INTERETHNIC CONFLICTS - TOWARDS AN INTEGRATION OF CURRENT RESEARCH APPROACHES

This paper aims at an integration of several explanatory approaches to ethnic conflicts: studies in ethnic clientelism and discrimination, in political mobilization by minority elites, in the unequal relations between ethno-regions and in the effects that different political systems have on the ethnic dynamic. For each of these approaches, the relevant research is reviewed comparatively and illustrated by selected examples, mostly from the Third World. The results of different research traditions are integrated into a common perspective. The starting point is the assumption that politicised ethnicities are not archaic identities that modernity has not yet managed to dissolve; rather, they are to be interpreted as the effects of political modernisation itself and of the very process of building a nation state. For only when people and state are mutually related in the ideal of a legitimate order does the problem arise of determining in the name of which ethnic group the state has to act, who is regarded as its legitimate owner and who is entitled to have access to its services. Ethnic conflicts are therefore to be interpreted as struggles for the collective goods of the state. Starting from these premises it is shown, step by step and on a middle level of abstraction, under which conditions such an ethnisation of political conflicts is to be expected.