Speaking about the Middle East to the British parliament a few weeks ago, President Obama echoed a long list of political observers when he contended that we must not expect those in power to relinquish it without some resistance. This resistance may take many forms and propaganda usually the first line of assault. Guyana is a bi-communal society and I will briefly consider the history of the bi-communal discourse to provide some understanding of nature and possible ramifications of this type of society. But perhaps more importantly, we need this history to attempt to quell notions that this concept has been concocted to suit political actors intent upon gaining power, as some say, through the “back door.”
Until relatively recently, political theorists believed that deeply divided ethnic societies were fated to autocratic rule. In 1861, in his ‘Considerations of Representative Government,’ John Stuart Mills, one of the stalwarts of British political philosophy, made the following observations. “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. …. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities, than from the common arbiter, the state. … That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler, is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Above all, the …. only reliable security in the last resort against the despotism of the government, is …. wanting the sympathy of the army.”
In other words, the existence of plural nationalities is a problem for representative government, which flourishes best in homogeneous societies and democratic participation in these latter societies is compatible with a majoritarianism that finds expression in, among other things, the freedom to form and join organisations, freedom of expression, the right to vote, eligibility for public office, the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes, alternative sources of information and free and fair elections. What then are we to do with a multiethnic society where majoritarianism does not prevent, the negative outcomes identified by Mills and fosters the permanent or semi-permanent establishment of regimes based on ethnicity?
This question presented a challenge to scholars, particularly those working in the field of development who recognised the obstacles majoritarian systems posed to development in ethnically divided newly independent colonies. Our own Nobel Prize-winning economist, Sir Arthur Lewis, in his 1965 “Politics in West Africa”, went back to the nature of democracy to find an answer. He argued that the primary meaning of democracy is that: “all who are affected by a decision should have the chance to participate in making that decision, either directly or through chosen representatives,” and that the secondary meaning is that “the will of the majority shall prevail.” In the normal political process, the two meanings are obviously incompatible since a winning party may make all of the decisions and the losers, who are affected by those decisions, may criticize but have no opportunity to be part of the actual decision-making process. “To exclude the losing groups from participation in decision-making,” he contended, “clearly violates the primary meaning of democracy.”
Of course, in a homogeneous society, where voter allegiance and governments change intermittently, the loser’s position is tolerable. But in an ethnically divided society, the situation could become unacceptable. In these kinds of society politics is usually based upon ethnic demands “which in turn often leads to the growth of zero-sum, winner-take-all politics in which some groups are permanently included and some permanently excluded. Politicians in divided societies face powerful incentives to play the ‘ethnic card’ and campaign along narrow sectarian lines, as this is often a more effective means of mobilizing voter support than campaigning on the basis of issues or ideologies” (Benjamin Reilly, “Democra-cy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management” 2001). In this kind of ethnic tug-a-war, society as a whole suffers.
The truth of the matter is that all societies are to some degree conflictual and a certain level of conflict is legitimate and is normally resolved by way of established democratic institutions. Democracy depends not only on the economic and social conditions but also on the design of political institutions and the latter is of paramount importance. “In a well institutionalised democracy, the competitive nature of the political process is ideally characterised by a recurring uncertainty of outcomes …. The best example of this is at election time where parties and individuals may ‘win’ or ‘lose’, but where the losers may win next time and the winners know that their victory is only temporary. The structural uncertainty of a democratic electoral process, where all outcomes are necessarily unpredictable and impermanent, is thus a basic precondition for the evolution and institutionalization of behavioral norms of cooperation” (Ibid)
This way of putting the matter and our historical experience suggest that when ethnic groups are relatively small and begin to exert themselves, their leaders are gradually accommodated within the status quo.
The many West Indians who have reached the upper echelons of British politics and Barak Obama himself are products of this kind of accommodation. However, once two relatively large ethnic groups exist, competitive politics is played out in a fashion that solidifies and galvanizes them into becoming political parties for themselves and this kind of context requires new systems of management.
In these conditions, requiring proof of discrimination before a discourse on shared governance could take place misses the point. In the interplay between these ethnic groups, negative responses are not necessarily the outcome of adverse conditions but of the context itself. Added to this, when we understand that in a competitive political situation no constituency leadership can survive if it visibly discriminates against its constituency, the dilemma of politics in a bi-communal society and the need for new forms of governance can be truly appreciated.
