Peshkopia: Intergroup Contact Theory and Albanians’ Feeling Temperature toward Greeks
Working Paper 006/2013
One Ethnic Group or Three: Ethnic Boundaries, Prejudices and Cultural Capital in the Independent Montenegro
RIDVAN PESHKOPIA[1]
Universum College Kosovo
D. STEPHEN VOSS
University of Kentucky
KUJTIM BYTYQI
Universum College Kosovo
UNIVERSUM COLLEGE WORKING PAPER SERIES
007/2013
PRISHTINA KOSOVO
2013
One Ethnic Group or Three: Ethnic Boundaries, Cultural Capital and Prejudice and in the Independent Montenegro
Introduction
The eruption of ethnic conflicts in the postsocialist Eastern Europe and its sub-region, the Balkans, has been able to inform us two major features. First, the imposition of the theoretically supranational communist regimes from 1917 and throughout the second half of the 1940 only froze an immature process of ethnic consolidation in several countries, and that process continued slowly beneath the communist iron jacket. Second, the simultaneous exposure of current ethnic groups to traditional values, domestic political dynamics and international developments―such as the growing impact of international organizations and globalization―makes the process of ethnic formation and consolidation more complex. Ethnic groups live today in a much interactive social environment and in some cases, it is almost impossible to find people who have not met certain out-group members of the same society. Such an interaction is expected to impact people’s perceptions for out-group members, and shape their attitudes accordingly. The complexity of contemporary interethnic relations increases as the growing frequency and intensity of intergroup contacts affect individuals, domestic structures and countries. Individual contacts affect group perceptions and, in turn, the latter influence the former.
Jesse and Williams (2011) suggest a multi-level analysis in order to understand ethnic conflict. Since much of the process of nation-creation and consolidation might cradle the future ethnic conflict (Van Evera 1995), we employ such a multi-level analysis to analyze the state of ethnicity among the Slavic and Albanian speaking populations in the newly independent Montenegro. The country emerged as independent in 2006, after 87 year of existence within Yugoslavia and more or less peaceful relations with former Yugoslavia powerhouse, Serbia. We consider several multi-level personal and aggregate variables, including social status as related to education, employment, economic performance and cultural capital, as well as some structural variables such as ethnicity, religious pertinence, people's perceptions for the out-group members, and the role of the EU membership perspective for Montenegro on how people from different ethnic groups feel toward out-group members.
Our empirical analysis on Montenegro considers the temperature feelings for out-group members of citizens of Montenegro who identify themselves as ethnic Albanians, Bosniaks, Montenegrins and ethnic Serbs. Historically, the division line between those who self-identify as ethnic Montenegrins with those who claim to be Bosniaks and ethnic Serbs has been blurry, and only by the second half of the 1990s, the ethnic identity debate surfaced in Montenegro, arguably, mostly as a reflection of country’s political orientation (Bieber, 20003; Casperen, 2003).[1] Therefore, now, the detachment after a lifelong contact is happening. Moreover, this detachment is not happening because of ethnic prejudices but because elite power calculations (Bieber, 2003; Casperen 2003; Huszka 2003). Therefore, by having been considered the same nation in Yugoslavia, the contacts between ethnic Montenegrins and Serbs in Montenegro were not a matter of choice but the state of society. Now that separation, as recorded by different accounts, has brought political frictions between both groups, prejudices between them are expected to further divide those groups.[2] However, since there is no ethnic Montenegrin who have not met a Bosniak and Serb, the psychological nature of Bosniak, Montenegrin and Serb ethnicity as related to each other and Albanians and the Roma can be analyzed only comparatively.
We conduct our empirical analysis both in the light of Van Evera's (1995) conditions for ethnic conflict and the role that lifelong peaceful contacts have played in peaceful existence among different ethnic groups in Montenegro. If we take into account the number of factors that define ethnicity (language, religion, historical memories and myths) we expect citizens of Montenegro from different ethnic groups to feel sympathetic toward those out-group members with whom they share most of such characteristics. We find that the more variables are added in the regression analysis, the more the difference between Montenegrins and Serbs on the one hand and, separately, Bosniaks/Muslims and Albanians on the other become visible. We test our arguments with public opinion survey data that we collected in June and December 2010 in Montenegro.
Ethnicity, Nation, the Individual and Society in the Contemporary Literature
Since the effect that we are trying to explain, namely, perceptions of the out-group members as a measurement of ethnic affinities has been largely employed in social psychology, and because much of our concern rests with ethnic feelings/conflict, knowledge advanced thus far both in the literature of ethnic conflict and the social psychology of intergroup relations would help to establish the conceptual framework of our research, and set the stage for our hypothesis.
Ethnicity, ethnic conflict and cohabitation
For Gilley's (2004: 1158) concept of ethnicity as a part of personal identity that is defined by one or more markers like race, religion, shared history, region, social symbols or language. Powell (1982: 43) adds tribes, nationality, and caste, elements that universalize the meaning of ethnicity. In some more specific terms for the European continent in general and particularly the Balkans, Byman (2002: 5) defines an ethnic group as gathering "people bound together by a belief on common kinship and group distinctiveness, often reinforced by religion, language, and history." Such bounds generate a sense of collective identity and perception of in-group members, those people who share such an identity, and out-group members, people who do not belong to the same collective identity (Esman 2004: 27-28; Jovitt 2002: 28; Weber 1968). From there, individualities are lost and they are replaced by collectivities who treat the groups either as uniformly friendly or uniformly hostile (Chirot 2002: 12). When individualities are lost, violence is more likely to emerge (Jowitt 2002: 29).
Yet, ethnicity does not become nationalism unless members of the ethnic group appropriate a political program and carry territorial claims where to implement that program (Hearn 2006; Smith 2001; Barrington 1997). Since most of the world territory is already claimed under someone else's sovereignty, it is easily conceivable that the establishment of a new sovereignty would clash with the existing political order. From this perspective, nationalisms would sooner or later lead to ethnic conflict unless some accommodations are made to both the nationalist demands and/or to the group (Van Evera 1995).
However, as Jowitt (2002: 27) notes, since ethnicity allows free exit and entry, it is simply a mode of identification, not a categorical identity. Therefore, not every ethnic conflict is set for all times, and the literature point to the perceptual factors of ethnic conflict. Van Evera (1995) provides a list of perceptive factors that might cause ethnic conflict, including the divergence among different ethnic groups of the way they perceive their history and current conduct; and the state of the economic conditions which, when deteriorate make public more receptive to scapegoats. Religion, another ethnic characteristic that fall between culture and psychology, has become more often than not a complementary element to ethnicity (Jesse and Williams 2011: 93-140), and is some cases has also determined the ethnic boundaries (Suberu 1995).
Intergroup contact theory and ethnic conflict: a literature review
For more almost seven decades now, contributors to intergroup contact theory have developed an enormous conceptual and empirical research to test the hypothesis that contacts between competing and/or hostile groups reduce prejudices and debunk stereotypes (Allport 1954; Hewstone and Brown 1986; Pettigrew 1998; Brewer 2001; Brown and Hewstone 2005; Pettigrew and Tropp 2006). The fundamental promise of intergroup contact theory is that more contacts between individuals belonging to antagonistic social groups (defined by culture, language, beliefs, skin color, nationality, etc.) tend to undermine the negative stereotypes and reduce their mutual antipathies, thus improving intergroup relations by making people more willing to deal with each other as equals. Living in isolation, groups tend to develop intergroup bias, a systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the in-group) or its members more favorably than a non-membership group (the out-group) or its members (Hewstone, Rubin, and Willis 2002).In a nutshell, more contact means less ethnic or cultural conflict, other things being equal (Miller 2002; Brewer and Gaertner 2001; Pettigrew and Tropp 2000; Pettigrew 1998a,b, 1971; Hamburger 1994; Amir 1976; Zajonc 1968; Works 1961; Allport 1954).
Contact theory has attracted enormous empirical work in social settings characterized by deeply divided societies in the US and other developed countries (Nesdale 2006; Levin, Laar, and Sidanius 2003; Cook 1984; Tajfel ed. 1982; Hamilton and Bishop 1976; Allport 1954) drew mainly from research conducted in the United States.[3] Recently, intergroup contact theory has been employed to explore effects of intergroup contacts in regions with violent ethnic conflicts. The work performed on the Northern Ireland conflict (Hewstone et al. 2006; Hewstone et al. 2004; Tam et al. 2008; Tausch et al. 2007) has brought strong support for the hypotheses of the contact theory, and so has Sentama’s (2009) work on the post-conflict Rwanda. However, to our knowledge, the theory has not been tested in the Balkans, and the special place that the region occupies in the studies of ethnic conflict begs for empirical work in that direction.
Critics of contact theory come from political science. Ideologies and the social norms that they produce assign stereotyped identities to members of other groups, and the nature of these social norms rather than interpersonal contacts make the difference between peaceful and conflictual relations(Jowit 2002; O’Leary 2002; McGarry and O’Leary 1995). This approach builds on a rational assumption and is supported by the widely known fact that most of the twentieth century’s ethnic killings have been performed by states under strong rational motivations rather than irrational crowd hysteria (Chirot 2002: 6). The elite-led breakups of former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia serve as strong supports of this argument (Roskin 2002; Zimmerman 1996).
Our common knowledge tells that contending groups tend to live adjacent to each other and that contact between neighbors tend to breed conflict. Forbes (2004) explains this paradox with the lopsided individual-level view of social psychologists, and suggests a model that would take into account fears of and resistance to assimilations that groups exhibit against perceived or real threats from other groups.[4] Moreover, critics of the contact theory point to—and its contributors are aware of—the endogenous relationship between contact and prejudice; people tend to contact out-groups toward whom they nurture positive feelings and shun contacts with out-groups toward whom they carry negative perceptions and stereotypes (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006; Forbes 2004; Voss, 1998; Wilson 1996; Herek and Capitanio 1996). Empirical work tries to resolve this issue either by using cross-sectional data and analyzing which path is stronger—in the studies of Van Dick et al. (2004), Pettigrew (1997), Powers and Ellison (1995), Butler and Wilson (1978) the path from contact to reduced prejudices is stronger. Alternatively, scholars might conduct longitudinal studies as the best way to resolve that problem (Pettigrew 1998)—in the case of Eller and Abrams (2003, 2004), Levin, van Laar, and Sidanius (2003), and Sherif (1966) longitudinal analysis show that optimal contact reduces prejudices over time (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006). Our capability is to establish any causal relations is reduced even more in cases when members from different ethnic groups live so intermingled that it is impossible to find people who have not met out-group members. Our following efforts focus on somehow bridging such gap by using comparatively analyzing the results of the regression analysis.
One Ethnic Group or Three: Assessing Ethnic Boundaries in Montenegro
Our efforts to explain ethnic boundaries in Montenegro confront us with some methodological challenges, especially related to one of our key variable, intergroup contact. It is easily perceptible that the specific historical context suggests a minimal variance of contacts between ethnic Montenegrins and Serbs as a key independent variable, but we expect to find more variance in the case of contacts of ethnic Montenegrins and Serbs with Albanians, Bosniaks and the Roma. Therefore, the only way to draw inferences is to consider also the effects of intergroup contacts with those groups. If the contact hypothesis holds, we should expect that, due to the lifetime close contacts between the ethnic Montenegrins and Serbs, the political frictions of the late 1990s and the 2000s should have left no deep scars in their mutual feelings, and each of them is expected to like the other better than they like the other ethnic groups. Finally, both Montenegrins and Serbs will tend to like better those out-group members whom they have met somehow.
We also control for the role of other social factors on group members’ attitudes toward out-group members. We expect age to play a role since people of different ages experienced different political systems and states of ethnic conflict. By the same token, years of education also reflect people exposure to interethnic dynamics in the country as well as the role of education in such relations. Economic factors have long been argued as determinants of ethnic conflict and almost everyone who has written on the subject credits the stagnant economy of the 1980s for the eruption of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (Jesse and Williams 2011; Chirot 2002; Zimmermann 1996; Djilas 1995; Diamond and Plattner 1994; Gagnon 1994). We expect variables that measure household financial performance during the last year as well as the employment status of respondents to play a role in their perception of out-group members.
Meanwhile, some political scientists tend to place ethnic conflict on existential anxieties caused by fears of assimilation and perception of group extinction (Mulaj 2008; Forbes 2006; Oberschall 2002; Kaufman 2001). Fear can be gagged either as fear from the irredentist activity of an ethnic minority within the country or from a neighboring country dominated by the same ethnic group with some minorities in the given country. It is expected that such fear will drive hostile perceptions against the out-group members from that particular minority group.
Religion is expected to play a role in people perception of out-group members, thus its implementation in any empirical analysis of the psychology of the ethnic conflict would help to gage more accurately the determinants of people’s feelings for out-group members (Jesse and Williams 2011; Sells 2003; Glenny 1996; Kaplan 1996). Arguably, nationalistic mobilization needs religious legitimating (Velikonja 2003). Specifically, the introduction of religion in any explanatory model of the psychology of ethnic conflict/peace will help to understand that element of ethnic boundaries.
Finally, the cultural capital; here we briefly elaborate migration as a form of cultural capital that, among other features, might have the potential to make people who experience it appropriate habits from the societies where they have worked and lived. We build on Bourdieu's ( Bourdieu and Passeron 1979) concept of cultural capital as a competence that becomes a capital when as it facilitates appropriating a society’s cultural heritage. Such a competence cannot be separated from the person who holds its, thus its formation combines personal talent and efforts with social norms one instilled by the social environment (see also Lareau and Weininger 2003). Therefore, foreign migration and exposure to foreign cultures might make migrants appropriate their habits. Such an appropriation of norms includes also the acceptance of others, especially in the case of the Balkan migration, which happens to be oriented toward the EU and the US, hence exposed not only to foreign cultures but also to the multiculturalism of their countries of destination. We expect higher feeling temperature toward out-group members from those who report to have had migrated before.
Methodology and data
We test models through regression analysis of both personal and aggregate data. We employ as a dependent variable the feeling temperature of Albanians, Bosniaks, Montenegrins and Serbs toward each other and toward the Roma in the range between 0 and 100. Since this variable could take any value between these margins, we employ linear regression analysis.
We employ a range of independent variables that operationalize the response of whether or not someone has met an out-group member (Albanian, Bosniak, Montenegrin, Roma and Serb), age, class, household economic performance during the last year, gender, religion, education, the fact that someone might have migrated abroad, whether or not they prioritize policies such as increasing employment and Montenegro’s membership in the European Union (EU), as well as their perception of out-group members as a threat to Montenegro’s sovereignty.