We are all Charlie

Amen Teferi

1-16-15

Part Two

Dispossession: A Key Predisposing Condition

By dispossession scholars refer to perceptions on the part of a group that it is systematically excluded, discriminated against, or disadvantaged with respect to some meaningful aspect of social, economic, and political life to which it feels entitled. There is no society in the world that does not have many groups that feel illegitimately dispossessed. Despite its widespread if not universal existence, this phenomenon of dispossession must be invoked as a necessary condition for dissatisfaction and collective mobilization. As a general principle, those contented with their lot do not protest, unless they feel imperiled—in which case they fear dispossession. We have a number of historical illustrations to support this claim. Here I will present three empirical examples that would illustrate absolute dispossession, as well as its relative deprivation aspect:

• Most of the “nation-building” efforts on the part of the Western nations have involved a systematic effort to homogenize the language and political cultures of their peoples through educating their children in schools, using the media to create national symbols, myths, and memories, and other means. More recently, the sustained efforts of the last Shah in the mid-twentieth century to develop Iran into a Western-style country simultaneously aimed to suppress clerical influences, ethnic differences, and nomadic uprisings.

We should also remind ourselves that much of contemporary Muslim fundamentalism rose to salience in the wake of disillusionment with other secular nation-building efforts (many including religious repression) in a number of other Arab countries. This process of cultural homogenization, at the very least, offended the sensibilities of particular groups, and in many cases occasioned political persecution of them. These efforts to homogenize have never been completely successful.

Turbulence and violence occur especially in the early stages of state formation. Europe today bears dozens of historical residues of its relative incompleteness in the presence of regional communities: the Bretons, the Basques, the Tyroleans, the Welsh, and the Scots, to say nothing of the religious-ethnic-linguistic sub-national groups in Central and Southeastern Europe. Typically, these people feel dominated and dispossessed in various ways, and this constitutes a basis for latent and sometimes openly expressed antagonism toward the parent state and other groups.

• Slavery could be said to be a source of absolute deprivation for black Americans in almost every respect. In the decades that followed emancipation, many black leaders hailed its end and foresaw full incorporation of the race as American citizens. After decades of disappointment, however, occasioned by there imposition of harsh Jim Crow arrangements in the South and continuing discrimination elsewhere, a deep disillusionment set in. This disillusionment was “relative” because it was experienced in the context of earlier high hopes. For a variety of reasons, it did not generate revolutionary protest, but it did occasion remarkable efforts to revitalize black American culture, the most notable of which was the Harlem Renaissance. Some of this effort even incorporated the experience of slavery into a new positive identity.

• The civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., was by all realistic standards a resounding success, leading to the formal desegregation of eating establishments, public transportation, and other facilities and stimulating the government to introduce many reforms. It was also a movement that raised expectations not only among black citizens but also among other groups as well (youth, women, and other ethnic groups).

Yet the imperfect realization of these successes in practice and the persistence of other deprivations (primarily economic) led to a renewed dissatisfaction and a radicalization of at least a minority of black activists. In this case, the movement spawned a sub movement of violence that has been treated as terrorism in the literature, especially as manifested in the activities of the Black Panthers.

These examples provide an idea of the processes and mechanisms by which relative deprivation and dissatisfaction are generated and which in many cases have spawned domestic social movements, a few of which have resorted to violence or terrorism.

Illustrations from the international scene

It is also instructive to identify some long-term international processes that have heightened the disjunction between the nation-state (and nationalism) and ethnic-regional-religious particularism around the world, and, as a corollary, a predisposition to the emergence and multiplication of dispossessed groups. The following are relevant:

• The colonial era, in which the world’s major colonial powers— Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and Germany—divided up the colonized world into territories in ways that took little or no account of the tribal, religious, and other characteristics of those territories except sometimes to exploit them for political purposes. For instance, Clutterbuck chided the British for having “no rivals in history” in “creating intractable communal problems.” He further commented:

“They attempted to form a unified sub-continent in India, in- stead of allowing it to take its course in shaking out into a Balkanized patchwork of independent states. . . . It was under British rule that Chinese and Indian labor migrated into Malaya, with the result that, when they inherited independence, the Malays made up only forty-nine per cent of the population of that country. It was largely under British administration that Greeks poured into Cyprus and outnumbered the indigenous Turks. The massive Jewish migration into Palestine, which passed the point of no return in the 1930s, took place under the British mandate. And, of course, it was the migration of English and Scottish Protestants into a Catholic Ireland which created a problem which no government has been able to solve since Queen Elizabeth I sent in the English Army.”

The diagnosis is correct, but it should be added that the British did not have a monopoly among the colonial powers in generating the political bases for antagonistic communalist sentiments. The postcolonial heritage, in which many of the newly independent colonies adopted the model of the nation-state—the mode of political organization represented by their former colonizers and the political mode preferred by the diplomatic communities and the United Nations for membership in the world system of nations. The result was one dominant ideal (in theory but not practice): the belief in the coherence of nation-states and the desire to maintain their territorial integrity. From these norms grew the grievances of territorial separatists and national independence movements.

• The formal adoption of the traditional characteristics of nation-states by the new states (political self-sufficiency, insistence on monopoly of violence, the focus on a national identity, and recognition as a nation by other nations) but their actual lack of effectiveness in many cases in developing the nation-state form, which was realized in the West only after a long and irregular historical process.

In some cases, the result was “failed states.” In the 1980s and 1990s, “[deadly] rounds of ethno-political conflict are likely to occur or reoccur in new, impoverished states with ineffective governments and sharp communal polarities.” In other cases, “the insistence on the right to conduct internal affairs without outside interference gave unscrupulous dictators like Macias and Amin freedom to commit atrocities against their subjects in the name of ‘nation-building.’” In fact, much of the “ethnic cleansing” of modern times has been perpetuated by political leaders from one particularistic group securing state power and attempting to crush violently or eradicate other groups.

• The dramatic “third wave” of democratization (Huntington, 1991), which began in 1974 and affected dozens of nations throughout the world. This development, combined with the spread of education, generated a great deal of relative deprivation, that is, heightened expectations for recognition, rights, and interests on the part of political groups—expectations that the idea of democracy typically fosters—as well as a more widespread sense of injustice.

The evolution and growing acceptance of democratic philosophies has also fostered the view that discriminatory social structures and political systems are neither immutable nor legitimate. The view of authority as a prescribed right is no longer accepted. It was replaced with the attitude that authority has to be earned, constantly justified, and, by the same token, challenged. The general shift was toward the dismantling of authoritarian regimes and the development of democratic institutions, but the results of this movement have been mixed in terms of the actual realization of stable democracies.

The transition to democracy implies a formal commitment to deal with contending opposition voices(including particularistic groups),thus giving them—legitimately—more political salience, but the transition did not guarantee effectiveness in dealing with conflicts among such groups or between them and the state.

• The even more dramatic dismantling of the communist and socialist countries in 1989–90, which not only permitted the emergence of multiple ethnic, religious, and local forces that had been held under by repression for decades but also resulted in the formation of a number of new states. Moreover, almost none of these states “solved” issues of internal diversity, because in almost all cases residual minorities remained (for example, the Russian population in Latvia).

Economic Deprivation

One factor that reappears in discussions of the causes of terrorism is the economic one. In its simplest form it is asserted that conditions of “[lack of] food, poverty, and hunger” and the accompanying “misery” breed desperation and extreme responses. The operative causal model relates real economic deprivation (the independent variable) to frustration and aggression (dependent variable). It is a model that has appeal among the political left, which traditionally favors explanations of protest based on economic suffering and class oppression. Explanations that are more conservative focus more on moral or psychological factors, which more or less explicitly place responsibility on individuals and minimize impulses to ameliorate the putative conditions of misery.

Economic factors evidently have to be taken seriously in considering the conditions inducing terrorism, but the simple model outlined is inadequate, for two reasons. First, participation in terrorist movements reveals a diversity of economic backgrounds. In some salient terrorist movements, notably the left-inspired Weather Underground in the United States and the Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the composition of these fringe political movements was primarily middle-class, relatively comfortable young people protesting on behalf of the poor and oppressed, but not from these classes.

In others, those recruited to terrorist tactics do come from conditions of extreme poverty—for example, economically displaced, unemployed, and disposed Palestinian Arabs—but often these participants are foot soldiers. Their leaders come from more comfortable economic back- grounds that have often included direct contact, through education and participation, with Western societies. Some scholars have reported the different economic backgrounds for the Ku Klux Klan (mostly working class, with a handful of small business owners, self-employed and white-collar workers), the Weatherman (privileged backgrounds), and black militants (working class, some lumpen proletariat), concluding that “no single [occupational] factor can explain their resort to terrorism.” 

Second, the history of economic deprivation and poverty in the world reveals that these conditions have existed forever and everywhere, and if militant protest is thought to be a product of this, it “begs the question why . . . militancy is not pandemic throughout the Third World.” In most cases, the poverty-stricken do not protest but bear their suffering passively and silently. This overwhelming fact suggests that, when poverty plays a role, it is as a result of its being elevated to political consciousness in combination with a number of other conditions. Absolute economic deprivation in itself is a poor predictor.

What are some of these other conditions? One is structural economic dislocation, which may not directly induce poverty but may increase the vulnerability of the affected groups to market forces. We can refer to traditional peasant subsistence farmers who are drawn into producing food for the market, laborers in traditional economies who are drawn into wage labor, technologically displaced craftsmen, workers in the former socialist countries who enjoyed a relative degree of economic security but who find themselves at the mercy of uncertain markets under the new, quasi-capitalist conditions, and even new middle-class occupational groups whose position in the economic and status order is ambiguous.

This variable of structural dislocation is an economic one, to be sure, but it is not a process that necessarily produces poverty. In fact, it may accompany a general improvement in economic conditions. Its primary effect is to produce economic uncertainty and the sense of being at the mercy of economic forces that are beyond one’s control; this is not economic deprivation as such, although it often carries a threat of economic dispossession.

Structural dislocation is often closely related to relative economic deprivation. This term implies that economic conditions come to be experienced as satisfying or frustrating not according to absolute levels of poverty or welfare but in relation to perceptions of other groups’ for- tunes or in relation to cultural expectations.

A particularly telling example of this phenomenon emerged in Peru in the 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed efforts and government economic reforms (increased expectations), the failure of these reforms to relieve the economic suffering of the peasants (dashing of expectations), and, in the 1970s especially, a radicalization of the government itself, and permission if not encouragement of radical protest (a sense of opportunity).

Such were the conditions that made the scene ripe for the appearance of the noted Peruvian terrorist movement, the Shining Path. If we apply the logic of relative deprivation broadly, it is possible to claim that almost every group can experience deprivation because there are inevitably other groups in relation to which it can feel disadvantaged. In practice, however, relative deprivation is more likely to be felt in relation to groups that are historical or new competitors (for example, women versus men in the labor force, or recent Central American Hispanic immigrants versus Cuban immigrants in Florida).

International economic penetration of all kinds, but the recent spread of global capitalism over the world is particularly likely to generate multiple kinds of relative economic deprivation. First, in less developed countries it creates new classes of low-paid wage labor whose economic position may be low in absolute terms but high in relation to traditionally very poor groups in those countries. The seeking of low-cost labor abroad clearly generates feelings of apprehension among higher-paid workers in wealthier countries, who feel themselves threatened with displacement. Often, too, the economic returns of international penetration are differentially distributed in the host countries (the history of oil production in the Middle East is the readiest example), occasioning reality-based perceptions of a worsening distribution of wealth. International economic fluctuations and crises also involve rapid changes in economic fortunes; the radical increases in energy costs in the 1970s affected most Third World countries’ economies strongly and negatively.

Cultural Disruptions

For decades, cultural anthropologists have documented the consequences of cultural domination, a regular accompaniment of colonialism. It took the form of different efforts to “civilize” the dominated peoples, whether as a matter of direct colonial policies (as in the case of French cultural colonialism) or more indirectly, through the efforts of missionaries. Such efforts were self-consciously directed toward acculturation. Their typical effects were to create conditions of cultural confusion and a double ambivalence in the dominated population: simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the cultural values of the oppressors and a similar attraction and repulsion to the traditional way of life. The international migration of groups into host societies creates similar effects, often described as “culture shock,” by setting up the four-way struggle among attraction to and rejection of the host society and attraction to and rejection of the society of origin. Thus, the possibilities of dissatisfaction under conditions of cultural domination and immigration are multiple. The era of classical colonialism has passed, but the process of the international diffusion of competing cultural worldviews, values, and expectations has not. In fact, under conditions described under the heading of cultural globalization, the process has become magnified. The cultural diffusion of globalization supplies above all new cultural standards that give realistic situations their depriving bite. We may identify three principal forms of cultural diffusion.

Economic culture: Materialism

The presence of wealthy foreigners and wealthy natives who have profited from the economic presence of those foreigners introduces two new groups who constitute an immediate source of envy. In addition, the growing presence of mainly American films and television conveys images of economic plenty into households and public places of less advantaged nations. This spread of material values, labeled variously according to the process involved (“globalization”), the nation that most personifies the material values (“Americanization”), or vivid commercial symbols (“McDonaldization”), constitutes an extremely powerful source of both relative deprivation and cultural conflict. The potency is illustrated by a story spread in the 1980s.

This had to do with an end-of-the-world scenario in the Hollywood film The Day After, which portrayed life in Topeka, Kansas, after the explosion of a nuclear weapon. The film drew great interest in other countries, including the Soviet Union, where it was shown. The story was that the only portions of the film that were censored by Soviet authorities were the scenes of supermarket shelves teeming with food and other material goods, as though the sight of these was more threatening than the post-nuclear horror.

The avid materialism in long-deprived Eastern European countries before and immediately after the end of the communist-socialist era reveals the same potency of material values. The impact of materialist values in deprived countries is thus the focus of deep ambivalence, of simultaneous envy and desire, on the one hand, and disgust and rejection of the presumed corrupting force of material desires on the other. In this regard, attitudes in these countries echo the deep Western ambivalence over the power of materialism to corrupt, proclaimed mainly by religious leaders and political protesters.

Secularization

Colonial powers and missionaries wished to Christianize native populations and did so to some degree. In more recent times, the religious impact of Western penetration has included continued missionary efforts (mainly by Roman Catholic, Mormon, and fundamentalist Protestant churches), but these efforts have been over- whelmed by the forces of secularization that have eclipsed traditional religions in the West. This influence has been of greatest consequence in the Muslim world, where fundamentalists and others decry the threats to Islam and regard secularized leaders of their countries with almost as much venom as they do the foreign nonbelievers who have brought secularism to their lands.

Democracy and human rights

The third wave of democratization in the last third of the twentieth century, the effect of which has been to bring new standards and higher expectations of political participation to countries long deprived of it. This democratic pressure is complemented by the contemporary worldwide concern with human rights, long a feature of Western political culture, made salient by the United Nations declaration of 1945 and pressed strongly if intermittently and somewhat inconsistently by the United States. The international human rights movement, widely regarded as admirable in its aims, is also, in effect, an extension of the missionary impulse in the sense that it is an effort to import if not impose putatively universal but mainly Western-invented values in parts of the world where these values are often not appreciated.

In any event, they constitute a major source of cultural domination, cultural clash, and the resulting cultural confusion experienced in the contemporary world. The scholarly and ideological literature regarding the international spread of Western-associated values such as materialism, democracy, secularization, and human rights has polarized around two extreme positions. The first, voiced both by radical critics and by avid proponents such as neoliberal capitalists, is that the spread of these values is leading, inevitably if irregularly, toward a cultural homogenization of the world (usually via an American-dominated version of global capitalism and cultural hegemony).

The essence of this position has been voiced by Fukuyama: “modernity, as represented by the United States and other developed democracies, will remain the dominant force in world politics, and the institutions embodying the West’s underlying principles of freedom and equality will continue to spread around the world.” The second, voiced by traditionalists, localists, and anti-globalists, stresses opposition to globalization and the reassertion of local social and cultural diversities. The foci of resistance are regional and include groups that are ethnic, racial, indigenous, ethno-nationalist, religious, linguistic, and cultural.

The dichotomization of the debate is unfortunate, because it obscures the evident truth that although the homogenizing forces are both powerful and universal, their effects are always muted by the modifying and resisting influences on the part of peoples in the settings in which they are received. Above all, however, the result of these mixed effects is almost universally to create a double ambivalence to- ward both Western and indigenous cultural values and beliefs, as well as confusions and instabilities of identity. Such are the main sources and mechanisms of deprivation, dislocation, and dispossession in the contemporary world. They more or less ensure that high levels of dissatisfaction and ambivalence are the order of the day in this world—and the menu of the future as well. We now turn to some of the processes by which these reservoirs of dissatisfaction come to be expressed in protest movements and their derivatives.