Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places

By Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O'Leary

Power sharing may be broadly defined as any set of arrangements that prevents one political agency or collective from monopolizing power, whether temporarily or permanently. Ideally, such measures promote inclusiveness or at least the coexistence of divergent cultures within a state. In places deeply divided by national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious conflict, power sharing is the standard prescription for reconciling antagonistic groups, particularly where genocide, expulsion, or coerced assimilation threaten the lives and rights of minority peoples. In recent history, the success record of this measure is mixed.

Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places features fifteen analytical studies of power-sharing systems, past and present, as well as critical evaluations of the role of electoral systems and courts in their implementation. Interdisciplinary and international in formation and execution, the chapters encompass divided cities such as Belfast, Jerusalem, Kirkuk, and Sarajevo and divided places such as Belgium, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, as well as the Holy Roman Empire, the Saffavid Empire, Aceh in Indonesia, and the European Union.

Equally suitable for specialists, teachers, and students, Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places considers the merits and defects of an array of variant systems and provides explanations of their emergence, maintenance, and failings; some essays offer lucid proposals targeted at particular places. While this volume does not presume that power sharing is a panacea for social reconciliation, it does suggest how it can help foster peace and democracy in conflict-torn countries.

Contributors: Liam Anderson, Florian Bieber, Scott A. Bollens, Benjamin Braude, Ed Cairns, Randall Collins, Kris Deschouwer, Bernard Grofman, Colin Irwin, Samuel Issacharoff, Allison McCulloch, Joanne McEvoy, Brendan O'Leary, Philippe van Parijs, Alfred Stepan, Ronald Wintrobe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812207989

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places: An Advocate’s Introduction

Brendan O’Leary

The Mafia makes offers that cannot be refused. In one peace process a politician was once accused of making offers that no one could understand (O’Leary 1990). Do these statements explain the difference between power and power sharing? Is power coercive capacity, whereas power sharing is incomprehensible?

Power sharing is not incomprehensible, but it is frequently misunderstood. To aid comprehension a comparison is useful. In standard English, power is the ability to act, to be able to produce an intended effect (Russell 1992 [1938]). The powerless lack the capacity to do things they might want to do. The powerful are in the opposite situation. Power sharing, therefore, suggests spreading access to the capacity to get things done. Power is also a synonym for authority, jurisdiction, control, command, sway, or dominion, as well as the capacity to persuade, induce, constrain, oblige, or force. It follows that power sharing minimally means widening the access of persons or groups to the same domains or attributes. In standard usage power is also a possession, held by those with authority or influence over others, especially public officials, governments, officers, managements, or establishments who constitute what Paul’s Letter to the Romans described as the powers that be. Power sharing, therefore, broadens membership of the powers that be. It also requires that the included parties have access to key and observable decision making. There must be no important non–decision making taking place off stage, that is, no hidden possessors of power who control the agenda or exclude some issues from being addressed.¹ There must instead be an open and negotiable public agenda among the powersharers, or at least among their leaders. Any suppression of (controversial) issues must be mutually agreed upon among those who share power.

Theorists contrast power to and power over (see Morris 2002; Parsons 1969).² Power to is ability, power over is domination. The contrast resembles that between positive-sum and zero-sum relationships. Positive-sum power is joint, collaborative, or cooperative. All gain from its exercise, even if the benefits are not the same for all. Zero-sum power, by contrast, describes a distinct antagonism: if power could be measured, then A’s gain and B’s loss would sum to zero. Positive-sum and zero-sum conceptions do not exhaust the logical possibilities of power relations. The exercise of power may generate net losses (a negative sum) or the mutual ruin of the contending parties. It may create winners and losers; there may be disparities in benefits among the winners as well as in losses among the losers; and only one party may gain, while the others experience no net losses.³ Power sharing, for its proponents, is defended as power to. It enhances collective capacity; it is positive sum. Those who share will gain from a constructive way of making public decisions, from which all stand to gain, notably through the preservation of order and peace. Critics, by contrast, suggest that power sharing shapes public life at the expense of other and better kinds of politics—more competitive, individualist, or harmonious.

The opposite of power sharing is power’s monopolization by a person, faction, group, organization, or party. On inspection, it is usually true that the chief power-holder has to delegate some power to organize and maintain the monopoly. But to delegate power is not to share it. The principal who delegates requires the delegated agent to perform specified tasks and may withdraw the mandate.

Monopolies of power exist, at least formally, in tyrannies, despotisms, military autocracies, monarchies, lordships, papacies, theocracies, and oneparty dictatorships. They also exist, however, in democracies, a more unsettling idea. To say that democracy may coexist with monopolistic domination requires no commitment to theories suggesting that behind the façade of electoral competition lies the power of a ruling class or a power elite (see, e.g., Miliband 1980 [1969]; Domhoff 1990; Mills 1956). For example, no matter how competitive or free elections may be, critical political power can be monopolized between elections by the incumbent president, prime minister, cabinet, and nominated judges associated with the dominant party, ethos, or ideology. Even a temporary domination (between elections) is nevertheless domination, and the opportunities for elected leaders to dominate their societies against widespread or deeply held public preferences are significant (see, e.g., Nordlinger 1981, 92–94, 111–12, 130–32).

That democracy might lead to domination was the theme of the tyranny of the majority, which deeply concerned eighteenth-century republicans, such as James Madison, and nineteenth-century liberals, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. They were mostly preoccupied, however, with the impact of that possible tyranny on the individual’s property and liberty (including the individual’s religious beliefs) rather than on national, ethnic, or linguistic minorities as such (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1987 [1788]; Mill 1997, 5–6, 81–82, 192–94; de Tocqueville 1988 [1835, 1840], vol. 1., chap. 7, esp. 250ff).

Democracy is, however, also straightforwardly compatible with the (temporary) tyranny of a minority, especially democracies with institutions that encourage the winner to take all. For example, an ideological faction, not supported by a majority of voters in a country, may nevertheless control a cabinet, which in turn controls a party, and which in turn controls a legislature. In consequence, law or public policy may be dictated in the interests of the faction as long as its control is maintained.⁴

Defining Power Sharing, Deeply Divided Places, and Well-Ordered States

These considerations suggest the following broad definition of power sharing: Any set of arrangements that prevent one agent, or organized collective agency, from being the winner who holds all critical power, whether temporarily or permanently. This suggestion explains why the synonyms of power sharing usually include the following generally positive connotations: coalition or cooperative government and consensual and inclusive decision making. Critics of power sharing just as powerfully insist upon negative connotations. They refer to power-sharing arrangements as rudderless or leaderless, and they complain of stalemated, deadlocked, or blocked decision making.

The general definition of power sharing just suggested is broad if not vague. It does not, for example, specify how power is shared among the parties. It is capacious enough to include arrangements such as the Roman Republic’s executive, based on the annual election of two consuls, and its tribunes, who were able to veto legislation; ancient Sparta’s two kings and ephorate; the mercantile republican aristocracy of Venice; and the Institutes promoted by Calvin in Geneva.⁵ These are examples of power-sharing arrangements, and the definition thereby displays a key advantage: it does not presume that all power-sharing arrangements are virtuous by our current standards. A definition is of considerable merit if it makes it possible to approve or disapprove of the use to which power-sharing systems are put.

In this book our authors’ attention is mostly on contemporary powersharing systems. The major exception is Benjamin Braude’s discussion of limited power-sharing provisions under the Ottoman and Safavid empires (Chapter 6). In contemporary political science, to summarize a very large literature, power sharing is defined both by a regulatory goal and by specific instruments. The goal is the arrangement of political institutions to prevent the monopoly, permanent or temporary, of executive, legislative, judicial, bureaucratic, military, or cultural power. Four principal sets of instruments accomplish this goal.

1.  The first are overtly political bodies (executive, legislative, judicial, and administrative) organized to ensure both shared rule and selfrule among the relevant agents. These political bodies are organized through partly self-governing communities or territories, or both. Differently put, and as we shall elaborate below, these political bodies may be consociational (based on communities) or federal (based on territories). These bodies usually respect some combination of the principles of parity, proportionality, and autonomy.

2.  The second are security bodies: militaries, which normatively face outward for defense; police, which face inward to preserve order; and intelligence agencies, which engage in lawful surveillance and threat assessments. Security bodies must be organized so that power sharing within the political bodies is meaningful.

3.  The third are economic policies, principally wealth-sharing formulae, that reinforce the power sharing within the political bodies through some combination of the principles of parity, proportionality, and autonomy that also apply within the political bodies.

4.  The fourth are policies and practices that preserve cultural pluralism. Modern power sharing deliberately avoids the full-scale integration or coercive assimilation of cultures within the polity; that is part of its monopoly-rejecting ethos.

The last set of instruments may be called cultural protectionism, both by their critics and their proponents. They distinguish modern power-sharing systems from the ancient, medieval, and early modern examples cited above: the Romans, the Spartans, the Venetians, and the Calvinists never intended to promote cross-cultural power sharing within their republics. In modern power-sharing systems, cultures, and their evolution, are not left to the free market or subject to the governing diktats of the largest group. Instead (at least some key components of) the cultures of the parties to the power-sharing system are protected. The overall power-sharing settlement may promote an inclusive overarching shared public identity, but that identity must complement rather than wholly replace the previously existing cultures.

Cultures is put in quotation marks because agreeing what is entailed in culture is highly contested.⁶ As employed here culture encompasses the languages, national and ethnic traditions, religions and philosophies of life, customs, mores, and the ethos of peoples. As used here, no supposition is made that particular cultures are homogeneous, intrinsically holistic, static, wholly authentic and unaltered transmissions from antiquity, or mutually exclusive.⁷ It is, however, usually true that in deeply divided places at least some key agents believe that their cultures, in whole or in part, are threatened by others.

Contemporary power-sharing systems promote the coexistence of at least some cultures. This idea is partly reflected in the language of multiculturalism. But to anticipate some false and facile criticisms, modern power sharing does not promote all cultures (e.g., headhunting, tribal scarring, genital mutilation of males or females, or foot-binding). Nor does it presume to freeze the cultures of the contending parties as they were when the power-sharing settlement was made. Rather, modern power sharing, through encoded pluralism, enables the partners to the political settlement to have the power to govern changes in their own cultures—through autonomy (self-rule) and through joint agreement with others (shared rule). Cultural protectionism works not through the wholesale freezing of certain practices but through empowering specified groups to control their own cultural evolution—both autonomously and jointly.

Deeply divided places has more obvious connotations than power sharing, but warnings are in order. Places is a better expression than societies because it is a mistake to presume that a divided place contains just one society; that may be an issue in deep dispute, and a deeply divided place may be characterized by rival, parallel, or segregated societies. In a deeply divided place there may be more than one civil society, and their relations may be far from civil. All moderately complex societies are divided (stratified) in ways that may matter politically, for example, by age cohorts, by sex or sexual preference, or by income, wealth, class, and status. But within deeply divided places these standard stratifications are superseded, or profoundly reinforced, by further divisions of nationality, ethnicity, race, tribe, language, or religion. Deeply divided places are, as the designation suggests, sites of actual or potential civil or intergovernmental wars. They are where genocide, ethnic expulsion, or coercive assimilation are threatened, or have taken place; they are the places for which power sharing is often recommended.

There needs, however, to be some prospect of stateness or governability for power sharing to work as a recipe for deeply divided places.⁸ States matter more than societies in building inclusive power sharing because they define societies and their possibilities.⁹ Impersonalized institutions that have some degree of centralized and procedurally governed political decision making characterize functioning states. They have coercive capacities to ensure security: they can regulate all instruments of potential public violence and prevent or inhibit their own agents from being predators. They express authentic legal authority over persons, property, and their movements, and are recognized as such entities by their citizens, civil society organizations, and other states. Through self-help or alliances they can defend themselves. Lastly, functioning states are defined by their recognized sovereignty over their territory and its accompanying prerogatives: control over entry and exit of persons and entities. If states lack these capabilities they cannot protect human rights, promote human development, be inclusive, or share power effectively. Credible power sharing requires credible commitments to governability.

Conversely, failing and failed states are personalized: previously dominated by rulers, a family, clan, or clique, which did not distinguish public from private realms. They have become kleptocracies, governments of thieves, before or during the collapses of their regimes. They lack coherent, institutionalized, rule-governed patterns that inhibit predation. The rulers are indeed predators. They have usually lost their monopoly on the regulation of coercion and are challenged by guerillas, paramilitaries, terrorists, Mafiosi; they may be invaded, looted, and occupied by other states. They neither make nor enforce law. Those over whom they have failed to rule despise them as much as they fear them. These properties of failed states remind us that inclusion and power sharing work best within wellordered states. Power sharing, inclusivity, and human development require more than the diffusion of the right values; they need the soil of functioning states because they are unlikely to grow in anarchia. Order, or its likely realization, is therefore a key condition of power sharing in a deeply divided place, a negotiated order that brings widespread human security.¹⁰

Thomas Hobbes was right to emphasize the necessity of order for a worthwhile human life but deeply wrong to mandate everywhere an authoritarian solution or a sole sovereign. Unlike Hobbes, we know that our states are far more lethal than the alleged war of all against all, and for that reason alone we need to prevent them from becoming Leviathans. Power sharing is one route to controlling the violence of states, not just the violence of civil wars. States are the most powerful agencies of exclusion, and governments the major murderers in human history; and many state-builders and nation-builders have been people-killers and nation-killers (Connor 1972). Rudolf Rummel has calculated that in the twentieth century governments killed nearly 170 million people within their borders, a figure that exceeds those killed in wars between states (Rummel 1997). Genocide—killing peoples because of their presumed ascriptive characteristics—has been more common than most countries’ official histories acknowledge, and governments have been the major perpetrators: the list is not confined to Ottoman Turkey, Nazi Germany, and Interahamwe Rwanda. Politicide—killing those deemed political opponents—has also been recurrent in modernity. The Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, was the major killing regime of the last century: nearly sixty-two million may have perished under its yoke. Maoist China was often as brutal, killing over thirty-five million people. Democide—the killing of peoples—is the ultimate form of exclusion, and government its major agency. Governments have also organized, encouraged, or not stopped the expulsion of whole categories of persons from their land borders or their shores—people whom they have helped define as undesirable, nonindigenous, non-national, or disloyal. The twentieth century is justly described not just as one of death by government but as one of expulsions, of the cleansing of populations. Governments have also been the prime architects of policies of discriminatory control: organizing dominant national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups, and disorganizing and subordinating others through systematic discrimination, what we are now encouraged to call exclusion.

These should be commonplace thoughts. Regrettably, they are not sufficiently appreciated. States define people’s life chances, and it is to their practices that we must look to see how greater inclusion, promised by power sharing, may best be facilitated. Exclusion, in the regulation of national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences, is the product of coercive homogenization and special treatment of privileged communities: counting some categories of persons and communities in, as members, and others out. Genocide, expulsion, and the unilateral partition of territories are ways of homogenizing peoples that are now internationally outlawed, even if the laws are dishonored. If international norms against genocide and expulsion are rigorously enforced, through diplomatic engagements, economic sanctions, military embargoes and interventions, and the international criminalization of genocidal officials, then the worst forms of exclusion may eventually be halted or inhibited. But success in these endeavors requires moral universalism and a reorientation of the foreign policies of the great powers so that both their policymakers and domestic constituencies see the prevention and punishment of genocide and expulsion as in their interests. We are far from there.

The record of recent history is, however, mixed: it need not occasion despair. Reforms and sanctions against exclusionary practices—against discriminatory racist, religiously intolerant, and xenophobic regimes—had major successes in the last century. The undermining of apartheid in South Africa had both international and domestic sources, both moral and political causes. Decolonization, desegregation, autonomy, the advancement of language rights, and civil rights movements were significant elements in the more inclusionary advances of the twentieth century. Power sharing is one of the most important instances of enhanced inclusion, and it was revitalized in the last century and in this one. It is a standard prescription for protracted national, ethnic, and communal conflicts in deeply divided places, especially ones focused on antagonistic self-determination claims, but it is not the sole one; and no sensible advocate of power sharing assumes it is a panacea. Power sharing in deeply divided places is the subject of this collection of essays. Our contributors address variations in power-sharing systems and the instruments used to calm deeply divided places to make them more peaceful, civil, and stable, and to provide credible commitments to well-ordered democratic states.

Constitutionalism: The Separation of Powers, Competing for Power, and Power Sharing

Democracy can operate as a tyranny of the majority, and as the tyranny of a monopolistic faction, and therefore may worsen sociability and civility among the contesting peoples in a deeply divided place (McGarry 2010b). One response to such fears is to suggest that well-designed constitutionalism will block such tyrannies through protecting some core rights of citizens from potential violations by the governing majority (or faction) or from the stifling of individuality by crushingly conformist public opinion. Constitutionalism also works through making officeholders publicly accountable, requiring them to follow rule-governed and transparent procedures in their performance of their functions and through dividing public authority among multiple offices and institutions. Is constitutionalism therefore the relevant way to control monopoly? Is constitutionalism the key to power sharing?

Power sharing is indeed normally constitutionalized, that is, encoded in formal constitutions, written agreements, treaties, or charters, but that does not mean that all constitutions are power-sharing systems, especially regarding the management of cultures. Constitutions in principle may assign termlimited authority to use power in a monopolistic fashion to a person, faction, party, or role, for example, The President shall exercise the full plenitude of the executive power for a seven year term of office. The constitution may grant emergency powers to a single-person executive, which may include provision for the suspension of basic rights, and fundamental freedoms, or dramatic war powers. A constitution may mandate that there is just one nation, one religion, one language, one ethnicity as the basis of eligibility for citizenship. A constitution may mandate that the territory of the state is indivisible, thereby blocking the formation of federal regions. A constitution may be nonamendable, or powerfully entrench some identities at the expense of others. The 1982 Constitution of Turkey has many of these features.

But even when constitutions are more pluralistic they need not be power-sharing systems. If constitutional rules permit the domination of one person (faction, party, or national, religious, or ethnic group) over all the key institutions that shape major political decisions (and nondecisions), then the abuse of political power is possible. A powerful president or prime minister, backed by a regularly electorally endorsed party, may lawfully execute the powers of the office, promote legislation that reflects the preferences of the dominant nationality, race, religion, or linguistic group, and fill the judiciary and administration with their appointees. The rule of law is therefore often the rule of the dominant majority (or faction). Periodic elections may not prevent such domination. Accountability to some of the electorate, or to the courts, may not protect visible minorities, especially if the laws (and the constitution) have been drafted according to majority preferences. Courts staffed by appointees of an executive and legislature controlled by the same party may not act as guardians of individuals’ rights, let alone collective minorities. Constitutionalism per se does not prevent cultural homogeneity from becoming the hallmarks of policy and the state. Constitutionalism, formal or informal, is probably a necessary condition for successful power sharing across cultures, but it is definitely not sufficient. Indeed modern power sharing is conceived of by some of its supporters as a necessary supplement to constitutionalism, required to prevent the monopoly of cultural power, and especially required by large minorities.

Another way to make much the same argument distinguishes three remedies for despotic power found primarily in liberal thinking, namely the division of power, competition for power, and power sharing.¹¹ All these three ways of preventing despotic power may be constitutionalized, although it is the separation or division of powers that is historically associated with constitutionalism.

The Separation of Powers

In the liberal political tradition, influenced by the arguments of Montesquieu and James Madison, and strongly present in American federalism, the separation of powers holds a famous place.¹² Here dividing political power is seen as critical to preventing despotism. The tradition commends separating executive, legislative, and judicial institutions. Inhibiting a monopoly of power, especially in the executive, avoids kingly dictatorship. The separation of civilian from military power, of nomination from appointment, of police powers to arrest and interrogate from the judicial power to prosecute, of federal governments from state governments, or local governments from central governments are less recognized but just as important parts of the same logic. To divide power is to prevent its abuse; to check power with power controls public officials. Ambition tempers ambition.

Some think that properly organizing the division of power to prevent domination is what really matters in deeply divided places (see Roeder and Rothchild 2005; Roeder 2007). A well-structured division of power, they say, inhibits national, ethnic, or communal majorities—or minorities—from dominating others. Instead of one majority, multiple majorities, or no majority, may be created. By placing power in different institutions, with different electoral procedures, and with staggered timings of elections, for filling key officials, different persons and different majorities (or pluralities) in different institutions may claim democratic mandates and thereby check one another. Proponents of integration and assimilation often make this claim. They celebrate the creation of dual executives (a president, and a prime minister and cabinet), a dual legislature (a house of representatives and a house of states or regions, or an elected house and a house of experienced experts), and autonomous legal institutions (perhaps with both a supreme court and a constitutional court). For such advocates, separating powers is power sharing as well as power-division because they think that the separation of powers in different institutions obliges power-holders to work cooperatively in anticipation of the checking and balancing capacities of the others.

One tempting response to this apparently persuasive rhetoric might be to observe that the well-attested division of powers in the U.S. Constitution proved compatible with institutionalized and racialized slavery between 1787 and 1860; racism and a white tyranny over blacks in the deep South from the 1880s until the 1950s; and the termination, expulsion, and demographic erosion of Native Americans in an unfinished process of destruction. The U.S. Constitution has also proven wholly compatible with regular eruptions of persecutions of immigrant and religious minorities. Far from always supporting pluribus, the Philadelphia Constitution has enabled the unum of the dominant people palpably to take charge and avoided neither the tyranny of the majority nor the tyranny of faction. While that rebuttal is in order, it would be too quick a response because it does not address the relevant difficulty: it is a feature of our concepts that the expressions power sharing and the division of powers can be construed as synonyms by the informed, as well as the less well informed. In constitutional advisory work in Iraq, for the Kurdistan Region between 2003 and 2009, and in Sudan for the United Nations in 2009–10, I experienced the difficulty in the flesh and in texts. Power sharing in English would be translated into Arabic and then later translated back into English by another person to confirm that all negotiators and their advisors agreed the meaning of the relevant text. More often than not when translated back, power sharing would emerge as the separation of powers.¹³

There are philological and etymological similarities between sharing and division that explain this conflation: through dividing, after all, people or groups receive shares. But power sharing and the separation of powers are distinct, albeit potentially intersecting, notions. Power sharing mandates both coordinated jointness in shared decision making and autonomy in group or territorial decision making. The separation of powers, by contrast, does not prescribe a coordinated policymaking system. Rather under the separation of powers, policy and order are expected to emerge (if at all) from the clash of ambitious power-holders scattered across multiple institutions, and the separation is not organized to facilitate group organization. Power-sharers seek to share power across national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups through their representatives making joint decisions in executives, legislatures, and judiciaries; power-dividers seek to break up the formation of such groups and to individualize what they disparage as communal politics. As we shall see, power-dividers are mostly integrationists—only centripetalists, whom we shall shortly describe, express the desire to compete as advocates of power sharing. But though they say that they support sharing power, centripetalists rarely wish to institutionalize autonomy among encompassing national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious communities, or to have their representatives jointly share power within an executive; what they want is power sharing among politicians incentivized to be moderate toward others who are different from them. That said, there can be a power-sharing coalition within a federal or central government that respects a formal separation of powers among executive, legislative, and judicial institutions, and between the federal/central government and the regional/local governments, and related variations.

The Competition for Power

In the liberal tradition, found also in its constitutionalist wing, there is a distinct focus on how public officials win powerful positions, be they executive, legislative, judicial, or bureaucratic. Competition, as in the marketplace, is seen as a way of preventing nefarious monopoly. In this tradition, competition for executive and legislative posts should occur through elections. Liberals, especially outside the United States, are more doubtful about elections to judicial and administrative positions, for which they generally favor competitive meritocratic appointment through professional associations and transparent and reviewable procedures. The minimal definition of representative government is a political system in which officials compete for authoritative positions in free and fair elections for citizens’ votes; in which elected officials hold office for limited terms, make laws, and give orders to unelected officials within constitutional norms that ensure accountability—both through the ballot box and recourse to the courts.¹⁴ Given these premises, the competition for power is a sine qua non of democratic government.

The division of powers and competition for power are established and intelligent principles. But on their own, advocates of power sharing submit, they are unlikely to calm deeply divided places and may cause conflict. Where the competition for power resembles an ethnic, religious, or linguistic census, elections may not check governments; rather they may encourage the tyranny of the majority. The combination of the separation of powers and the competition for power may also be conducive toward the oppression of national, ethnic, and religious communities. After all, the competition for power expresses or creates majorities—and such majorities may be constructed from national, ethnic, or communal cleavages. A sustained majority from the same community may win control over all major offices and governments—even if the powers of those offices and governments are divided and checked—and then propose and implement discriminatory public policy or biased conceptions of merit.

Integrationists and assimilationists often prescribe the division of powers and the merits of the competition for power but often presume that a nation of individuals is in existence, or that one should be built. They may forget (or ignore) that many states are multiethnic and multiconfessional—and that many are pluri-national—and thereby pass over the fact that the competition for power (with or without the division of powers) may be a recipe for conflict in deeply divided places.¹⁵ Sri Lanka has not wanted for a separation of powers or for elections. Neither has Kenya nor Northern Ireland. To commend procedures that advance the position of nationalizing majorities when there are rival national self-determination claims is partisan or, alternatively, utopian. It is partisan when one community seeks to nationalize the state or region in its image on no better claim than might (numbers) makes right; it is utopian when (potentially or actually) antagonistic communities are expected or instructed to fuse. Partisans and utopians have had opportunities many times in the last two centuries, too often producing bloodbaths. That is why many contemporary liberals commend power sharing as a supplementary approach to avoiding the worst outcomes in pluri-national, multiethnic, and multireligious states.

Power sharing, however, commends not only the sharing of power but also the division of power and the competition for power. Power sharing should add to rather than subtract from the liberal, constitutional, and democratic experience. Power sharing commends coalition as a considered way of doing things, but not as a wholesale substitute for the division of power or competition for power.

If Rudolf Rummel’s calculations in Death by Government are even approximately correct, the last century was the most lethal in human history. Power sharing claims to offer some prospect of reducing domestic lethality and war in human affairs. The argument for power sharing is more sophisticated than acknowledging that what cannot be won on the battlefield is best allocated through a shared forum and a shared executive. Powersharers follow Rousseau’s declared method in The Social Contract that commends taking men as they are, and laws as they might be, but because they do not seek just one community they reject Rousseau’s particular proposals as disastrous, namely inalienable, indivisible, and absolute sovereignty, the rejection of partial associations, and one vigorous homogenizing civic religion. Power-sharers do not seek a social contract among a unified people; they seek social contracts for sociability among divided communities or between territorial governments. The first of these possibilities leads to what are called consociational directions; the second leads toward territorial or federative power sharing. These two possibilities can be combined in complex forms, as we shall see.

Power Sharing, Participation, Accommodation, and Their Alternatives

Power sharing is intended to enhance effective and peaceful political participation, especially by minorities. Ineffective participation by majorities is rarely a major cause of violent conflict in an established democracy, though a majority’s potentially negative reaction to more effective participation by minorities may cause violence—the backlash phenomenon.¹⁶ What follows assumes that the relevant majorities are demographically and electorally dominant, an assumption that needs to be relaxed in deeper analysis.¹⁷ All other things being equal, we may assume that more effective political participation is desirable, for example, through electoral mobilization, interest-group or party membership, or through institutionalized functional or territorial autonomy.¹⁸

Power sharing is intended to hold the existing state together with the active participation and consent of its minorities, unlike strategies of genocide, expulsion, partition, and control. It may also bind states together, through confederations, to prevent war recurrence over deeply divided places. It should always be considered in the light of the possible alternatives.¹⁹ Genocide and expulsion are terminating and terminal strategies. Secessionists, when reasonable, wish to convert their status into that of majorities inside their own sovereign state. Their leaders and followers logically reject promises of better participation or power sharing in a unitary, a unionor a federal state, either because the historical record shows the promises lack credibility, as for the people of South Sudan, or because the merits of independence outweigh the expected benefits of greater participation in the existing state. Partitionists seek to divide territories to control conflict; in executing this strategy they invariably offend at least one national or ethnic community’s conception of its homeland, often more than one (O’Leary 2007, 2011). When sincere, partitionists promise better participation in all the post-partition entities, promises unfulfilled in the historical record. Controllers, by contrast, seek to organize the dominant and to disorganize the subordinate—and the potentially insubordinate. They wish to block effective participation by minorities in the core regime that matters and to confine whatever participation they enjoy to subordinated social organizations or to co-opted or indeed trivial institutions (Lustick 1979; O’Leary and McGarry 1996, chap. 3). Measured by these alternatives, power sharing merits a hearing, though it is never the sole strategy available or on offer.

To understand power sharing fully we must compare it with its apparently reasonable alternatives, not just the grim prospects of genocide, expulsion, partition, and coercive assimilation. To do so, we may distinguish among strategies that respect the equality of human beings and minimal human rights by their degree of tolerance of heterogeneity (in race, language, ethnicity, religiosity, and nationality). At one extreme homogeneity is insisted upon in the aptly named assimilationist strategy; at the other end, recognition of heterogeneity may reach the point of accepting that it is better that the state be downsized. Policy and institutional instruments are logically linked to where policymaking elites’ preferences fit on this scale (see Figure 1.1).

Assimilationist strategies encourage effective political participation solely on the majority’s terms: Join us and you can be part of us and cease to be a structural minority.²⁰ They may work when targeted at migrants who have left their homelands and who wish to be assimilated, and where the dominant people welcomes egalitarian assimilation to take place. If the two groups wish to tango, assimilation occurs, either through acculturation, where the minorities adopt the dominant majority’s culture,²¹ or through fusion and amalgamation, where a novel collective identity is formed from a blend of the previous ingredients, including through extensive exogamy.²² Since Alexander the Great’s wedding of his Macedonian companions to the princesses of the Persian empire, formal and ambitious fusion strategies have been rare, and rarely successful. Fusions happen more than they are planned, as in Spanish-speaking America. Both acculturation and fusion have been evident in the Americas since 1492 and part of the histories of settler states elsewhere, such as Australia; but acculturation has also been present in immigrant welcoming states, such as France was—when it wished to have as many citizens as Germany.

Figure 1.1. Scaling tolerance of difference among democratic elites.

Assimilationists emphasize majoritarian institutions for democracy, including single-person executive presidencies and winner-takes-all electoral systems in single-member districts (WTA-SMD), or expressly majoritarian electoral systems such as French-style double-ballot or two-round systems (TRS), or the majoritarian preferential vote in single-member districts, often known as the alternative vote (AV). (The varieties of electoral systems are lucidly appraised in Bernard Grofman’s chapter.) Formally, assimilationists emphasize inclusive civic citizenship: Nous n’avons pas de minorités, mais seulement des citoyens ou des étrangers. More circumspectly, they insist that their states only have political minorities, which are capable of becoming governing majorities if they become electorally persuasive. To establish homogeneity, assimilationists often seek to ban (minority) ethnic, religious, or linguistic parties and encourage the building of national parties based on programs, doctrines, and interests (Bogaards 2008). Assimilation is especially beneficial when voluntary, but if one or more party is a reluctant groom or bride, then different forms of coexistence may be demanded. Power sharing is one of these.

Integrationist strategies, by contrast, do not seek the full cultural homogenization of minorities. They confine their homogenizing ambitions to the public sphere, as its proponents call it (following Habermas 1992; Calhoun 1992). In the public sphere, a common public language, public symbols, and common party politics are preferred. Integrationists are relaxed about the private preservation (and indeed the dynamic development of) minority cultures but do not hesitate expressly to bar them from the public domain. A duly elected Gaelic Irish nationalist and self-professed political republican may be admitted to the UK Parliament but must address it in English, if not the Queen’s English, and the republican must recognize the constitutional monarchy before being admitted to the floor of the house. Integrationists seek, at least in their own estimations, to design public institutions—executives, parliaments, courts, public mass media—to be inclusive, even if they recognize that they cannot be entirely culturally neutral. They encourage minority participation in public life; they do not oblige minorities to abandon their cultural identities, but they are expected to leave their cultures at the doors to public places in the way some institutions and peoples expect visitors to leave their shoes. Minorities may be monotheist, polytheist, or atheist in the synagogue, mosque, or club; they may be monolingual, bilingual, polylingual, or nonlingual in the bedroom; and they may be ethnic, fused, cosmopolitan, or plain dull in the kitchen; but respect is expected for the codes of the formal public culture. The sincere integrationist seeks to strip the state of as much of its inherited cultural presumptions as possible, but there are limits. Even Habermas’s ideal speech takes place within a language, and at least one person may need translation help (as all do with Habermas).

Table 1.1 indicates the preferred goals, forms of party and party system, views of federalism, preferred political institutions, and favored electoral systems typically found among three types of integrationist: a (recognizably French or Turkish) republican, a (recognizably 1960s British Labour) socialist, and (a recognizably current U.S. or Canadian) liberal. Republican and socialist integrationists are strongly hostile to minority ethnic, linguistic, and religious parties, preferring national and class orientations, respectively. They favor party and electoral systems that discourage minority party formation and voting for ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority parties. Republicans and socialists are strong majoritarians. Liberals, however, have feared tyrannies of the majority, by which they have usually meant usurpationist labor movements, or religiously superstitious and ill-educated masses, rather than those of nationalizing majorities. Accordingly, they have generally preferred the constitutional division of powers and the creation of multiple nonmajoritarian regulatory institutions²³ to unrestrained sovereign parliaments. Republicans and socialists dislike federalism if it weakens the center and its distributive and egalitarian powers; by contrast liberals favor national federations—because they may constrain socialists, protect markets²⁴ and liberties through power-dispersal, yet emphasize one nation.

Table 1.1. Integrationist Strategies Toward Minorities

Note: For discussion of voting systems, see Chapters 2–3.

Accommodationist strategies are synonymous with power-sharing strategies. These favor the formal public recognition and organization of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities, as the Latin etymology of accommodate and its cognates suggests—namely, ad (toward) and commodare (to make fit), in turn derived from commodus (suitable). Genuine accommodation requires the political recognition of more than one ethnic, linguistic, national, or religious community in the state and aims to secure coexistence, though its proponents may occasionally support downsizing, secession, or even partition, if accommodation is impossible. Academic supporters of power sharing are not, contrary to their critics, primordialists who believe that national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups have existed since time immemorial.²⁵ Accommodationists insist, however, that such groups’ identities, and differences from one another, are often resilient, durable, and hard, rather than malleable, fluid, soft, or quickly transformable, as suggested by self-styled social constructionists, who are often unconscious of their assimilationist or integrationist biases. Where divisions are enduring, advocates of power sharing believe that attempting either assimilation or integration is unjust, and unfeasible, unless much blood is shed, and that is usually counterproductive.

John McGarry and I believe there are four distinct forms of democratic power sharing in real-world strategy and academic commentary, now known as centripetalism, multiculturalism, consociation, and territorial pluralism. Each of these sees itself as a mode of power sharing, and each is briefly treated below (see also Table 1.2). The order reflects, from left to right on the scale in Figure 1.1, the willingness of the respective advocates of these strategies to embrace national minorities on their own agendas, with centripetalists being the least enthusiastic and territorial multinational pluralists the most keen.

The centripetalists are the closest to integrationists. They see themselves as responsible realists, though they regard some integrationists as wishful thinkers, except regarding policy toward voluntary immigrants. They are skeptical of romantic multicultural celebrations of difference. Centripetalism involves prescriptions first clearly articulated by the political scientist and legal scholar Donald Horowitz and a small number of other scholars who have followed in his tracks. Centripetalism emphasizes convergence toward the center, or bringing together, and is usually juxtaposed by its proponents to consociation, which is seen as generating centrifugal or fissiparous politics (in my view, contentiously and often inaccurately). Centripetalists claim majority-rule institutions may be tempered through vote pooling to facilitate the election of moderate ethnic politicians capable of reaching out to other ethnic communities (Harris and Reilly 1998; Reilly 2001; Reilly and Reynolds 1999). They counsel against electoral systems that they think favor ethnic partisans and often condemn proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, particularly party-list PR with low thresholds, or the single transferable vote (STV) in multimember constituencies with a significant number of seats because they permit extremists to flourish. Vote pooling, according to its proponents, should require at least some winning candidates to obtain votes from ethnically different voters and encourage campaigns focused on centrist moderate voters in heterogeneous constituencies. Such systems should make moderation pay (Horowitz 1989, 1991).

Table 1.2. Accommodationist Power-Sharing Strategies Toward Minorities

Centripetalists advocate two approaches to electoral system design. The first relies on territorial distributive requirements, which is considered especially useful for presidential elections. An electoral college is an example. A majority of the electoral college votes need not be the same as a majority of the popular vote and may obligate successful candidates to focus their campaigns across a range of member states (and, by implication, groups). Horowitz’s favorite example is presidential elections in Nigeria circa 1979. The then new constitution stipulated that a winning presidential candidate needed at least a plurality of the popular vote and at least a quarter of the vote in at least two-thirds of the nineteen states, and tacitly required any competitive presidential and vice-presidential team to appeal across the north and south of Nigeria and, minimally, to at least two of its three largest ethnic communities. The second approach is the frequent advocacy of the alternative vote, a majority-preferential voting system that can be used for both legislative and presidential elections: the winning candidate must win an absolute majority of first—preference votes or a majority of votes after the transfer of lower-order preferences from the ballot papers of eliminated candidates (Bean 1997; Lijphart 1990; see also Allison McCulloch’s and Bernard Grofman’s chapters in this volume).²⁶

Centripetalists support the conciliatory potential of federalism because it may undercut support for secessionists. But their reasons show the limits of their willingness to accommodate nationalism among minorities. Federalism, they argue, may disperse power away from the center, thus inhibiting authoritarianism; quarantine conflict at the local level (such as Muslim-Christian disputes over sharia law in northern Nigeria); provide training for future central politicians to engage in ethnic bargaining at the local level; and promote cross-cutting politics through facilitating interand transethnic alliances based on common regional interests and facilitating intragroup divisions and group proliferation within regions (Horowitz 1991, 214, 2007, 1985). On federations, Horowitz’s ideas are close to those of national federalists, for example, for both South Africa and Iraq he commended strong political centers. He has also supported the forced partition of federative entities dominated by large ethnic communities, even against their will, to prevent regional majoritarianism. Horowitz commends Nigeria, where I grew up, as a paradigm case: the Nigerian First Republic was (primarily) made up of three regions, dominated by the Yoruba, Ibo, and Hausa-Fulani, respectively. Nigeria’s military dictators subsequently forcibly restructured the federation into twelve, and then nineteen states. (There are now thirty-six states, and perhaps forty-six soon.) Some are dominated by the three large communities, some by other smaller minorities, and some by no single community. None of the big three now commands an integrated contiguous homeland region. In contemporary Iraq, followers of Horowitz recommended a national federation based on the eighteen governorates established under Saddam Hussein’s Baathists and hoped that it would be imposed by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority (Wimmer 2003–4; for similar ideas, see Dawisha and Dawisha 2003 and Makiya 2003). They believed that it would divide the Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite Arabs among several different governorates respectively, and thereby promote intercommunity and cross-provincial alliances, as well as an inclusive Iraqi national identity.²⁷

Horowitz himself comes close to integrationists in several respects: he seeks to promote transethnic identities, to disadvantage politicians who focus exclusively on their own communities, and to favor those who can find ways of transcending their own ethnic affiliations (1991, 207). Yet it is difficult to see how a single-person presidential executive can fully represent distinct communities, as opposed to representing what they may share, unless the person is of mixed origins, such as President Obama. However, Horowitz is clearly not an integrationist (though some of his followers are): he does not favor engineering social mixing or the wholesale privatization of culture and has argued for bi- and multilingualism, and other forms of public support for minority cultures, in different contexts. He favors at least some self-government for minorities, particularly small ones that do not threaten the state, though not national self-government, and his vote-pooling ideas are sincerely aimed at promoting some interethnic power sharing, albeit through a coalition of moderates, and albeit he strongly prefers transethnic to ethnic parties.²⁸

Multiculturalists go closer toward meeting the aspirations of minorities; they affirm the desirability of protecting multiple communities in both public and private realms. Recognition is their theme.²⁹ In most of North America and much of Western Europe, multiculturalism is not practiced literally or pervasively. That would