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Jonathan Zartman
Fonus Volume 1, no. 1, 2001-
Ziyodullo Shahidi Foundation
Prevalent explanations of human events claim, "Politics always triumphs over culture."(1) While the pursuit of money and power provide some explanation of human action, economics and politics do not fully account for the complexity of human behavior. Using the categories of politics, economics and cultural-identity to compare descriptions of human behavior offers a number of insights into theoretical debates currently popular in the west. Cultural identity describes a source of loyalty, contributes to our understanding of the birth of nation-states, provides a base for criticizing western policies and helps explain how cultural breakdown and social fragmentation support civil war.
Limitations of Contrasting Categories
Cynicism denigrates power-seeking politics as destructive human ambition and capitalism as naked covetousness in the pursuit of wealth. However, people use politics to strive for social protection, security, and the conditions for self-actualization. Because all people depend on political authority for the regulation of their affairs one cannot escape the imperative of living within political systems. Instead, we need political systems that more closely represent the character and needs of people. Yet solely political tools or strategies cannot create more perfect political systems.
Similarly, properly channeled economic motives create productivity that provides wealth for the entrepreneur as well as a solid standard of living and more fulfilling lives for all citizens. Yet economic equations alone cannot explain how to transmute greed or self-interest into socially beneficial productivity. The role of culture does not serve primarily in contrast to politics and economics, nor can we say that the field of cultural identity is wholly benign and wholesome. This century has witnessed the terrible destructive potential when dictators have harnessed cultural identity to serve exclusive and intolerant projects of self-assertion. Not one of these categories that we use to study human action can independently provide easy strategies for the expansion of human freedom, prosperity or self-expression.
Power-based explanations fail to acknowledge the role of culture in defining the social significance of various goals people pursue. Culture provides meaning because shared understandings help people define their significance in the universe. Cultural identity means that people use their shared culture to identify themselves and others as members of a group. They acknowledge their responsibility to protect that group and its culture as a form of self-protection. Culture breaks down when it no longer provides the definition of the people one must fight to defend. Culture also provides social definitions of actions that deserve punishment. People who seek public approval accept culturally defined limitations on their conduct. An integrated cultural system justifies the social rejection of those who pursue selfish ends by unacceptable methods. Just as economic or political systems break down, so do cultural systems. The breakdown of a culture forces people to strengthen local or family loyalties as broader social restraints on behavior deteriorate. Therefore, the breakdown of culture results in flagrant self-seeking activities and a society ruled by warlords.
Cultural Explanations of Loyalty
Classical psychological theory provides explanations of loyalty that support all three categories of collective action--political, economic and cultural. Political practices create various motivations for loyalty, including "loyalty as conformity" through the use of loyalty oaths and pledging allegiance. (2) In this description, the state embodies legitimate authority and obedience to that legitimacy enables the state to exist, however, political practices only lead to passive loyalty in some individuals.
The concept of "loyalty as an end-value" describes the interlocking of institutions that promote the nation-state as a "good" unto itself. Economic motivations for loyalty include the value of the group for individuals because group activities satisfy their personal needs. For instance, survey results show that in Europe people tend to identify themselves as European rather than according to their nationality when their region receives more money from central European institutions, in contrast to the benefits they receive from their own state. Motivations for loyalty derived from a shared culture include "vicarious satisfaction through identification." This means a belief that the nation-state exists as an expression of popular will, which reifies the state as an actor.
Cultural Explanations of the Birth of the Nation-State
Political scientists employ similar strategies to describe the birth of modern nation-states. Charles Tilly represents the power-centered perspective when he writes, "war makes the state and states make war.". (3) This perspective describes the state as merely that particular form of organized crime that supplants all contenders. The modern analogy suggests that drug smuggling organizations can gradually take greater control over territory and turn this control into political legitimacy.
From the economic viewpoint, Sami Zubaida writes that the nation-state arose through interdependence with industrial capitalism. Nation-states derive their legitimacy and extract loyalty based on providing services such as state-funded education and infrastructure, contract enforcement, state monopolization over legal authority, currency and control over the money supply. (4) In return, industrial capitalism provides high levels of productivity that the nation-state can tax efficiently.
By contrast Benedict Anderson, provides a cultural-identity explanation in the book Imagined Communities, claiming that people identify themselves as members of the same group based on a sense of shared experience derived from sharing a language and the same media. (5) As schools and government operations enforce linguistic unification, nationalism takes root as a product of the imagination.
In Tajikistan the media offers little support for the development of national identity or for the stimulation of civic consciousness and political activity. Most people get their information from television, which is either Russian or state controlled, and they do not believe that the central government has much effect, or can affect their lives. (6) The opinion survey group "Center for Sociological Research" observes that of the ten newspapers in Dushanbe, papers covering serious topics like politics and economics have little popularity and low numbers of readers. (7) However, the 1999 UNDP Human Development report notes the thriving number of NGOs and the growth of civil society in Tajikistan.
Criticism of Western Policies
This theoretical framework allows us to criticize the behavior of western capitalist democracies as they apply their conventional wisdom toward the states of the former Soviet Union. In the economic field, western advisers propose a set of agreements regulating and protecting foreign investment and supporting enforcement of contract law. However greatly an economy needs laws and agreements, many studies of economic growth confirm that some economies grow faster due to the influence of social and cultural characteristics. When people place a high value on education, on savings, on craftsmanship, and respect for the creation of wealth, these cultural variables promote prosperity. Perfect laws mean little when norms that advance the interests of society fail to constrain the behavior of businessmen. The perfect set of laws, or perfect state control over inflation and money supply cannot promote prosperity. Laws mean little when society despises rather than cherishes the entrepreneur. Prosperity only comes when entrepreneurs arise who place great value on long-term investment and creating a product. Western advice derives from the profoundly cultural assumption that socially productive behavior will arise spontaneously within every supportive legal and macroeconomic environment. Western economic guidance may offer broad general help but remains fundamentally insufficient for prosperity.
In the political realm, western efforts offer greater benefit when these efforts promote election laws, protection for freedoms of press, assembly and of speech. All these protections advance human welfare, but remain inadequate when people lack sufficient literacy to evaluate the political appeal of competing candidates and the future consequences of their voting decision. Legal protection for political rights means little without a supporting culture of tolerance. Western advice assumes that an appropriate constitution and laws alone will persuade a ruling party to yield power peacefully, that leaders will care more about the preserving a constitutional system than about continuing in power. The western model depends upon assumptions that people will choose freedom, even at considerable sacrifice of either economic growth or social order. These suppositions derive from western culture, but to whatever extent people prefer order to freedom, laws and constitutions lose their salience.
Moreover, western political efforts have also targeted cultural change. These efforts include projects to raise the status of women and protection of minorities, to develop practical hands-on experience at self-government and assist socially beneficial problem solving through support for NGO development. As foreign models, these limited efforts do not directly engage the indigenous cultural-identity. State directed foreign intervention predominantly derives from a power-politics model and targets state officials and regional field commanders with incentives. Intervention by NGOs generally tries to ameliorate grievances and therefore relies on significant community-based project implementation, but often fails to include indigenous problem-solving practices and institutions. Insight for guiding external support for peace can be derived from comparison between competing explanations of the civil war in Tajikistan
The Tajikistan Civil War
The political explanation begins with the seventy-year domination of government and the Communist Party by people from the northern region of Khujand. People from the southern region of Kulob served as junior partners to this ruling "clan." Excluded from power and its prerogatives, people in other regions developed resentment against the ruling clan. When the Soviet Union began to collapse the structures of domination and control appeared to weaken. Political power-seekers in the subordinated regions saw an opportunity for the redress of their grievances and grabbed for the full control of the state apparatus. In the political perspective, more consistent application of power--intimidation--to deter expressions of discontent and more equitable distribution of political benefits could have prevented the civil war. In this view, following Nicolo Machiavelli's advice, those who understand political authority must not hesitate when power appears attainable.
The power perspective emphasizes the peace of submission secured through overwhelming countervailing power. People who use this approach compare the peace agreement in Tajikistan to a forest fire. They say that the civil war ended because the people lost the will to fight after suffering so much destruction. The civil war burned up all the combustible materials of hatred against people from other regions and desire for political gain. However, as in Afghanistan, other civil wars have endured for decades after much greater destruction and poverty. The political view offers little guidance for resolving a civil war, protecting human rights and building a tolerant society. In this perspective, a new state requires a strong leader who will distribute some benefits and apply force to deter potential competitors from seeking advantage through violence. Yet "benevolent dictatorship" models inevitably fall short of the ideal and repress human self-actualization.
In contrast, the economic explanation says that the pursuit of material gain motivated both sides fighting in the civil war, rather than hatred or ideology. Negotiators resolved the civil war by promising material incentives, which induced warlords to allow peace. The opposition has received jobs, cars, money, and a section of the border in which they can control the flow of drugs and make more money, so they gain nothing more from fighting. While the opposition gained what it wanted, the government still has power and freedom of action. The government now uses the threat of becoming another Afghanistan to pry economic aid from western donor agencies and international organizations. The economic explanation offers little advice for building a new society, assuming that with enough aid and the right laws, people will become capitalist and democratic and therefore, eventually, also peaceful, prosperous and secure.
Appropriate consideration of cultural explanations requires refuting similar unsupported approaches. One U. S. State Department publication claims that, "Russian troops helped Tajikistan forces fight Islamic rebels to a stand still in 1997." (8) Considerable evidence available even in the west shows that political Islam provided neither the most significant driving force nor the primary motivation for the civil war. (9) Using the label "Islamic rebels" obscures the specific context in Tajikistan. Central Asian governments employ this form of explanation to excuse their authoritarian practices repressing individual liberties, cultural expression and especially non-political religious expression. The motif of danger from Islamists artificially stimulates fear and validates security dependence on Russian military capabilities. Even so, the Tajikistan economy depends on the skills of Russian speakers, and the state depends on Russia politically for protection from the vacuum of political insecurity in Afghanistan and from the ambitions of Uzbekistan. Therefore, Russia promotes this image in the pursuit of influence throughout central Asia.
Civil War as a Product of Cultural Breakdown
Any cultural explanation of the civil war requires an understanding of how Soviet control affected cultural development. Although most Soviet republics avoided civil war, secessionist movements in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldavia and Russia itself reveal a broad connection between Soviet control, social fragmentation and civil war. Other Central Asian states also face problems of social cohesion. For example Kazakhstan must prevent the rise of secessionist sentiments in its northern, largely Russian regions. Uzbekistan has promoted Uzbek identity at the expense of the Karakalpaks and the large Tajik population (20% or 5 million by some estimates).
The Soviet government reached decisions and imposed them by recourse to power and authority rather than from any calculation of costs, or in order to fulfill cultural values. Can we blame the civil war on the pattern of human relations created by the Soviet reliance on power? The Soviets imposed Russian culture in their efforts to bring political and economic development to Central Asia, but they created an estrangement between people and their culture while attempting to create "a new Soviet man." The Soviet system imposed political domination over all elements of economics and cultural expression. In the Soviet pyramidal pattern of control, all information and monitoring flowed from top to bottom. People became so accustomed to addressing problems through an appeal to power, through either giving orders as superiors or receiving them as subordinates that habits of horizontal communication between people as equals fell into decline. In contrast, Tajik cultural patriots assert that Ibn Sina taught the essential equality of humanity. (10)
The alternative to blaming the civil war on "Islamic fundamentalism" or accepting the economic and political explanations advanced here requires understanding some characteristics of Tajikistan and Tajik culture. Statistics document the poverty, underdevelopment and rural traditional character of Tajik society. Through these qualities the social forces affecting all of Central Asia exerted a concentrated effect in Tajikistan. Tajiks boast of their historical literary heritage, their role as the carriers of science and administrators in the courts of successive waves of conquerors. (11) Under Soviet control, Russians displaced Tajiks from their function in the division of labor (as artisans, academics and administrators), and from control over their heartland and major regions. Now the citizens of this republic, further damaged by the civil war, have the greater difficulty discovering, connecting with and fulfilling their heritage and natural function. However, Tajik cultural patriots believe that as Tajiks rediscover their cultural-identity they can bring healing to the region.
Vatural geographical and linguistic barriers separating regions such as the Pamirs and Leninabod exacerbate the tendency toward social fragmentation. For example, deteriorating road conditions and irregular airline service pose great obstacles in travelling from Dushanbe to Khorog, the major city of the Pamiri region. Because the Anzob pass closes in winter, for six months of the year Khujand is only accessible from the capital by expensive flights or a very long, difficult trip by train. Soviet policy created the borders that now divide Central Asia and disrupt the symbiosis of Central Asian life. Soviet policy put the majority Tajik populations of the ancient imperial capitals of Samarkand and Bukhara into the Republic of Uzbekistan. This nationality policy, which cut the Tajiks of Tajikistan off from their ancestral heartland, inflicted a serious wound in the cultural psyche of the people and strengthened the social effects of natural geographic barriers.
In a functioning and culturally integrated society people try to solve their problems by appealing to universal values. The broad acceptance of a cultural standard of legitimacy allows conflict resolution by discussion and compromise. But in Tajikistan Soviet policies imposed conflicts between the indigenous culture and the system of power, which reinforced the existing fragmentation of society and thwarted natural cultural development. These factors inhibited the work of cultural intellectuals as they struggled to preserve a unified nation that could develop free and independent institutions. Evidence of social fragmentation can be seen in the lack of a unifying language and in the primacy of loyalty to hometown. The importance of hometown loyalty can be contrasted with power-centered or economically based thinking. The power-centered man describes the motivation for work as, "I must do this because I accept authority and know my self-interest in obedience." Economic thinking says, "I will do it because I know there is money in it for me if I do." One might imagine other descriptions of motivations such as performing an obligation out of self-respect or a sense of honor. However, in Tajikistan even educated people commonly say, "I must help this man because he is from my home village."
Some observers emphasize the differences between people of different regions, ethnicity and urban or village heritage so much that they speak of different Tajiki societies, rather than of one Tajiki society. For example, some Tajiks assert that the Tajiks are Europeans, like the Greeks, but other Tajiks say, "It is just the Pamiris who like to say that they are like the Greeks." Others explain that Tajikistan consists of many different kinds of people.
The foreign language student struggles to recognize the different dialectical variations in the vocabulary. Rather than solely finding one proper word for a given meaning, one must also ask, "How do people from Leninabod say this? And what word do people from Kulob use?" In the absence of consensus over word meanings, Tajiks reflexively go to the Russian word. Russian serves not only as the language of academia and of technical description, but also as referee. The necessity for those with education to appeal to a foreign language as the external and impartial arbiter of disputation reveals the obstacles Tajiks face in building a national idea around language.
According to a poll of residents of the capital, Dushanbe, in May 2000 by the Center for Sociological Research, only 19.2% of those questioned say their level of Tajiki is excellent, 68.8% say that it is easier to read in Russian. Furthermore, 9.1 % of Tajiks and Uzbeks and 63.6% of Russians say they do not know Tajiki at all. The authors of that study conclude, "That is why, it is not possible to expect that the Tajik language will implement its social functions in society without conducting more thorough and diverse work on effective mass language teaching." (12) Tajik nationalism seems particularly uprooted, yet desperately searching for an anchoring place in a common language. The cultural producers complain that inadequate popular familiarity with the language of the great poetic canon of Tajik literary heritage hinders language from serving fully as the tool of national integration. Therefore, Tajikistan must overcome these limitations to achieve a greater sense of common national destiny.
The future for Tajikistan
Indigenous culture offers the valuable service of binding society together, but societies need the services of artisans that will provide a reservoir of integrating symbolism. To sustain a national culture, artists must be able to support themselves by their art. Central Asian culture, having developed from its birth at the crossroads of civilizations, incorporates elements from many civilizations. It freely invites intercourse with the different cultures of the rest of the world. Tajiki culture cannot be preserved in isolation, but requires channels of communication and marketing connections, so that as Tajik artists support themselves, Tajikistan can become a country that exports cultural products.
Relations between the cultural identity of the government and that of the people reveal the influence of cultural factors. By reshaping the structure of state agencies and changing personnel throughout the state sector, the ruling party continues to consolidate its gains from the peace agreement. State policy-makers accepted the constraints imposed by the peace agreement of June 27, 1997 which granted the opposition 30% of significant positions. Two interacting trends now affect the influence and activity of the government. First, multilateral international organizations exert pressure to promote capitalism and democracy. The government enjoys broad but reserved support from the "international community." Foreign organizations devote significant activity and resources to improving domestic welfare. Second, the government must reconcile its preferred ideology and management style with popular sentiment.
Discrepancies between the cultural identity of the state and that of the people continue to hinder the development of a unifying national idea, yet contrary to the common western belief, Tajikistan faces other challenges more significant than divisive pressures from regionalism or from political Islam. The country has suffered much from the triple blows of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the necessity of an economic transition and a crippling civil war, but shows no prospect of open conflict. However, because the state does not embody the cultural identity of the people, economic recovery and political consolidation continue to suffer setbacks and policy initiatives fail. According to cultural patriots, the conclusion of the civil war did accomplish a victory for the freedom to express one's identity, especially in the religious dimension, in contrast to state promoted atheism under communism. But this victory remains incomplete as long as the state cannot represent the values of the people and even finds those values threatening, leading to secretiveness and defensiveness. As long as the state must rely on international organizations for its support rather than on the people, its policies will not find their greatest productive effect.
NOTES
1. In a personal interview, a senior American government official in Dushanbe, October 2000 remarked, "Politics always triumphs over culture." He amended this remark to note that culture exerts an enduring persistent manifestation so that the Persian poetic canon from 900 years ago continues to influence the culture of Tajikistan today.
2. Harold Guetzkow, Multiple Loyalties: Theoretical Approach to a Problem in International Organization. Center for Research on World Political Institutions, (Princeton University; Princeton. New Jersey, 1955)
3. Represented by Charles Tilly’s dictum, “war makes the state and states make war.” The Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
4. Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State: essays on political ideas and movements in the Middle East, (London; New York: Routledge, 1989).
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991).
6. "A majority (55%) say that they have little interest in matters of politics. Furthermore, 50% say that no level of government has much influence at all. Steven Wagner, "Public Opinion in Tajikistan 1996" IFES.
7. Zerkalo #7, July 2000, pp. 17-22.
8. "Is a New 'Great Game' On for Uzbeks. Kazakhs, and Tajiks?" Opinion Analysis, Office of Research, Department of State, Washington, D.C. M-59-00, May 23, 2000.
9. See the Rand study "Tadjikistan," by ArkadyYu. Dubnov.
10. These last two paragraphs owe distinctive perspective to the author's conversations with Munira Shahidi in November, 2000.
11. Tajikistan Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999) 16.
12. Zerkalo, #5, p. 15.
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