ABSTRACT
Multiethnic armies are often perceived as dysfunctional. They are considered to lack cohesion, are prone to desertion and disintegration, and are often entangled in civil strife. As security agents, they are therefore considered to be largely ineffective. Cases like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the establishment of new armed forces is challenging, fuel this image and add to the perception that multiethnic states in general face an issue not only in their civil service composition, but also in social coexistence. And yet, multiethnic states (and armies, for that matter) are the rule, not the exception. To begin with, monoethnicity is an invention of Western modernity – most countries are multiethnic to some extent (comprising at least one minority group that makes up 20 per cent of its population), while the ideal of a monoethnic nation-state prevails mostly in Europe. If most countries are multiethnic, so must be their armed forces. Five hundred years before Christ, Persian king Darius I had an army containing 24 ethnicities. Similarly, Roman, Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian militaries generally mirrored their respective empire’s multiethnic make-up.1 Until the French Revolution, ethnic features were standard in the armed forces. The idea that the military should preferably be monoethnic gained popularity only with the advent of the People’s Army in France in the nineteenth century, as did the common conviction that the nation-state should supersede affiliations other than nationality. But just as the ideal of the state where people and nation (monoethnic, so to speak) are identical, the ideal of the monoethnic armed force is far from being reached. Multiethnicity in Western armies prevailed, and continues to do so, until today. Racial segregation in the US Army was legal until 1948 and continued to exist unofficially well beyond that. Armed forces in Belgium, Kenya, Switzerland, India or Canada face issues of diversity and ethnicity without affecting their effectiveness. Yet the common perception of the armed forces as a harbour of unity, cohesion and nationalism seems to contradict the diversity, factionalism and ethnicity that make a multiethnic society. Simply put, a multiethnic armed force seems a paradox in itself because its backbone, cohesion, appears to be difficult to achieve owing to two common perceptions: multiethnicity and cohesion seem mutually exclusive, and the former is seen as difficult to deconstruct while the latter is essential for a functioning military.
