McGarry, J., O’Leary, B., and Simeon, R. (2008) ‘Integration or Accommodation? The Enduring Debate in Conflict Regulation’

McGarry, J., O’Leary, B., and Simeon, R. (2008) ‘Integration or Accommodation? The Enduring Debate in Conflict Regulation’, in S. Choudhry, ed., Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? Oxford, OUP, 41-88.

1. Democratic states managing deep diversity can adopt two strategic approaches: either integration – promotion of a single public identity across the state’s territory (‘bridging capital’) coupled with acceptance of collective diversity in private realms (‘bonding capital’) – or accommodation – acceptance of multiple public identities and respect for cultural and regional differences – as tools of public policy. They both reject coercive assimilation.
2. Assimilationists seek the erosion of private cultural and other differences as well as the creation of a common public identity, through either fusion or acculturation, in the name of ‘nation-building’: they are often ‘benevolent paternalists’ (J.S. Mill).

Integration

1. Main aim: equal citizenship. It turns a blind eye to difference for public purposes (privatization of ethno-cultural differences – B. Barry) to eliminate political instability and conflict.
2. Reject ethnic political parties or civic associations – prefer parties on redistributionist continuum, not recognition one and any form of autonomy based on group identities.
3. Three types:
   1. Republicans:
      1. support civic nation-state, integral nationalism, sharp laicity;
      2. veer towards assimilationism;
      3. favor unitary state, majoritarian or winner-take-all political institutions, centralization and a nation-building executive;
      4. oppose federalism, decentralization, judicial review, ethnic-based political parties in the name of undiluted popular sovereignty.
   2. Liberals:
      1. champion nation-state and liberal institutions focusing on the individual and on values of choice and freedom, as well as meritocracy.
      2.  incline towards soft multiculturalism but reject ethnofederalism;
      3. value political competition and system of checks and balances, bill of rights, judicial review, separation of powers, functional
      4. federalism;
   3. Socialists:
      1. state as driver towards socialist civilisation / or barrier to it!
      2. focus on social classes and distributive justice through substantive social citizenship; much less focus on ‘nation’ as key unit of solidarity: constitutional patriotism instead;
      3. promote bottom-up, mass-based collective action and civil society organisations to develop social solidarity and commonality of interests.
4. Usually the norm in long-established democracies in the Euro-American sphere; often associated with large majorities or territorially dispersed minorities, but not with large minorities that are territorially concentrated.

Accommodation

1. Requires recognition of ethno-cultural diversity within a state, and aims at peaceful coexistence od difference communities: ‘responsible realism’, but also ‘Herderians’.
2. Not primordialists, but believers in the empirically testable existence of resilient, durable, hard ethno-cultural and linguistic identities and divisions; therefore support adaptation, adjustment, and consideration of special group interests to promote loyalty to the state. (53).
3. Main forms:
   1. Centripetalism (D. Horowitz): convergence / centrism; promote crosscutting politics and transethnic identities;
      1. votepooling electoral systems facilitating election of moderate politicians through campaigns appealing to centrist moderate voters in heterogenous constituencies;
      2. against PR systems with no or no thresholds and party lists, as well as STV in multi-member constituencies;
      3. appeals to rationality of politicians.
      4. prefers two particular electoral systems: territorially redistributive (Presidential Electoral College); and alternative vote for both legislative and presidential systems;
      5. favors federalism; regional majorities, asymmetrical autonomy arrangements.
   2. Multiculturalism (K. Renner & O. Bauer): Protection and maintenance of multiple communities in both public and private realms;
      1. North America and Europe do not have practice real multi-culturalism: toleration differences in private domains and promote integration in public domains as well as some minority language services, so as to help minorities adapt to dominant society.
      2. NA&E M remains heavily liberal and tends to be more unicultural than it pretends to be: emphasizes voluntary and fluid group memberships.
      3. ‘boutique multiculturalism’ (S. Fish): resistance to different culture at the point it matters most to its committed members. “Such multiculturalism is, in our view, “pseudo multiculturalism”.
         It is liberal integration in disguise” (57).
      4. Credible multiculturalist arrangements involve:
         1. Respect for a group’s self-government in matters the group defines as important; plus proportional representation of all groups in key public institutions;
         2. Share of public power through consociational arrangements;
         3. Territorially-based communities share public power through pluralist federations or pluralist union states respectful of historic nationalities, languages, religions.
         4. All require public support through legislation or expenditures.
   3. Consociation (A. Lijphart): addresses deep antagonisms with executive power sharing and minority vetoes, in addition to autonomy and proportionality.
      1. Cross-community power-sharing executive staffed by representative elites from different communities (usually grand coalition); there are ‘complete’, ‘concurrent’ and ‘plurality’ consociations;
      2. Mandates the principles of proportionality in executive, legislature, judiciary, elite levels of bureaucracy, police service, army – in both elected and unelected positions, as well as in electoral systems (both list-based and STV).
      3. Autonomy or community self-government: recognises parallel societies, equal but different, and rejects hierarchical ranking of groups; can be functional autonomy or take on territorial form; mandates public support for  maintenance of diverse communities over time (therefore different from Western ‘pseudo-multiculturalism’);
      4. Rigid consociations in very antagonistic environments may endow each partner with veto rights, in case they perceive their fundamental interests as threatened; veto rights can be asymmetric (do not block others from pursuing certain policies) and symmetric (block all parties to do so).
      5. Can be democratic or undemocratic, formal or informal, liberal or corporate.
   4. Territorial pluralism:
      1. Communities that are territorially concentrated and ethnically / nationally mobilised can be managed either in a pluralist federation (internal boundaries respecting ethnicity) of pluralist union state;
      2. Full pluralist federations have 3 complementary arrangements:
         1. Significant and constitutionally entrenched autonomy for federative entities, that cannot be rescinded unilaterally by the federal government;
         2. Consensual, even consociational, rather than majoritarian decision-making rules within federal government, including executive power sharing and proportional principles of representation; they have strong second chambers representing the regions, strong regional judiciaries, and  regional role in selecting federal judges;
         3. Plurinational: they recognise a pluralist rather than monist conception of sovereignty, recognised in the state’s constitution, state symbols, official languages etc; they involve collective territorial autonomy for partner nations and may permit asymmetric institutional arrangements. When autonomous and asymmetric institutions are entrenched the result is a federacy (ex: Northern Ireland if Belfast Agreement fully implemented) (66).
         4. However, it cannot meet adequately the needs of communities that extend beyond the state’s borders: crossborder institutions are required., ranging from functional cooperation to confederal institutions (66). “Comprehensive accommodation encompasses interstate institutions as well as intrastate institutions.

Engagements between integrationists and accommodationists

1. The approaches lie on a continuum stretching from assimilation to disintegration.
2. Significant debate between various positions (in particular between centripetalists and consociationalists) regarding which approach best contributes to secure the three fundamental sets of values grouped around stability, justice, and democracy.
3. Stability:
   1. opposition between integrationists (charging elite-driven deepening divisions and instability justified by exaggerated ‘ancient hatreds’ and internal group homogeneity) and accomodationists (charging creation of an unstable equilibrium that will either degenerate into assimilationism or evolve into power-sharing);
   2. also between centripetalists (charging that elite leaders will not compromise enough because if they do they will be ‘outbid’ by more radical parties, and that ‘grand coalitions are both undemocratic and unworkable) and consociationalists (charging that reliance on outside forces to implement centripetalism as well as emphasis on votepooling as unrealistic and unlikely to bring out stability) -who agree, however, that accommodation is preferable to integration;
4. Distributive Justice:
   1. debate between integrationists (charging that recognizing public groups as political actors may lead to internal group repression and discrimination grounded in ascriptive factors, including unfair treatment of regional minorities and unjust resource distribution) and accomodationists (charging that beneath veneer of integrationalism hides “merely assimilation with good manners” (80) privileging the majority or largest group over others) regarding the social justice of their recommendations.
5. Democracy:
   1. Both integrationists (charge that accomodationists undermine democracy by surrendering public power to unaccountable ‘cartels’ of interest groups elites) and accomodationists (charging that majority rule in divided places is likely to be partisan rule by an actual minority of voters) regard their own solutions as more democratic than rival ones.

When is integration or accommodation appropriate?

1. Today’s democratic states are limited normatively and practically to variants of integration and accommodation, since rival strategies based on assimilation, control, partition, ethnic expulsions are no longer acceptable.
2. Integration is till the preferred choice in Western states, but accommodation strategies are gaining ground.
3. Integration is most effective for societies where social cleavages are crosscutting rather than reinforcing, as well as in places with numerically small, territorially dispersed minorities that do not claim specific ‘historical homelands’.
4. Territorial accommodation works best for middle-sized minorities concentrated in their own national space. Large, nationally mobilised minorities will tend to demand not just autonomy, but power-sharing arrangements within the federal government.
5. Consociation is demanded by territorially dispersed and interspersed minorities with deeply polarised politics. In such cases, centripetalism has few chances of succeeding.
6. Transstate settlements are required where national communities spill over state boundaries. Such transstate settlements are difficult to imagine, but they may become more feasible when the relevant states participate within an overarching institutional framework, such as the European Union” (87).
7. “The mobilization power of a community partly shapes its orientation towards either integration or accommodation” (88).
8. “In general, integration is the politics of the historically weak or the newly arrived, whereas accommodation shapes the politics of those powerful enough to resist assimilation but not strong enough to achieve secession” (88).