Different countries have got different reasons for intervention in other weaker countries. It could be for political, economic, security, humanitarian or ideological reasons. When French tanks broke into Damascus in the s, Sheikh Rasheed Redha wrote in Al Manar Magazine that the Kingdom of Syria was a promising democracy and that the French intervention undermined this new-born country. In , Syrian Constitution was the most secularistic one in the region.
It separated the three authorities, and all citizens were equal regardless of their religion, ethnicity or sect. Political justice as a means for responding to social diversity. The focus on crystallization of unified national identity can contain all sub-national affiliations, and it is a privilege and it can enhance citizenship and anticipate any sub-national identity. To achieve this, political justice is the most important factor, as it has many implications like economic and political partnership.
Adversely, if the state marginalized some components of the society, there would be a fracture inside the society and its components will feel injustice and they will go to destructive choices in dealing with the national identity.
As political parties are a manifestation of democracy. These parties, which are supposed to play the role of opposition, have the chance to take over, but they should be committed to the values of democracy and maintaining economic and political stability of the society. When democracy is adopted as a philosophy, political culture and strategic hypothesis for building a democratic pattern, there will be a chance for national unity on the social, economic and political levels.
In such an atmosphere, all political entities play a role in governance of the country and social diversity will remain a guarantee rather than a threat to national unity. Through social diversity, a country can be turned into a coherent unity that embraces all components and anticipate any chance for fragmentation and fracture. So far, no common ground has been found and a very little chance for national consensus is still being looked for.
Such consensus can give guarantee to all components of the Syrian society and ensure equal participation in political life for all Syrians. This experience will formulate the price that should be paid by spectra of the Syrian society on the way to establishing a fair political system and economic prosperity. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website.
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The Employer Branding Podcast. Besides partitioning ethnicities in several countries colonial rulers and missionaries even created tribes or deepened cleavages between them when it was of use for ruling.
The British colonisers for example followed a distinct divide and rule strategy in which they would choose a smaller minority group to get British education and to dominate the civil service as well as the police and military. This policy should enforce division and resentments to avoid the formation of anti-colonial alliances Blanton et al.
The infamous division of Hutus and Tutsi in Rwanda was intensified first by the German and later by the Belgian rulers. Belgian colonisers classified the population following racial traits. Taller and lighter coloured were formally classified as Tutsi, darker and shorter people as Hutu or Twa. The Tutsi were granted educational, social and economic advantages, because the colonisers attributed to them a higher intelligence and a racial superiority.
This ethnic discrimination was one of the factors leading to the Rwanda genocide against the Tutsi population Sarkin , pp. A way how many countries overcame ethnic and linguistic fractionalisation was by urbanisation. Through urbanisation, different but related ethnic groups would get in contact with each other and notice their common interests and create a common broader ethnic identity.
By this broader ethnicity the state could facilitate a national ideology and identity. A rural population instead remains more isolated from each other. Empirical findings confirm that urbanisation is positively correlated with higher identification with the nation state and homogenisation within Africa.
However, the colonial rulers tried to prevent urbanisation within their colonies as it could lead to the formation of an urban working class or other nationalist movements opposing foreign rule Green , pp. When people of different ethnicities, who follow different religions or speak different languages live together in the same country, it can be difficult to compromise on public policies. Fractionalisation and polarisation will be of different importance for various economic, political and social outcomes.
Diversity is not static, therefore it is important to take into account different fault lines that can go through a society and how these impact different aspects. The measure of ethnolinguistic fractionalisation ELF , which was used in many papers to assess the impact of fractionalisation, was constructed by Soviet researchers and based on data that they compiled in the early s.
The ELF measure calculates the probability that two randomly chosen persons in a country will belong to different ethnolinguistic groups. A theoretical maximum of fractionalisation is reached, when every person belongs to a different group Easterly and Levine , p.
The most widespread way to calculate fractionalisation is by use of the Herfindahl index, which in other contexts is often used to measure the market concentration of firms in an industry:. Another way to measure diversity is by polarisation. Different to fractionalisation, polarisation is emphasising the extreme ends of a distribution. A polarisation index will reach its maximum with the existence of two equally sized groups. To measure diversity as a source of conflict it is important to also consider the polarisation.
A polarised society is marked by intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity Esteban and Ray , p. A frequently used polarisation index is:. The conflict level depends on the size of the groups Montalvo and Reynal-Querol a, p.
Assume three groups distributed to 0. According to the formulas above, the level of polarisation would be 0. If now the distribution changes to 0. This example shows the different underlying concepts of fractionalisation and polarisation and that it is important to consider both when measuring diversity. According to rent seeking models, social costs are higher when two equally sized groups compete for rents Reynal-Querol , p.
The problem of a highly fractionalised country is that the clash of many different interests could lead to sub-optimal public policy decisions Easterly and Levine , p. The empirical evidence how ethnic and linguistic diversity affects the economy is mixed. A channel through which diversity can influence economic outcomes is for example via corruption.
It was shown that with increasing ELF corruption increases, which has a negative impact on private investments, that in turn lowers economic growth Mauro , p. In ethnic diverse countries the governing of regions or ministries is often allocated according to ethnicity, which produces more independent bribe takers.
Uncoordinated bribing leads to more bribe per unit of output and less output in general. For instance, uncoordinated groups e. The overvalued exchange rate incentivises smuggling of money out of the country in fear of devaluation and lowers the savings which the other group could take as loans. The low domestic interest rate gives additional incentive to keep money in other countries. The group controlling the exchange rate can implicitly tax when it lowers the amount of foreign exchange.
The groups do not internalise the effects of their rent- seeking on the whole society which in this case leads to high black market premiums and financial repression Easterly and Levine , pp.
Further, ethnicity based power separation leads common pool problems where everyone is seizing from the pool of rents until it is exhausted. This problem can be observed when economic activities are highly overtaxed. An example of conflict over economic rents among different ethnicities are the cocoa policies in Ghana after independence. Production of cocoa, which was a main export good, was largely controlled by the dominating Ashanti ethnic minority.
A leader of the larger Akan ethnicity could enforce a freezing of the cocoa producer price and an overvalued currency. On the one side, various ethnic coalitions continued the damaging cocoa export taxation via increasing overvaluation.
On the other side, ethnic and political supporters were granted importing goods at the official exchange rate, which generated rents because the black market exchange rate was much higher. The profitable cocoa export, controlled by one ethnic group, could have been beneficial for the whole country, but it was destroyed through uncoordinated rent-seeking and growth-retarding policies due to various competing ethnicities Easterly and Levine , pp.
The various interests of an ethnic fractionalised society may also lead to lower public goods provision, like schools or infrastructure. Because the more parties that have to compromise on different preferences regarding language and curriculum for schools or location of infrastructure projects, the lower is the satisfaction for each party and thus makes it harder to agree on growth enhancing policies.
As a consequence, less public goods will be supplied. ELF was found to be negatively correlated with school attainment, financial depth and infrastructure indicators like paved roads, number of telephones per worker and electrical system stability, but positively correlated with black market premium.
The high ethnic diversity of Africa helps to explain the widespread poor public policy decisions. Even when excluding African countries, the study finds that ethnic fractionalisation is affecting black market premium and the infrastructure in unfavourable ways. In general, various ELF measures are significantly related to various public policy indicators, which in turn are correlated to economic growth.
Moreover, the authors modelled that countries with a higher level of ELF in will be more corrupt and less likely to follow the principal of the rule of law as well as less democratic in However, the underlying data of the above mentioned study mixes ethnic and linguistic criteria but relies mainly on linguistic differences, which is downplaying the role of other important aspects of ethnicity such like race or skin colour.
This means that North and South America appear as quite homogeneous in terms of language, but in fact there were obvious differences between blacks and whites in the US of the s. Latin America is as well more divided by racial origins e. Afro-Latino, European, Indigenous or Mestizo than by the language, which is mainly the one of the former coloniser. To address this problem, more disaggregated variables of fractionalisation are necessary Alesina et al.
Because the concept of ethnicity is not clearly defined and is based on various characteristics, Alesina et al. The variable includes ethnic groups and countries and dependencies. Additionally, they also employed an isolated linguistic measure which is based on the numbers of languages spoken as mother tongue and comprises 1, major language groups and countries and dependencies.
The former used Soviet ELF index is only available for countries. Due to the different concepts of diversity, the influence of ELF is different to the influence of pure linguistic fractionalisation on various economic indicators Alesina et al.
Because of its stronger emphasis on racial traits, the fractionalisation index shows much higher degrees of fractionalisation for Latin America and the Middle East, but lower for East and South East Asia than the Soviet ELF. Sub-Saharan Africa remains to be the most fractionalised region for both ethnic and the pure linguistic measures.
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