I write this as a poorly informed and unqualified observer. If you wished to avoid these kind of analyses you should have stayed away from the blogosphere.
The inspiration for my thoughts on this subject come from news reports and my own recent discussions with some more conservatively minded individuals over events in the Ivory Coast. The term that keeps coming up is ‘tribal conflict’.
I don’t know whose term this is. It may be that of the Africans, it may be that of the media, it may be a perfectly accurate term. What I would like to draw attention to are the connotations of the term with which it seems to have become synonymous.
These connotations are obvious. Tribal conflict is something that exists between primitive groups with archaic beliefs. Tribes are associated with a long redundant form of allegiance that developed societies such as ourselves abandoned decades ago. Meanwhile, savages in the third world hold onto these alliances along with their uncivilised religions and traditions.
Thus, the west is provided with a typical ability to look down on these poor misguided people and wish they would see the light in the way that we have. Unlike their religions, ours are philosophically and theologically considered. Unlike their allegiances, ours are not based on primitive ‘tribes’ but on a sophisticated notion of national identity. Unlike their wars, ours are based on our higher knowledge, not on archaic grudges.
This is where my objection arises. It seems to me, as an ill-informed outsider, that there is little difference between tribes and what are essentially separate national identities. Had the nations of Europe been created in the same archaic fashion as those of Africa, would we be any different? If German and French citizens had been forced into the same nations would their conflict have been any less violent?
We don’t actually need to remain hypothetical on this question. The German ‘tribe’ is well known to have attacked those people derived from other ‘tribes’ in recent history. In even more recent history, the various ‘tribes’ that made up Yugoslavia entered a bloody conflict. Even today we feel the ripples of conflict between Catholic and Protestant ‘tribes’ in Northern Ireland.
My concern here, and again I stress the ignorance that underlies all my comments, is that this perception allows us to wash our hands of a conflict and not consider possible solutions. Unlike inter-ethnic conflict or conflicts between national identities, tribal conflicts are waged by primitive peoples who know no better. By reducing the conflicts in places like Ivory Coast to this level, we assume they don’t have solutions in the same way as those of our superior world.
The term may well be accurate in a technical sense. I don’t know the etymology of the word nor the historical context of the Ivory Coast. It just seems to me that the way the term is used could easily be applied to our world as much as theirs, and we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the defeatism and nonsense that is the concept that it is an irreconcilable conflict simply because it has this term attached to it.
