ABSTRACT
According to the theory of identity that renders cultural autonomy palatable to the liberal state, cultures – especially minority ethnic cultures – require some sort of official recognition if the self-esteem of individuals is not to suffer damage. ‘As Gleason (1983) suggests: the individual realises his/her personality through his/her culture, therefore a respect for individual differences entails a respect for cultural differences.’ There are many problems with this argument, and we will touch on some of them later in the book, but I do not wish to deny those whose self-understanding depends on this view of their culture and identity (see Gutman 1994 and Wren 2002). What I want to develop here is a different argument: that the problem with consociation is less the fact that it valorises particular ethno-national traditions, but that it valorises ethnicity per se and makes it normative, such that the space for other ways of being and other forms of politics is diminished. To take a short cut into this argument, let me invoke the work of Asim Mujkic, a Bosnian critic of the Dayton Accords:
Due to her or his marginalized and discriminated-against position under the [Dayton] Constitution, a Bosnian citizen is valuable only as a member of an ethnic group. He or she, according to ethnopolitical expectations, has two purposes in his or her individual life: a reproductive purpose (to increase the biological mass of the collective) and a pseudopolitical purpose (to vote for ‘his or her kin’ in elections). Both of these functions or purposes are deeply biological. In the first case, this is obvious. The second presupposes that a vote for the representative of a person’s kinship group is a precondition both for the existence of the group and for that of the individual. In other words, you don’t vote for lower taxes, ecological laws, and the like; rather, you vote for your own survival (every four years or so). So each and every election is described during the
campaign as ‘decisive,’ ‘crucial’, a ‘matter of life or death’ . . . taking part in politics takes the form of obeying a biological obligation. In this sense, ethnopolitics is a form of biopolitics. The notion of the individual citizen, abstracted from his ethnic and religious kinship, is viewed as subversive. It is thought of as a despicable form of atheism, moral corruption, decadence, and rebellion.
