Something I’ve wondered about from time to time, and my wife and I started discussing it this morning in light of the basketball riot in Kosovo. So people are willing to riot over a basketball game, not to mention the post-cold war situation in the former Yugoslavia. There was the situation in Northern Ireland, the Armenians and Turks, and on it goes, on one hand. On the other hand, the Brit Commonwealth nations, as well as France, the US, who have certainly had good reason for emnity against Germany, function quite well (I have had some experience dealing with a variety of NATO military personnel who were enemies in WWs I and II). In my own country, Canada, we have the historic French/English thing which, at worst has the odd hot-head doing something stupid but we’ve never come close to civil war or chronic sectarian violence. Indeed one of my best friends is a French Quebecker, his wife is an Italian Quebecker, I’m Anglo, and I have a number of acquaintances and colleagues who are Francophone.
I’m sure I’ll take hits for generalizing on this but what is it about western European nations and their various spin-off nations that have made them so reasonable over the last 60 years?
That is a very big question, so I can answer only part of it. With some countries, a lot of effort was put into it - the relationship between France and Germany for example. With three wars - Napoleon I, the 1870/71 wars and WWI - the “Erbfeindschaft” (Inherited enmity) between those two countries made good material to exploit for rabble-rousers on both side, although even before WWI, politicans and individuals on both sides tried to bridge the gap and make friendships. After WWII, two politicans worked hard to do away with it once and for all. This meant a variety of measures, things like school exchange and town partnerships, which often sound idiotic or feel-good, but do a part in the big puzzle. Changing school books to clean out the jingoistic patriotism and neutrally epxlain how each country had part of the fault for WWI, and where mistakes were made, is also a very important part (it would help in many conflict areas today, I think, like Israel -Palestine, if the children in school weren’t already indoctrinated by school books telling one-sided views of the conflict).
Another important part is the economic angle. The Irish conflict is partly fueled by the economic differences. If one side is poor and without hope for advancement, then violence to change things looks attractive, and polemics exploit that for their own gain. If both groups hope to prosper from and with each other, friendship is more within reach. So the founding of the EWG (European Economic Union) as the pre-runner of todays EU was partly because of economic necessity, partly with the aim of reducing hostility among the European nations.
Also, sadly, the success should not be overestimated. A lot of European nations haven’t been tested like the Yugoslavians, who suddenly had the chance to play “I take revenge for what happened to my grandfather, or how during communist times, your state kept all the money we produced, and our polemic politican tells us how, if we get rid of all you, paradise will come here”.
And in the places where tensions between different ethnic groups do come up - Turkish workers in Germany, ex-colonials from Africa in France and Netherlands - the great majority of the population clings to prejudices despite contact. Bigots are able to eat a Döner during lunch and fly to Turkey for holiday because it’s cheap and still grumble about how Turks are ruining the country, taking our money etc.
current conflicts happen primarily because of current problems/grudges whereas past grudges are brought into the picture for rhetorical value. So if you have a place where there is a continual latent conflict (let’s say the Serb establishment’s policy making other groups in an increasingly impoverished country really unhappy or else rebels against that establishment terrorizing Serbs and making them unhappy) then the past grudges will be remembered and talked about in speeches that deal primarily with the current ones. By contrast, if everybody is rich and reasonably happy, there is little conflict and little need to remember bad things from the past.
To take an example closer to home, why do American blacks still hold grudge about slavery 150 years ago and discrimination 50 years ago? Because it makes sense for them to do so to reinforce their position in the current ongoing political conflict over preferences and money being given them through government policy. If the “legacy of slavery” results in government programs that “redress” that legacy and pay decent salaries to black employees of such programs, clearly it is a very useful past grudge to entertain.
You mean that the English invaded, occupied and sucked dry Ireland? I was thinking of “Why is there still violent terrorism in Northern Ireland today, instead of talks and negotiations?”
On a small level, there are many hopeful iniatives that show that people can learn to get along with the sworn enemy once they get to know each other, as trite as that may sound. For long-lasting peace between whole groups, economic and political changes are necessary, but grudges are not impossible to overcome.
There is a group where Protestant and Catholic kids in Ireland meet to have a vacation at the sea side, and realize that they aren’t so different as they have been told. (Together with projects where ex-terrorists coming out of prison are put in different places than before and learn to live without violence).
In Palestina, there’s a kindergarten where Arab Christians, Arab Muslims and Israel Jews play and learn together, each learning both languages and getting along well. During one TV report on the problems in the Near East, the reporters got together (with a lot of bureaucratic problems) a group of Israeli children - afraid of being bombed when taking a bus to school - and a group of Palestinan children - afraid of being bombed in their houses - and all played soccer together and talked about how they wished the whole bombing on both sides would just stop altogether.
There’s also a project where Palestinians trained as suicide bombers were converted to peaceful people (during a peaceful period, by their own handlers) … by giving them spouses, a nice flat, a washing machine and other small luxuries. After a few years, with kids, they no longer wanted to die, because they had something to live for.
I think it was in “Collapse” where Jared Diamond pointed out that during the Ruandan genocide, the killings didn’t break down simply along ethnic lines, but rather, that it started with the completly poor killing those moderatly better off - relative to the poor overall conditions in Ruanda - the relativly well-off owned a small piece of land and struggled to feed their big family, but the completly poor had nothing, neither land nor a job, because they were younger sons. When then the overall economy worsened, so that the moderatly well-off families could no longer feed or employ the completly poor, then the killings started. He has hard data on who was killed to support this.
And in Yugoslawia, there were not only remote grievances from centuries ago, but rather, that during the communist time, some provinces felt that they had to pay for the rest of the country without getting any proportiante say or power in the politics and distribution of that money. So that was one factor, too.
No, I wasn’t talking about the English. I was talking specifically about what started the Troubles that started in 1969, the economic and social marginalisation of Catholics/Nationalists within the Northern Irish statelet. There is still some terrorism in Northern Ireland today but the community has been at peace (more or less) since 1998. Economic development, parity of esteem, increased interconnection with the rest of the world will eventually make peoples’ religion in NI a non-issue for the most part as it already is for plenty of people there. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how long that will take though.
I think part of the problem may be that a historic enmity or antagonism can become part of the self-identity of a particular group, e.g. on of the things that identifies (say) an Ulster loyalist community is that it is under constant threat from the Irish nationalist community which which it shares it space. They understand themselves as a righteous beleaguered people, and their mythology, their values, their culture reflects that. If the threat from their neighbours disappears, then Ulster loyalists undergo an existential crisis; they are no longer quite sure who they are. Hence, perversely, they are more secure and comfortable being attacked than not being attacked. So they have a psychological need to nourish and foster the conflict.
(No offence to Ulster loyalists; the example, with minor modifications, would work just as well the other way around. Or I could have picked any number of other intercommunal conflicts to illustrate the point.)