ABSTRACT
Consociationalists have responded to the ‘liberal’ critique by distinguishing liberal and corporate forms. In the former the participating groups are said to be self-determined; in the latter pre-determined. In line with this, consociational revisionists claim that there is a difference between accepting the fact that identities are durable but malleable constructs and believing them to be an unchanging primordial inheritance. None of these distinctions are as stable as consociationalists would like to believe. Looking at the best example of actually existing liberal consociation – the GFA – we saw that the scope for self-determination is institutionally severely circumscribed. Following Brubaker and Cooper, I would also wish to question the viability of the analytical distinction between a constructivist and primordial or essentialist understanding of identity. Given the unpalatable associations of essentialism, ‘academic correctness’ (2000: 6) requires lip service to constructivism, but when it comes down to it, there is little to choose because either way ethnic identity is taken for granted as something that ‘is always already “there” as something that individuals and groups “have”’ (2000: 28).
