Race, Indigeneity, and Land in Belize: A National Debate

An incident on Maya land in southern Belize has sparked a passionate national debate in Belize over the role of race, ethnicity, and democracy in Belizean society.

On June 24^, 2015, armed police arrested 13 Maya villagers and leaders on charges of unlawful imprisonment of Mr. Rupert Myles.  Myles had been notified by the Maya people since 2014 to cease the construction of a house within the grounds of the sacred Mayan archeological site Uxbanka.  The site stands within Maya communal lands, recently declared by the Caribbean Court of Justice as legal property of the Maya people.  After many months in conflict with Myles and without response from the national police, village police restrained him in handcuffs after he allegedly threatened to use a firearm.  Village leaders had previously alerted Mr. Myles about the impropriety of his actions and had requested government assistance, but to no avail.  After his later release, he pressed charges against the Maya and accused them of racism for preventing him from constructing in the village.  Among those charged was the village alcalde and respected spokesperson and mother Cristina Coc.


Fierce debate was spurred after Belizean Prime Minister condemned the Maya People before they were formerly charged: Telling Channel 5 news on June 22, Minister Barrow stated,

“I don't know how on earth they can ever justify this. In my view they've lost whatever moral high-ground they ever had and I want to look carefully at it to see if any of them might not perhaps be criminally liable from what they did to that gentleman. Tying up this man, falsely imprison him, physically assaulting him - that is absolutely intolerable and I am telling you, I mean to find out from the appropriate authorities what if anything they mean to do about it. (Channel 5 News, June 22, 2015

When informed by the reporter: “They say he built a structure since 2014 on the Uxbenka site and they did this as a last resort, that’s what their release says.” The Prime Minister’s reply was:

“Well I don’t know about that. I don’t know about their sites.” 

National and local TV, newspapers, social media, and bloggers have all taken up the debate.  Blogger Filiberto Penados, responded, “Note that the Prime Minister disregards the question of trespassing Maya lands and the fact that the Santa Cruz people had sought the assistance of the State to deal with this matter months ago by simply saying 'Well I don’t know about that. I don’t know about their sites'."   In fact, the Maya had notified the authorities of this issue multiple times over the past months, and requested the assistance of state police at their town meeting the day that Myles was arrested.

Many have called into question whether the alcaldes had the authority to detain Myles.   Penados went on to explain, “The Alcalde operates as a magistrate in the Maya communities - they have a responsibility for maintaining order. The Alcalde system is part of the legal framework of Belize. They arrest people; they have done in the past, since colonial days. So, the alcaldes are not just “these people” as the prime Minister refers to them. They are not just a mob. They are the law. Clearly, the arrest of Mr. Myles was neither random nor unreasonable.’’ The Prime Minister, however, disregards all of this, when he says  'I don’t know about that. I don’t know about their sites'.'"
Another central piece of the debate has revolved around race and culture and what it means to be Belizean. Mario Lara, a Belizean living in the US, reflected on the incident in light of the Black Lives Matter movement against unjust arrests and harassment of Black men in the US, although the Maya reject that view of the events.

“One of the related issues that have been front and center in the discussion is that of racism and bigotry in Belize – the darker side of a multicultural and diverse society, if you will. The allegations made by Mr. Myles Rupert that he was unwelcomed in the village of Santa Cruz, and that as a result he was ultimately insulted, humiliated, and wrongfully detained by the Santa Cruz Maya village community and village police simply because he’s black, is very disturbing,” he continued, however,  “The public pronouncements by the Prime Minister that they were guilty even before a proper investigation or much less a court trial had been conducted was quite a shocking display of indignation toward the Maya by the Prime Minister. The fact that the Prime Minister himself is a black man is not easily overlooked in this situation; and one has to wonder whether the alleged actions of the Maya community touched a core nerve with the Prime Minister that is rooted in his black (not his Belizean) consciousness and identity."

Many have has characterized the Maya people as non-Belizeans or foreigners, who are trying to separate themselves as having a higher privilege over other non-Maya Belizeans.    Cristina Coc, one of the leaders arrested, released a statement rejecting this pitting of oppressed minorities against each other, and brought up the  question of whether the Maya people can maintain their traditions and culture and still be 'Belizean'.

“All over the world, all throughout history, people have engaged in countless struggles for their dignity, for equality, for respectful and just societies, for democratic power relations, for a livable planet. We can draw lines between these different struggles, as if these struggles were separate and belonged to distinct social groups.  But the distinctions would be false and we would only lose sight of something important: that our struggle is for a better world, one that is more just and where there exists the possibility of many worlds.  In this sense there has only ever been one struggle.
"...Sometimes people may wonder wouldn’t it be easier for indigenous peoples to just get on with the play, check in their identities and become ordinary citizens, just learn English so you avoid being labeled Guatemalan, forget you native Q’eqchi or Mopan,  forget about communal property….. perhaps, but that would mean giving up our identity and our responsibility of creating a better world for our children and for all the children of Belize.  So, despite 500 plus years of oppression and marginalization, we continue to imagine and pursue alternative ways of being, ways of organizing our societies,  alternative ways of relating to each other and our environment.  Alternatives to dehumanizing colonial and neocolonial models.  It is not that we have the answers: but we believe like our forefathers that we must try.   In creating human beings our creators tried three times, two times they failed, in the third they succeeded.   In creating a just and inclusive nation we may fall along the way but just as the creators in Maya cosmology, we can only succeed by joining our words and our thoughts and our hearts.”

After her violent arrest, Ms. Coc has received a statement of support from Maya women, and also from neighboring Afro-Indigenous Garifuna communities Liyawada Cerro expressed their solidarity with the Maya across race lines;

"[We face] an attack on the right to communal land, to practicing autonomy within your communities. These are the rights we have as Indigenous people that scare the powerful. … Only when it suits them politically, do we ever have the government or the support of the educated and powerful. And so we must unite and we must seek good allies and support."

Nationally, tensions are running high following the international court ruling requiring Belize to accept Maya land tenure, after decades of opposition with the government. The case was won by the Maya in April 2015  at The Caribbean Court of Justice, Belize’s highest appellant court.  The decision reaffirmed that the Maya of southern Belize have rights to lands they have customarily used and occupied, and that these traditional land rights constitute property within the meaning of the provisions of the Belize Constitution that generally protect property free from discrimination. The Government of Belize now is required  to demarcate and register Maya village lands, and protect them against incursions by outsiders. Meaning the must adopt the necessary ‘legislative, administrative, and/or other measures’ to that end and, in the meantime, to abstain from and prevent acts that would adversely affect Maya land rights.
The responses from the Prime Minister belay a reluctance to embrace this decision.  Former UN Special Rapporeur James Anaya flew to Belize to provide his expertise and legal support. He released the following statement putting the incident into global and historical context:

"Belize stands at crossroad in it history and in defining the way forward in its treatment of the Maya people.  This crossroad is marked by two distinct, historical trends that are present on a global scale.  One is rooted in historical patterns of thinking and action that have discriminated against indigenous peoples and facilitated the taking of their lands by failing to recognize their customary land tenure and property systems that are crucial to their survival. Unfortunately, that trend can be seen in the positions and actions of government officials in many countries across the world.

But in many countries and internationally, that trend is being taken over by a modern, more enlightened one; one that starts with the premise that indigenous peoples are equal in value and dignity to all others, and that is more and more accepting of the proposition that their own systems of property and land tenure are to be treated on the basis of equality. This modern trend understands that embracing these rights of indigenous peoples is a mark of a truly democratic state that is genuinely respectful of the human rights of all.

The courts of Belize, the Caribbean Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have together marked a path for Belize along the more enlightened, modern trend, by upholding the property rights established by the Maya people’s own laws and traditions on the same terms as the property rights of others. The government has made a commitment to follow that path.  The world expects that it now make good on that commitment."

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Official Definitions of Indigeneity

The UN / WGIP
The original definition was accepted in 1972 by the UN Working Group for Indigenous Peoples, but was considered too restrictive and was later amended to what follows in 1983.

Indigenous populations are composed of the existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial condition; who today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic and cultural customs and traditions than with the institutions of the country of which they now form part, under a state structure which incorporates mainly national, social and cultural characteristics of other segments of the population which are predominant.

• (a) they are the descendants of groups, which were in the territory at the time when other groups of different cultures or ethnic origin arrived there;
  
• (b) precisely because of their isolation from other segments of the country’s population they have almost preserved intact the customs and traditions of their ancestors which are similar to those characterised as indigenous;
  
• (c) they are, even if only formally, placed under a state structure which incorporates national, social and cultural characteristics alien to their own.

In 1986, the following rather important line was added;

any individual who identified himself or herself as indigenous and was accepted by the group or the community as one of its members was to be regarded as an indigenous person (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7/Add.4.para.381).

ILO 169
The ILO 169 Convention applies to the following peoples;

both tribal peoples whose social, cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of the national community and whose status is regulated wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations, and to peoples who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabit the country at the time of conquest or colonisation.

WORLD BANK
In 1991, the World Bank adopted the following definition of indigeneity.

Indigenous Peoples can be identified in particular geographical areas by the presence in varying degrees of the following characteristics:
a) close attachment to ancestral territories and to the natural resources in these areas;
b) self-identification and identification by others as members of a distinct cultural group;
c) an indigenous language, often different from the national language;
d) presence of customary social and political institutions; and
e) primarily subsistence-oriented production.

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Indigeneity and historical consciousness: comparing Greek imagination with others

Indigeneity and historical consciousness: comparing Greek imagination with others

Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, University of Bristol

Abstract:

Many in Greece invest with deep persuasion to their connection with ancient Greek history and culture. This is broadly conceived in essentialist terms and supported by competing claims to an authentic and original culture. While in everyday conversation the causality of historical events is enthusiastically debated — sometimes admittedly by means of original arguments — most local actors in Greece will hesitate to challenge the main threads that sustain the master-narrative of Greek ethnohistory, such as for example, the connection of Greek identity with ancient Greece and Europe. Greek origin myths, like those of other powerful or powerless ethnic groups, forge a relationship with a primordial time, and on this basis they legitimise entitlements to territory and culture. The ‘I came here first’ principle rules here, prioritising one previously migratory ethnic group over another.

Stripped from its credentials of European excellence, the national Greek historical consciousness looks very much like any other, but many in modern Greece, proud of their paradigmatic European-ness, remain unaware of their shared similarities with other peoples. At a more abstract level, this attitude permeates the disciplinary compartmentalisation of anthropology, and has discouraged direct analytical comparison beyond prescribed regions, such as, for example the wider European or Mediterranean neighbourhoods. I see the lack of direct communication between the Anthropology of Europe and the Anthropology of the Developing World as representing a double (crypto-evolutionist) standard of analysis. It is based on the idea that European history belongs to a higher order of complexity, not directly comparable with the transient histories of ‘smaller’, ‘tribal’, ‘marginalised’ groups. Following this widely established way of thinking, a great majority of the anthropologists concerned with indigenous identities have excluded from their discussions European histories and cultural traditions. In a similar manner they appear reluctant to re-examine and put in perspective their own cultural indigeneity, thus reserving ‘indigeneity’ as an analytical construct only suitable for discussing the identity of others. I believe that this implicitly ethnocentric tendency deprives anthropological analysis of new possibilities.

In this paper, drawing upon my work in Greece and Panama I will attempt to problematise some widely unchallenged notions of cultural authenticity that form an integral part of Greek national consciousness.

Introduction

I have always found history documentaries or televised portraits of Greek culture made for and presented to international audiences more inspiring than similar Greek productions in Greek. But I have only lately discovered why. It is not that the international ones are more expensive (or presumably, of a higher standard). On the contrary, there are many sophisticated programmes of this type in Greek, which are very well produced, demonstrate a better awareness of context, and in all respects are stronger in detail. In ethnographic terms they represent a ‘thicker’, more nuanced description. But there is often one serious disadvantage to programmes prepared in Greek for a Greek audience. In most cases, and to different degrees, they take the classificatory category of ‘us’ for granted; and along with it a narrow, selective, but so enormous in terms of the detailed information it entails, imagined conception of Greek-ness.

The same, taken for granted, view of Greek history — one that presupposes a certain amount of shared, and in most cases unquestionable knowledge — is assumed in everyday conversation among modern Greeks; to be more precise, those among them who identify with the dominant Greek ethnic identification. They remain persuaded by the factual validity of a particular version of history that is developed early in life under the guiding, but prescriptive, influence of national education (cf. Frangoudaki & Dragona 1997; Karakasidou 1997; Bryant 2004; Hamilakis 2003).[1] In later life, the same convictions are maintained by the media and the rhetoric of political parties, which further reinforce a belief in a history accepted by all in the self-inclusive category of ‘us’. This is indeed the type of certainty that nurtures national imagination, as has been persuasively established by the scholars of this phenomenon—more representatively, Benedict Anderson (1983).

I am more intrigued by a parallel manifestation of this presumptive imagination. In many conversations that include both Greeks and non-Greeks, the Greeks often assume that their foreign interlocutors possess a good deal of knowledge about Greek history. A knowledge that is likely to encourage, it is assumed, some admiration, or at least, a certain degree of appreciation towards Greek culture. As my systematic observations demonstrate, the Greek parties in these conversations feel particularly disappointed when the foreign interlocutors do not meet this expectation. Such a failure is described in Greek by the noun ‘a-historitos,’ reserved to describe a person ignorant of basic historical facts (similar to the English adjective ‘a-historical’).

My reflection on that type of interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks have inspired me to tackle the topic I examine in this paper. This is the privileged treatment of Greek history and its relationship to non-Greek histories of minoritised ethnic groups, such as those described by Eric Wolf (1982) as ‘people without history’. I will argue that the widely held, but largely implicit expectation that Greek history deserves privileged treatment—inspired by western European scholarship and cultivated by Greek nationalism—discourages direct comparison with non-European histories and identities. This attitude, I maintain, is crypto-evolutionist in perspective: Greek-ness and European-ness are treated with a special reverence, as representative of a higher order of civilisation, which is beyond comparison with other, more ‘tribal’ or exotic versions of indigenous identity.

As a remedy to this problem, I have argued in a recent paper (Theodossopoulos n.d.) for a more inclusive treatment of the notion of indigeneity, one that acknowledges all cultures as indigenous to a certain socio-political context. My position developed as a response to a previous debate about the concept ‘indigenous’, as this unravelled itself in the pages of Current Anthropology, Anthropology Today and Social Anthropology. Adam Kuper (2003), initiated the debate with his article, ‘The Return of the Native’, in which he presented the term ‘indigenous’ a remnant of 19^th century evolutionism, a more politically correct equivalent of the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘native’. He proposed that the term should be abandoned, provoking passionate protest from many other anthropologists, who often employ indigeneity to advocate the rights of several dispossessed groups (see in particular, Kenrick & Lewis 2004).

I set apart my position from both sides of the debate. Any traces of evolutionism that might be identified in the term indigenous, I argued in response to Kuper, are the result of the anthropology’s unexamined tendency to search for indigenous people in far away lands, and the denial of many anthropologists themselves to put in perspective their own indigeneity. Instead of abandoning the term, I propose to treat it reflexively, with a sense of humility that examines all cultures within the same analytical order, and without separating ourselves — as researchers, or as the subjects of our study — from others. For this reason, I also tried to differentiate my argument from the critiques of Kuper, who treat indigeneity — in their defence of the rights of minoritised groups — as the exclusive attribute of these groups. Their perspective, I maintain, despite its noble intentions, contributes in the ‘tribalisation’ of the people they study and try so hard to defend.

The stereotyping attributes of the term indigenous — its potential to Otherise, orientalise, tribalise — are to be found, like all other kinds of categorisation, in its capacity to exclude. I would like to stress that social exclusion can simultaneously realize two goals: first, to discriminate Others, and second, to implicitly underline the superiority of oneself (and one’s ethnic category). This observation brings me at once closer to the topic of this paper, the indigeneity of the Greeks, and their privileged European credentials. Drawing connections with their famous ancestors, many in modern Greece employ their indigeneity to validate claims of cultural distinction. Like anthropologists who study far away lands, they appear unwilling to compare themselves as equals with other peoples that do not lay claim to such a distinguished history.

It is worth noting that this ethnocentric disposition is not representative merely of the Greeks, but is a more widespread Western attitude. It has been apparent in Western academia, even within anthropology, the discipline that has paradigmatically defined itself in an attempt — not always successful — to defy social evolutionism (see, Argyrou 2002). To encourage some reflection on this issue, I will attempt to compare Greek indigeneity with that held by of the Embera, a kind of people that represent an unlikely point of comparison in standard everyday conversation among Greeks, but also among students of Greek culture. This comparison, I hope, will help us see the privileged position of Greek history in the European imagination, from an unusual, but stimulating perspective.

Comparing Greek imagination with others

The Embera do not have their own, separate nation state, a body of literature written in their language, an academia that produces an official history representing their point of view. Dictionaries of their language and guidebooks to its grammar exist only in photocopies, while their children are educated in Spanish and gradually learn to adopt many of the ways of the wider latino society that surrounds them. Their ancestral homeland has been the lowland Choco in Colombia, while significant numbers have migrated to Southeast Panama. There are not any ancient monumental buildings on their land, and archaeologists have been, until recently, unmotivated to dig out their past. In all these respects, the Embera differ from the Greeks: they have neither marble monuments, official, national(ist) history, nor many foreign specialists theorising their past.

At first sight, one can argue that this is an ethnic group dissimilar to the Greeks. But then again, it is this striking difference that can help us think about and appreciate some of the similarities more deeply. I will highlight here those that relate to the topic of this paper more closely. The Embera I met in Panama heavily rely on their indigenous identity to promote their cultural and political representation. Their relationship with the outer world, their pride and self-respect, is based on the distinctiveness of their identity and cultural tradition. When they have an opportunity to present themselves to others, they derive inspiration from awareness of their indigenous heritage. In those cases, the Embera indigenous traditions — their dance, music, artefacts and knowledge of the rainforest — capture the imagination of Western travellers in ways comparable to the monumental architecture of the Mayans, the Incas or the Greeks.

When the Embera talk about their migratory history, they don’t express a sense of rupture from an original homeland. Some of my Embera respondents in Panama have stories to tell about a time when their grandfathers fought their neighbours, the Kuna, with spears and poison darts and took their land. This was the time when their ancestors migrated from Colombia, following a strategy of dispersion within inaccessible rainforest environments. This strategy, historians and anthropologists describe (see, Kane 2004; Williams 2005), was a response to persecution by the colonial authorities, overpopulation, internal division, or simply exhaustion of local resources. In all cases, migration in a landscape carved by rivers and thick, ever-growing vegetation has been a readily available option for the Embera.

This fairly recent link with the land does not appear to threaten the indigenous identity of the Embera. In contrast to wider, non-Indian Panamanian society, the Embera are in position to demonstrate a strong and continuous link with the Americas, a relationship with the land that is deeply embedded in their culture and history. Their American history, like the European history of the Greeks, provides access to a primordial connection with a land of myth, an identity that defies the constraints of time. In this respect, the geography of Embera indigeneity relies on an archaeology that is so old, and so vaguely defined, that it is almost timeless. There are many parallels here with the indigeneity of the Greeks.

The ancestors of the modern Greeks, like those of the Embera, inhabited a wide geographic area that does not coincide with their contemporary residence. Furthermore, in both cases, their ancestors lived for centuries in large multicultural Empires. The Ottomans, like the Spanish in Latin America, were the conquerors of many peoples indigenous to Southeast Europe and Anatolia, whom they united under their government by right of conquest. There was, many admit, some mixing of populations, and lots of economic and social exchange, which gave birth to the Ottoman culture. The informants of anthropological research in Greece have recognised this ‘mixing’, and attribute to it several of the common characteristics, the cultural traits, that unite the Greeks, the Turks and other people in the Balkans (Theodossopoulos 2007). They also discuss mixing in terms of both blood and culture, a combination that naturalises the resulting hybridity. Comparable ideas are also very prominent in Latin America. In that continent they call it mestizaje (Wade 1997).

Like the people indigenous to the Americas, the Greeks have systematically developed a historical consciousness that stresses the historical importance of being conquered by an exogenous invader. In Greece this is encapsulated by one of the most widely used metaphors in popular and official national imagination: the 400-year long Ottoman yoke. This number is a figurative expression, as different parts of what is now the Greek national territory were part of the Ottoman empire for longer or shorter periods of time (see, Just 1989: 74; Theodossopoulos 2004). Simplifications of that type, however, can be tremendously inspiring for nationalist imaginings. The modern Greeks blame those notorious 400 years for most of the shortcomings of their nation, a causal relationship that anthropologist, were quick to identify and vividly portray in their ethnographies (see for example, Herzfeld 1982, 1992). In more general terms, the Ottoman conquest is frequently used in everyday discussion in Greece to explain the Greeks’ peripheral position in the contemporary world — a causal relationship between conquest and powerlessness, which is, once more, very familiar in Latin America.

And as much as the Embera and other Amerindian groups stress their link with the Americas, the Greeks stress their connection with Europe. They point to their ancestors who set the foundations of a distinctly European culture, and demarcated its boundaries through systematic stereotyping of non-Greek people: the invention of the barbarians (Cartledge 1993), a very ancient example of what Said (1978) describes as Orientalism. This negative form of classificatory logic introduced the basic parameters for establishing the idea of Europe, a powerful concept in Western civilisation, but not necessarily a well defined one. What is important to note here, however, is that European-ness, like indigeneity, is a concept that thrives in imprecision. Its dynamic relies on its ill-defined inclusiveness and exclusiveness.

This imprecision allows modern Greeks to pose as the quintessential Europeans. They are old Europeans for that matter, the first of the kind, indigenous to Europe and bearers of the most antiquarian credentials of European indigeneity. Other European nations, such as England and Germany, have adopted the prestigious civilisation of their ancestors as their own (Knox 1993), putting classical Greece on the pedestal of a paradigmatic European-elite culture. I argue that it is this privileged quality of Classical Greek history that can stop us from seeing the simplicity of Greek indigeneity. It inspires a taken for granted admiration that hides the naturalisation of Greek claims to excellence, to difference, to primacy.

In those terms, the Greeks, the people with that heavy history, claim a position of privilege in the world; but like many underprivileged indigenous groups — the people ‘without history’ — they share the same apprehension, frustration and anger towards the processes that promote their own peripheral-isation. Among the Greeks, but also among the Embera, indigeneity is the vehicle for claiming rights, safeguarding territory, names and place-names, a sense of belonging in a competitive world. Like most other kinds of identity, indigenous identities are constantly transforming themselves, adapting to new challenges and circumstances. The ancestors of the contemporary Greeks, people who once shared different histories, were brought together under the auspices of a new nation state. Since then, they have been encouraged to imagine their history — and to expect others to understand that history — in similar terms. The ancestors of the Embera shared different histories too. They now learn how to imagine themselves, and the expectations others have from them, in mutually reinforcing ways. In both cases, indigeneity and historical consciousness inform and inspire each other in the context of an unpredictable, but analytically comparable, process of imagination.

In the remaining sections of this paper, I discuss (first) the idea of historical continuity with ancient Greece, which I see as representing the principal origin myth of Greek indigeneity, and (second) the advantages of direct comparison between European and non-European histories, adopting a critical position towards a crypto-evolutionist Western European standard of analysis that encourages the production of ‘ethnographies for “traditional” communities’ and ‘history for the “modern” world’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1992: 6). I conclude by highlighting the privileged character of Greek indigeneity and its reliance on a European myth of cultural superiority.

References

Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Argyrou, V. 2002. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: a Postcolonial Critique. Pluto: London.

Bryant, R. 2004. Imagining the Modern: the Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I.B. Tauris.

Cartledge, P. 1993. The Greeks: a portrait of Self and Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Comaroff, J and Comaroff, J. L. 1992. Ethnography and the historical imagination. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Frangoudaki, A. & Dragona, T. (eds) 1997. ‘Τι ειν’ η πατρίδα μας?’ Εθνοκεντρισμός στην εκπαίδευση [‘What is our motherland? Ethnocentrism in education]. Athens: Alexandreia.

Hamilakis, Y. 2003. ‘Learn history!’ Antiquity, national narrative, and history in Greek educational textbooks. In The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, eds K.S. Brown & Y. Hamilakis, 39-67. Lanham: Lexington.

Herzfeld, M. 1982. The etymology of excuses: aspects of rhetorical performance in Greece. American Ethnologist 9, 644-663.

Herzfeld, M. 1992. The Social production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Just, R. 1989. Triumph of the ethnos. In History and Ethnicity, eds. E. Tonkin, M. McDonald & M. Chapman, 71-88. London: Routledge.

Kane, S.C. 2004. The phantom gringo boat. New Zealand: Cybereditions Corp.

Karakasidou, A. N. 1997. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia 1870-1990. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Kenrick, J. & Lewis, J. 2004. Indigenous peoples’ rights and the politics of the term ‘indigenous’. Anthropology Today 20(2): 4-9.

Knox, B. 1993. The oldest dead white European males and other reflections on the classics. New York: Norton.

Kuper, A. 2003. The return of the native. Current Anthropology 44(3): 389-402.

Said, E. W.1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin.

Theodossopoulos, D. 2004. The Turks and their nation in the worldview of Greeks in Patras. History & Anthropology, 15(1), 29-45.

Theodossopoulos, D. 2007. Introduction: the ‘Turks’ in the Imagination of the ‘Greeks’. In When Greeks think about Turks: The view from Anthropology, 1-32. London: Routledge.

Theodossopoulos, D. n.d. Are you indigenous? Towards an inclusive understanding of indigeneity.

Wade, P. 1997. Race and ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press.

Williams, C.A. 2005. Between Resistance and Adaptation: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation of the Choco 1510-1753. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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[1] And its history textbooks, which have lately become an issue of contention.

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Democracy, Power and Indigeneity

Democracy, Power and Indigeneity

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan

Charles Sturt University

Abstract

This paper identifies a theoretical nexus between indigeneity and democracy in four post-colonial contexts. Like democracy, the politics of indigeneity asks questions and makes assumptions about where power ought to lie and how it ought to be shared.

The paper argues that indigeneity’s interaction with democracy highlights liberal theory’s limitations, as well as its opportunities, for meeting indigenous claims and conceptions of justice. Exploring the ideological tensions and commonalities between democracy and indigeneity allows the paper to contrast, in comparative context, the proposition that in Fiji, for example, democracy is ‘a foreign flower’ unsuited to the local environment, with the argument that democracy can, in fact, mediate power in favour of an inclusive national polity.

Introduction

Sitiveni Rabuka, who led the military removal of two democratically elected Fijian governments in 1987, viewed democracy as a ‘foreign flower unsuited to Fijian soil’.[1] He insisted that the concept undermined the inherent right to paramountcy that first occupancy accorded native Fijians. The argument was apparently so strong that it justified the violent removal of two governments, setting aside the Constitution, and the transfer of sovereignty from the people to the military, which obtained power once again and by similar means in 2007. In the intervening period a putsch, whose instigators proclaimed themselves the legitimate indigenous rulers of Fiji, had also set democracy aside and created a political impasse illegally resolved by military decision makers.[2] Democracy was positioned as a negative colonial legacy. But neither the military nor the putsch leader, George Speight, could advance a coherent alternative notion of power or admit a relationship between stable government, and indigenous self-determination. The effect was that indigeneity’s principal purpose of making the state responsive to indigenous aspirations became unattainable.

Rabuka’s logic suggests that if democracy was a ‘foreign flower’ because it interfered with inherent indigenous political rights it would also be unsuited to other post-colonial societies. Yet for indigenous peoples democracy remains deeply contested and from an alternative perspective, where indigenous peoples also constitute the majority population, democracy guarantees the necessary space for indigenous political authority to resurface. The two perspectives share the view that extant indigenous political rights properly influence governments and that internal decolonisation requires re-balancing political authority. But they differ in their preparedness to juxtapose indigenety with prevailing international ideas about state governance. Democracy’s limits and opportunities are shaped by competing attempts to define and direct it towards different priorities and interests. This contestation of power is the principal common characteristic of indigenous politics across jurisdictions.

A principled democratic order shaped and influenced by indigeneity may not, in fact, be a noxious foreign flower but a medium for returning the balance of power to the native Fijian people and for guaranteeing the participation of other indigenous peoples in their national polities. Alternatively, if democracy is indeed an unsuited flower the central liberal problem remains: how should societies govern themselves in order to create peaceful relationships among people with different perceptions of the common good?

The paper’s majority/minority contextual comparison shows that negative power relationships in Australasia are not simply a function of minority status in a majoritarian democracy. Democracy is intended to emancipate and include all citizens. When this does not occur it is usually because prejudice prevails in the national political order rather than because of any systemic barrier to participation in democratic theory per se.

Democracy and the Politics of Inclusion

Held argues that a ‘‘fair framework’ for the regulation of a community is one that is freely chosen’ and that

members of a political community – citizens – should be able to choose freely the conditions of their own association, and that their choices should constitute the ultimate legitimation of the form and direction of their polity.[3]  

So there is a democratic parallel with indigeneity’s concern for personal and collective freedom and an obvious theoretical convergence between these two concepts of power and authority. All encompassing democratic practices limit the power of elites to exclude. Exclusion is not the point of democracy. But at the same time the concept can be more narrowly interpreted to restrict the terms of public engagement in decision-making, even to the point that for minority indigenous groups assimilation into a culturally homogenous polity is positioned as an essential and necessary precondition for full democratic participation. The former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard (1996-2007), developed a powerful assimilationist narrative to counter growing demands for indigenous self-determination: ‘Son you’re Australian; that’s enough for anyone to be’[4] became a simple theme of his Prime Ministership.  He was untroubled by the intellectual conflict between socially conservative emphases on homogeneity and the liberal emphases on freedom. Reconciliation and assimilation became the opposite sides of a nationally polarizing debate which contrasted limiting with expansive democratic interpretations.

Underlying the assimilationist narrative was a normative racism as ‘cultural artefact’,[5] meaning that it stands to reason that prejudice influences the ends to which democracy is ordered. But even so it is not true that the modern state is necessarily ‘a compulsory association which organises domination’.[6] Democracy, in fact, constrains the capacity of post-colonial states to dominate, and while the state does monopolise coercive power,[7] coercion is not always and necessarily negative for indigenous peoples. For example, guaranteed Maori representation in the New Zealand Parliament and the enactment of settlements to grievances under the Treaty of Waitangi when simple majority vote is likely to have prevented either in spite of their foundation in justice and contribution to social stability and cohesion. In recent Australian history it has been the coercive power of the judicial system that has imposed incremental developments in indigenous legal rights on unsympathetic governments. In both cases coercion is justified to pursue fundamentally just objectives over simple populism. There is consequently pragmatic truth in the general observation that: ‘While the state is the burden individuals have to bear to secure their own ends, it is also the basis on which it is possible to safeguard their claims to equal rights and liberties’.[8] The limiting factor is that democracy only safeguards the right to make these claims; it does not guarantee a political order that will ensure indigenous perceptions of equality and liberty, which are themselves contested.

Liberal political theory developed to respond to religious diversity. It follows that it ought to be able to consider the political and constitutional implications of ethnic diversity. Its purpose is to mediate rather than to mask difference and to resolve not dismiss conflicting ideas.

Men have different views on the empirical end of happiness, and what it consists of, so that as far as happiness is concerned, their will cannot be brought under any common principle, nor thus under an external law harmonizing with the freedom of everyone.[9]

Recognising difference does not counter liberalism’s sacrosanct protection of individual rights. Individual identity must come from somewhere. It is heavily shaped by culture and derives meaning from communal relationships. Differences in political identities contribute to the differences in ideas that democracy is intended to mediate. The ideas that compete for popular ascendency are not confined to abstract philosophical positions; they include the simple proposition that indigenous perspectives ought to be seen and heard in the wider body politic.

The unity of society and the allegiance of its citizens to their common institutions rest not on their espousing one rational conception of the good, but on an agreement as to what is just for free and equal moral persons with different and opposing conceptions of the good.[10]

Indigeneity’s concern with collective rights means that it is also inevitably interested in correcting the effects of colonisation as a serious violation of individual liberty. Indigeneity gives theoretical expression to the recognition of differences based on first occupancy. Its interpretation of political rights evolves in response to its theoretical and political interactions with other discourses; its potency is a function of its engagement with liberal democracy as the prevailing internationally accepted framework of state governance. Together they create opportunities for indigenous peoples to articulate their own conceptions of justice, and democracy is crafted towards its inclusive potential. Indigeneity is concerned with differentiation from the wider polity, but this does not inevitably or necessarily require political separation. Instead

one of the interesting consequences of the encounter between liberalism and its colonial past and present might be a more context-sensitive and multilayered approach to questions of justice, identity, democracy and sovereignty. The result would be a political theory open to new modes of cultural and political belonging.[11]

Such a theory can accord with indigenous aspirations because there need not be any inconsistency between collective group rights and the sovereignty of the total polity. Kymlicka’s argument that the paradigm shift from democracy ‘suppressing to accomodating’ minority ethnic groups in the United States of America has ‘actually played a vital role in consolidating and deepening democracy’[12] can be translated into indigenous contexts to add to the rationales for guaranteed indigenous parliamentary representation in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, for example. In these contexts emphasis on individual rights in isolation from the collective offers no real prospect for securing comprehensive individual freedom or the certainty of equal individual influence over the polity. 

Held outlines four democratic criteria which would, if applied consistently and universally, make states more responsive to indigenous aspirations. Democracy should provide for:

Protection from the arbitrary use of political authority and coercive power…

The involvement of citizens in the determination of the conditions of their association through the provision of their consent in the maintenance and legitimation of regulative institutions…

The creation of the best circumstances for citizens to develop their nature and express their diverse qualities…

The expansion of economic opportunity to maximize the availability of resources…[13]

These criteria arise because ‘the capability of persons to determine and justify their own actions, with their ability to determine among alternative political programmes is the ‘core of the modern liberal democratic project’.[14] Or as Benhabib proposes: ‘the institutions and culture of liberal democracies are sufficiently complex, supple, and decentred so as to allow the expression of difference without fracturing the identity of the body politic or subverting existing forms of political sovereignty’.[15]

Democracy and Self-determination

There is a theoretical link between democracy and self-determination which the state President, Thabo Mbeki, explained on the tenth anniversary of South African democracy: ‘South Africa’s next decade will unfold from a script written by and for South Africans, within a country eager to embrace the continent and the wider world beyond’.[16] Although the following decade showed most graphically that the relationship is not a causal one Mbeki’s aspiration provides two important points of contrast with Fiji. Firstly, in spite of the rhetoric and the indigenous Fijian majority, Fijian futures are not unfolding from a script written by and for themselves. Secondly, Fiji’s inward looking indigenous politics means it cannot embrace the wider world which is preliminary to the greater self-determination available where indigenous peoples admit that the aspirations of others may also have a just foundation as well as pragmatic economic utility.

Self-determination cannot be reduced to the simplistic wish to overthrow governments on the assumption that control of the machinery of government necessarily equates to universal indigenous authority. The Mandela Government (1994-1999) in South Africa, for example, well understood that internal decolonisation is not simply a matter of domestic politics. Economic development is preliminary to indigenous self-determination and political authority which makes non-indigenous and international capital essential contributors to indigenous aspirations.

In New Zealand, Maori persuasive authority and capacity to establish terms of engagement on the basis of non-colonial relationships is strengthened by relatively pragmatic and inclusive approaches to political relationships. For Fiji, however, there is a desperate imperative to reconcile indigenous nationalism with harmonious co-habitation. There is a similar need for stable inter-ethnic relationships, as preliminary to self-determination in all post-colonial societies. Problematically, in South Africa

When the biggest opposition party (the Democratic Alliance) rails against transformation as a matter of course and aggressively attacks every policy of a black government, whatever the merits, South Africa’s politics is in danger of becoming polarised into ‘white’ verses ‘black’. That is the road to certain disaster, since so far the abiding character of the democracy has been its apparent ability to rise above race’.[17]

Economic security is unattainable in ethnic isolation. Native and Indo-Fijians, black and white Australians and South Africans, and Maori and Pakeha inter-relate to varying degrees, but in no case are they completely separate, with no need for cross-cultural interaction within the nation-state, any more than the nation-state can exist in isolation from the international community. Even without recourse to moral considerations there remains a pragmatic connection between a political order which accommodates Indo-Fijian interests as preliminary to enhancing opportunities for indigenous self-determination. Yet as Lawson argues Laisenia Qarase, whose government was deposed in 2006, adopted a national reconciliation policy which was not conciliatory at all. It required ‘Indo-Fijians reconciling themselves to a form of Fijian paramountcy that works to subordinate their own interests across a range of goods from access to agricultural land to education, employment opportunities and business licences.’[18]

Democracy, Nationalism and Sovereignty

Indian immigrants came to Fiji as indentured labourers because they were desperately poor; they are as much victims of colonialism as the native Fijians and democracy does not permit their political exclusion. But on the other hand, how can one justify recourse to democratic ideas, when democracy is not an indigenous Fijian concept, and when Fijians had little say in the mass migration of Indians which dramatically re-shaped the local political order? Even the British Cabinet had accepted, at the time of independence, that Fijian dominance was just provided that there were ‘adequate safeguards for all other communities’.[19]

Outwardly, at least, there is a conflict between Fijian indigeneity’s paramountcy and liberalism’s individual paramountcy. Alternatively, as Horscroft put it ‘paramountcy and equality can form a foundation for an inclusive national policy that respects all its citizens and is attuned to the protection of Indigenous culture and socio-economic well being’.[20] Paramountcy, if it is concerned with protecting indigenous land, resources, cultures and languages and the guaranteed participation of indigenous peoples in the political community, even to the extent of ensuring an indigenous majority in the House of Representatives, can be reconciled with non-indigenous claims to political inclusion. There is, however, an obtuse logic in the assumption that the rights of others must be subjugated for paramountcy to prevail as Speight argued in 2000 when he suggested that Indo-Fijian rights ought to be protected but that did not require or justify their participation in national governance.[21]

The corollary to the argument that Fijian independence ought not justify or require the domination of others is that native Fijians need not accept subjugation to allow Indo-Fijians to protect their own freedom. Indigeneity need not claim privilege by taking rights from others, even though it does claim different rights on the basis of first occupancy. The parallel in South African political history is the division within the African National Congress (ANC) over whether whites would be allowed to remain in South Africa once black rule was restored. The debate was resolved with non-racialism becoming the principle of the new democratic South Africa. As the Youth League had argued:

We take account of the concrete situation in South Africa, we realise that the different racial groups had come to stay. But we insist that a condition for interracial peace and progress is the abandonment of white domination, and such a change in the basic structure of South African society that those relations which breed exploitation and human misery will disappear. Therefore our goal is the winning of national freedom for the African people and the inauguration of a people’s free society where racial oppresssion and persecution will be outlawed.[22]  

Since independence from Britain in 1970, national constitutions have strictly protected indigenous Fijian rights, meaning that ethnic difference is not the sole cause of political unrest. The coups were motivated by class politics and it was only afterwards that alliances of convenience were created with indigeneity to seek popular legitimacy. Ethnic nationalism has been used to legitimise opportunism which has destroyed ordered participatory government.[23] Bainimarama’s resolve to ‘clean up’ a ‘corrupt’ indigenous led government in 2006 precipitated that year’s coup. Corruption was not, however, new. Bainimarama simply reflected the prophetic as well as reflective nature of the Fiji Times’ comment in 2001 that: ‘Years of Fijian leadership [have] shafted indigenous people... their own people [have] been robbing them blind’.[24] In addition the repeated failure of Parliamentary government and the political marginalisation of the Great Council of Chiefs removed any popular, institutional or cultural check on state power.

Fijian political dominance seemed never to translate into real authority, influence and well-being. Qarase’s was certainly a nationalist government pursuing policies of ‘Fijian advancement’. But its affirmative action policies, for instance, were ‘characterised more by play-offs among indigenous elites than a concern to raise standards for ordinary Fijians’.[25] Indigenous Fijians dominated national politics and there was always recourse to the political system to protect and promote native interests. What was missing was a fuller understanding of democracy and its implications for cultural strength and economic power in a nation where land is substantially Fijian owned.[26] As the Fiji Post has suggested

we are the most privileged and most protected indigenous community in the world. We have had 30 years of indigenous Prime-Ministership for Fijians; we have had all the permanent secretaries... but what have we done? We have 84% of the land. But I would say that Fijians are the poorest community not because of the other communities but because they have not been led by the people who care about Fijian people.[27]

The 1987 Constitution’s requirement that a native person hold the office of Prime Minister was based on too narrow a view of the relationship between that office and fuller political authority. As the Fiji Post noted, the country had had a non-indigenous Prime Minister for only one of the last thirty years. Timoci Bavadra, whose government was the first to be forcibly removed in 1987, was an ethnic Fijian while the limited policy success for indigenous people of the Rabuka (1992-1999) and Qarase (2000-2001 and 2001-2006) governments powerfully illustrates the absence of any causal link between an indigenous Prime Minister and indigenous self-determination.

Parliamentary democracy disperses authority among the executive, parliament and judiciary, and no Prime Minister has authority to the point of being unconditionally free and powerful. Prime Ministerial authority is also hindered by a multitude of constraints on national sovereignty so that when indigenous peoples, in whatever jurisdiction, speak of reclaiming sovereignty it is not the all-encompassing commanding construct that many imagine. It is not a final and absolute authority. Nor is it ‘natural or inevitable or immutable’.[28]

Sovereignty ‘was originally an instrument of escape from rule by outsiders,’[29] yet for many indigenous peoples it has become simultaneously an instrument of entrapment as it shifted from  indigenous societies to colonial and post-colonial states. It is emancipatory only in so far as it is located with the people as an all encompassing construct, rather than vested in some individual or institution from which indigenous peoples are excluded. If sovereignty belongs to the people it must, in the interests of cohesion, order and justice, belong to all the people. Exclusion from full and equal membership of the polity, either by virtue of race or alienation from the centre of military power also undermines capacity for independent indigenous political authority.

If sovereignty is ‘popular’ then the populace must be defined either as an homogenous whole where minority voices are rightly subsumed, or as a body comprising many parts requiring some political solution to the question of how these disparate parts ought to share power and authority. The theoretical engagement of democracy with indigeneity offers one way of thinking about this question. It suggests that some rearrangement of sovereignty is implicit in the creation of more inclusive democratic orders while balancing the rights and expectations of indigenous peoples vis-a-vis all others. Democracy requires checks on unbridled majoritarian rule meaning that there must be constraints on popular sovereignty so that one group’s liberty is never at the expense of another’s.

Democracy is usually concerned with how territorial sovereignty is exercised. But for indigenous peoples a wider conception of sovereignty is advantageous; one which includes authority over resources, language and culture and the institutions which might safeguard these. ‘In the absence of any alternative, Fijian people may discover the “foreign flower” of democracy as a political savior’.[30] Even for Fijian nationalists, democracy is only selectively and hypocritically a ‘foreign flower’. Laisenia Qarase, for example, has argued that democracy is unsuited to Fiji,[31] yet in 2006 happily drew on the concept to resist the military coup against his government. Mahendra Choudry, the country’s only Indo-Fijian Prime Minister whose government was overthrown in 2000 sought recourse to democracy in defence of his office, yet accepted a position in the military government after the 2006 coup.

Sovereignty cannot be divided but if the polity is understood as plural then it can be shared. Indeed, indigeneity challenges democracy to mediate contested sovereignties. Guaranteed Maori representation in the New Zealand Parliament is illustrative, while South Africa and even Fiji have at least attempted to share sovereignty. In Australia sovereignty is shared among the tiers of government but, as yet, not in any substantive way with the indigenous populations. Two simple ways in which Australia might intertwine indigeneity with democracy’s broad potential is through guaranteeing indigenous representation at every level of government, or through the recognition the Commonwealth chooses to accord a national indigenous representative body. While both options could purposefully enhance indigenous self-determination the former is likely to make the greater substantive difference.

There is presently no electoral incentive for mainstream political parties to court indigenous votes. There are simply not enough of them to make an appreciable difference in most electoral districts. This means that indigenous Australians have recourse only to moral persuasion not electoral strength in pressuring political parties to treat seriously their concerns. Political parties are not immune to moral argument but they are more certainly attentive to electoral pragmatism, courting the votes of those who count in electoral terms over those who do not. Indigenous peoples require a guaranteed voice and vote in Parliament to enjoy the full rights of citizenship. It is a reasonable and fair expectation that they might sit in the executive and participate in national affairs at the highest level, remembering especially that policy failure which is the ‘most significant feature of the relationship’ between governments and indigenous Australians’[32] is always a likely outcome of indigenous political exclusion. Guaranteed representation overcomes the otherwise inevitable distance between the executive and the indigenous peoples for whom policy is made. Democracy gives indigenous peoples the reasonable expectation that they will engage in government as participants not merely as interest groups. Although interest group status does remain simultaneously important because these groups facilitate the robust yet ordered contestation of ideas that are the inevitable outcome of different human identities, which is important ‘because no democracy ever reaches the point at which justice is simply done, democracies need to recognize and foster enclaves of resistance.’[33]

Indigeneity is a legitmate basis for belonging to the modern democracy and the notion of guaranteed indigenous parliamentary representation confronts limiting conceptions of liberalism which re-craft the culturally located indigenous person as an individual citizen of an homogenous polity. It keeps democracy from distortion, misrepresentation and positioning to exclude.

Denying collective identities requires that ‘some existing rights have been constructed on the very exclusion or subordination of others.’[34] When difference is overlooked one has failed to consider that ‘difference is just another word for what used to be called pluralism’[35] and it is only undemocratic insecurities that lead to objections to plurality.

Populist anti-indigenous sentiment in Australasia arises in the absence of any clearly thought out position on the legitimacy of the majority imposing its will on the minority. A medieval understanding of a majority being ‘more likely to be substantively right than a majority’[36] prevails in resistance to indigenous claims. This is, however, a simplistic and divisive approach to power which is better shared according to the common good and deeper principles of justice. There are grounds in justice for protection against unbridled majoritarian rule because democracies can in fact ‘produce outcomes... that are substantively unjust.’[37]

On-going popular support for the abolition of the Maori seats in New Zealand’s House of Representatives is illustrative of democracy’s capacity to entrench and even provide popular electoral demand for power to be used to exclude. Guaranteed indigenous parliamentary representation does not, however, impinge on the rights of others. Instead, it secures the right of any group to participate in making decisions that affect their own livelihoods and for minority indigenous groups provides a political check on assimilationist pressures.

Everybody ought to be included in the political life of the state. No one group should always and necessarily find itself on the losing side. Democracy is intended to be emancipatory and if it is to offer protection against the misuse of political power it must make group interests an important concern of the political system itself. Democracy should also protect and foster active political participation although this is unlikely if there is systemic favour towards assumptions of political and cultural homogeneity. So there is an argument for allowing equal rights to be expressed in cognizance of indigenous peoples’ unique and historically grounded circumstances, bearing in mind especially that recognising difference is preliminary to recognising freedom, which is not acultural. Across the world indigenous peoples do not wish to be part of a cultureless polity so often presented as political ideal. Free societies ought to be able to accommodate this wish, which secures social cohesion by giving indigenous peoples grounds for believing that their value systems have a place in the public realm.[38] Inclusive and participatory understandings of democracy can also contribute important foundations to self-determination and to indigenous peoples’ common aspiration to belong in their own terms to the nation state that has developed in the lands of their ancestors. For indigenous peoples group autonomy is often preliminary to the individual liberty underpinning liberal democratic thought. ‘If democracy means rule by the people’, the determination of public decision-making by equally free members of the political community, then the basis of its justification lies in the promotion and enhancement of autonomy, both for individuals as citizens and for the collectivity’.[39]

Removing the Maori seats in Parliament would not eliminate Maori political significance. There is a complex set of relationships giving stability and legitimacy to New Zealand’s political order and Maori are not so small in number or lacking in moral claim to be insignificant.[40] Although, on the other hand, indigenous Australians, are numerically too small to have great political impact, their just claim to government by representative government remains and recognising it would add to the moral legitimacy of the Australian state. Legitimacy is, after all, derived from the system’s acceptance by the people.

If democracy holds that power belongs inalienably to the people then in Fiji it is a more likely protector of indigenous interests than unaccountable military power. Fiji’s deposed governments certainly faced crises of legitimacy of their own and important weaknesses in democratic arrangements were exposed. But it remains that legitimacy requires power to be ‘acquired and exercised according to established rules.’[41] Military rule has never been subjected to any test of legitimacy meaning that it, too, is open to the charge of being a ‘foreign flower unsuited to Fijian soil’. Further, the separation of executive and judicial powers and civilian authority over the military is essential to legitimacy. The political order descends into crisis when these conditions are not met.

Fiji’s experiences provide evidence to support Beetham’s argument that it is generally erroneous to seek cultural explanations for the breakdown of democracy in developing countries. Instead ‘there are certain politico-economic conditions… in which the different requirements of legitimacy come into conflict with one another, because effective electoral choice can only be realized at the cost of an intensification of social and political division’.[42] Although the electoral system enshrined in the Constitution adopted in 1997 was seriously flawed, Horscroft describes it as established on ‘an inclusive polity based on fundamental individual equality and affirmative action principles to realise equality of opportunity’.[43] It was intended to reduce ethnic conflict but instead the electoral system allowed the Fiji Labour Party to obtain an absolute Parliamentary majority without winning a single Fijian seat. The Fiji Labor Party, formed in 1985, was the first officially non-racial political party, but as its support base remains disproportionately Indo-Fijian it has, in effect, only added to the entrenchment of race-based parties as the standard political arrangement.

The limits of democracy

Alley’s assessment of political tensions between paramountcy and democracy in Fiji in 2000 parallels the outbreak of ethnic violence in KwaZulu-Natal in 2008.

While Speight’s hostage-taking lacked the endorsement from indigenous Fijians that his backers claimed, the bored, aimless, unemployed, and poorly educated rallied in number to the clarion of ethnic demagoguery. This signified an erosion of the respect previously paid to indigenous national leaders now perceived as corrupt, incompetent, and unable to discharge customary responsibilities to ordinary Fijians in a market economy under the rule of law.[44]

The apartheid state’s legacy was also a very poor, uneducated and angry population making it difficult to acquire the ‘workable moral consensus’ needed to secure South Africa’s future. As in other post-colonial societies there needs to be some reconciliation of the aspirations of those previously excluded with the interests and indeed rights of those traditionally privileged. At the same time, although indigenous South Africans are a significant majority population there are institutional weaknesses in the country’s democracy which undermine the connection between that concept and self-determination.

When the ban on the liberation movements was lifted in 1990 the ANC began a transformation from political agitator to political party seeking government of a nation state morally and economically crippled by its history. The enormity of the transition shows in the ANCs failure to make significant progress in the critical areas of economic and social reform. It had no plan

for the practical implementation of anything except donning the mantle of power after centuries of colonialism and oppression. There was a strangely naive expectation that the abolition of apartheid in itself would put an end to black economic deprivation.[45]

Jacob Zuma’s election to the ANC presidency in 2008, in spite of his alleged wide-scale corruption, shows that there remains personal and tribal rather than policy bases to intra-party power relationships. Indeed, its intra-party democracy is weak and there is no serious alternative government. Substantive checks on power and ‘accountability, transparency and active engagement with the people’ do not, therefore, feature strongly in domestic political relationships.

Intra-party democracy subjects policy decisions to wider scrutiny which is preliminary to ‘the ability of ordinary... citizens to make decisions for their own good.’[46] As Gumede argues, if there had been greater internal debate, South Africa may not have lost 500,000 jobs in five years and if the ARV AIDS drug had been made available five years earlier thousands of lives might have been saved.[47] Policy failures of this magnitude inevitably undermine democracy itself.

The less the ANC can offer a convincing and effective strategy for improving the material situation of the black masses, the more many of the most wretched and impoverished members of the population are likely to look to alternative ethnic solutions, which, however retrograde, offer both psychological comfort and, often, immediate economic relief.[48]

It is, however, misleading to suggest that ‘those who suffered the worst deprivation under apartheid also ended up paying the highest price for democracy.’[49] Aparthied’s legacy remains among the most significant constraints on black economic and political advancement. Democracy does not explain why the people who suffered the most under apartheid remain the most disadvantaged. When the two are compared as if they are equally legitimate alternatives the potential of one and the evil of the other are diminished. Most importantly, however:

Should a new opposition emerge that is prepared to speak out for social justice, redistribution and a better lot for the poor, the... ANC could find itself in real trouble. There is neither an ideological nor a cultural guarantee that the nation will stand together, and South Africa’s salvation will lie in a broad nationalism that not only accommodates its diversity, but addresses the fears and needs of all its citizens.[50]

The absence of serious opposition negatively impacts upon South Africa’s democratic functioning. Although Mattison does suggest there may be some ‘unexpected democracy deepening consequences of one-party dominance’ which mitigate against the possibility of degeneration ‘into hegemonic one-party rule.’[51] The argument is that because alternative positions are not meaningfully expressed by opposition political parties; civil society steps in to fill the void and is itself strengthened in the process. The Mbeki Government’s (1999-2008) inept handling of the HIV/AIDS crisis is a case in point. The government was challenged by a successful civil partnership among churches, trade unions and the media which ‘held the government to the ideals and values entrenched in, and protected by, the Constitution.[52] As the example illustrates, there is much more to democracy than electoral systems and procedures for the formation of governments. Civil society’s capacity to influence from outside the legislature is important especially where one political party dominates to the extent of the ANC:

if citizens are encouraged to see that their participation can make a substantive difference, they can provide the countervailing power to check the government until such time as this can be provided by conventional party politics.[53]

The debate showed the limits of a politics of indigeneity that is concerned only with the acquisition of power. But a strong civil society is not a substitute for an electoral system that ensures a contested political voice for the most vulnerable.

Democratic Failure

Australia’s stable democracy is conducive to broad conceptions of liberty. Yet in Australia democracy is widely interpreted as unbridled majoritarian rule giving the minority indigenous population no moral claim to particular recognition. Even when apartheid was at its strongest in South Africa there was always the expectation that the system’s inconsistent logic coupled with gradually increasing international moral objection would make it unsustainable. There was always the potential for the Western democratic ideal of one person one vote to deliver empowerment. Democracy’s prevailing international acceptance also meant that indigenous South Africans could intellectually align their cause to a philosophy that others could endorse. In this sense there was no parallel with the indigenous Australian experience. In Australia exclusion and suppression remain the legacy of a political order over which indigenous peoples had no influence or connection and which in many cases offers people negligible control over even the most basic elements of their day-to-day lives. Even arguments about the propriety and form of a national indigenous representative have been couched in exclusive assumptions of state power and regulation. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) which was the primary national representative indigenous body for fourteen years was abolished by the government in 2005. In gaining Non-Government Organisation accreditation at the United Nations[54] ATSIC had provided an alternative to the distorted picture of indigenous affairs provided by the official Australian mission in New York, and as its political voice increasingly diverged from prevailing government policy direction, it became a voice to be sidelined.

Sanders, among others, argued that ATSIC should not have been abolished until an alternative ‘representative arrangement’ was ‘negotiated’ with indigenous Australians.[55] This view supposed that governments, not indigenous communities, should determine how they are represented to government. Yet, as well as being elementary to both citizenship and indigeneity, the representation of indigenous peoples to governments is preliminary to a well-functioning representative democracy. Governments constrain independent political expression when they develop then ‘negotiate’ the terms of some citizens’ political engagement. Indigenous Australians ought not therefore wait for governments to set the boundaries of their participation. Democracy ought to empower groups of citizens to pursue their common interests balanced only by the right of other groups to do the same and limited by the requirement that they not impinge on the rights of others. An independent civil society is an essential accompaniment to elections and political parties in protecting against tyranny and in ensuring that the full plurality of political perspectives can be expressed.

Democracy can encourage conformity but it can also protect difference depending on how its fundamental purpose is understood and how its institutions and processes are ordered. The democratic ideal of a strong civil society creates space for indigenous political expression and a forum for the contestation of ideas. When civil society functions well across the entire polity a significant check on power is established. This means that a national representative indigenous body could be expected to enhance democracy. But, as the ATSIC experience so pointedly illustrates, it ought to stand apart from the state if substantive independence capable of contributing to checks on power is to be assured. ATSICs abolition creates an opening for indigenous Australians to make a definite statement of self-determination by strengthening their own representative organisations.

A national representative organisation is not, however, a bad idea per se. ATSIC did facilitate indigenous political participation, broadened indigenous leadership opportunities and strengthened possibilities for the public expression of indigenous voices. But a new body will not necessarily enhance democracy or self-determination and has the potential to limit both if all it does is contain, manage and restrict the nature of national indigenous political participation or institutionalise ‘conflict in a way that sets limits on debate.’[56]

During the 1990s the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, argued for a national Maori representative body to be established to provide policy advice to the government. It did not succeed because Maori tribes saw the initiative as more concerned with meeting the needs of government than with advancing their own interests. An alternative and still functioning representative model was developed by the Tainui tribal confederation. The Tainui people elect members to a parliament, Te Kauhanganui, which is concerned with managing its own affairs and assets in its own way and for its own self-determining purposes. So if indigenous Australians desire a new national representative structure it is best that it is not a statutory creation or it may well contribute to an assimilationist centralisation of power, rather than to a self-determining dispersal of power from the state to indigenous communities.

In 2008 the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, who is independent of the executive, initiated discussion on the establishment of a new national representative body. The Commissioner’s discussion paper raises the possibility of the body not being a government entity but does not commit itself to that course of action, even thought it notes the importance of such a body being able to work credibly with each tier of government – implying that independence from the Commonwealth would be desirable. The paper also makes the significant observation that although a government entity ought to have the advantage of ‘privileged access to government’, this was not the ATSIC experience. Privileged access, if it were to occur, could come at a very high cost for a body that requires independence to establish its own authority and to provide an unhindered indigenous public voice. A further perspective considered by the Commissioner is that an indigenous representative body might have a formal role in Senate Estimates committees because their ‘abilty to call the government and bureaucracy to account is something that many Indigenous peoples would like to emulate’.’[57] Given the constraints of contemporary Australian politics this could provide a more inclusive and accountable democratic form. But on the other hand it masks one of the most fundamental failures of Australian democracy – that there is not a single indigenous Senator able to speak and vote as of right on an Estimates Committee.

A further manifest failure of democracy and civil society in recent Australian history was the Commonwealth government’s emergency military intervention to counter widespread child sexual abuse in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. The desperate dysfunction of these communities was a product of political exclusion, built on paternalism and secured by successive state policy choices which made welfare dependence the only real life style expectation for large numbers of people. Poverty, poor housing, health and education also seriously curtail the freedoms that democracy is intended to foster. The democratic principle of state rule by the peoples’ consent has never applied substantively to indigenous Australia which has never had formal representation in any of the country’s parliaments, nor been able to organise a collective independent political voice. On the other hand, liberal democratic justification for the Howard Government’s intervention into indigenous communities could, perhaps, be found in the description of Bentham’s view that:

Tied to the advocacy of a ‘minimal state’, whose scope and power need to be strictly limited, there is a strong commitment to certain types of state intervention: for instance, intervention to regulate the behavior of the disobedient, and to reshape social relations and intstitutions if, in the event of the failure of laissez faire, the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not achieved.[58]

If individual autonomy is to be upheld government interference in people’s lives ought to be minimal and truly aimed at enhancing self-determining capacity, in contrast with the historical intrusion which is indefensible in liberal terms. There is consequently an active but tightly focused role for governments which is at odds with conventional neo-liberal ideas about limited government.

Conclusion

Democracy is a ‘foreign flower’ to indigenous peoples in post-colonial societies. But that does not, of itself, make this prevailing internationally accepted theoretical basis to ordered and representative government unsuited to realising indigenous needs and aspirations. Indeed for majority indigenous populations in jurisdictions such as Fiji and South Africa it offers a path to reclaiming traditional authority. Yet, in spite of a massive indigenous majority South Africa has struggled to make democracy serve its people by alleviating poverty, reducing unemployment or negative health outcomes, or improving housing and educational levels. Political power is no longer seriously contested and the dominant ANCs own intra-party democracy is too weak to provide serious policy checks on government, meaning that democracy does not fully serve its representative, inclusive and emancipatory purpose. Nor does it serve this purpose for minority indigenous populations, in Australia and New Zealand for example, if it is understood as demanding unbridled majoritarian rule.

Notwithstanding these objections democracy, broadly interpreted, still finds intellectual convergence with the politics of indigeneity, which aims principally to make the state responsive to indigenous claims and conceptions of justice. Crafting an inclusive national polity is central to this aim and to the re-balancing of political authority to give indigenous peoples greater authority over the things that are important to them.

The politics of indigeneity is concerned with the recognition of difference based on first occupancy. Like democracy it aims to secure freedom and liberty, but sees protection of group rights as preliminary to these wider goals. Democracy and indigeneity emphasise separate but intertwining conceptions of power. Democracy serves indigeneity by potentially providing a way of mediating power relationships and reconciling indigenous nationalism with the harmonious sharing of national sovereignty, which short of expelling non-indigenous populations, is the only means indigenous peoples have of securing self-determination. At the same time, democracy is served by indigeneity’s constant reminder that it ought to be interested in the liberty and representation of all not just some people. In this way Fijian paramountcy can be reconciled with Indo-Fijian participation in national governance, and indigenous Australians can construct an argument for substantive inclusion in the country’s parliaments, perhaps in similar fashion to the representational model enjoyed by Maori in New Zealand. It is where narrow and limiting individualist conceptions of democracy are maintained to restrict indigeneity that democracy becomes injurious to indigenous aspirations. Democracy ought to be an all-encompassing inclusive concept or it excludes some people from full and equal membership of the polity which in turn limits indigenous political authority. But so too does unbridled military power, which is at least as foreign to Fiji as democracy.

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Brij V. Lal, ‘Making History, Becoming History: Reflections on the Fijian Coups and Constitutions’; The Contemporary Pacific 14, (2002), 148-167, p. 148.

[2] Fiji Court of Appeal, Republic of Fiji v. Prasad (Unreported, 2000).

[3] David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance    (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p.145.

[4] Judith Brett, ‘Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia.’ The Australian Quarterly  Essay (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing Pty, 2005), p. 25.

[5] Roberta James, ‘Rousseau’s Knot: The Entanglement of Liberal Democracy and Racism’, in Gillian Colishaw and Barry Morris, eds, Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997), pp. 53-75 at p. 57.

[6] Max Weber, ‘Legitimacy, Politics and the State’, in William Connolly, ed, Legitimacy and the State, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 32-62 at p. 37.

[7] Weber, ‘Legitimacy, Politics and the State’, p. 37.

[8] Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 145.

[9] Immanuel Kant in H. Reiss, ed, Kant’s Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 73-74.

[10] John Rawls, ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’, in A. Sen and B. Williams, eds, Utilitarianism and  Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 159-185 at p. 160.

[11] Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, ‘Introduction’, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds, Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-21 at p. 21.

[12] Will Kymlicka, ‘American Multiculturalism and the `Nations Within’, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds, Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 216-36 at p. 227.

[13] Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 150.

[14] Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 149.

[15] S Benhabib, ‘Introduction’, in S Benhabib, ed, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 3-18 at p. 5.

[16] Thabo Mbeki “Introduction’ in F Sicre, ed,  South Africa at 10: Perspectives by Political, Civil and Business Leaders, (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 2004), pp. 1-15 at p. 13.

[17] William Mervin Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005) p. 254.

[18] Stephanie Lawson, ‘Nationalism versus Constitutionalism in Fiji’; Nations and Nationalism, 10  (2004), 519-38, p.  535.

[19] Eleanor Emery in Robert Norton, ‘Seldom a Transition with Such Aplomb: From Confrontation to  Conciliation on Fiji’s Path to Independence’; Journal of Pacific History 39, (2004), 147-62, p. 163.

[20] Virginia Horscroft, The Politics of Ethnicity in the Fiji Islands: Competing Ideologies of Indigenous Paramountcy and Individual Equality in Political Dialogue (MPhil, University of Oxford, 2002), p. 2.

[21] Greg Fry, ‘Political Legitimacy and the Post-Colonial State in the Pacific: Reflections on Some Common Threads in the Fiji and Solomon Island Coups’, Pacifica Review 12 (2000), 295-304, p. 299.

[22] African National Congress, ANC Youth League Basic Policy Document (1948 [cited 19 August  2008); available from http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/ancylpol.html.

[23] Lawson, ‘Nationalism versus Constitutionalism in Fiji’, p. 536.

[24] Fiji Times, 7 April 2001.

[25] Lawson, ‘Nationalism versus Constitutionalism in Fiji’, p. 536.

[26] Horscroft, The Politics of Ethnicity in the Fiji Islands, p. 4.

[27] Fiji Post, 24 August 2001.

[28] Robert Jackson, ‘Sovereignty in World Politics: A Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape’, in Robert Jackson, ed, Sovereignty at the Millenium (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 9-34 at p. 10.

[29] Jackson,  ‘Sovereignty in World Politics’, p.  9.

[30] Lal, ‘Making History, Becoming History: Reflections on the Fijian Coups and Constitutions’, p. 166.

[31] Henry Srebrnik, ‘Ethnicity, Religion, and the Issue of Aboriginality in a Small Island State. Why Does Fiji Flounder?’; The Round Table (2002), 187-210, p. 210.

[32] Ian Cook, Government and Democracy in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.  239.

[33] Jane Mansbridge, ‘Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity’, in S Benhabib, ed, Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) pp, 46-66 at p. 58.

[34] C Mouffe, ‘Democracy, Power and the "Political"‘ in S Benhabib, ed, Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 245-56 at p. 247.

[35] Bonnie Honig, ‘Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home’, in S Benhabib, ed, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 257-77 at p. 257.

[36] Mansbridge, ‘Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity’, p. 53.

[37] Mansbridge, ‘Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity’, p. 57.

[38] Dominic O’Sullivan, ‘Keeping Maori Seats Ensures Democracy Provides Fair Deal’, New Zealand Herald 12 February 2007.

[39] Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 145-46.

[40] O’Sullivan, 2007.

[41] David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 121.

[42] Beetham, The Legitimation of Power, p. 171.

[43] Horscroft, The Politics of Ethnicity in the Fiji Islands, p. 4.

[44] Roderic Alley, ‘The Coup Crisis in Fiji’, Australian Journal of Political Science 35 (2000), 515-21, p.   519.

[45] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 67.

[46] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 305.

[47] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 307.

[48] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 67.

[49] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 95.

[50] Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, p. 225.

[51] Heidi Mattison, ‘Beyond Party Politics: Unexpected Democracy-Deepening Consequences of One-Party Dominance in South Africa,’ Theoria, (2004), 1-30, p. 1.

[52] Mattison, ‘Beyond Party Politics: Unexpected Democracy-Deepening Consequences of One-Party Dominance in South Africa‘, p. 10.

[53] Mattison, ‘Beyond Party Politics: Unexpected Democracy-Deepening Consequences of One-Party Dominance in South Africa,’ p. 26.

[54] Will Sanders, ATSICs Achievements and Strengths: Implications for Institutional Reform (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, August 2004), p. 2.

[55] Sanders, ATSICs Achievements and Strength, p. 1.

[56] Milton Fisk, The State and Justice: An Essay in Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University  Press, 1989), p. 171.

[57] T Calma, Building a Sustainable National Indigenous Representative Body (Sydney: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, 2008), p.  99.

[58] Held, Democracy and the Global Order, pp. 10-11.

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