Consociationalism and the State

Abstract

The state has never been a central category in consociational analysis, but recent developments have put the state on the radar of consociational scholars. This article is the first to survey and systematize insights on the role of the state in consociational theory and practice. The article does so by providing an overview and review of the answers to three guiding questions. First, who owns the state? Second, what comes first—consociation or state building? Third, is there an inevitable tradeoff between consociationalism and state strength? All these questions and answers have normative and empirical dimensions, and this article seeks to make a contribution to both. Empirically, the article formulates a research agenda. Theoretically and normatively, the article sketches an original consociational approach to the state that goes back to the early days of the Westphalian state system and has surprising relevance in today’s world.

Introduction

As Dodge¹ notes in his contribution to this collection, “consociationalism has surprisingly little to say about the state.” In none of Lijphart’s books on consociationalism does the index contain the term “state.”² Not in his first book on the politics of accommodation in the Netherlands,³ not in his major comparative study of consociationalism across time and space,⁴ his recommendation of power sharing for a democratic South Africa,⁵ the more recent selection of his journal articles and book chapters,⁶ or the edited volume close colleagues devoted to his life work.⁷ As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, this relative neglect has become a problem, as there is increasing recognition of the central role of the state in contemporary consociations. Three developments in particular contributed to this. First, most new consociations are found in postwar societies, where they face the task of state reconstruction and state building. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a prominent case. Second, problems of consociational governance have put a focus on state capacity. Some of these are well known, but in the context of weak states, phenomena such as clientelism are compounded. This is clearly visible in such places as Lebanon and Iraq, as several contributions to this special issue show. Third, many power-sharing arrangements nowadays have an international dimension, complicating questions of sovereignty and self-determination. Northern Ireland is a case in point.

Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. Five decades of consociational literature have yielded important assumptions, observations, conclusions, and recommendations about consociationalism and the state.⁸ This article brings together the insights from the various strands of scholarship in what is arguably the first systematic, comparative reflection on the role of the state in consociational theory. The article does so by providing an overview and review of the answers to three guiding questions.

First, who owns the state?⁹ Five answers are discussed: “We do,” “We want a piece of the state,” “We want our own state,” “Nobody,” and “Someone else.” The article will highlight consociationalism’s impressive flexibility in dealing with these issues. The second set of questions and answers is a chicken–egg question: What comes first—consociation or state building? Is the state a precondition for consociation, or is consociation a precondition for successful state building in divided societies? The third and final set of questions is whether there is an inevitable tradeoff between strength of the state and the extent of consociationalism, differentiating between the political side of consociationalism (the four institutional features of grand coalition, proportionality, mutual veto, and segmental autonomy) and the socio-political side (segmentation/pillarization). All these questions and answers have normative and empirical dimensions, and this article seeks to make a contribution to both. Empirically, the article formulates a research agenda. Theoretically and normatively, the article sketches an original consociational approach to the state that goes back to the early days of the Westphalian state system and has surprising relevance in today’s world.

The article is organized into three sections. The first section reviews the various answers in the consociational literature to the question “Who owns the state?” The second section discusses the various views on the “chicken–egg” relationship between consociationalism and the state. The third section deals with the alleged tradeoffs between consociationalism and state strength. The conclusion is that most claims about the state in the consociational literature are best treated as hypotheses in need of empirical testing.

Who owns the state?

Broadly speaking, approaches to state and society can be grouped into two categories: top-down versus bottom-up.¹⁰ A top-down, state-centric view would phrase the question thus: “There is a state, how can we organize it?” This discourse would use terms like “decentralization” and “group rights.” For all its merits, the influential summary of state responses to ethnic and national diversity found in McGarry et al.¹¹ ranging from assimilation to secession/partition, falls in this category. A bottom-up, society-centered view would put the matter thus: “There are these groups, how can they live together?” Typical terms would be “autonomy” and “accord.” Federalism is a variant of the society-centered view, with territorial units as the constituent parts. Consociationalism offers a bottom-up, societal understanding of the state.¹² This is the central point of the first section of the article, which maps the various relationships between nations, communities, and states with the help of five possible answers to the same question: Who owns the state?

Answer one: “We do”

Lustick’s¹³ control model, Smooha’s¹⁴ influential concept of ethnic democracy and Yiftachel’s¹⁵ ethnocracy all aim to capture the same phenomenon: how one ethnic group dominates the state. Control of the state is often visible in state symbols. Ghanam,¹⁶ who classifies Israel as a “textbook example of an ethnic state,” notes how “the symbols and the dominant values of the state and its institutions discriminate ipso facto against its Arab citizens” and criticizes “the Jewish ethnic character of the state.” Byrne¹⁷ writes about the “Orange State” to indicate the control of Northern Ireland by Protestant settlers loyal to the United Kingdom.¹⁸ Often, state symbols are contested. For example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the weakening of the central state and its institutions is reflected in the “demise” of the country’s National Museum and the History Museum.¹⁹ Aboultaif²⁰ draws attention to the “politicization of memory and trauma” in Lebanon and Iraq. In consociational Kosovo, “the debate about state symbols such as the flag, the coat of arms, and the anthem are very complex issues.”²¹

Ethnic dominance is the opposite of consociational power sharing, but recent studies show that it may be useful to acknowledge how different groups relate differently to the state. Stojanović and Hodžić²² claim that Bosnia and Herzegovina is both a consociational democracy and an ethnocracy. It is a consociation of the three constituent peoples recognized in the constitution (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats), but an ethnocracy toward all others.²³ Chima²⁴ detects in India elements of consensus, consociation, and control, with the latter becoming ever more prominent, especially in relation to non-Hindus, leading to the emergence of “crypto-ethnic democracy” in contemporary India. It can also happen in a consociation that some groups are more strongly represented in the state than others. Aboultaif,²⁵ for example, identifies the Maronites in Lebanon and the Shiites in Iraq as “communal hegemons.”²⁶

While recent contributions have added nuance to our thinking about systems of control and consociation, O’Leary’s²⁷ masterful history of Northern Ireland shows the importance of keeping them separate, analytically and empirically. Instead, Anderson²⁸ and Morjé Howard²⁹ define ethnocracy in such broad terms, as basically any political system in which ethnicity plays a role, that crucial distinctions become blurred. Anderson’s notion of a “consociational ‘shared post-conflict ethnocracy’” reduces consociationalism to a subtype of ethnocracy. Morjé Howard³⁰ describes contemporary Belgium, a textbook consociation,³¹ as an ethnocracy, even doubting its democratic credentials. The fundamental difference between ethnocracy and consociationalism is their answer to the question of who owns the state. “We do,” say ethnocrats. “We all do,” says consociationalism, at least in principle.³²

Answer two: “We want a piece of the state”

The contributions of Dodge³³ and Salloukh³⁴ to this special issue suggest a deep concern about the “allotment state”³⁵ or the way the proportionality principle “at the core of informal consociationalism has given rise to systematically sanctioned corruption.”³⁶ Likewise, O’Driscoll and Costantini³⁷ criticize how “consociational power sharing has failed to meet the governance needs of the population.” Consociationalism “is often seen as a dysfunctional form of democracy”³⁸ and even Lijphart³⁹ admits it “is an expensive form of government.” The “price to be paid” for social peace, democracy, and political stability “is inevitably a certain amount of inefficiency, slowness, and lack of decisiveness.”⁴⁰ However, Lijphart’s admission was based on the experience of prosperous West European cases and in contemporary consociations, the “price to be paid” may be significantly higher.⁴¹

If the “development of collusive agreements between parties favors corruption,” as Della Porta⁴² hypothesizes, then consociational regimes are more susceptible to corruption than others. Peters⁴³ highlights the functional aspect of corruption, which can be used to build political coalitions that keep together deeply divided societies and political systems with multiple veto players. Salloukh⁴⁴ provides a vivid and detailed account of how this works in Lebanon. Dodge⁴⁵ does the same for Iraq, focusing on the consociational logic of the system of sectarian appointments. In the Balkans, Muharemovic⁴⁶ sees Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state institutions as “just ‘preys’ of the ethnic oligarchs.”

Kendhammer⁴⁷ examines the relationship between consociational power sharing and neo-patrimonialism in Nigeria. At first glance, his story is one of neo-patrimonial capture of a consociational state, the latter the victim of the former. However, as Kendhammer realizes, this is too simple. There are two features of consociationalism that aid neo-patrimonial state capture. First, inclusive political institutions based on power sharing and proportionality, two consociational features, facilitate access to the state and its resources. Second, the partially informal nature of consociationalism in the Nigerian context again facilitates patronage politics. As Kendhammer⁴⁸ admits, Nigeria at best has displayed only a limited number of consociational traits, and even this is probably an overstatement,⁴⁹ but his analysis nonetheless provides a starting point for thinking about consociationalism and the post-colonial state.

Patronage and state capture can also be found in developed, post-industrial countries. Katz and Mair⁵⁰ see in the Netherlands “an early example of a party cartel.” The party cartel is characteristic for the cartel party, a type of party Katz and Mair see as the latest stage of political party development, a trend they are highly critical of, as they observe how parties lose their roots in society while nestling themselves instead in the state, whose resources they depend on and share. Again, consociations were trendsetters, solving “the problem of access to state resources” by “effectively erasing the category of loser.”⁵¹

In sum, it is possible to directly relate the four political features of consociationalism to state capture: The grand coalition facilitates access, proportionality justifies dividing the cake, the mutual veto allows veto players to exact concessions, and segmental autonomy comes with a lack of central control. In general, consociationalism legitimizes segmental demands on the state, even more so if consociationalism is part of a peace agreement in a postwar society, as is true for most modern consociations.⁵² Empirically, one expects that variation may be explained through intervening variables that either aggravate the pernicious impact of the political economy of consociationalism, such as attributes of the post-colonial state, or mitigate this impact, for example a vibrant civil society. Clearly, more research is needed on the comparative performance of consociations.⁵³

Baumann’s⁵⁴ analysis of the 2015 garbage crisis in Lebanon in this special issue is a damning exposition of the political economy of consociationalism. But we should be careful with generalization. For example, while the positive discrimination of ethnic Malays in Malaysia’s consociational regime may have gone too far, it also served the purpose of improving the opportunities of an historically disadvantaged majority.⁵⁵ And the opposite of inclusive spoils in a consociation may be the exclusive access to the state of a privileged group in a majoritarian democracy. The moral economy of consociationalism holds that all segments have a right to a piece of the state, though in practice, it tends to be segmental elites who benefit the most.

Answer three: “We want our own state”

When it comes to the territorial organization of the state, consociationalism is compatible with all scenarios from decentralization to dissolution. This flexibility has not always been recognized in the literature, which has sought to link consociationalism to particular forms of state. Smooha,⁵⁶ for example, characterizes consociationalism as a “bi-national or multinational state.” McGarry et al. define accommodation, of which consociationalism is one version, through its “plurinational state.” In his typology of states and societies, Smith⁵⁷ appears to equate consociational states with federal states.

In fact, according to Freiburghaus and Vatter,⁵⁸ Switzerland is the only contemporary plural society where federalism and consociationalism are logically and empirically linked.⁵⁹ In other words, where federalism is an integral part of consociationalism and vice versa the federation operates according to consociational principles. The trend, according to these Swiss authors, is in the opposite direction, with consociationalism and federalism drifting apart. But that is only because they classify Belgium and Bosnia and Herzegovina, arguably the prime examples of consociational federations, as “decoupled.” For the case of Belgium, this verdict seems to be based on the critical study of two Belgian scholars about how the federalization of the Belgian state threatens successful consociational conflict management.⁶⁰ Even if that were true, there is no doubt that Belgium has all four political features of consociationalism.

Around the world, Ethiopia is known for its ethnic federalism and for a constitution that seems to take the right to self-determination to its logical extreme, allowing any state to secede. However, this arrangement has not stabilized relations between the country’s communities, as the recent civil war in Tigray attests to. Degefe⁶¹ therefore recommends making the Ethiopian constitution more clearly, fully, and formally consociational.⁶²

Bauböck⁶³ sees federalism as “the best possibility for building viable and just democracies” and regards the break-up of multinational democracies as “regrettable” and often due to “avoidable political failure.” One such scenario played itself out in Czechoslovakia, which fell apart even though in the first three years after the end of communism, from 1989 to 1992, the country “could be classified as a textbook case of a consociational system of institutions.”⁶⁴ In an analysis that is broadly in line with Henderson,⁶⁵ Kopecký blames the unfavorable background conditions, with Czechoslovakia lacking six out of nine of the factors Lijphart identified as favorable to consociationalism.⁶⁶ Especially damaging was the lack of a tradition of elite accommodation and compromise. Kopecký⁶⁷ concludes that “without a minimal prior level of consensus of the system, the institutions alone will not preserve it.” In a reversal of the consociational view of divided masses and bridging elites, “the Czech and Slovak political elites appeared, in fact, to be both more ideological and less tolerant than their electorates.”⁶⁸ The result was a “velvet divorce” as the Czechs and Slovaks created their own states. The reverse is also possible. If the Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus are to have a common future, this will be through a “‘consociational state-shaping process’.”⁶⁹

In sum, consociationalism can keep states together, loosen them, break them, and put them back together. This makes sense in its societal, bottom-up perspective of the state that is also evident in the (Catholic) notion of “subsidiarity” and the (Protestant) doctrine of “sovereignty within their own circle.”⁷⁰ In other words, what can be done by the group itself should be done by the group itself. Self-rule can be territorial or not, as demonstrated by the literature on non-territorial autonomy and national cultural autonomy.⁷¹ But note that without shared rule, self-rule cannot be consociational.⁷²

Answer four: “Nobody”

A common, though incorrect, view of the consociational state is that of a referee who maintains a level playing field for the contending communities and is the ultimate arbiter when disputes need to be resolved. For example, Yiftachel⁷³ views the role of the state in a consociational regime as an “even-handed protector.” Pinkney⁷⁴ distinguishes democracies on the basis of seven criteria. One of these is role of the state. In both liberal and consociational democracy, the role of the state according to Pinkney⁷⁵ is that of a “referee.” Dutch Calvinists saw a limited role for the state. Their leader, Abraham Kuyper, considered “state intervention” to be justified only in three conditions: to solve “border conflicts” between the sovereign social circles that make up society, to protect individuals against abuse of power, and to maintain classic state services.⁷⁶

There are three problems with the view of the state as a referee.⁷⁷ First, it is based on a conception of the state as “not only separated” but “elevated.”⁷⁸ But in fact, the state is composed of the very groups whose conflicts it is supposed to adjudicate. Second, constitutional courts play a marginal role at best in consociations.⁷⁹ Third, consociational theory puts a premium on the responsibility of political leaders themselves. That is one reason why it is often criticized as being elitist.⁸⁰ There is no “get-out-of-jail card” when the country grinds to a halt because political leaders cannot agree, there is no person or organ political leaders can turn to in case of stalemate or dead-lock, at least not in the classic consociations, and not internally. Byrne⁸¹ writes about “the coercive consociational élite power-sharing model” in Cyprus and Northern Ireland. In both cases, a set of “external ethno-guarantors” were involved: Greece and Turkey and Britain and Ireland, respectively. Other examples are the role of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina⁸² and the role of Syria in Lebanon. In other words, consociational referees tend to be external, which brings us to the next answer.

Answer five: “Somebody else”

Consociationalism is not always locally designed and owned. In Kosovo, “power-sharing arrangements were imposed […] without a broad inter-ethnic consensus and under the circumstances of an all-powerful international administration that had undertaken administration of Kosovo society directly.”⁸³ Baliqi⁸⁴ calls the EU a “promotor and supervisor” of consociational democracy in Kosovo. Likewise, Keil and Kudlenko⁸⁵ see Bosnia and Herzegovina as having undergone a process of “external state building.”⁸⁶ They complain that these external state builders had no clear idea of the kind of state they were building. Worse, there is still “no consensus within Bosnia on the common state and where to go, and there is no consensus among major international actors on the future of the Bosnian state and the best way forward.”⁸⁷

McGarry⁸⁸ recently complained that classic consociational theory has little to say about the challenges facing contemporary consociations, especially the external dimension, security, and issues of self-determination. McGarry and O’Leary⁸⁹ argue that self-determination disputes require “‘consociation plus,’” which includes “interstate and or inter-regional and transborder institutions.” Based on his analysis of Northern Ireland, Anderson⁹⁰ concludes that “the cross-border component” should not be “a secondary add-on” but should be “built into the peace process from the start and fully integrated with consociationalism.”

O’Leary⁹¹ emphasizes the necessity of power sharing between Israel and a Palestinian state. It is not entirely clear how consociational these power-sharing arrangements should be or what role consociationalism should play within the respective states, but O’Leary certainly drives home the point that the fates of these states and peoples are inevitably entangled⁹² and that pragmatic solutions are necessary for accommodating this reality.⁹³ In an early proposal for power sharing in Kosovo, Ivanisevic⁹⁴ advocates internal consociationalism in Kosovo but also suggests a consociation with Serbia or inclusion in the union between Serbia and Montenegro, which he argues “has many traits of a consociational state.”

In sum, recent consociations tend to be embedded in arrangements that include higher levels of governance, neighboring countries, and regional organizations as initiators and guarantors. This development has been both welcomed and criticized by consociational scholars, with the controversy less about the “whether” than about the “how” and “how long.”

A consociational approach to the state

After reviewing these five answers to the question “Who owns the state?,” the reader might be eager to learn what the consociational answer is to this question. The answer is: We are the state. Whereby “we” refers not to individual citizens but to communities. This is reflected in the earliest definition of a consociation as “a society of societies.”⁹⁵ According to the late sixteenth-, early seventeenth-century political theorist Althusius,⁹⁶ state formation or indeed the formation of any political unit is a process of consociation. It is a bottom-up process resulting in what today would be called multi-level governance, without a “supreme ruler with the right to decide the scope and dimensions of particular rights of self-governance.”⁹⁷ Consociationalism is incompatible with hegemonic claims to the state, but it may prioritize some groups over others, as demonstrated in the recent literature on consociational others.⁹⁸ As indicated by Althusius’s notion of mutual solidarity, consociationalism is based on sharing, shared rule, and shared resources, but in practice this can turn into ugly competition, clientelism, corruption, and state capture. Consociationalism is both a means to hold states together and a framework for state dissolution. While it is attractive to think of the state as a referee in communal disputes, in practice the state cannot be seen as separate from society⁹⁹ and the only examples are of external, not internal, referees. Consociationalism is compatible and even comfortable with complex forms of power sharing that transcend national borders. And as we will see below, consociationalism can be practiced outside or beyond the context of a state. In light of this impressive flexibility, it is no wonder that the state so far has not been a central category in consociational analysis! However, this is changing, prompted by real-world developments. As the articles in this special issue show, these developments have raised new questions about the relationship between consociationalism and state building. The next sections of the article address these issues.

Chicken and egg

In the democratization literature, there has been a lively debate about “sequencing” or the question of what should come first: strengthening political institutions or democratization.¹⁰⁰ Both positions have been argued, though by now there seems to be agreement that the institution-building record of autocracies is rather poor and that in practice, any hope that democracy will be on a stronger footing after a period of authoritarian state building is illusory.¹⁰¹ In the consociational literature, a similar question about sequencing can be detected. The second section of this article discusses the relationship between the state and consociationalism.

State as a precondition for (successful) consociation

Does consociationalism presuppose a state? Some think yes. Wimmer¹⁰² provides two reasons why consociational arrangements are fragile in the absence of strong states, a feature he deems widespread in the Global South. First, a lack of resources makes it difficult to satisfy the demands of all groups. Second, the politics of accommodation is more difficult when state institutions precede the build up of a civil society. A state, or more precisely, a strong and rich state, would thus be a favorable factor for consociational democracy. For O’Leary,¹⁰³ there needs to be “some prospect of ‘stateness’ or ‘governability’ for power sharing to work as a recipe for deeply divided places.” O’Leary directly links state capacity to effective inclusion and power sharing to the point where he boldly states that power sharing requires a “functioning state.”¹⁰⁴

Others question this assumption. Consociational interpretations of the European Union¹⁰⁵ see this regional organization as a consociation of states but not as a state in itself. The EU thus puts the classic understanding of the relationship between segments and the state on its head, with the states being the segments and supranational and intergovernmental institutions taking the place of the state. If consociational interpretations of the EU are correct, it is possible to have consociationalism without a state.

Other evidence comes from Somaliland, a de facto state in the northern part of Somalia.¹⁰⁶ After declaring independence in 1991, its process of state-making and peace-making has attracted considerable international attention. Several early accounts highlight the importance of “clan-based power-sharing or consociational democracy”¹⁰⁷ and “consociational practices.”¹⁰⁸ More recent analyses, instead, tend to emphasize the tension between peacebuilding and state-making,¹⁰⁹ arguing that “the system based on traditional authority and consensus formation […] has outlived its success”¹¹⁰ even though, or in part because, traditional authorities have become part of the state in the form of the House of Elders, the second chamber in Somaliland’s parliament.¹¹¹

Consociationalism as a precondition for (internationalized) state building

Weller and Wolff¹¹² have probably put this claim forward most clearly: “Internationalized state building can thus only serve the stabilization of states emerging from conflict well if it draws on a well-balanced approach of consociational techniques.” In other words, without consociationalism, state-building attempts in postwar societies are if not doomed to fail at least less likely to succeed.

Writing about the case of Palestine, Parker and Zemni¹¹³ see the development of the social-political side of consociationalism, namely vertically organized segments or pillars,¹¹⁴ as a precondition for state building. The following quote reveals their logic: “The legitimation of the current or any future Palestinian state building project might require that the currently divided sectors of Palestinian society be attached to the state as blocs whose elites act as arbitors [sic] in the process of state/society legitimation.”¹¹⁵ In this view, segments are the building blocks of the state. Their analysis therefore focuses on evidence of the emergence of a nationalist and an Islamist pillar in Palestine, both of which are viewed as desirable trends. In his recent overview of pillarization research, the Belgian sociologist Hellemans¹¹⁶ agrees that Islamist movements like Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon are “examples of pillarization.” Hellemans¹¹⁷ also agrees with the positive assessment of pillars, which he sees as “products and exponents of modernity.” This positive view on segmentation may come as surprise to the many political scientists who lament the divisive impact of ethnic and religious organization, but it is in line with the early Dutch literature on pillarization, which saw pillars as forces of emancipation.¹¹⁸

Cooley and Pace¹¹⁹ update and supplement Parker and Zemni’s¹²⁰ analysis. They agree that “the secularist/nationalist and Islamic factions that dominate Palestinian society can be regarded as representing pillars of some sort.”¹²¹ Then, they examine the political side of consociationalism, focusing on the 2007 National Unity Government and the Palestinian National Reconciliation Agreement of 2011. They conclude tentatively that the last document “could represent the first step toward developing a consociational agreement of some sort.”¹²² This matters because in their view only a power-sharing agreement between Hamas and Fatah can provide the political stability that would allow for progress with state building.¹²³

Against this positive view, there are alternative interpretations of the needs of divided societies. Here, it should suffice to mention two: first, Roeder’s¹²⁴ critique of ethnic federalism; second, Horowitz’s¹²⁵ recommendation of integrative majoritarianism.

At this point, it is not possible to formulate a conclusion and to settle the question about chicken or egg. First, we have to discuss the claim that consociationalism weakens states. If true, this would compromise the claim that consociationalism is a precondition for state building. In the next and final section, we turn to this task.

Can’t have both?

The third and final set of questions is whether there is an inevitable tradeoff between strength of the state and the extent of consociationalism, differentiating between the political side of consociationalism (the four features of grand coalition, proportionality, mutual veto, and segmental autonomy) and the socio-political side of segmentation/pillarization.¹²⁶ It is a variation on Migdal’s¹²⁷ theme of “strong societies, weak states.”

A tradeoff between the strength of the state and consociationalism

Many observers have accused consociationalism of weakening the state. Baliqi¹²⁸ applauds consociational arrangements for having solved the security dilemma in Kosovo but criticizes them for creating “new problems in the consolidation of statehood and democracy” in the long run. Muharemovic¹²⁹ complains that state building in Bosnia and Herzegovina “has been drastically slowed down by internal disagreement, fostered by the consociational model of democracy.” His conclusion is that to strengthen the (central) state, consociationalism has to be weakened. Writing about Lebanon, Deets¹³⁰ claims that “because communal groups use state resources to fulfill their particular needs, they deliberately keep the state ‘weak’ (from a Weberian perspective),” Mazzola¹³¹ accuses consociational elites in Lebanon of deliberately creating ‘areas of limited statehood.’ Nagle¹³² even blames “zombie power sharing” for the “evisceration of the state” in Lebanon.

In her analysis of the break-up of Czechoslovakia and the Union of Serbia and Montenegro, Macek-Macková¹³³ notes how “transitions and democratizations are periods of weakness of the state,” a context in which consociationalism not only strengthens ethnic divisions but can result in “a questioning of the state itself.” In an argument that echoes Snyder’s¹³⁴ work on democratization and nationalist conflict, Macek-Macková¹³⁵ highlights how elites competing for votes in new electoral regimes resort to nationalism. This leads her to argue that consociationalism “may not be particularly suited to states undergoing a transitional, regime-change period.”¹³⁶

This conclusion can be contested. First, the Union of Serbia and Montenegro was not a “complete consociation.” Second, as Macek-Macková¹³⁷ shows, neither Serbia nor Montenegro seemed committed to keeping the Union, which was primarily a tool to increase the prospects of joining the EU. Third, what is the counterfactual? Would these states have had better chances to endure without consociationalism? Fourth, what is the policy recommendation for multinational states undergoing regime change, if not consociationalism? Finally, although several countries claimed as consociational, including Burundi and Iraq, score high on the fragile state index, so far there is no evidence of state collapse.¹³⁸

A tradeoff between the strength of the state and segmentation/pillarization

In their analysis of Israeli politics and society, Lipshits and Neubauer-Shani¹³⁹ note how already in the 1950s, the state “took over many functions that had previously been carried out by voluntary organizations.” In other words, they hint at a tradeoff between size/strength of the state and the activities of subcultures. In Israel, the “subcultures gave way to officialdom,”¹⁴⁰ but in other times and places the scenarios may be different. Farhat et al.’s¹⁴¹ comparison of Belgium and Lebanon shows how in both countries segmental actors are “hollowing out the central state,” but in different ways: a progressive federalization of Belgium and a “new distribution of power from within the unitary structure” in Lebanon.¹⁴² Nagle and Clancy¹⁴³ go further, noting how “Hezbollah had begun to construct its own de facto state within Lebanon.” The other sectarian leaders also seek to keep the state weak, placing goods and services under their own administrative networks “to make sure that much of the working-class population are heavily reliant on the assistance provided by their communal leaders.” O’Driscoll and Costantini¹⁴⁴ in this special issue claim that in Iraq, the “state has become almost irrelevant to its citizens” and that if they need the state, they access it through sectarian organizations. All these accounts thus see a tradeoff between the state and segments. On the other hand, Lacina¹⁴⁵ argues that what she calls “segment states” have stabilized India, contrary to the fear of the country’s first prime minister, Nehru, who was initially opposed to drawing state boundaries along linguistic lines.

In a series of publications, Salamey¹⁴⁶ has observed and analyzed the interaction of two contemporary movements in the Middle East: the decline of nationalism and the rise of communitarianism (also discussed as sectarianism¹⁴⁷). As a corollary, “outdated and corrupt state services” have been supplemented and substituted by “public welfare and social safety nets [that] were founded at the community—rather than the state—level, while economic gains and political advancement were sought out through communal struggles over power.”¹⁴⁸ This interpretation suggests not a tradeoff but a substitution process, in which communities step in when states cannot deliver. The future of post-Arab Spring politics, according to Salamey, will be determined by the struggle between exclusive versus consociational communitarianism. He prefers the latter, even holding up the much-maligned Lebanese consociational model as “a prototype.”

Table 1 provides a summary of the last two sections, dealing with sequencing and tradeoffs. References to authors have been omitted but can be found in the text. Several of the authors are in fact part of this special issue. At this point, all these claims, whether formulated positively or negatively, are best treated as the starting point for an empirical research agenda on consociationalism and the state.

Table 1. Empirical claims about consociationalism and the state.

Issue	Claim	Why?	Why not?
Sequence	The state as precondition for consociation.	Resources and civil society. Effective inclusion.	Consociation can exist without and beyond the state.
	Consociation as precondition for state building in divided/post-conflict societies.	The political features of consociationalism produce stability. The socio-political features of consociationalism are building blocks for the state.	Alternative arrangements possible and desirable.
Tradeoff	State strength is inversely related to the political features of consociationalism.	Central state relatively weak compared to lower levels of governments. Central state immobilized by consociational decision-making procedures.	What is the counterfactual? What is the alternative? Why this obsession with the central state?
	State strength is inversely related to the socio-political features of consociationalism.	Societal actors perform “state” functions.	What is wrong with autonomy? Segments as source of stability. Consociationalism as the solution, not the problem.

Conclusion

This article has suggested that there are still many things we do not know and that claims about consociationalism in relation to the state should be treated as hypotheses in desperate need of empirical verification. This is especially true for questions about the sequence of consociationalism and state building (Chicken or egg?) and the alleged tradeoff between state strength and the extent of consociationalism (Can’t have both?). Normatively, the picture is much clearer. Consociationalism offers a bottom-up approach to the state, seen as the contingent and changing outcome of processes of consociation. In practical terms, there are limitations to such an approach, as is evident from the critique of “fluid federalism” in Iraq,¹⁴⁹ but as a principle, it is powerful corrective to top-down views of state-society relations and in line with attempts to “rethink the state” as a process.¹⁵⁰

The origins of consociationalism predate the Westphalian state system. Lijphart¹⁵¹ borrowed the term consociation from Althusius, who used it to describe a polity and process based on the pluralization of governance, a requirement to reach consent, a principle of subsidiarity, and mutual solidarity.¹⁵² Daalder¹⁵³ observes how “Swiss and Dutch statehood as well as nationhood were formed on the whole by compact and accommodation,” following, in other words, a process of Althusian consociation. Howe¹⁵⁴ characterizes imperial Austria as a “semi-consociational constitutional monarchy.” Lehmbruch¹⁵⁵ draws additional parallels with the Holy Roman Empire. Ambarkov¹⁵⁶ sees the Ottoman millet system as a “pre-consociational experience” for Bosnia and Herzegovina and for North Macedonia.¹⁵⁷ In other words, consociationalism has been an integral part of historical processes of state formation.

In a post-sovereign world, consociationalism has relevance beyond the state. Skelcher¹⁵⁸ notes how “consociationalism has potential benefits as an institutional design for collective action under conditions of polycentrism.” The notion of shared or pooled sovereignty can already be detected in the work of Althusius, so in a way consociational theory has come full circle, predating and outlasting the Westphalian state system.¹⁵⁹

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his deep gratitude to the editors of this special issue, Toby Dodge and Bassel Salloukh. They have been instrumental in shaping this article, from the original invitation to think about the topic of consociationalism and the state, to the stimulating exchanges in a series of authors’ workshops. I also learned a lot from the other contributors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthijs Bogaards

Matthijs Bogaards was full professor of political science at Jacobs University Bremen and is currently associate professor of political science at the Central European University in Vienna. He has published widely on democracy in divided societies, political institutions, and democratization. His most recent research interests include terrorism and gender.

Notes

1 Toby Dodge, “Iraq, Consociationalism and the Incoherence of the State,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023, this issue).

2 The same is true for the term “nation,” ironically leading McGarry and O’Leary (2010, 40) to accuse consociational theory of being “state-centred.”

3 Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968).

4 Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

5 Arend Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1985).

6 Arend Lijphart, Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008).

7 Markus Crepaz, Thomas Koelble and David Wilsford, eds., Democracy and Institutions: The Life Work of Arend Lijphart (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000; This article is about consociationalism as a particular form of power sharing. Although there is a tendency to use these terms synonymously, they are distinct and should be kept separate (Matthijs Bogaards, “The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 12, no. 4 (2000): 395–423; Matthijs Bogaards, “The “Boomerang Effect”: Lessons Learned from Power Sharing in Kenya and Zimbabwe,” in State Politics and Public Policy in Eastern Africa: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Gedion Onyango (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 75–96).

8 Matthijs Bogaards, Ludger Helms, and Arend Lijphart, “The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty-First Century Politics and Political Science,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 341–56.

9 This is the title of Andreas Wimmer’s “Who Owns the State? Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial Societies,” Nations and Nationalism 3, no. 4 (1997): 631–66 classic article.

10 Thomas Hueglin and Alan Fenna, Comparative Federalism: A Systematic Inquiry (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006).

11 John McGarry, Brendan O’Leary, and Richard Simeon, “Integration or Accommodation? The Enduring Debate in Conflict Regulation,” in Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation,? edited by Sujit Choudhry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41–88.

12 I thank Toby Dodge for this felicitous phrase.

13 Ian Lustick, “Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control,” World Politics 31, no. 3 (1979): 325–44.

14 Sammy Smooha, “Types of Democracy and Modes of Conflict Management in Ethnically Divided Societies,” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 4 (2002): 423–31.

15 Oren Yiftachel, “‘Right-Sizing’ or ‘Right-Shaping’? Politics, Ethnicity, and Territory in Plural States,” in Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, edited by Brendan O’Leary, Ian Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 358–87.

16 As’ad Ghanam, “State and Minority in Israel: The Case of Ethnic State and the Predicament of Its Minority,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 3 (1998): 428–48, 476.

17 Michael Byrne, “Politics beyond Identity: Reconsidering the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland,” Identities 22, no. 4 (2015): 468–85, 476.

18 Michael Byrne, “Politics beyond Identity,” 476. Interestingly, as Byrne describes it, the civil rights movement that emerged to challenge the Orange State did not, or at least not entirely and not at first, rally around a counter ethnonational claim but instead sought a “dispersion of state power.”

19 Giuditta Fontana, “War by Other Means: Cultural Policy and the Politics of Corporate Consociation in Bosnia And Herzegovina,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 19, no. 4 (2013): 447–66, 402.

20 Eduardo Wassim Aboultaif, “Ethnurgy, Mobilization, Memory and Trauma in Consociational Systems,” Nations and Nationalism 25, no. 2 (2019): 564–86, 580.

21 Bekim Baliqi, “Consociational Democracy, Citizenship and the Role of the EU in Kosovo’s Contested State-Building,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies 11, no. 1 (2021): 59–75, 70.

22 Nenad Stojanović and Edin Hodžić, “Ethnocracy at the Heart of Europe,” Ethnopolitics 14, no. 4 (2015): 382–9.

23 Matthijs Bogaards describes how the consociational system in Belgium is inclusive of parties across the country’s linguistic divide but systematically excludes the extreme right (Matthijs Bogaards, “Militant Consociational Democracy: The Political Exclusion of the Extreme Right in Belgium,” in Compromises in Democracy edited by Sandrine Baume and Stephanie Novak (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 175–200). He labels this phenomenon “militant consociational democracy” and notes that political exclusion may be deliberate and legitimate.

24 Jugdep Chima, “India as a ‘Crypto-Ethnic Democracy: The Dynamics of ‘Control’ in Relation to Peripheral Ethnic Minorities,” Third World Quarterly 42, no. 12 (2021): 2822–40.

25 Aboultaif, “Ethnurgy, Mobilization, Memory and Trauma.”

26 Brendan O’Leary, “An Iron Law of Nationalism and Federation? A (Neo-Diceyian) Theory of the Necessity of a Federal Staatsvolk, and of Consociational Rescue,” Nations and Nationalism 7, no. 3 (2001): 273–96. As Brendan O’Leary has shown, consociational federations do not need a Staatsvolk to function.

27 Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume II: Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume III: Consociation and Confederation. From Antagonism to Accommodation? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

28 James Anderson, “Ethnocracy: Exploring and Extending the Concept,” Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal 8, no. 3 (2016): 1–29.

29 Lise Morjé Howard, “The Ethnocracy Trap,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 4 (2012): 155–69.

30 Ibid.

31 Matthijs Bogaards, “Militant Consociational Democracy.”

32 Or, as Guido Panzano puts it, the distinction is between “inclusivist” and “exclusivist” regimes (Guido Panzano, Ethnic Domination in Deeply Divided Places: The Hegemonic State in Israel and Estonia (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2021), 41). Şener Aktürk makes a further distinction between mono-, multi-, and anti-ethnic “ethnicity regimes,” equating multi-ethnic regimes with consociations (Şener Aktürk, “Regimes of Ethnicity: Comparative Analysis of Germany, the Soviet Union/Post-Soviet Russia, and Turkey,” World Politics 63, no. 1 (2011): 115–64, 128). What sets multi-ethnic regimes apart from anti-ethnic regimes is that they recognize the political relevance of ethnicity. What sets multi-ethnic regimes apart from mono-ethnic regimes is that they grant rights to multiple ethnic groups, not just the one dominating the state. As Matthijs Bogaards shows, ANC rule in South Africa is anti-ethnic, not multi-ethnic, one reason to doubt descriptions of South Africa as consociational (Matthijs Bogaards, “Democracy and Social Peace in Divided Societies: Exploring Consociational Parties (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)).

33 Toby Dodge, “Iraq, Consociationalism and the Incoherence of the State,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023, this issue).

34 Bassel Salloukh, “The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon” (2023), this special issue.

35 Bassel Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State: The Political Economy of a Very Sectarian Public Sector,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 43–60, 45.

36 Toby Dodge, “Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 145–52, 148.

37 Dylan O’Driscoll and Irene Costantini, “Conflict Mitigation versus Governance: The Case of Consociation in Iraq,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023, this issue).

38 Allison McCulloch, “Introduction: Power-Sharing in Europe – From Adoptability to End-Ability,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1–18, 3.

39 Arend Lijphart, “Cultural Diversity and Theories of Political Integration,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 4, no. 1 (1971): 1–14, 14.

40 Ibid.

41 It should be added that while consociational democracies are often criticized, fairly or not, for their poor record, consensus democracies, a broader category of political systems identified by Lijphart, have been demonstrated to outperform majoritarian democracies on a wide range of indicators (Matthijs Bogaards, “Comparative Political Regimes: Consensus and Majoritarian Democracy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, edited by William Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)).

42 Donatella Della Porta, “Political Parties and Corruption: Ten Hypotheses on Five Vicious Circles,” Crime, Law & Social Change 42, no. 1 (2004): 35–60, 48.

43 B. Guy Peters, “Consociationalism, Corruption and Chocolate: Belgian Exceptionalism,” West European Politics 29, no. 5 (2006): 1079–92, 1087.

44 Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State”; Salloukh, “The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon.”

45 Dodge, “Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism”; Toby Dodge, “The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15, no. 4 (2021): 459–75.

46 Mahir Muharemovic, “The Dayton Democracy Model and Its Impact on the Bosnian State,” International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies 4, no. 1 (2016): 45–53, 51.

47 Brandon Kendhammer, “Getting Our Piece of the National Cake: Consociational Power Sharing and Neopatrimonialism in Nigeria,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 21, no. 2 (2015): 143–65.

48 Ibid., 161.

49 Matthijs Bogaards, “Ethnic Party Bans and Institutional Engineering in Nigeria,” Democratization 17, no. 4 (2010): 730–49.

50 Richard Katz and Peter Mair, Democracy and the Cartelization of Political Parties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 133.

51 Ibid., 112; in contrast, in an early analysis, Guy Peters et al. established a direct link between type of democracy and type of public policy (B. Guy Peters, John Doughtie, and M. Kathleen McCulloch, “Types of Democratic Systems and Types of Public Policy: An Empirical Examination,” Comparative Politics 9, no. 3 (1977): 327–55). Neither distribution, redistribution, nor self-regulation is found to be typical for consociational democracies, but regulation, or policies that “place constraints on acceptable behavior” (p. 333). Interestingly, the indicators of regulation (number of civil servants and police, presence of economic planning, and share of public expenditure devoted to it), point to the classic functions of the state.

52 Matthijs Bogaards, “Lebanon: How Civil War Transformed Consociationalism,” in Power Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges, edited by Allison McCulloch and John McGarry (London: Routledge, 2017), 148–65.

53 Allison McCulloch provides an excellent start with her paper on “Getting Things Done: How Capable is the Consociational State?” Paper presented at the Workshop on Consociationalism and the State, LSE, 22-23 July 2021.

54 Hannes Baumann, “Bringing the State and Political Economy Back In: Consociationalism and Crisis in Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023, this issue).

55 M. Shamsul Haque, “The Role of the State in Managing Ethnic Tensions in Malaysia,” American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 3 (2003): 240–66.

56 Smooha, “Types of Democracy and Modes,” 426.

57 M. G. Smith, “Pluralism, Violence and the Modern State,” in The State in Global Perspective, edited by Ali Kazancigil (London: Gower, 1986), 183–203.

58 Rahel Freiburghaus, and Adrian Vatter, “Federalism and Consociationalism,” in Handbook of Federations and Federal Studies, edited by C. Colino (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, forthcoming).

59 Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation: Refining the Theory and a Defence,” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 3 (2003): 1–69. O’Leary obverses many more combinations of federalism and consociationalism.

60 Didier Caluwaerts, and Min Reuchamps, “Combining Federalism with Consociationalism: Is Belgian Consociational Federalism Digging Its Own Grave?,” Ethnopolitics 14, no. 3 (2015): 277–95.

61 Belachew Girma Degefe, “Consociation as a Guarantee for the Protection of Minority Rights in Ethiopia,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 26, no. 3 (2019): 335–72.

62 This solution assumes that the constitution will be adhered to, whereas the recent experience of Lebanon and Iraq suggests that implementation is often partial and selective. I thank Bassel Salloukh for this observation.

63 Rainer Bauböck, “Why Stay Together? A Pluralist Approach to Secession and Federation,” in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, edited by Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 366–94, 381–82.

64 Petr Kopecký, “From ‘Velvet Revolution’ to ‘Velvet Split’: Consociational Institutions and the Disintegration of Czechoslovakia,” in Irreconcilable Differences? Explaining Czechoslovakia’s Dissolution, edited by Michael Kraus and Allison Stranger (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 69–86, 72.

65 Karen Henderson, “Czechoslovakia: The Failure of Consensus Politics and the Break-Up of the Federation,” Regional & Federal Studies 5, no. 2 (1995): 111–33.

66 Matthijs Bogaards, “The Favorable Factors for Consociational Democracy: A Review,” European Journal of Political Research 33, no. 4 (1998): 475–96.

67 Kopecký, “From “Velvet Revolution” to “Velvet Split”,” 83.

68 Henderson, “Czechoslovakia,” 126.

69 Yiftachel, “‘Right-Sizing’ or ‘Right-Shaping’?,” 375.

70 Hueglin and Fenna, Comparative Federalism.

71 Ephraim Nimni, ed., National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

72 On the relationship between self-rule and shared rule in the context of contemporary Iraq, see Matthijs Bogaards, “Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: The Case against” Consociationalism Light,” Ethnopolitics 20, no. 2 (2021): 186–202.

73 Yiftachel, “‘Right-Sizing’ or ‘Right-Shaping’?,” 366.

74 Robert Pinkney, Democracy in the Third World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994).

75 Ibid., 6–7.

76 Bernard Hoetjeś, “The European Tradition of Federalism: The Protestant Dimension,” in Comparative Federalism and Federation: Competing Traditions and Future Directions, edited by Michael Burgess and Alain-G. Gagnon (New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 117–37, 131–2.

77 In consociational accounts of the EU, its supranational institutions, especially the European Commission, are sometimes seen as referees (Matthijs Bogaards, “Consociational Interpretations of the EU: A Critical Appraisal,” European Union Politics 3, no. 3 (2002): 357–81). Even if correct, however, this does not lend credence to the view of the state as a consociational referee, precisely because the EU is not a state.

78 Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying How State and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17.

79 Andras Gal, “Beyond ‘Unwinding’: Constitutional Review Strategies in Consociations,” Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 3 (2020): 594–610.

80 Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa.

81 Sean Byrne, “Power Politics as Usual in Cyprus and Northern Ireland: Divided Islands and the Roles of External Ethno-Guarantors,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 6, no. 1 (2000): 1–23, 2, 3.

82 Roberto Belloni, “The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

83 Adam Beha, “Consociational Democracy and Political Engineering in Postwar Kosovo,” Nationalities Papers 47, no. 4 (2019): 674–689.

84 Baliqi, “Consociational Democracy,” 67.

85 Soeren Keil and Anastasiia Kudlenko, “Bosnia And Herzegovina 20 Years after Dayton: Complexity Born of Paradoxes,” International Peacekeeping 22, no. 5 (2015): 471–89, 481.

86 Gerhard Lehmbruch observed how the small West European consociational democracies have a history of neutrality that helped preserve their independence (Gerhard Lehmbruch, “Consociational Democracy in the International System,” European Journal of Political Research 3, no. 4 (1975): 377–91).

87 Keil and Anastasiia Kudlenko, “Bosnia And Herzegovina 20 Years,” 482.

88 John McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 538–55.

89 John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation and Self-Determination Disputes: The Evidence from Northern Ireland and other Recent Cases,” in After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism, edited by Keith Breen and Shane O’Neill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38–59.

90 James Anderson, “Partition, Consociation, Border-Crossing: Some Lessons from the National Conflict in Ireland/Northern Ireland,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (2008): 85–104, 102.

91 Brendan O’Leary, “Power-Sharing and Partition amid Israel-Palestine,” Ethnopolitics 15, no. 4 (2016): 345–65.

92 See also Omar Dahbour, “Self-Determination and Power-Sharing in Israel/Palestine,” Ethnopolitics 15, no. 4 (2016): 393–407.

93 Peter Crowley, “Consociation for Israel-Palestine,” Peace Review 32, no. 1 (2020): 71–6, 73 proposes “an Israeli-Palestinian consociational agreement” with both states also internally consociational.

94 Bogdan Ivanisevic, “Power-Sharing Proposal for Kosovo,” Eurobalkans 32 (1998): 34–39.

95 Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation: Refining the Theory and a Defence,” 1–69.

96 Thomas Hueglin, “Althusian Federalism for a Post-Westphalian World,” in The Challenge of Cultural Pluralism, edited by Stephen Brooks (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing, 2002), 105–17.

97 Hueglin and Alan Fenna, Comparative Federalism, 92.

98 Nenad Stojanović, “Political Marginalization of ‘Others’ in Consociational Regimes,” Zeitschrift Für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 12, no. 2 (2018): 341–64.

99 Joel Migdal, Strong Societies, Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

100 See, for example, the exchanges on the “sequencing fallacy” in volume 18 (2007) of the Journal of Democracy.

101 Sebastián Mazzuca, and Geraldo Munck, “State or Democracy First? Alternative Perspectives on the State-Democracy Nexus,” Democratization 21, no. 7 (2014): 1221–43.

102 Wimmer, “Who Owns the State?,” 648.

103 Brendan O’Leary, “Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places: An Advocate’s Introduction,” in Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places, edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O’Leary (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1–64, 6.

104 In Lijphart’s work, the state plays no role in the favorable factors or preconditions for consociational democracy (Bogaards, “The Favorable Factors”), 6–7.

105 Bogaards, “Consociational Interpretations of the EU”; Matthijs Bogaards, “The European Union: Consociational past, Centripetal Future?,” Representation 58, no. 3 (2022): 443–60.

106 Michiel Leezenberg’s contribution to this special issue does not view the Kurdish Region in Iraq as a de facto state (Michiel Leezenberg, “The Kurdish Consociational Experiment in Post-Saddam Iraq: A Practice-Theoretical Approach,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023, this issue). Therefore, his analysis is better regarded as belonging to the universe of regional consociations, which includes, for example, South Tyrol in Italy.

107 Hussein Adam, “Formation and Recognition of New States: Somaliland in Contrast to Eritrea,” Review of African Political Economy 21, no. 59 (1994): 21–38, 30.

108 Federico Battera, “State- & Democracy-Building in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Somaliland – A Comparative Perspective,” Global Jurist Frontiers 4, no. 1 (2004): 1–21, 10.

109 Dominik Balthasar, “On the (In)Compatibility of Peace-Building and State-Making: Evidence from Somaliland,” The Journal of Development Studies 55, no. 4 (2019): 457–72.

110 Markus Hoehne, “Limits of Hybrid Political Orders: The Case of Somaliland,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 199–217, 212.

111 Rebecca Richards, “Fragility within Stability: The State, the Clan and Political Resilience in Somaliland,” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 6 (2020): 1067–83.

112 Marc Weller and Stefan Wolff, “Bosnia And Herzegovina Ten Years after Dayton: Lessons for Internationalized State Building,” Ethnopolitics 5, no. 1 (2006): 1–13, 12.

113 Christopher Parker and Sami Zemni, “From Securitization toward Consociation? The Civic Dynamic of Palestinian Authority/Islamist Rivalry,” The Arab Studies Journal 6/7, no. 2/1 (1999): 34–56.

114 Bogaards, “The Uneasy Relationship.”

115 Parker and Zemni, “From Securitization,” 52.

116 Staf Hellemans, “Pillarization (‘Verzuiling’): on Organized ‘Self-Contained Worlds’ in the Modern World,” The American Sociologist 51, no. 2 (2020): 124–47, 137.

117 Ibid., 138.

118 Matthijs Bogaards, “Consociationalism in the Netherlands: Polder Politics and Pillar Talk,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 19–42.

119 Laurence Cooley and Michelle Pace, “Consociation in a Constant State of Contingency? The Case of the Palestinian Territory,” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2012): 541–58.

120 Parker and Sami Zemni, “From Securitization.”

121 Cooley and Michelle Pace, “Consociation in a Constant State,” 547.

122 Ibid., 554.

123 Ibid.

124 Phil Roeder, “Ethnofederalism and the Mismanagement of Conflicting Nationalisms,” Regional & Federal Studies 19, no. 2 (2009): 203–19.

125 Donald Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).

126 Bogaards, “The Uneasy Relationship.”

127 Migdal, Strong Societies, Weak States.

128 Baliqi, “Consociational Democracy,” 71.

129 Muharemovic, “The Dayton Democracy Model,” 52.

130 Stephen Deets, “Consociationalism, Clientelism, and Local Politics in Beirut: Between Civic and Sectarian Identities,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 24, no. 2 (2018): 133–57, 140.

131 Francisco Mazzola, “Community Policing in Areas of Limited Statehood: The Case of Lebanon,” Mediterranean Politics (forthcoming). DOI: 10.1080/13629395.2023.2195545.

132 John Nagle, “Consociationalism is Dead! Long Live Zombie Power-Sharing,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 137–44, 138.

133 Emanuela Macek-Macková, “Challenges in Conflict Management in Multi-Ethnic States: The Dissolution of Czechoslovakia and Serbia and Montenegro,” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 4 (2011): 615–33, 622.

134 Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2000).

135 Macek-Macková, “Challenges in Conflict Management.”

136 Ibid., 629

137 Macek-Macková, “Challenges in Conflict Management,” 627.

138 Daniel Lambach, Eva Johais, and Markus Bayer, “Conceptualising State Collapse: An Institutionalist Approach,” Third World Quarterly 36, no. 7 (2015): 1299–315; Available at: https://fragilestatesindex.org/.

139 Hadar Lipshits and Michal Neubauer-Shani, “The State-Religion Issue in Israel: Is the Consociational Model Still Alive?,” Israel Affairs 25, no. 2 (2019): 383–99, 386.

140 Ibid.

141 Nadim Farhat, Ward Vloeberghs, Philippe Bourbeau, and Philippe Poirier, “Transforming Unitary States into Federations: Path-Dependent Construction of Political Identities in Belgium and Lebanon,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 50, no. 4 (2020): 593–619, 610.

142 See also Adham Saouli, “Sectarianism and Political Order in Iraq and Lebanon,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 19, no. 1 (2019): 67–87.

143 John Nagle and Mary-Alice Clancy, “Power-Sharing after Civil War: Thirty Years since Lebanon’s Taif Agreement,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 1–8, 4.

144 O’Driscoll and Irene Costantini, “Conflict Mitigation,” 2.

145 Bethany Lacina, “India’s Stabilizing Segment States,” Ethnopolitics 13, no. 1 (2014): 13–27, 25.

146 Imad Salamey, The Decline of Nation-States after the Arab Spring: The Rise of Communitocracy (London: Routledge, 2016); Imad Salamey, “The Double Movement & Post-Arab Spring Consociationalism,” The Muslim World 106, no. 1 (2016): 187–204; Imad Salamey, “Mitigating MENA Communitarian Conflicts through Power-Sharing Options,” Orient II (2019): 51–8.

147 See Morten Valbjørn and Raymond Hinnebusch, “Exploring the Nexus between Sectarianism and Regime Formation in a New Middle East: Theoretical Points of Departure,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 19, no. 1 (2019): 2–22.

148 Salamey, “The Double Movement,” 196, 203.

149 Bogaards, “Iraq’s Constitution of 2005.”

150 Joel Migdal and Klaus Schlichte, “Rethinking the State,” in The Dynamics of States, edited by Joel Migdal and Klaus Schlichte (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–40.

151 Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, 1.

152 Hueglin, “Althusian Federalism.”

153 Hans Daalder, “On Building Consociational Nations: The Cases of The Netherlands and Switzerland,” International Social Science Journal 23, no. 3 (1971): 355–70, 356.

154 Philip Howe, Imperial Austria as a Precursor to Consociational Democracy, Vol. 32 (Vienna: Institute for Human Sciences, JVF Conference Papers, 2012), 13.

155 Gerhard Lehmbruch, A Non-Competitive Pattern of Conflict Management in Liberal Democracies: The Case of Switzerland, Austria, and Lebanon,” in Consociational Democracy: Political Accommodation in Segmented Societies, edited by Kenneth McRae (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 90–7.

156 Nikola Ambarkov, “Ottoman Millet System and the Political System of Both Yugoslavias as Pre-Consociational Experience for the Macedonian and the Bosnian Multicultural Society,” Iustinianus Primus Law Review 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–14.

157 Though Ergun Cakal, “Pluralism, Tolerance and Control: On the Millet System and the Question of Minorities,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 27, no. 1 (2020): 34–65 notes how the millet system can function as an element of control and Neophytos Loizides, Designing Peace: Cyprus and Institutional Innovations in Divided Societies (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) observes in his analysis of post-Ottoman states how the way past elite accommodation is remembered may hamper contemporary efforts at federalism and consociationalism.

158 Chris Skelcher, “Jurisdictional Integrity, Polycentrism, and the Design of Democratic Governance,” Governance 18, no. 1 (2005): 89–110, 105.

159 Hueglin, “Althusian Federalism”; see also Salamey, “The Double Movement,” 204.