Guest Contributor
Bassel F. Salloukh, Associate Professor of Political Science, Lebanese American University
Consociational power-sharing is no stranger to academic and policy controversy. It tends to divide students of politics in plural and postwar places into unwavering proponents and staunch opponents. Some find power-sharing institutions necessary for any prospects for peace after protracted wars; others consider ‘power sharing as an impediment to peace and democracy,’ to borrow the title of Donald Rothchild and Philip G. Roeder’s seminal essay (Rothchild and Roeder, 2005: 29-50). This is not surprising, however. After all, the stakes are usually very high, especially in postwar contexts, and the policy choices are stark. For how do you reconstitute postwar states and societies? How can you convince one-time warring combatants to disarm, demobilize, and reconcile? How can you ensure that postwar consociational power-sharing arrangements do not end up reifying sectarian or ethnic identities at that moment when they are most injurious, or that they do not destroy the very state institutions they are supposed to salvage?
These are only some of the questions considered in a Special Feature I edited for Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. The essays gathered in this Special Feature grew out of a desire to reflect theoretically and normatively on consociational power-sharing, take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab world after the popular uprisings. This is not strictly an academic exercise in an Arab world dotted by seemingly frozen conflicts. It is rather an attempt to examine both the pitfalls and the possibilities of consociationalism in institutional and structural contexts that differ substantially from those states that make up the theory’s original birthplace.
Consociational power-sharing’s main institutional features to promote peace and stability in plural or postwar divided places consist of a grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality, and segmental autonomy. What this parsimonious formula means in practice in different contexts is 1) any variation of a cross-community executive gathering political elite representatives along ideological, ethnic, religious, or sectarian lines, whether of the grand coalition, concurrent executive, or plurality executive types; 2) specified or unspecified veto power on decisions that may affect the political balance of power, or infringe on the cultural identity, of the different cultural, ethnic, or sectarian groups; 3) some form of proportionality in the distribution of public offices and resources, and hence a preference for Proportional Representation (PR) electoral laws; and, finally, 4) territorial or non-territorial community self-governance particularly on matters pertaining to cultural identity and family law.
Consociationalists do not assume that ethnic, religious, sectarian, or tribal identities are the only significant markers in a plural or postwar society. Rather, that in divided or postwar places people tend to mobilize politically primarily along what may be historically-constructed but ultimately ‘sticky’ identities, to borrow Ashutosh Varshney’s accurate formulation, despite the existence of alternative counterfactual ones, whether cross-ethnic, cross-sectarian, national, ideological, environmental, gender, or regional. The challenge for consociationalists, then, is to find the right mix of institutional arrangements to achieve peace in plural and postwar societies. Towards this end, consociationalists propose two such arrangements reflecting different perspectives on the historical genealogy and malleability of identities: corporate and liberal consociation. As John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary contend, corporate consociation accommodates segments of a plural society according to ascriptive criteria institutionalized through predetermined quotas ‘on the assumption that group identities are fixed and that groups are both internally homogenous and externally bound’. By contrast, liberal consociation adopts a constructivist logic and aims to reward ‘whatever salient political identities emerge in democratic elections, whether these are based on ethnic or religious groups, or on subgroup or transgroup identities’.
The problem, however, as Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy argue in their contribution to this Special Feature, is that consociational power-sharing ‘works in some places on some issues at some times but it does not work everywhere all of the time’. They consequently deploy the ‘lifecycle’ heuristic to understand consociational power-sharing’s mixed record as an institutional strategy to manage ethnic or sectarian conflict in different contexts. ‘Choices made at the point of adoption and during the life of the agreement’ go a long way in determining a consociational arrangement’s performance, its ability to achieve compromise, its dysfunctionality, and, finally, prospects for its ‘endability’ or biodegradability. This process-oriented approach deployed by McCulloch and McEvoy foregrounds greater sensitivity to contexts: how macro-institutional types, such as liberal and corporate consociation, interact with formal and informal micro-institutional rules in determining the success or failure of consociational power-sharing arrangements in specific places.
Paul Dixon and Ibrahim Halawi present critical evaluations of consociationalism’s embedded violence against alternative political economic choices. Dixon’s radical critique is chiefly aimed at how consociationalism’s inconsistent heuristics precludes the emergence of alternative policy options, identities, and socioeconomic struggles. On this view, then, and far from the promised politics of accommodation, consociational power-sharing often ends up producing a kind of ‘sectarian authoritarianism’. Halawi magnifies this critique and considers elite consociational arrangements in the Arab world exclusionary and intrinsically counter‐revolutionary. This is so primarily because they presume class inequalities and over‐emphasize state stability. By critiquing class and state assumptions embedded in the consociational power‐sharing literature, and presenting a nuanced conceptualization of counter‐revolution, Halawi seeks to inspire more inclusionary state‐(re)building arrangements in the Arab world.
These theoretical explorations are followed by empirical contributions by John Nagle and Toby Dodge. Both authors converge on how the institutional architecture of consociational power‐sharing in Lebanon and Iraq torpedo the very states and state institutions they are meant to reclaim from civil wars. Consociational power-sharing in postwar Lebanon and post-invasion Iraq incentivize sectarian and ethnic modes of political mobilization and identification, serve elite political economic interests, stubbornly resist reforms, and encourage institutional dysfunction. In Lebanon, a complex ensemble of institutional, clientelist, and discursive practices operates to reproduce sectarian identities at the expense of alternative cross-sectarian, class, gender, ideological, or regional ones. Similarly, in post-invasion Iraq the notorious al-muhasasa al-ta’ifiya or sectarian apportionment system structures access to state resources, public offices, and political mobilization along ethno-sectarian lines. In both cases, then, consociationalism created a host of distortions that ossified identities, shaped ethno-sectarian modes of political mobilization, and eviscerated state institutions by turning them into clientelist platforms immune to rational policy-making.
The causality is crucial here: it is the institutional architecture of consociational power-sharing, through both formal and informal rules, corporate and liberal arrangements, that creates a host of distortions that, in Dodge’s words, transformed consociationalism in Iraq into ‘widespread and systematically sanctioned corruption, which has alienated an even broader section of society from the ruling elite and the system as a whole’, and in Lebanon, as Nagle describes, mutated into a kind of ‘zombie power-sharing’ that ‘devours and drains the lifeblood out of the body politic’. Paradoxically, then, consociational arrangements in postwar Lebanon and Iraq undermined the very prospect for ‘stateness’ (O’Leary, 2013:6) consociationalists consider a prerequisite for the success of power-sharing in divided and postwar places. They have also created the political economic, ideological, and social incentive structures that militate against the kind of de-pillarization experienced in other divided societies with a consociational legacy, but namely Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Finally, Steven Heydemann and Simon Mabon explore prospects for consociational power‐sharing in two hard cases: Syria and Bahrain. Although in both cases prospects for power‐sharing may appear remote, both authors suggest that the reality is far more complex, and that ultimately some kind of consociational power‐sharing may prove necessary to secure postwar reconstruction and reintegration into the international community in Syria, and genuine representation and peace in Bahrain. In Syria, and despite regime preferences against sharing power with any kind of opposition, consociational power-sharing may be imposed from the outside by Russia to achieve a number of overlapping local and geopolitical objectives: shore up the Bashar Assad regime’s legitimacy and preserve its unchallenged authority across the country, meet regional and international conditions for reconstruction aid, and project Russia’s political and military capabilities on behalf of a client regime. Alternatively, in Bahrain, an informal power-sharing arrangement, one that emerges endogenously and can hence secure a modicum of reconciliation, some kind of political representation beyond sectarian identities, and hence peace, yet without undermining substantially regime prerogatives, may be the best possible option in the foreseeable future.
In sum, then, and despite its long practical history and substantial academic literature, the cases explored in this Special Feature suggest that there is always room for more cross-regional comparative examination of the impacts of consociationalism’s core institutional features on divided places with varying histories of state, ideological, class, and sociological formations. Hopefully this Special Feature encourages such research as we continue to explore consociational power-sharing’s assumptions and effects in very different divided places.
Read the full Special Issue on Challenges to Power‐Sharing in the Post‐Uprisings Arab World edited by Bassel F. Salloukh