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Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype
HUNTINGTON ESTIMATES THAT IN 1990 there were 130 independent states having a population of at least one million people, of which 59 (45.4 percent) were democratic. In comparison, in 1973 there were only 30 democratic states out of 122 (24.6 percent).(1) Hence, the situation in 1990 had improved greatly. Huntington holds that the entire world has been swept by a wave of democratization since 1974.(2) This is all the more true after the breakdown of Communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the liberation of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.
Most of these democratic states arc ethnically or nationally divided societies, and some of them are even deeply divided. Ethnic divisions constitute special hindrances for democracy because of structural incompatibilities and sharp disagreements between the constituent segments of society. The main question that comes to mind is what types of democracy prevalent in these societies are and how they cope with the ethnic splits and conflicts.
The current literature on comparative politics distinguishes three types of democrat: liberal, consociational, and Herrenvolk. They differ markedly in the way they handle ethnic and national cleavages. An attempt to classify democracies into one or another of these types is not easy. At least several of them defy classification. A striking case is Israel, which is universally accepted as a democracy, yet does not neatly fit any of the known types.
This article posits that one type of democracy is missing from the current typology of democracies. This type, nicknamed "ethnic democracy" will be presented and distinguished from the others. The detailed application of this model to Israel will expose the issues, tensions, and contradictions in ethnic democracies and the strategies employed for dealing with them. The main discussion will focus on the division between the Jewish majority and Arab minority, because this cleavage makes the ethnic nature of Israeli democracy salient, problematic, and conflictual.
FOUR TYPES OF DEMOCRACY
Democracies are commonly classified into one of two distinct types: liberal (majoritarian), and consociational.(3) In a liberal democracy, such as the United States, ethnicity is privatized. The state does not legislate or intervene in ethnic cleavages, but forges a homogeneous nation-state by setting up uniform language, identity, nationalism, and national institutions for...