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Donald L. Horowitz Biography

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“Page 334 - Perhaps the most notable characteristic of ethnic parties is the extent to which they preempt the organizational field, crowding out parties founded on other bases. Left parties have been particularly affected by this. Over and over again, socialist intellectuals in the developing world have organized parties intending to do battle on class lines, only to find that their potential followings had rather different ideas about the identity of the enemy. Page 337 - In conventional Marxist thinking, whole ethnic groups, at least unranked ones, could scarcely be said to occupy a class position at all. By redefining ethnic interests in terms used to characterize class positions, it became ideologically permissible to justify the reliance of a left-wing party on the support of a single ethnic group—even if some doctrinal gymnastics were involved in the redefinition.”

Ethnic Conflict
Book:Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
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“Page 32 - Ethnic conflict, however, impedes or obscures class conflict when ethnic groups are cross-class, as they are in unranked systems. There is, under those circumstances, a strong tendency to reject class conflict, for it would require either interethnic class-based alliances or intraethnic class antagonisms, either of which would detract from the ethnic solidarity that unranked ethnic conflict requires”

Ethnic Conflict
Book:Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
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“To view ethnicity as a form of greatly extended kinship is to recognize, as ethnic groups do, the role of putative descent. There are fictive elements here, but the idea, if not always the fact, of common ancestry makes it possible for ethnic groups to think in terms of family resemblances—traits held in common, on a supposedly genetic basis, or cultural features acquired inn early childhood—and to bring into play for a much wider circle those concepts of mutual obligation and antipathy to outsiders that are applicable to family relations.”

Ethnic Conflict
Book:Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
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“Page 85 -- Generally, there are more than two groups, but sometimes they nonetheless choose up sides in what becomes a bipolar confrontation. Where bipolarity does not take over, the presence of third groups opens the possibility that the largest group, though able to muster a plurality of the vote for its party, will be excluded from power by the configuration of votes and seats obtained in toto by the other groups. If the excluded group is the largest, the degree of dissatisfaction may be greater than in the simple 60-40 situation. An even more extreme result can be produced by party fragmentation. If Group A, with 60 percent of the population, divides its support between two parties, it is open to Group B or to B and C, with 40 percent but only one party, to form a government that excludes the majority group. This it can do by winning a majority of seats by repeated pluralities in three-way contests Page 86 -- I shall show later that elections of this general type are a major - though not the only - reason for the decline of democracy in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Such elections have much to do with the outlawing of opposition, the rigging of future elections, and the incidence of military coups”

MulticulturalismEthnic Conflict
Book:Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface
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“Page 107 -- Trading minorities, it is argued, come into conflict with business rivals of other ethnic groups. Conflict occurs, not merely because of ordinary business rivalries, but because immigrant minorities are able to undercut their rivals by the use of their own credit institutions, their guild techniques of restraining competition among themselves, and their use of cheap, usually family, labor. Their interests also collide with the interests of those with whom they transact business: consumers, tenants, clients. Finally, because trading minorities have the ability to obtain their own cheap labor, they depress the prospects for labor in the host society. The tractable character of labor in middleman minority firms insures that rising wages in competing businesses would not be accompanied by similar increases for workers of minority firms. A competing firm in the host society that granted a wage increase would find itself priced out of the market. Eventually, workers in host society firms come to identify immigrant businesses and the low wages they pay as the source of the low wages paid in the economy generally”

ImmigrationEthnic Conflict
Author:Donald L. Horowitz
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