Addressing Ethnic Cleavages in Globalized Political Theory

For much of the twentieth century, political theory was organised around a powerful assumption: that the deepest divide in society was economic. Marxism predicted that class struggle would eventually override every other identity, uniting workers across nations and religions. Yet as the Soviet Union collapsed and the socialist bloc disintegrated after 1989, something unexpected happened. Instead of a world converging on shared economic interests, the globe fractured along lines of ethnicity, religion, language, and identity. These fault lines-what political scientists call ethnic cleavages-have become one of the central concerns of political theory in a globalising world. Understanding why they matter, and how a more inclusive political theory can respond to them, is essential for anyone studying politics today.

What are ethnic cleavages? 🔗

A political cleavage is a durable division that separates citizens into distinct groups with conflicting interests and identities. Political cleavages are understood as relatively permanent divisions among citizens that structure how societies organise their politics. While the classic Lipset-Rokkan model focused on cleavages like owner versus worker or church versus state, an ethnic cleavage divides people on the basis of shared ancestry, language, religion, or cultural identity.

Ethnic cleavages are not always equally dangerous. Scholarship distinguishes between different types: in some societies, stable hierarchies between groups produce relatively integrated but stratified arrangements, while unstable hierarchies and high social segmentation tend to increase the capacity for violence and armed conflict. In other words, the structure of the cleavage-not merely its existence-shapes whether diversity coexists peacefully or erupts into conflict.

Why globalisation sharpened ethnic divisions 🔗

It might seem paradoxical that globalisation-a process of integration and interconnection-has intensified ethnic and religious conflict. But the connection becomes clear once we examine what happened after the Cold War.

The collapse of socialist states 🔗

When the socialist states of Eastern Europe disintegrated, the removal of a strong, centralised authority created a vacuum. Studies of this period note that the rapid disintegration of party-states produced a power vacuum that was quickly filled by fragmented political forces prone to radicalisation around ethnic and religious cleavages. Identities that had been suppressed under socialism resurfaced with force. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union showed how quickly the secession of one region could act as a trigger for others, illustrating that strong ethnic movements expose the vulnerability of central governments and raise fears of broader disintegration.

The weakening of the state under economic liberalisation 🔗

Globalisation also transformed the economic role of the state. As liberalisation spread worldwide, many governments lost the capacity to redistribute resources and protect citizens. Research argues that much contemporary “cultural” violence is closely linked to globalising forces and economic liberalisation that weakened states’ political and financial capacities to redistribute resources, forcing them to break long-standing social contracts. When the state can no longer guarantee security or fairness, people fall back on the identities that feel most reliable: ethnicity, religion, and kinship.

The rise of fundamentalism and intolerance 🔗

The same period saw a striking revival of religious movements. Far from fading away, religious nationalism gained new energy after the Cold War. One analysis notes that religious nationalism, rather than spending itself by the late 1980s, received a fresh impetus from the collapse of communism, unleashing suppressed religious movements across Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Importantly, many of these movements were not simply expressions of faith-they were reactions to the perceived failures of secular, modern ideologies. Scholars observe that most religious opposition movements emerged as reactions to the failures of modern, secular projects, which had promised progress but often delivered insecurity and inequality.

Why class alone could not explain this 🔗

This is where the limits of orthodox Marxism become visible. Marxism placed class at the centre of all political conflict, predicting that workers would unite across ethnic and national lines once they recognised their shared material interests. The expectation was that economic identity would dissolve cultural identity.

The reality after 1989 was almost the reverse. Ethnic and religious identities frequently overshadowed class solidarity. A factory worker in Bosnia or Rwanda might share economic conditions with a neighbour of a different ethnicity, yet the cleavage that mattered politically was ethnic, not economic. This does not mean class is irrelevant-economic grievance often fuels ethnic mobilisation-but it shows that a theory built solely on class cannot account for the kinds of conflict that have defined the globalised era. Political theory needed a richer vocabulary, one that took identity, culture, and recognition seriously rather than treating them as a mere “superstructure” resting on an economic base.

The problem of majority dominance 🔗

If ethnic identity is politically central, then democracy itself faces a difficulty. Democracy is usually defined by majority rule-but in a society divided by ethnic cleavages, the majority can become a permanent ruler and the minority a permanent loser. This is the danger of majoritarianism.

The concern is that in democratic politics it is possible to convert a numerical majority into political power through elections, which is precisely why religious or cultural minorities require special protection. When a dominant group uses democratic procedures to entrench its position, the formal machinery of democracy can mask the substantive exclusion of minorities. Numbers become a weapon rather than a safeguard.

India is a particularly instructive case. It has no single culturally homogeneous group large enough to represent everyone. One study emphasises that India has no culturally homogeneous, dominant majority ethnic and religious group that could both dominate and effectively claim to represent all Indians. This diversity is a strength, but it also means that any attempt by one community to claim sole ownership of national identity threatens the inclusion of others. Concerns about majoritarian politics-visible in debates over citizenship, religious conversion, and cultural symbols-reflect exactly this tension between numerical majorities and the protection of minority rights.

New approaches: democracy as diversity and inclusion 🔗

Faced with these challenges, political theorists have moved beyond a purely procedural view of democracy. Instead of asking only “who won the most votes?”, they ask how democratic institutions can accommodate difference and protect those who will never form a majority.

Multiculturalism and group rights 🔗

One influential response is multiculturalism, which argues that genuine equality sometimes requires recognising group differences rather than ignoring them. As a policy and a theory, multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand that they assimilate into the dominant culture. The philosopher Will Kymlicka, drawing on debates between liberals and communitarians, argued for the cultural rights of minorities within a liberal framework.

In the Indian context, thinkers have extended this logic to historically oppressed groups. B. R. Ambedkar, for instance, viewed Dalit rights as minority rights within a majoritarian social order, defending them within liberal democracy on the basis of the disadvantage, oppression, and injustice experienced by Dalits. Here, group rights function as regulatory devices that accommodate difference and create a structure of belonging for those who would otherwise be marginalised.

Consociational and power-sharing devices 🔗

Another approach focuses on institutional design. Some divided societies adopt power-sharing arrangements-coalitions, guaranteed representation, and mutual vetoes-that prevent any single group from monopolising power. Indian democracy, while not formally consociational, has adopted such devices in practice. Observers note that the Indian experience suggests institutional heterogeneity is not in itself a problem and can in fact be a source of strength. Coalition governments and federal arrangements that give linguistic and regional communities a meaningful share of power are concrete examples of managing ethnic cleavages without suppressing them.

Rethinking freedom: from non-interference to non-domination 🔗

These new approaches to democracy require a deeper rethinking of what freedom actually means. The dominant liberal tradition often defined freedom as non-interference-you are free as long as no one is actively stopping you from doing what you want. But this definition is inadequate for a society marked by ethnic dominance. A minority might face no direct interference and still live in a state of constant vulnerability, dependent on the goodwill of the majority.

The republican conception of liberty 🔗

This is where the philosopher Philip Pettit’s idea of freedom as non-domination becomes valuable. For Pettit, real freedom requires not just the absence of interference but the absence of domination-of living under the arbitrary power of another. He illustrates this with the image of a slave under a benevolent master: it is possible to have domination without interference and interference without domination. Even a kind master who never actually interferes still dominates, because he retains the capacity to interfere at will. The slave’s apparent freedom exists only at the master’s pleasure.

Applied to ethnic cleavages, this is a powerful insight. A minority community that survives only because the majority chooses, for now, not to act against it is not genuinely free. As Pettit puts it, you cannot be free if you live under the thumb of another, under another’s will, even if that other person is nice to you. True freedom requires institutions-rights, constitutional protections, an independent judiciary-that remove the very capacity for arbitrary domination. Freedom, on this view, is secured by rightly ordered laws rather than by the mere absence of interference.

Freedom as self-realisation 🔗

Closely linked to non-domination is the idea of freedom as self-realisation-the positive capacity to develop one’s identity, culture, and potential. Some scholars argue that the republican view of liberty resonates with a positive idea of freedom concerned with a person’s sense of agency, where freedom as self-realisation is intricately linked to human agency. Defenders of this view note that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realisation can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by proponents of negative liberty-for instance, protecting minority languages or supporting marginalised communities so that they can flourish on equal terms. For a multi-ethnic society, this means freedom is not just being left alone, but being empowered to live one’s identity with dignity and security.

Why this matters for political theory today 🔗

The shift from class to cleavage, from majority rule to inclusion, and from non-interference to non-domination represents a fundamental reorientation of political theory in the globalised era. The old certainties-that economic development would dissolve ethnic loyalties, that secular modernity would replace religious identity, that majority rule was sufficient for democracy-have all been challenged by events.

What emerges is a political theory that treats diversity not as a problem to be eliminated but as a permanent feature to be accommodated. It demands empirical attention to how real societies actually manage difference, rather than abstract models that assume homogeneity. And it insists that freedom is meaningful only when no group, however numerous, can dominate another at will. For students of politics, especially in a society as plural as ours, these debates are not academic luxuries-they are the questions on which the future of democratic coexistence depends.

What do you think? If a minority community enjoys peace today only because the majority chooses not to act against it, can we honestly call that community free? And in a deeply diverse society, where should the line be drawn between protecting group identities and maintaining a shared national citizenship?

References

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