Consociational Democracy in Crisis: The Case of Lebanon
1978; City University of New York; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/421648
ISSN2151-6227
Autores Tópico(s)Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts
Resumocomponents, the region remains a mosaic of subnational collectivities. This faulty notion of viewing the Middle East monolithically is partly attributable to the Western propensity to favor the nation-state-a bias which has become universal. In a milieu of nation-states any other kind of political unit is deemed subversive and perhaps even illegal. One hears more frequently about Arabs, Iranians, or Egyptians, rather than Maronites, Azeris, or Copts. Even in such a pluralistic society as the United States, the melting pot syndrome made it unfashionable to talk about ethnicity until the last decade. Nor is it an accepted practice to manifest ethnic nationalism in communist states, e.g., the U.S.S.R., China, and Yugoslavia. The Middle East is no exception; few of its governments have been able to develop effective public policies toward the ethnic, sectarian, and/or tribal components of their respective mosaics. The result has been official repression, communal violence, and massacrerealities which have been endemic in that part of the world particularly in the last one hundred years. These communal conflicts are often exacerbated by neighboring states, not to mention the great powers which have made intervention in ethnic problems a part of their national policies. Students of the Middle East also manifest strong biases in favor of national units. The usual practice is either to write single country studies or to group countries together in a cross-national framework. Not only are cross-ethnic studies rare,1 but there is a notable deemphasis on the ethnic and sectarian components of individual Middle Eastern states. In typical textbooks on Middle Eastern politics, the reader interested in the Kurds has to look under four chapter headings-Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria; and information on the Druzes may be found in the chapters on Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. Yet the
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