Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization 9781626373617

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IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE

AGE

OF

GLOBALIZATION

IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE

AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

edited by

Roger Coate Markus Thiel

Published in the United States of America in 2010 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2010 by FirstForumPress. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Identity politics in the age of globalization / edited by Roger Coate and Markus Thiel. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935049-26-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Minorities—Political activity. 2. Group identity—Political aspects. 3. Nationalism. 4. World politics—21st century. I. Coate, Roger A. II. Thiel, Markus, 1973– JF1061.I43 2010 323.1—dc22 2010018973 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

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Identity Politics and Political Identities: Local Expressions in a Globalizing World Markus Thiel and Roger Coate

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Trapped Between Gender and Ethnicity: Identity Politics in Ecuador Manuela Picq

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Civil Society and Cosmopolitanism: Identity Politics in Hong Kong Wai-man Lam and Kay Chi-yan Lam

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Reshaping Identity Politics in the EU: The Case of the Hungarian Minority in Romania Eloisa Vladescu

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Deploying National Identity: HIV/AIDS and South African Health Politics Vlad Kravtsov

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Modern Islam or Theocracy? Turkey’s Gülen Movement Nuray V. Ibryamova

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Conclusion Markus Thiel and Roger Coate

155

Bibliography About the Authors Index

179 199 203

Preface

The topic of this book—identity politics in an age of globalization—is simple yet has important consequences for understanding world politics in the post-9/11 world. Identity is the need for a sense of “self” in relation to those around oneself and recognition of the legitimacy of that identity in society. It is a basic human desire and as such is a powerful source of explanation of human behavior and social interaction in international relations. The framework employed here is derivative from a basic human needs approach to understanding world politics (Coate and Rosati 1988). That approach argues that all politics are inextricably linked to processes and outcomes associated with the satisfaction or deprivation of basic needs. Building on this foundation, the book is the result of a collaborative group process that has evolved over several years and numerous professional conferences and much networking. The process germinated during a dinner-time conversation between the editors at the 2007 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in Chicago. Panel sessions and group discussions at subsequent annual ISA meetings in San Francisco in 2008 and New York in 2009 followed. As we have proceeded, the world has moved and changed around us, making it ever more apparent that our topic—identity politics—is as important as ever. This change has served to challenge some of our initial basic assumptions and helped to enlighten our understandings of identity-based political activities and identity politics. The election of the first U.S. African-American president has brought to the fore both in the United States and abroad a renewed focus in public discourse on the nature and role of identity politics. Writing about President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court in May 2009, for example, Peter Baker of the New York Times stated on May 30: “In the heat of his primary battle last year, Barack Obama bemoaned ‘identity politics’ in America, calling it ‘an enormous distraction’ from the real issues of the day. Many thought his inauguration as the first African-American president this year was supposed to usher in a new post-racial age.… But four months later, identity politics is back with a vengeance.” Much of the controversy centered on a speech Sotomayor had given in 2001, in which she stated the hope that

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a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who had not lived such a life. A few short months later, when President Obama was addressing a joint session of Congress on health care reform, the issue of race again captured headlines as Congressman Joe Wilson from South Carolina shouted “You lie” at the president from the House floor. Former president Jimmy Carter, a seasoned veteran of southern racial politics, was quick to suggest that Wilson’s comment had been based on racism. Moreover, the renewed focus on identity politics spurred by Obama’s presidency extends far beyond the waters of North America. In mid-October 2009, for example, Roger Coate was in the staff cafeteria of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris having coffee with a friend of some 25 years from French-speaking Cameroon. For over three decades she had served in the Director-General’s office at UNESCO and thus gained a unique vantage point on world affairs. Soon the conversation came to the topic of President Obama’s selection as Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2009, which had been announced the day before. To her, the selection was not curious or questionable. She went on to explain her perspective on the role of symbolism and identity in global political affairs. “This is the first time in modern times,” she offered, “that a person of black color has assumed the top leadership role of any major world power and with his selection by popular vote came a renewal of hope and belief in the American dream and the restoration of America as a symbol of equality, justice and rights of all.” *** There are, of course, numerous persons and institutions to thank. First, the authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable resource and networking environment of the International Studies Association (ISA) for moving the project from idea to reality. Roger Coate is indebted to the Department of Government and Sociology and the Paul D. Coverdell Endowment of Georgia College and State University and the Department of Political Science of the University of South Carolina for providing financial and other support for the project. He also wishes to thank Chadwick Alger, John Burton, Leon Gordenker, Charles Hermann, Margaret Hermann, Harold Lasswell, Craig Murphy, Donald Puchala, Jerel Rosati, James Rosenau, Daniel Sabia, Markus Thiel, Timothy Shaw, Tedd Gurr, and Richard Snyder for their varied and important contributions over the years to helping him conceptualize this topic.

Preface ix

Markus Thiel thanks the Department of Politics and International Relations, School of International and Public Affairs, at Florida International University, as well as Sarah Mahler at FIU’s Center of Transnational and Comparative Studies, for institutional support, and also the European Research Academy (EURAC) Bolzano for its hospitality during Summer 2008. He is particularly grateful to Carolyn Stephenson, Aart Holtslag, and Elisabeth Prügl for their comments, and Simona Merati for providing her time for the completion of this manuscript. The recent salience of identity politics provided for an intellectually stimulating exercise during the authors’ collaborative effort, and it is our hope that the reader may find the outcome equally thought provoking.

1 Identity Politics and Political Identities: Local Expressions in a Globalizing World Markus Thiel and Roger Coate

The resurgence of identity politics of various groups aided by processes of globalization is one of the major puzzles of the contemporary political world. From indigenous groups fighting against corporate power to gayrights movements seeking equality to political dissidents publicly denouncing authoritarianism, political action based on collective identity promotion is evident everywhere these days. On the other hand, the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns supposedly transcended issues of race and gender because of the candidates’ universal appeal irrespective of their characteristics. Yet as was clearly illustrated with the vicepresidential nomination for the first female Republican candidate vying for votes against an African-American Democratic one, identity politics are not only an important, but also contentious, political dynamic in our age. In today’s world, emphasizing and mobilizing identities of various kinds seem to be a constituent part of global politics. Be it in the domestic realm or in transnational and regional affairs, the significance and utilization of collective identity as a marker of political activities are evident everywhere, with some analysts projecting a new, global ‘clash of peoples’ as a result (Muller 2008). This has not always been the case. Identity politics—broadly defined as political action oriented on the needs, values and interests of particular collective groups possessing a shared identity—have received growing attention in the past three decades in the academic realm and public discourse. The acceleration of processes of globalization and

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Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization

cultural homogenization acted as catalysts of identity politics and has impacted on them, lending new urgency to issues of identity and its nexus with politics. As a result, the relationship between globalization, identity, and social movements has been noted as an important area of future research (Bernstein 2005). This volume concentrates on two major questions worth exploring in this context: first, how are collective identities being experienced, framed and utilized in identity promotion and maintenance and secondly, how are globalizing features such as the mediatization of politics, the spread of international norms and support by intergovernmental institutions and non-governmental actors being instrumentalized by various identity-based groups. This book explores collective identity configurations as they play out in the globally expanded political environment involving to a greater degree mass media, IGOs and INGOs, rather than focusing on constitutive identitive characteristics or movement strategies alone. A brief primer on collective identities and the theoretical framework surrounding identity politics below is of essence to correctly assess the repercussions of such actions. The use of the term “identity politics” to describe identity-based political activities originated in the 1960s with the civil rights movement in the United States, although collective political groups and social movements representing particular identity-related causes have existed throughout history (Calhoun 2004). In a first wave, these groups aimed at inclusion into society and nondiscrimination, whereas in recent years, a more assertive stance has taken hold among them, requesting acceptance or recognition as different (Isin and Wood 1999, p. 14). Nowadays such collective group representations are based on a diverse array of identity markers, including gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, culture, and other shared characteristics, such as being disabled or chronically ill. The definitions for identity politics are as numerous as the groups conducting such action, from philosophical definitions highlighting the ambivalent liberty-threatening character of identity-based demands to the post-structuralist or neo-marxist critique of class-based politics to the social-movement inspired literature we are drawing upon (Bernstein 2005). The lack of an international relations and political science body of work stems from the fact that identitybased groups only recently began to utilize the effects of globalization transnationally, and that the post-modern and constructivist literatures challenge forms of essentialism. Our aim here, however, consists less in exploring the constitution of collective identities but rather how such collectives experience and transform their identities in the international environment. These groups represent to a certain extent a minority

Identity Politics and Political Identities 3

struggling for, at the minimum, equal treatment, recognition or other social-justice causes. At times these demands are extended to include affirmative treatment (e.g. with gender or racially based groups) and/or territorial autonomy (e.g. with many ethno-cultural groups). In this sense, research on identity politics focuses on “how culture and identity […] are articulated, constructed, invented, and commoditized as the means to achieve political ends” (Hill and Wilson 2003, p. 2). The number of groups concerned with identity politics is very large, and the emergence of largely normative global human rights standards have pushed issues of recognition, preservation, and resource allocation to new heights. The abundance of collectivities bound together by a shared identity facet based upon differentiating characteristics from the majority population is confusing at best and has led to a somewhat biased overuse of the term “identity politics,” coupled with the assumption that these groups are too diverse to be conceptually compared as to their expectations, goals and performance. It can be said, however, that these groups are joined by their belief that their belonging to politico-cultural identities contain valuable resources for social change and that they need to be actively involved in obtaining their goals (Preston 1997). They should be distinguished from more professionalized public interest groups or power-acquiring political parties, although admittedly, identity-based groups are often simultaneously social movements. Identity politics, however, are also distinct from social movements because they exist independent of a postulated opportune political structure (Tarrow 1994) and prove often more durable than issue-based movements. Collective identities and the ensuing identity movements, while in itself socially constructed “arise out of what is culturally given” (Johnston and Klandermans 1995)—they evolve out of socially engrained and ritually reinforced group affinities. The theoretical underpinnings supplied by social movement theorists specifying political opportunities, mobilizing structures, cultural framing processes and contentious interaction between state and movement aid in the analysis of identity politics in changing socio-economic environments. Even globalization has been examined in its impact on social movements (Guidry et al. 2000). Yet these movement structures have been questioned in recent years (Goodwin and Jasper 2004; Kriesi 2007), and it is our contention as well that identity politics cannot easily be reduced to the issue politics of most social movements, nor do identity-based groups pursue necessarily postmaterialist objectives typical of (new) social movements. In light of the augmented prominence of medialized politics, discursive opportunity structures, in

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creating enabling political and social public spheres, are significant promoters of identity politics as well (Koopmans et al. 2005). Members of such a group generally share a social positioning in relation to the self-identification of other societal groups as not only sharing common traits, but often also as being oppressed or marginalized i.e., they constitute collectivities that are often defined by social or political inequality and encumbered with ambiguous or negative representations by the wider polity (Williams 1998; Woodward 1997; Ingram 2004). This does not mean that identity politics represents simply protest by oppressed minorities, nor are concerns for recognition or competition for resources sufficient explanations for the prevalence of collective identities: “Like identities, identity politics in itself is neither positive nor negative. At its minimum, it is a claim that identities are politically relevant, an irrefutable fact. Identities are the locus and nodal point by which political structures are played out, mobilized, reinforced, and sometimes challenged” (Martin-Alcoff and Mohanty 2006, p. 7). Groups exercising identity politics should also be differentiated from non-identity based groups who agitate on behalf of humanity in general, such as environmental groups or the peace movement (Harding 2006), which are often summed up as ‘new’ social movements (Melucci 1996; Kriesi et al 1995). One important discussion in the theoretical treatment of identity politics concerns the apparent dichotomous reactive effects of identity politics: while the almost universal acceptance of fundamental equitable democratic values has become a main focus of liberal democracies, “claims for the recognition of group difference have become increasingly salient in the recent period, at times eclipsing claims for social equality” (Fraser 1997, p. 2). This debate has been taken up by political theorists, philosophers, and social theorists, who have recognized the underlying tension between these two societal processes as constitutive elements of contemporary political discourse and practice that do not have to contradict our conception of liberal democracies as long as civil rights are not obstructed by the choices people or governments make in practice. This claim is based on John Rawls “overlapping consensus,” (Kenny 2004) exemplified, for instance, by gender parity laws in Europe. If every person is an individual with a unique set of identity markers, it seems reasonable to expect to live with the tensions created by the pressure for recognition as special or different as long as there exists some degree of solidarity regarding equal coexistence in society and before the law. Sometimes, the argument is put forth that identity politics may be illiberal because of its emphasis on special privileges. In our opinion, this holds not true as a

Identity Politics and Political Identities 5

vibrant civil society adds towards a democratic ideal, and the salience of identity promotion, even when facing difficult domestic circumstances, proves that it remains a constant concern for such groups. This specific notion also distinguishes the cases in this book here from movements based solely on opposition towards a government or another entity. With respect to the “political” connotation in identity politics, it appears that while some of the literature on identity politics deals concretely with the political implications of minority rights, much of it is confined to an ontological debate in political theory and philosophy (Kenny 2004; Ingram 2004) or it is treated within the fields of anthropology and ethnology (Martin-Alcoff 2006), often by utilizing singular case-studies with little room for generalization. Some valuable efforts were made in the field of ethnic politics or nationalism research, for example recent investigations exploring the impact of cultural variables on the outcomes of ethnic conflict in a comparative manner (Ross 2007; Brubaker 2006). This literature, however, tends to include only one aspect of identity politics, race or ethnicity. In contrast, our project attempts to conceptually position identity politics in the political sociology and international relations realm by examining the common political structures and processes that a variety of marginalized groups create and face in a globalizing environment. This book sets out to deliver a much-needed comparative analysis of identity politics in an attempt to discern identitive structures and differences in the utilization of globalizing processes across various regions, rather than focusing on the intrinsic origins of these movements—or identities—in specific cases. While a review of the vast literature on globalization (Held et al. 1999) is impossible here, some major effects of the global technological, economic, political, and cultural transformations are addressed insofar as they influence the political actions of identity movements, as such a discussion is lacking in the camps of pro- and anti-globalization scholars (Stieglitz 2003; Bhagwati 2004). We concur with recent analyses of globalization who attest that we find ourselves in a third-wave ‘transformationalist’ age (Tarrow 2005; Martell 2007), a stage in which state sovereignty is increasingly shared with other international actors such as IGOs and NGOs, but which also leads to greater risk for the maintenance and protection of cultural and social identities because of competitive neomedievalist tendencies in the emergence of various (non-)state actors jousting for influence, and the homogenizing influence of a Westernized harmonization of politics, economics and culture. Yet at the same time, the threat of homogenization is not indicative of the rise of such movements alone; groups promoting their identity tend to be concerned

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with more tangible self-asserting claims than, for instance, much of the current anti-globalization movement with its all-encompassing socioeconomic focus against neoliberal capitalism. All of these movements experience ‘glocalization’ in that local, regional and domestic identities and cultures are increasingly created and modified in reference to external global structures (Robertson 1994). This produces qualitatively different configurations of identity politics under the impact of globalization, and presents novel challenges for states as well. Returning to the foundational sociological literature, classic social movement theory evolved out of the struggle for economic justice and labor rights. Yet socio-economic class is not covered as a separate identity marker for political groups in this work. Economic structural indicators have been found to have an effect on the total population, and in the related literature issues, uneven economic development tend to be left out as a sole base for identity politics (Benhabib 2002; Nederveen Pieterse 2007). It has been simultaneously argued, however, that “the social valuation placed on personal attributes such as skin color, ethnicity and gender […] is determined by the individual’s objective class position” (King 2004, p. 189). Traditional movement activity relating to social class has been largely channeled into political parties, from the inception of the conservative and social-democratic parties to the stratified party spectra found today in multi-party democracies. While it is established that class is in many regions somewhat institutionalized through political parties, many other social minority groups still largely act through social movement organizations (Verloo 2006). Sociology, which provides the theoretical backdrop for identitybased action, thus distinguishes between traditional class-based social movements advocating social equality and so-called ‘new’ social movements that are rather concerned with postmaterial and identityrelated issues (Melucci 1996). This distinction has been often criticized on grounds that the line between these two kinds of activity is too blurry, though for our approach this basic distinction holds true as identity maintenance and promotion as the main concern is the essential feature of identity politics. Furthermore, critical theory has proposed that the fact that every individual sells labor, exploits it and is involved in consuming commodities and services creates a homogenizing class positioning process for every individual (Harvey 2000), albeit to different degrees in developed and emerging economies. This in turn provides for structurally similar issues of economic inequality independent of a country’s stage in economic development. In this volume, macroeconomic conditions are taken into account only as they bear on

Identity Politics and Political Identities 7

the resource mobilization of individuals and groups in these varying socio-economic regions. Equally, spatial relations of collectives and their environment are a universal feature of identity politics (Maier 2007), particularly when they are connected to economic conditions i.e., economically advanced or deprived regions inhabited by a single ethnic minority (Jenne 2007)—as is the temporal factor in the collective interest aggregation (Preston 1997). Gender is a noteworthy category of identity politics as numerically, women represent the largest contingent of a ‘minority’—in absolute terms, they actually consist of almost half of the world’s population (United Nations 2008). While globalization certainly augmented competitive pressures and exposed women to some negative socioeconomic risks, many also profited from the empowering effects of globalization: “Globalization breaks through cultural barriers and transports images and ideas on television and the Internet […] It often runs up against archaic social ideas that cement drastic inequality between the sexes. Globalization attacks backward gender roles in Vietnam, encourages women in Yemen to shed their veils and gives European women economic power” (Supp 2009, p. 2). Such processes do not always work in a facilitating fashion, though: Changing cultural roles initiated through international human rights norms prove particularly contentious when confronted with pre-existing patriarchal gender norms, as pointed out in the chapter by Manuela Picq focusing on indigenous women in the Andean region. Nationalism may be the most compelling force for identitymovements in existence, but it is only partially concerned in this work where it expresses the cultural and/or spatial autonomy of a minority vis-à-vis the government. Globalization has significantly challenged the dominance of nation-state discourses and weakened the autonomy of most countries on the globe, weaving them into an interdependent web of economic and social transnational relations. Here, it will not be treated in its role as a master-identity for a nation-state as this has been sufficiently explored in the ethnic nationalism literature (Anderson 1991; Brubakers 1995; Jenne 2007), but rather explored in its meaning for sub-nations within existing state structures which may feel emboldened by the weakening of traditional state governments and the facilitated cross-border linkages with their kin. Nationalist policies as expressed by cultural minorities are crucial aspects as they express opposition to the majority government or collective action aimed at selfexpression (see the chapter on the Hungarian minority by Eloisa Vladescu).

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Similarly, religion is a universally recurring identity position that has fundamental implications for majority-minority relations and thus will be explored within this project in the framework of Turkey’s Gülen Movement, analyzed by Nuray Ibryamova. Religious adherence has become one of the strongest identity markers in a world of various religious-ideological markets and the ability to spread promotional messages more easily than ever. The playing up of religious identities provides stability and cohesion for communities in a seemingly plural, secular and dangerous world, and religious motivations often contribute to the (de)legitimization of existing political systems. With respect to a further differentiation of the fundamental qualities of identity politics, the question becomes apparent whether democratic governance (i.e. the guarantee of popular sovereignty, civil liberties and functioning state institutions, among others) makes a difference in how identity-based political groups behave and attain their objectives. While it is our conviction that liberal democracies enable to a greater degree the formation of identity-based groups because of the existence and promotion of a pluralistic civil society consisting of a variety of actors, the absence of such guarantees also provokes political activity in nondemocracies such as, for example, Arab countries (Mandelbaum 2007). In that sense, identity politics are prevalent and active in both, democratic and autocratic countries, but they face different challenges from state governments depending on the political ideology. Consequently, we opted for the inclusion of cases displaying both, democratically and (semi-)autocratically led country examples, as the government structure is a determinant variable and thus part of our theoretical model below. As pointed out earlier, this project builds largely upon social movement literature, but with the salience of individual and collective identities at the heart of identity politics, social constructivist thought, rather than primordial essentialism offers ontological answers to the (re)construction of these identities which are expressed in identity politics. Not only that, the ongoing transformation of society by governments, elites and civil society determines the necessity and place of identity politics in public life. In this context, social relationships are based fundamentally on the formation and maintenance of social identity groups and networks through which individuals and groups go about satisfying needs and values. By including states, their structural nonstate environment consisting of norm-creating and -diffusing IGOs and INGOs as well as the identity movements themselves advocating mediasupported rules of engagement, we recognize the added value of constructivist ontology for this kind of comparative analysis (Green

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2002). Although individuals negotiate their various identity-facets in many different interactions in daily life, a ‘primary’ identity is theorized to frame others (Castells 1997), which allows for collective identities to become regularized over time so that individuals’ roles in them become institutionalized (Tilly 2005). The resulting movement-organizations are an expression of this identity as related to the larger social environment and the role expectations associated with them. Yet in order to avoid an ‘essentialist trap’, one should keep in mind that identity, in contrast to its institutionalized representation, is never a fixed concept of social life. In complex social systems individuals tend to associate with a wide array of ever-changing identity groups. With respect to any particular issue, individuals may be involved in a broad spectrum of social relationships associated with differing identities. The range of identities is limitless, but for the purposes of this study, culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and clan are among the most relevant. Individuals may also associate together in response to negative identities, that is, identities they see as threatening. Despite the sometimes held post-modern notion that identities are too fluid as to be conceptualized, a lot of stimulating work has recently been produced that aims at conceptualizing identities for research (McDermott et al. 2006) and that operationalizes context-based collective identities (Rousseau 2006). This project, however, is mainly concerned with the repercussions of identity-maintenance and promotion in interaction with other actors such as states, (I)NGOs, IGOs etc. rather than on their intrinsic origins. Having reviewed some fundamental concepts surrounding identity politics and the corresponding theoretical backdrops, we concentrate in the following section on the configuration of such political expressions as they play out in variously globalized settings. The Configuration of Political identities in their Environment

An important cornerstone for understanding the role of identity movements in their political and societal environment is the way they function in aggregating and articulating interests. In this regard, Almond, in his seminal work on comparative politics, found it helpful to differentiate four main types of structures involved: institutional groups, anomic groups, associational groups and non-associational groups (Almond 1960, p. 33). Institutional groups are formally organized bodies with professional staffs whose main missions are something other than interest articulation, and yet they can and often do serve as a base of operation for a subgroup to engage in such political activities,

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including legislatures, political executives, bureaucracies, and churches. Anomic groupings are rather spontaneous societal and populist phenomena often materializing, for example, in demonstrations (Almond 1960, p. 34). Of most interest for the reader should be the last two categories: associational interest groups and non-associational groups. Associational groups are the specialized structures of interest articulation—i.e., trade unions, business associations, gay rights groups, ethnic-based organizations, associations organized by religious denominations, civic groups, and the like. Non-associational groups are based in more traditional conceptualizations of identity and embrace kinship, ethnic, regional, religious, status, or class groups whose configuration is relatively informal and interest articulation function irregular. These latter types of aggregation, (non-)associational groups, most often dominates the scholarly focus and conceptualization of civil society and identity politics, although we find the distinction in Almond’s work somewhat rigid in that a person’s associations with an identity group is more freely-determined than conceptualized above. Still, the basic premise that identities are relational (Tarrow 2005) holds true and contributes to the explanatory framework built here. In large parts of the developing world, classic associational groups are not the predominant form of social identity. Interest aggregation and articulation occur more commonly through traditional non-associational groupings or institutional groups. Processes of globalization may be changing this orientation. The strength of identification with any particular identitygrouping is relative in social time and space and may vary significantly with the particular issue at hand and how that issue is framed in political discourse and practice as it relates to political stakes in question (Vanhala 2009). A given issue, such as globalization and the resulting homogenization of cultures, may trigger one identity and elevate it above all others. Recognizing the fluidity of identities, their (de-)construction and reconstruction, the question remains if they are given or people consciously acquire a certain inclination toward aspects of their existence? Recent postmodern literature has pointed out that most identity markers are assumed or instrumental in that even ethnic or racial characteristics can be (de-) emphasized or played up/down (Benhabib 2007; Pieterse 2008). However, the choice of group belonging— associating, in the sociological realm—is contingent upon some semblance of a liberal democratic system that delivers citizens with roughly equal participatory options regardless of their ethnic background or linguistic affiliation, something we do not always find in the treatment of, for example, indigenous people in the developing

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world. It is certainly true that in consolidated democracies, particularly if they are multiethnic or multicultural to some extent, the self-professed recognition of societal diversity has taken precedence over egalitarian aspects. But if one were to look at the bread-and-butter issues that come with belonging to a certain identity group, e.g. in racial job discrimination, the problematic becomes apparent. Ingram (2004) goes further than Almond and discerns two different kinds of membership in “affinal” collectives that have a common interest or ideology and in “structural” groups whose shared bond is a result of conditions beyond their choice: gender, sexual orientation etc. This distinction is important as it determines the efficacy of such groups: successful mobilization is theorized as possible only if a certain extent of positive reframing of a particular group’s identity can occur, as a negatively viewed one encounters too much public opposition (Schneider 2005)—even if one belongs to it without having had a choice of belonging. Despite the fact that social constructions such as “race” or “gender” should be carefully applied so as not to become labels themselves, they represent collective identities that feminist or ethnic emancipatory groups use themselves and, as such, they are legitimately utilized here. In addition, these identity markers are often coupled with a certain class positioning deducted from belonging to an identity group, thereby aggravating the often detrimental consequences of being part of such minorities. At times it is not only a question of self-profession of these identities, but individuals are just as often labeled by others as belonging to several or only one group, which often is decisive when, for example, second-generation immigrants have to negotiate their bicultural backgrounds upon entering the labor market. How these various identity facets are prioritized in the political arena is dependent on the individual (case). Furthermore, the expression of particular identities regularly suppresses other roles, where dominant identities are politically instrumentalized. Some analysts correctly argue that ethnic or gender minorities are “trapped in a matrix-system of intersecting oppressions,” as pronounced by feminists suggesting an intersectionality of conjoining identity facets (Hill Collins 1990). Many minority groups, however, have actually achieved a surprising level of recognition and legalpolitical protection in democracies, independent of their belonging to one or more groups. On the other hand, the distinction between structural and political intersectionality, referring to the negative impact of normative standards of society as well as to the political agency of governments respectively, deserves attention (Verloo 2006) insofar as it accentuates the detrimental effects of possessing multiple identity attributes in society and before the law.

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Leaving the debate about the nature of identity politics, which has been criticized in light of its philosophical nebulosity and lack of empirical reality (May et al. 2004) and returning to its configurations, one of the major commonalities of groups pursuing identity politics is the goal of recognition as in need of protection from discrimination. It includes “anti-discrimination measures, culturally sensitive interpretations and applications of laws, exemptions from certain rules, groups-sensitive application of public policy, additional rights and resources, fostering public respect for marginalized identities, ensuring their adequate representation in public institutions” etc. (Parekh 2008, p. 42). Communities that have not (yet) experienced such inclusive treatment are prone to develop low self-esteem, self-imposed isolation, and potentially self-hatred and thus will be more disadvantaged to unify as a pressure group to advance their concerns. At the same time, groups and the individuals within them who might avoid societal (let alone familial) clashes or culture wars by keeping a low profile are more exposed once they work toward recognition as they ‘disturb’ the mainstream conception of a unified or majoritarian socio-political community. In that respect, a major factor in the political situating of identity politics concerns the majority-minority position of such groups. Such actions are mostly brought forth by minorities facing exclusion, indifference, or discrimination by the rest of the population. While there exist some identity politics originating from majority populations, these do not deserve rectifying measures; for instance, being a Caucasian male in the United States does not present the same kind of problematic situatedness that being an African-American or Hispanic women does (the same goes for disability, sexual orientation, ethnic minorities, or an intersectional combination of these). By treating the various factors of origin only as they relate to their identitive performance in the exertion of identity politics, we concentrate mainly on identity framing and interest aggregation and its effects on the political environment, based on the notion that identity politics “provide messages for the political system about needs that are unmet or ignored” (Kenny 2004, p. 126). Globalization in particular aided such movements by providing accessible media and activist platforms as well as intergovernmental support through which they can amplify their claims. This theorem has been termed the ‘boomerang’ model of transnational activism. It emphasizes how domestic groups appeal to external supporters in order to affect pressure on and change by the antagonizing government, thereby ‘externalizing’ the issue at hand (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Tarrow (2005) went further by estimating the efficacy of externalization,

Identity Politics and Political Identities 13

making it dependent on a certain kind of movement using a specific strategy, such as information politics in human rights issues. While the boomerang model of transnational advocacy network activity supplies us with the basic strategic dynamics of identity politics, there are still many unanswered questions regarding the direction and strength of movement identities and the accompanying utilization of legitimizing identities, that this book attempts to shed light on. One novel aspect that warrants further investigation in this volume is the extension of supportive international agents from previously theorized smaller entities such as kin-states or NGOs to transnational regional and/or global media, INGOs and IGOs, in effect creating more leverage for identity-based groups than before. Taking into account the particular challenges and opportunities globalization presents for identity politics and recognizing the constitutive effects of culture on mobilizing societal structures, the model below illustrates the main theoretical components which are examined by the case-studies in this volume based on the political process model highlighting political opportunity structures such as national cleavage orientations, institutional structures and the configuration of power (McAdam 1996; Goodwin and Jasper 2004). Despite the limited utility of the political process model for identity politics—identities are more than issues that simply ally with political forces or cleavages along a political spectrum—our basic model recognizes the distinction between cultural-discursive processes through media and norm diffusion on the one hand and more classically oriented mobilizing structures and political opportunities brought about by the involvement of IGOs and INGOs on the other. There is no linearity or exhaustiveness implied, as each group conducting identity politics experiences its own set of structures and challenges to a different extent. It does, however, go beyond theoretical elaborations and previously stated assumptions by extending underrepresented facets of analysis such as the impact of media presence and the internationalization of global human rights norms and activities, attempting to facilitate a crossnational analysis of various forms of collective identities:

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Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization

Figure 1. A ‘Glocalized’ Identity Politics Model

Identity Movement

State

Impact of ICT/ Mass Media & Diffusion of Int’l Norms

Mobilizing Structures: IGOs and INGOs

Cultural-Discursive Processes

In looking at the first set of intermediary variables, some of the major exogenous environmental characteristics and cultural-discursive practices of identity politics determine how group claims play out differently in their socio-cultural environment, i.e. their communities and public spheres. Media utilization and media impact—the mediatization process by which reality and reactions are increasingly constructed by mass media—is of particular importance in creating discursive opportunities in the ever changing spheres of public exchange and contestation (Habermas 1989), as are political cultures and civil society relations. One major advantage for identity politics groups nowadays is the comparative ease of mobilization aided by the availability of information and communications technologies (ICT) such as, for example, internet calls, phone banks and video cell phone transmissions. In the Global North, the leadership in movements is often equipped with better access to an audience to recruit new members or to raise awareness for their specific cause and thus seek allies through these technologies. But between 2000 and 2004 alone the gap separating the developing and the developed countries shrank in terms of mobile

Identity Politics and Political Identities 15

subscribers, fixed telephone lines, and internet users. Mobile phone usage has led the way in bringing access to the Global South. By the end of 2005, for example, about 15 percent of Africans had cellular phones, thus skipping land-based telephones completely. Cellphone industries, because of their low-cost availability, serve as globalizing ‘leveler’ enabling increased political participation. Nonetheless, in terms of internet subscribers and server connections the "digital divide" continues to persist, with developing countries ranking two-thirds lower than the market leader, the United States (Economist Intelligence Unit 2008), and fewer than two out of one hundred persons are on line in Africa as of yet. While developing countries have started to catch up and sometimes leapfrog in the application of communication technologies, access to the internet in particular remains limited to a privileged few, compared to the widespread use of electronic media in the Global North (International Telecommunications Union 2006). However, in regions such as, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa the number of computers available is often quite limited, may be restricted to paying customers, and may limit access to a very short time per visit. This disparity in access complicates political mobilization and information dissemination amongst fellow group members as well as with the rest of society in underdeveloped regions. Yet it also aided the mobilization of rather sinister identity-based violent movements, such as Al-Qaeda, which networks with the help of communications technologies. Related to the previous point, the role of the media in creating public discourses is of central significance for how identity politics may play out. In contrast to past decades, the ubiquitous presence of mass media and the ‘new’ web and satellite-based media (Kahan 1999) provide for fast and extensive outreach for political minorities. Thus, mass media or participatory, local media outlets are not only instruments to gain visibility for a cause or to provide a common reference point— the media access, but the media make use of identity-based groups to gain readership and create a public discourse supportive or defensive toward these—the media portrayal. The role of these outlets is actually more complicated, in that media portrayal is influenced by many societal, private and governmental actors and thus, can result in a forged identity that might be disadvantageous in cases where assimilation of identity groups is an objective (Madianou 2005), e.g., with the media portrayal of ethnic minorities in their host societies. Through regulatory intervention, governments possess a significant degree of influence over mass media (Smith 2008) and thus, are in a position to elevate media coverage of certain identity groups in a positive or negative way. The variety of media outlets existing in every country contributes to the

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Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization

shaping of a public sphere amenable or hostile to these groups, and, as we have seen in the case of significant events such as the Olympic Games 2008 in China or the Iranian election protests in 2009, even extends worldwide and puts international media-pressure on governments. The number of civil protests has increased all over the world and in particular, in authoritarian systems, and so has the number of broadcasted uprisings—which have doubled in China from around 60,000 to 120,000 over the past 10 years (Tsai 2009). At the same time, media concentration in the hands of private companies in Canada or the United States, or governments in the case of Russia and Venezuela, or a combination of both— in Italy under Berlusconi—delimits the diversity of these outlets and potentially skews the portrayal of identity-based groups and thus, impacts on their efficacy in pursuing their objectives. The role of the mass media in terms of the pervasiveness of technology and increase in plurality of outlets (Castells 1997) in local, regional, national and even international public spheres augmented tremendously with globalization; yet this aspect has been consistently under-analyzed in the past, particularly as the proliferation of ICTs introduced a variety of novel contributing variables for such research, including automated non-human agents and programs (Eriksson and Giacomello 2009). Internationally advocated human and minority rights norms and their diffusion through transnational actors present another novel facilitating factor utilized by identity movements. Constructivist scholars see norms even co-constitutive, alongside actor identities, in the generation of collective interests and behavior (Kowert and Legro 1996), while others specify a three-pronged procedural sequence of norm emergence, cascading, and internalization for transnationally diffused norms (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Analysts of globalization have proposed that identity-based action aims at normative goals such as equality, diversity and democratization (Croucher 2004) as well as other protective and participatory standards as these are goals from which such groups profit. In an illustration of this change, for example, the UN’s call for a third of parliaments to be made up of female representatives by 2020, together with the diffusion of gender quota norms resulted in a significant increase of female parliamentarians globally (Tripp and Kang 2008). In this regard, are international human and minority rights norms decisive or significant for identity politics? It appears as if such rights norms are only insofar effective as the resulting claims are backed by credible enforcement, such as judicial proceedings and the possibility of multilateral sanctions. The UN-sponsored Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been signed by a multitude of states, but only few governments actually care or react if a minority

Identity Politics and Political Identities 17

group should invoke these. The situation is slightly improved in places, where enforceable legal instruments are available for individuals and groups to obtain a legal backing for their case, as for instance with the Council of Europe’s European Court of Human Rights. Nevertheless, in the past decade a qualitative enhancement, even if still largely rhetorical and discursive in nature, has evolved in the international community with the increasingly propagated ‘responsibility to protect’ and the related contentious concept of humanitarian interventionism. Besides being contested on grounds of non-intervention and cultural relativism, these norms are difficult to put into practice, so that institutional structures of supervision such as independent regional or domestic courts are still the best defenders of human and minority rights. One incursion has to be noted, though: it appears that Islamic courts can be problematic in this regard as their application of Sharia-law may interfere with commonly acknowledged human rights norms. Even then, though, international pressure by the UN and governments can result in positive outcomes, e.g. in the case of a female rape-victim who was pardoned by the Saudi King after an international outcry following her sentencing of 200 lashes because of supposed ‘offensive’ behavior (she was in the presence of non-related men). On a larger scale, unfortunately, we also see the tendency for small and medium powerstates to submit to the potentially detrimental influence of emerging superpowers such as Russia and China regarding international humanitarian crises in Sudan, Kosovo or Georgia (European Council on Foreign Relations 2008). As major economic forces, many states increasingly won’t dare to go against these countries’ emphases on noninterference in ‘domestic’ issues, resulting in a new challenge for the spread of international norms promoting identity-politics. Mobilizing Political Opportunity Structures

In contrast to the socio-political environment in which identity politics are discursively contested and promoted, mobilizing opportunity structures in the social movement literature are defined as distinct from the above set of characteristics as “the kinds of structural changes and power shifts that are most defensibly conceived of as political opportunities that should not be confused with the collective processes by which these changes are interpreted and framed” (McAdam 1996, p. 25). They contain the second set of structural intermediary variables that determine the configuration of identity politics under globalizing conditions.

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Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization

The evolution and form of government is a primary determinant predictor of domestic identity politics dynamics, resulting in dissident groups challenging autocratic systems to classic identity-based movements proliferating in liberal democracies. Governments are the most important factor influencing the accommodation or political mobilization of such groups. They constrain a movement’s strength by creating an institutional environment that is more or less permissible with regard to, for example, access to political institutions and elites, expression of policy preferences, devolution of political power and redistribution of material resources. The state government has been named the critical variable in the understanding of identity-based politics in the South (Jega 2000), but the same rings true for countries in other stages of socio-economic development. Most advanced economies today are governed by liberal democracies, and as such they are contingent upon and supportive of a pluralistic civil society, including minority groups. Pluralistic multi-ethnic states adhering to democratic principles are theoretically advised to govern under a consociational scheme (Lijphart 1977) as it enables power-sharing for different cultural groups. On a minimum level, such consensual forms of government stray away from majoritarian populism and guarantee every citizen equal rights in front of the law. Full civil rights in such a polity, however, require that “wherever a dominant public culture creates disadvantages for legitimate cultural minority practices, public policies ought to accommodate and compensate minorities” (Bauböck 2007, p. 99). This sort of affirmative action by governments can only occur where a consolidated liberal-pluralistic system of governance is in place, with a willingness to take on minority demands. It is our understanding that the trend towards popular support for democracy globally (Diamond and Plattner 2008) and the resurgence of identity groups promoting specific and equal rights go hand in hand. As part of this process state institutions themselves may place certain positive or negative values on group identities, for example, being underrepresented or deviant, which in turn fosters identitive groups (but does not generate them, as with social movements—see Lam’s chapter in this volume). Here again, the question of the compatibility of religious identity politics with the state order needs to be raised and differences noted: while liberal-pluralistic states exercise a widespread separation of state governance and religious observance—the “separation of church and state”—we find in many developing countries, particularly in those with a Muslims majority, a conflation of the legal and religious order, for instance in the extreme case of Malaysia, whose constitution declares all Malaysians to be Muslims as well (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004, p.

Identity Politics and Political Identities 19

104). The religious case study in this volume, however, represents the opposite, a religious movement acting within the parameters of a secular Muslim state, Turkey. On the other hand, even consolidated democracies visibly express the cleavages that result from the separation of church and state, e.g., in the debates about the place of religion in several recent U.S. presidential races or in the writing of the (failed) European Constitution. In contrast to the mixed reaction that religious identity movements may experience, the discrimination against ethno-political minorities remains a particular problem in the developing world through political discrimination by governments, affecting Latin America and Caribbean minorities the most, followed by minorities in Asia. In line with pluralist-liberal prescriptions, Western democracies initiated accommodative strategies so that ethno-political conflicts there substantially declined (Gurr 1993; Kymlicka 2008), as confirmed by Vladescu’s Transylvanian case study. As is often the case, governments in the Global South suffer various pressures ranging from economic development, which is closely tied to the global trade system, to the creation of a stable state guaranteeing security internally as well as externally. The majorities of state governments in the developing world were established in the postcolonial period, which explains some of the assertiveness of governments to preserve state unity against the demands of multiple ethno-political groups which could potentially destabilize the country. In that regard it is notable that democracies do not automatically favor accommodation if the cost to the state’s integrity is too high. Conversely, authoritarian leaders may make concessions if they deem this strategy less costly than investing scarce resources in combating such groups (Gurr 1993, p. 294). The various institutional groupings that surround and/or make up "the state"—militaries, political parties, bureaucracies, legislatures and, most importantly, judiciaries — may serve either in facilitating or inhibiting roles in identity politics group formation, maintenance, and growth, as will be varyingly showcased in our case studies. Under the impact of regional integration—in itself a parallel development to globalization in that it occurred mainly in the past few decades and often constrained state governments—, many countries, particularly in Europe under the EU umbrella, allowed for unprecedented minority rights as showcased by activists, judges and interest group representatives (Prügl and Thiel 2009). They also incorporated devolutionary approaches in their dealings with autonomyseeking ethno-cultural minorities and hence, found a relative peaceful way of accommodating these demands. Groups pursuing identity politics

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in unitary countries are more often than not threatened with forced assimilation, whereas in states participating in regional integration, normative and material resources are available to guarantee the basic welfare, recognition and continuance of these groups. Furthermore, depending on the constitutional model found in these states, devolved governance allows for the accommodation of identity-based demands for self-rule, as regional governments in many areas of the world have become the mitigating agency between the demands of ethno-cultural groups and the central government (Castells 1997). Related to the previous aspect, the engagement of national governments in larger international organizations, and with (I)NGOs and other groups that show an increased concern for equal rights aids identity groups in the achievement of their objectives. The number of NGOs accredited in consultative status with IGOs skyrocketed in the past two decades, thereby attesting to the increased professionalization of these groups (Smith 2008), and provided a ‘glocal’ platform for social change at in the name of many identity-based movements. A search for identity-related NGOs with consultative status at the UN-ECOSOC division reveals that over one third of all NGOs, 1063 out of 3051, are related to identity-issues based on indigenous people, women, minority groups etc., most of which gained ‘special’ status only in the past 10-15 years (UN DESA 2008). IGOs, in turn, increasingly seek to utilize the expertise of NGOs and movement actors in their aid and development programs. For instance, the impact of the EU not only on its member states, but also in its dealings with the recipients of European development aid reflects a commitment to equality and the building of a pluralistic civil society as explicitly expressed in the Coutonouagreements for the Union’s former colonies (European Commission 2000). On the flipside, the benevolent influence of this intergovernmental organization is a result of the realization of the damage that occurred through the previous colonial politicization of ethnic and cultural identities. Another noteworthy example includes the UN Development Program, which focused attention on empowering women alongside the spreading of human rights norms and thus stimulated the work of feminist NGOs and identity-related movements. The U.S. Agency for International Development played a similar role during the Clinton Administration with regard to HIV positive groups in Africa, providing them support needed to attend major AIDS conferences outside their countries and become linked with larger transnational social movement activities (Gordenker et al. 1995). But aside from these flanking support measures, the impact of these external agencies or democratizing superpowers (Mandelbaum 2007) remains

Identity Politics and Political Identities 21

subordinate to the extent of openness that can be provided by the domestic government. It is also the national government that allows the extent of NGO activity to a different degree: particularly in emerging semi-authoritarian countries such as Russia, China or Venezuela, the restrictions placed on domestic and foreign NGOs limit the influence of these agencies. Political, social and economic elites acting upon issues of recognition and equal treatment for citizens are common in states and they have only gained more visibility with the internationalization of media and politics. Without them, ordinary members of a particular identity group would not be able to sufficiently mobilize for their cause, since elites from a minority group possess the information as well as access to material and media resources necessary for the organization’s success. However, while in the developed world, these elites are just some of the many societal actors working on behalf of their particular constituency, in the developing world they face a higher degree of opposition because they demand ideational and material resources that the constituency was often excluded from in the past, or because they contest the structuring of traditional, pre-modern societal hierarchies. In this context, access to elites with their capacity to influence political agendas and the framing of issues in political discourse can be important. In the developing world, processes of economic globalization, coupled with adjustment programs and development issues, incur high costs such as labor right disputes, an increase in crime or government cuts in welfare etc (Stieglitz 2003), which make identity politics occur more frequently, particularly if these processes are based on an already unequal social stratification. This social disparity, coupled with a large peasantry, evolved on the basis of a neo-feudalistic clientelistic system, in which socio-economic disadvantaged strata of the population were conditioned to rely on the favors and support of dominant colonial and post-colonial economic and political elites, which in turn profit from the accommodation of these collectivities, thereby avoiding domestic conflict. Clientelism suppresses and at times, corrupts the expression of group identities by coopting these in order to avoid having to deal with their demands of recognition and economic or political participation. To add to this dilemma, group identities seem to become more rigid under conditions of scarcity, which coincide with some of the global economic fluctuation: “In struggling over scarce resources relating to needs fulfillment or other related goals, groups often create exclusive and rigid identities” (Polkinghorn 2000, p. 154). The temporary inflationary rise in food prices, for example, or the deterioration of availability of public goods during World Bank

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Identity Politics in the Age of Globalization

mandated adjustment programs leaving out some ethnic groups or women disproportionately are just a few examples of how economic relations based on a clientelistic system can spur identity-based activity. In the Global North, these issues are mitigated in a pluralistic or corporatist governance system to the degree that political and judicial oversight prevents such abuse. Citizenship policies and related legal norms and practices of political ownership and control are the main instruments to enable minorities, naturalized citizens as well as permanent residents to attain a degree of rights and duties common to liberal democracies. Historically, women have achieved such inclusion through the suffragette movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With it came the provision of fundamental equality, if not (yet) on a societal level, then at a minimum before the law, what Mouffe calls with respect to identity politics “equivalence without eliminating difference” (1995, p. 38)—a sort of nominal but not social equality. There are, however, two incursions to be noted: First, the design of citizenship policies has often been used to exclude ethnic (for example, in the case of Russian minorities who attained rights in the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia only under EU pressure), cultural (the Kurds in Turkey are still fighting for full recognition) and/or even social minorities (in the case of the U.S. immigration legislation for homosexuals). Second, while there might be far-reaching attempts by governments in the developed world to prohibit discrimination (as significantly expanded in the far-reaching antidiscrimination provision for EU citizens in the European Union’s Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999 and the Charter of Fundamental Rights), societal biases and the ensuing socioeconomic inequality cannot be prevented by governmental regulation— in addition to the fact that up to now, citizenship policies in the EU are still legislated nationally. Citizenship remains an important link connecting identity groups and their larger political environment, and even as we have seen the emergence of multinational legal citizenship schemes in recent years in the Global North, the social and cultural citizenship aspects of individuals remain bounded by the limitations of self-professed and externally determined “belonging” to such a collective group. Hence, the increase in global migration has spurred a construction of physical and legal barriers to keep poorer immigrants out (Klusmeyer and Aleinikoff 2001). In the developing world, citizenship policies may be more closely linked to the government—or the majority perception of threats to the survival of the nation or its control over socio-economic and political resources and the allocation of values. In this regard, such policies may also reflect the identity group’s relative

Identity Politics and Political Identities 23

economic strength and social standing in relation to important kinship groups, clans, and other traditional groups in a state. It appears that political parties, no matter if in power or otherwise participating in the political process, represent both an obstacle and an area of involvement for identity politics. Political parties have often evolved out of larger labor and/or ethnic movements whose activities became institutionalized over time. However, for “new” social and/or ethnic issues, such as migrant rights or gender-based social equality the creation of political parties does not automatically remedy the deprivation experienced by minority groups. For instance, many ethnic parties evolved in the 1990s in Latin America around ethnic cleavages, therefore attesting to the evolution of indigenous political mobilization in this region. At the same time, one of the major cross-cutting factors for the emergence of these movement parties was that non-indigenous parties had abused and “exploited” their constituents; even natural allies such as the leftist parties did so by placing party loyalty over allegiance to the collective identities of the indigenous movements (Van Cott 2005). In the case of equality movements based on gender or sexual orientation, ideologically compatible parties increasingly take on the demands of these groups but subsume them under their programmatic ‘leftist’ hierarchy and thus, often dilute the movements’ objective. Political parties, thus, are limited in their ability to incorporate identitybased demands because of the necessity of appealing to a larger populace. Cultural-discursive processes initiated by the role of the media and the diffusion of international norms, and political (opportunity) structures as expressed through a country’s government, its politics and involvement in transnational governance and activism represent the most significant structural conditions determining globalized identity politics. Yet there are other contributing factors at work as well, which will be shortly detailed in the following section in the interest of a holistic view. Additional Factors Influencing and Advancing Identity Politics

In contrast to the discursive nature of media utilization and norm diffusion or political structures provided by states, INGOs and IGOs, one of the additional constraints of the societal environment lies in the degree of compatibility of the national as well as local political culture—defined as the patterns of orientation towards political objects and action (Almond and Verba 1963)—with the goals and aspirations of identity–based groups: a major distinguishing factor in these two

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environments results from the liberal-pluralistic conception of civil society found in most consolidated democracies, which promotes tolerance and thus is, at least theoretically, an enabling factor for all sorts of identity politics. Identity-based movements not only attempt to correct injustices in the political sphere, their activism also translates in the social realm, into societal discourses and cultural expectations: “Social movements such as Gay Liberation, Feminism and Black Activism have consciously challenged dominant morality and definitions of norms and conventions relating to sex, gender and family relations” (Hirst 2004, p. 82). Contributing to this challenge to existing domestic mainstream norms is a seemingly evolving global public opinion (Parekh 2008) interacting with domestic ones, even though the impact of it is, at least at this point in time, negligible. Thus, a liberal civil society with multiple interest and associational groups represented—more likely to be found in advanced industrial societies as a result of socio-economic modernization and cognitive mobilization (Inglehart 1997)—will be more amenable to new identity movements than one in which there exists a combination of collectivist hierarchical societal stratifications and limited material and political resources such as, for instance, in the postcolonial societies of Latin America (see the case study of Ecuador), Africa (see the South African one) or Asia (the case of Hong Kong). The political cultures in these countries often makes it harder for identity politics groups to push successfully for the promotion of what these groups perceive as muchneeded equality with regard to subsistence rights, not to mention the social and political rights that are claimed by identity politics groups in the North. As Ottaway and Carothers (2000), based on Almond’s distinction have demonstrated, civil society in the developing world is dominated by institutional groups such as bureaucracies, churches, and political parties, which exist in complex interrelationship with kinship, ethnic, regional, religious, status, class and other non-associational groups—in contrast to the rather fluid movement activity in politically consolidated, liberal-democratic states. Moreover, when associational groups do exist and penetrate society, these often tend to have firm cultural and/or religious foundations that inhibit or delay the development of identity-based associational groups which may not fit the mainstream societal model. In (semi)authoritarian systems, the normative standards for a pluralistic recognition of identity politics is not embedded in the governing context, as countries such as China or Iran have repeatedly denied rights to ethnic or sexual minorities. A factor that shapes identity-based collective action irrespective of the national political culture is the degree of competition among existing

Identity Politics and Political Identities 25

civil society actors such as other movements, churches and NGOs. One of the effects of globalization resulted in the marked increase of (I)NGOs, particularly in the post-cold war period and in the run-up to the new millennium. The more numerous civil society actors who appeal to the goals of a collective group are, the harder it can be for identity politics to be noticed and gain material and ideational support from the environment. The prevalence of a range of identity-based groups actually denotes a bi-directional argument in this regard: “The flourishing of myriad kinds of argument and politics, including many instances of coalitional activity with liberals, socialists, or ethnic minority women, suggests that movements of identity are contributors as much as obstacles to associational plurality” (Kenny 2004, p. 99). On the other hand, certain civil society actors that might not pursue the exact same goal but offer support for the objectives of an identity politics group might well be a valuable ally for the cause. Religious organizations in particular have often fulfilled a detrimental and/or beneficial role in the way they have opposed (e.g., the gay rights movements in Eastern Europe) or supported (e.g. through application of liberation theology for the South American indigenous poor) identity politics. On an individual level, people belonging to particular collectives seem to attempt to congregate in or move consciously toward areas that reflect a desired socio-political climate in which their demands for recognition and rights are better accommodated. This mobility results often in the concentration of identity-groups in specific areas or even a move towards other countries with a more suitable socio-political climate, as evidenced by the build-up of large ethnically homogenous quarters in many cities throughout the world, the congregation of sexual minorities to urban areas or the migration of ethnic minorities from their unwelcoming homes to more liberal host countries. While such personal-political mobilization is occurring in both the developed and the developing world, the differences in prosperity account for the relative degree and success of such dislocations. With regard to the political interaction of these individuals, those with higher incomes and more education end up having less exposure to cross-cutting political communication i.e., they tend to remain more among people of their own view, just as people with high level of political activism and knowledge do (Mutz 2006). This finding suggests a counterintuitive effect of the individuals pursuing identity politics: while they need to reach out to other political actors, minority group members tend to remain among themselves and thus, limit their interaction with the outside world on which they place demands—resulting in a

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strengthening of their identity yet a diminishing of their action repertoire. The thesis just put forward, however, reflects largely on identity politics in the developed world. In regions where large masses are impoverished and without higher or even secondary education, political demands are likely to be expressed in a more direct way to outreach to the conventional addressees such as governments and other civil actors. In sum, individual choices of societal belonging and collective national cultures are additional environmental determinants that impact on the strength of identity politics and can have both, a positive and/or negative influence on the efficacy of identity politics. The aspects mentioned above are in part conditions that are well established in the literature—such as, for example, the mobilizing opportunity structures found in domestic governments—but some are also under-analyzed, as in the case of globalizing features such as the impact of international organizations upon identity politics. Taken together with the first set of cultural-discursive variables specifying media impact and norm diffusion, these provide an innovative comparative framework for the exploration of identity politics under conditions of political globalization. Conclusion: Identity Politics as Challenge for Social Sciences

Let’s revisit the main research question and see if there are discernible commonalities and differences recognizable in how identity politics play out under the impact of political globalization? Some analysts argue somewhat generalizingly that the answers “depend on [the] cultural and political context” (Gurr 1993, p. 320) and that “social specificity determines the actual development of a movement, regardless of structural sources of discontent” (Castells 1997, p. 245). In this sense, we embed our work in a sociologically inspired, constructivist perspective rather than a rationalist one focusing on preferences and interests alone. On the one hand, it is certainly true that each individual case of identity-based conflict in a state is subject to a variety of economic, political, societal, and cultural factors existing there, which is why we find a case-study based approach most appropriate for this kind of contextual analysis. On the other hand, the aspects developed in our model and detailed above show that, despite differences in the actual outcome, identity politics go through similar processes of framing and utilization of new, facilitating opportunity structures provided by internationalized media and transnational governance. They experience comparable structural challenges in the pursuit of their demands,

Identity Politics and Political Identities 27

varyingly influenced by exogenous and domestic variables and mobilizing structures. The bifurcation of these constitutive variables into cultural-discursive and on the other hand, mobilizing structural ones, recognizes the distinction between the diversity of cultural-discursive practices on the one hand, and commonality of political constraints, on the other. Taken together, they produce a comprehensive view of identity politics in the age of globalization and add to the existing social science literature on identity-based collective action. Identity politics as “recognition of difference” remains difficult everywhere independent of space but beyond encouraging the selfactualization of a specific group it contributes to a more pluralistic society, which in turn strengthens democratic, human and minority rights. But is identity–based politics then a universal phenomenon or rather an “export” of the developed world, spread through the globalizing internationalization of norms and rules? We believe that while collective identity groups have been pursuing their goals as a result of marginalization in more traditional settings as well (by politicization of their status or the threat of territorial secession, for example), processes of globalization have certainly aided in the visibility and instrumentalization of certain identity groups, as, for example, in the case of HIV/AIDS activist groups in South Africa or indigenous Andean women, such political action is increasingly based on organizational and normative models originating in and supported by the Global North. Furthermore, the spread of democratic norms to many previous autocratically governed states popularized liberal pluralistic conceptions of domestic societies. Democratic values such as tolerance and equal representation, together with strategies such as power sharing and mainstreaming, which originated in liberal Western democracies, have become widely accepted—and maybe even globally, expected— features of governments. Few states can afford to exclude identity-based groups from their political and civil rights without being internationally blacklisted by activists, NGOs, IGOs or the international media and risking sanctions by powerful states in the international community. The model sketched above can be applied to most identity politics groups, no matter if they possess minority status in a domestic polity or if they are a transnational migrant group establishing their demands in the host society. Identity politics in the Global South contain political objectives that, because of the underlying economic deprivation, focus more often on material and economic resource allocations than their counterparts do in advanced democracies. For the latter, ideational issues of recognition and societal status are as important as material redistribution or political participation. One unifying denominator

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remains the experience of belonging to, and to a various degree identifying with, these groups. Yet all of these groups share a qualitatively different and novel international environment that is less hierarchically structured, provides more avenues for identity promotion and in general, seems more supportive of rights-based identitive assertions. Identity politics then could, in a globalized world in which domestic identity groups are influenced and supported more and more by international nongovernmental and intergovernmental coalitions representing these identities transnationally, be less about socio-political autarky or territorial secession, which at times can result in the extremist identity politics of civil wars and genocide, but about equal political and social rights within states or regions. In fact, the globalization of democratic and human rights regimes may erode the power of statetargeted identity-politics because of the circumvention by transnational identity-based coalitions who appeal directly to larger, more influential regional or intergovernmental institutions such as the UN, the EU, etc. Factors such as the accessibility of governmental channels or national political culture, however, will remain important domestic determinants, while at the same time culturally based non-associational groups are by nature more traditionally and spatially oriented and thus will more often than not prefer isolated autonomy or exclusion over inclusionary recognition. In this context, an important question that drives our future research is how the process of defining and perceiving globalization by these collective groups influences the efficacy of their utilization of media or IGOs and NGOs. What are the underlying dimensions of how globalization is perceived by these groups as opposed to how globalizing opportunities are responded to? Political science or sociology, in their emphasis on national institutions and structures, has not been able to account for the preeminent salience of identity politics in the age of globalization. Hence it is here that International Relations and Political Sociology can stretch beyond the domestic governmental framework under which identity politics occur and operate. The above mentioned factors are an attempt at theoretically exploring the (dis)similarities of such actions in an abstract and comparative manner, while at the same time refocusing the subject of identity politics from a Western-centric view to the rest of the world. The objective is to compare identity politics across regions with the intent to uncovering discernible socio-discursive and structural similarities as well as contrasts among ‘glocal’ identity politics and in that context to propose a parsimonious model to guide future research.

Identity Politics and Political Identities 29

In the following chapters, we provide evidence that this model bears fruit. Chapter Previews

The following chapters consist of case-studies based on the changing structural and procedural political configurations under which identity politics play out in a globalized world. Each consists of an identity movement promoting an important, socially engrained identity facet yet all of these experienced tremendous changes and challenges in the past few years. A selection of prevalent identity-based political groups in a variety of settings across regions aids in comparing and contrasting how globalizing influences impact the activities of these collectivities. All of our case studies come from pluralistic states comprising of multicultural or -ethnic societies, representing globally significant ethnocultural, gender, democratic, and religious minorities. In addition, the transformation of state identity in its response to domestic challenges and international expectations is taken into account as well. The cases below explore the evolution and transformation of identity movements through part process-tracing, part discourse analysis, informed by and responding to the model outlined in this chapter. Manuela Picq describes how indigenous politics achieved recognition and a new voice to express the interest of indigenous, rural sectors in Ecuador after electoral reforms in the 1980s. Indigenous women present not only a topical collective, but also a double identity combining ethnicity and gender. Her chapter analyzes the tensions between ethnicity and gender in the complex political cultures that prevail today in Ecuador. The case study of Ecuador reflects a larger reality in the Andean countries, in which women are increasingly trapped between competing discourses of local identity and internationally claimed human and women’s rights, suggesting an external impact on cultural practices prevalent in indigenous cultures there. In the following chapter, Wai-man Lam and Kai-Chi yan Lam examine Hong Kong’s civil society groups asserting their regional democratic identity vis-à-vis the Chinese government after the handover from Britain to China in 1997. Civil society there represents a semiautonomous realm, independent of state control, and provides the basis for social movement-based identity politics. Hong Kong is famous for its relative political liberalism and consensual politics, and exemplifies the politics of democracy groups under pressure. Their contribution

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sheds light on the potentials and constraints of East Asian identitypolitics in relation to governmental attempts to limit democratization. In Europe, the EU enlargements in 2004/7 have been characterized by aspirations for the just treatment of ethnic minorities, in particular the significant Hungarian Diaspora living in Transylvania and other Eastern European regions. Eloisa Vladescu probes the country’s capacity to recognize the significance of identity politics in preparation to EU integration and shows that the dominant elites’ ability to respect minority rights will ultimately determine how effectively states such as Romania will consolidate its democracy in the face of minority rights norms and policies prescribed by international organizations such as the EU. In his examination of South Africa, Vlad Kravtsov analyzes how much (state) identity factors into the formation of transnational HIV/AIDS policy coalitions. His case study defies simple norm diffusion explanations. He details the activist conditions there surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis, which resulted in a leadershipadvocated “anti-treatment” coalition, and highlights the clash between the state’s and the activists’ identity constructions in the post-apartheid era. Lastly, Nuray Ibryamova explores a religious identity movement, the Gülen Movement in Turkey, which has become the most prominent socio-cultural force in Turkish society today representing patrioticconservative values in view of Turkey’s acceptance as EU accession candidate since 2005. Yet, secular state and religious group identity tend to clash there because of the movements’ wish for religious expression. The editors’ concluding chapter summarizes the individually treated constituent parts of globalized identity politics above, and reviews the applicability of the ‘new’ identity politics determinants laid out above. By including the homogenizing processes of mediatization of politics, the support by international organizations and activists and the diffusion of human and minority rights norms, it delivers a comparative synopsis detailing the rise of dissimilar local, regional and state identity expressions under comparable larger structural processes of economic, social, technological and political globalization. Finally, it offers a critique at the existing schools and a research agenda for an extended view of ‘glocal’ identity politics in a transformationalist age.

2 Trapped Between Gender and Ethnicity: Identity Politics in Ecuador Manuela Picq

During a workshop on gender equality in Ecuador, a group of indigenous women leaders unanimously refused to self-identify as feminists. Participants were a heteroclite group of young and old women from rural and urban areas, combining illiterate and university graduates leaders working from health to politics. There were two common denominators among them: they were all indigenous to the highlands and they were all women who advocated women rights, many becoming regional icons of gender empowerment. Yet they unanimously rejected the gender label, rather identifying their struggle with ethnic disenfranchising. What identities prevail—and when? Identities may overlap, but they also carry different opportunities. As indigenous women carefully navigate their multiple identities to negotiate political opportunities, they value strategic ethnicity over gender. The emergence of indigenous movements in Latin America stirs widespread attention and support. From Mexico to Bolivia, ethnic mobilization fascinated scholars from anthropology to political science over the last two decades (Yashar 2005; Postero 2007; Canessa 2007; Van Cott 2008; Jung 2008). A vast literature now traces the mobilization of indigenous movements and the consolidation of ethnic parties. Ethnopolitics is particularly tangible in Ecuador, where a strong indigenous movement engaged in formal politics in 1996. The indigenous party Pachakutik has become a key player on the politicalstage, dominating regional governments and influencing congressional and presidential outcomes (Van Cott 2005; Becker 2008). As indigenous voices echo claims for social justice and the redistribution of resources, ethnicity became emblematic of the long struggle against inequality.

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Inequality is undeniably one of the most pervasive challenges of Latin America, and one indigenous peoples have faced for centuries. Yet, inequality is complex and multifaceted, rooted in a mosaic of factors, many of which lacking the political appeal to translate into electoral attractiveness. Whereas ethnic identities gain political momentum from Venezuela to Bolivia, gender is less used to tackle inequality. The fact that certain sources of inequality are engaged more consistently than others in discourses on social justice raises the question whether some identity markers are more valuable than others. Ethnic politics seem more attractive than gender politics, even though they both advocate equality of opportunities and the end of discrimination. Indigenous women experience both ethnic and gender inequalities, yet it is their ethnic identity they emphasize to the detriment of gender. How can we understand the prevalence of one sort of identity politics over the other, if gender and ethnicity both call for the redress of inequalities? This essay evaluates politics of identity in Ecuador. Based on the theoretical argument laid out by Coate and Thiel, I challenge conceptions of politics as fixed and cohesive to argue that identities are negotiated in multiple political geographies. Through the interaction of domestic grass-root mobilizations and international norms, identity politics acquire a global legitimacy, thus translating into international political capital. This chapter explores the identity politics of Ecuador’s indigenous women in three tempos. First, I analyze the ‘glocal’ making—and meaning—of ethnopolitics in Ecuador, bridging a local history of mobilization with the instrumentalization of emerging global norms and opportunities. Second, I reveal the gender gap within indigenous politics, mapping how indigenous women negotiate the traps of their overlapping identities. Finally, I analyze indigenous women’s choice for ethnic identities as an intersectional feminism of their own making. The ‘Glocal’ Making of Ethnopolitics

The making of ethnopolitics has multiple geographies. In this section, I first retrace decades of indigenous resistance and mobilization across Ecuador to account for the emergence of ethnopolitics. I then recognize the role of a growing set of international norms and policies to protect indigenous peoples in making ethnopolitics valuable. While indigenous movements grasped political opportunities, they also framed their politics of identity in a context of globalizing political discourse focused on ethnicity. This in turn enabled ethnopolitics to develop enough legitimacy to become a viable political strategy.

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Politicizing Ethnicity in Ecuador

Indigeneity echoes centuries of immeasurable suffering in the Andes. In Ecuador, peasants were kept in debt and labor exploitation through the concertaje system, enduring systemic physical abuse as hacienda owners disposed of indigenous lives at will (Icaza 1934; Lyons 2006; O’Connor 2007). As a matter of fact, indigenous families were sold with land properties—just as cattle—until the agrarian reform freed them of concertaje in 1964. This history of structural oppression is nevertheless accompanied by one of continuous resistance and uprising (Silverblatt 1987; Stern 1987; Lucas 1992). The roots of the indigenous movements now blossoming throughout Latin America are deeper and more complex than often acknowledged. Marc Becker (2007) traced these histories of resistance in Ecuador from the first rural syndicates in the 1920s to the elaboration of an ethnopolitical agenda in the 1990s. The modern indigenous movement developed through constant mobilization throughout the twentieth century with key support from the socialist party in its first phase. As peasants dispossessed of land, indigenous peoples were natural allies of the international communist movement, and Ecuador’s socialist party invited the workers to join their ranks. For the first time, indigenous peasants were welcomed as political actors. Socialists engaged indigenous voices in their congresses and helped develop organizational structures, such as unions, in rural communities. The convergence of interests between Indians, who needed a political voice, and the party, who needed to side with the masses, generated a socialist discourse advocating for the marginalized peasantry. The communist legacy remains very tangible in the grammar of indigenous politics. The word “compañero” is engrained in indigenous vocabulary, and indigenous leader Transito Amaguaña self-identified as a communist until her death in 2009.1 Ecuador’s indigenous movement, warns Becker (2007), did not emerge from socialism. It preceded it, and survived it as well, moving away from communism to adopt ethnicity. Agrarian reform forced the democratization of local politics, a slow and conflictive process that started in 1964 and lasted into the early 1990s (Zamosc 1994). Claims for land rights soon developed into a larger struggle for recognition, bringing ethnicity to center-stage.2 The making of indigenous citizens goes well beyond the political sphere, of course, and Maria Helena Garcia (2005) illustrated the dynamic process of plural identity construction. The political right to land gave birth to ethnic contestation. Without abandoning socio-economic claims, the social movement amassed collective and cultural grievances related to

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the condition of peoples. By the late 1980s, ethnicity had irremediably taken over class identity as the focus of reform movement in Ecuador. The move from peasantry to ethnicity is not specific to Ecuador nor has it gone unnoticed (Albó 1991; Bretón 2001; Jung 2008; Canessa 2008). What is specific to Ecuador is the solid process of institutionalization and politicization that proceeded. There is now an abundant literature about Ecuador’s indigenous politics (SelverstonScher 2001; Van Cott 2005/2008; Becker, Zamosc 2004; Yashar 2005; Lucero 2006b, Madrid 2005). The tipping point towards ethnopolitics was the founding of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) in 1986.3 After decades of local organizing, all indigenous organizations of Ecuador joined efforts into one national confederation. With ethnicity as its spinal cord, the institution brought Quichua peasants from the highlands together with Shuars from Amazonia. Although language on peoples took center-stage, CONAIE kept identifying as an organization of oppressed and exploited people, calling for popular unity against imperial capitalism (Becker 2007, p. 170). Ethnicity and class proved not to be antithetical but complementary in the indigenous movement—a key ingredient to understanding the attractiveness and lasting echo of Ecuador’s indigenous movement. CONAIE’s major asset has been its mobilization capacity. It gained international visibility in June 1990 by successfully blocking the roads of Ecuador with more than two million peoples. This first levantamiento indigena (indigenous uprising) was a milestone in ethnic politics across the Andes, paralyzing the country for more than a week and mobilizing entire communities, women and children included (Almeida 1993). Mobilization persevered, and uprisings were used to pressure governments, or oust them, as in the cases of Presidents Bucaram and Mahuad. The state was forced to acknowledge this new political constituency and sit at the table with indigenous leaders. Combining organizational capacity with legitimacy, CONAIE became one of Latin America’s most effective and internationally renowned indigenous people’s organizations (Van Cott 2005, p. 99). The series of levantamientos in the early 1990s was crucial in two ways: it restored a sense of dignity and self-confidence to indigenous peoples and it established the indigenous movement as a new political actor in national politics. In 1995, the creation of the political party Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik announced CONAIE’s transition from the “politics of influence” to the “politics of power” (Zamosc 2004). The party experienced a meteoric ascent to power, getting three indigenous

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deputies to Congress and gaining local governments from Cotacachi to Guamote in 1996 (Peralta 2006). The party helped elect President Gutierrez in 2002 and secured five cabinet seats. Ethnopolitics catapulted into the state machinery in a few years time. Deborah Yashar (2005) described Ecuador’s indigenous movement as the strongest, oldest, and most consequential of Latin America. The achievements were many, from bilingual education to a ministry for indigenous affairs. Perhaps the most important was the redefinition of Ecuador as a “multiethnic and pluricultural” state and the recognition of ethnic collective rights in the 1998 Constitution. Through Pachakutik, CONAIE re-asserted its central role in promoting more democratic, inclusive politics. Ecuador’s indigenous movement is genuinely rooted in a long history of local resistance. It is, by all means, an endemic, national movement. But domestic politics are never isolated from international forces, and what happens in the global arena of the U.N. inevitably affects domestic change—especially norms protecting the rights of indigenous peoples. I now turn my attention to the international making of Ecuador’s ethnopolitical scene. International Norms Enabling Ethnopolitics

International norms and organizations designed to protect and support indigenous peoples have proliferated over the last twenty years. The international community adopted treaties, crafted institutions, appointed special rapporteurs and even declared an international day to celebrate the almost 400 million indigenous peoples of the world. Indigenous groups, in turn, learned to make strategic use of new international tools. International actors boosted ethnopolitics in three major ways: normative empowerment, economic support and a process of socialization to international politics. The first—and most used—international norm to protect indigenous peoples consists of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, adopted in 1989.4 The political principle advanced by ILO 169 is that of self-determination: it proclaimed indigenous peoples’ right to participate in the state decision-making process and be recognized as full citizens while respecting their right to live according to their own structures and traditions. ILO 169 was the first international document to explicitly state indigenous autonomy, land rights, and rights to participate in development projects and government policies. Many of the few states to sign the convention were from Latin America. This legal instrument became a powerful tool for indigenous movements

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advocating for collective rights in the region. In fact, it backed indigenous calls for a pluri-national state and the legal recognition of autonomous forms of administration. It was a milestone for indigenous politics to ratify the convention in the 1998 constitutional reform: Ecuador became a multicultural nation that legalized indigenous justice. Indigenous groups gained autonomy, self-government, and the right to consultation. The indigenous movement often used ILO 169 to protect their land, notably to contest President Correa’s mining projects. In 2009, CONAIE filed a lawsuit against the state alleging that the new mining law was unconstitutional for failing to consult with indigenous organizations whose territories would be affected by mining activities. According to the convention, indigenous peoples should be consulted prior to programs of exploration, participate in the benefits, and receive compensation for damages resulting from exploitation. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon often used the norm to protest oil companies exploiting their territories. In 2005, Waorani women contested the intrusion of oil giants Petrobras and Skanska within the national park of Yasuni. The failure to inform the Waorani people and the meager environmental assessments forced the state to retreat permits for oil exploration. Both cases illustrate how indigenous groups use international legislation. Even when treaties are directed at governments, they can be used to increase accountability and institutional pressure against multinational companies exploiting indigenous territories for natural resources. The United Nations (UN) started to address indigenous issues in 1982 with the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), which became a normative tool for the construction of indigenous identity. As the UN slowly made place for indigenous voices, the WGIP operated as a “think-tank”, reviewing national politics and international standards concerning indigenous matters (Muehlebach 2001). It was an institutional opportunity for indigenous peoples to develop international legal standards to secure their rights, and they pushed for an International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples in 1994, aiming for a declaration. The decade called for international cooperation to address problems in the areas of human rights, culture, the environment, development, education and health—ambitious and far reaching goals that met little consensus and led to a second Indigenous Decade in 2005. The two Indigenous Decades entailed political shortcomings, but they “mainstreamed” indigenous affairs into the UN system (Corntassel 2007). Participation of indigenous organizations in the WGIP soared from 48 in 1983 to 500 by 2005 (Corntassel 2007, p. 153). Since 2002,

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WGIP established a Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues (PFII) to expand the organization’s reach, meeting every May in the condition of advisory body to ECOSOC. In contrast to the elitism of most UN organs, these forums were designed with an open attendance policy to allow any indigenous person or representative to participate in the annual conferences. Ecuador’s indigenous peoples were visibly present since the start. Nina Pacari, an indigenous leader formed in the struggle for land rights and former Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Policy, was nominated to the PFII by indigenous vote. She made CONAIE’s voice heard at the core of the UN, advocating its interests and aspirations at the highest international levels. Pacari remains emblematic of the legitimacy of Ecuador’s indigenous movement both in domestic and international politics. These Indigenous Decades, together with the WGIP and the PFII, strengthened indigenous politics in two major ways. First, they fostered transnational advocacy networks engaging indigenous NGOs to set agendas and influence policy-making (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Second, they institutionalized ethnic politics in the international system, with the multiplication of institutions and norms for indigenous peoples. The major legal achievement was by far the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in the works since 1985, and finally passed in 2007.5 Although it did not contain new provisions on human rights, it reaffirmed principles of equality and non-discrimination, interpreting how international human rights legislation should be applied to indigenous peoples. It also provided universal recognition to self-determination (Article 3) and the rights to lands, territories and resources (Articles 25 to 30)—despite heated controversy and negotiation over the issue of territorial integrity. As with all UN declarations, this treaty lacks enforcement capability. It was nevertheless the first universal legal instrument for the human rights of indigenous peoples, surpassing ILO 169 both in terms of content and ratification. In addition to norms, international organizations provide resources. The World Bank prioritizes ethnicity in its portfolio since the early 1990s, issuing reports to assess the living conditions of indigenous peoples in Latin America (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 1994; Hall and Patrinos 2005). In 1997, the first-ever investment project supporting ethnic identity formation in the Bank was launched in Ecuador. The Project of Development of Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian Peoples (PRODEPINE) was co-financed by the government of Ecuador and the Bank.6 In Guamote and Cotacachi, projects financed capacity building and ethnic governance by channeling loan resources through indigenous federations (Uquillas and Nieuwkoop 2003). Today, the Bank offers

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regular workshops on topics such as governance and communication technology, trying to act as a “linchpin to strengthen the voice” of indigenous leaders across the Andean region (World Bank 2003). Ethnic projects are highly controversial and criticized by indigenous leaders as “ethnic neoliberalism” (Macas 2001). Whether it was policy conditionality or investment projects, the World Bank and other multilateral donors, such as the Inter-American Development Bank, did contribute to bring ethnicity into policy agendas (Carroll and Bebbington 2000, p. 218). Finally, international organizations provided an arena to articulate indigenous agendas, building legitimacy by filling in the crevasses of international development. They also ignited indigenous socialization to global norms. Risse and Sikkink (1999) defined the socialization to international norms as the process through which a state becomes a member of the international society. As Ecuador’s indigenous movement grew present in international forums, it brought global standards and debates back into national politics, learning to maneuver political discourses to their advantage. ILO 169 and the 2007 UN Declaration reveal how indigenous delegates were able to make strategic use of their constructed difference. Indeed, Muehlebach (2001) explored how indigenous groups instrumentalized politics of identity to present their cultural knowledge as an ally to biodiversity in a context of global environmental concern. This strategic use of discourse helped validate their nations and territories at multiple levels. It also reveals the extent to which indigenous groups are socialized with the global politics of normmaking. The case of Ecuador illustrates the model set forth by Thiel and Coate in this book, exposing how global dynamics play a supporting role in empowering indigenous identities in Latin America. Further, it reveals the complex interaction between grass-roots and international organizations in the construction of ethnic identity. Identity formation builds not only from the bottom-up, through indigenous struggles, but also from the outside-in, catalyzed by international norms. As in Ignatieff’s “rights revolution” (2000), the consolidation of indigenous rights brings moral prescription, which in turn leads to unexpected opportunities. Ethnicity as Political Strategy: Indigeneity for Social Justice

As ethnicity was mainstreamed into national and international politics, it was assumed and celebrated throughout the region. In Bolivia, Evo Morales took ethnicity to the highest corridors of power, redefining

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governmental policies and inspiring others to run for office, such as Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala. Ethnicity was paraded in electoral language and presidential inaugurations, and indigenous leaders turned into icons of democracy throughout the Andes. As ethnopolitics became more attractive, almost fashionable, more people self-identified as Indians (Canessa 2007, p. 208). In Ecuador, ethnopolitics acquired normative legitimacy, becoming a viable political project across parties. Like human rights, ethnicity is becoming a barometer for democracy. Indigenous identity is a political achievement that encompasses the world’s poorest and most marginalized. Indigenous voices echo those of the most dispossessed, the underdogs of the world—Galeano’s “nobodies” (1989). In the global era of postcolonialism, indigenous identity is embedded in ideals of resistance, cultural diversity, and self-determination (Niezen 2004). Canessa (2006) argued that indigenous movements are not quintessentially about ethnicity. They really are fights for social justice and the redistribution of resources. Thus when Evo Morales proclaims “we are all Indians”, he is siding the indigenous struggle with that of all excluded peoples in the world. Courtney Jung (2008) sees the moral force of Chiapas indigenous claims resting not on cultural differences but on the history of exclusion that is constitutive of indigenous identity. In Ecuador too, the indigenous claims for cultural rights are woven into the fabric of the fight against inequality, with calls for socio-economic redistribution, political participation, and environmental sustainability. Ecuador’s indigenous movement is aware of the legitimacy capital that comes with politics of identity. In a 1993 political declaration, CONAIE defined its struggle as a frontal option against the capitalist system, hegemonic, and repressive, to solve problems such as unemployment, housing and education caused by discrimination. The movement identified with the history of resistance against ethnocentrism, aimed at “reestablishing the collective political and economic rights denied by the dominant sectors of society.” Advocating “integral humanism” through “reciprocity, solidarity, and equality,” CONAIE shaped a political identity based not on cultural difference, but on the common exclusion of peoples throughout the global south. The role of international organizations became explicitly clear: CONAIE self-identified as “an alternative political force at the national and international levels, recognized by international bodies and society in general” (CONAIE 1993). The grammar of Ecuador’s indigenous movements echoes the global culture against imperialism and neoliberalism, coalescing into aspirations towards a new humanity.

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Now ethnicity sells (Comaroffs 2009). As culture becomes commodified, countries like Bolivia learn to market ethnic authenticity to the world. But the attractiveness of ethnicity goes beyond the market, reaching into the political realm. Ethnicity holds a moral legitimacy stamped by international law—and legitimacy is a scarce political capital in a region where politicians are plagued by a credibility trap (Latinobarometro, Booth and Seligson 2009).7 In fact, when President Correa wears ethnic shirts and speaks in Kichwa, he is not expressing support for Ecuador’s originary peoples as much as searching for legitimacy beyond them. He is in fact portraying his political legitimacy as a leader for social justice and against neo-liberalism on the global media, addressing a broad, global constituency. The symbolic presidential inauguration in Zumbahua with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales was a show-off rather than a celebration of indigenous peoples—most of who were barred from their own town square—or their movement—since Pachakutik decided against an alliance with Correa (Martinez 2009). The ethnicized inauguration of a mestizo president in Zumbahua defined Correa’s political branding on television screens and YouTube: surrounded by the radical left and the authentic Indian, embodied in the persona of Chavez and Evo, Correa visually situated himself on the global politics of resistance. In times of globalization, democracy expands beyond national borders, becoming a cosmopolitan and post-national affair (Archibugi and Held 2001; Habermas 2001). Indigenous peoples make strategic use of international law, as argued above, turning into expert users of edemocracy (Niezen 2005). The global media is an important platform to appeal to their international constituencies, feeding public opinion and building political identity (Coate and Thiel). It is through the web that Zapatistas garnered most support in 1994. In the global media, ethnicity is made tangible beyond borders, turning into a “realm of memory”—the selective recovery of the past forging new political identities in the present (Nora 1992). Identities are then weaved into ethnic motifs, such as dress and language. Whereas in Nicaragua “to wear traje is to say we are Maya” (Hendrickson 1995), in Ecuador to wear an ethnic shirt and speak Quichua with Evo in the background is to side with the oppressed peoples of the world. Correa’s authenticity matters in the global village, sounding indigenous and diverse (Brysk 2000; Bigenho 2002). As ethnicity became a viable political project, it turned into a framing process to foster electoral politics at large. Scholars analyzed the making of ethnicity as a political strategy, instrumentalized for political profit from the Andes to South Africa (Albó 2005; Martinez 2006; Comaroff 2009). In Ecuador, ethnic credentials were

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interchangeably used by CONAIE and Correa, blurring the borders between culture and identity. Ethnopolitics reward those who prove to be “more Indian,” paying limited attention to de facto representativity (Lucero 2006a). Earlier I argued that the case of Ecuador illustrates how ethnic identity can form from the outside-in as much as from the bottom-up. The multi-uses of ethnopolitics make it instrumental not only for indigenous groups themselves, but for political actors at large in quest of political capital. Ethnopolitics took on the challenge to fight the inequalities that affected indigenous peoples. By assimilation, ethnopolitics became one of the main banners of social justice in the Andes, often entangled with the discourse of the New Left. Yet ethnicity is not a stand-alone source of inequality. Gender explains poverty as much—if not more—than ethnic belonging. But if overlapping identities lead to the extreme poverty of indigenous women, they are not easily “overlapable” in the game of identity politics. The Gender of Inequality

Ethnopolitics is a major democratizing force in Ecuadorian politics. However, the political discourse on social justice has not consistently translated into practice, some actors lagging behind in the process of rights emancipation. Indigenous women, in particular, suffer high levels of poverty and exclusion, and seem to marginally benefit from the formal, collective conquests of the movement at large. The stark gender gap prevailing within indigenous groups reveals sexist and patriarchal practices contradictory with the redistribution discourse of ethnopolitics. Struggling for balance at the intersection of their gender and ethnic identities, indigenous women nevertheless opt to fight for their rights within the indigenous movements, stating un-equivocal preferences in the politics of identity. Indigenous women suffer cumulated discrimination because they are indigenous, they are women, and they live, for the most part, in rural areas. Social indicators reveal very high levels of poverty, with bigger gender gaps in relation to income and more than 50 percent of the economically active women working non-remunerated jobs (GarcíaAracil and Winter 2005; Vasconez 2005, p. 276). Indigenous women’s access to education is alarmingly low compared to national standards (Ponce y Martinez 2005), with illiteracy rates reaching 36 percent among women and 20 percent among men (Guzman 2003). In the province of Chimborazo, female illiteracy rates (31 percent) are virtually double that of men (17 percent), and ethnically marked municipalities

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such as Guamote show rates of functional illiteracy above 56 percent for women (INEC 2001). Indigenous women’s access to health facilities is also extremely low, leading to high levels of infant and maternal mortality (CONAMU 2005; Guzman 2005).8 The participation of indigenous women in politics is another indicator of stark marginalization. Since the legalization of women’s right to vote in 1929 (Morales 2009), women movements actively advocated for gender equality. The pressure for political parity during the 1990s achieved quota legislation emblematic of the consolidation of democracy (Herrera 2001; Lind 2005).9 The 1997 labor laws and the 2000 reforms of electoral laws established gender quotas for the electoral system, causing female participation in Congress to double (Guzman 2003; Cañete 2005).10 Laws tend to be only partially implemented (Htun 2002; Ugalde 2005) and women are still underrepresented in local politics—which disproportionally affects indigenous women (Cañete 2005, p. 144).11 Although indigenous women participated actively in the mobilization process, joined the levantamientos with their children, assured logistical success, and marched in the frontlines against police blockages, their voices were silenced once the movement gained political leverage (Pacari 1993). Indigenous women are marginalized both from national and local politics, harassed at the polls (Q’ellkaj 2005),12 and virtually absent from political offices. According to Nina Pacari herself (2004, p. 5), gender quotas were, until recently, “imperceptible” for indigenous women. The political confinement of indigenous women goes beyond state failure in securing their rights. Political opinions of women are trivialized and their work delegitimized, both at the individual and institutional levels (Picq 2009). One of the most puzzling political inequalities is that while indigenous women are required to vote like every other citizen in national politics, they are often silenced in community forums, where elections are usually organized on the basis of one vote per household. Women receive little opportunities to pursue political activities, having to combine family chores with professional responsibilities and even less encouragement from skeptic or resistant family members who perceive women in politics to be “public.” Reports abound of indigenous women being harassed verbally or sexually during political gatherings, notably during the uprisings in the early 1990s. Married indigenous women in positions of power are a recent phenomenon. At the institutional level, the indigenous movement aborted the emergence of the Council of Indigenous Women of Ecuador (CONMIE) in 1996, accusing it of internal division and betrayal.

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Sustained harassment led some of the founding members, including Nina Pacari and Blanca Chancoso, to abandon the gender path to accept a political career focused on ethnic rights within CONAIE. Discredited since its start, CONMIE survives as a marginal and disarticulated entity (Picq 2008). One of the most pervasive problems affecting indigenous women, however, lies behind closed doors. Domestic violence against women within indigenous families and communities is extremely common. Violence, which comes in the form of psychological, emotional and physical aggression, is indigenous women’s “daily bread” (Cucuri 2007). Psychological violence, through verbal abuse, mistreatment, and threats, undermines the already low self-esteem of women who do not believe in their inner strength and individual capabilities. Domestic abuse appears to be highest among indigenous groups, with physical and psychological violence reaching 44 and 45 percent of families respectively, and physical violence affecting 41 percent of girls (ENDEMAIN 2004). Culturally, gender violence is tolerated as a part of life. Rape is often the first sexual experience of indigenous girls, constituting a significant problem their schooling (Cucuri 2007). The saying “marido es, marido pega” (as the husband, he can beat) testifies to the permissibility of gender violence in indigenous culture rather than women’s acquiescence. Physical violence is both intense and frequent, compromising women’s physical integrity, sexual and reproductive health, and often putting their lives at risk.13 These high levels of violence result in growing fear and anguish, public health problems, and the erosion of trust in social relations.14 Women’s basic human rights continue to be violated on a regular basis, and their socio-economic marginalization is a major impediment for their development and empowerment (García-Aracil and Winter 2005). The poverty of indigenous women is related both to gender and ethnicity, but also at its intersection: within ethnicity, gender considerably aggravates poverty. In some studies, gender accounts for 61 percent of inequality, whereas ethnicity only 23 percent (Ramirez 2006). Although indigenous women perceive gender inequality within their communities to be a major obstacle to their emancipation, scholars have yet to express any kind of sustained interest on the issue. Sarah Radcliffe did point to women’s marginal access to rights, yet she too blamed the state for treating women as “as a problem rather than a constituency in its own right” (Radcliffe 2000, p. 4). While the state is responsible for not securing women’s rights, I suggest that the indigenous movement is also to blame for pursuing and legitimizing discriminatory practices.

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Women are perceived as the guardians of indigenous culture, the keepers of tradition. They are, in the words of Margarita Caizabanda (1999), “the key to the unity and conservancy of (collective) identity, traditions, education, and overall, of the Salasaca-Kichwa culture” (p. 41). Women have the capacity to create, transmit, and secure culture— thus ethnic identity (Prieto 2005). As their daily practices provide meaning to the cultural reproduction of the group, women are expected to be more “Indian” than men (Pequeño 2007), and their role as culture keepers can be traced from clothing and language to work and food (Weismantel 1988). As guardians of culture, women carry the responsibility of cultural preservation, an especially critical task in times of globalization inviting hybrid, blending identities. Yet if women bear the responsibility for the preservation of culture, they are also prey to isolationism, cultural purity often reinforcing their social, political, and economic exclusion. In an ironic twist, the guardians become the guarded. Susan Moller Okin (1999) saw an intrinsic tension between cultural practices and gender because the majority of women’s time is directed towards preserving family life and because most cultures aim at the control of women by men through personal law (1999, p. 13). Ethnicity as the essentialization of cultural differences is intrinsic to the private sphere, where culture is reproduced and inequalities are inherited. If women are crucial to the conservation of culture, identity, and ethnicity, they are also silenced by these same cultural traditions. In Ecuador too, culture is commonly associated with collective rights, and the fight for individual rights is often accused of being non-indigenous and breaking with cultural patterns within indigenous cosmovision (Picq 2008). One of the spheres where tensions between culture and women’s rights become most visible is indigenous justice. Indigenous justice systems based on rehabilitation and communal practice are extremely valuable and have been successfully advocated by indigenous groups and human rights advocates throughout the region (Van Cott 2000; Stephen and Hernandez 2006). In Ecuador, just as in Colombia and Bolivia, traditional justice has been recognized by the constitution and is part of indigenous autonomy as codified in ILO 169 and the 2007 UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights. As much as traditional justice is synonymous with local democracy, it also entails stark gender biases, revealing the patriarchal face of the indigenous movement. The cultural realm is particularly violent on women, not only because it tolerates violence against them but also because it grants them very restrictive freedoms. Although arranged marriages are less common, imposed marriages in cases of pregnancy remain frequent. Indigenous justice’s

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double-standards leave women with little individual rights, “taken care of” in private and public spheres, subjugated both to men and the community at large. Ethnicity can be a double-edge sword, combining liberating and oppressive aspects. Indigenous women gained visibility and self-esteem in the marches of the 1990s, represented by ethnopolitics and empowered with collective strength and confidence. Yet, ethnic emancipation has yet to improve their situation as women, notably in the daily practice of culture. Multiculturalism theories need to tackle the issue of minorities within minorities more closely, paying attention to internal accountability and the restrictions imposed on members within the group (Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005). The intimate and conflictive relationship between ethnicity and gender leads women to feel trapped between selecting one of two exclusive identities: being Indian in a largely mestizo society, or being a woman within patriarchal indigenous communities. Because indigenous women suffer marginalization in different arenas—the family, the community, indigenous organizations as well as the Ecuadorian society at large—either identity only provides partial protection. It is problematic to preserve a culture that encompasses “traditions” of violence, subjects women to heavy, unpaid workloads, and silences them. There are little alternatives outside the community, where they become excluded, facing restricted opportunities because of ethnic rather than gender discrimination. Wherever they go, indigenous women are vulnerable to exclusion, whether it is for their ethnicity in the city or their gender in the villages. This tension between ethnicity and gender generates identity and political crises as they find themselves trapped in essentializing categories, unable to assert their plural identities to protect their rights as indigenous women (Stephen 2001; Hernandez 2002). Their situation reveals a deeper tension between identity and citizenship, individual rights and collective rights. The struggle for women rights is, quintessentially, a struggle for individual rights that advocates inclusion and redistribution. The struggle for indigenous rights, in contrast, often calls for political exclusivity, increasingly advocating for differentiated rights (Htun 2004). The promotion of women’s rights is rejected by indigenous politics as foreign to indigenous values, being associated with western individualism (i.e. capitalism). Women’s rights are conflictive both for symbolizing a western inheritance and for clashing with the foundational myths of collectivity, solidarity, and reciprocity in indigenous cosmovisión. By rejecting politics of difference within, however, the indigenous movement denies the co-existence of multiple identities, within and

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beyond ethnicity. Whereas Ecuador’s indigenous leaders consistently advocate the right to difference from the UN to Congress, it has been much harder for the movement to practice what it preaches within its own ranks. As important as ethnopolitics might be in the Ecuadorian Andes, it must not be taken as an exclusive identity. Gender also matters for redistributing opportunities, and it matters powerfully (Nussbaum 2001; Sen 2006). The assertion of multiple identities, however, coexists with the pragmatic necessity of group politics. Indigenous women are thus pushed to prioritize one set of rights over the other in their political agenda. In the messy overlap of identities and oppressions, they strategically mobilize the identity politics of ethnicity. Playing Ethnicity, Advocating Gender

Indigenous women might be discriminated against and even left behind, accumulating various forms of oppression. That does not mean, however, that they do not fight for their rights. Indigenous women do mobilize and struggle to make their voices heard, trying to access spaces they are not invited to join. Their organizing might be peripheral and lack structure, anchored in the local and barely tangible in mainstream politics, yet two aspects of their efforts are worth noting. First, indigenous women actively use international resources, both norms and organizations, to advocate for their rights in local politics. Second, indigenous women organize as Indians, not as women, favoring the identity politics of ethnicity to advance their rights. The first particularity of the advocacy of indigenous women in Ecuador is that it actively instrumentalizes international resources. International organizations create unique opportunities to address indigenous women issues. In fact, they are one of the most accessible spaces for indigenous women, welcoming and encouraging them to discuss their concerns. Thus, it is a favorite venue for Quechua Ana Maria Guacho from Chimborazo. This determined leader never made it to the forefront of the indigenous movement. Her long trajectory of political leadership, from the agrarian reform to the uprising of the 1990s, discredited her within the community and own family, forcing her to separate and leave to the city. Her political activism was poorly supported in regional ethnopolitics, yet her voice gained a global reach through the UN system. Every year, she attends the UN PFII, and her hard-work and expertise led her to be appointed as representative for the Latin American caucus in 2006 and co-president of the Global Caucus in 2008.

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International organizations present in Quito constitute a steady source of support for indigenous women. The Andean branch of UNIFEM, based in Quito, has an office solely dedicated to indigenous issues. In 2007, UNIFEM organized a regional conference bringing indigenous women together to discuss traditional justice. Women from Guatemala to Bolivia had a unique opportunity to exchange and generate knowledge regarding indigenous justice (UNIFEM 2009). Gatherings like this are key political spaces for women to engage in debates that are either inaccessible or taboo within the indigenous movement. In 2009, UNIFEM also embarked on a project with Ecuador’s Association of Women from Rural “Juntas Parroquiales” (AMJUPRE) to encourage their use of information and communication technologies and thus strengthen their advocacy networks. The mainstreaming of gender and ethnicity in international organizations means that portfolios prioritize indigenous women projects. It is in that context that the indigenous women’s association Nueva Vida (New Life) benefited from the UNDP Small Grants Program in 2002. It is also in that context that it became one of five projects in the world to be awarded the 2007 global 'Seed Award' by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), UN Development program, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The award, which supports sustainable development projects, was granted to a small group of Quechua women in Lupaxi for recovering native tubers through organic agriculture to foster food security and counter migration to the cities. The most interesting case of indigenous women organizing is perhaps the advocacy for gender parity within indigenous systems of justice during the 2008 Constitutional reform. The Network of Quechua Women of Chimborazo, a grassroot organization of less than one hundred peasant women, mobilized to advocate for a new law codifying gender parity in the administration of indigenous justice in Ecuador. Without the support of the national women’s movement and despite the resistance of indigenous politicians, the group articulated gender claims within the ethnopolitical agenda. They searched for inspiration in the newly reformed Bolivian Constitution—to no avail. Cristina Cucuri researched international documents and found legitimacy to their claim for gender parity in Article 44 of the UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the only to mention gender equality: “All rights and freedoms recognized herein are equally guaranteed to male and female indigenous individuals.” Women traveled to the lowlands of Monte Christi for more than six months, engaging politicians in charge of judicial reforms within the constitutional assembly. Development funds

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from Canada were used by CEDIS to support some of the traveling costs, and indigenous women relayed themselves to secure a regular presence during the eight months of negotiation. Their efforts paid off. Article 171 of the new constitution guarantees women’s participation and decision-making in the implementation of indigenous justice. Indigenous justice is formally recognized in art 171 of the Ecuadorian constitution—although the language frames the limits of tradition with gender parity and international human rights. It is no coincidence that indigenous women put international norms to good use. Ethnopolitics refer to a political stand—formed through constant resistance to the state—rather than a cultural identity. If ethnicity reiterates cultural difference it is to better claim selfdetermination over autonomous territories. More than engaging a dialogue with the state, ethnopolitics contest state sovereignty, navigating international norms and opportunities the best they can. The very grammar of indigenous rights instrumentalizes international language to advocate rights to land and autonomy and challenge state boundaries.15 Ethnopolitics in the Andes are therefore intimately embedded in international relations, revealing bargaining games between the local/marginal and the global/hegemonic. Indigenous identity is intrinsically “glocal” (Brysk 2000) as it articulates local claims in international spheres of authority. Ethnopolitics challenge traditional conceptions of citizenship (Postero 2007) as much as it calls for the re-invention of the state, seeking to redefine the social contract rather than extend it. In that sense, ethnopolitics are as much about entering the state as surpassing it—in some sort of ethnic, post-national constellation (Habermas 2001). By joining international actors, indigenous women are locating themselves both within the Ecuadorian state and beyond it. Indigenous women voices echo cosmopolitan democracy as much as the constructivist momentum, in which politics of identity shape a “world of our making” (Onuf 1989). Ethnopolitics are much more global than often admitted in our literature, becoming as salient to scholars in international relations as well as in anthropology. This leads me to the second striking consideration about indigenous women’s advocacy in Ecuador: their preference for ethnopolitics. In their overlapping identities, they can choose among a diverse set of political allies. Indigenous women strongly advocate for their rights as women, as illustrated in the examples above. Yet, when it comes to politics, they emphasize cultural and collective rights, promoting ethnic self-determination. Indigenous women are traditional allies of the national women’s movement. Pictures show indigenous leader Transito Amaguaña siding with the leaders of the national women movement in

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the 1940s. Indigenous women participate at meetings organized by CONAMU, contributing and challenging the agenda. They count on the support of women groups, at the local and national levels, to advance their causes. Gender solidarity exists, despite the many shortcomings of the women’s movement and their inability to produce a more diverse discourse. Indigenous women are aware of the discrimination they endure as women, within the communities in the indigenous movement at large. They are well-aware of the machista practices of indigenous leaders and often call for the solidarity of their counterparts in women’s organizations. And yet, indigenous women favor ethnic over gender identities. They keep a solid dialogue with the national women’s movement, but they identify as indigenous before identifying as women, and their loyalty goes to the national indigenous movement. Their coalition building is weak, and their interests are not truly represented by either side. But indigenous women are unambiguous on the politics of representation. Just as Rigoberta Menchú chose to follow ethnopolitics in Guatemala, indigenous women in Ecuador chose to follow CONAIE politics of ethnicity. From Nina Pacari and Lourdes Tibán, who silence gender to gain positions of power within CONAIE, to Cristina Cucuri and Ana Maria Guacho, who contest the gender inequalities prevailing within the indigenous movement, all indigenous women abide to the politics of ethnicity. Indigenous women consistently advocate gender rights, overtly or behind the scenes, but always from within the movement, never siding openly with politics of gender. When indigenous women need to advocate gender inequalities, they do so from within the indigenous movement, not siding with Ecuadorian feminists. In fact, indigenous women claim that they are not feminists even when they actively advocate for women’s rights. As indigenous women consistently opt for politics of ethnicity, advocating gender equality only from within, we wonder why they prefer to capitalize on ethnic identity as a political strategy. If both gender and ethnicity are sources of discrimination, why is one favored over the other? Are some political identities more valuable than others? After analyzing the double making of ethnopolitics in local and global politics and the advocacy strategies of indigenous women, we now turn our attention to the intersectionality of identity politics in Ecuador. Intersectional Politics

The reasons why indigenous women favor ethnicity over gender are complex and multifaceted, buried in a kaleidoscope of politics and

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culture. The cross-cutting and hegemonic dimension of gender identity leads indigenous women to craft a political identity of their own at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. One of the immediate responses to why indigenous women reject gender identity might lie in its Western value, at once foreign and hegemonic. Feminism is anchored in Western ideals of liberalism and individual empowerment, making history in the suffragette movement and the sexual liberation of the 1970s. Gender followed western institutionalization, evolving into an indicator that ranks societies’ development. Indicators such as the gender development index (GDI) and the gender empowerment measure (GEM) determine the development policies of international organizations. Gender symbolizes the individualism of the West as well as its political and normative hegemony. It refers not just to the role of women, but also that of men, their relation to women, and the feminization and exclusion of indigenous identity (Weismantel 2000; Berger 2004; Canessa 2008). It is because gendering was embedded in colonizing methodologies that Amrita Basu (1995) problematized global feminism and L.T. Smith (1999) engaged traditional knowledge’s as a counter-practice of research. At the 2009 Encuentro de Mujeres de America Latina e del Caribe, in Mexico City, indigenous women issued their own declaration, proposing a broader political agenda that encompassed collective rights and environmental resources. The pluralism of women voices increasingly complexifies the mainstream agenda, white and urban, with other feminisms (Roth 2004). Gender is too crosscutting of an identity, hardly making it an indicator for interest-based agendas and thus carrying limited political significance. There are also profound inequalities of class and race among women. Some women are extremely privileged, cumulating political, social and economic power while others lay at the very bottom of society, deprived of rights as they are exploited in factories, raped in brothels, or isolated in rural highlands. Not only are there differences among women, but women themselves practice racism, discrimination, and exploitation against other women, which explains by indigenous women do not identify with gender as much as with ethnicity. In fact, prioritizing ethnic identity is a way to emphasize a shared reality of exclusion. Hence, Bolivia’s union of domestic workers allied with Morales’ MAS rather than the national women’s movement, finding more resonance to their struggles in the Aymara quest for social justice than in gender calls for sexual rights. Indeed, ethnicity can hardly be interpreted as a pure cultural marker. Scholars of ethnicity in Latin America have repeatedly questioned

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ethnicity as an identifier (Martinez 2006; Corntassel 2003; Canessa 2007). One cannot really tell the percentage of Indians in Ecuador. In government censuses, which include ethnicity since 2001, seven percent of the population identifies as indigenous. According to that same census, 13 percent speak a primary language other than Spanish at home—which implies an indigenous background. Many anthropologists and social organizations give a higher estimate of 25 percent indigenous population. The International Labor Organization gives a figure of 43 percent, and CONAIE raises the estimate up to 45 percent (Van Cott 2005, p. 101). Who, exactly, is indigenous in Ecuador? As in Bolivia, “indigenous” rights are codified in the constitution but the term is open to interpretation (Canessa 2007), perhaps contributing to the varied population statistics. If ethnicity is an accessible, fluid identity, it is also quintessentially political. Ethnicity is constructed from the outside, through the orientalization of the other (Said 1979). It relates to the otherness of culture—an essentialized (and romanticized) otherness that never is. Indigenous peoples do not self-identify as Indians.16 They are Kichwas, Saraguros, Shuars, and Huaoranis. Ethnic identity is incredible diverse—just as much as gender. It is also variable, and ephemeral. It is used as a dress, worn for the occasion, revived according to the political context that needs to be navigated. Feminist scholars themselves contest the capacity of feminism to speak for all women, and its historical disregard to racial, ethnic, class, and sexual differences. While Black women destabilized the notion of a “universal woman,” women from the global south accused its western framework. The trouble with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, but rather the opposite: it often ignores intra-group inequalities. The violence women experience is shaped by overlapping marginalities, such as class and ethnicity. Crenshaw (1989) coins the term intersectionality to account for the ways in which racism and sexism converge to build systems of domination. The experience of gender-based violence by women of color is qualitatively different from that of white women. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the mere sum of racism and sexism, argues Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality is key to address the particular manner in which black women are subordinated. Taking the unique epistemological position of marginalized subjects into account contributes a nuanced conception of identity. Political intersectionality is key to address the complex disempowerment of indigenous women. Indigenous women have an intersectional political agenda of their own—as illustrated in the

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advocacy for gender parity within indigenous justice. Political strategies based solely on the experience of women, with no focus on ethnicity, will be of limited help to indigenous women. In fact, Mala Htun (2004) noted that if identity politics of gender and ethnicity both pursue equality, gender calls for equal rights and integration, whereas ethnicity calls for exclusive rights and differentiation. Disentangling gender and ethnicity into distinct identities only confines the agenda, increasing the competition for resources for diverging goals. The politics of gender and ethnicity both fail indigenous women: they do not account for the specific location of their identity nor provide adequate strategies to redress their marginality. Intersectionality is a key concept to understand the location of indigenous women both within overlapping systems of subordination and at the margins of mainstream politics of gender and ethnicity in Ecuador. The interests of indigenous women have not gained center-stage in the national feminist agenda. Ecuador’s women movement boosts a long trajectory of mobilization and contestation (Herrera; Goetschel 2006; Rodas 2009). Yet the concerns of indigenous women have generally been marginal—lost in the minority of numbers or class. Women organizations have recently been more aware of economic and racial divides, and tried to pay greater attention to indigenous women. Ecuador’s CONAMU created an office for indigenous affairs and supported grass-root organizing in rural areas. Yet ethnic-based interests tend to get diluted in the overall agenda and disappear from sight. In 2008, for instance, indigenous women participated in the National Women’s Assembly to design a gender memorandum to the newly elected constitutional assembly. However, indigenous interests were watered down, diluting ethnic specificity into a universal gender-based agenda. Thus, gender equality was requested in the justice system at large, not in indigenous justice in particular. Indigenous women do struggle for gender rights, but their gender is inexorably tied to ethnicity. Intersectionality is rooted in the causes for oppression as much as in the political opportunities available. From a causal perspective, indigenous women are concerned with more than just female marginalization—they fight for collective land, cultural justice, and bilingual education. From a strategic front, indigenous women have access to ethnic normative and political frameworks gender actors cannot access. There is therefore an opportunity structure in using ethnicity for coalition building. The intersectional critique asserts the utility of identity politics. Discourses about identity can only be effective if they acknowledge how identities are constructed through the intersection of multiple systems. In

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that sense, identity politics can be thought as coalitions that build (on) opportunity structures to consolidate their agendas. Intersectionality enables a more complex understanding of the practice of identity politics. Indigenous women are intersectional subjects, and this chapter underscores the need for greater attention to variation and diversity within women and indigenous experiences. This case identifies intersectional practices of identity politics, acknowledging the messiness of subjectivity through a concrete case-study bridging gender and ethnicity. Perhaps we should read indigenous’ women’s choice for ethnic identities as a form of intersectional feminism of their own making. This analysis explains under which conditions organizing as “women” or “indigenous” makes sense, understanding how identity politics are used to organize according to the oppressions at play and the political opportunities available. Analyzing the processes by which subjects mobilize particular aspects of their identities according to context and opportunities, this chapter maps the organization patterns of indigenous women in Ecuador. In the process, it offers insights into the larger patterns of coalition-building among different identity politics in Latin America. Further, this analysis invites us to imagine points of intervention—and articulate more adequate political responses—to redress the multiple oppression marginal groups face in the Andean region. Conclusion

Quechua leaders contest feminist politics by claiming that one does not need to label herself a feminist to act in protection of women’s rights. Indigenous women in Ecuador might be trapped in multiple systems of discrimination, but they strategically channel their struggle for emancipation through the politics of ethnicity. In this chapter, I analyzed the construction of ethnopolitics in Ecuador, focusing on the situation of indigenous women and their identity strategies. The analysis illustrates the theoretical model developed by Coate and Thiel, showing how ethnic identities are utilized for political capital in regional politics and how international norms reinforce indigenous identity. International legislation and the global media are a catalyst to ethnopolitics in Ecuador and throughout the Andean region. Without a doubt, indigenous movements are made in the local, but they efficiently instrumentalize international structures to consolidate their moral legitimacy and political visibility. The political climate growing supportive of ethnicity, ethnopolitics are becoming a source of political

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capital, appealing to indigenous groups and beyond. Indigenous women lie at the intersections of competing discourses on gender and ethnicity, navigating the politics of identity in the attempt to maximize their political capabilities. They too instrumentalize international norms, challenging state sovereignty and engaging human rights discourses to negotiate their rights as Indians and as women. The celebration of ethnicity in international politics has brought some recognition to indigenous movements in the Andes. However, the analysis of indigenous women suggests that the discourse on social redistribution does not always trickle down to address peoples at the margins within minorities. Indigenous peoples in Latin America continue to live at the margins of society, disenfranchised from the nation-state and increasingly so from the indigenous politics. Ethnopolitics has yet to address the violence that affects indigenous women in Ecuador and acknowledge their voices and concerns. While the power of ethnopolitics is clear and sound, most indigenous peoples remain powerless, living in precarious conditions. The strongest commonality between Shuars, Quechuas, and Cofanes is exclusion rather than culture. Can the indigenous movement seize the political momentum to secure permanent rights for the peoples it claims to represent? Is it willing to tackle social hierarchies at large, including patriarchy, to promote social justice? There has been a stark crisis of legitimacy within Ecuador’s indigenous movement, with the emergence of ethnic parties competing with Pachakutik, such as Amauta in Chimborazo, and the migration of indigenous votes to non-ethnic parties, notably Correa’s Alianca Pais. The politics of ethnicity are here to stay, anchored in the regional political establishment. It remains to be seen, however, if ethnopolitics can succeed where traditional parties have failed—that is in generating lasting, genuine public support for parties and for democracy itself. So far, ethnopolitics seem to play party politics as usual navigating electoral politics rather than engaging in the risky business of tackling structural inequality. 1 Transito Amaguaña participated in the indigenous uprisings of the 1920s in Pesillo, Cayambe, made famous in the indigenista novel Huasipungo (1934) by Jorge Icaza. 2 In 1979 the universal right to vote gave citizenship rights to most indigenous peoples. 3 CONAIE represents peoples in the Amazon region (Shuar, Achuar, Siona, Secoya, Cofàn, Waorani, Zapara, Shiwiar, Andoa y Kichuas), in the coastal region (Tsachila, Epera, Chachi, Awa, Manta y Wankavilka) and in the highlands (Palta, Sarakuru, Kañari, Puruwà, Chibuleo, Tomabela, Salasaca,

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Kisapincha, Waranka, Kitukara, Kayampi, Otavalo, Karanki, Natabuela y Pasto). 4 The first international legal instrument to specifically address indigenous peoples was ILO Convention 107, adopted in 1959. At the time, however, member state conceived the protection of indigenous peoples through policies of integration and assimilation. ILO 107 was condemned as assimilationist and racist by indigenous peoples, international jurists, and human rights advocates around the world. Indigenous peoples called for the revision of ILO 107 to recognize their collective and cultural rights of autonomy and selfdetermination. 5 Negotiations lasted over 11 annual sessions to reach consensus, and the only four countries to oppose it were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. Adopted by 144 countries, the Declaration was the first legal document dedicated to indigenous rights in the UN system. 6 The government and the Bank contributed USD 10 million and USD 40 million, respectively. The Bank’s contribution included funds from other organizations, such as USD 15 million from the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development. 7 Ecuador is particularly unstable, with no president-elect remaining until the end of his/her mandate since 1996, and populism is a growing political alternative (Carlos de la Torre). 8 Women living in rural areas take twice as long to reach health establishments as women in urban areas, and almost half of these women recur to a midwife or family members for giving birth (CONAMU 2005: 47, 53). 9 Ecuador was the first country to grant the vote to women in 1929, and subsequently the first Andean country to establish electoral quotas for women following the 1995 Beijing World Conference. 10 The 1997 “Ley de Amparo Laboral” reformed electoral laws to set gender quotas on electoral lists at 20 percent, which were later expanded to 30 percent and subject to a progressive increase of 5 percent in each electoral process until reaching 50 percent (Ugalde 2005, p. 171). 11 In 2002, women’s presence in Congress barely surpassed 15 percent (Ugalde 2005). The law of alternation and sequence has been partially implemented by the Electoral Supreme Court and left up to the interpretation and goodwill of political parties after complaints and legal pursuit from the women’s movement. 12 In monitoring discrimination at the polls, the Q’ellkaj Foundation concludes that most discriminatory practices are directed at indigenous women, in the form of verbal, psychological, and even physical aggression (Q’ellkaj 2005). 13 Although most women do not have recourse to a police station, the First Police Station for Women and Families in Riobamba recorded an average of 11 victims per day in January 2006. (Data collected by author.) 14 The few victims of physical and sexual violence who look for institutional support contact Comisarías de la Mujer (3.7 percent), normal police stations (2.5 percent), churches (1.2 percent), health institutions (0.3 percent), and women organizations (0.2 percent) (ENDEMAIN 2004). 15 In fact, territorial integrity was the most contested issue in the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples, and member states only agreed upon it once

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Article 46 clarified that the text could not be interpreted as “authorizing or encouraging any action that would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” States thus support self-determination as far as it is consistent with their sovereignty. In other words: the Declaration is not about providing new rights to indigenous groups, but bringing indigenous individuals as full citizens within the state. 16 Indigenous is a colonial identity that is contested silently in daily practice and aggressively in academia, which favors the terminology of “originary peoples.” The groups that gather under the banner of indigenous peoples are extremely diverse, belonging to different cultures and speaking different languages, and gather in specific political contexts only.

3 Civil Society and Cosmopolitanism: Identity Politics in Hong Kong Wai-Man Lam and Kai Chi-Yan Lam

Hong Kong, a highly developed capitalist system formerly under British colonial rule, takes pride in being a world city where cosmopolitanism has been embedded as part and parcel of the local identity and way of life since the 1980s. Nevertheless, after Hong Kong’s reversion to China as a special administrative region (SAR) in 1997, observations abound that the local Hong Kong identity has become “sinicized” (Ting and Lai 2007), its cosmopolitan character transmuted, and the people’s aspiration for democracy diminished. The various conscious or unconscious government attempts in remaking the local identity and nourishing nationalism have played a significant part in accelerating the transformation. This chapter analyzes the identity politics of Hong Kong’s citizenry after the city’s return to China in 1997. Specifically, it examines the attempts of the Hong Kong government, Beijing officials and the proestablishment camp in Hong Kong in remaking the local identity. It further inquires into how civic groups have used the cosmopolitan element as a political-cultural repertoire of resistance to the government attempts of reframing the Hong Kong subjects. Using as an example the public protest against the proposed legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law,1 we argue that while the governments and pro-establishment political actors have exalted a narrow perspective of nationalism and economic development, the civic groups involved in the protest attempted to maintain the universal values and cosmopolitan outlook embedded in the local culture. This manifests the influence of former colonial rule and the internationalization of global human rights norms in Hong Kong (introduction, this volume), which have constituted the

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core elements of Hong Kong’s identity. The case of Hong Kong shows that cultural-discursive processes can be the battlefield of identity politics. Against the governmental promotion of a notion of collective identity beneficial to state unity and a restriction of political expression as proposed in Article 23, individuals and civic groups resist perceived negative identities and assimilation imposed on them. Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Political Arrangements

Cosmopolitanism is a thesis about both identity and responsibility. As a theory about identity, being cosmopolitan indicates that a person is influenced by different cultures. To be cosmopolitan is to be openminded politically, forward-looking, and so on. This meaning stands contrary to a parochial morality of loyalty or provincial outlooks. As a theory about responsibility, cosmopolitanism puts emphasis on our obligations to other people including those we do not know (Nussbaum 1996). Nevertheless, there is little consensus among contemporary theorists about the manifestations of a cosmopolitan position. In what follows, we will discuss four common strands of cosmopolitanism including the moral, political, cultural and economic strands (Scheffler 1999). Moral cosmopolitanism implies a form of identity which emphasizes individuality, freedom and equality. Individual human beings, instead of states or other forms of human associations, are regarded as the ultimate unit of moral concern, and possess equal worth of respect (Scheffler 1999). Implied in this notion is egalitarian individualism that rejects nationalist and communitarian arguments on identity formation. The latter views hold that people’s identity is partly constituted and defined by their membership in social groups that share a common history, culture, language or ethnicity. Moral cosmopolitanism has certain political implications. The principles of equal worth and value of human beings as well as active agency and personal responsibility can only be realized in a non-coercive political process where people can negotiate, deliberate and maintain their public interconnections. Also, public consent is important in the process of decision-making (Nussbaum1996). This means that the procedures and mechanisms for decision-making must be inclusive (Dahl 1989). Moral cosmopolitanism is sometimes associated with, and a prerequisite of, political cosmopolitanism. Political cosmopolitanism refers to the structures and forms of political life necessary for the creation of more democratic governance, from the local to the global level. It states that principles under moral cosmopolitanism can be

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achieved only if everyone is ultimately subject to the same authority with the power to enforce these moral laws. Since decisions at issue may have different scopes of impacts, sometimes we do not only need locally based decision-making mechanisms but also trans-local or global ones. In this regard, some advocate an overarching political organization, while some favor a federal system with a comprehensive global body of limited power or more limited international political institutions that focus on particular concerns, such as global environmental issues, war crimes, etc. Evidently, the idea of an overarching political organization goes against the nationalist argument of self-determination. In some versions of nationalism, the concept may be understood as having full statehood with complete authority in both domestic and international affairs, while some other versions may impose lesser requirements. However, under the cosmopolitan scheme, building up a strong and central global government implies the submission of the states to a joint-sovereignty (Beitz 1998, p. 831). Nevertheless, nowadays supporters of political cosmopolitanism do not in fact advocate a global government that assumes powers like national governments. They instead argue for something more modest, such as a system of international law backed up by coercive forces and global authorities with limited power (Nussbaum 1996). Cultural cosmopolitanism emphasizes culture and the self, and is opposed to any suggestion that individuals’ well-being, their identity or capacity for effective human agency depends on their membership in a particular cultural group. Human beings are active agencies who have the ability to shape human community and culture instead of the mere expression of a given tradition. This idea appreciates a multi-cultural melange where individuals exercise their inventiveness and creativity to construct new ways of life using the most heterogeneous and hybrid cultural materials. It opposes a strong nationalism that purports that members of each ethno-national community are closer to one another than those who do not share the same culture, and have special and strong ties of mutual obligation. Politically, the idea of cultural cosmopolitanism will require a form of arrangement where individuals may get access to multiple cultures and maintain public interconnectedness which is neither restrictive nor coercive. Lastly, economic cosmopolitanism is more often discussed among economists such as Milton Friedman (1982). It advocates the strict adherence to the rule of the marketplace, and cultivation of a single and free global economic market with minimal government involvement. The procedures in making such rules and frameworks must be fair and

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participatory to ensure universal acceptance. Since the government is construed as an umpire in enforcing, defining and modifying such rules, it should be inclusive and transparent in its formation and operation. The argument for a free global market may, however, contradict the idea of economic nationalism, which refers to the body of economic policies aimed at bringing backward countries on par with developed countries. Subscribers of economic nationalism (Burnell 1986) regard states as the basic units of economic relations, and take the initiative in modernizing the country by protecting their national economy from foreign intervention, competition and international influence. In general, they reject laissez faire and accept the central role of the state. These visions run counter to the ideas of free market and the minimal state under economic cosmopolitanism. In sum, moral, political and cultural cosmopolitanism suggest a worldview which contrasts to provincial or parochial outlooks and rejects a strong nationalism. Individuals are recognized as free and equal beings, along with active agency and personal responsibility of human beings more generally. These versions of cosmopolitanism also delineate some essential political and organizational features. In particular, public power is regarded as legitimate only if decisions are made through an inclusive and non-coercive political process. Evidently, democracy goes hand in hand with cosmopolitanism, as it best facilitates equality, freedom and autonomy, protection of human rights, active agency of individuals, multiculturalism, a limited government and rule of law. In the international realm, cosmopolitans promote international law, multilateral institutions, and international connection and exchanges on all levels. Compared to other versions of cosmopolitanism, economic cosmopolitanism is the most underdeveloped concept. Economic cosmopolitans argue for a free and single global market with minimal government intervention, as well as a participatory process for forming the government. The Hong Kong Identity and Cosmopolitanism History and development

Globalization and British colonial rule have both left their marks on today’s Hong Kong identity. Yet, such a local identity had not yet developed among the residents until the 1960s. From after World War II to the early 1960s, Hong Kong could be described as an open refugee

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society where the people were still strongly connected with the mainland population regarding their economic activities, family and cultural ties. Various factors had brought about the transition from a refugee society to a more locally rooted identity of the Hong Kong Chinese since the 1960s. For example, the changing immigration policy of the colonial government had led to the official creation of local identity categories. The generations of young people born in Hong Kong after World War II were given the opportunity to develop a stronger sense of local belonging as compared to their parents. While illegal Chinese immigrants were still accepted on humanitarian grounds in the 1950s and 1960s, starting from the 1970s, the colonial government’s policy toward waves of Chinese immigrants had undergone important changes. A halfway measure of acceptance and exclusion, named the “reach-base policy,” was formulated. Under the reach-base policy, anyone arrested on illegal entry along the border areas was repatriated to China, while those who evaded arrest and successfully entered the urban areas were allowed to stay (Ku 2004). In the 1970s, increasing restrictions and controls were exercised on immigration and later in the 1980s, the policy moved further toward full immigration control, which had contributed to the formation of a distinctive sense of local identity. The formation of the local identity can also be attributed to the mass riots in 1966 and 1967, as well as to the colonial government’s conscious efforts in community building thereafter. The two riots originated from certain social sectors’ discontent toward specific social and political occurrences such as corruption, which subsequently aroused general concerns about local affairs. After the mass riots, a series of policies on administrative absorption by which social elites were co-opted into government advisory committees and social services were carried out to make the people feel more like citizens than colonized subjects. Nevertheless, universal values such as “civil rights” and “rule of law” were still downplayed by the British government. Rather, a conscious articulation of “law and order” as part of the governing ideology had virtually emerged after the riots. On the whole, legal protection of human rights in Hong Kong remained very weak until the 1980s, and a “right-based” sense of citizenship and identity had yet to be developed. In the 1970s, however, tides of social movements emerged, and the authoritarian discourse of stability and social control in the earlier colonial years was gradually altered by the competing values of democratic citizenship. The struggle between the two discourses resulted in mixed colonial legacies, which contributed to the cultivation of different values integral to today’s Hong Kong identity. Meanwhile, new

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narratives regarding the Hong Kong identity engendered by the economic take-off in the 1970s, with particular emphasis on the community’s newly achieved prosperity and stability as well as alertness to any threat to the collective achievement emerged. In this narrative, the mainland Chinese immigrants were specifically labeled as a threat to the society’s political stability and economic prosperity. Thus, it is suggested that the emergence of the Hong Kong consciousness had a strong economic basis, and its consolidation was also constituted by the presence of mainland Chinese as outsiders. In the 1980s and the 1990s, political events occurred at the local, national and international levels that brought about further changes on the Hong Kong identity. In the context of the 1997 handover issue, the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 and rising international norms of human rights, the contents of the Hong Kong identity were further enriched. A new discourse arose with an emphasis on democracy, rule of law and rights as will be discussed below. In 1991, the enactment of the Bill of Rights further provided a more solid protection of human rights in legal terms. Under the rule of Chris Patten, the last colonial Governor of Hong Kong, the Society Ordinance and the Public Order Ordinance which originally imposed constraints on the freedom of association and public procession were liberalized, in which a rights-component was formally incorporated into the law. Cosmopolitan Elements of the Hong Kong Identity

Several aspects of the Hong Kong identity are affiliated with cosmopolitanism. Of foremost importance is the people’s aspiration for freedom and democracy. Studies show that support for the protection of freedom and civil liberties has been persistent since the last few decades of colonial rule. As early as in the 1970s, the public had shown resistance to the colonial power’s suppressive measures against civil liberties, for example, in the Public Order Bill in 1967 (Mushkat 1992). After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, political ideas of freedom and civil rights gained further significance and were placed at the center of political debates. The period also witnessed an emergence of political groups advocating autonomy, liberty and democracy. On the whole, though the colonial government was not democratically elected, the Hong Kong society was to certain extent free.2 This explains the people’s backlash against the proposed legislation of Article 23 in 2003 fearing a potential infringement of their liberties. In 2004, a survey further testified to the central importance of freedom in the core values

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of the people. The majority of survey respondents (90.2 percent) agreed that “a society with freedom of thought” was crucial (Ng 2004). On top of freedom and civil liberties, the people of Hong Kong also aspire to the ideal of democracy more generally. The transition period before the handover witnessed a progressive development in the system of representative government, and the emergence of pro-democracy political parties and public support for these parties. In the Legislative Council election in 1991 in which part of the council seats were open to universal suffrage for the first time, 12 out of 18 seats were captured by the democrats, while the pro-Beijing candidates failed to win any seats. In the 1990s, then-Governor Patten implemented a reform on the electoral franchise of the Legislative Council which helped enhance the democratic element of the elections and increase the pace of democratic development. Although the reform was harshly criticized by Beijing, the public in general supported the proposal. Hong Kong has remained a partial democracy after the political handover, in which now the Chief Executive of Hong Kong and half of the seats of the Legislative Council are not elected by universal suffrage.3 Nevertheless, polls conducted in 2007 indicate that respectively 57.6 percent and 63.8 percent of the respondents agreed that the selection of the Chief Executive and Legislative Councilors should be implemented by universal suffrage in the coming term of 2012 (Hong Kong University Public Opinion Poll, hereafter HKUPOP). With continuous British influence for more than a century and rapid industrialization and democratization in the late colonial era, cosmopolitan ideas and components have found their place in Hong Kong’s life. Since the 1980s, Hong Kong has gradually established a system of international law, and multilateral institutions and international connections on all levels. People are somewhat westernized in terms of their ways of living, patterns of consumption, political outlooks and use of language. For instance, the great resistance against the introduction of Putonghua as the medium of teaching after the political handover may have illustrated that English language is regarded as an important cultural capital, and to replace English may mean a deprivation of their “Western” part of identity (Chan 2002). Along with this, the Hong Kong identity is characterized by its embedded awareness of the city’s connection with the global world. According to a recent poll, the strength of identity as an Asian and a global citizen reached 7.79 and 6.74 respectively, with ten points indicating extremely strong and zero extremely weak identitive positions (HKUPOP 2009). In comparing the strength of these civic identities with their other identities including the identities as a Hong Kong citizen

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(7.83), Chinese citizen (7.72), and member of the Chinese race (7.73), it is noteworthy that their Asian identity was as strong as their other identities (HKUPOP). The importance ascribed to global citizenship education is another indicator of the respect for multiculturalism in the local culture. A survey conducted among secondary school teachers and principals in 2006 illustrated that almost 93 percent of the respondents strongly agreed or agreed with the need to strengthen global citizenship education. Importantly, they regarded “cultivation of the understanding and appreciation of diverse values” as the most important reason. The second reason was “raising awareness of global issues,” and “enhancing students’ competitiveness” was rated only fourth (Lee and Leung 2006, pp. 73-74). Coupled with all these factors is the people’s rejection of strong nationalism, notably state nationalism. A survey conducted in 2006 showed that 38 percent of the respondents claimed themselves as “Hongkongese but also Chinese,” followed by 22 percent who regarded themselves as “Hongkongese,” 22 percent as “Chinese but also Hongkongese,” and 19 percent as “Chinese” (Mathews, Ma and Lui 2008, p. 97). Admittedly, while the respondents’ identification with Hong Kong loomed large as seen from the findings, they were also nationalistic but predominantly in a cultural rather than political sense. For instance, the same survey found that the respondents’ sense of love for the Communist Party only scored 2.91 on a ten-point scale with ten points indicating extremely strong and zero extremely weak. However, their sense of love for the Chinese nation scored 6.49, which is noteable, and for Hong Kong it was as strong as 7.52 points (Mathews, Ma and Lui 2008, p. 107). Furthermore, 73 percent of the respondents felt strong pride in the Great Wall, the historic Chinese cultural symbol, whereas only 28 percent felt so for the Great Hall of the People, a political symbol of China (Mathews, Ma and Lui 2008, p. 102). This phenomenon may be partly explained by the antipathy to communism embedded in the local culture inherited from the older generations of Chinese immigrants who fled communism to Hong Kong. Also significantly, as stated, the Tiananmen Square Massacre has contributed to the locals’ suspicion and fear of the Chinese regime and authoritarianism. Nevertheless, although the Hong Kong identity is embedded with cosmopolitan elements and affiliated with universal values such as democracy and freedom, it is not internally coherent. Some aspects of the local identity run against the idea of cosmopolitanism and also inhibit its growth. For instance, a discursive construction of the “Hong Kong Dream,” characterized by the beliefs in the openness and

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opportunities in society, has affected the locals’ commitment to democracy. In this construction, Hong Kong is depicted as a land of economic opportunities and individuals as economic animals who pay most of their attention to the economy as it affects their life most (Yau 2006). This discursive construction has been widely shared by the local population for the last three decades. Both the colonial and posthandover governments in Hong Kong had used this construction to influence people’s self-definition and their commitment to collective action and democratization (Lam 2004). Pragmatism and individualism emerged out of a fast-developing economy and a relatively stable political order in Hong Kong since the 1970s have also negatively affected the people’s commitment to democracy. Research shows that social stability and economic prosperity have been the two most important concerns of the people (Ku 2001; HKUPOP; Yau 2006).4 A democratic government is valuable to them only if it also contributes to the achievement of pragmatic objectives such as efficiency (Lam and Kuan 2005; 2008; Lau 2004). Certainly, the consolidation of the Hong Kong consciousness by the presence of mainland Chinese as outsiders and the local people’s cultural bias of Chinese immigrants, as stated above, runs against the assumption of cosmopolitanism that people have duties to human beings generally. Despite the above examples of internal contradictions of the Hong Kong identity, we should note that no identity is perfectly coherent. The internal inconsistencies of the identity only illustrate the twists and turns in its development and its multiple sources. They should not obscure the fact that certain aspects of the Hong Kong identity and local life have been influenced by colonial rule and globalization, and are affiliated with cosmopolitanism. Reframing the Hong Kong Identity

There are noticeable efforts of the Hong Kong government, Beijing and the pro-establishment camp in transforming the local Hong Kong identity after the political handover partly because of Beijing’s embedded fear of foreign cultural influence. Although globalization serves the benefits of most of Chinese society, it has also made Beijing worried, postulating that the spread of Western ideas such as democracy and freedom compares to cultural imperialism which may trigger off social movements on Chinese soil. Out of such fear, Beijing has been confronting foreign cultural influence, for instance, through controlling the Internet and foreign media’s coverage on local movements in China.

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Similar attitudes can also be seen in Beijing’s governmental approach in dealing with Hong Kong after political resumption. During the process, Beijing, the Hong Kong government and the proestablishment camp have used various political, economic and discursive measures to reset political boundaries and fabricate new perceptions, such as “sinicization”, which function directly or indirectly to reshape the local identity. Specifically, three strategies have been employed in achieving these political objectives. First, it is through identity reconstruction, in particular, to weaken the cosmopolitan elements in the existing local identity. As stated, the cosmopolitan elements of the Hong Kong identity are associated with people’s aspiration for democracy and freedom. Thus, identity remaking in posthandover Hong Kong has a lot to do with weakening the aspiration in these respects. Second, there are the actual attempts to obstruct the possibility of democratization and third, there are the attempts to redefine the scope of freedom. Weakening the Cosmopolitan Element in the Hong Kong Identity The first strategy employed by the government, Beijing and the proestablishment camp attempt identity transformation through weakening the cosmopolitan elements in local identity, as well as values associated with such identity, in particular, aspirations for democracy. Furthermore, collective actions by the local population are downplayed and denounced. Cosmopolitan elements in the local identity are simultaneously being replaced by the idea of nationalistic and passive citizenship, which is cultivated through a process of sinicization, with particular emphasis on discourses such as Chinese virtues, harmony and economic dependence. Denouncing Collective Actions As part and parcel of the cosmopolitan Hong Kong identity, protest and demonstration are regarded as acceptable means to express collective will and to exercise the right of association. However, since political resumption, it has become common for pro-establishment elites to make derogatory remarks on such collective action and rights. For instance, Raymond Wu, a former local deputy to the National People’s Congress, attacked democracy activists in Hong Kong: “They [democrats] can march, by all means, because if Hong Kong goes into terminal decline in the future, they only have themselves to blame as the entire population are so stupid and can be incited so easily.” Also, he stated that, “the demonstration is like a body check to show how easily these people can be incited in political, economic and other issues” (Leung 2005).

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In a similar tone, Hong Kong’s business tycoon Li Ka-shing threatened to withdraw his investments from Hong Kong while denying media allegations that his companies obtained government information through special connections. He said, “I try my best to stay free from politics. But if the media and politicians orchestrate together, I will reduce my investment in the territory.” He added: “I invest in 24 countries, and not one politician attacks me (there)” (Asiaweek December 8, 2000). Occasionally, the intentions of protestors and the significance of demonstrations were downplayed by Beijing to minimize the impact of such contentious actions. For instance, on the demonstrations in 2003 against the proposed legislation of Article 23, the newspaper Renmin Ribao wrote that, To say something that is not too pleasant to the ear, it is probably quite an easy matter to demonstrate in the street in Hong Kong today. No matter whether the reason is big or small ... No matter whether it is right or wrong or who is to blame, everything “lands” on the government.…No wonder many citizens say disapprovingly that Hong Kong has simply become “the city of protest,” which damages its international image (July 3, 2003).

Containing the Aspiration for Greater Democracy Studies and polls show that the people of Hong Kong in general demand for the implementation of universal suffrage in the elections of the Chief Executive and the entire Legislative Council in 2007 and 2008 (HKUPOP). But democratization in Hong Kong was not on the agenda of the government until 2004, after half a million of Hong Kong people took to the street to protest against the legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law in 2003. Despite that, in the following year, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China (hereafter SCNPCC) ruled out the possibility of introducing universal suffrage in 2007 and 2008 and stipulated that any political development in Hong Kong should be made in a gradual and orderly manner. Afterward, it also ruled that universal suffrage of the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council may be implemented in 2017 and 2018 if a “wide” consensus could be reached in the community of Hong Kong, which however appears unlikely due mainly to the different views of the method of electing the Chief Executive and the abolition of functional constituency seats in the legislature. Indeed, the Hong Kong people’s demand for a quicker pace of democratization was regarded as unrealistic and unimportant, and thus thwarted.

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Sinicization: Passive Citizenship, Nationalism, Unpatriotic Accusation Apart from repressing the cosmopolitan and activist elements of the Hong Kong identity, such as the people’s aspiration for democracy and acceptance of right-based collective action, in the identity reframing process, the notion of passive citizenship which promotes the ideas of homogeneity, consensus and harmony, is cultivated. Hong Kong’s people are urged to focus on responsibility instead of rights. Various discourses, such as neo-Confucianism and communitarian Asian values, were introduced by former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in public speeches to convince the citizens to believe that they should be conformists. Praises of traditional values, such as hard work, mutual help, tolerance and a community spirit believed to underpin Hong Kong’s economic take-off in the 1970s were made (Lam 2005). Furthermore, nationalism as a component of ideal citizenship has gained emphasis after political handover. For example, Chinese elements in the existing school curriculum were strengthened by the government. School textbook publishers were provided with guidelines advising them to observe the “one China” policy. Since 1998, Putonghua, the national language of China, has been taught in all primary schools, and civics has been made available as an elective subject. Connections of students with the mainland society are reinforced by facilitating regular school visits to mainland China and exchanges among students (Morris et al. 2000). In fact, it is expected that the nationalistic education discourse will act in creative ways to rearticulate larger groups of people into the nationalistic discourse (Lau 2008). Society-wise, popular measures are also employed to raise the general public’s cultural identification with China. The national anthem, for instance, is broadcasted everyday on the television. Chinese astronauts and Chinese Olympic medalists were invited to visit Hong Kong. Since the Tiananmen Square Massacre has significantly constituted the Hong Kong people’s repressive view of the Chinese regime, considerable attempts to dilute the importance of the incident in the public memory were made by the establishment and pro-establishment camp. In the first few years after political handover, the role of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (established since 1989), which continued to host annual commemoration of the incident in Hong Kong, was heavily debated. Some people urged for its abolition, and advocated that the people should condone what happened in Beijing in 1989. This, they believed, would help bridge the gap between the Chinese government and the Hong Kong population. Part of the advocacy campaign went too far in

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denying that killings once happened in the Tiananmen Square, which subsequently created an even greater uproar (The Standard May 18, 2007). At the same time, in the nationalistic discourse in post-handover Hong Kong, good citizens must also be nationalists. Proponents of democracy thus run a high risk of being labeled as unpatriotic. One good example is Martin Lee, considered the father of Hong Kong’s democratic movement, who became the target of criticisms in the “patriotism debate.” Lee was reported on the news to have encouraged former United States President George Bush to use the Beijing Olympic Games to press for a significant improvement of basic human rights in China (The Wall Street Journal Oct 17, 2007). What he said subsequently aroused intense rebuttals from the pro-establishment camp in Hong Kong. They accused Lee as unpatriotic and betraying national interests by inviting external forces to interfere in the internal affairs of China (Ming Pao Oct 26, 2007). In a similarly unconvincing manner, nationalism is depicted as one’s support for enacting Article 23, a law proposed to protect national security. As stated by Tung, the then Chief Executive, the enactment of Article 23 was “an essential task” under the Basic Law that had bearing on national honor (People’s Daily June 27, 2003). Also, making laws to protect national security is “a matter relating to the national dignity and the glory of the Chinese race” (People’s Daily July 6, 2003). Proestablishment newspapers like Ta Kung Pao further equated any criticism aiming at the proposals to implement Article 23 as being unpatriotic and excessively aligned with the West (December 23, 2002). While patriotism may not be a bad thing, the subsuming of human rights claims under nationalistic discourses may, however, gradually erode the public’s aspiration for universal values. Scholars also observed that looking “North” instead of “West” has become the easiest economic strategy of the government. Particularly after the political crisis in 2003, economic solutions were designed to solve the crisis of governance. For instance, a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) and more extensive economic collaboration and integration with China have been implemented (Yep 2007). Hong Kong is on the fast track of “sinicization” as its economic reintegration with China deepens ( Chan 2004; Ting and Lai 2007). Obstructing the Possibility of Democratization

After political resumption of Chinese rule, political arrangements contrary to the development of a democratic government are emphasized

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in both government rhetoric and practice. This development serves to minimize peoples’ democratic aspiration that constitutes an important aspect of their cosmopolitan identity along with the attempts previously stated. Executive-led Governance Contrary to a legislative-led model, both the Hong Kong government and Beijing have stressed that governance should follow the executiveled principle. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s second Chief Executive, once wrote, “The political system established under the Basic Law envisions the Hong Kong SAR to practise ‘executive-led’ government. The Chief Executive is the head of the SAR and leader of the SAR Government” (Tsang 2006, p. 4). Similarly, at the celebrations of the 5th Anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, former Chinese President Jiang Zemin said that “the executive-led structure should be further strengthened” (People’s Daily July 1, 2002). In practice, the executive-led structure in Hong Kong gives supreme power to the Chief Executive and executive departments relative to the legislature. For instance, the executive is in control of the budgetary process and the introduction of laws while the legislature’s power in these regards is curtailed. As stated in Article 74 of the Basic Law, legislators are restricted from introducing bills related to public expenditure or political structure or the operation of the government (Cheung 2002). The importance placed on restricting the power of legislators can be explained by the fact that half of the legislative seats are elected by universal suffrage, and the pro-democracy legislators elected via universal suffrage are commonly regarded as the icon of democracy lending strong leadership to the democratic movement. Marginalizing Party Development Theoretically, political parties are part of a democratic system and can help political development. However, current arrangements continue to reinforce the underdevelopment of a political party system and marginalize the institutional importance of political parties (Lau and Kuan 2002; Ma 2007). For instance, the Basic Law stipulates that the Chief Executive is elected by a small circle of 800 members consisting of mainly professional and business elements. According to the Chief Executive Election Ordinance (Section 31, cap. 569 of Laws of Hong Kong) introduced in 2001, anyone with party affiliation who, upon election as the Chief Executive, has to give up such affiliation. Moreover, in the Executive Council, the most important advisory body to the Chief Executive, only a few of its members are connected to

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political parties and among them, only one is marginally connected to the democratic camp. Indeed, both the Hong Kong government and Beijing would prefer an executive clear of partisan politics. Redefining the Scope of Freedom The last strategy of reframing local identity is through redefining the scope of freedom in post–handover Hong Kong. This development serves to limit local organizations’ connection with foreign bodies, dilute the importance of universal norms in media practice, reduce the democratic functions of the media, and promote the priority of patriotism and social order over universal human rights norms. The Media Although it is said that the degree of liberty in post-handover Hong Kong has remained more or less the same, worrying signs in this regard pop up from time to time, especially in media circles. These reflect the subtle changes in the levels of freedom of the press and speech as well as the public attitudes toward the importance of media freedom in posthandover Hong Kong. Although deprived of a democratic system, Hong Kong’s media has long performed the functions of surrogate democracy (Chan and So 2005). Also, the extent it is allowed to be the mouthpiece of people validly indicates the degree of liberty in Hong Kong. After the political handover, one significant change regarding media performance among all is its increasing susceptibility to the control and influence of Chinalinked business interests. Since the early 1990s, those mainland interests have gained significant ownership of some mainstream media outlets in Hong Kong. Some other media outlets are owned by foreign business people who, however, have businesses in China. As observed, this development has affected the impartiality of the media outlets in news selection and reporting (Chan and Lee 2007). There has been increasing self-censorship and editorial shifts in the media after political handover as a result of political cooptation. Scholars point out that many media executives and owners were appointed advisors to the Chinese government or granted honour by the Hong Kong government (Ma 2007). Moreover, it has become more common that journalists in Hong Kong are advised to behave themselves so as not to “misuse” their freedom and threaten the overall interest of the nation, especially on matters related to national unity. For instance, in 2000, the Wharf Cable Television news channel’s interview of Anne Lu Hsin-lien, Taiwan’s former vice-president, had provoked strong criticism from Wang Fengchao, former Deputy Director of the

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Central Government Liaison Office in Hong Kong. Wang claimed that Hong Kong’s mass media should fulfill its duty and responsibility to safeguard national unity and territorial integrity, and should refrain from reporting the views of advocates of Taiwan’s independence (So 2000; 2002). A similar remark was made by Tsang Hin-chi, a former member of the National People’s Congress (Wen Wei Pao December 28, 2002). Soft Authoritarianism Soft authoritarianism,5 a direct consequence under the principle of strong governance adopted by the Hong Kong government, has curtailed people’s freedom. An example in Hong Kong in this regard concerns the Provisional Legislative Council’s revival of certain repressive provisions of the Public Order Ordinance and the Societies Ordinance that had been repealed by the colonial regime before 1997. Police are authorized to exercise control over demonstrations on the grounds of national security under the Public Order Ordinance, and ban the activities regarded as advocating the independence of Hong Kong, Taiwan or Tibet. Also, it has become more common for the police to label protestors as non-lawabiding, or deploy pepper spray against protestors (So 2000; 2002). Article 23, Civil Resistance and Cosmopolitan Identity

Despite the pessimistic tone of the above analysis, the governments’ attempts of reframing the Hong Kong identity have been met with considerable resistance. The vibrant civil society of Hong Kong defended its position through (1) the use of cosmopolitan discourses and (2) calling for support from overseas organizations and international organizations in Hong Kong. The following discussion illustrates how the cosmopolitan discourses were utilized by civil society in its resistance against the legislation of Article 23 (2002-2003), which is the most notable example of resistance after the political handover. Numerous civic groups got involved in expressing their objection to the bill. The climax of the mobilization took place on July 1, 2003 when around half a million of people took to the street to protest against the bill, and the government subsequently withdrew it. This case demonstrates the tenacity of the cosmopolitan aspect of the local identity resulting from former colonial rule and the incorporation of global human rights norms in Hong Kong (Thiel and Coate, this volume). It further shows the contentious interaction between the state and civic groups in which civic groups make use of their cosmopolitan identity as repertoire of resistance and also actively promoted this identity in turn (Williams 1998; Woodward

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1997; Ingram 2004, p. 86). This section analyzes the findings on the public discourses of protest made by civic groups. It derived from a reading of selected newspapers, related websites and documents for the period between September 2002 and August 2003. Apart from numerous individual submissions to the government’s consultation on the proposed legislation, more than 1,100 local political parties and civic groups had been involved in the issue in a variety of ways. Over 100 regional, international and overseas organizations also participated in the demonstrative event at various stages. Around onethird of these organizations have an office in Hong Kong, while the rest are based in foreign countries. Noteworthy, the nature of these participating organizations are highly diverse, including political and human rights, humanitarian, labour, religious, media, legal, professional, publishing and academic, educational, economic and so on. Examples include the Hong Kong Social Workers’ Union, Amnesty International, and Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese. Throughout the event, they remained key actors in articulating positions, building up collaborations, providing criticisms and putting forward alternative proposals, to organizing signature campaigns and rallies. Making Use of the Cosmopolitan Discourse

In response to the Beijing government’s attempts in identity transformation, civil society groups made use of the cosmopolitan discourse as a defense to resist such encroachment. They emphasized the cosmopolitan values embedded in the Hong Kong identity, particularly freedom and the rule of law. As further elaborated by them, the deterioration of these values may threaten the status of Hong Kong as an international city. The following analysis will present in detail how the cosmopolitan discourse is used as resistance against Article 23. Freedom of Expression, Information and Association In essence, the clinging to certain universal values embedded in the critique of the opposing organizations manifests the cosmopolitan element of Hong Kong’s identity. These values include the protection of freedom, civil rights and the rule of law, and the prevention of abuse of police power and so on. The organizations considered that the offences of sedition and the handling of seditious publications would pose serious threats to the freedom of expression. Media and journalists’ associations, in particular, expressed grave concerns in this regard. For instance, The Committee to Protect Journalists worried that the bill may be used as a tool to prosecute journalists and to control press freedom. As urged by

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Joel Simon, chairman of the association, the bill should be substantially revised, as a considerable number of journalists in mainland China were prosecuted because of the insufficiencies and ambiguities embedded in the legislation on national security (Apple Daily February 22, 2003). The Forbes magazine also expressed similar worries, since the legislation may endanger the freedom of information in Hong Kong. As The Forbes further emphasized, the implementation and interpretation of Article 23 is crucial, and it will closely monitor the upcoming situation in Hong Kong (ATV Home June 28, 2003). Regarding freedom of association, the bill was criticized for allowing the banning of any organization in Hong Kong which is subordinate to a mainland organization banned on national security grounds by Beijing. Local organizations can be declared unlawful without any oversight and protection by the courts in Hong Kong since their legality will be determined by the central government. For instance, the Society of Publishers in Asia emphasized that the mechanism for putting down associations should not be initiated by Beijing. The whole process should be implemented by the courts in Hong Kong, in line with the local judicial system. As stated, the Security Bureau should not be empowered to design and manage the appeal mechanism for associations which have been put down under Article 23. The association saw it as a “regression” if such power will indeed be given to the Security Bureau (Ming Pao June 18, 2003). Local associations such as the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and the Falun Gong religious group expressed similar concerns as well. As commented by Szeto Wah, chairman of the Alliance, they are labelled by the People’s Daily as “subversive.” Once the bill is passed, they are the first to the affected (Hong Kong Economic Times February 10, 2003). Rule of Law Regarding people’s right to fair trial, international standards and norms in this regard were invoked, and the potential threats of the bill to maintaining such standards in Hong Kong were publicly raised. For instance, the joint statement of the regional and international organizations claimed, The bill also suggests that during the appeal against proscription the appellant and their lawyer can be excluded from attending the appeal hearing in order to “protect” the publication of evidence which might prejudice national security. This arrangement, however, goes against the principles of equality before the courts and the right to a fair and

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public hearing…run contrary to both the Basic Law and international standards on the right to fair trials which Hong Kong is obliged to uphold. Indeed, the introduction of such proposals represents a massive retrograde step for the internally recognized rights of Hong Kong’s citizens (June 3, 2003).

On the other hand, the International Chamber of Commerce-Hong Kong and the China Business Council urged the SAR government to reconsider the legislation process, and that contents of the bill shall be consistent with the common law system, as well as the constitutionally protected rights of citizens (Hong Kong Commercial Daily January 3, 2003). Status of a World City The status of Hong Kong as a world city and the danger of losing this reputation because of the introduction of the bill were considered vital by the organizations. Hong Kong’s identity is tied to its status of being a free port and its role in the international economy. As pointed out by them, If this bill becomes law, the function of Hong Kong as a bridge between China and the outside world will be greatly diminished. The new law will create a filter between Hong Kong and China that will inhibit the free flow of information […] The chilling effects of this law will also suffocate the initiatives of Hong Kong’s people and the international community to support humane and sustainable development in China (Joint statement June 3, 2003).

In general, it is argued that the legislation of Article 23 will jeopardize Hong Kong’s reputation and status as a “world city.” The institutionalization of the rule of law, civil rights and freedom is regarded as the major reason why Hong Kong is being competitive and stands out in the international arena. In their words, if these values are undermined by the bill, then “we can hardly find any differences between Hong Kong and other cities such as Shanghai, Bangkok and Singapore. It is even better for us to move to other places where production costs are far lower than that in Hong Kong” (Hong Kong Economic Journal January 18, 2003). The London Times also expressed similar concerns. In its commentary, the economic situations of Hong Kong and Shanghai were used as cases for comparison. As it suggested, since Article 23 substantially restricts the free flow of information, it harms the economic development of Hong Kong. This legislation is to be further

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used as reference for assessing the level of risk of investing in Hong Kong when investors have to make their decisions (Hong Kong Daily June 28, 2003). The concerns about the bill’s potential threat to Hong Kong’s international status were echoed by the foreign chambers of commerce in Hong Kong, such as the American Chamber of Commerce, which regarded that anything that weakens Hong Kong’s rule of law or its open business climate ultimately endangers Hong Kong’s economic competitiveness and well-being. Connections with Foreign Associations In general, civil organizations were critical of the potential threat that the proposed legislation would pose to their connections with foreign associations. For them, it is important to preserve such connections with similar associations in Taiwan and other countries. For instance, a local Christian organization wrote, “Our organization has always been free to maintain contacts with any religious organizations disregarding their political stance. However, if the proposed legislations on national security are passed, we are worried if we could still maintain normal relationship with organizations such as local churches in Taiwan in the future” (Hong Kong Christian Association April 22, 2003). Another organization pointed out the potential contradiction between the bill and Article 148 of the Basic Law. Article 148 allows non-governmental organizations in Hong Kong to maintain contacts with organizations in China and to offer support to them based on the principles of non-subordination, non-interference and mutual respect. These activities will become impossible, however, if the bill is passed and the government can then proscribe a local organization from doing so (Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese May 3, 2003). Taking Asian Countries as Reference In the criticisms voiced by the organizations, particularly the regional and international ones, other Asian countries were taken as reference or criticized at the same time. This illustrates the broad perspective of analysis of the critique. For instance, an organization stated, Yesterday’s protest conveys a strong message to other Asian States that have enacted and used national security laws to curtail the freedoms and human rights of their people, like Singapore, Malaysia, India and South Korea. Yesterday Hong Kong’s people voted with their feet that they do not want the law to be used to oppress them and deny them their freedoms as happen in so many other parts of Asia. It

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is time to get rid of national security laws once and for all, not only in Hong Kong, but in all Asian countries which have such laws (Asian Human Rights Commission July 2, 2003).

Moreover, the joint statement issued by 14 regional and international organizations6 in Hong Kong commented that “in the experience of other Asian jurisdictions, to provide the police with search and seizure powers without warrants often leads to an abuse of this power and an increase in corruption” (June 3, 2003). Overseas Connection and the Role of International Organizations

A few overall observations of the massive mobilization testify to the cosmopolitan nature of Hong Kong and the effects of globalization. Indeed, one of the ways of civil resistance against Article 23 consists of securing support from the international community. International NGOs As stated, apart from making use of the cosmopolitan discourse as a defense, civil society group also called for overseas support, which reveals that they have maintained good connections with the rest of the world. For instance, a delegation to the U.S. was organized by the Hong Kong Democratic Party and some civic groups which attempted to draw international support notably from foreign governments. The delegation was received and interviewed by the representatives from the U.S. government, members of Congress, the media, and various political groups such as the Freedom House and Human Rights Watch (Hong Kong Economic Journal June 7, 2003). Apart from overseas visits, the local community also invited foreign human rights experts, legal experts and intellectuals to Hong Kong in return. These experts were involved in the discussion of Article 23 through their participation in local forums, press conferences, meetings with political parties, civic organizations, and the government. In December 2002, a group of human rights consultants, who were also the drafters of “The Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information”7 paid a visit to Hong Kong at the midst of the Article 23 debate. As commented by Fracnces D’Souza, the convenor of this consultant group accused the government’s bill on national security as “full of loopholes” and posited that passage of this bill will severely endanger Hong Kong's freedom and human rights (Apple Daily News December 17, 2002). Furthermore, the consultants also handed in a submission to the Hong Kong government, which

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highlights how the proposed Article 23 legislation departs from the standards set out in the Johannesburg Principles. In essence, assistance from the international community was crucial in this case. Though the government did not revise its position after their meeting with the human rights consultants, their visit exerted considerable pressure on the government to elaborate its position, and it also aroused discussion and attention amongst the local community. The pure presence of numerous regional and international organizations in Hong Kong constitutes another piece of evidence. As stated above, the number of such organizations involved in the mobilization (over 100) was impressive. Indeed, international organizations had significantly assisted the mobilization as seen from their active involvement and the intensity of their critiques, which reflected that they treasure and dedicate to protect Hong Kong’s free and vibrant civil society. Amnesty International Hong Kong accused the Article 23 bill as undermining the rule of law in Hong Kong, which adversely affects its economic future; similar concerns were also expressed by the Asian Human Rights Commission, who worried that laws on national security may be manipulated by the state in suppressing political freedom, which can be seen from the case of Singapore and other authoritarian Asian countries. These international organizations also produced a joint declaration, showing their objection and discontent against the legislation (Sing Pao, November 18, 2002). Importantly, such support was substantial in affecting the government’s decision on the bill as it would not want Hong Kong’s international image be jeopardized. It was reported that the Hong Kong government had repeatedly attempted to gain other governments’ recognition of the bill through meetings and conferences, and in official speeches (Hong Kong Economic Journal January 10, 2003). With regard to the role of international media in the process, we found that that those overseas media outlets in general expressed serious concerns about the issue. The issue was widely reported in international news media, for instance, in The New York Times and The Times. Chambers of Commerce and Foreign governments Apart from international NGOs, some foreign governments, including the governments of the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Canada, Taiwan, Germany and France, and important foreign chambers of commerce, such as the American Chamber of Commerce and the Australian Chamber of Commerce, had also expressed concerns about the impact of the bill. In general, they were also critical of the impact of the implementation of Article 23 on rights and freedom, free trade and

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exchange matters, the consultation process of the bill, the bill’s ambiguities and its potential threats on the maintenance of ‘one country, two systems’. Intense debates on the issue were also held in certain overseas political institutions including the European Parliament, The U.S. House of Representatives, and the British government. The debates were followed by government position papers or public declarations that demanded the Hong Kong government to improve or withdraw the bill. For instance, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a motion with 426 votes affirmative, and only 1 negative, on urging the suspension of the bill. As stated in the declaration, “Hong Kong was one of the most advanced societies in realizing liberty and the rule of law, with sufficient legal protection on individuals’ freedom and civil rights. However, as Article 23 overpowers the Secretary for Security, the present rights of association, religion and expression may expose to imminent danger” (Ming Pao June 28, 2003).

As further added in the declaration, the House of Representatives would “condemn” any acts which would impose restrictions on Hong Kong citizens’ human rights and freedom. Further, the bill should be debated and legislated by a popularly elected legislature that represents the people. Similar concerns were expressed by the British Government, which emphasized that the final version of the bill should be widely recognized by the public and the international community (Hong Kong Economic Journal June 28, 2003). Jim Thompson, ex-chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce, also remarked that the international community and the business sector are paying considerable attention to the legislation process, and the Hong Kong government should respond to their concerns. He felt particularly disappointed with the consultation process such as the government’s refusal of issuing a white-paper consultation. He further emphasized that the international community and the business sector will impose huge criticisms on the government if the legislation is eventually used as a means to curb civil rights and freedom (Hong Kong Economic Journal February 18, 2003). Conclusion

This chapter studied the contentious interaction between the Hong Kong government, Beijing, the pro-establishment camp and civic groups in the

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process of reframing the local identity in post-handover Hong Kong. It traced the formation of the regional Hong Kong identity, and argued that this local identity contains certain aspects associated with the idea of cosmopolitanism. It then reconstructed the conscious and subtle attempts of the governments and pro-establishment actors in reframing the local identity in post-handover Hong Kong. Using the civil resistance against the legislation of Article 23, which is the most notable example of opposition in Hong Kong after the political handover, as an illustration, we argue that the civic groups involved in the protest had attempted to maintain their cosmopolitan outlook and the universal values embedded in the local culture. As analyzed, the vibrant civil society of Hong Kong defended its position through, first, the use of cosmopolitan discourses and, second, calling for support from overseas organizations and international organizations in Hong Kong. Regarding the first attempt of defense, the civic groups emphasized the cosmopolitan values embedded in the Hong Kong identity, particularly freedom and the rule of law. As further argued by them, the deterioration of these values may threaten the status of Hong Kong as an international city. The second attempt was made via rallying support from the international community including international NGOs, foreign chambers of commerce, and foreign governments, which was highly successful in terms of publicity and diplomatic stature. The tenacity of the Hong Kong identity regarding its cosmopolitan components, influenced by the legacy of British colonial rule, the incorporation of universal norms and Hong Kong’s status as a world city, should not be underestimated. Hence, identity politics, as expressed in this example, will remain a significant force even in the face of adverse circumstances. 1 The Basic Law is the mini-constitution of Hong Kong. Article 23 authorizes the government to legislate to prohibit subversion against the Chinese government, the theft of state secrets, and political activities by foreign organizations. 2 Hong Kong received a rating of 4 in the Freedom House rating for most of the years from 1980 to 1997. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 7, with 7 being the least free. 3 The Hong Kong legislature is composed of 60 seats among which 30 seats are returned by universal suffrage via geographical constituency election whereas other seats by functional constituency election via mainly business and professional sectors composed of an electorate of around 200,000. The methods of election of the functional constituencies are inconsistent, ranging from smallcircle elections by company holders and leading chambers of commerce to direct elections by professionals such as social workers for their own representatives in the legislature.

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4 For instance, from the 2008 figures of the HKUPOP opinion polls, more than 60 percent of the respondents regard economic problem as the most concerned problem. Social problems come the second, with about 30 percent of respondents regard them as important, while political problems receive the lowest priority, with less than 10 percent of the respondents regard them as the most concerned problem. 5 Soft authoritarianism is a term commonly coined to describe several East Asian regimes, such as Singapore, in which the governments cultivate the ideas of conformity, community, economic development among the people. Conformity is not only achieved by coercion but also by indoctrination. 6 The organizations include Amnesty International (Hong Kong Section), Asia Monitor Resource Centre, Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, Asian Centre for the Progress of Peoples, Asian Human Rights Commission, Asian Migrant Centre, Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives, Bethune House, China Labour Bulletin, Centre for Justpeace in Asia, Documentation for Action Groups in Asia, Human Rights in China (Hong Kong Office), No War Coalition Hong Kong and World Student Christian Federation Asia Pacific. 7 These Principles were adopted on 1 October 1995 by a group of experts in international law, national security, and human rights convened by Article 19, the International Center Against Censorship, in collaboration with the Centre for Applied Legal Studies of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. The Principles are based on international and regional law and standards relating to the protection of human rights, evolving state practice (as reflected, inter alia, in judgments of national courts), and the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations.

4 Reshaping Identity Politics in the EU: The Hungarian Minority in Romania Eloisa Vladescu

The end of the communist era has raised important questions about the nature of identity politics in Eastern and Central European countries and the role it plays in shaping collective identities within newly emerging democratic states. Although there have been many attempts, including political, social and legal responses, to effectively address this sensitive issue, negotiations between majority and minority groups in this region have often been characterized by strong nationalist sentiment and varying conceptions of minority rights, autonomy, and identity politics, among many others. The Hungarian minority living in a democratic Romanian state, more specifically in the region of Transylvania, is one ethnic minority in the Central and Eastern European countries that has framed its demands for minority rights as a question of societal security and cultural preservation that has the potential to be answered through the institutionalization of identity politics. In an effort to evaluate the options available to the Hungarian minority to address its claims and establish its rights within the recently democratized Romanian state, especially in light of Romania’s recent entry into the European Union, it is essential to examine the issue from the perspective of one of the proposed models for understanding and reshaping Romanian identity politics. The approach in question was put forward by Thiel and Coate and examines both the commonalities and the disparities in the way that identity groups react to the impact of globalization and the forces of external pressures to reform human rights laws and recognize various identities. In applying their approach to the case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, a central question arises: What role have the media, international organizations (IOs), non-

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governmental organizations (NGOs), and norm diffusion had on human rights policy reforms and the restructuring of Hungarian identity politics? To answer such a complex question, this chapter will focus solely on the Hungarian minority living in the region of Transylvania and not on the debate surrounding the rights of the Roma minority or other groups in Romania. Although claims by minorities combined with external pressures have contributed to a reevaluation of minority rights in Romania, the groups themselves are different in composition and structure and will therefore be approached separately. The first section explores the historical experiences and the complex nature of ethnic relations between Hungarians and Romanians and how this has affected their ability to negotiate minority rights at present. Next, I examine the effects of both the transition from a communist dictatorship towards democratic governance and the impact of reforms implemented in association with ‘rejoining Europe’ on the way in which the Hungarian minority currently defines itself. The second half of the chapter will set out to answer the aforementioned central question about the restructuring of Hungarian identity politics in light of actions taken and policies implemented by the Romanian government and the subsequent reaction of the Hungarian minority leadership. The discussion will focus on the role that the media, IGOs and NGOs, and norm diffusion among these actors play in shaping identity politics. Finally, I discuss the vital role that identity politics, and its corresponding frameworks, occupy in the development of the Hungarian minority identity that has emerged within a young democracy. The impact of the influences on Romanian identity politics cannot be understood, however, without first taking an in-depth look at the historical tensions between Hungarians and Romanians. Competing Historical Romanian and Hungarian Claims

The complex relationship between the Magyars, or Hungarians, and Romanians dates back to the Roman occupation of Dacia and other regions in the Central and Eastern European countries: The resurgence of nationalist contention in Cluj and elsewhere in East Central Europe during and after the collapse of communist regimes can only be understood historically […] Contemporary ethnonational conflicts—the characteristic pattern of claims and counterclaims, the idioms in which they are framed, and the understandings of self and

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other on which they depend—draw on an historically formed repertoire of contention (Brubaker 2008, p. 23).

Two theories have been proposed by Romanian and Hungarian scholars to explain the types of territorial claims and disputes that have made addressing the status of Transylvania the subject of extensive debate for centuries. The first theory is known as the ‘Daco-Roman Continuity Theory’, proposed by Romanian scholars and accepted by Western historians. While Daco-Romans were consequently subject to both German and Slav assimilation, according to Andrei Otetea they were able to preserve to the end what was most valuable, the Roman strains rooted in a Dacian background. By the eleventh century, “the people living in the territory of Dacia were the Romanian people, who had preserved all the characteristic features of their forefathers, the Dacians and who spoke a common Latin language, Romanian” (Roe 2005, p. 112). The process of ‘Romanisation’, according to Romanian scholars, had a significant impact on the development of the Romanian identity and many Latin-speaking Romanian people settled in areas surrounded by Slavic and German-speaking peoples despite cultural or linguistic differences. The Daco-Romanian Continuity Theory also claims that the Romanian people had been present in significant numbers in three main regions: Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania. This theory is, however, highly contested by Hungarian scholars who have proposed the second and competing ‘No Man’s Land Theory’ to explain the Magyar claims to this region, more specifically Transylvania. “At the beginning of the tenth century, Hungarian forces…invaded present-day Transylvania. But the Magyars encountered no significant numbers of what were, in effect, proto-Romanians. The region was, for all intents and purposes, deserted” (Roe 2005, p. 112). By the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries, Magyar leaders encouraged heavy colonization in order to establish solid control over the region. In fact, other groups, including the Szeklers and Germans, were also invited to move to Transylvania and populate the region in exchange for rights to self-government. The treatment of the populations that had settled in Transylvania would eventually be one of the most important issues of disagreement between the Romanians and the Hungarians. It would also prove to have some dramatic consequences over time. In the first part of the sixteenth century, however, many of the ethnic groups in this area united in an effort to ward off invasions in the Balkans by the powerful Ottoman forces. The Hungarian kingdom was captured by the Ottoman Turks, but

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Transylvania was allowed to enjoy a far greater degree of autonomy during this period. As a result of having escaped severe policies of ‘Ottomanisation’ imposed on Hungary, Transylvania became a safehaven for Hungarians looking to preserve their culture and they subsequently developed closer ties to Wallachia and Moldavia. Transylvania represented, on the one hand, a region in which Hungarians could ensure the survival of their culture and identity and, on the other hand, a territory populated by Romanians that was forming an ever-closer relationship with Wallachia and Moldavia in an effort to ward off Ottoman influence and control. The identity of the region itself was so complex at that time that it is not surprising that the difficulties in determining which version of history is closest to the objective truth have persisted well into the twenty-first century. By the late 19th century, the most important regions in the area of Greater Romania joined together to form the Kingdom of Romania, ruled by Carol I. The process of the unification of Greater Romania, including Wallachia and Moldavia, with Transylvania became one of the most important issues on the kingdom’s agenda prior to World War I. The signing of the Treaty of Trianon forced the Hungarian state to come to terms with the fact that it had lost Transylvania to Romania. The creation of the League of Nations in 1919 also heralded unprecedented attention to minority rights, particularly in the Central and Eastern European countries where these issues had contributed to a deterioration of relations and even violent clashes between ethnic groups. The Minorities Treaty was signed in December 1919 by the Romanian government and it promised to respect the basic rights of the Hungarian minority, among others in the Greater Romanian territory. In theory, the treaty represented an important step and a new sense of tolerance and respect for minority rights. In practice, however, the treaty did little to protect the Hungarian minority or improve relations between the two ethnic groups. Romania’s annexation of Transylvania would be a source of disputes and disagreement between Romanians and Hungarians well into the twentieth century. On the one hand, Hungarians argued that Transylvania represented the region in which their culture and ethnic nation had survived for centuries. Romanians, on the other hand, claimed that the population of Transylvania was made up primarily of ethnic Romanians whose culture and ethnicity had been suppressed by Hungarian leadership over the centuries through the implementation of policies of ‘Magyarisation’. The imposition of communist rule would only serve to exacerbate both nations’ claims to Transylvania, known as Ardeal in Romanian and Erdély in Hungarian. In fact, Transylvania and

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many other territories in different parts of the world that have been the subject of dispute “are all sensitive territories so imbued with special meaning and disproportionate mythical status that states and nations rely upon them for their legitimation” (Kurti 2001, p. 8). The competing claims over Transylvania and the fight to implement the protection of minority rights would be somewhat silenced by the political, economic and social hardships associated with communist rule in both countries beginning in the late 1940s. At this point, both Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu and Hungary under János Kádár were preoccupied with managing their relationships with the Soviet Union, maintaining control of the government through the sometimes violent suppression of opposition forces, and addressing economic concerns. “Although Hungary’s involvement with its diaspora was limited during the Cold War, the fall of communism in 1989 led politicians and opinion leaders to revisit Trianon in domestic debates over the country’s identity” (Jenne 2007, p. 91). By the end of the 1980s, however, the suppression of ethnic minorities during communist rule was beginning to consume too many resources and ethnic Hungarians had begun organizing themselves even before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, the negotiated transitions and the violent Romanian revolution that took place in the Central and Eastern European countries marked the beginning of a long-awaited era of both political and social change. In fact, the Hungarian minority played an instrumental role in the breakdown of the communist government in Romania by engaging in protests against the Romanian government’s treatment of ethnic minorities. Many Hungarians living in Romania felt that their claims and demands had been ignored and suppressed long enough and that it was time to engage in the political process that would allow them to reaffirm their collective identity within the borders of an ethnically diverse state. Consolidating Democracy: Domestic Political Parties and the Institutionalization of Hungarian Identity Politics

The consolidation of democratic rule has been an ongoing and challenging process for the states of Central and Eastern Europe. It has been more than two decades since the transition in this region began, but the vestiges of the communist era have created an array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In an effort to address complex political, economic and social issues, many of these countries have looked to the West for guidance, more specifically to member states of the European Union. In fact, the ultimate goal of most of the Central and Eastern

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European countries was to effectuate a ‘return to Europe’ in the hopes that this would mitigate some of the costs associated with their transition to democracy and the establishment of free market economies. Member states of the European Union made it abundantly clear, however, that their economic aid was contingent upon the articulation and implementation of political, social and legal reforms that would protect the rights of minority groups. In the case of the Hungarians living in Romania, the implementation of such minority rights reforms has often been met with resistance from Romanian nationalist political parties and groups that claim to represent the country’s majority population, particularly because the state is still struggling to define the role that identity politics plays in its fledgling democracy. Immediately following Ceauşescu’s hasty trial and execution on December 25, 1989, the Hungarian minority in Romania announced the establishment of the UDMR (Uniunea Democratâ Maghiarâ din România), or the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, led at that time by Geza Domokos and later by Gyorgy Frunda. The establishment of a minority political party in Romania was a clear indication of the emergence of democratic pluralism and a newfound ability of the Hungarian minority to assert itself politically. This move would be followed by the creation of other ethnicallybased political parties, including the PRM (Partidul România Mare), or the Greater Romania Party. The PRM, led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, was a right-wing party that adopted an anti-Hungarian stance on issues of minority rights. Tudor and members of the PRM wanted the Romanian government to continue imposing assimilation measures that would deny the Hungarian minority rights to pursue policies to protect their culture. For the Hungarians, this was perceived as an affront to the articulation of their distinctiveness, but the emergence of a democratic system would help to solidify their collective identity despite opposition from nationalist political groups in Romania. The nature of the policies advocated by the newly formed political parties became the subject of debate both among various ethnic groups in Romania and within the European Union. Romania’s weak and vulnerable democracy was being forced to adequately incorporate parties from both sides of the political spectrum while the government was in the process of organizing democratic elections and dealing with external pressures from Western Europe. As a result, political analysts noted signs of the emergence of populism: “for populist leaders, as in the cases of Corneliu Vadim Tudor’s România Mare Party, Ion Iliescu’s Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR) […] political platforms are instruments for expanding their electoral base. Populism is thus a

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deliberately vague ideology whose main asset is its negative approach to democratic politics and processes” (Wysong 2005, p. 20). Based on the idea that “a robust civil society promotes and sustains a healthy democracy,” the Hungarian minority would have to be allowed to develop its political identity if Romania were to effectively ‘rejoin Europe’ (Wysong 2005, p. 8). While leaders of the Hungarian minority did begin to organize and participate in the political process, evidence of intolerance would eventually become apparent during the escalation of tensions into a clash between the Hungarian minority and Romanian authorities in the city of Tîrgu Mureş. In March of 1990, just a few months after the fall of communism, ethnic tensions between the Hungarian and Romanian populations in the city of Tîrgu Mureş spiraled out of control. The exact cause of the riots in this ethnically mixed city is still the subject of heated debate. According to the Hungarians, Romanians had attacked the central office of the UDMR party and the riots ensued as a form of retaliation for the attacks. The Romanians, however, argued that Hungarians had attacked Romanian symbols, including institutions, statues and even Romanian authorities, repeatedly since the collapse of the oppressive communist state. In addition, “on both sides, worst-case assumptions had taken hold: many Romanians viewed educational reform as a precursor to demands for ever greater autonomy, and ultimately succession, while many Hungarians saw the National Salvation Front’s refusal of changes to the existing educational structure as a clear indicator of the further suppression of minority rights by the Romanian government” (Roe 2005, p. 138). Although many unanswered questions surrounding the outbreak of violence remained, some scholars saw the protests as a new means for the Hungarian minority to express dissent and disagreement, something that had been prohibited by the communist government for so many decades. It was a step in the right direction. In Contention and Coexistence: Ethnic Struggle and Democratization in Eastern Europe, Sherrill Stroschein explains that “even when inter-ethnic politics are particularly contentious, ethnic debates can provide the foundations for regular patterns of inter-ethnic interaction and establish institutions” (Stroschein 2007). In other words, such violence, initially perceived to be harmful to the delicate process of democratization, could be reinterpreted as a sign of hope that contentious identity politics would not only take place, but would also raise awareness about the need to address minority demands. Effectively addressing the Hungarian minority’s claims would also demonstrate to the leaders and institutions of Western countries that the

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various ethnic groups in Romania were capable of adopting a ‘civic’ approach to dealing with sensitive issues involving ethnicity. As Stroschein argues, “as Hungarians and Romanians engaged in debate and political contention throughout the 1990s, they became accustomed to the stances of the other group and the degree to which they could push their own claims. Ethnic contention thus produced a de facto deliberative process”, through which democratic transition slowly and successfully took root (Stroschein 2007). In the case of the clash between Hungarians and Romanians, the violence was never in fact reproduced and the riots marked the beginning of an important dialogue between the two groups that would manifest itself through contentious, but now institutionalized politics. The process of democratization, therefore, led to the establishment of a channel of communication between the Hungarians and Romanians on a number of issues. As the Hungarians began to effectively organize themselves politically, they addressed the Romanian government with a series of demands that they believed would strengthen their identity and allow for the survival of their unique culture. These demands included “limited local autonomy in the regions where they form the majority; the right to use their mother tongue in the public administration and tribunals; the right to have instruction at all levels of education in their mother tongue; and restitution of church property confiscated by the communist regime” (UN High Commissioner for Refugees 2003, p. 2). While these demands were not entirely fulfilled or immediately addressed, their articulation demonstrated the positive effect that the process of democratization had on the institutionalization of Hungarian identity politics within Romania. The institutionalization of identity politics was a relatively difficult process in Romania. The country’s new constitution was adopted in 1991 and it addressed, in detail, the status of the ethnic minorities and their rights. Although there are several parts of the constitution that clearly articulate a strong sense of nationalism, it simultaneously recognizes national minorities and their right to strengthen and affirm their own national identities (Andreescu 2001, p. 273). Empowered by the passing of the new constitution, the UDMR pursued policies to establish internal self-determination and a system of regional autonomy for Transylvania. Under the populist and nationalistic presidency of Ion Iliescu, however, requests for regional autonomy and higher education in the Magyar language were largely ignored. The 1996 presidential election brought some degree of change, including an increase in government tolerance for ethnic minorities’ pursuit of policies to protect their identity. When Emil Constantinescu

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came into office, he proceeded to integrate members of the Hungarian minority into the national government by naming them to positions such as Minister of National Minorities and Minister of Tourism, thus providing them with, albeit limited, political represenation: The political class that accepted new standards for minority protection in Romania’s post-1996 political life did so, sometimes against their political beliefs, in order to comply with the new political environment. NATO and the EU regarded the resolution of minority problems as a compulsory criterion for integration. The will to integrate overcame the reluctance of the political class to turn Romania into a multicultural society. Moreover, the situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania is also an issue for regional stability (Andreescu 2001, p. 275).

External pressures, from the EU, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and other organizations would, therefore, play an influential role in determining the evolution of the Hungarian identity, especially in light of the ethnic conflict that was breaking out in several different parts of the Balkans and threatening the stability of the entire region. While tensions between the Hungarian minority and Romanian majority have not led to violent outbreaks in recent years, there is no doubt that the Hungarian minority continues to express discontent with the strength of the commitment on the part of the Romanian government to address a long list of concerns. In late 2003, the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation (HHRF) submitted a briefing to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission), entitled “Romania: Moving Toward NATO and the EU” listing several perceived human rights violations. Among these were the obstruction of the freedom of expression of the Hungarian minority, the denial of symbols of ethnic identity, anti-Hungarian bias in the judicial system, complaints about the lack of Romanian government support for Hungarian schools, the obstruction of bilingualism in certain parts of the Transylvania region, and Church and community property restitution issues (Hungarian Human Rights Foundation 2003). The concerns expressed by the Hungarian minority in the past few years have been politicized both at the domestic and the European levels. The UDMR is represented by several candidates in the Romanian Congress and has established itself as a force to be reckoned with. The coalition between the UDMR and the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania captured nine per cent of the vote in the June 2009 European Parliamentary elections, securing three mandates, (Hungarian

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Human Rights Foundation 2003). Laszlo Tokes, arguably the most influential voice for the Hungarian minority in Romania, was recently reelected as a Romanian member of the European Parliament and has made it his goal to make Europe aware of the importance of the plight of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. With the EU spotlight shining on Romania’s ability to handle delicate ethnic minority issues, it is necessary to explore some of the pressures involved with the ‘return to Europe’ and the normalization of Hungarian identity politics. External Pressures and Rejoining Europe: The Role of the Media, IOs and NGOs and the Diffusion of Norms

Given the difficult circumstances surrounding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the incidences of ethnic cleansing, the international community felt a certain level of responsibility to prevent the outbreak of similar conflict in other Central and Eastern European countries. In addition, the escalation of conflict in Moldova between Moldovan nationalists working to reunite the state with Romania, separatists in Transnistria claiming their independence, and inhabitants of the Gagauz region seeking greater autonomy served to demonstrate the pressing need to address issues involving ethnic and territorial claims before their escalation into armed conflict. As a result, the treatment of the Hungarian and other national minorities was heavily scrutinized by international organizations, including the EU, NATO, the UN, the OSCE and the Council of Europe. The EU’s Acquis Communautaire clearly outlined the requirements that had to be met by Central and Eastern European states hoping to join the organization. Among these requirements were the consolidation of democratic rule, meeting certain economic and development standards, the abolition of the death penalty and the implementation of reforms and laws that would ensure the protection of minority rights. The identity of the Hungarian minority in a democratic Romanian state could be shaped, on the one hand, from the top-down with the influence of external actors and government policies. On the other hand, it could also develop from the bottom-up as the Hungarian minority framed its demands for minority rights as a question of cultural preservation and societal security and developed a stronger sense of collective identity, reflecting its newfound freedom to pursue minority rights and meaningful political representation. According to Thiel and Coate’s approach, some of the most important elements affecting the restructuring of the Hungarian minority’s identity have been culturaldiscursive processes taking place as a result of globalizing forces, the

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media, the role played by IOs and NGOs and the impact of norm diffusion. In their introduction, they “concur with recent analyses of globalization that attest to the fact that we find ourselves in a third-wave ‘transformationalist’ age, a stage in which state sovereignty is increasingly shared with other international actors such as IGOs and NGOs, but which also leads to greater risk for the maintenance and protection of cultural and social identities,” (Thiel and Coate, p. 3). In essence, the shift to democratic rule in Romania and recent membership in the EU went hand in hand with the external pressures to recognize minority and human rights and implement reforms accordingly. Such influences, along with many cultural-discursive processes at play, served to set the course for the restructuring of Hungarian identity politics —opportunities to make new demands and pursue policies that would protect their culture would begin to abound. The Impact of Globalization

Cultural-discursive processes often consist of the development of a set of ideas or perceptions that are transformed into and reproduced as patterns of behavior that constitute a group’s social, political or even economic reality. The editor’s ‘Identity Politics Model’ points to the importance of several factors in shaping a collective identity: culturaldiscursive processes and environmental constraints, mobilizing structures and political opportunities, and the accommodation or mobilization of groups based on their demands. Such factors have been instrumental in shaping the way in which negotiations between the Romanian majority and the Hungarian minority have been carried out. According to this model, one of the most influential forces has been that of globalization, including increases in channels of communication, the augmented role of the media, and the diffusion of international liberalpluralistic norms. For the purpose of understanding the restructuring of the Hungarian minority’s collective identity since democratization began in Romania in the early 1990s, globalization is considered here as the supraterritorial and cross-boarder linkages forged among people on a variety of levels: Much as the expansion of transplanetary and supraterritorial links between people has helped to alter various attributes of capitalist production and state governance, so globalization has encouraged changes in the manifestations of national identity […] Regionalization against the backdrop of globalization has promoted some development

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of macro region-nations, especially in the case of European identity. (Scholte 2005, p. 226)

The forces of globalization have, therefore, brought the Hungarian minority in Romania closer to people living in Hungary, making it more aware of its cultural uniqueness and potentially complicating the process by which it frames its demands as a question of cultural preservation within the Romanian territory. The linkages that have emerged as a result of globalization have manifested themselves in many different ways and have affected the development of the Hungarian minority’s collective identity, both from the top-down and the bottom-up. Increases in channels of communication have been largely responsible for the way in which members of the Hungarian minority in Romania have been able to mobilize themselves politically. The media controlled by the Hungarian minority, in its various forms, has strengthened the image of the proud ethnic Hungarian and reaffirmed his or her right to self-preservation and political representation. Minority rights groups and the establishment of NGOs that serve the interests of the Hungarian minority have emerged as a result of the openness associated with democratic governance. In addition, many international organizations (IOs) and inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) have begun cooperating across borders to ensure that minority rights are protected. Often, organizations with a global scope adopt and contribute to the spread of international norms as a means of facilitating negotiations and ensuring the development of constructive and peaceful relations among various ethnic groups within, as in the case of Transylvania, a particular territory. Communication and the Media Shaping Identity Politics

The small portion of the media controlled by the Hungarian minority has played a substantial role in shaping its collective identity and in promoting its pursuit of adequate and equitable political representation. While there is no national Hungarian or Magyar-language television station, some regional studios, such as those in Cluj and Timisoara, broadcast programs in Magyar for a several hours a week. Similarly, regional radio stations have considerable broadcasting time and many are able to tap into programs provided by radio stations in Hungary. The internet has provided a new method of communication whose scope can no longer be rivaled by other forms of media because it is characterized by boundless possibilities, with new websites and portals being introduced constantly. Newspapers and print media have, in large part,

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utilized the internet as a method of targeting a wider audience and allowing their coverage and reporting to be accessed from anywhere in the world. As a result of the progress made in these various channels of communication, the Hungarian minority in Romania has been better able to organize its ideas and demands, often contributing to a distancing of the minority from the Romanian polity. It is also engaging more constructively with the Romanian-controlled media. One of the most critical political, legal and social crossroads in recent Romanian history was covered on a daily basis by both the Romanian and international print and televised media. The general elections held in 2000, at the end of Emil Constantinescu’s presidency, were monitored more closely than any previous election and the Romanian government and public were well aware that the rest of the world was watching. State officials realized that the EU and other international institutions would be critical in their assessment of this important democratic process and this would eventually determine which organizations Romania would officially be invited to join. The media, often referred to as the “fourth estate”, would play a decisive role in the outcome of such substantial decisions because it would provide the Western public with images of and insight into the kinds of countries that would join their organizations. Jürgen Habermas considered the media one of the principal ‘institutions and instruments of the public sphere’ and these instruments were most certainly at play during a period in which Romanian voters were being exposed to the importance of adopting human rights legislation (Habermas 1989). In this context, the media emphasized a return to Europe and increasingly printed and televised references to the demands of the Hungarian minority to demonstrate openness and willingness to negotiate. Although the degree to which the Romanian public responded to the claims of the Hungarian minority and demands of international institutions like the EU varied, the fact that such information was now the subject of public debate was evidence that democratic ideals were beginning to take firm root in Romanian society. Liberals tended to be the most supportive activists of the recognition of minority rights, while supporters of right-wing political parties like the PRM were outraged by the idea that Hungarians demanded certain levels of autonomy or higher level education conducted in Magyar. Romanian newspapers and television stations were notoriously biased after the fall of communism, but “despite economic difficulties, the press is fairly independent and critical of the government” and had begun to make some progress in objective reporting by the early 2000s (Freedom House 2004, p. 3).

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Of course, Romanian newspapers and television stations are not entirely free of bias because political parties and wealthy entrepreneurs with strong political convictions continue to contribute heavily to the evolution of Romanian media. Some newspapers that have tended to print more balanced interpretations of the negotiations between the Hungarian minority and Romanian majority include National, Curentul, Cronica Romana, Ziua and Ziarul Financiar. Those that were labeled as right-leaning or sympathetic to nationalist discourse were Jurnalul National, Revista Romania Mare and Adevarul, the latter boasting one of the most substantial readerships among the Romanian public. According to a Media Monitoring Agency report analyzing the general elections of 2000: The means of mass communication, including those in Romania, have reached the main position in the public sphere, and are thus able to emphasize the powerful social position they hold and to act for the resolution of “major social conflicts” in the society. Consequently, if the media (and the press) constitute “a battleground between contending forces”, then the balance between these social forces will depend especially on the mode in which it will respond and mediate the conflict. (Cosmeanu 2001, p. 3)

With the media playing such an influential role in shaping public sentiment toward the demands of the Hungarian minority, it is essential to analyze its impact on the subsequent electoral outcomes and on the kinds of reforms and laws passed to address this complex and sensitive issue. Media coverage of the 2000 general elections is just one example of the way in which the media has been able to shape public opinion that then translates into voting outcomes at the polls, and eventually into the way in which the Hungarian identity is framed politically. Similar media coverage of the issues raised by the UDMR and leaders of the Hungarian community took place during the recent European Parliamentary elections in June 2009. The voice of the Hungarian minority in Romania has been magnified by Romania’s entry into the EU and the campaigns of several Hungarian MEPs, including Laszlo Tokes, were the subject of extensive media attention for several months. The media, extremely powerful in helping to shape identity politics, is also one of several factors in the construction of the image of the Hungarian minority and the role it should play in Romanian politics. With coverage of the UDMR’s active involvement in Romanian politics and of Hungarian leaders like Tokes in positions of political influence at the EU level, the average member of the Hungarian minority has come to associate media coverage with a wide range of possibilities for the

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strengthening of the collective identity. Each time the face or comments of prominent members of the Hungarian minority are televised or printed, it reaffirms the notion that the Hungarian ethnicity is deeply rooted and an important player within Romania. Of course, it must also be noted that the media often works to serve its own interests, sometimes dramatizing situations or putting a particular spin on a story to increase the size of its audience or to put out captivating headlines. While the media has been focused on shaping public opinion, and in some cases identity, international organizations, intra-governmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations have been far more concerned with the kinds of reforms and legislation being passed by the Romanian government to protect the rights of the Hungarian minority and the way these policies have shaped the minority’s collective identity. The Role of International, Inter-governmental and Non-governmental Organizations

In an effort to reshape identity politics, both the Hungarian minority and the Romanian state have relied, in large part, on the expertise and guidance of international organizations that concentrate on the promotion of minority rights. To join the EU in 2007, the Romanian government was obligated to institute and enforce laws as part of the Copenhagen criteria to protect the rights of minorities such as the Hungarians, Roman, Germans and Jews. Acceding member states, for instance, were required to sign the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and to recognize the legislative authority of the European Court of Human Rights. The conditions for membership of many other IOs, IGOs and NGOs included similar references to the protection of minority rights. Such protective measures and the ensuing international scrutiny meant that the Hungarian minority would be better equipped to pursue its interests and agenda without significant resistance from the Romanian majority or state. The EU would accept the challenge of helping to prepare Romania for eventual membership in exchange for a real commitment on the part of the Romanian government and people to respect minority rights. One of the problems the EU faced, however, was ensuring compliance after a states’ entry. Without a solid foundation in EU law or precise benchmarks, as well as inconsistencies in implementation and the lack of articulation of explicit financial consequences for non-compliance, it has been a challenge for the EU to monitor such a delicate issue. Of

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course, upon the submission of Regular Reports to monitor compliance with human and minority rights protection, the EU retained the right to vote a member state out of the Union or freeze the outflow of aid packages in the case of the outright violation of or disregard for minority rights policies. In the meantime, Romania’s shorter-term goal included joining NATO and this would require the Romanian government to enter into negotiations with the Hungarian government about the status of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. “The United States urged Bucharest in particular to make concessions to its Hungarian minority, noting that its failure to do so had hindered the country’s accession to NATO […] With NATO indicating its willingness to consider Romania’s application in 1997 and the fall elections fast approaching, Iliescu launched a desperate bid to start Romania down the path toward accession, even if this meant granting concessions to the ethnic Hungarians” (Jenne 2007, p. 116). External pressures, in the form of both carrots and sticks, were beginning to pay off and, in the fall of 1997, both the Hungarian and Romanian governments indicated their willingness to cooperate on issues of minority rights. In the interest of protecting the Hungarian minority in Romania, the Hungarian government agreed not to meddle in the affairs of the Romanian government with respect to the Hungarian diaspora in exchange for the Romanian government’s promise to offer some degree of regional autonomy. One way this was operationalized was through the development of political ties and IGOs that crossed traditional ethnic lines. “True to this expectation [of cooperation], DAHR [UDMR] leaders abandoned their demands for territorial autonomy in exchange for concrete amendments to Romania’s education and language laws. The DAHR [UDMR] worked closely with its Romanian allies to achieve these goals and obtained positions in government” (Jenne 2007, p. 117). Just a few years prior to this political commitment on the part of both groups, this kind of cooperation had seemed almost impossible. In addition, the adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities by the Council of Europe established the conditionality that pushed Romania to implement long-awaited legal reforms. “The Framework Convention was a milestone in the process of strengthening minority protection, and converted the political declaration of the OSCE Copenhagen Document (1990) into legal terms. It became the first legally binding international agreement devoted to minority protection and has been ratified by 36 countries” (Decker and McGarry 2005, p. 9). According to the Framework Convention, the

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Central and Eastern European states were required to report on the status of several minority rights initiatives periodically. This represented an extremely effective method of enforcing the protection of minority rights while encouraging the Central and Eastern European countries to pursue the fulfillment of the Copenhagen criteria. Rather than focusing on just one issue at a time, both Romania and Hungary understood that it was essential for their reforms and initiatives to complement one another in the context of the consolidation of their democratic governance. The pressure to implement minority rights legislation has been mirrored by the OSCE’s initiatives to address security issues in democratizing European states. The OSCE was established in 1990 to address issues of security in the democratizing Central and Eastern European states. The OSCE created the office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) in 1992 in an attempt to resolve underlying problems and take preventative measures against the outbreak of violent ethnic conflict. There remains room for improvement, but the aid of intergovernmental organizations, such as the OSCE, Council of Europe and EU, has contributed to Romania’s noteworthy progress in legally protecting minority rights and in reshaping identity politics. To the surprise of Western leaders and observers, the Hungarian minority and the Romanian government had achieved unprecedented levels of cooperation. In fact, Tibor Szatmári, head of public relations for the UDMR party in Bucharest, announced that: After being in government, we realized there are different ways of securing the rights of Hungarians and avoiding discrimination. In the past, autonomy was the solution to discrimination against Hungarians and lack of investment in these regions. Now Hungarians have a Hungarian minister of territorial development—he is the guarantee that there will be no more discrimination against Hungarians (Jenne 2007, p. 117).

This announcement provided both the Romanian government and Hungarian minority with the hope that they would be able to resolve future differences in a democratic manner that would not jeopardize membership in NATO, the EU or any other international organization that required a long-term commitment to the protection of minority rights. NGOs such as the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation (HHRF), the Center for Independent Journalism, and the Association for the Defense of Human Rights in Romania (APADOR—CH) have also done

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their part to ensure that members of the Hungarian minority in Romania receive fair treatment in the justice system, have equal access to employment opportunities, and are allowed to preserve all of the cultural elements associated with their ethnic origins. Such NGOs have also established close ties among themselves. They often play the role of monitoring agencies and work closely with the Hungarian and Romanian governments, the EU, and other international organizations, like the Council of Europe and the OSCE. The widespread intergovernmental and non-governmental cooperation to validate the importance of identity politics and ensure the protection of Hungarian minority rights is an example of the proliferation of transnational actors having a positive impact on the development of domestic politics. The Diffusion of Norms

Having established the fact that the Romanian government would have to comply with the requirements set by the EU, NATO, the OSCE and other international organizations in order to ‘rejoin Europe’, it now had to figure out a way to operationalize the goal of reshaping the minority identity politically. One of the most important results of the give-andtake negotiations that have occurred between the Romanian government, the EU and other IOs and NGOs has been the diffusion of norms of toleration and minority rights. Once demands for human rights reforms and minority rights legislation had been articulated by the EU, however, the Romanian government also began to take them more seriously and members of the Hungarian minority began to pursue their ethnic agenda. This represented a subtle diffusion of positive norms that went hand in hand with a series of benefits provided by the EU, from structural funding to developmental aid programs and prospects for a better economic future. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, government officials on both sides of the political spectrum understood that the decisions and policies they introduced would determine the country’s future. Hillary Appel tested argument using both qualitative and quantitative methods and found that “outside pressure from the EU [and OSCE] has caused candidate countries to adjust domestic policies and enact more liberal laws regarding the treatment of minorities,” (Appel 2006, p. 1). Norm diffusion has been articulated by several authors and in a variety of contexts. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink explain that “the diffusion of international norms in the human rights area crucially depends on the establishment and the sustainability of networks among domestic and transnational actors who manage to link up with international regimes, to alert Western public opinion and

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Western governments,” (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999, p. 5). In the case of transitioning Central and Eastern European countries like Romania, regional integration and EU membership has provided both incentives and conditions for the reevaluation of policies and laws and the implementation of political, economic, judicial and social reforms. “International policy diffusion occurs when government policy decisions in a given country are systematically conditioned by prior policy choices made in other countries […] This introduction distinguishes among four causal mechanisms of international diffusion: coercion, competition, learning and emulation” (Simmons, Dobbin and Garrett 2008, pp. 7-10). According to them, the structural funds and developmental aid that come along with the minority and human rights legislation requirements, among many others outlined in the Copenhagen criteria, represent a series of incentives and diffusion of policy essential to the democratic evolution of the Romanian government and strengthening of the Hungarian collective identity. In the case of the Hungarian minority, political and economic pressure or coercion was a tool of the EU, as well as NATO, the UN, the Council of Europe and the OSCE, in the sense that Romania would not be allowed to join these organizations if they could not fulfill the criteria outlined in membership negotiations. In terms of competition, the bar was raised for the Romanian government and new standards, based on those met by other candidate countries, made government officials more attuned to the need to engage constructively with the representatives of the Hungarian minority. Learning and emulation are part of what Sandholtz and Gray have referred to as ‘normative rationality’ and, accordingly, “the desire to behave in justifiable ways calls on a different form of rationality, one attuned to social norms” (Sandholtz and Gray 2003, p. 762). Both the Romanian government and representatives of the Hungarian minority had witnessed the destructive nature of ethnic relations in the former Yugoslavia and, although each stood firmly by their own claims, they were willing to enter into diplomatic negotiations to ensure that another incident such as the one at Tîrgu Mureş did not repeat itself. As Sherrill Stroschein explains, “NGOs that work to improve relations between the ethnic Hungarians that live as minorities in Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, and the titular ethnic groups of each state (Romanians, Slovaks and Ukrainians), tend to focus primarily on strategies to increase communication between individuals of each group—an approach that dovetails with theories of social networks” (Stroschein 2002, p. 1). In the case of the OSCE, the UN and the Council of Europe, this increase in diplomatic negotiation and openness

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in the channels of communication proved to have significant and lasting results in the diffusion of norms among relevant political and civil society actors. Social norms and their diffusion into policy reform is a pattern that has represented a commonality in the cases of countries that were effectively able to address human and minority rights concerns. In fact, the way in which Romania has dealt with questions of Hungarian minority rights has often been referred to as a regional success story. During a visit to Bucharest, Romania in 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton commended the Romanian government on its respect and legal concern for the Hungarian minority: “You have brought ethnic Hungarians into democratic government for the first time. You are giving minorities a greater stake in your common future. (President Clinton’s Address to the Romanian People, July 11, 1997). A report published by the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) also pointed out that “ten years ago, there were no legal provisions for the protection of national minorities except the abstract constitutional principle on the right to preserve one’s national identity. Today, a person belonging to a national minority can rely on a specific legal framework in order to defend his/her linguistic rights regarding public administration and justice, and to take advantage of the right to study in his/her mother tongue” (Sergiu 2007, p. 3). There is no doubt that much progress remains to be made in terms of human and minority rights reform in Romania. While the Hungarian minority has received a disproportionate amount of attention because of its proximity to the motherland and the fact that the Hungarian state itself is also a member of the EU, the issue of the Roma minority remains underrepresented. While this does not diminish in any way the advancements made up until this point, it is indicative of the work that remains to be done. Conclusions: The Evolution of the Collective Identity of the Hungarian Minority in Romania

While there are an estimated 1.5 million Hungarians living in Romania today, the vast majority of the members of the Hungarian minority do not seek a separate state or complete independence from the Romanian state. About half of this number is made up of Szeklers, who have been living in Romania for centuries and consider this region their true home. Instead, the demands of the Hungarian minority consist primarily of more regional autonomy, access to state funds to promote their culture and language, and the ability to nurture an identity separate from that of

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the Romanian minority. Ethnic Hungarians continue to speak Magyar in their homes and the language is taught at a limited number of schools and universities established in cities and regions where the ethnic minority makes up the majority or a substantial portion of the local population. There are also limited television and radio broadcasts that allow members of the minority to disseminate and preserve their culture. All of these elements combine to form the basis of the collective identity of the Hungarian minority that has been politicized and institutionalized in the past two decades since the collapse of communism in Romania. Identity politics have been gaining widespread support from minority groups and disenfranchised people all over the world for many years. What is more interesting to note in recent times, however, is the way in which governments and majority groups have been reacting. Whereas twenty or thirty years ago, the claims of minority groups, like the Hungarians in Romania, might have been disregarded or even aggressively dismissed, those claims are now being integrated into democratic processes. Thiel and Coate argue that this “resurgence of identity politics [has been] aided by processes of globalization,” such as the mediatization of politics and the diffusion of IGO/NGO norms and activities in varying environments (Thiel and Coate, p. 1). While the authors recognize the significance of the variation in political and social environments in which these groups operate and seek to establish their identities, it is important to note their similarities. Doing so will enable scholars as well as activists to frame minorities’ demands and rights in the most effective way possible. The Hungarian minority in Romania has enjoyed spurts of autonomy throughout its history, but has also witnessed many attempts to suppress its identity, language, culture and historical experiences. After World War II, strengthening Romanian national identity became one of the top priorities for government officials because they were in the process of revamping the state and began looking to strong ideologies as an instrument with which they could accomplish this task. Under Ceausescu, nationalist sentiment was replaced with a new ‘religion’: that of the state. People were forced to leave their religious convictions or nationalist feelings behind in an effort to take on their new roles as members of the communist party. For the Hungarian minority, this period was especially difficult because its members were not only required to distance themselves from their cultural identities, but also because they were being forced to pledge their allegiance to a state and a party which suppressed their rights and political identity. Hungarian identity politics would undergo a slow and often painful transformation after the collapse of communism, but this period of

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transition would eventually contribute to the strengthening of the Hungarian collective identity and long-term cultural preservation. Channels of communication began flourishing between the Hungarian minority and Romanian majority in the early 1990s, but in other parts of the Balkans, identity politics were at the root of some of the most destructive violence Europe had seen since World War II. In light of the ethnic cleansing and territorial claims based on cultural boundaries taking place in the former Yugoslavia, the peaceful negotiations being conducted in Romania demonstrated that it was indeed possible to resolve fundamental differences through cooperation. Negotiations to include the UDMR in the Romanian political sphere and the development of education and cultural programs sensitive to the Hungarian minority’s identity would eventually contribute to a significant reduction in discrimination against Hungarians, even though the reforms remain far from perfect. Policy reforms implemented by the Romanian state were often carried out at the expense of unfavorable public opinion and criticism from supporters of the Right. The pressure to implement such reforms, however, came only in small part from liberal supporters within Romania. In fact, the majority of that pressure came from external sources: the EU, NATO, the OSCE, the UN, the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation, the Council of Europe, and the media. All of these organizations represented one of the most significant shifts in Romanian politics: the effects of the pressures of globalization, primarily in the form of membership in international organizations, were now serving to influence domestic policy reforms and the passage of laws in Romania. The different types of pressures associated with globalization that helped to shape Hungarian identity politics and minority rights have been outlined in detail in Thiel and Coate’s approach. There have been several influential factors that have raised global awareness of the importance of identity politics, including the role of the media, IGOs, IOs and NGOs as well as the diffusion of international norms. These factors have contributed to unprecedented networking among various international and non-governmental organizations and have also served to push Hungarian identity politics into the mainstream domestic and European political spheres. The media, particularly national newspapers and television stations, was heavily focused on Romania’s ‘return to Europe’. Media coverage reflected the strong public support for the idea of being reunited with the West in a political, economic, and social context. Newspaper articles and television programs were the vehicle through which international organizations were able to carry their message to the Romanian public:

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in order to be invited to join, Romania would have to implement the policy reforms and pass the minority rights legislation that would protect minorities. This did not mean paying lip service to such reforms, but actually passing laws and ensuring that cases in which minority rights had been violated would be resolved in the Romanian justice system. External pressures from international organizations would contribute to a diffusion of norms and, eventually, to a diffusion of minority rights policies. Should the Romanian government renege on its commitments to minority and human rights reforms, the repercussions could be devastating in terms of Romania’s membership in organizations that have facilitated and fostered its political, economic and social progress in recent years. The impact of the media and international organizations are just some examples of the forces of globalization that have been shaping identity politics all over the world for the past decades. Although it can be argued that the Romanians and Hungarians have been able to work out most of their differences, for example, because they were dealing with ethnically different but religiously similar groups or because both Romania and Hungary were in the process of negotiating their entry into the EU, the fact remains that they have successfully addressed each others’ claims in a peaceful manner. Such diplomatic negotiations are indicative, on a number of levels, of the fact that democracy is no longer just something the Central and Eastern European countries aspire to, but a concept that is taking firm root in the way the Hungarian minority defines its political identity and the way the Romanian government takes on challenges. Globalizing forces that have had a positive impact on the evolution of the collective identity of the Hungarian minority because they have allowed Hungarians to make claims, demand minority rights, and seek political representation. These forces have also aided the Romanian government to include the Hungarian minority in the political process as part of the openness associated with democratization. In the case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, these forces, along with the invitation to join the EU, NATO and other organizations, served to pressure the Romanian government into adopting legislation that would protect minority rights, allow minorities to study in their mother tongue and even ensure their full participation in government. The Hungarian minority living in a democratic Romanian state is one example of an ethnic minority in the Central and Eastern European countries that has framed its demands for minority rights as a question of societal security and cultural preservation and had these questions answered through the institutionalization of identity politics. Studying what the Hungarian

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minority and the Romanian government did right in the restructuring of their collective identity, as well as where they might have gotten sidetracked, and determining how those lessons learned could provide other countries struggling with issues of identity politics with examples and recommendations might prove to be both a useful academic exercise and a model for policy-makers and practitioners to consider.

5 Deploying National Identity: HIV/AIDS and South African Health Politics Vlad Kravtsov

The majority of observers agree that the in the past decade South African health policy in response to HIV/AIDS significantly deviated from globally set standards (Lieberman 2009, pp. 97-102, for instance, describes them under the heading of Geneva Consensus). The majority of commentaries typically have focused on former President Thabo Mbeki’s unorthodox biomedical convictions. While Mbeki’s personal impact on the national health policy was undeniably significant, the deviations from international practices were much broader in scope than simply rejecting scientific evidence that human immunodeficiency virus caused AIDS. As the focus of the volume is the investigation of identity politics in the age of globalization, one of the markers of a significantly expanded political environment was the rising awareness that multiple global problems can be mitigated only in cooperation among international actors directly and indirectly affected by the looming crises. Thus, fostering partnerships has become an integral part of global prescriptions how states should respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This chapter explores the impact of national identity on South African health policy. More specifically, it probes the nature and scope to which “African Renaissance”—a particular formulation of the South African national identity in the period of Mbeki’s presidency—challenged the globally accepted principles of partnership in response to HIV/AIDS. It expands the traditional academic focus placed on subnational, smaller identity entrepreneurs and social movements to the exploration of elites’ purposeful attempts to develop national identities in rebuilding their nations after the fall of previous political regimes. The chapter

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commences with an analysis of the challenges scholars face in investigating national identities in the context of globalization. Then it discusses the configuration of South African political identities in their political environment and concludes with the three sections relating the deployment of national identity to three specific principles of global health policy. These principles include: 1) securing the supply of generic antiretroviral medications; 2) accepting the expertise of international health organizations; and 3) meaningfully engaging and empowering domestic civil society organization in curbing HIV/AIDS. The deployment of the concept of “African Renaissance” made it possible for the South African government to expose pharmaceutical companies’ profiteering agenda based on the promotion of perceived useless/toxic medical products. This policy strategy stood in direct opposition to the mainstream practice of joining a broad international coalition for the differential pricing of pharmaceuticals and fair rules of procuring the generic products. It made it undesirable to accept the expertise and help of global health organizations and specialized health agencies. It also enabled a number of policy choices which obscured and damaged the potentially fruitful engagement of domestic civil society in the formulation of national health policy—to the degree that this gulf would seem insurmountable. Studying and Deploying National Identity in the Context of Globalization

In the introduction, Thiel and Coate assert that “identity politics, broadly defined as political action oriented on the needs, values and interests of particular collective groups possessing a shared identity, have only in the past three decades received more attention in the academic realm and public discourses” (p. 1). Indeed, during the past three decades of increasing interconnectedness we have learned a great deal about multiple identities across various levels of social aggregation. Minorities, underprivileged social movements, and some subaltern groups deploy identity-related arguments and expose their political action and grievances to public audiences. Academic disagreement persists regarding whether these groups act on genuinely internalized identities or strategically deploy identity-related arguments as eyegrabbing political imagery to attain specific material objectives as an instrumental technique to make certain grievances appealing to potential sponsors, supporters, and fellow travelers, as Clifford Bob (2005) has compellingly argued. Regardless of whether identity politics is a new phenomenon or only an extension of the millennium-old struggle for

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power and resources, today’s identity politics are increasingly visible and accessible for everyone. Empowered by rapidly developing information and communication technologies, the outreach of mass media to the distant corners of the globe, and novel and exciting networking devices such as Twitter, identity-related struggles cannot be confined to the domains where they originated. Astute observers of global, regional, or local politics can easily name a plurality of identities, permeating political, social, and cultural struggles across the globe. Even those not obsessed with global politics but simply within the reach of the CNN, BBC or Fox news stations and the rapidly expanding blogosphere can name at least a few indigenous groups, and ethnic minorities, civil and human rights movements, and the new status groups struggling to promote their identities in order to gain public acceptance and justice. Yet all these identities defy an easy portrayal and generalizing characterization. When perusing journals such as African Studies, Cultural Critique, National Identities, Social Identities, Nations and Nationalism, Race and Class, Postcolonial Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, among many other premium academic outlets placing a strong focus on examining collective identities, it is difficult to rid oneself of a lingering impression that every single article retrieves and examines truly inimitable, unique, country and time-contingent subnational identities. Each of these singular identities may indeed be undeniably important for academic investigation in its own right, inasmuch as it may be politically relevant. Yet, as the editors of this volume correctly point out, in today’s world identity-based actors are a constituent part of global politics. In this context, five interrelated considerations require further elaboration. First, in paying attention to all these intriguing sub- and transnational identities, we should not toss out the state level of analysis as irrelevant to this topic. In fact, it has been often argued that states can have identities too. Several years ago the topical discussion in the Atlantic magazine featured iconic writers, public intellectuals, and prominent political leaders reflecting about the future of the “American idea” (identity). Candidates for the 2008 U.S. presidential nomination often incorporated in their speeches innuendos to the United States as a purposeful nation that possesses a certain national identity (see for instance, the December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs). Influential political commentators and academic journalists such as Fareed Zakaria and Robert Kagan also employ similar language. Thus, even if the public articulation of national identity is not as obvious as articulations and rhetoric provided by social movements and

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smaller identity entrepreneurs, its existence is intuitive and grasped by many. National identity is understood here as a certain political program (or political imagery) for what the country is and how it should act based on the envisioned Self-Other dichotomies. In South Africa, the governmentally trumpeted “African Renaissance” demonstrates the resurgence of identity politics at the state level in response to the processes of globalization and the return of the country to world politics after a long period of isolation and pariah status. Thus, the main focus of this chapter is national identity as stimulated by a government and its elites, rather than constructed by individuals or smaller groups of people. Second, the overarching analytical puzzle concerns the effects of deploying identity. Simply stating that identities are politically relevant is not an irrefutable and compelling claim. Any actor can declare an identity, which may or may not be politically consequential. An assertion of ‘this is who we are’ needs to be translated in political action. Subsequently, in examining the constitutive role of identity, many academic accounts have had trouble keeping identity and policy outcomes separate. From an analytical standpoint, the principal difficulty in probing the effects of identity is in the widespread research practice of underspecified conjecturing about identity and its relationship to behavior or set of enacted policies (for some plausible conjectures, see Hopf 2002, pp. 81–82, 209–210). Not surprisingly, the difficulties in examining identity politics produce studies which offer either intuitive or even trivial results. It is not (or should not be) surprising that negatively constructed target populations would fight against stigma, discrimination, and injustice. Consider, for instance, the Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) community opposing the ban on same-sex marriage in the United States, or People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA) promoting HIV/AIDS awareness in the Russian Federation or South Africa. In other words, we need to think deeply about an identity’s causal or constitutive impact on political behavior in order not to come uncomfortably close to merely inferring identity from political behavior. The earliest step to rectifying these shortcomings is to demonstrate that the core themes of national identity were developed and articulated separately from the international norm of HIV/AIDS treatment. Indeed, the idea of African Renaissance was developed in 1996–1999, while the norm of treatment entered the domestic arena in 1999–2000. Therefore, it is imperative to separate identity as an intervening variable from its presence in the norm of treatment as a dependent variable.

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This task becomes even more significant in the context of recent constructivist studies asserting the role of identity, which are often contradictory and lack specification of the ways identity can make a difference. A typical constructivist claim is to note that domestic identity can either facilitate the acceptance of international norms and prescriptions or hinder them if the international prescriptions are not facilitated with the simultaneous changes of/in domestic identity (for detailed analyses of these and related core analytical claims, see Johnston 2005, pp. 1013–1044; Zürn and Checkel 2005, pp. 1045– 1079). To deal with this problem, a putative taxonomy of deployment effects needs to be constructed. It is hypothesized that national identity construction may have more specific effects than simply rejection or acceptance. On the basis of the South African case as a plausibility probe, the study delineates three tentative effects. First, localization is a distinct form of domestic adaptation, imbuing the international prescriptions and best practices with strong local content (see for instance, Acharya 2004). Second, resistance is an active opposition to the international policy, implying the promotion of policy alternatives at the international arena. Third, filtering is a selective form of domestic adaptation of prescriptions and practices, attuned to the potential variations inside the mainstream international formulations. Fourth, ignoring is a distinct form of domestic response, presuming indifference to global prescriptions and conducting the business as usual. My empirical analysis endeavors to connect the contents of national identity to the revisions, challenges, and adaptations made in regard to international partnership prescriptions. Contrary to what seems obvious, I do not claim that national identity has only one type of impact on the transferred policies, such as wholesale adoption, rejection, or any other type of response. Rather, I am interested in how and why national identity makes possible a whole range of responses. Third, there is still a tendency to essentialize and reify identity. For example, preexisting patriarchal gender norms, intolerance to religious adherence, or xenophobia to migrants in host societies may be considered to imply inherent identity positions with fundamental and universally recurring political implications. Although today we are aware of these analytical pitfalls, we still often talk about “identity in general,” as if to belong to PLWA, an alternative lifestyle, or an indigenous group implies only one distinguishable “master” characteristic. This chapter, however, operates under the assumption that identities consist of specific and distinguishable components as invented by political elites (or social movements’ leaders, if we are considering subnational identity groups). Without such specification, content of any

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national identity would remain ambiguous and difficult to put to use (Vale and Maseko 1998; Evans 1999). The broad notion of South African identity as a seemingly consistent phenomenon has to be disaggregated into several distinct, graspable components pinned on understanding of Self and the Other. This chapter demonstrates that African Renaissance is comprised of Africanism, Antiracialism, and Marketization. Each of these components has to be embedded into the nations’ consciousness and yet able to be dismantled in the future. Subsequently, scholars need to demonstrate how and why each specific component of domestic identity affected certain indicators of the dependent variable. Doing so will enable us not only to claim but also to compellingly demonstrate and sort out the constitutive impact of national identity on enacted policies. Following Thiel and Coate’s model, for the purposes of analytical clarity the period when identities are conceptualized, contested, and consolidated is bracketed. Consistent with their suggestions, the focus is shifted to national identity, which is preconstituted and already in existence. For the purposes of falsification, an account of several alternative proposals for South African national identity preceding the advent of African Renaissance is examined. Concentrating on fleshing out its crucial components allows one to examine in depth the identity politics as engaged by the South African government. Fourth, the editors of this volume urge us to think about collective identities and movements under the impact of globalization. Today we have some sophisticated models that explain how various norm entrepreneurs and identity activists use global interconnectedness to change the behavior of those states disrespecting domestic identityrelated grievances and violating equal treatment and recognition (consider, for example, the boomerang model). The discussion below, however, concentrates on the global processes enabling and constraining elites in building national identities. Certainly, in defining national identities political elites both draw on and respond to their global environments. At the very least, national elites are constrained by a broader set of principles about the globally recognized set of features or legitimate building blocks for an acceptable national identity. These processes have been abundantly explored in the context of modern European history. According to Carlton J. N. Hayes, the dean of modern diplomatic history, in the seventeenth century nearly all European powers opted to take up an absolutist divine-right monarchy as a legitimate form of government, styling it after France (Hayes 1916). In the nineteenth century ethnic nationalism and political liberalism

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spread across the newly emerging European polities as a result of the international demonstration effect of Britain (Janos 2000). In today’s world the response to global environment can result in a nuanced domestic application of the long-standing European tradition of international political thought (inasmuch as it offers conceptual languages for building a legitimate state), or a more direct response to external shocks occurring in the international system, such as the delegitimization of any form of autocratic and personalistic regime in the context of the third wave of democratic transition (Ottaway and Carothers 2000). Tentatively, we can detect at least three general streams of how globalization stimulates governmental approaches to building a national identity. First, as indicated in the introduction, various forms of cultural and political homogenization are catalysts of identity politics. More accurately, the perceived threat of homogenization (or, in some cases Westernization) stimulates domestic elites to reformulate and reasserts what makes their nations distinct and proud in blurred international arenas. In the context of South Africa, the national elite reclaimed the meaning of being “African” (African solidarity and uniqueness against the homogenizing globalism) and imbued it with a new sense of pride. Consider Thabo Mbeki’s dictum, “Today it feels good to be an African”. Second, Thiel and Coate correctly argue that identity-politics in the developing world are increasingly based on organizational and normative models originating in the North. In other words, national elites are constrained by liberal pluralistic conceptions of domestic societies and have to pay at least lip service to such democratic values as tolerance and equal representation. Even if the content of some nationbuilding projects is far from these values, it nevertheless has to be cast in similar terms, alleviating discursive dissonance with Western articulations. Incorporating human rights as an identity-building resource seems to be especially important when the U.S. intentionally attempts to revamp the world order using democracy promotion. This process is, of course, historically contingent on the post–Cold War era and current American hegemony. Not surprisingly, in the context of South Africa, issues of race and antiracialism continue to be most important. Third, while the current antiglobalization movement is spearheaded against economic neoliberalism, the principles of marketization, deregulation, and privatization seem to have gained momentum after the global collapse of administrative-planned economies (Yergin and Stanislaw 2002). The strong emphasis placed on social redistribution of wealth, among other principles touted by the communist states, lost its

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legitimacy and was replaced by the so-called Washington Consensus in the 1990s. In South Africa the impetus of global economic neoliberalism as promoted by international financial institutions was intensified by negative memories of economic disempowerment during the apartheid regime. As late as the mid-1980s South African national elites claimed that black South Africans were hostile to market principles and were unable to sustain themselves economically. Thus, not surprisingly, despite sharp domestic debate and much criticism, a new South African identity embraced neoliberal ideals, rather than social welfare principles (Bond 2003). While these considerations may be empirically accurate in many cases, a caveat is in order. In some extreme cases, of course, the abovementioned constraints may not work. Consider today’s Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe, or Libya. These states may pursue radical forms of national identity that may not be permissible by global standards. Yet such insulation seems to be rare in the interconnected world. Even the countries named will inevitably reopen the debate about national identities once they are relieved of their idiosyncratic autocrats. Thus, it is reasonable to begin empirical work assuming that elites are likely to incorporate general global resources, themes, and principles in their proposals for the nation. On the other hand, common international themes and principles of legitimacy do not have to result in analogous proposals for national identity across nations. Rather, different states plug contingent domestic understandings of self and the Other into international mainstream formulations, which is likely to produce distinct results. The final general consideration concerns studying identity politics as related to the HIV/AIDS issue-area. So far, scholars have placed exclusive emphasis on how policy-makers constructed the individual characteristics of vulnerable subpopulations and how this construction affected public health interventions. This research went hand in hand with transnational activism, which was aimed at overcoming stigma as related to the etiology of HIV/AIDS. The principal objective of this approach has been to push policies based on human rights to health and access to affordable medicines for anybody who needs them. Today, after more than 25 years of fighting the pandemic, it is time to reconsider how analysts interested in HIV/AIDS policies employ identity as an analytical tool. The major reason is not that stigma, exclusion, indifference, and discrimination have been finally eliminated. As Thiel and Coate point out, groups and communities that have not yet experienced public respect for their marginalized identities and have not yet gained an adequate representation in public politics are “prone to

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develop low self-esteem, self-imposed isolation, and potentially selfhatred and thus will be more disadvantaged to unify as a pressure group to advance their concerns” (p. 9). Notwithstanding the importance of rectifying these deficiencies, we need to examine the factors which shaped political commitments to fight HIV/AIDS across the globe beyond the narrowly conceived identities.This exploratory chapter thus seeks to obtain a realistic, even if only tentative, understanding of these problems. The next section explores the immediate impact of globalization, describing the partnership models that global institutions have prescribed in response to HIV/AIDS. The Configuration of African Renaissance in Its Political Environment

Before African Renaissance was pitched as a proposal for national identity construction, political elites engaged in a long period of contestation about the content of a desired national identity. In postapartheid South Africa smaller groups had to work hard to reinvent their identities (see, for instance, Vestergaard 2001 on the attempt to revamp the Afrikaans identity), and yet an even more challenging task was to invent a new, non-divisive idea for the whole nation against the concept of “two nations,” which was rapidly gaining currency (Nattrass and Seekings 2001). In the 1990s the democratic transition witnessed several alternative programs for a South African national identity, but these were developed simultaneously and often in competition against each other. Proponents of all the proposals related their legitimacy to decisive participation in the opposition and dismantling of the apartheid regime. The process of devising a single national identity was complicated by the fact that political actors at times supported more than one prospective identity for the nation and sometimes were not quite sure which specific components the desired identities should embrace (Neuberger 1990, pp. 54–77). Among all those proposals, the Pan-African national identity coalesced with the core imagery of Africa for Africans from Cape to Cairo and was articulated by the Pan-African Congress, based on the political writings of Steve Bantu Biko. Africanism envisioned the common supra-ethnic nationhood of all black South Africans and was espoused by certain members inside both the African National Congress (ANC) and the PAC. South African nonracialism (also known as “the Rainbow Nation”) was trumped in Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s proposals for a multiracial, multicultural South African nation.

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Other proposals included less elaborate and politically feasible ethnictribal nationalism (Inkatha’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi), which eventually was alleviated by granting Buthelezi a place of status in national politics. Last, but not least, the members of the South African Communist Party (SACP), including Jabulani “Mzala” Nxumalo, Joe Slovo, and charismatic Chris Hani promoted the radical class-based nationalism. This chapter concerns itself with African Renaissance as the proposal for national identity that eventually won in this competition. The origins of the new identity development in South Africa can be traced back to Mbeki’s 1996 speech “I am an African” (Mbeki 1996). Although many political observers noted that this highly poetic and beautifully emotionally speech was marked with ambivalence and often contradictions, it definitely set in motion wider national efforts to define what it means to be a South African after apartheid. In September 1998, for instance, the African Renaissance conference in Johannesburg brought together more than 400 participants. Moreover, Mbeki’s subsequent speeches lucidly articulated the core content of the new identity and became ‘canonical texts’ to which domestic political actors have anchored their discussions of national identity. Notwithstanding the richness, complexity, and diversity of the multiple societal interpretations described by the term, it can be narrowed down to three core organizing prescriptions: Africanism, antiracialism, and marketization. The first component—Africanism—prescribes finding local solutions for local problems. This component is based on the worthiness of the creative and unique self, in contrast to the Afro-pessimist Other who does not believe that [South] Africa can offer anything of significance and value to the world. This identity component translated into the political prescription that enabled the South African government to localize international models of partnership. More specifically, instead of pursuing typical legal mechanisms of partnerships to keep pharmaceutical companies accountable—presupposing a convergence of views over the importance of procuring generic pharmaceutical products—the government opted to throw its political weight behind a unique biomedical product and later even evaded any partnerships based on pushing generics for local disbursement. The second component—antiracialism—advocates protecting new South Africa by exposing the legacies of racialism, oppression, and domination, which continued to thrive in the global arena. This component is based on a mentally and spiritually liberated Self, whose Other crusades for ‘mental colonization’ and acts on inherent racism.

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The external Other perpetuates the negative construction of South Africans and denies them human dignity and subjectivity. An example of this is an intentional overestimation of the number of HIV-positive persons and a continuing dismissal of the epidemic’s uniqueness in South Africa. Following this prescription constrained the South African government’s willingness to build partnerships with international health organizations. In effect, the Cabinet jumped on risky opportunities to develop the alternative loci of biomedical expertise. The third component of national identity—marketization— prescribes the economic empowering of South Africans based on boosting the private sector and relying on market economy strategies rather than governmental delivery and redistribution (Johnson 2004, pp. 111–112; Gumede 2007, p. 189). This component is based on the concept of self—who can provide for himself/herself—and rejects both exploitation and redistribution as practices that deny South Africans well-deserved subjectivity and autonomy. The Other claims that South Africans are hostile to market principles and unable to sustain themselves economically (for the origins of this argument during the apartheid era (Greenberg 1987). As the stress on governmental delivery was strongly connected with the disempowerment of South Africans, it prompted the government to counter civil society’s demands of delivery in the health care sector and even propelled the Cabinet to put significant constraints on how domestic civil society operated, including the restriction to policy-making arenas. To recap, in the context of this chapter, the claim is made that there is an innate and undisputable connotation to what it means to belong to the South African political nation. Moreover, today’s intersubjective consensus that such a nation exists may be challenged in the near future. Major South African ethnic groups, for example, could politicize their status and pursue territorial autonomy (even though today such an option does not sound feasible). The rise of the first ethnic Zulu—Jacob Zuma— to the presidency prompted several observers to chime in on such a possibility in regard to KwaZuluNatal. By no means was the advent of African Renaissance preordained or accepted without an acute public debate and critique. In South Africa, speculates Ibbo Mandaza (2001), developing the new post-apartheid identity has resulted in “the new ideology of self-deception, the refusal to acknowledge the current realities that parameter even our own political space” (p. 135). For a while even the creators of African Renaissance were not quite sure whether this political proposal had become dominant. As Mbeki put it:

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The question persists whether we have done and are doing enough, as the ANC, government and all sectors of our nation, to bring into being a unified and common South African identity. While we cannot decree the emergence of this identity, all of us have to work hard among other things to promote the various symbols that are critical to the evolution of a common identity (Mbeki 2007, p. 23)

Even after African Renaissance was deployed, various observers remained skeptical about whether this identity had any profound policy implications or were simply a result of Mbeki’s daily obsession with lofty eloquence. For the purposes of this study, however, it is sufficient to underscore the emergence of a general agreement among domestic political elites on the basic components of the described national identity. It is clear that the Cabinet and some domestic spin-doctors (such as Ronald Suresh Roberts) tried to intentionally disseminate and embed this identity to justify pursuing some internal and external political goals. At the very least, one-party dominance suggests a powerbase of consensus, which may be more temporary in nature but nevertheless very informative for the study how external norms and practices were adopted in the country. Whether the identity of African Renaissance was genuinely embedded at the broadest societal level is a different issue that requires a separate investigation. The Impact of Globalization: Prescribing Partnership Models to Combat HIV/AIDS

Over the past two and a half decades transnational partnerships slowly have become a key mechanism to deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Gordenker et al. 1995). Partnership is especially important for countries suffering from the generalized epidemic, which is aggravated by scarce financial resources, inadequate infrastructural capacities, and insufficient biomedical expertise. The global prescription to foster partnerships is comprised of three principal components. First, it stipulates the need to keep pharmaceutical companies accountable to ensure the sustainable supply of treatment. Governments are expected to incorporate generics drugs in their treatment plans and join international coalitions promoting their use. The global prescription also implies that national governments should keep the pharmaceutical sector accountable in order to secure the uninterrupted supply of medicine at minimal prices and make sure that safeguards under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) can be fully implemented

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In the late 1990s–early 2000s the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS provision remained a major roadblock for international partnerships by putting significant restrictions on access and supply of generic pharmaceutical products while protecting brand-name drugs and keeping their prices high. By putting up legal barriers for accessing cheap generic versions of brand-name pharmaceuticals for the developing world, TRIPS limited the effectiveness of addressing health emergencies at the domestic level (’t Hoen 2003, pp. 39–67). HIV/AIDS treatment activists have often considered TRIPS to represent the interests of the developed world in general and the international pharmaceutical corporations in particular. By 2004 things turned around. Most importantly, generics became more widely available for a parallel import from India, Brazil, and Thailand, which enabled governments in the developing world to implement the TRIPS safeguards, including the compulsory licensing and parallel import. Many transnational health activists, a group of developing countries, and some representatives of international health organizations joined a broad global coalition to pursue these goals. At the same time, the long-standing debate about the safety of generics was resolved when the international community reached an agreement on the standards for approval of fixed dose antiretroviral combinations as well as their safety. As a result, the pharmaceutical sector by and large had to accept differential pricing for drugs and agreed to cut prices on fixed-dose combinations for the developing world. In 2004 the United States allowed generic manufacturers to apply for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, and the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) incorporated generics into its operational plans. These achievements, however, can be reversed under certain circumstances (Shadlen 2007). Thus, joining or remaining a part of the broad coalition to keep the pharmaceutical sector in check remains pivotal. Second, the global prescription for fostering partnerships suggests that governments accept the expertise of international health organizations and incorporate their recommendations and guidelines in national strategic AIDS plans. This partnership prescription is based on the understanding that in fighting HIV/AIDS, state governments should keep up with constantly updated and improved knowledge about HIV/AIDS epidemiology and methods of health intervention. For many countries, accurate biomedical and epidemiological knowledge can be obtained only from international health organizations and specialized agencies. Even if the domestic expertise is not so dismal, following

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international health organizations’ recommendations on monitoring and evaluation of domestic health interventions are essential. Over the years these recommendations and guidelines have become very sophisticated. Although there are some general concerns about the unrealistic expectations of success pervading international guidelines, these concerns are not immediately relevant for the purpose of the national commitment to partnerships with health organizations. Today we have a very rich global landscape of health-related organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS, and the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS), among others. Their recommendations and guidelines include prescriptions for how to allocate available resources, evaluate and monitor national HIV/AIDSrelated budgets, manage adherence protocols, and so on. UNAIDS provides guidelines for resource allocation, funding, and budget control mechanisms in the developing countries. The United Nations Millennium Project provides benchmarks (in the form of goals and targets) for monitoring and evaluating national HIV/AIDS programs. UNAIDS and UNGASS offer up-to-date guidelines on how to construct the core indicators for countries with generalized epidemics (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS/05.17E). These recommendations should also be reflected in official national plans to mitigate HIV/AIDS and in major policy papers. Third, this partnership prescription recommends engaging domestic civil society for the purposes of AIDS service and advocacy. It is based on the understanding that fighting HIV/AIDS is very costly for the public sector and increases the monetary burden on state governments. It is imperative for governments to mitigate the shortages in public health care infrastructure, personnel staffing, and supply of medicine, as well as the uneven distribution of health services across the country. All this implies partnerships based on engaging the civil society sector, including various AIDS service and advocacy organizations, both domestic and transnational. Thus, governments, at a minimum, should not interfere with how domestic AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) are sponsored. At a maximum, the prescription entails the commitment to pursue closer links with domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), allowing them to take an active part in HIV/AIDS policy formulation and decision-making. At the same time, a truly autonomous civil society may not be a very friendly or submissive partner. If the main aspirations of domestic HIV/AIDS advocacy and treatment organizations are at odds with governmental ones, the conflict between them could become

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acute. This conflict may escalate when domestic civil society actors come to possess independent resources. These three prescriptions for how to deal with the HIV/AIDS crisis, in essence, are rather technical. Nevertheless, they prompt the homogenizing effect of globalization and in certain cases, such as when entering domestic political arenas, could trigger a highly politicized reaction. According to the postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, even a ‘”technical choice” in regard to international prescriptions may impinge on domestic legitimacy, sovereign capacity, and even national identity: …by displacing the site where political regulatory, and technical choices are made, not only have the very sources of power been transferred to international trustees just when some attributes of sovereignty were being “deleted.” What has also happened is that the sources of legitimacy and influence have also been displaced, and in so doing, the criteria of accountability have been blurred, since those who impose policies are not merely “invisible” to the eyes of the population but are also different from those who must answer for their consequences to the people. (Mbembe 2002, pp. 75–76)

In South Africa domestic decision-makers’ partnership strategies went beyond the mere technical goals of securing and expanding domestic provision of treatment and encompassed partisan political overtones. In explaining South African politicization of partnerships, many scholars referred to former President Thabo Mbeki’s leadership and personality (Russell 2009, pp. 201–230; Feinstein 2007, pp. 132– 133). While capturing an important part of the story of HIV/AIDS politics in South Africa, this approach blew the significance of Mbeki’s personal unorthodox biomedical convictions out of proportion. Each subsequent section offers detailed examination of the implications of the South African identity for the globally prescribed partnerships against HIV/AIDS. Resisting Pharmaceutical Colonialism

The South African government shared the international community’s concerns about keeping the pharmaceutical sector accountable. Yet it pursued accountability via mechanisms other than securing the supply of generics and bargaining for price reduction. The Cabinet infused this imperative with a local meaning: South African officials stressed the strategy of Africanism, explicated as the promotion of local solutions to local problems, finding a local medicine for the local epidemic.

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Instead of mainstream international prescriptions to press international pharmaceutical companies for cheaper medicines, the Cabinet decided to attack the pharmaceutical sector on the premise that it was concealing scientific evidence about the inefficacy of its drugs in order to increase sales. In 2000 the presidential spokesperson Mankahlana asserted that the pharmaceutical sector misused information about the pandemic, exaggerated the positive effects of antiretroviral medicines, and benefited from the unmitigated scourge of AIDS (Mankahlana 2000). This discourse dismissed the results of domestic trials that proved the efficiency of antiretrovirals (D’Adesky 2004, p. 183). Purchasing ARVs from pharmaceutical giants even at reduced prices was represented as reinforcing the predatory power of “pharmaceutical colonialism,” bringing to South Africans more problems than solutions. While the United Nations announced a negotiated deal with five major pharmaceutical companies, the South African government turned down offers to enter talks on price reduction to the poorest African nations and offers to accept pharmaceutical products at slashed prices. The members of government argued that “price reductions negotiated with manufacturers were neither substantive nor a permanent solution” (Gumede 2007, p. 196). Such an argument became quite widespread and robust (End AIDS 2007). From 1997 to 1999, however, the South African government seemingly followed the mainstream strategy of challenging big transnational pharmaceutical corporations. The South African Medicines Act of 1997 was designed to allow the domestic production of generic drugs and parallel import and compulsory licensing (Barnard 2002). In defending the Medicines Act against international pressures, the government challenged the rules of pharmaceutical production as formulated by the international pharmaceutical sector (Behrman 2004, pp. 142–148). Despite the fact that the global and national media interpreted this resistance in terms of the Cabinet joining the coalition for the global fight for treatment, it soon became apparent that the Medicines Act and its provisions were but a declaration rather than action. The Medicines Act ensured neither the uninterrupted inflow of medicines nor the protection of the legality of the development and importation of generics. Instead the government’s emphasis seemed to shift toward the research and development of original domestic pharmaceutical products. Mbeki’s Cabinet first became very enthusiastic about the prospects of developing original domestic pharmaceutical products against global pharmaceutical colonialism. The domestic development and trials of

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Virodene® PO58 took place from 1997 to 2002. Unfortunately, a cheap and effective anti-AIDS drug turned out to be based on an industrial solvent used in cryopreservation and thus was ineffective and highly toxic. What distinguishes this story from the multiple reports of fake successes in finding the AIDS vaccine or new treatment across the globe is how these physicians got the political and financial backing from the government. In essence, these scientists accused Western pharmaceutical companies of exercising control over the production of new pharmaceutical products. Such an argument resonated well with then Deputy President Mbeki, the Health Minister, and some other senior members of the ANC. They not only supported Virodene and debunked any medical evidence against it, but also tagged their opponents as being racist and countertransformationalist (see Fourie 2006, p. 152). As a result of the domestic outcry, the ‘Virodene affair’ gradually disappeared from high-profile politics. The government, however, kept on pushing the drug internationally (Myburgh 2007). Even if the anger towards the international pharmaceutical sector can be seen as justified, the government displayed a similar distrust of generics. Some policy analysts noted the Cabinet quietly pushing aside the international advocates of the generics, including the Clinton Foundation. According to one report, “[M]any generic companies complained of being shut out of the process—which mostly seemed tailored to favour the Western pharmaceutical industry and/or possibly, the development of South African sources” (Smart 2005, p. 52). Although the local production of generics had begun in 2003, it was not used as a tool for cutting deals with the pharmaceutical sector. In 2002 and 2003 the Cabinet reacted very negatively both to domestic activist groups’ efforts to smuggle generics into the country and their connections to transnational partners. It became evident that the government lacked interest in either driving the prices of generics down or even brokering deals with the medicine manufacturers. Over the period of Mbeki’s presidency, the South African government had at least three viable options in joining a transnational coalition to keep the pharmaceutical sector accountable. The first option was to forge a coalition with transnational actors, advocating both the differential pricing of drugs for the developing world and their uninterrupted global supply. This transnational coalition included highly visible activist health groups, such as Oxfam, Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), Health GAP, International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRCRC), F-X Bagnoud Centre, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and others. In the late 1990s–early 2000s this

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coalition was at the forefront of pressing the pharmaceutical sector to slash prices for developing world and advocated for the wide use of generic medicines. Eventually, the advent of a new generation of AIDS organizations ushered in a second option for South Africa: to join this coalition and become a founding member of the Global Fund against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM)—the multilateral financial instrument of AIDS funding— along with Nigeria. The literature cursory acknowledges some modest South African contribution to the foundation of UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) and GFATM (Patterson and Ciemenis 2005, p. 182). Compared to other countries’ assertive role, however, the South African role was minimal. The third option was to forge links with Brazil, India, and Thailand as challengers to the pharmaceutical sector, actively promoting the production of generic medications, universality of treatment, and the full implementation of all TRIPS safeguards. These countries would have been natural allies for the South African government in widening its Global South solidarity, as well as asserting the country’s legitimacy and prestige in the Third World. The choice by the South African Cabinet was counterintuitive, as the members of this coalition widely used the anti-colonialist discourse and wished to curb the power of the Global North, but explainable in the light of the discussion provided in this section. Seeking an Alternative Health Expertise

The South African government focused instead on anti-racialism in overcoming the legacy of apartheid, while claiming that the outbreak of HIV/AIDS reinforced the preexisting “imaginings” of Africa as the West’s Other. The Global North was claimed to have used AIDS to construct the black African population as the racial, diseased, promiscuous, poor, and powerless Other in the international arena. In this discursive context, to pursue close partnerships with international health organizations and the unqualified acceptance of their expertise meant to succumb to these imaginings. To follow the international policy prescription meant useless ‘mimicking the foreign approaches’, a criminal betrayal of the South African people, and surrendering to imposed low self-esteem and self-hatred. Thus, by and large the Cabinet chose to resist international expertise and sought to set up alternative fora of health expertise. It turned first to AIDS dissidents as chief partners in formulating policies in response to the epidemic, and

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later attempted to play a key role in institutionalizing an all-African movement for the support of African Traditional Medicines (ATMs). The governmental understanding about the role and motivation of international health organizations heavily borrowed from the literature on how racism and prejudices guided Western medical study of AIDS and the collection of evidence on the disease etiology in Africa in the 1980s. All these ideas about the undesirability of partnerships with the international health sector blew early policy blunders by the international health community out of proportion (Packard and Epstein 1992, pp. 346–372). The most explicit (and controversial) reiteration of this line of thinking was expressed in the “Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot and Mouth and Statistics: HIV/AIDS and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African”. Distributed at the 51st National Conference of the ANC, this 2002 self-styled monograph attacked the very notion of partnerships with internationally recognized and respected health organizations, official medical licensing and registration institutions, and Western scientists and medical doctors. The anonymous author (it is speculated that Mbeki himself submitted it) reasoned that any partnerships would be objectionable. The Western approach overestimated the number of the HIV-positive persons in South Africa. It also placed a strong emphasis on African sexuality, and distorted the root causes of the epidemic in Africa (Castro Hlongwane 2002, preface). By-and-large, the argument deployed in Castro Hlongwane failed to acknowledge the fact that international stigmatization of certain target subpopulation and countries had long since ceased to drive the politics of HIV/AIDS. Thus, despite mounting international pressures, the South African government resisted incorporating recommendations formulated by the major international health organizations. The most illustrative case, perhaps, was the Health Minister’s overt attack on the WHO as the source of targets and guidelines (Thom 2005). More subtle forms of resistance could be found in the overwhelming majority of principal domestic policy documents, which likewise either did not follow these prescriptions or attempted to reframe them (Department of Health 2004; Republic of South Africa 2006b). Later governmental reports were also widely criticized for eluding the discussion and presentation of any tangible data, glossing over the shortcomings in domestic policy formulation and implementation, and downplaying any reports prepared by international organizations (International Treatment Preparedness Coalition 2006, p. 35; United Nations Country Team South Africa 2005, p. 12). Evading monitoring

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and evaluation mechanisms also became pervasive on the provincial level as well (Ndlovu and Daswa 2006, p. 3). The single most infamous governmental policy decision consisted in the creation of the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel (PAAP) that was mandated to focus dissidents’ views and legitimize their presence in South Africa. The dissidents’ main ideas revolved around claims that AIDS was not contagious, that AIDS was not sexually transmitted, and that AIDS was not caused by HIV. Different dissidents spelled out this broad theme with minor variations. The story of summoning and disbanding this counter-epistemic community has been well-explored and will not be treated here (Youde 2007). The governmental distrust of orthodox health expertise even extended to its own domestic health agencies and high-profile peak institutions, including the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC). In both cases, the Cabinet worked hard to replace independent scientists, medical practitioners, and representatives of AIDS service organization with functionaries and loyalists (Nattrass 2004, p. 50; Strode and Grant 2004, pp. 18–46). Once the public outcry had crushed the dissidents, many domestic intellectuals and governmental agencies started emphasizing indigenous knowledge, while underscoring its counter-hegemonic and anti-racialist disposition (Odora Hoppers 2002). The development and protection of indigenous knowledge, as intellectual property collectively owned at the local level, was contrasted and juxtaposed to Western domination in devising the international health care models (Mosimege 2007). In multiple speeches, the Minister of Health upheld African Traditional Medicines as a strategy consistent with the African Renaissance. Traditional Medicines were meant to prove wrong the international colonialist attitudes to Africa. To institutionalize the new health alternatives, the Cabinet in 2006 established the Presidential Task Team on African Traditional Medicine in South Africa and the Directorate of Traditional Medicine within the Department of Health. (Republic of South Africa 2006a) The Department of Science and Technology (DST) sponsored study of local knowledge as an alternative (and better) foundation than international expertise for the local decision-making. (Department of Science and Technology 2006) In 2007, the South African government hosted the Third Ordinary Session of the Conference of African Ministers of Health in the framework of the African Union decade on African traditional medicine. This new set of international and domestic bodies was intended to promote alternative health guidelines.

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Not to Disempower the Economy for the Sake of Delivery

Prior to deploying ‘African Renaissance’, the government typically had cooperated with major domestic nonstate actors and had incorporated their prescriptions about appropriate responses to the epidemic into the national plans. Yet growing in self-sufficiency and autonomy enabled the civil society sector to demand the governmental delivery in the public health sector, as well as the universal coverage of the antiretroviral medications free of charge for all those who need it. These demands, not surprisingly, did not sit well with the Cabinet, as the policy strategy oriented towards governmental delivery and redistributive programs was strongly linked with the disempowerment of South Africans. From 1998 to 2003 the Cabinet insisted that universal access to free antiretrovirals in the public sector was not sustainable in the long run. As the result of a perceived need to protect the empowerment strategy based on marketization, the South African government became very selective in adopting broad international prescriptions about how to engage domestic civil society. Governmental officials went as far as accusing civil society of disloyalty to the South African transformation process (Fourie 2006, pp. 119). The annual report of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition provided evidence of civil society having been excluded from deliberations about the Operational Plan and many health care workers having been silenced (ITPC 2005, p. 86). This behavior demonstrated that the government largely ignored the general international principle of engaging the civil society in order to build partnerships only with those nonstate actors that were considered not interfering with private sector and marketization strategies. In the context of globalization, external donor assistance programs provide the money for the rollout of antiretrovirals and thus lessen the budgetary constraints. At the same time, international sponsorship stimulates the fulfillment of civil society’s hopes and aspirations, as well as the sectors’ autonomy and empowerment. Being attuned to the variations among the available pool of international donors, the South African government filtered the imperative of partnership by “cherrypicking” which transnational partnerships and funding options were permissible. GFATM strengthened the resolve of domestic civil society sector and indirectly pushed the Cabinet to expand delivery and provision in the public health care sector. The Cabinet aggressively interfered with the GFATM mechanisms of grant distribution, while accepting the funding models as provided by the Presidential Emergency Program for

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AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Both governmental and nongovernmental programs funded by PEPFAR were running quite smoothly, which suggests that the government indeed filtered the partnerships, intentionally choosing to favor one of them. The new generation of HIV/AIDS organizations, including GFATM, was, perhaps, the most important single factor in empowering the South African domestic civil society sector. Since GFATM’s inception, and especially since the first round of disbursement of generous grants to the local AIDS service organizations, the hopes of autonomy for transnational AIDS civil society in dealing with nationstates seemed to come to fruition. The Fund’s ability to empower domestic civil society lies with its so-called bottom-up approach. It directly solicits grant applications from multiple nongovernmental organizations on the ground and then disburses resources on the basis of their performance (see GFATM 2002/2003). In 2002 Mbeki accused GFATM of not coordinating its activity with the Cabinet. Subsequently, the Cabinet tried to control the submission of applications to GFATM. It supervised the disbursement of funds to AIDS service organizations on the ground, seized specific provincial grants, and protracted signing agreements for the funds transfers (ITPC 2005 pp. 80–89; ITPC 2006, pp. 33–36). At the same time, the government seemed not to have any problems in dealing with PEPFAR funding, as the Emergency Fund was not directly enabling dissident local AIDS service and advocacy organizations. Rather, PEPFAR provided what the government saw as an acute need—help in mitigating the resource scarcity. According to Nattrass, “the contribution of donors to the public-sector HAART rollout has taken the pressure off the national Department of Health to use available domestic resources” (Nattrass 2006, pp. 618–623). The availability of these resources also alleviated the Cabinet’s concerns of diverting too many domestic resources to ARVs from other governmental programs. As a result, PEPFAR got a privileged position in domestic HIV/AIDS partnerships network. It got closely connected to governmental agencies as well as nongovernmental organizations. The evidence suggests that the South African government used the influx of resources as an excuse not to strengthen its public sector and continue its support for the strategy of pro-marketization. The Outcomes of Deploying African Renaissance

This chapter asserts that in South Africa domestic responses to the prescribed models of partnership in response to HIV/AIDS were based

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on the deployment of an African Renaissance identity. Thus, this analysis can be used to provide insights for the development of sustainable and robust partnerships between governments and the proliferating plethora of AIDS service and advocacy organizations. The consequences of deploying national identity to HIV/AIDS as a particularly South African problem were self-defeating inasmuch as doing so distorted international mainstream prescriptions on principles and strategies for cooperation around this issue-area. First, most strikingly, believing in the inevitable success of the domestic medicine, the South African government at some point decided to accommodate pressures of the pharmaceutical companies, dropping the compulsory licensing safeguard. Once domestic attempts of producing a local pharmaceutical product failed, the government had no interest in substituting the domestic medicine with the internationally available antiretroviral treatment. By 2006, the South African government had failed to secure licenses for the generic manufacture and production of drugs. In general, after the Cabinet was forced to introduce ARVs in the public sector and procure drugs, it tried to stick to the brand name medicines, which remained very costly compared to the expanding production of generics. Second, the discursive line of attack on international health organizations translated into the desire to suspend the domestic distribution of internationally approved pharmaceutical products on the basis of their supposed toxicity and lack of any tangible medical benefits. More radical views regurgitated the AIDS denialists’ claims about AZT aggravating or even causing the disease by poisoning the immune system and killing the bone marrow. Instead of learning about the increasing relevance of international guidelines and recommendations about how to curb HIV/AIDS, the Cabinet built up a discourse against “mental colonization” and resisted cooperation with “wrong” partners acting on “inherent racism.” Most importantly, an outcome of this rendition was that the Department of Health resisted the development of an adequate monitoring and evaluation system, which would have enabled comparison between the domestic progress and international guidelines and objectives. These choices resulted not only in skirmishes between the Cabinet and the civil society sector, but also in the diminished state capacity to curb HIV/AIDS. Third, many observers insightfully suggested that “the conflict around AIDS, in the context of an emerging post-apartheid state, represents a battle between certain state and non-state actors to define who has the right to speak about AIDS, to determine the response to AIDS, and even to define the problem itself” (Schneider 2002, p. 153).

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From 1998 onwards partnership with the civil society sector eroded. The Cabinet ‘unlearned’ that the civil society sector ought to be an autonomous party in fighting AIDS and instead attempted to take over it by excluding from policy-making bodies and restricting their access to the international grants (ITPC 2006, p. 33). Although domestic civil society earned the international respect for their efforts in fighting HIV/AIDS, the government restricted pro-treatment NGOs’ access to governmental HIV/AIDS policy-planning organizations. The government missed the international targets of curbing HIV/AIDS and failed to acknowledge how grave the epidemiological situation was. The ousting of President Mbeki in September 2008 and the appointment of Barbara Hogan as the new interim Health Minister abruptly altered the process of dealing with the HIV/AIDS health crisis in South Africa and the subsequent reformulation of South African state identity. The change of the political leadership, however, does not imply that all the tribulations with South African health policy will suddenly go away. First, Liberman (2009) noted “a persistent tolerance or even acceptance of heterodox view of HIV and AIDS among the party’s leadership” (p.140) which may still complicate or even block bringing domestic practices in consistence with the global partnership prescriptions. Second, building state capacity and efficiency, as well as rectifying resource scarcity and financial constrains may take a long time, thus delaying the much needed improvements in the South African health policies. Note: The author thanks Asli Ilgit, Deepa Prakash, Jooyoun Lee, Chan Woong Shin, Eric Rittenger, Braden Smith, Roger Coate, Markus Thiel and an anonymous manuscript reviewer for their insightful comments, and especially Audie Klotz for creating an intellectually stimulating and encouraging environment at Syracuse University, where the ideas for this chapter originated.

6 Modern Islam or Theocracy? Turkey’s Gülen Movement Nuray V. Ibryamova

Fethullah Gülen is a relatively unknown name in the West outside of the circle of experts on Islam or Turkey and the Middle East in general. But this quiet man has a following of over five million people in the country of his birth and has been called ‘the third power’ in Turkish politics. The Fethullah Gülen Community is the largest religious movement in Turkey in present day and represents transnational network with substantial influence. In contrast to other religious movements, the Gülen movement has taken full advantage of the process of globalization, as well as political and economic liberalization both domestically and internationally. This has allowed the movement to survive and expand its influence by normalizing religious conservatism in a country where the official ideology of Kemalism had heretofore constrained the public expression of religious identities. In this sense, the evolution of the Gülen movement is remarkable and dovetails with the model proposed by Thiel and Coate. This chapter looks at the factors that facilitated the evolution of the Gülen movement. Specifically, what were the domestic and international factors that made the rise and growth of this identity-based movement possible? It argues that the growth of the Gülen movement is due to its ability to adapt to political and economic conditions, and to take advantage of domestic and international opportunities for expansion. While it does not engage in overtly political activities, the Gülen movement exercises its influence and seeks to bring about social and political change through the creation of a new generation of sympathizers who have internalized its ideational framework.

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The first part of the chapter looks at the rise and development of Fethullah Gülen’s movement. It examines the key points in Gülen’s teachings and discusses the schools, media, and businesses controlled by Gulen. It then turns to the factors that enabled the growth and success of the movement. Finally, the chapter addresses some of the implications of the increasing strength of the movement for Turkey and Islam in general. Brief Outline of Theoretical Considerations

Examinations of social movements usually take into account political opportunities and constraints as well as structural elements, such as conditions and state strength. These are the more generalizable elements in such examinations, in contrast to the focus on historical specificities, although in recent years advocacy of integrated approaches has grown (MacAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 1997). Studies on Islam, on the other hand, can also be “essentialist,” where Islam is seen as a homogenous phenomenon, or “contextualist”, which look at the different interpretations that this religion receives across the Muslim world— from Turkey to Egypt, from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia. In the pages below, attention will be paid to the conditions, political opportunities, as well as choices made both by governmental actors and Gülen supporters. The political institutions and processes in Turkey, where religion has been subordinated to the state since 1924, had a defining impact on the evolution of the movement over the decades. So did evolving political opportunities, defined as “the degree to which groups are likely to be able to gain access to power and to manipulate the system” (Eisinger 1973). The political opportunities approach looks at factors such as the degree of openness of the political system, elite alignments and elite allies, and state repression (McAdam, McCarthy, Zald 1996; Tarrow 1999). This approach can help explain the development of the movement within the specific Turkish context. The shape which a particular social movement or identity politics group takes is frequently attributed to particular political opportunities. There have been many other religious movements, communities, and sects in Turkey, however, which have not enjoyed similar growth or influence. The main differences between these and the Gülen movement are the kind of Islam they embrace, the elites they ally with, and the methods of achieving their goals. The Gülen movement likely might not have grown or become as influential as it has without the tolerance and support of political elites at the highest levels. For many years, the elites chose to foster rather than prosecute the movement as well as Fethullah Gülen

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himself. Hence, in addition to looking at the political opportunities, the preference of the elites for the Gülen movement should also be taken into consideration. In this respect, the movement’s evolution fits the expectations that its fate will be largely determined by the political opportunities and the ideological predisposition of those in power (McAdam et al. 1996, p. 23). Gülen’s moderate version of an Islamic identity also has bearing on the success of the movement. The ideational basis for the Gülen movement is found in the writings of Said Nursi, who began to emphasize new interpretation of the Quran and, hence, new understanding of Islam following the establishment of the modern Turkish republic, the abolition of the caliphate and the ensuing subordination of religion to the state soon thereafter. Gülen himself took further steps in embracing modernity and thereby making the Islam he preaches compatible with modern lifestyles, in contrast to other, more traditional Islamic movements in Turkey itself. That said, the movement now has a presence in dozens of countries in the world, suggesting that its influence in Turkey is not due exclusively to its contextual specificities. The process of globalization and its recent acceptance by the movement have certainly contributed to the growth of conservatism and advocacy of more religious freedoms in Turkey itself, as well as the transnationalization of the movement itself. Origins and Evolution of the Fethullah Gülen Movement

The Gülen movement’s evolution to a large extent reflects changes in domestic conditions within Turkey: politically, economically, and ideationally. The republican regime in the country has been most closely identified with Kemalism—the ideas put forward by the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and espoused by his political party, and later, the state itself. Historically, Kemalism has been associated with westernization and modernization. The basic principles of Kemalism are nationalism, populism, statism (in economics), laicism, reformism, and republicanism. The notion of laicism is of particular interest here as it defined the state control of religion. Islam and Islamic culture were subject to far-reaching Kemalist reforms of the early republican period. Religious orders and sects were banned, religious titles abolished, sharia law replaced by Swiss civil and Italian penal codes. Religious schools were closed and education was strictly secularized. The Directorate of Religious Affairs was established in 1924 as part of the executive, subject to funding and regulation by the state. All mosques in the country were placed under its control and

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preachers became state employees. Secularism in Turkey aimed at creating an “official” Islam, infused with civic values and responsibilities, as part of the secular state apparatus (Atasoy 2005, p. 38). The imposition and legal enforcement of Western clothing, the Latin alphabet, and the Gregorian calendar, among others, also aimed at Westernization and diminishing the role of Islam. The issue of Ataturk’s own religiosity is debatable; the fact remains, however, that he did use appeal to popular religious sentiments during the struggle for independence to gain the support of Islamic sects and movements (Mango 1999). It is also the case that he was the main force behind the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and establishment of state control over religion. Ataturk considered religion to be the root cause of the decline of Muslim nations, and sought to create a society on civic bonds rather than religious. Ataturk’s political and social reforms, however, reached the educated, urban, and elite segment of Turkish society; life in the countryside of this then predominantly rural country went on much as it had for years. Over the next several decades, a significant portion of the Turkish population remained deeply religious, while the secular establishment, led by the military, remained the guardians of Ataturk’s legacy (Ibid). The first challenges to Kemalism arrived in the 1950s, when the first genuine multiparty elections were allowed in the country. During the next few decades, political parties from left and right appealed to the religious segment of the population and used the “Islamic card” to win votes. It is within these conditions that the Gülen movement developed and became a transnational phenomenon. It was in the 1990s and 2000s, however, that debate emerged in Turkish society on the compatibility of Kemalism and the social, economic, and political realities of modern Turkey. The debate was further promoted by the election of the Adalet ve Kalkinma (Justice and Progress) Party (AKP), which had its roots in political Islam (specifically, Milli Gorus, which represented political Islam), to office in 2002. Since then, a number of policies initiated by Ataturk himself or imposed on the political establishment by the strictly secular military have been either repealed, subjected to attrition, or openly questioned. The Gülen movement is seen as an important player in domestic politics and some commentators have even discussed the basis and future viability of the “AKP-Gülen movement coalition” (Birand 2009). The Gülen movement is inextricably linked to the life and ideas of his founder, Fethullah Gülen—a mild-mannered man dressed in modern garb. Gülen was born in 1941 in a village outside Erzurum, a town in northeastern Turkey, near the Russian border. Erzurum was frequently a

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battleground for Russo-Turkish battles or Armenian occupation in the early 20th century. It also played an important role in the organization of the nationalist forces led by Ataturk, who eventually won the war for independence in 1923 and established the Republic. Arguably, growing up in a town that had changed hands between competing empires instilled a sense of statism in Gülen. His father was an imam (preacher) and Gülen continued the tradition by enrolling in a medrese (Islamic school) following the conclusion of third-grade education. As an employee of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Gülen was appointed in 1958 as imam in Edirne, a town in Trakiya, and then transferred to Izmir in 1966. It was here that his movement had its humble beginning (The Gülen Institute). Gülen began to form small all-male groups, summer camps, and establish dershanes (tutoring centers). The students were asked to organize small groups of their own. Availability and access to funds provided by local businessmen allowed the spread of these activities. Over the years, Gülen expanded his summer camp activities as well as dershanes in the Izmir area. During this period of time, Gülen established a number of educational organizations, including the Foundation for Turkish Teachers (1976) and the Foundation of Middle and Higher Education in Akyazi. The restoration of democracy in 1983, following the military coup of 1980, provided opportunities for Gülen to broaden his movement at the national level. Two factors made that possible: first, the political and economic liberalization in the country, and second, the support Gülen found within the establishment, including then Prime Minister Turgut Ozal. The argument has been made that Ozal saw Gülen as a moderate Islamist and promoted his ideas as a counterweight to other, more fundamentalist religious movements in the country. The argument can be made, then, that Ozal and his successors’ support for Gülen was a matter of calculated choice. The latter and his movement developed close ties with state institutions, such as the Ministry of Education, and were able to expand its activities and influence in the economy, education, and media. Being buttressed by its elite allies, the movement was able to avoid the Turkish state’s repressive policies until 1998. The liberalization that began in the early 1980s allowed the Gülen movement to enter two arenas of critical importance for spreading its ideas: education and the media. Taking advantage of reforms of the educational system which allowed privatization, the movement began establishing private schools with donations from its wealthy businessmen members or followers. It was also in the 1980s that the movement began to have access to more financial resources and began

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to build its media empire. The opening for these steps was also provided by the liberalization in the economic sphere, which allowed many entrepreneurs from smaller towns in the inner regions of the country to enter the marketplace. This group became the main support pillar of the movement. Gülen’s movement continued to evolve and draw supporters throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His sermons and other writings were published in close to 50 books, dozens of audio and videotapes. It was also during the 1980s that Gülen began to moderate his ideas and emphasize dialogue and tolerance. He used the platform of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, of which he was honorary chairman, to spread his ideas of tolerance and shape his image accordingly. The next major event to have an impact on the movement was the 1997 “soft” coup in Turkey, following which restrictions on all religious activities were imposed. Despite its closeness to state authorities and purportedly supporting the military’s move against the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan, Gülen himself soon faced charges. In 1998, Fethullah Gülen travelled to the United States, presumably to seek medical treatment for diabetes and cardiovascular problems. He has since remained in the country, living a relatively reclusive lifestyle outside of Philadelphia. Since the beginning of his self-imposed exile, the Gülen movement has become a truly transnational movement, while its normative framework has continued to evolve The organizational structure of the movement itself is difficult to determine. The inner core consists of a small group of friends and students of Gülen who are loyal to him, are regularly consulted on the activities of the movement, and paid by the movement. The second circle consists of businessmen who sit of the board of trustees of the numerous foundations. They are expected to participate in the creation of good works through supporting charities. Finally, there are the sympathizers who support the movement’s schools, dormitories, media outlets, foundations, and other associations. Due to the secrecy surrounding the movement, the number of members and sympathizers has been estimated anywhere between one and five million in Turkey alone.1 Basic Elements of Fethullah Gülen’s Beliefs

Fethullah Gülen is considered by many to espouse a more liberal version of Islam, both in its outlook and practices. It is important to note that

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Gülen’s beliefs only gradually became more liberal and can be considered as moderate only compared to other religious frameworks; in fact, Hakan Yavuz describes the process as “forced liberalization.” This was not coincidental: the Islam Gülen preached was influenced by the political changes in Turkey as well as the world as a whole. Hence, a distinctive feature of Gülen’s understanding of Islam is its changing and adaptive nature. His moderate version of Islam—compared to other, more fundamental ones—is rooted in the Sufi tradition of Sunni Islam, which has an element of mysticism in its nature. The Gülen movement is also the major successor of Said Nursi’s Nur (light) movement of the early 1920s. Gülen’s teachings can be described as based on tolerance: tolerance toward other religions, the West, modernity. Gülen is best known for advocating tolerance toward and dialogue with other religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, Judaism and Christianity. Inclusiveness is an important part of Gülen’s normative framework. As he puts it, “Islam does not discriminate based on race, color, age, nationality, or physical traits” (Gülen 2001, p. 101). Gülen agrees that historically not all Muslims have observed the rights of others, but argues that this was based on wrongful, subjective interpretation of Islam. According to him, When you look at the issue from that perspective, it will be understood that while saying tolerance, dialogue, respect for all and accepting anyone with their current positions, we voice our Prophet's (pbuh) Medina Document and speak out the realities he declared in the Farewell Sermon. Hence, we fulfill our obligations and duties. Those who dealt with the issue before us might have been mistaken at this point and walked in a different route through both internal and external reasons and fair or unfair causes. We do not care about them. If we can, we should fulfill our obligations. (Gülen 2001, p. 101)

To underline this message, in 1998 Gülen met with Pope John Paul II and Israel’s chief rabbi to discuss interfaith dialogue. In addition to meetings with religious figures, Gülen promotes his ideas through the work of foundations created by him (estimated by some to be in the hundreds), non-profit organizations, and international conferences around the world, some of which have taken place in the House of Lords in the UK, Monash University in Australia, Rice University, and most recently, at UCLA. Gülen rejects political Islam per se. His movement does not engage in overt political activism, and as such, does not fit very neatly in the definition adopted by Thiel and Coate (see Chapter One). In contrast to

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many other religious movements in Turkey, such as Milli Gorus, Gülen believes that Islam is best able to transform society and politics from below rather than from above. Instead of openly expressing his support for individual politicians, he prefers to focus on their ethics and character. Gülen did not support the Refah Party in the 1994 elections, and disapproved of its leader Necmettin Erbakan, who became Turkey’s prime minister in 1996 as part of a coalition government with a centerright party, and is said to have supported the “soft” military coup of February 28th 1997 that forced Erbakan to resign. Gülen purportedly believes that he can have the most impact on Turkey’s politics and society through his educational and media institutions: he strongly encourages his followers to participate in civic life. He has openly argued that his movement has moved from a stage of internalizing his ideas and vision to their externalization (Yavuz 2003). Gülen also claims to support democracy and sees Turkey’s democratization as irreversible. He argues that while democracy is an ideology, Islam is about spiritualism. Moreover, the fundamental principles of Islam—including the rule of law, private property, and among others—do not contradict democratic values: The Quran (13:11) says: "God will not change the state of a people unless they change themselves [with respect to their beliefs, worldview, and lifestyle]." In other words, each society holds the reins of its fate in its own hands. The prophetic tradition emphasizes this idea: "You will be ruled according to how you are."(FN4) This is the basis character and spirit of democracy, which does not conflict with any Islamic principle. (2001)

In his writings, however, Gülen does not necessarily support individual freedom and choice; instead, his emphasis is on the cohesion of the community. The education provided in his schools does not emphasize critical thinking, but still relies on memorization; graduates are not expected so much to pursue their self-realization as much as to fulfill their duties to the community. Gülen has not criticized the oppressive policies of the state toward religion or minorities, even though he does not seem to differentiate between ethnic and non-ethnic Turks and seeks interreligious tolerance. Hence, despite its acceptance of democracy, as a political thought, Gülen’s ideas are more communitarian than liberal in nature. The movement itself is said to encourage obedience (Tanir 2009). With respect to women’s rights, Gülen acknowledges the existence of differences between the sexes, but argues that women should be full

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participants in daily life. Although he posits that “the most important thing a woman should know is social breeding,”2 Gülen sees women as being able to take jobs as administrators or judges. He has declared the headscarf to be a “detail,” pointing out that women who do not wear one are equally Muslim.3 While perhaps still seeing women primarily in their roles as nurturers, Gülen’s view of women is more liberal compared to that of many other Islamic movements. One of the most important aspects of Gülen’s version of Islam is what experts refer to as its nationalist-religious nature. As the description itself suggests, for Gülen the national is indivisible from the religious. In contrast to other religious orders or sects, Gülen does not speak of a global Islamic community. Instead, his goal is a strong state; a strong Turkey can only come about if it embraces God. Turkey was at its strongest during the Ottoman Empire and Gülen frequently expresses admiration for the Ottoman sultans and advocates remembrance of the past as an inextricable part of Turkish identity. Gülen’s view of the relationship between the individual and religion focuses on well beyond simply avoiding sin. He emphasizes the importance of individual actions in the name of faith and the community to which people belong. Two of the key principles embraced by the movement are hizmet and himmet. Hizmet (service) is required of the members to their community, society, state or Islam: in other words, it is about serving something bigger than oneself. Service forms the core of membership, it is voluntary and can take many forms. All movement members are expected to make charitable contributions, acts known as himmet, or donation pledges. Contributions vary between 5-10 percent of the members’ yearly income. These two notions help to understand the success of the economic and financial activism, educational efforts, and media empire of the movement (Aslandogan 2009). The Gülen Movement, Education, the Media, and Business

The three components on which the Gülen movement places particular emphasis and which have made it so successful are economic investments, education, and the media. Fethullah Gülen himself does not own either of these; instead, ownership of media outlets and businesses or sponsorship of schools are by members of his movement. In this indirect way, Gülen is said to control a business and media empire worth several billion dollars. Gülen has devoted considerable attention to education in his writings and the importance he attaches to it is evident by the hundreds of schools and several universities around the world funded by members

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of his movement or its supporters. Estimates of the number of schools the Gülen movement run vary between 500 to 1000, primarily in Central Asia,4 Turkey, the Balkans, and even in the United States. In recent years, students in Gülen’s schools in Turkey consistently outperform their peers. To attend one of these schools anywhere around the world, a student must pay a fee—at times, more than $10,000 per year. Hence, in many countries, such as in Central Asia, only children of elites are able to enroll. Frequently, however, the movement recruits motivated and hard-working children whose families are unable to support them in other private or even public schools, often from towns in the heartland of Turkey. Students coming from poor or middle-class families can also attend with the help of scholarships provided by the movement, collected from its sympathizers. The schools are state of the art in terms of the available infrastructure, the curriculum adheres to state guidelines, and the instruction is in English. The Turkish state does not allow religious education, and Gülen’s schools are not exception. Gülen emphasizes the role of the teachers—many of whom are graduates of some of the best universities in the country—who are expected not only to educate but also to provide the students with examples of model behavior based on Islamic values. The emphasis on education reflects several different characteristics of Gülen’s worldview. For him, ignorance and poverty are two of the main reasons for the underdevelopment of many Muslim nations. Gülen strongly believes that science and technology are the key to a successful future; hence, a strong Turkey needs a well-educated population, conversant with the achievements of natural science and technology. He does not see any contradiction between science and religion; on the contrary, those who do not study science are derelict in their Islamic duties: Science, with all its branches such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine and so forth, is at the service of humanity, and every day brings new gains which may also be gifts of hope. There is no reason for man to be afraid of science. The danger does not lie with science itself and the founding of a world in accordance with it, but rather with ignorance, and the irresponsibility of scientists. (2006)

That said, Gülen insists that science must be put in service of “uncover(ing) the nature of men and women and the mysteries of creation”5. Gülen seeks to shape a generation of scientists, engineers, and other professionals, who espouse and live their lives according to Islamic values. In real life, this is translated into an emphasis on the

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natural sciences and mathematics in his schools. The educational institutions of the Gülen movement, then, are not only conduits of Islam in society, but also serve to strengthen the state through the embrace of modernity: “Since ‘real’ life is possible only through knowledge, those who neglect learning and teaching are considered "dead" even though they are still alive, for we were created to learn and to communicate what we have learned to others” (ibid.). Many opponents of the Gülen movement argue that the real indoctrination of the students takes place in dershanes, dormitories or in the so-called isik evler (“lighthouses” or “Houses of Light”). The latter are apartments rented by the movement, in which high school or more frequently, university students, live for a small fee. Each apartment has an elder, a member of the Gülen community, who leads study sessions on Islam with his/her flatmates. Members of isik elver are said to feel more comfortable in the camaraderie of like-minded peers, in addition to having to pay lower rents. In addition, Gülen continues to run dersane and summer camps, much like the movement had done in its earliest days. What comes across from a survey conducted with teachers and students, who have either attended Gulen’s schools or have been involved with their “isik evler” is the consistency with which their attendance and participation in meetings has been solicited (Toprak et al 2008). Each school and dormitory is supported by different individuals, and while the curriculum adheres to state guidelines, the dormitories have their own regulations. A common feature of life in the dormitories is religious education. For students who live in Gulen’s dormitories, the day begins with prayer at dawn, and in many cases continues with reading Said Nur’s writings or other texts of similar nature prior to beginning of class. Girls usually begin to cover their hair during their last or penultimate year of high school. Attempts at attracting new members at this age, begin with helping—or offering to help—students, including university students, to prepare for exams (Ibid). In step with Gülen’s teaching, who is also sometimes referred to as hocaefendi, the Gülen movement relies on an array of modern media outlets to spread its message. Perhaps the most prominent among those is the newspaper Zaman (Time), which has a circulation of 795,000— the highest in Turkey. The paper is also published or distributed in the United States, Germany (50,000 copies), Bulgaria, Romania, Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Zaman was the first Turkish newspaper to start its electronic version in 1995; it Englishlanguage version, Today’s Zaman, is most widely read by Muslims in the United States and Malaysia. While it is not directly linked with the movement, it is owned by a group of wealthy businessmen affiliated

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with the movement, and is part of a media empire, which also includes Cihan News Agency, Aksiyon magazine, radio station Burc FM, and a number of television stations: STV, S Haber, Mehtap TV, and Ebru TV. The Zaman newspaper is known as a conservative, pro-government media outlet. It is quick to defend Gülen and his movement against any perceived attacks, and publicize his message.6 A look at STV’s programming indicates that the vast majority of women appearing either as participants or audience members of different shows wear headscarves, suggesting not only the main target audience for the TV channel, but also the conservative religious message it may be sending. Gülen-owned media serve to promote an image of tolerance for Fethullah Gülen and are quick to refute any criticism toward the movement or Gülen himself.7 In addition, Gülen’s essays frequently appear in some of these publications. The Gülen-affiliated media are also known to advertise businesses owned by Gülen supporters and run human-interest stories on Gülen’s followers. Like other social and religious movements, access to print and telecommunications media have made their ideas accessible to a wider audience. In the case of the Gülen movement, they have also served to enhance the popularity of the movement and recruit new members. From this perspective, the role of the media and the movement’s use of it to popularize its particular viewpoint are consistent with Thiel and Coate’s arguments. The movement’s control over a significant number of media outlets is even more important in view of the questionable independence of the media in Turkey. For instance, the largest media holding in the country, Dogan Holding, was assessed taxes in the mount of approximately $500 million in 2008, and another $2.5 billion in 2009, when the total worth of the holding $3 billion. Its media outlets were among the most critical of the government. The fate of Dogan Holding has forced other media as well as journalists to self-sensor. Hence, in today’s Turkey—with the exception of a few newspapers—the government is assured of receiving positive coverage, with Gulen controlled media being among the primary cheerleaders. Neither Gülen’s schools nor access to the media would have been possible without access to financial resources. The primary source of funding for Fethullah Gülen and engine for the implementation of his ideas has been the growing class of small and medium-size entrepreneurs, living primarily in small towns in the interior of Turkey. Many of them own export-oriented small businesses (known as Anatolian tigers) in towns like Kayseri. The Gülen movement also owns the Asya Finans—bank run according to Islamic principles—and the insurance company Isik Sigorta. The emergence of this new class of

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pious businessmen goes back to the economic liberalization that came after 1983. The appeal of Gülen’s ideas has to do with their emphasis on hizmet, or service, and economic activity falls into that category. Gülen believes in the accumulation of capital, and much like his emphasis on education, he sees engagement in the market economy in service of one’s country as part of being a good Muslim (Yavuz 192). As far back as 1978, in his seminal Altin Nesil (The Golden Generation), Gülen urged young people in Turkey to combine knowledge of science and technology with Islamic values in order to enhance the economic and financial power of the state. This also provides a clue to the success of the Gülen movement: it attempts to wed Islamic values with Western modernity. His followers, if they are to be successful and competitive in the global economy, and therefore, good Muslims, also have to accept the rules of the international economics and financial marketplace. Their own piety and prosperity, then, prevents them from being extremists: after all, jihad is not good for business. It is because of this emphasis on economic activities as a way of providing service to the community at large that comparisons to Calvinism and the link between capitalism and the protestant ethic is frequently made. Gülen has also encouraged the organization of Muslim entrepreneurs in order to pressure the state to provide more economic and social opportunities. This is part of the explanation fro the growth of Gulenist businesses: they tend to trade and do business with one another (Toprak 2008). In addition, with the privatization of state assets still an ongoing process and public tenders being important source of capital, big businesses have incentives to toe the government’s line. Many of the public tenders have gone to businesses headed by pro-Islamic businessmen, who have become immensely rich. Gülen’s supporters have established the Association for Solidarity in Business Life (ISHAD) and the Businessmen’s Association for Freedom (HURSAID), as counterparts to the largest business association in the country TUSIAD, which is associated with large conglomerates supportive of the secular establishment, and MUSIAD, an organization established by Erbakan’s supporters of the Refah Party. It should also be emphasized that the industrialists supporting Gülen are in favor of Turkey’s integration in the European Union—yet another example of the drive to compete in international markets. The Gülen Movement, the State, and Globalization

Gülen’s personal relationships with Turkish heads of state and government have been a key factor in the movement’s development.

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Thiel and Coate argue that governments are the most important factors influencing the accommodation or mobilization of dissident groups and social movements alike (18), and the case of the Gülen movement supports this assertion. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state defined the domestic opportunity structures in two main ways: through continued political and economic liberalization, and through the support of the secular political establishment. As noted above, the gradual liberalization that took place in Turkey after the return of democracy in 1983, allowed for Gülen’s followers to make significant inroads in education, business, and media ownership. It is safe to say that without this development the access and financing it provided, the Gülen movement’s influence would have remained more limited. In addition, however, Gülen also enjoyed the support of the secular establishment at the highest levels. His ties to prime ministers and presidents (Turgut Ozal, Tansu Ciller, Suleyman Demirel, and Bulent Ecevit) and their support throughout the 1980s and 1990s are well-known. Gülen did not hide his ties with the Turkish military or intelligence services, either.8 The reason for this accommodation of the Gülen movement by the state is said to have been the belief—beginning with Ozal—that Gülen’s moderate Islam was a counterweight to the more fundamentalist sects and communities that emerged or gained popularity in Turkey after 1983. Hence, successive governments threw their support behind Gülen and allowed his movement to grow. On his end, Gülen was careful not to criticize the secular order, support political Islam or sharia; neither did he criticize Turkey’s role in the Gulf War, or took sides against the United States or Israel. When Gülen’s supporters did criticize state policy—as in the Merve Kavakci case9—the criticism was moderate and couched in terms of human rights. Gülen, then, took a decidedly nonconfrontational approach toward the government’s policies and sought accommodation within the existing opportunity structures. Whether this was a matter of pragmatism in the existence under the shadow of the staunchly secular Turkish establishment at the time or genuine support for a secular and democratic Turkey, is debatable; what is beyond doubt is that this mutual accommodation allowed Gülen to attract more supporters, and increase its financial strength and societal outreach. In the aftermath of the “soft coup” of February 28, 1997, Gülen’s movement was initially left alone in the midst of investigations of various religious movements, communities, and sects in Turkey. It was only in December 1997 that Turkey’s then military-dominated National Security Council (MGK) began to look at Gülen’s activities. Following the emergence of a tape, in which Gülen was allegedly advising his

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followers on how to achieve their goals, Gülen was accused of reactionary activities with the goal of subverting the secular state. Gülen never faced charges in court, as he had by then left Turkey for the United States. With the election of the mildly Islamist AK Party to office in 2002, the Gülen movement is once again enjoying the support of the government. The case against Gülen himself was first dismissed and then he was acquitted of the charges. The AKP and the movement share ideational commonalities, as evidenced by the support the AKP government receives from Gülen movement media outlets. In addition, both the AKP and the movement continue to work for the liberalization of human rights in Turkey, including the expression of religious identity. The Gülen movement has helped create a more conservative environment in Turkey and has also contributed significantly to a debate on the role of religion in social and political life in a country that is officially secular, but in which the vast majority of the population remains deeply religious. For instance, the debate on the turban (headscarf-like veiling for women) is one of the most controversial ones in Turkey,10 but as the number of Turkish women who wear it has increased in recent years, so has the support for revoking the ban. The pursuit of EU membership, of which the AKP has been a proponent, has further justified and legitimized reforms that emphasized minority rights and religious freedom. For instance, the AKP attempted—so far, unsuccessfully—to lift the ban on wearing headscarves in public buildings, as part of this effort. The European Union has been a major influence behind the democratic reforms in the country. Following Turkey’s recognition by the EU as a candidate for membership, successive Turkish governments took steps to meet the criteria necessary to start accession negotiations. The political criteria included improvements in human and minority rights, freedom of speech and freedom of press, and freedom for religious minorities, and reducing the influence of the military, among others. The AKP, which had its roots in political Islam, often passed such reforms citing EU membership criteria. In this sense, the European Union has certainly contributed to the democratization process in Turkey, including the advancement of religious freedom. The Council of Europe has also urged Turkey to do more to improve the rights of religious minorities in the country. The argument can be made that with the opportunities that come along with democratization, in conjunction with the increasing conservatism of broad segments of Turkish society, have helped with the growth of the Gülen movement.

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The changing international environment has also helped shape the Gülen movement. A lot has been written about the link between globalization and the renaissance of religion around the world. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld immediately come to mind as some of the most frequently cited or debated arguments on this topic. Many religious movements across the world, including in Turkey, have advocated separation from foreign cultural influences, especially Western ones. Globalization is seen as interfering with local religious traditions and disrupting the social fabric of the community, and ultimately, intensifying identity politics, as argued by Thiel and Coate. In contrast, the Gülen movement is the most significant religious and social movement in Turkey that has embraced globalization. Various civil society and identity groups and movements in Turkey have benefitted from globalization, and among those none more so than the Gülen movement. It should be noted that the movement was not always so receptive of increased societal interconnectedness and economic integration. The interplay of domestic-international opportunity structures played a key role in the adaptation of the movement. First, an important factor that allowed the internationalization of the Gülen movement was the collapse of the communist regimes in the former eastern bloc, especially in the Balkans, and the subsequent liberalization in these countries. The fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of the former constituent republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus offered further opportunities for the movements to open schools, set up foundations, and distribute print materials in these countries. Had the old regimes persisted in their totalitarian form, with state monopolies in education and politics, it is highly unlikely that Gülen’s movement would have been able to set itself up in the region. A second factor that propelled the internationalization of the movement was Fethullah Gülen’s move to the United States in 1998. Health problems were cited as the reason for his departure. The political situation in Turkey, however, may have been the underlying reason for Gülen’s continued stay across the Atlantic. Following the February 1997 events, the secular establishment in Turkey introduced further restrictions and reinforced existing ones on religious activities, including religious education and veiling. Gülen, who had enjoyed close relations with successive governments and had reportedly supported the military, also felt the sting of the new circumstances. The domestic restrictions, then, were another reason for Gülen to seek opportunities abroad, which eventually led to the transnationalization of the movement. The

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combination of domestic and international opportunity structures were a critical factor in the movement’s growth in the age of globalization. In line with his views on the fundamental importance of science and technology in the modern world and acceptance of liberal economics, Gülen has embraced globalization and his movement has taken advantage of the process to expand and grow. According to Gülen, "Modern means of communication and transportation have transformed the world into a large, global village.... This time is a period of interactive relations. Nations and peoples are more in need of and dependent on each other, which causes closeness in mutual relations” (Gülen 2000). This largely supports the argument that Gülen’s acceptance of globalization is the result of two factors: its moderate normative framework and the international opportunity structures (Kuru 2005). Globalization figures prominently as a topic of discussion at conferences organized by the Gülen movement, along with topics such as the state and religion, and human rights. Is Fethullah Gülen the next Khomeini?

The Fetullah Gülen community numbers millions and has even more sympathizers. In Turkey, Gülen enjoyed the support of the political elite for many years. Abroad, Gülen has been praised by Christian religious leaders, politicians, and academics alike for his advocacy of interfaith dialogue and tolerance. He was even voted as the most influential intellectual by a 2008 online Foreign Policy Magazine poll. That said, not everyone believes in the stated aims of his movement and many remain suspicious. Gülen is particularly controversial in his home country, where he has been the target of the judiciary, journalists, and other members of the secular establishment. In 1998, a report prepared by the West Working Group (BCG), the unit created at the General Staff to monitor anti-secularist activities throughout Turkey, was presented at the March 27, 2008 National Security Council meeting. It said Gülen and his group were exploiting religion and objecting to republican principles while ostensibly maintaining a moderate line. It indicated that the group was trying to sneak into the armed forces in a "planned, programmed, sly and deceptive manner." The group poses a danger for the secular republic and has been engaging in "religious deception" to attain its goals, according to the report (Hurriyet 1998). Later that year, Gülen was charged with trying to “undermine the secular system” while camouflaging his methods with democratic and tolerant image,” but charges were later dropped after a change in the law. In 1999, a tape of

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Gülen talking to a group of supporters was aired on television, in which he was heard saying to his supporters, Until Muslims arrive at a certain stage, service should be rendered in this way […] If they […] come out early, the world will squash their heads. They will make Muslims once again relive the kind of incidents that occurred in Algeria. Let us not live the same situation as happened in Algeria, Syria and Egypt. It is obligatory to act cautiously….Any steps taken at this stage would be early, before power in constitutional institutions is on your side. Every step will be early until one arrives at a certain level, until one has the power to carry the world on his back and has all things in hand to represent that power and until we have the power of the constitutional establishments on our side.11

This statement is often quoted as evidence that Gülen’s intentions are much more sinister than stated; Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute has compared his influence in Turkey to that of the Ayatollah R Khomeini in Iran in the days preceding the Islamic revolution in the country (2008). Others argue that Turkey is no longer a secular and democratic country due not only to AKP’s policies but also to Gülen’s movement who “not only seek to influence government but also to become the government” (Sharon-Krespin, 2009). Others, while not going so far as to accuse him of wanting to bring sharia to Turkey, argue that his supporters have managed to infiltrate the entire government bureaucracy, including the judiciary, the police, even the military. Many argue that during AKP’s rule in Turkey, Gülen’s supporters have been able to infiltrate the government’s institutions at all levels and help set the political agenda through their followers in the AKP. For instance, Soner Cagaptay, an expert based at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, states that in exchange for its support for the AKP, the movement received appointments at the police and national intelligence institutions, and argues that the recent Ergenekon case12 is an illustration of the control of the Turkish police by the Gülen movement (2009). In Russia, Gülen’s schools were recently closed and in the Netherlands funding for organizations affiliated with the movement have seen their funding cut by several million euros. The schools were banned in Uzbekistan in 2000 because of fears of fundamentalism and worsening of relations between Turkey and Uzbekistan, but continue to operate in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan, albeit under strict state observation. In Central Asia, Gülen’s schools are seen as a double edge sword: on one hand, they provide solid education, especially in the natural science, for the local elites, and channel Turkey’s example of economic and political

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development; on the other, they spread Islam and Turkism, which may have negative impact in the ongoing nation-building processing in these countries.13 The most disturbing aspect, however, appears to be the discrepancy between Gülen’s rhetoric and the practice of his movement (Muzalevsky 2009), echoing the sentiments of some secularists in Turkey of Gulen’s deceptiveness. Is the Gülen Movement a New Form of Identity Politics?

Opinion polls show that Turkey has become a more conservative country during the last decade, religion being at the heart of this shift. With respect to religion, there are two observable trends: first, there is a discernible increase of religiosity in Turkey, and second, there is movement away from extreme, fundamentalist form of Islam and Islamic practices. With respect to the latter, a survey published in 2009 showed that support for Shari’ah has fallen from 21 percent to 6 percent between 1999 and 2006, (Carkoglu and Toprak 2007) although 6 percent strongly approve and 16 percent approve of stoning a woman who has committed an adultery, according to another survey (Esmer 2009). The number of those who consider themselves “very religious” has increased from 6 percent to 13 percent between 1999-2006, those who identify themselves primarily as Muslim has gone up from 36 percent to 46 percent (Carkoglu and Toprak 2007). Yet according to another poll published in 2009, 54 percent consider themselves very religious, but only 36.5 percent of them attend mosque more than once a week (Carkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2009). When asked “Which of these comes first for you?,” 62 percent of respondents said “religion,” 16 percent “secularism,” 13 percent “democracy”, 5 percent “ethnic identity”, 4 percent “sufficient income.” (Esmer 2009). In addition, surveys show that Turks are rather intolerant when it comes to individuals with different religions marrying into their families, having as neighbors atheists or members of other religions, people who consume alcohol, or whose daughters wears shorts. These attitudes have bearing on views of other countries and policies as well. For instance, a poll conducted in January 2010 showed that only 49.7 percent of those surveyed would vote in favor of Turkey’s membership in the EU, whereas 35 percent would vote against membership (MetroPOLL 2010). When asked whether fundamentalist Islam posed threat Turkey, 14 percent responded that it posed no threat whatsoever, and 17 percent said it did not pose significant threat. On the other hand, when asked whether the US aimed at dismembering Turkey, 47 percent agreed and 39 percent strongly agreed. When asked the same

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question about the EU, 48 percent of respondents agreed and additional 28 percent strongly agreed (Esmer 2009). U.S. President Barack Obama enjoys the highest approval among world leaders (24.1 percent), immediately followed by Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad (6.2 percent) (MetroPOLL 2009). When discussing perceptions of other states and nations, however, we also must take into consideration the impact of the “war on terror,” including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly in a Muslim societies such as the Turkish one. Admittedly, surveys do not address all questions and sometimes provide contradictory answers. These numbers suggest, however, that Turkey has become a more conservative society, in which anti-Western sentiments can run high. They also indicate a divided society, in which the secular elites feel marginalized and under pressure from the power and influence of the Anatolian countryside. The predominant social values and norms of conduct are bound to have an impact on the identity of individuals. In this context, the most significant impact is likely to be on the younger generation, whose identity-formation will be impacted by the predominant values and norms. In turn, those who espouse this conservatism are likely to prolong its impact by supporting and voting into office those political actors that share their values and worldviews. This may be the lasting and most significant legacy of Turkey’s current conservatism. Fethullah Gülen himself has yet to be seen publicly and has not shown a sign of desire to seek public office. He may not have to: it appears that the movement’s emphasis on a bottom-up approach to the transformation of society has yielded results and its collaboration with the AKP has borne fruit in domestic and foreign policy. His emphasis on education and the concurrent religious activities in which students engage in their dormitories and through the movement’s vast social network of members and sympathizers, as well as control of numerous media outlets, has contributed to the rising religiousity and conservatism in Turkey. The Gülen movement does not overtly engage in political activities, but its success in influencing Turkish identity and policy and politics makes it an example of successful identity politics.

Conclusion

The Gülen movement has recently attracted significant attention by academics and commentators alike. While the movement itself has been the driving motor behind much of the publicity it has received in Turkey

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and abroad through the skillful use of foundations, associations, educational institutions, the media, and even and advertizing agency, it has also been accused of undermining secularist principles both in Turkey and abroad, especially Central Asia. Gülen himself and the movement have not been particularly forthcoming toward the mainstream media, contributing to the cloud of controversy. Despite that, some general conclusions can be drawn about Gülen’s ideas and the movement and the ways in which it differs from other religious movements in Turkey. First, Gülen’s ideas of Islam allow his followers to combine modern lifestyles with piety and devotion. For instance, Gülen emphasizes education and sees economic activity as an act of worship, thereby reconciling accumulation of capital with devotion to Islam. The embrace of modernity in science, technology, and economics has provided the movement with the ideological basis for its growth. Second, the movement has rejected political Islam and sought more of a bottom-up approach to social and political transformation, while simultaneously adapting itself to state policies, and taking advantage of both domestic and international openings. Third, the movement is transnational one—it is estimated that it operates in over 100 countries. In contrast to other Islamic movements, it has embraced globalization, but does not seek to create a global Islamic community, and instead has nationalist undertones. Gülen does not support religious groups other than his own, nor is he known for having links to Islamic organizations abroad. The root of the controversy between Gülen and other religious organizations is in their way of understanding Islam and the approaches to the realization of their goals. Hence, in many respects the movement is different from others in Turkey both in the form of Islam it preaches as well as in the methods it employs to achieve its goals. It is precisely its adaptability and acceptance of modernity have made its success possible. The Gülen movement can be credited with adding to the pluralism within the religious movements in Turkey. It has fostered a debate on religion both as a right and its role vis-à-vis the state, and promoted tolerance and interfaith dialogue, as well as entrepreneurial spirit. Gülen is known to have supported women’s education. The movement has also been at the forefront of advocating for religious freedom in officially secular Turkey and has used the myriad venues it has at its disposal to promote its message. In the AKP, the Gülen movement has found a party and government that are very sympathetic to its activities; on its end, the movement’s media outlets have been highly supportive of the AKP government. In countries with predominantly Muslim populations, such as in Central Asia, it has helped promote the Turkish model of

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development as an alternative to fundamentalism. At the same time, the movement’s schools and isikevler are not known for promoting critical thinking, but instilling communitarian spirit instead. Its inclusive normative framework has not prevented the undertones of TurkoOttoman nationalism. Hence, the contribution of the Gülen movement to the spread of liberal democratic values is somewhat limited. Instead, it can serve as an example of how the embrace of modernity and globalization can turn a moderate Islamic movement into a transnational phenomenon. Finally, the Gülen movement’s strategy of grass-roots advocacy, cooptation of the ruling elites, and the current symbiosis with the ruling AKP party have been very successful as a new type of identity politics. Testament to this success is Turkey’s growing Islamization. The resurgence of Islamic identity is likely to have long-lasting effects on society, domestic and foreign policy. The emerging emphasis on brotherhood with Muslims around the world has already left its print on Turkey new foreign policy orientation. The quiet success of the Gülen movement may be the new model for achieving identity group’s goals in the age of globalization. 1 Most recently, a spokesperson for the movement stated that every Turkish citizen is a target. 2 “Women,” Criteria or Lights of the Way 3 (1990): 67-77. http://en.fgulen.com/about-fethullah-gulen/gulens-thoughts/1256-women.html. 3 Ertugrul Ozkok, “Women and Women’s Rights.” Hurriyet Daily, January 23-30, 1995. http://en.fgulen.com/about-fethullah-gulen/gulens-thoughts/1257women-and-womens-rights.html. “Women’s Covering.” July 20-29, 1997. http://en.fgulen.com/about-fethullah-gulen/gulens-thoughts/1260-womenscovering.html. 4 For instance, according to Bayram Balci, head of the Turkey-Caucasus program at the Baku campus of the French Institute for Anatolian Studies (IFEA), “The disciples of the latter (Gulen) have set up a vast network of private schools in Azerbaijan allowing the movement to mobilise a modern proselytism which many have compared to that developed by Christian AngloSaxon movements.” The Gulen movement has been the most successful Turkish Islamic group to exercise influence in Azerbaijan. Bayram Balci, “Post-Soviet Azeri Islam: Under Turkish, Arabic and Iranian Influence,” Caucaz Europenews, http://www.caucaz.com/home_eng/breve_contenu.php?id=169 (accessed August 17, 2009). 5 Fethullah Gülen, “What We Expect of Science,” Criteria or Lights of the Way 2 (1996): 9-14. http://en.fgulen.com/about-fethullah-gulen/gulensthoughts/1282-what-we-expect-of-science.html. 6 It is interesting to note that there have been instances in which stories have been covered differently in Zaman than in its English-language equivalent. For instance, there have been stories, such as Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008, which received a critical coverage in Zaman, but which were

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either missing or more subdued in the English-language Today’s Zaman. Such differences in the coverage suggest that the two versions of the paper may pursue different editorial lines domestically and internationally. 7 Most recently, Zaman very quickly responded to Soner Cagaptay’s article in Newsweek arguing that the “witch hunt” in Turkey regarding the Ergenekon case was due in no small part to the infiltration of the police by members of the Gulen movement. Criticism of Gulen are almost always responded to in a very expeditious manner. 8 It is interesting to note that there have been instances in which stories have been covered differently in Zaman than in its English-language equivalent. For instance, there have been stories, such as Israel’s invasion of Gaza in December 2008, which received a critical coverage in Zaman, but which were either missing or more subdued in the English-language Today’s Zaman. Such differences in the coverage suggest that the two versions of the paper may pursue different editorial lines domestically and internationally. 9 Merve Kavakci was elected as member of Turkey’s parliament in 1997 and attempted to enter the building with her headscarf on, which is prohibited by the Constitution. Eventually, she was stripped of her parliamentary seat and her Turkish citizenship. 10 Specifically, the 1983 constitution largely bequeathed from the military after the 1982 coup, stipulates that veiled women cannot attend universities or enter government buildings. This prevents many veiled young women from pursuing higher education and forces others to attend school outside of Turkey, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s daughter-in-law, who left for the US, and President Abdullah Gul’s wife who sought education in Saudi Arabia. Both Erdogan and Gul’s wives are unable to attend state functions in Turkey due to the headscarf, but can and do so abroad. 11 “Revelations Hurt Gülen, Prosecutor Demands Punishment.” Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review, June 21, 1999. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/h.php?news=revelations-hurt-gulenprosecutor-demands (Accessed 9/6/2009). 12 The latter refers to the alleged existence of an ultra-nationalist organization, called Ergenekon, which tried to destabilize and overthrow the AKP government. The allegations have been aimed at members of the military, academics, journalists, businessmen, and NGO activists, all openly critical of the government, as well as organized crime bosses. Opponents argue that the Ergenekon case is politically-motivated. Methods used in the investigation and trial proceedings have also been criticized, including the indefinite imprisonment of suspects prior to trial, the use of secret witnesses, and emails without verified IP addresses, among others. 13 Although the Gülen movement is controversial at home, it appears that Turkey supports the activities of the movement in Central Asia, as a surrogate in expanding Turkish influence.

7 Conclusion Markus Thiel and Roger Coate

The overall idea of this volume consists in the examination of the salience of collective identities as advanced by globalizing processes. Thus, this book attempts to explain not only how identity-based groups obtained and expanded their values and rights through continuous political and social struggles in an incremental fashion, but specifically studies how global communication patterns and the internationalization of previously domestic politics through transnational agents influenced these identitive actions in a novel way. In doing so, it aims at a conceptual merging of two distinctly different, some would say, opposite, phenomena: on the one hand, we theorized identity politics as being community-anchored, intrinsically localized experiences, attracting and retaining bottom-up support by individuals and groups in a specific local, regional or national setting. On the other hand, we introduced the top-down ramifications of political and communicative globalization, a fairly abstract set of external changes seemingly applicable across the field in a similar manner. Our objective, in this chapter, is to wed these two perspectives and to review how the contributors to this volume have experienced globalizing features in their specific case study and to what degree the initial framework model set up in the introduction is helpful for analyzing the configuration and expansion of collective identities in their political environments. By doing so, we seek to deduct comparative principles resulting from these observations without them being rendered too abstract as to be applied to specific instances and groups. With regards to the local-global nexus found in this work, it becomes apparent that the more identity-based politics transnationalizes, the closer it moves into the strategic realm of a transnational social movement. For the comparative examination of globalizing processes in

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the case studies below, it thus makes sense to adapt from social movement literature what Tarrow (2005) refers to as processes of global framing of domestic issues (in transnational media), internalization (of domestic IGO/INGO presence), diffusion (of international norms), externalization (of issues onto international levels) and lastly, coalition formation (with allied elites and organizations, to which we referred to in the introduction). In contrast to the mainstream social movement literature, however, the contributors in this volume are less concerned with the strategic actions pursued by these actors and governments, but rather how their identities are articulated, reformulated, promoted and maintained in a transnational fashion with the aid of media, INGOs and IGOs. Here, the diffusion of identity-creating and –enhancing norms is more closely connected to collective identities than the transmission of strategies emphasized in social movement literature. Further questions to be answered in this concluding review are if the chapters are indicative of an increasingly transnational collaboration between similarly minded identity-based groups as a result of political globalization: Can one find, as often asserted, a newly empowered and better informed transnational civil society, however organized, across the globe able to challenge doctrinaire notions of governance, or is the openness of the national political context still decisive? Lastly, to what extent can all the precedent identity groups be subsumed under a new human-rights-based movement wave emphasizing the protection and assertion of thirdgeneration collective rights? Most comparative studies of movements rely on cases in a specific region, i.e. in Western Europe or in Latin America, as opportunity structures seem to condition similar background conditions based on minimal standards of democratic governance, economic development and political cultures. As this sort of cohesion is not given in our comparative approach, an overarching similarity of the regionally diverse scholarly work in this volume consists of the “direct relationship between movement activity and the institutional strength and responsiveness of the state in each country” (Landmann 2008, p. 171). The theoretical framework of the social movement literature, however, becomes problematic for further analysis once the type of government response is connected to either a leftist or rightist policy orientation or is preconditioned to the level of attention a policy issue is given within the national political arena (172). In the cases analyzed here, policy orientations can, in contrast to many leftist social movements, actually be also of a rightist-nationalist nature if pursued, for example, by ethnocultural identity groups such as the Hungarians, the Quechua or Gülen adherents. The potential for mobilization, unlike in social movement

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research, therefore cannot be tied to the issue at hand but is predetermined by the salience of the collective identity. Regarding the openness of the government to the demands of an identity politics group, one could make an analogy of presenting ethno-cultural groups as being more radical or threatening to the claims of the dominant group in power, whereas identity-based claims by social minorities are viewed as less competitive. A fundamental ontological difference, however, between issue-based social movements and identity-based politics groups remains: as participant of the collective identity, one inherently recognizes linkages with other individuals from this category and can declare solidarity with fellow group members without having to consciously adopt an issue. It appears that indeed, not only technological advancements in communications, but also the emergence of transnational issues such as human rights, environmental degradation, sustainable development and so forth have propelled the strengthening of identity-based movements to coalesce in support or opposition to existing practices, laws and regimes. In particular, demands for democracy in its multi-faceted aspects have become a focal point, if not as a direct claim at repressive governments, then at a minimum in its expansion through communicative exchanges and practices enabling the spread of democratic ideas and pluralistic norms (Center for the Study of Global Governance 2008). The cases in this study present identity movements in various stages of democratic embeddedness, from the fairly consolidated democratic environment in which ethno-cultural competition in Romania occurs to the oligarchic exclusionary approach of the Mbeki-government in South Africa, to the patronizing communist influence in the ‘autonomous’ Hong Kong region. Most comparativists today would be careful to embrace a world-wide trend towards democratization based on the ability of autocratic regimes to sustain their hold on power through wealth creation and internal control. But in agreement with Diamond and Plattner (2008), our case studies find that independent of government settings, be they democratic or not, individuals find it easier to mobilize and if necessary, circumvent oppressing governments with the help of transnational agents such as media, IGOs and INGOs, and thus legitimize their causes internationally. In this sense, they contribute to the procedural bottomup democratization in each of the countries analyzed here. While much of the current sociology-inspired literature focuses on such bottom-up approaches by asking how social movements such as social justice advocates contest globalization processes (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Smith 2008), create transnational spheres amenable to

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their causes (Guidry, Kennedy and Zald 2000) or aid the domestic implementation of international human rights norms (Risse et al. 1999), the evidence provided here shows how the interactive effects of political globalization, such as new discursive and organizing opportunities and transnational support by IGOs and INGOs, aided the mobilization and maintenance of collective identities. Framing processes, the portrayal and diffusion of issues related to collective identities, are central to this analysis, as are cultural aspects of social reproduction of identitive references, in which these collective identities are embedded and articulated. As such, the former aspect details modes of mobilization, while the latter refers to the structural context in which these actions occur. Thus, the objective of this project is to provide an account of how political globalization impacts upon identity politics in their domestic or regional setting across the globe, not necessarily to explain the building of global single-issue (human or minority rights) movements. Despite this theoretical limitation, all of the cases in this book are based in a distinct national setting yet exert potential to become transnational identity-based movements. Domestic and even subnational, regional configurations allow for collective identities to be articulated in a manner consistent with the group’s language, cultural and communal needs. This is particularly true of the ethno-cultural groups represented here, such as the Hungarians in Vladescu’s case study, the Quechua in Picq’s, or the Gülen movement in Ibryamova’s chapter. A different quality of identity politics emerges in the representational state identity analyzed by Kravtsov, focusing on an embattled national identity under domestic factionalism in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, or in Lam’s non-traditional democracy movement case displaying a distinctively civic identity under pressure from China. All of these, however, are transnational to the extent that similarlyminded collectivities ally together through boundary-crossing discourses and mobilizing opportunities. Hence cross-border mobilizations (referring to the organizational infrastructure) are enabled and international, rather than domestic, opportunity structures (such as transnational governance, and international law and norms) are actively sought and provided. In this context, Hungary is an exemplary state actor providing external partisan support, while other regional indigenous Andean groups collaborate closely across frontiers, and even in the less obvious cases the South African government and their activist opponents were finding outside (state and INGO) allies for their stance, whereas the Democracy movement in Hong Kong referred to the international business community and to Taiwan to substantiate their resistance to domestic pressures. Non-traditional identity collectives,

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then, appear to find fewer resources in kin-communities than ethnocultural ones, which makes it more difficult for them to sustain identity politics. Having recapitulated some of the main questions of this book and the respective agents involved, the section below reviews the case studies according to the identity-based framework. It is followed by a detailed analysis of the application of the main theoretical components of our model, i.e. international media, rights norms and transnational IGO and INGO activity, on the individual studies. Lastly, the ambiguous role of the state and its identity is problematized and avenues for future research provided. Synthesis of the Case Studies

The following paragraphs extract the main arguments of our approach for each case study, highlight the commonalities as well as differences and in the section that follows, triangulate the findings so as to substantiate the main arguments made about the globalizing influences on identity politics. Manuela Picq, as an expert of South American movements, illustrates the sometimes difficult intersectional aspects of gender and ethnic identity, in Ecuador framed in competition to each other. The inception of the indigenous movements was helped significantly by domestic political constellations, such as socialist parties wanting to take advantage of a disenfranchised electorate after voting rights were given to the peasantry in the 1970s. Beyond allying with left-wing parties, various indigenous groups formed the umbrella organization CONAIE, which subsequently became institutionalized as a leveraging force in Ecuadorian politics, setting in motion reforms aimed at improving the educational, social and political participation of indigenous peoples. International fora, mainly equipped by the UN with collective rights norms, generated additional external support for the reification of this ethno-cultural identity. This process, however, produced tensions within indigenous groups as women’s needs fell by the wayside in the process of “strategic essentializing” ethnicity. Women trying to organize a gender-oriented faction within CONAIE were discouraged from doing so. The case illustrates that not only in the public life are women disadvantaged, but domestic violence and lack of education contributes to their malaise. Even worse, the newfound value of indigeneity keeps women from attaining the same rights as men by trapping them in traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures. Here, the framing of collective identity becomes central, and in this case one particular articulation of identity—ethnicity—no matter how successful, impedes

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on or even outright negates the other one, a recurrent theme that spans over all case studies in this volume. When examining the configuration of identity politics by an ethnocultural group—in her case, the Hungarians in Romania—Eloisa Vladescu finds the discourse framed largely in terms of societal security, modernization and human rights policy reforms. Deeply-rooted historical tensions and competing territorial claims between the minority Hungarians and the majority Romanians in the border region of Transylvania prepare the ground for today’s volatile and externally stabilized coexistence of both nations in the newly enlarged European Union. Vladescu traces the emergence of Hungarian identity politics to processes of democratization after the fall of Communism and ultimately, to the conditions set upon Romania by the EU in preparation for membership. She finds congruence between the main points of our model, in particular the role of the print media and the external pressures provided by the international organizations, such as the EU, NATO, etc., that Romania wanted to join in order to mitigate the costs of democratization and modernization. Her work also highlights the diffusion of norms of tolerance and deliberation, pushed by external agents during the critical junctures of democratization in the early 1990s and then again, in preparation for EU membership in the early 2000s. Her case demonstrates the powerful positive impact of external norms and organizations on domestically contested minority rights discourses. Vlad Kravtsov, in his essay on South African responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis, shifts the focus from subnational, smaller identity movements to the exploration of the construction of national identity under adverse conditions of state leadership and political stability. During the internationally recognized fight for cheaper generic drugs by governments in the Global South, certain enabling factors linked HIV/AIDS activism to the construction of South African identity, including localization of self-empowering collective pride; filtration of preferred domestic actors according to the needs of elites in power; and policy resistance as a well-known strategy of contention of hegemonic power. While localization was pursued through the dilettante and ultimately unsuccessful production of domestic generic medication under state guidance, the filtration of permissible non-state interveners and the evasion of transnational coalitions (either with other like-minded states or INGOs) proved to be a result of the nation-centric focus on the autonomous production of medicines. Lastly, underlying anti-colonial and anti–apartheid sentiments actually contributed to a defensive and uncollaborative stance of the South African government vis-à-vis other health-related IGOs and non-state actors in the global health arena.

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Instead, alternative methods and traditional medicines representing African solutions were sought and prescribed. Here, the triangular interconnectedness of various collective identities becomes apparent: as domestic pressure by NGOs and the affected community grew, so did international pressure in the face of a dominant government-created state identity acting against the interest of the former two entities. A religious community displaying identity politics is examined in Nuray Ibryamova’s chapter on the Gülen Movement in Turkey. The country internalized strict secular values after its reorganization by Kemal Ataturk following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This state-mandated secularism currently experiences a form of popular, some would say populist, backlash, recognizable in the heated debate about the role of religion and religious parties in public spheres and the government. The Gülen Movement supports a moderate form of communitarian, nationalistic Islam—thus merging cultural and political values without acting overtly political. It became particularly powerful after the relaxing of educational policies in the 1980s allowing the establishment of private, Gülen-oriented schools and the broadening of economic and political relationships experienced in Turkey through globalization and regional integration. Ibryamova states that economic investments and transnational educational and media outlets enabled the movement to gain an immense following beyond the country’s borders. In fact, Gülen leaders embrace of economic liberalism coupled with an outward-looking attitude towards the opportunities that globalization presents for a rapidly modernizing Turkey, firmly established this religious identity movement as a significant player in Turkish public and political life. The domestic success of the Gülen movement catapulted it across regional borders, in part because of domestic government pressure fearing too much religious influence of the movement, and in part because of a more welcoming environment in terms of religious affinity and more permeable state-church relations in neighboring states. From a theoretical perspective, the Gülen movement runs counter the widespread assumption of religious upheavals against globalization as it actively embraces it by framing it in nationalist terms, although, in agreement with our model, its success is domestically contested and externally facilitated. In their analysis of Hong Kong, Wai-man Lam and Kay Chi-yan Lam posit that Hong Kong’s regional identity as a cosmopolitan and democratic beacon is under pressure by the Chinese government. In particular, they find that in the past few years, the confrontation has continuously grown between the Beijing government, which introduced legislative changes in the election of the executive leadership and

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regulating the activities of civic organizations, and civil society representatives, who resent such interference. The authors highlight the popular protests and media outcries related to the state-mandated Article 23, which specified limitations on civic organizations’ activities if national security was deemed to be threatened. If enacted into law, it would have had a potentially devastating effect on political and press freedoms in the region. Only after much media pressure and demonstrations by 500,000 citizens and numerous (I)NGOs, the planned ordinance was revoked in 2003. Since this time, Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan elite has continued to utilize international connections to non-state organizations such as churches or business chambers of commerce and relationships to the international media observers in order to sustain their demands for the continuance of their democratic system of government in spite of Bejing’s rejection of it. Despite the nontraditional quality of Hong Kong’s identity movement, it neatly fits into the theoretical model established in this volume as evidenced by utilization of cosmopolitan media, norms and IGOs/INGOs. The following sections provide a more detailed account of the major influencing structural factors mentioned in the introductory chapter, as they were captured in the case studies. Access to local and outreach to the global media, local norm advocacy and international norm diffusion and the often competing influence of INGOs and IGOs impact to a varying degree in each context, yet with similar consequences for the maintenance and promotion of collective identities. Global Media, Local Outreach?

The mass media, mobile-virtual devices and other ICT breakthroughs, as presented in the introductory chapter, expanded in reach and power and thus serve more than ever before as a co-constitutive factor in identity politics. Here, we summarize the author’s findings regarding the impact of such media while at the same time probing our initially set assumption of the efficacy of media usage and portrayal. The Gülen movement in Turkey provides analysts with an exemplary use of standard mass as well as online media. Widely read international Gülen-supportive print media, TV channels and an online presence enhanced the popularity of the movement and served as a recruitment mechanism for new members, even transnationally in neighboring states and all the way to the United States. Backed by Gülen’s own financial resources and an array of wealthy individuals and powerful business associations affiliated with his movement, the extensive media coverage, including the most widely circulated paper in

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the country, established the movement as a fixture not only in the national Turkish media, but also the global Islamic media landscape and actively supported as well as utilized the opportunities that globalized, diversified media, in conjunction with educational outreach, offer—in part precisely to circumvent national restrictions. Here, media access and media portrayal are closely intertwined as the movement undertook early on not only to attain access to media but also to establish outlets, thus controlling their portrayal as well. In Lam’s case study of Hong Kong, online and print media work in a more complex fashion. On one hand, at play was the liberal, cosmopolitan outlook of Western-oriented media outlets advocating on behalf of the population and the reputation of the city in the world. On the other, the Chinese government, through the pronouncements of installed government and publishing executives and pro-Beijing journalists, decried any disturbance caused by popular resistance to the legal and political sinification of this region as hurting the image of Hong Kong. In fact, a nationalist counter-discourse is slowly being created in which, for example, the national hymn is being broadcasted daily and Chinese holidays receive special attention. The authors present evidence of the creeping erosion of press freedoms and renationalization in the post-handover period. This process is critically viewed and denounced by international religious, trade union and human rights organizations, such as Churches, Amnesty International, etc., but is also reprimanded in the international press, which spreads the message of China’s repressive stance towards Hong Kong around the world, thus generating global pressure. In this case, the complex triangular interplay of the identity group, the state and international medial entities becomes apparent, which is always present in our case studies, but not equally pronounced. This strong interdependency also surfaces in Picq’s study of Ecuadorian indigenous women. All three levels, from Quechua groups to state leaders to representatives of international non-state IGOs and NGOs, present themselves as promoters of indigenous rights as this sort of ethno-national discourse seems more attractive and profitable than a purely feminist one. In doing so, the ethnic groups gain more attention, material resources and political representation, while at the same time leaders such as Ecuador’s President Correa fortifies not only his domestic legitimacy, but solidarity with other leftist leaders in the region and the global social-justice movement. The surprising embrace of new ICTs by desolated and marginalized indigenous elites presents a prime example of the twenty-first century mélange of technological innovation and traditional appeals—precisely to address issues of

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underdevelopment. The contributions by Picq and Vladescu are similar in that they represent ethno-national groups, but differences in the state reaction are evident. Whereas in Picq’s case indigenous women find support for their ethno-cultural demands from the state, thereby exposing the weakness of their gender identity, the Hungarians in Romania fight against a government perceived as being unaccountable to the minority and regional socio-political dynamics. In the region, Hungarian media and language use stabilized the collective identity held by the Transylvanian minority. In addition, the attention focused on Romania’s general elections in 2000 became an internationally broadcasted test for the country’s maturity in the run-up to EU accession in 2007. Normative expressions of the country’s desire to “return to Europe” and to respond to human rights demand placed on it by the EU and the Council of Europe (CoE) were at first contested in “European” versus “nationalist” papers and TV stations, but also subsequently internalized. Kravtsov presents the role of the media as ambiguous as well. He notes that while most global media was critical of South Africa’s HIVcare choices, the national media consciously framed the government’s attempts at medical independence as an empowering post-apartheid success story. Here, most media outlets acted rather state-controlled, disregarding any sort of international criticism while at the same time disbanding of the inquisitive power of journalism. HIV/AIDS advocacy groups seemed to be almost entirely excluded from health-care formulation by way of the government’s filtering and evasion processes, and their coalition-building occurred in spite of the government’s stance, not with its support. As in Vladescu’s case, the national media and some international anti-globalization outlets were split in support for the government’s push for medical autonomy and the alternative, yet insufficient, provision of traditional African medicines as propagated in speeches and declarations domestically and abroad. In a similar manner, the government successfully framed the issue at hand as matter of state identity —in the case of Romania as a matter of European reintegration and in the case of South Africa as post-apartheid anti-racism. The differences play out on the level of the identity movements: for the Hungarians minority, this construction worked in their favor as it provided accommodation, yet it meant additional challenges for protreatment coalitions in South Africa—though it was overcome later with support of the international health community. That identity movements utilize available mass media to promote their cause has been firmly established in this and other works, yet aside from the notion of the boomerang pattern little has been discovered

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about the identitive references in media outlets. Our contributors find the role of the media in most all cases as an enabling one for the propagation of collective identities on a national level, but also a transnational media-based circumvention of adverse domestic forces occurs, be it through external partisan outlets (such as in the Hungarian or South African case), international organizations (in the case of indigenous Ecuadorian women), like-minded world-wide business and human rights communities (as in the case of Hong Kong) or in the pursuit of expanded opportunities abroad (as in Gülen’s media transmittal from the United States). A further differentiation rests not only on the effects of media externalization, i.e. the anticipated and unexpected effects of media utilization, but on the increase in coverage and thus, promotion, of a certain group’s identity or norms. If one was to simply orient him or herself on the output, i.e. changes in behavior by societies and governments, then one would neglect the fact that by simply reaching a wider regional, national or global audience, many identity movements profit from (inter)national awareness of their situation or existence— even if they don’t reap immediate benefits. The utilization of media does not always manifest in actual policy changes, but it incrementally produces consciousness of the issue at hand in public domestic and international spheres and aids in the diffusion of permissible norms. The two major venues through which media involvement is pursued are the national public spheres and the rather thinly developed transnational arenas of communication. The former is anchored in tradition and market penetration but can be equally beneficial and damaging for identity movements, while the latter tends to be created by elitist opinion-makers. Independent of these localities, mass and ICT media enable identity movements to be heard to an extent previously impossible and to spread their messages and normative expectations. At the same time, a differentiation of media-politics regarding domestic and international outlets is in order, depending on the degree of domestic governmental support and pre-existing norms. The Importance of International Norm Diffusion

International norm diffusion entails two aspects. On the one hand, it refers to the directionality of diffusion across regional, domestic and transnational public spheres. The second aspect emphasizes the content of such norms, whether it be localized norms that are externalized onto the international arena or, as occurs more and more frequently, the invocation of internationally recognized human and minority rights

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norms. The intent here is to focus on the differentiation between local and international norm adoption in the governing context in which claims for identity promotion are embedded. In Picq’s case study of indigenous women in Ecuador, successfully internalized international norms of social justice and cultural authenticity seem to clash with hierarchically lower relegated ideas about gender equality. For one, gender is not as politically effective in claim-making against the state as ethnicity. But, according to the author, it also is rejected as too Western, and ironically it is too universal to be meaningful in the local context. This content-based normative friction is, however, caused by considerations based on diffusion tactics. Norms of retribution and equality propagated by ethnic movements in Ecuador seem more effective in negotiations with the government, but they also resound with and are influenced by larger indigenous rights bodies in the international community (see below). International norms such as the ILO Convention 169 are domestically invoked to protect indigenous rights and territory as well as the establishment of an indigenous UNForum to advance and coordinate respective claims signify that external, globalizing forces increasingly impact on the emancipation of this identity movement. The author sees the growing transnational environmental awareness as another contributing area in which indigenous knowledge provides added legitimacy. She highlights the bidirectional socialization process by which elites engage in a learning process initiated from outside, but to which they respond by strengthening their own organization from bottom-up. Identity formation occurs both from below through indigenous struggles, and also from the outside-in, catalyzed by international norms. In doing so, the CONAIE group claims their externally supported status as one representing a new regional, if not global, aspiration for social justice, cultural diversity and ecological awareness. The case of the Hungarian minority in Romania represents yet another case in which international, EU- and OSCE-mandated norms of liberal coexistence, subsidiarity and minority rights have profound effects on the restructuring of the domestic political organization and thus, on the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. In particular, the provision of localized minority rights, such as political representation and cultural autonomy, were bound together with the long-term democratization of Romania, which had begun years earlier and was conditioned to the entrance into the European Union in the future. While the public at large seemed initially unresponsive to the introduction of these ‘new’ norms and policies, it also did not want to risk the reintegration into the EU nor face a repeat of previous ethno-

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national clashes in Transylvania. Building on a number of studies confirming the case, Vladescu expands this notion by pointing out that the negotiation over minority rights also produced a growth of diplomatic negotiation exchanges and enabled an opening in the channels of communication. This proved to have significant, stabilizing long-term effects in the diffusion of norms of tolerance and cultural pluralism. This case contrasts starkly to the rather difficult encounter of group and state norms in Kravtsov’s case of South African identity construction. On the one hand, transnational actors such as the WHO and various HIV/AIDS advocacy groups built a mainstream consensus on how to best defuse the epidemic crisis by negotiating better access to and lower prices of antiviral medication (usually produced by large international pharmaceuticals), by increasing its distribution and building up preventative measures aimed at risk populations. Domestic governmental constellations in South Africa, insistent on the development of counter-norms ranging from autarky-mindedness to anti-Western/Racial sentiment, while ultimately unsuccessful and coinciding with attempts to establish alternative, traditional African norms of epidemic containment, thus prevented effective strategy development and collaboration with the international advocacy movement. More specifically, Kravtsov developed a typology of domestic norms which became evident in the government’s quest for an ‘African Renaissance’ identity: localization norms focused on South African independence, a filtering and evasion strategy aimed at preferential government treatment of certain civil society actors, and state-advocated notions of resistance towards the international mainstream approach of combating the disease. In this sense, not only were domestic state and international humanitarian norms clashing, as is evident from the other cases in this book, but we find transnational efforts to develop indigenous, anti-colonial counter-norms by Mbeki’s government and like-minded sub-Saharan states, clashing with a more conciliatory stance of the global HIV/AIDS advocacy scene. In Ibryamova’s study, the Gülen movement spread traditional moderate Islamic values such as communitarianism and public service to a wide, religiously oriented audience in Turkey and beyond, aided by political and economic liberalization starting in the 1980s. In contrast to the South African resistance strategy or the Ecuadorian competition of gender and ethno-cultural norms, religious-pious values in Turkey were successfully dispersed, supported by an array of media and educational outlets in part affiliated with or owned by Gülen and his adherents. Despite strong state secularism, its nominal apolitical configuration

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provided the movement legitimacy in the eyes of the government and the largely religious population alike. There even seems to have been an extension of self-enhancing Islamic-nationalist values as well as entrepreneurial life and work ethics implied in the movement’s teaching of religious tolerance, economic betterment and international human rights. Some questioned these universal values on grounds that they simply reify the movement’s standing against an overly zealous secular state, yet their nationalist appeal, highlighting allegiance and patriotism, allies more closely with the Turkish government’s norms and values, which finds itself in a process of identity change brought about by Globalization and Europeanization. In contrast to the previous case studies, Hong Kong’s established local norms of political liberalism, pluralism and pragmatism in the Lam case became challenged after the political handover from the British by the Chinese government. Different than with ‘newly’ emerged movements such as the Gülen one in Turkey or traditional ethnic minorities as the Hungarians in Transylvania, the Hong Kong people are territorially a regional majority, but a minority within mainland China. Here, existing cosmopolitan norms and values are challenged by the ‘legitimate’ Beijing government seeking a distribution of different norms in alignment with the official ‘soft-authoritarianism,’ mixed with nationalist Confucian values of a ‘harmonious’ society. The latter in particular is advocated so as to quell public resistance to the curtailing of civic freedoms in the city, although all government-related actions aim at the supposed establishment of the rule of law. International norms were present in Hong Kong throughout its colonial past and retained somewhat through its current status as special autonomous region, and these, together with the close relationships to other international organizations, have become the identitive reference points for the people of Hong Kong. These values, however, are at times internally contested as well, perceived as foreign to the Beijing government and not recognized as part of Hong Kong’s official identity and thus diluted by the reorganization of educational and cultural policies in line with the ‘sinicization’ of the region. At the same time, international democratic and neo-liberal norms propagated by newspapers, business chambers etc. are being held up against the Beijing government to sustain the region’s independence. These case studies make apparent that normative claims and their diffusion matter to sustain the collective identity, as well as on a government level. In the past, the norms and values projected by governmental power remained overwhelmingly dominant so that identity politics in the national arena possessed few legitimate ways of

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value expression, and norm promotion. As the examples in this volume show, globalization has fundamentally altered the majority-minority relationship by introducing additional influencing variables conducive to the legitimization of group norms and the realization of internationally held human and minority standards. Where local rights claims are echoed by internationally recognized norms and are embedded in the workings of IGOs and INGOs, they become reinforced and eventually, a significant challenge to the existing set of rules and values a government possesses. On the other hand the relative isolation of identity movements allows states to project their supportive, traditional norms not only onto domestic minorities but also to externalize these norms to a significant degree onto the international system. The Impact of IGOs and INGOs

The reverberations of IGOs and INGOs should be conceptually distinguished not only by the obvious separation of trans-governmental and non-governmental structures and objectives, but also with regards to their efficacy. Whereas IGOs are often constrained by state governments in the provision of redress to minorities, INGOs as the main nexus between movements and IGOs are much less restricted in providing assistance—but also less powerful. The degree of NGO influence varies with the issue at hand and the INGO-access provided by IGOs involved (Joachim and Locher 2009) in identity promotion. In Picq’s case studies of two almost exclusive identity movements in Ecuador, both gender- and ethnicity-based groups find a readily available international support structure mainly offered by the United Nations. For both sets of identity movements, the UN proved instrumental by creating the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues (PFII) open to every indigenous person and enhancing the availability of UNIFEM’s national office in Quito, the programming of World Bank loans and beyond. Furthermore, the creation of Ecuador’s CONAIE as one of the most powerful indigenous organization in the world reinforced the dominant status of ethnicity as political identity. Yet, the strength of this transnational connectedness was compromised by the fact that these inter- and transnational fora seemed to compete alongside the valuation of the respective collective identity that was being instrumentalized among female Ecuadorian indigenous people in order to receive a maximum of material and political support. The current mainstreaming of gender and ethnicity through the prioritization of female indigenous projects in the aid disbursement by IGOs aims at mitigating the competing influences of both identity characteristics.

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A similarly ambiguous positioning of IGOs and INGOs implemented on the one hand EU and CoE rules of minority protection in Transylvania, but on the other hand encouraged INGOs to agitate and claim rights on behalf of the Hungarian minority, most often framed under the umbrella of ‘human rights.’ Yet, norms of liberal pluralism and ethnocentrism seemed to compete within the respective area of competence of each of these non-state actors, indicating that the—at times competing—input of NGOs representing collective rights and IGOs territorial integrity as well as minority rights, was more contentious than often acknowledged. Particularly in cases where INGOs teamed up and collaborated with transgovernmental IOs, they achieved a stronger resonance and leverage than simply by internationalizing the groups’ objectives among the media and a global public. In this sense, the linkage of INGOs and IGOs produced an amplified boomerang effect for domestic identity movements. An entirely different effect materialized initially in the South African case study. There was neither a linkage of pro-retroviral INGOs and IGOs with the domestic civil society against the recalcitrant government, nor was there a detectable positive transgovernmental impact on Mbeki’s government. First off, the role of IGOs was ambiguous to say the least. In the early 2000s, Mbeki’s cabinet was being stifled by existing intellectual property rights regimes of the WTO while at the same time being provided with material and ideational support by the WHO. The government at no point had an interest in establishing links with either group of mainstream actors representing ‘pharmaceutical colonialism,’ although, as the author points out, partnerships with such transnational actors were essential. Instead, any outside influence was evaded by the government, while at the same time sought by domestically neglected activists. HIV/AIDS activist sought the aid of the international health community and other activist alliances to bolster their own stance and to discredit the domestic government. Only after years of an unsuccessful pursuit of pharmaceutical autonomy and an international name-and-shame period, in which South Africa was unanimously accused by other INGOs, IGOs and major states as mishandling the epidemic, the government and thus, national health strategies, changed. In Hong Kong, INGOs found in the past a rich pedigree of pluralist values and a cosmopolitan perspective which allowed political and human rights, labor, religious, media, legal, professional, publishing and academic, educational, economic organizations to thrive. Since 1997, these organizations have come under scrutiny as they have to mitigate Hong Kong’s democratic practices with China’s communist ideology.

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Yet, the people of Hong Kong remained in contact with other democracies around the world and closer to the mainland, such as Taiwan, which is another thorn in the eyes of Beijing. INGOs and local civic associations have been allowed to exist and act in the city according to Hong Kong’s Basic Law, but have been challenged by the intended introduction of Article 23, which could have easily put them under suspicion of interference with governmental doctrine. Both, intergovernmental entities such as the European Parliament as well as large INGOs such as Amnesty International were instrumental in articulating und mobilizing popular protest, which eventually led to the defeat of the imposed law, and over 100 of them were actively involved in the popular uprising even if they didn’t have offices or chapters in the city. Here again the boomerang effect occurred, whereby domestic democratic activists appealed to the larger international community, including IGOs and INGOs and thus achieved a resounding support to contest the state’s original intention. Comparatively, less is known about the impact of non-governmental actors on the identity politics of the Gülen movement. There, the movement operates fairly independent and without the need to appeal to such transnational actors as contemporaneously domestic business and civic associations provide significant backing within Turkey. Sharing similar socio-political objectives, the current government is in fact moderately supportive of the group’s activities, and vice versa. In addition to these domestically framed relationships, the perspective of EU accession provided an external impetus for the government to become more tolerant of such religious groups and cultural minorities, and thus supplied legitimacy to the previously discouraged exercise of religion. The transnationalization of the movement parallels the growth of Turkey’s political opening, regional integration into the EU and through the strength of the movement’s own transnational business linkages and educational and media outlets in over 100 countries globally. In summary, it can be said that while for all identity-based movements, human or minority rights are the main objectives, INGO activity and IGO involvement proves more successful where no major material or governmental repercussions can be expected from accommodating such demands (which were particularly pronounced in the negative impact on the South African pharma-industry or, conversely, in the conducive prospects for Hong Kong’s status as major trade and finance locus). Moreover, access to IGOs conditions the efficacy of INGOs and thus, identity politics were facilitated in cases that allowed for supportive IGO and INGO access (such as in the

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Romanian or Ecuadorian examples), but became more inhibited in cases that lacked such strong contacts (as in the Hong Kong or South Africa). At the Intersection of Identities, Media, Norms and IGOs/INGOs

Collective identities, as represented by the movements in this volume, experience a dichotomous, at times paradoxical, reifying process in that the increased political engagement with agents from outside necessitates a defined and thus somewhat essentialized profile of the group, its needs and aspirations. At the same time this essentializing process leads in some cases to a stereotyping of intersectional identities (as in the case of indigenous women) or an explicit admission of vulnerability or marginalization (as in the examples of HIV/AIDS activists or democracy supporters). Hence the fostering of such identitive positions through political exchange with external agents such as the domestic government or transnational actors officially certifies the ambiguous and often problematic existence of identity movements, in addition to the actually experienced marginalization of these groups. In all studies presented here, the progression from inward-looking identity formation to outward-oriented identity politics engenders counter-reactions, suspicion or control by governments. The instrumental social reproduction of a group identity also restricts individual as well as collective freedom of action: as much as a person acts in many roles over the course of his or her life, so exist identity-based groups in a variety of constellations such as social movements, culturally bounded communities and (transnational) social networks. An added ambiguous repercussion of the above mentioned external factors pertains to the dichotomous effects of mass media and international norms: both of these factors can exert detrimental effects in the way mass and new media (mis)inform and skew messages about the group, and international norms may restrict identitive expressions when clashing with pre-existing majoritarian norms. In this respect, cultural and even religious groups (as in the case of the Hungarian minority, indigenous Ecuadorian women or the adherents to the Gülen movement) in interaction with structural agents are more often represented as territorially and socially established entities and thus, are attested a higher degree of legitimacy, whereas non-spatial or social identity movements (such as Hong Kong democrats or South African HIV/AIDS activists) lack such attribution yet profit from a broader global appeal in order to assemble a variety of international supporters. All of the external variables such as media, norms and INGOs/IGOs do not simply operate in an isolated manner in identity politics and

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should therefore be considered alongside and in relation with each other. IGOs function as creators and diffusers of international norm, which are then picked up by the (trans-)national media, INGOs and identity groups, and accordingly propagated, contested or ignored. States also play a prominent role in issue framing and identity promotion, as will be detailed below. IGOs increasingly seek to utilize the expertise of NGOs and movement actors in their programs. Representing their claims and posturing legitimacy, identity movements—and the INGOs supporting them—exhibit knowledge of the issues at hand and are equipped with multiple strategies for the attainment of their objectives. INGOs in particular specialize in gaining access to media outlets and (trans-) governmental institutions. In doing so, the new information and communication technologies are being utilized to advance informational policies and advocacy work on behalf of their clients. Media access remains not only essential for coverage of the problematic sociopolitical challenges identity movements face but can also be more readily utilized by professional NGOs operating on behalf of disadvantaged minorities to coordinate and exchange information and bargaining strategies. On a more technical level, new media thus aid the coordination and lobbying efforts of advocacy groups: “NGO representatives can be much more confident and better prepared to engage government officials. Online fora broaden the discussion of issues, positions, and strategies” (Hanson 2008, p. 191). The effect of the media utilization by NGOs seems two-fold. On one hand, it enables a coordination and discussion among NGOs and their clients, and on the other it improves the responsiveness of NGOs in contact with governmental entities—the latter representing political elites which are pressured to get accustomed to the constant supervision by watchdog media outlets and NGOs. The governments either adapt to the media pressure in many cases by proceeding more transparent (as seen in the case of Hungarians in Romania), they evade external oversight (as in the South African case) or claim national exceptionalism against norm adoption (as in the case of Hong Kong). Furthermore, the utilization of the media by identity movements and the media portrayal of issues of concern to these groups and the state they find themselves in produces effects on the strengthening and externalization of local group, domestic governmental as well as on the diffusion and internalization of international human and minority norms. Each of these sites of contestation remains firmly bound to their set of norms and values, but transnational cooperation and coordination as

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well as emergent notions of required human rights standards impact favorably on the local and domestic context in which identity-based minorities live and operate. In comparison to the introductory model, one of the main determinants of identity politics, then, emerges in the strength of state (identity) and movement representation through INGOs in IGOs. In cases where there is little direct as well as indirect medial-discursive representation by both sets of actors, such as, for example, in Hong Kong or in South Africa, the state will likely remain in the traditional dominant position and thus, severely constrain identity politics exerted by such movements. In cases where there exists a relatively strong institutionalization of transnational bonds with INGOs and/or media outlets, as in Romania, Ecuador or Turkey, identity politics tend to produce favorable results for the affected group, otherwise the status quo in the power relationship prevails, as the calibrated model below graphically shows: Figure 2: Identity Politics with Strong IGO/INGO Representation of Movement and State

Identity Movement

MobilizingStructure: INGOs

State Identity

Impact of ICT/ Mass Media & Diffusion of Int’l Norms Mobilizing Structure: IGOs

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What Identities do States Assume?

The theoretical framework and the case studies of this volume confirmed and advanced knowledge of the ‘internationalization (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Tarrow 2005) processes that identity politics undergo. In particular, they found that non-state actors, be they IGOs, INGOs, identity movements or mass and ‘new’ media, possess far greater leverage over framing and mobilization processes than in the past. Globalization aided the development of technology for nonrelational information and norm diffusion, created new transnational issues together with the ensuing regime formation, and provided political as well as discursive, virtual spaces for identity groups. The sections above synthesized how collective identity groups in concrete circumstances utilize local-global media, stimulate the transnational diffusion of international norms and appeal to widely available and supportive IGO and INGO allies to maintain and in some cases, promote their identities. The augmented role of transnational supporting factors, however, does not change the fact that the state is still the most eminent domain which affects and constrains identity politics in their immediate domestic environment, as can clearly be seen in Kravtsov’s case study of South Africa or in the Lam’s one of Hong Kong. It is not argued here that states possess unitary identities or that they have become obsolete—but that identity politics are becoming more pronounced and forceful in promoting their claims as international media, INGOs and IGOs and international norms provide significant alternatives to previous limited confrontational strategies vis-à-vis the state. More importantly, while much of the literature about state identity emphasizes the external mutual recognition and elite interactions as formative for state identity (Katzenstein 1996; Wendt 1999), our examples highlight the under-analyzed identity-forging power of minority politics on a state’s identity. A government’s endogenously derived identity is thus co-constituted by the challenges that identitybased movements pose in the domestic realm, either through identity as a purposeful constitutive element or as a regulatory one prescribing cohesion (Kowert 2010). Many of our examples speak to the challenges minorities create to the ongoing construction of state identity. This process becomes further complicated when such a domestic, reactive state identity has to be reconciled with the externally assumed or prescribed identity a state inherits in its international relations or assumes in IGOs. Particularly in the South African, Romanian and Hong Kong cases, the pressures exerted domestically reverberate into the

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international sphere, eventually leading to a change in policy as a result of the previous discrepancy. For states, it becomes evident that, depending on the issue and the degree of international norm agreement about it, a process applies in which governments can foster their functional state identity as well, either in support of (as in Ecuador or Romania) or in opposition to (as in South Africa and Hong Kong) international forces—or, it can remain relatively unaffected by and ambiguous about these, as in the Turkish case study. The overall supporting and facilitating effect of globalizing external factors and actors encourages identity movements, but it does not automatically mean that a strong global human rights regime will be vanguarded by identity movements. Too much power is still vested in state authorities relative to domestic non-state actors, and, as constituent parts and cofounders of the regulatory IGO landscape, they have learned to resist media pressures, evade criticism by other states and organizations and question the legitimacy of ‘universally’ accepted human and minority rights norms. Territorial integrity as favored by Andean governments still conditions rights for indigenous women in Ecuador. State sovereignty still reigns in the democratic ambitions of the Hong Kong region. And state-mandated secularity continues to dampen religious aspirations for an Islamic Turkish state. Governments remain the preeminent confrontational actor for identity-based groups, but increasingly, alternative routes are being made available by media outlets and the support of INGOs/IGOs. Another note of caution relates to identity movements facing powerful states in the international system. Recent research points to the fact that some IGO bodies (such as the UN’s Security and the contentious Human Rights Councils) express little support for minority groups confronting emerging powers as this would be viewed as potentially endangering the diplomatic and economic relationship with, for example, China, Sudan, or Russia (ECFR 2009). The case study of the successful protest of democracy promoters in Hong Kong seems rather exceptional under these circumstances. Viewed in this light, governments still remain preeminent actors to the degree that they proactively shape their domestic public spheres and public policies with regards to minorities and influence IGOs in their formulation of common human and minority standards. Yet states that follow a reactionary model of domestic control and transnational isolation and obtrusion in human and minority rights matters experience negative repercussions not only from bottom-up domestic identity movements, but also from an array of external media forces, transgovernmental bodies and powerful liberal states. Future research

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could address questions of how states react to such demands external structural agents and processes, something this volume did not set out to explore. One could also expand the array of regional and identitive experiences or compare various forms of identity politics in a single case study so as to substantiate our theoretical assumptions across a range of countries and identity movements. Seen from a theoretical perspective, the fact that the political opportunity model is focused on domestic conditions demands greater attention to the effects of globalization and internationalization on such structures beyond national settings. Sociological movement theories have begun to take account of these new settings, particularly with regards to transnational social justice networks, although the augmented roles of INGOs, IGOs and other states point to the essential analytical lenses of international relations scholarship, which has begun to take note of the diversification of political agents in world politics. By merging the fields of politics, international relations and sociology and incorporating a social constructivist ontology, the knowledge about the nature of identity politics as well as its effects on surrounding sociopolitical structures is enhanced. Identity politics are not sudden or unique phenomena, but consist of observable group processes with underlying identitive and evolving strategic structures. This volume aimed at deepening the knowledge of external factors on collective identity promotion and maintenance by contextualizing an identity politics model and drawing conclusions for identity movements and states alike. In this sense, identity politics in the age of globalization has not done away with either movement or government, but it has changed the configuration of power between these depending on the ability to utilize media, involve INGOs/IGOs and evoke internationally acknowledged human and minority rights norms.

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The Authors

Roger Coate is Paul D. Coverdell Endowed Chair of Public Policy at Georgia College & State University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former Director of the Richard L. Walker Institute of International Studies at the University of South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and holds a M.A. from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on public policy related to multilateral relations, international organization and global governance. His specific areas of expertise include: the UN system, international organization reform, international administration and development, the role of civil society in global governance, nonprofit management, public-private partnerships, and U.S. multilateral foreign policy. He is author or co-author of more than a dozen books and monographs, including: United Nations Politics: Responding to a Challenging World; The United Nations and Changing World Politics; International Cooperation in Response to AIDS; United States Policy and the Future of the United Nations; Unilateralism, Ideology and United States Foreign Policy: The U.S. In and Out of UNESCO, and The Power of Human Needs in World Society. Nuray V. Ibryamova is Assistant Professor in International Relations and European Politics at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Miami. Her main research interests are in the area of European Union enlargement, membership conditionality, and Turkish foreign policy. She is the co-author (along with Bradley Thayer) of Debates in International Relations (Pearson Education 2010), and is currently working on a book manuscript on the causes and consequences of the eastern enlargement of the European Union.

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Vlad Kravtsov is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He has previously taught at the Northern Illinois University and the Russian State University for the Humanities. His previous publication on the HIV/AIDS politics in South Africa appeared in Global Society. Wai-man Lam is Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong. Her major research interests include identity politics, political culture and political participation, democratization, civil society and social movements. She is the author of Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization (M.E. Sharpe 2004), and editor of Contemporary Hong Kong Politics: Governance in Post-1997 Era (Hong Kong University Press 2007). She has published in The China Quarterly, Asian Journal of Women Studies, Citizenship Studies, and elsewhere. Kay Chi-yan Lam received her Bachelor of Social Sciences and Master of Philosophy from The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include party politics, civil society, political co-optation, and Hong Kong politics in general. She has been tutoring courses in various subjects ranging from Hong Kong politics, comparative politics to public administration, at The University of Hong Kong. In March 2010, she finished a presentation in the conference of China’s Policies on Its Borderlands and Their International Implications, Macao. Manuela Picq is visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Her doctoral research on the international politics of human rights in Brazil won the 2005 Barrett Prize for best dissertation on a Latin American topic and she received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. As a professor of international relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, she refocused her research on the rights of indigenous women in the Andes. Recent publications include “Gender Within Ethnicity: Human Rights and Identity Politics in Ecuador” (2008) in O’Donnell, Tulchin, and Varas (eds) New Voices in the Study of Democracy in Latin America, (Woodrow Wilson International

The Authors

201

Center for Scholars) and “Exclusión política de mujeres indígenas en Chimborazo” (2009) in Pequeño (ed.) Participación y políticas de mujeres indígenas en América Latina (FLACSO). She is currently working on the gender dimension of indigenous justice in Ecuador, serves as program track-chair for the 2010 Latin American Studies Association and the vice-president for the Ecuadorian Studies Session. Markus Thiel is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) at Florida International University. His research interests are European (Union) Politics, Nationalism & Identity (Politics), International Organizations and Political Sociology more generally. He has published several EU-related articles and book chapters at the EU Center, University of Miami, as well as in Transatlantic Monthly, Tamkang Journal of International Affairs, the International Studies Compendium and Perspectives on European Politics & Society. He just published a co-edited volume with Lisa Prügl on ‘Diversity and the European Union’ (Palgrave, 2009) and his manuscript on ‘Transnationalism in the EU’ is being revised for publication. Eloisa Vladescu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on the impact of corruption and EU membership on FDI inflows in Eastern Europe. She is the author of several articles published at the EU Center, University of Miami. She has worked as an Editorial Assistant at the Miami European Union Center of Excellence.

Index Advocacy, 13, 37, 47, 49, 52, 120, 128-129, 152, 164, 167. See also Identity Politics Africa(nism), 15, 24, 107-130 Asia, 19, 24, 30, 63-4, 68, 76-7, 140, 151, Boomerang Model, 12-13, 112, 164, 170-171 China, 16-17, 24, 57-81, 153, 168, 170, 176 Citizen(ship), 18, 22, 33, 35, 45, 48, 56, 61, 63-64, 68-9, 72 Claims, 4, 12, 24, 29, 33, 39, 47-49, 69, 84-85, 87, 92, 101, 157, 160, 166 Colonialism, 39, 121-122, 170. See also Africanism Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), 34-51, 159, 166 Constructivism, 2, 8, 16, 26, 48, 111, 177 Cosmopolitan(ism), 40, 48, 57-81, 161-162 Council of Europe, 17, 91-2, 98-100, 104, 145, 164 Culture, 2-3, 10, 12, 13-14, 23-24, 28-29, 39-41, 44, 58, 59, 80, 86, 90, 93, 103, 133 Democracy, 18, 30, 39-40, 54, 62-63, 65-70, 87-89, 113, 135, 138, 144, 149, 157 Discourse, 1, 4, 7, 10, 15, 29, 32-33, 38, 41, 54, 61-62, 68-73, 77, 96, 108, 124, 159 Discrimination, 12, 19, 22, 32, 39, 41, 49, 53, 99, 104, 110, 114 Economy: 60, 65, 75, 117, 127, 143; Neoliberal, 6, 38, 113-114 Ecuador, 29, 31-56, 159, 163, 166, 169, 176 Education, 25, 35, 39, 41, 52, 64, 68, 89-90, 98, 104, 133, 135, 138143, 146, 151, 161

Elites, 8, 18, 21, 31, 61, 66, 107, 110, 112-114, 118, 132, 140, 148, 152, 160, 166 Elections, 16, 42, 63, 67, 70, 80, 88, 90, 91, 95-6, 134, 138, 145, 161, 164 Essentialism, 2, 8, 9, 44-45, 111, 132, 159, 172 Europe, 4, 19, 30, 79, 84, 86-9, 92, 95, 99-100, 104, 112, 145, 156, 164, 166 European Union (EU), 19-20, 22, 30, 79, 83-106, 145, 148-9, 160, 164, 166, 170 EU. See European Union Framing, 2, 3, 10-12, 21, 26, 32, 65, 71-2, 84, 92, 103, 105, 125, 156, 158, 160, 173 Gender, 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, 23, 31-56, 111, 159, 166, 169. See Women, GLBT Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT), 1, 10, 24, 25, 110. See also Gender, Minorities Globalization, 1, 3, 5-7, 12-13, 16, 25-26, 28, 40, 44, 60, 65, 83, 9394, 103-104, 108, 112-113, 127, 133, 146-147, 156-158, 161, 175 Government(s), 4, 7-8, 15, 18-21, 23, 35-6, 51, 57-9, 61, 65-8, 70-80, 84-7, 91, 93, 97-101, 105, 108, 112, 116-120, 122-130, 142-3, 144-5, 148, 156-173 History, 33, 39, 51, 58, 60, 84-86, 112, 132, 137, 160 HIV/AIDS, 20, 27, 30, 107-130, 158, 160, 168, 170, 172 Hong Kong, 24, 29, 58-81, 157-158, 163, 168, 170-171 Human Rights, 3, 7, 13, 16-7, 37, 39, 43, 54, 57, 62, 77-78, 83, 91, 9798, 100-102, 105, 109, 113, 144145, 156-158, 163-165, 170, 173 Hungary, 83-106, 158

203

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Index

Identity: Collective, 1-4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 23, 27, 44, 58, 83, 87, 92-3, 94, 97, 102, 105, 109, 112, 155-158, 161-164, 172, 175; National, 7-8, 13, 57, 59-60, 64, 68-69, 83, 90, 92-94, 96, 102-103, 107-116, 134, 139, 152, 157, 158, 163, Identity Politics: Definition of, 1-8; political environment of, 9-26, 45; 80-81, 83-106, 108-109, 132, 146, 149-152; 157-159; 162 ; as Ethno-cultural Politics: 32-37; 160-161; Intersectional, 49-53; Institutionalization of, 105; 106110; 174-175; Politics Model, 14, 174. See also Minority Rights, Ethno-Politics, Essentialism, Intersectionality Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), 14-16, 47, 67, 109, 162-165, 174 Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs), 2, 12, 28, 94, 97 IGO. See Intergovernmental Organization International Organizations, 20, 28, 34-35, 39, 46-47, 50, 72-3, 78, 80, 83, 95, 97, 100, 104-105, 119, 124-125, 169-171. See Intergovernmental Organizations, (International) Non-governmental Organizations Language, 34, 40, 44, 48, 58, 68, 85, 94, 102-103, 141, 158, Latin America, 19, 23, 31-35, 38, 46, 53-54, 156. See also Ecuador Intersectionality, 11-12, 32, 49-53 Law(s): 3, 4, 12, 17, 18, 22, 36, 42, 44, 47, 57, 69, 70, 97, 98,100, 101, 133, 157, 171; Reform, 69, 83, 92-97, 104-105, 168; International, 40, 59, 60, 63, 158; Rule of, 60, 61, 62, 73, 74-75 , 76-80, 138 Majority, 3, 8, 12, 18, 22, 83, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 103, 144, 160, 168, 169. See also Minority Media, 2, 8, 12-16, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 40, 53, 65, 67, 71, 71-72, 73, 77, 78, 83, 84, 92-97, 103-105,

109, 122, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139-147, 150, 151, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 162-165, 170, 171, 171-174, 175, 176, 177. See also ICT, Newspapers Minority/ies: 2,5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 83-106, 145, 158, 160, 164-174, 175-177; Ethnic, 7, 12, 15, 25 , 30, 83106, 87, 90, 109, 168; Social, 6, 22, 157; Indigenous, 1, 7, 11, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31-56, 109, 111, 126, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172, 176. See also GLBT, Women Minority Rights, 5, 16, 17, 19, 27, 30, 83-106, 145, 158, 160, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 176, 177 Nationalism, 5, 7, 57, 59, 60, 64, 68, 69, 90, 109, 113, 116, 133, 152 Newspapers, 67, 69, 73, 94, 95, 96, 104, 141, 142, 168. See also Media, ICT Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), 2, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 76, 77-78, 80, 84, 92-102, 103, 104, 120, 128, 130, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 169 169-174, 175, 176, 177 NGO. See Non-governmental Organizations Norms: 7, 8, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24, 26, 84, 100- 102, 103, 112, 118, 160, 165, 170, 177; Domestic, 22, 24, 27, 111, 150, 156; International 2, 7, 13, 14, 16, 23, 27, 30, 32, 35, 35-38, 46, 48, 53, 54, 57, 62, 71, 72, 74, 80, 93, 94, 104, 105, 110 111, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 165-169, 172-174, 175, 176 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 166 Party/ies, 3, 6, 19, 23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, 54, 63, 64, 70-71, 73, 77, 88-92, 95, 96, 99, 103, 116, 118, 130, 133, 134, 138, 143, 145, 151,152, 159, 161 Pluralism, 50, 88, 151, 167, 168, 170,

Index 205

Political Participation: 15, 21, 27, 39, 159; Representation, 92, 94, 95, 105, 163, 166 Post-Colonialism, 39, 121. See also Colonialism Public Opinion, 24, 40, 63, 96, 97, 100, 104 Region(alism), 5, 6, 7, 15, 20, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36, 38, 40, 44, 53, 57, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 99, 102, 135, 146, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 168, 176 Religion, 2, 8, 19, 79, 103, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 147, 149, 151, 171, Resistance, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 47, 48, 57, 62, 63, 72-79, 80, 88, 97, 111, 122, 125, 158, 160, 163, 167, 168 Rights. See Human, Minority Rights Romania, 30, 83-106 , 141, 157, 160, 164, 166, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Russia, 16, 17, 21, 22, 110, 134, 148, 176 Socialization, 35, 38, 166, Sociology, 5, 6, 28, 157, 177 South Africa, 24, 27, 30, 40, 107130, 157, 158, 160, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176 State Identity, 29, 30, 130, 158, 161, 164, 174, 175, 176. See also National Identity Television, 7, 40, 68, 71, 94, 95, 96, 103, 104, 141, 147, Turkey, 8, 19, 22, 30, 131-153, 161, 162, 167, 168, 171, 174, United Nations (UN), 7, 16, 17, 20, 28, 36, 37, 38, 44, 46, 47, 90, 92, 101, 104, 120, 122, 124, 125, 159, 169 UN. See United Nations United States (U.S.), 1, 2, 12, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 69, 77, 78, 79, 91, 98, 102, 109, 110, 113, 119, 136, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 149, 162, 165 U.S. See United States Women, 7, 12, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 3156, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 172, 176. See also Gender

World Bank, 21, 37, 38, 169 World Trade Organization, 119, 17

About the Book

Despite the homogenizing effect of globalization, identity politics have gained significance—numerous groups have achieved political goals and gained recognition based on, for example, their common gender, religion, ethnicity, or disability. Are each of these groups unique, or can comparisons be drawn among them? What is the impact of globalization on identity politics? The authors of Identity Politics offer a comprehensive analytical framework and detailed case studies to explain how identity-based collectives both exploit and are shaped by the new realities of a globalized world. Roger Coate is Paul Coverdell Chair of Public Policy at Georgia College & State University. Markus Thiel is assistant professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.

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