The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, by Yoav Peled

Abstract

Yoav Peled The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, Poland and Northern Ireland London: Routledge, 2014. 188pp., $145.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-415-66421-9The model of was originally developed by Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha. It describes a particular arrangement of power distribution within states with a substantial ethnic minority, where the state is conceived as belonging solely to the ethnic majority but provides the minority with a suite of liberal individual freedoms and rights. In Yoav Peled's phrasing, these states attempt to balance two conflicting of (13)-an inclusive liberal-democratic one and an exclusive ethno-nationalist one-in a single constitutional structure. Ethnic democracies are therefore diminished democracies that rely on majoritarian concepts of democracy together with a strong conviction about the essential inassimilability of their ethnic minorities to ensure continued dominance by the majority.The titular Challenge of Ethnic Democracy, as proposed by Yoav Peled, associate professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, is twofold: the very applicability of the model to states outside the archetypical case of Israel; and the question of the model's long-term stability. The applicability of the ethnic-democratic model to other states has been questioned ever since the model was originally developed in the 1990s. Smooha himself suggested a number of possible cases-Northern Ireland until 1972, interwar Poland, and Canada until the Quiet Revolution-and argued that as more countries face growing ethnic minorities, we may see new cases of this method of mitigating ethnic conflict in a quasi-democratic framework. The model has been successfully applied to some states in the post-communist bloc (e.g. Estonia and Latvia), but little has been done so far to study older cases. Peled argues that it is exactly those older cases that must be examined to reach any conclusions about the second question, that of stability. By examining 1921-1972 Northern Ireland and interwar Poland, two ethnic democracies that collapsed, he attempts to explain the dynamics that preserve or undermine the stability of the model.While Smooha published several lists of conditions for the success of ethnic democracy, Peled offers a more parsimonious model: the balance between the two conflicting discourses of citizenship can be kept only by the introduction of a third discourse of citizenship that can generate solidarity among the majority without an explicit ethnic component, thus appearing realistically inclusive to members of the minority but effectively excluding them nonetheless. Furthermore, this third principle cannot exist merely as a cultural construct; it must have a material basis (153). This requirement explains the dynamics in the three cases examined. In Poland, where the Allied Powers imposed minority rights by the Versailles Minorities Treaty, democracy was tenuous at best to begin with, but it is the lack of any third principle to curb the strength of Polish nationalism that explains its inability to effectively deploy ethnic democracy. In the second case, the subsidies granted by the British government allowed Northern Ireland for a time to sustain a populist discourse that applied primarily to Protestants, but the fear that those subsidies would decline led to the deterioration of ethnic democracy into the chaos of The Troubles of the 1970s and the abolition of self-rule. In contrast, the republican-civic ethos in Israel, based on its socialdemocratic roots and structured around its chief labour organization, the Histadrut, allowed Israel to sustain its own ethnic democracy; it is the deterioration of this ethos in light of the introduction of neo-liberal policies that has caused the destabilization of ethnic democracy evident since 2000. …