Which Land Is Our Land? Domestic Politics and Change in the Territorial Claims of Stateless Nationalist Movements

Why do stateless nationalist movements change the area they see as appropriately constituting the nation-state they aspire to establish? This article draws a number of hypotheses from the literature on nationalism and state formation and compares the predictions of each about the timing, direction, and process of change to the empirical record in two stateless national movements in the post-Ottoman space: Fatah and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Based on this investigation, the article argues that shifts in the areas stateless nationalist movements seek as their nation-states occur as a byproduct of the politically competitive domestic environment in which these movements are embedded. As nationalist movements engage in the competition for mundane power and survival, their leaders may alter their rhetoric about the extent of the desired national state to meet immediate political challenges that are often only loosely related to territorial issues. If these, initially tactical, rhetorical modulations successfully resolve the short-term challenges that spurred their adoption, they can become institutionalized as comprising the new territorial scope of the desired national state.     

The Shifting Framing Strategies and Policy Positions of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego

This article asks why, in contrast to other historic territories with a regional language, such as Catalonia and the Basque Country, nationalist parties in the Autonomous Community of Galicia receive less electoral support. Going beyond prior explanations of this counterintuitive political outcome, which were mainly based on economic, sociological, and institutional factors, this piece of research sheds light on the strategies of political parties. It examines not only nationalist forces but statewide ones that successfully compete in Galicia. Our analysis is focused on the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) because this is the only nationalist force that has consistently achieved representation within the regional Parliament. Along with BNG's translation into party positions in both the left-right and center-periphery dimensions, the article's main contribution is its updating of the BNG's three framing strategies: the nationalism/“Spanishism” (1982–1993), the “common project” discourse (1993–2005), and the sovereigntist one (2005 onward). Shifts in public opinion regarding the territorial model and other attitudes toward self-government are also examined.     

Ethnicity,political survival,and the exchange of nationalist foreign policy

How does leadership’s desire for political survival in ethnically heterogeneous democracies affect the probability of states exchanging nationalist foreign policy? I define nationalist foreign policy as foreign policy that aims to fulfill national self-governance using a civic or ethnic frame. I argue that civic-nationalist policy disputing the territoriality of one’s own state is more likely, while ethno-nationalist policy favoring the leadership’s foreign co-ethnics is less likely, when the size of the leadership’s ethnic group is small and the level of democracy is relatively high. This is because the leadership, under such domestic conditions, has to mobilize support from other ethnic groups in order to stay in power. Civic-nationalist policy allows the leadership to increase domestic solidarity across ethnic lines and mobilize support from other ethnic groups, whereas ethno-nationalist policy would risk other ethnic groups criticizing the leadership of being ethno-centrist. These hypotheses are supported by quantitative analysis using an original dataset.     

Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity

The Middle East is one of the most war-prone regions in the international system. What is the most powerful explanation of the war-propensity of this region? I argue that neither realism nor liberalism are able to account for variations in regional war-proneness. Instead, I advance an alternative explanation based on the concept of the state-to-nation balance in the region. This balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region's peoples. The balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. Thus, I explain the Middle East's high war-proneness by focusing on its relatively low level of state-to-nation balance. This imbalance has led to a powerful combination of revisionist ideologies and state incoherence. While other regions suffer from state incoherence, powerful revisionist nationalist forces, notably pan-nationalist and irredentists (the “Greater State”), aggravate this problem in the Middle East. These revisionist forces are often transborder and are especially powerful in the Middle East because of the high degree of external/transborder incongruence in comparison with all other regions. The combination of nationalist revisionism and state incoherence has made the Middle East more prone to violence than most other regions.     

The Kosovo Demonstrations of 1981 and the Redefining of the Albanian Question

This analysis considers the impact of the demonstrations that occurred in Kosovo in spring 1981. They shocked Federal Yugoslavia and re-opened the Kosovo question as an issue in European and international diplomacy. They simultaneously intensified and consolidated the Albanian national movement in Kosovo, although activists held differing views as to the best solution to the problem. Another result of the demonstrations was a deterioration in Albano–Yugoslav relations over territorial and nationalist issues. The “Kosovo Spring” placed Albania in conflict with Yugoslavia, which declared a state of emergency in Kosovo on 2 April 1981 and suppressed the demonstrations by force. The events in Kosovo had the effect of redefining the whole Albanian question. The maturity of the Albanian response led international opinion to take Albania more seriously. For its part, Albania was impelled to evaluate more highly the response of Western countries to events in Kosovo and initiate a more realistic approach to the West—albeit tentatively—despite the persistence of deep ideological differences. The demonstrations of 1981 had a substantial effect on Albanian state policy regarding Kosovo.     

Strategies,capabilities, and demands: Explaining outcomes in violent intrastate nationalist conflicts

The study of nationalist and ethnic conflict has undergone considerable growth since the end of the Cold War. Much of the effort has been focused on ascertaining the nature and origins of such conflicts, and less on their process and termination. Those studies that do focus on conflict termination have generally done so using case‐study or idiosyncratic methods. Hence, we do not yet have much large‐N or statistical evidence that might suggest broad trends in how such conflicts end, or even much experience in measuring the relevant concepts in a manner conducive to such methods. This paper will address these questions by introducing a theoretical framework that seeks to explain the outcomes of violent intrastate nationalist conflicts. It will discuss measurement issues for relevant independent variables, and present data for a group of 75 violent, intrastate nationalist conflicts from 1945–1996. This data will then be used to test propositions derived from the model. The aim is to provide a useful building block for the study of the process and outcome of conflicts which political scientists now recognize to be some of the most important for the coming century.     

Democratization and European standards of National minority protection: Polish issues

This article considers how a nationally homogeneous state in East‐Central Europe, Poland, which in this respect is comparable to Hungary and the Czech Republic, has responded to a major post‐1989 challenge – that of meeting European standards of national minority protection within a civic‐territorial model of democracy. The forced assimilation and repression of such minorities as the Ukrainians and the Belarusans in prewar and communist Poland is now being handled within a common pan‐European perspective; this offers a model for the resolution of ethnic‐communal conflicts in the remainder of the highly differentiated post‐communist space. Although Poland's national minorities are now very small, historical memories of bad integral nationalist practice has induced post‐1989 governments to allay external criticism of alleged ethno‐nationalism by meeting European standards in this area as a key step towards eventual EU membership. The dual identity, linguistic, cultural and autonomy‐seeking characteristics of its currently non‐state‐destroying (that is, non‐secessionist) minorities points to comparisons with such groups as the Welsh or the Bretons. It argues for the redefinition of ‘normal’ as against more publicized aggressive forms of East European nationalism.     

The Electoral Salience of Trade Policy: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Welfare and Complexity

Why do some trade policies become electorally salient while others do not? While much of the literature argues that citizens act as a domestic constraint in the formation of trade policy, a general consensus has emerged that trade is most often a nonsalient issue among voters. This poses a paradox. On the one hand, trade models hinge upon voters’ rational self-interest and preferences for varying levels of protectionism to keep their governments accountable. On the other hand, the conditions by which trade becomes salient to these very voters in the first place are both undertheorized and untested. Using experimental evidence, I argue that two dimensions of a trade policy affect the likelihood of that issue becoming electorally salient. First, policies with large welfare effects should be more salient. Second, more complex issues should be less salient because such agreements are more likely to obfuscate an individual’s ability to discern its effects. I find support for my hypotheses that a trade policy’s salience tends to increase with the magnitude of its welfare effects and decrease with its complexity.     

Catalan Independence and the Challenge of Credibility: The Causes and Consequences of Catalan Nationalist Parties’ Strategic Behavior

This contribution examines the role of Convergència i Unió and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in putting the issue of Catalonia's constitutional relationship with the rest of Spain at the top of the Catalan and Spanish political agenda. It focuses on the strategic behavior of these two parties in pursuit of their territorial goals since 1978 and identifies the complex dynamics that led both parties to converge around a shared commitment to Catalan sovereignty. It is argued that the extent to which past strategic decisions have strengthened or weakened nationalist parties’ credibility on their core business of territorial empowerment has a significant impact on the options currently available to them as they seek a satisfactory answer to the Catalan question.     

Nationalist Protests,Government Responses,and the Risk of Escalation in Interstate Disputes

While the existing literature emphasizes that elites often have incentives to pander to nationalist sentiment, much less attention has been paid to elite efforts to subdue popular nationalism, either to avoid domestic instability or international escalation. This article examines how different governments respond to nationalist protests and the resulting effects on the risk that interstate disputes will escalate to armed conflict. We argue that government responses to nationalist protests tend to vary in patterned ways across regime types. Nationalist protests present particular dangers in weakly institutionalized democracies, where demonstrations often pose serious threats of instability but are difficult or costly for the government to subdue, tempting or forcing leaders to escalate to appease domestic critics. We illustrate the theory with four cases representing a range of regime types: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines.     

暴力方式与民心向背：寻找治理族群叛乱的条件组合

治理族群叛乱的目标既包括土地的控制,也包括人的控制,这是治理族群叛乱区别于其他形式叛乱的特点之一。人的控制实际包含两个内容,既包括人心向背,也包括人员数量的控制。人心向背关乎民众支持,而争取民众支持的必要性在于,虽然拥有民众支持并不必然导致叛乱的平息,但是没有民众支持是不能平息叛乱的。在族群叛乱已经发生的情况下,国家政府只有赢得更多当地民众的支持,才能成功治理叛乱。根据冲突各方的暴力行为方式及其对当地民众支持的影响,成功平息叛乱应具备国家政府有区别使用暴力、叛乱组织无区别使用暴力、当地温和派主导平叛行动等三个必要条件,以争取更多民众支持。这三个条件构成的条件组合,可以有效控制和减少叛乱组织能够招募到的人员数量,只要国家政府的平叛战略能够有效控制叛乱组织所招募的叛乱人员数量,叛乱组织就将走向衰败并最终消亡,也就是说这一条件组合能够成为国家政府成功平叛的一个充分条件。通过对结合俄罗斯、印度和西班牙等国家治理族群叛乱的经验和教训的分析,进一步证实了以上观点。     

Regime Change and War: Domestic Politics and the Escalation of the Ethiopia--Eritrea Conflict

The 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea seems to defy rationalist explanations. This paper contends that the escalation of the war, from an isolated border clash to the largest conventional war of the past decade, has its roots in the domestic politics of each of the two states. Quasi-democratisation in both countries created environments in which political elites were able to bolster their popular legitimacy by utilising nationalist and aggressive foreign policy rhetoric. The Eritrean leadership believed that a rapid escalation of the border clash to full-scale war would undermine domestic popular support and topple the Ethiopian People's Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime. War escalation had the opposite effect, strengthening the EPRDF domestically and provoking a massive Ethiopian retaliation. War thus served nation- and state-building goals in both countries. This paper provides a theory of the domestic political roots of international conflict in transitional regimes and applies this theory to explain the escalation of a localised border conflict into a highly destructive, full-scale war.     

Gambling for Resurrection Versus Bleeding the Army: Explaining Risky Behavior in Failing Wars

This article examines the behaviors of political leaders who implement costly and risky measures during wars in which victory has become highly unlikely. It advances two related claims. First, counter to the prevailing logic, leaders with little to no culpability for starting a war remain susceptible to blame and domestic repercussions for how a war ends. Second, with these new leaders, the impetus to avoid blame can prompt risky behaviors that look like gambling for resurrection; but the underlying objectives differ. Through similar behaviors, new leaders do not necessarily hope to salvage victory but instead seek to simultaneously exhibit resolve and demonstrate the futility of further fighting, thus securing support for a less-than-favorable settlement while hedging against domestic punishment. To assess this “bleeding the army” logic as distinct from gambling for resurrection, the article looks at the case of the French Government of National Defense during the Franco-Prussian War.     

Japan's conciliation with the United States in climate change negotiations

This paper attempts to analyze Japan's conciliation with theUnited States regarding national targets on greenhouse gas emissionsin the multilateral climate change negotiations (1990–2001)for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changeand for the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention. Japan's conciliatoryproposals had nothing to do with bilateral pressure from theUnited States. Why, then, did Japan make special efforts toconciliate with the United States, and offer lenient proposals?I focus on three factors: concern for international status,the costs of the climate change regime and domestic politics.My main argument is that the Japanese Ministry of InternationalTrade and Industry used ‘conciliation’ with theUnited States in its favor as an excuse for making proposalsthat would emasculate the climate change regime and as a meansof receiving support from the United States for differentiationof national targets on greenhouse gas emissions.     

Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

In a recent article, James Fearon advances an innovative approach to the study of interstate crises. He adds to the traditional view (that crisis outcomes are influenced by the balance of capability and the balance of resolve) the notion that domestic political audiences exert a strong influence over which state in a crisis is likely to achieve a successful outcome. His game-theoretic analysis yields a number of interesting hypotheses, which are tested in this study using data on militarized disputes, the structure of polities, and national capability. In general the results strongly support Fearon's model, though we find that relative national capabilities do tend to affect the outcomes of crises. This study highlights the importance of combining formal models of political events with large-N empirical tests.     

The Limits of Diversion: Rethinking Internal and External Conflict

The diversionary hypothesis offers a powerful alternative to rationalist explanations of war based on the state as a unitary actor. Most recently, it has been used to explain why democratizing states are more likely to initiate the use of force. In the past two decades, however, quantitative tests have produced mixed and often contradictory empirical results regarding the relationship between domestic unrest and external conflict. This article uses a modified “most likely” case study research design to test the hypothesis. Examination of Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands and Turkey's invasion of Cyprus, two cases that should be easy for diversion to explain, provide surprisingly little empirical support for the hypothesis, raising doubts about its wider validity as well as the relationship between democratization and war.     

Dangerous Days: The Impact of Nationalism on Interstate Conflict

Does an upsurge in nationalism make interstate conflict more likely? This article gives evidence to suggest that spikes in nationalism do have a direct impact on the likelihood of disputes between states. In it, I use national days or anniversaries as occasions that increase the salience of a national identity and its historical wars. I show that in the two months following national days, conflict is markedly higher than would be expected—almost 30 percent more likely than the rest of the year—and particularly likely for states who initiate conflict or who have revisionist intentions. I demonstrate further how nationalist sentiment can increase international tensions with a case study of national anniversaries in China and Japan. Together, this evidence suggests that the increase in nationalism around national days provides both risks and opportunities to regimes and shapes when they choose conflict over cooperation in international relations.     

Assessing international aid for local governance in the Western Balkans

This article investigates the impact of international efforts to cultivate effective and authoritative local governing institutions in the Western Balkans, a prime testing ground for democratization aid to post-war states. It explores three hypotheses, each of which argues that a particular approach of international actors toward domestic officials best improves the quality of local governance. The study's gathering of interview and survey data from field-based actors enables it to evaluate local government reforms' impact on domestic communities. This investigation arrives at three findings. First, in the view of Western Balkan peoples, local governance reforms do not produce benefits when they are either imposed or ignored by international authorities. Secondly, reforms produce benefits for local communities when they are designed to meet domestic concerns. More specifically, reforms valued by local communities are designed in ways that respond to domestic, rather than international, concepts of good local governance that emphasize socioeconomic aspects and produce tangible benefits. Well designed reforms also include significant aid targeting local governance that is coupled with the promise of a larger political settlement that is attractive to powerful domestic elites and contingent on clearly articulated local governance reforms. Thirdly, such aid best characterises European Union efforts only in Macedonia.     

The Intra-National Struggle to Define "US": External Involvement as a Two-Way Street

Three perspectives on the causes of communal conflict are visible in extant work: a focus on ancient hatreds, on leaders, or on the context that leaders "find" themselves in. Leaders therefore have all the power to mobilize people to fight (or not to) or leaders are driven by circumstantial opportunities or the primordial desires of the masses to resist peace or coexistence with historical enemies. Analysts who focus on leaders or context recognize that external actors affect internal conflicts, but little systematic research has explored the processes relating the domestic politics of nationalist mobilization to factors in the international arena. How does the international arena affect the competition among leaders? How do skillful leaders draw in external actors to lend credibility to their own views? This article asserts that leaders compete to frame identity and mission, and explores the degree to which international factors affect whose "definitions of the situation" are successful in precipitating mobilization shifts among potential followers. A unique finding of this longitudinal study of Northern Ireland is that the role played by international institutions and actors is affected by how domestic actors perceive, cultivate, and bring attention to the linkages between the two spheres.     

Crisis leadership and non‐communication: Marcos of the philippines

For all of their centralized power and undisputed authority, even crisis leaders are susceptible to breakdowns in political communication. This is particularly significant when martial rule or a state of emergency—most effective when of short duration— becomes open‐ended; the sense of urgency no longer prevails.

In the initial stage of proclaiming a constitutional emergency it is perhaps easiest to create an atmosphere of crisis and to promote a collective sense of danger. A climate of national fear and insecurity, in turn, enables the constitutional dictator to mobilize broad support even for draconian measures imposed at the expense of individual freedoms. With the prolongation of the emergency, however, and the institutionalization of crisis government, certain immunities to authoritarianism do begin to surface. As suggested by periods of prolonged emergency rule in India and South Korea, the leader becomes remote and isolated; he or she no longer feels quite so compelled to communicate; domestic opposition increases.

The experience of President Marcos and the Philippines since 1972 illustrates some of the political dynamics of the modern, permanent “emergency state.” What has happened to the New Society program of reforms should help in understanding the critical link of communication between leaders and their followers under conditions of either real or manipulative domestic political stress.