It has been said that technological and economic development lead ultimately to the decline of communal conflict, and that the emergence of new kinds of socio-economic roles and identities undercuts the organizational bases upon which communal (that is, “racial,” “ethnic,” “religious,” or “tribal”) politics rests. In the past decade, several scholars working in culturally plural societies have challenged this conventional view. They have suggested that communalism may in fact be a persistent feature of social change, and that the dichotomous traditionmodernity models which have often guided our empirical investigations have obscured this theoretical alternative and thereby produced false expectations concerning the direction of change. This paper attempts to synthesize the various elements of this emerging theoretical perspective through the formulation of several propositions which link modernization to communalism. While our discussion will draw primarily upon the Nigerian experience for illustrative material, the propositions are intended to be applicable across societies.“Communalism,” in this paper, refers to the political assertiveness of groups which have three distinguishing characteristics: first, their membership is comprised of persons who share in a common culture and identity and, to use Karl Deutsch's term, a “complementarity of communication;” second, they encompass the full range of demographic (age and sex) divisions within the wider society and provide “for a network of groups and institutions extending throughout the individual's entire life cycle;” and, third, like the wider society in which they exist, they tend to be differentiated by wealth, status, and power.

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.After the nationwide general strike of June 1964, workers in Nigeria gained unprecedented political prominence. The timing of the strike had much to do with this, for only five months hence the Federal elections of December 1964 were to be held and Nigerian politicians became keenly aware of the labor movement. Two kinds of politicians began to compete for the labor vote. On the one hand, there were politically oriented labor leaders who wanted to take the opportunity of the strike and of the elections to form a Nigerian Labor party. They made their appeals to the class-consciousness and self-interest of Nigerian workers defined as workers, not as members of this or that ethnic group. On the other hand there were the politicians of the major political parties who made their appeals to the ethnic loyalties of the workers.2 Thus between June and December 1964, and for some months after, workers were crosspressured between their labor and their ethnic loyalties.3 Working against the effect of the 1 I have benefitted from suggestions made Wolpe. As research assistants, Platon Rigos and Ronald Stockton were most helpful. I wish to acknowledge also the assistance of the Department of Political Science and the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. in an Urban African Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956). For a recent application of the situational mode of analysis developed by the Rhodes-Livingstone group to the Nigerian scene, see Leonard Plotnicov, Strangers to the City: Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).'"Cross Pressures" are "combinations of characteristics which in a given context would tend to lead the individual to vote on both sides of a contest." Bernard cross-pressures were, first, the appeal to classconsciousness and labor interest of the ethnic parties themselves, and second, the climate of ethnic and national insecurity which raised the saliency of ones' ethnic membership over ones' membership in the working class.What I shall try to show in this analysis is that the Nigerian worker, like the worker in other countries, tends to support his ethnic group when that group is threatened. This is not surprising and was not surprising to Nigerian labor leaders. What was surprising was the fraction of workers who claimed to support a labor party while at the same time supporting ethnic parties. This fraction which we have called "inconsistent respondents" or for short, the "'Inconsistents," played an important role in allowing Nigerian labor leaders to count on more support than they actually had.4 Beyond that, it would seem that inconsistent respondents in transitional societies such as Nigeria make polit...

In the period 1894–96, when the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred. Nineteen years later, when the empire was weakened by disintegration and war, some one million persons—half of the Armenian population—were killed with the active participation of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the day. The massacres and the genocide—for that is what the second act of violence has come to be called—must rank among the most terrible catastrophes of our era. Two questions come to mind: why did these things happen, and what is there to be learned from the Armenian case? We shall attempt to answer these two questions, keeping in mind that for historical events of such complexity and magnitude there are no final answers, merely more or less credible, more or less convincing, formulations. And given the obvious limitations, this article will focus on the massacres alone.

When confronted with mass death and forced deportations, the contemporary world community has often reached for the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of genocide in order both to make sense of and to condemn current events. This article suggests that the Armenian Genocide sets a more accurate precedent than the Holocaust for current mass disasters, especially such as those in Nigeria and in the former Yugoslavia, which are the products of nationalism. Conversely, the Holocaust is a prototype for genocidal movements that transcend nationalism and are motivated by ideologies that have global scope.