Ambassador Darko Angelov, prominent scholar, diplomat and foreign policy advisor shares his analyses and considerations with ICRI associates. Angelov served as Macedonian Ambassador to Greece anf Hungary, Foreign Policy Advisor and Secretary General (Chief of Staff) to the President of Macedonia,  Program Advisor at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and Senior Political Assistant at the OSCE Mission to Skopje. He has received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Social Geography from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a Master of Arts degree in International Relations and European Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

 

 

How to make two or more ethnic groups live together within one state boundary when they have divergent understanding and interests in the functioning of the state and its interests? The answer is, many would argue, to force them to remain together and to cohabitate at any price, as contemporary international relations seldom support changing of internationally established and recognized boundaries. And here in the cases of divided societies, the oft-prescribed recipe is the enforcement of a consociational democracy. The key feature of consociationalism is that it is a power sharing arrangement encompassing a set of institutional devices (proportionality, grand coalition, mutual veto etc.) as well as related cooperative attitudes of political elites in segmented societies, leading them to transcend the borders of their own groups, to be receptive to the claims of others and to accommodate the divergent interests and claims of the segments (Lijphart 1969: 216).

History knows of positive experiences of consociational power sharing. One such example is the Netherlands, with its consociational democracy up until the 1960s. Another is neighboring Belgium, over the last couple of decades relatively successful in the implementation of consociational power sharing between the country’s two main entities. Aside from these positive examples of consociational democracy in practice, an example of complete failure was the short-lived attempt to implement consociational power-sharing mechanisms in Cyprus in the 1960s.

The following will refer to the three above-mentioned cases, and relate them to Europe’s latest experiment consociational democracy – the case of Macedonia, following the Ohrid Framework Agreement and the 2001 conflict.

 

The Netherlands

 

The birthplace of consociationalism is the Netherlands, where Arend Lijphart first hammered out the theory. And it was the Netherlands that provided one of the earliest, if not the earliest, and surely one of the most successful consociational arrangements in practice. The Netherlands is a relatively ethnically homogeneous society with a small minority of Friesians in the northwest of the country. But what made it fruitful soil for consociationalism to take root was its religious and hence cultural heterogeneity, reflected in relatively deep societal cleavages witnessed up until the late 1960’s. (It had been in the 1950s when consociational concepts of governance were introduced).

However, this occurred in a society renowned for its welfare system and overall economic prosperity. Thus, the issue of the Netherlands’ success in the utilization of consociationalism may be tied to the very fact that it was in a society not divided on profoundly deep, ethnic lines and that it was not a society (also) burdened by social cleavages lining up to the religious division. As the following examples will show, the more societal cleavages have to do with ethnic antagonisms and division, the less the consociational model is effective and the less it can offer a state sustainable viability.

In the Netherlands today, the Protestant, Catholic, and secular societal cleavages have lost most of their significance. This modern Western country is now mostly culturally homogeneous (when it comes to the traditional, foregoing divisions).

When this homogenization really occurred (throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a follow-up to the successful implementation and practice of consociationalism) there was no need to continue practicing consociationalism as a scheme for creating government coalitions or for safeguarding the well-being of state and society. It was precisely when consociationalism became part of the political mentality and culture that it also became unnecessary to continue rigidly and instrumentally enforcing it. After a successful decade of enforcing consociational democracy (in the 1950s), it was no longer necessary for the leaders to practice consociationalism in order to hold the Dutch subcultures together. Simply, the decline of consociational democracy in the Netherlands since the 1960s was an indicator of its success, not its failure. Societal cleavages became relativised as the consensus-based, cohabitation approach to practicing politics became a core characteristic of the ‘Dutch way’ of doing politics and running a state.

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