: 246), and recently Jonathan Wheatley wrote about the disruptive potential of direct democracy in deeply divided societies (Wheatley 2012: 64). While critical, Wheatley was not as dismissive of referendums as Roger Mac Ginty, who noted, The principal problem with referendums in situations of profound ethnic conflict is that they are zero-sum, creating winners and losers. Simple majoritarian devices do little to help manage the complexity of conflict. Instead they validate the position of one side and reject that of another. Often, they do little other than delimit and quantify division (Mac Ginty 2003: 3).

This interpretation may have been correct in the case of the 1973 Border Poll in Northern Ireland (Osborne 1982: 154) and, indeed, in the case of many of the referendums held in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Terret 2000). But Mac Ginty’s conclusion that the blunt reductionism of a referendum (for example the perception that a conflict is about a line on a map and little else) (Mac Ginty 2003, 3) is perhaps a little bit cavalier and perhaps ignores the fact that the Schleswigian conflict, which caused two wars between Denmark and Germany, was resolved by a referendum (Laponce 2010 24). Indeed, Sarah Wambaugh noted in her much-quoted study Plebiscites Since the World War that the plebiscite was so fair and excellently administered that the Schleswig question, which caused three wars in the 19th Century and rent of councils of Europe for some seventy years, has ceased to exist (Wambaugh 1933: 98).

A referendum is admittedly unlikely to work on its own, and referendums have been followed by violence (the case of East Timor in 1999 comes to mind). But this does not prove that the referendum is to blame. Indeed, there are examples of the opposite, including the peaceful poll in Eritrea in 1993 (on secession from Ethiopia).

Just as we can find contrasting empirical examples, we can also find contrasting academic assessments. Some, such as Ben Reilly, maintain that despite hollow claims that the ‘will of the people’ must prevail, it is only the most obtuse interpretation that could recommend building peace this way (Reilly 2003: 174), while others, notably Arend Lijphart, take the view that the potential of calling the referendum … is a strong stimulus for the majority to be heedful of minority views (Lijphart 1999: 231).

We have a welter of empirical evidence, but so far there have been no systematic study, no developing of hypotheses, and no general theories. One of the aims of this book is to alter this state of affairs. It is surprising that this task has not been undertaken before. The ethnonational referendum has been around for a long time, and it is still popular. From the Swiss referendum on independence and Bonaparte’s France in 1802 (and before that Avignon’s incorporation into France in 1791) to more recent referendums on power sharing in Northern Ireland in 1998, autonomy for East Timor in 1999, and statehood for Puerto Rico in 2012, voters have been called upon to decide ethnic issues. There have been more than two hundred of these referendums, and their outcomes have decided the fates of people and peoples from Malta to Micronesia and from Mongolia and Montenegro to Montreal. Some have been held in despotic—and indeed totalitarian—regimes (like the Anschluss Referendum in 1938 in Austria), others have been held in countries with impeccable democratic records such as Switzerland (Jura), Denmark (Greenland), and Canada (Nunavut). This geographical spread and the fact that the same institution has been used across different countries and by very different types of regimes make these referendums both puzzling and challenging.

Although they are never far from the media news stream, these referendums or plebiscites (I use the words interchangeably) have rarely received systematic treatment.³ Mentioned in passing in one of my previous books (Qvortrup 2003) and in Larry LeDuc’s The Politics of Direct Democracy (2003), as an aside in David Altman’s Direct Democracy Worldwide (2011), as an afterthought in Markku Suksi’s Bringing in the People (1994), and in sections of Rouke, Hiskes, and Zirakzadeh’s Direct Democracy and International Politics (1992), referendums on national issues and ethnic conflict have been relatively marginalized in scholarly research. The only existing monographs on the subject are Lawrence T. Farley’s fairly empirical and theory-free Plebiscites and Sovereignty (1986) and, much earlier, Sarah Wambaugh’s Plebiscites Since the World War (1933). Before that Johannes Mattern’s doctoral thesis, The Employment of the Plebiscite in the Determination of Sovereignty (1921), dealt with some legal and historical aspects of plebiscites on national self-determination and related issues. At the time when my book was all but finished, Jean Laponce’s Le Référendum de souveraineté: Comparaisons was published in French (2010). While Professor Laponce’s book deals with some of the same issues, my book differs in taking a more positivist approach that is more devoted to testing hypotheses and finding general and statistical patterns, whereas Le Référendum de souveraineté is a more descriptive study in the very best sense of this word. The two books therefore are complements rather than competitors. I hope that my book will spur other scholars on to consider these issues and that it will be superseded by works that further elaborate on a theme that has received too little treatment before.

Methodology and Testing of Hypotheses

Social scientists have always been strangely fascinated by the exact sciences—though they have not always practiced what they have preached.⁴ Ever since at least Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics it has frequently been the ambition of political and philosophical writers to analyze public affairs with the stringency of Euclidian geometry or, to paraphrase Spinoza’s Ethics, to conduct political science in the manner of política more geometrico demonstrate.⁵

The Competition Proximity Model of Ethnonational Referendums

In recent years in particular it has become de rigueur to develop formal models to present theoretical arguments, which subsequently can be tested empirically (Aldrich, Alt, and Lupia 2010), and this tendency has begun to influence scholars specializing in direct democracy (e.g., Setälä 1999). However, neither Hobbes nor Spinoza slavishly followed the razor-sharp logic of strict deductive reasoning. The geometric method that they both espoused provided mathematical illustrations rather than proofs in the Euclidian sense (Jesseph 1993). This book does the same. Formal models are proposed and even subjected to quantitative tests. But the statistical arguments do not stand alone. Throughout the book numerical data are contrasted and complemented by case studies and historical narratives. Together they provide a mosaic that point toward general tendencies and trends. The conclusions drawn in the study are inspired by and seen through the prism of formal models; however, the truthfulness of these is determined not solely by statistical data but also by circumstantial and even anecdotal evidence. This approach may appear defeatist to the positivist purist, but to the realist living in the practical world of politics the departure from pure mathematical models is justified by the greater ability to draw general conclusions. These caveats notwithstanding, this book loosely follows the positivist approach by proposing that the decision to hold referendums on ethnic and national issues can be explained by a formal model that sees the likelihood (probability) of a referendum being held as result of an inverse relationship between political competition and support for the proposed policy among the constituents. The formal model looks as follows:

According to this competition proximity model, the probability, Pref that an actor, i, will submit a national or ethnic issue to a referendum depends on the relationship between the competition, C, the actor is facing, and the squared distance between the actor’s preference point Pi, and the preference point of the median voter Im. If an actor is facing considerable competition (large value for C), and if the actor’s preferred policy is a popular one (the value of [Im – Pi]² is small), then holding a referendum—especially if this is opposed by his competitors—is likely to give the initiator a boost and strengthen his or her legitimacy.

The bold hypothesis in this book is that most referendums on ethnic and national issues are held as a result of the logic underlying this model. In other words, if the value for C is large (something that, admittedly, is difficult to measure), and if the preferred policy is a popular one (the value of(Im – Pi)² is small), then the probability of a referendum will be larger than 1. Formally speaking, referendums on ethnic and national issues (and European integration) are likely to be held if the conditions of the competition proximity model are met.

Of course, this model does not—and cannot—stand alone and throughout will be contrasted with other hypotheses. We shall return to these shortly, but before even starting the analysis it is useful to outline the methodological considerations underlying this study.

The Scientific Method for the Social Sciences

At the most basic level, academic or scholarly research differs from other endeavors because of its method and as a result of the more stringent criteria applied. Scholarly research requires at the most basic that we have:

  1.  clear definitions of the concepts we are studying;

  2.  criteria for when we can make firm conclusions; and

  3.  considerations of when we can compare different instances and facts

In this section I set out to answer these questions in an operational way with a view to addressing the questions in this book. This introduction is not intended to provide an analysis of the more philosophical issues pertaining to social science analysis. It is merely intended to provide an overview and a statement of the methodology that I accept a priori.

The ultimate goal of a positive science is the development of a ‘theory’ or, ‘hypothesis’ that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed, wrote Milton Friedman in The Methodology of Positive Economics.⁶ Developing theories that yield predictions about phenomena not yet observed means, in this case, to foresee conditions under which the different kinds of ethnonationalist referendums are likely to occur. For the present purposes we take Karl Popper’s falsificationist theory as our point of departure.⁷

Karl Popper’s argument is based on simple propositional logic. In his early study Logik der Forschung (later published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959), Popper challenged the view espoused by the Vienna Circle, namely that scientific statements must obey two conditions: (1) have semantic reference and (2) be of a so-called modus ponens form. That is—formally speaking—they must be of the form "If p then q, p, therefore q."

However, as Popper pointed out—with reference to Hume—while statements should have semantic reference, they should be of modus tollens form, that is, be of the form "If p then q, not q, then not p. Popper further stressed that the antecedent should be a universal statement (i.e., all x are y) and the consequent should be a singular statement (e.g., of the form this x is y").

We can explain this by a practical example from political science, namely Duverger’s Law (Duverger 1972: 23).⁸ The argument, developed by the French political scientist Maurice Duverger, can be summed up as follows:

All countries that have first-past-the-post (FPTPT) systems have two-party systems.

Canada (which uses FPTP) does not have a two-party system.

Not all countries that use FPTP have two-party systems.

This hypothesis is true for many countries, such as the United States, Jamaica, Botswana, and so on. But there are cases that break the law. Now the problem with this statement is that it stricto sensu should be considered as falsified, as a first-past-the-post country like the aforementioned Canada—to take but one example (India is another one)—has a multiparty system.

Box 1. Formal Example of Hypothetical Syllogism and Auxiliary Hypothesis

Under normal circumstances the formula for testing hypotheses is a modus tolendo tollens. It can formally be stated as follows:

With the addition of an auxiliary hypothesis (where R denotes the auxiliary hypotheses), we get

Source: Based on Popper (1963).

Clearly there is something to Duverger’s Law, but a couple of exceptions exist. What do we do? To proceed one might invoke auxiliary hypotheses. One might thus restate the theory thus: countries with FPTP electoral systems and without strong regionally based political movements have two-party systems. However, to use such auxiliary hypotheses we must require that such caveats are universal and not ad hoc. Thus, the existence of a particular (nonuniversal) factor—such as, for example, Quebecois nationalism—will not be regarded as acceptable as we are striving for universal laws. In other words, and to