"Polarization and Conflict: summary of (and reaction to) some of the main points"

Philippe van Parijs

(UCL|Belgium)

I hope this won't be too much of an anticlimax, after all the nice things that have been said about the relevance of the project to various concerns at the European level. Of course, part of my job is to point to a number of difficulties. Let me say that I find it a nice habit, in a summer school to end the sessions by giving the flow to one of the pupils who came knowing nothing or nearly nothing about the subject, listening carefully to all the scholars -some young, some old, some very young, some quite old- who taugth him about all sort of aspects of the subject he had not even suspected. Now, of course, he will be able to find out part of the extent to which the pupil has understood what has been said, but, as we all know, as teachers, as people who earn our living by teaching, whenever a pupil has not understood it is never the fault of the pupil but never the fault of the teacher, so I feel exonerated in advance.

Still, needless to say, this nice practice is also a daunting task, in fact an impossible task, so I am not going to summarize the main points. I simply stick to a number of points which I think I have understood, and which I think are relevant to the essential theme of this whole meeting. And I also react to a number of these points, but I wanted to [*] structure of final discussion, since in such a way we can still, before departing, learn from each other, including learn from our mutual misunderstandings. So the plan I am going to follow and what I am going to say is this [First Slide].

Is polarization helpful in understanding conflict?

The central question of the whole meeting, suggested by the title, is polarization and conflict, but interpreted -presumebly, that's the most obvious interpretation- as "Does polarization cause conflict?" or, more modestly perhaps, "Is polarization helpful in understanding conflict?" It is fair to say that not all papers addressed this question in the straightforward way, even though a large proportion, nearly all, addressed questions closely related to that question. I must say the only case in which I really couldn't manage to make the link was David. I tried to pull all the elastics of my brain as hard as I could, but I couldn't make the link with the theme. No doubt some other people can make that more explicit. So what I want to do is quickly run through the various questions I've put in the board, and indicate a number of things which I've learned and a number of questions I asked myself while listening to you.

1. What is conflict and why does it matter?

First of all, since we are talking about conflict, we need to say a bit about what we mean by conflict, because, as you all have noticed, there were a lot of fluctuations in the implicit use or in the implicit definition that was being used of the term conflict. It went all the way from something like civil war -some papers were focused on that (Jean Paul, for example)-, to very broad notions ofconflict as simply the existence of opposing interest.

Violence can be defined as the violation of some people´s legal rights

So I think it is certainly useful to try to do a sort of minimal typology of what we mean by conflict and, first of all, by distinguishing between violent conflict and non-violent conflict. Now, violence can be defined -without too muc h dificulty- as the violation of some people´s legal rights. In the most extreme form the rip of their personal integrity, but there is violence, of course, even in other forms of violation of rights or just destruction of people's properties. So violence can be something defined in those terms.

But not any type of violence will be conflict. It may be something a bit more specifically united to violent interaction between opponents. You can have some sort of random violence in the street or someone aggresing someone else in order to pinch a bag, I mean this wouldn't count as a form of conflict or violent conflict. To have conflict, you need to have people defining themselves as opponents. And then you can have, of course, all sorts of gradations, when you speak about violent conflict in this sense, going from civil war, massive violence between citizens or groups of citizens of the same country, to all sorts of political violence, including, for example, the one on which one of the papers focused, namely terrorism.

[David Schmeidler] You restricted violence to violating legal rights. There are laws imposed which are could be considered violence, civil violence, and would be out of your definition's scope.

[PvP] It is, but should not be. This is inappropriate as a definition of violence, because the violence perpetrated by the very legal system is something conceptually meaning. So it has to be redefined.

we would have this sort of non violent conflict in the case we have non violent interaction between opponents

However we define violence -and clearly we need to define it differently from the way I just did-, we want to extend our explanandum in the connection between polarization and conflict beyond the case of violent conflict. And then I suggest, again as a first cut, that we would have this sort of non violent conflict in the case we have non violent interaction between opponents, people defining themselves in a fairly durable way as opponents, that generates an overall loss, be it simply in the form of foregoing cooperative surplus. For example, there was this brief discussion in Joan Esteban's paper in connection with Homans [*], and Debraj also interveined on that issue. Thinking Homan's quote, there is a far wider notion of conflict that would apply, that would obtain, whenever there is anything like a conflict of interests. The idea was that there was conflict as soon as one of the parties could have made a better bargain than the other. So whenever there are some options in the feasible set that are better for one person and worst for the other, you would have a conflict of interest in this sense.

It seems to me that the implicit notion of conflict that has been used to refer to non-violent cases of interaction in many instances throughout this conference requires some notion of loss, if only the foregoing of cooperative surplus. In Joan's paper, for example, there is the idea that resources are being expended on conflict as opposed to production, resources that are wasted in terms of production, but that makes sense only becauses of the conflict. So that we need, again as a first cut, some notion of non violent interaction that generates an overall loss. For example, in the case of secession, there can be a completely non violent secession, but it can count as a case of conflict, to the extent that it comes with an overall loss in terms of the economies of scale that wouldn't be compensated by gains from decentralization. So when the net effect in terms of efficiency is negative, this would be a case of conflict.

Then come the second question in my point one. Well, we are interested in conflict, why? Is conflict, in particular, necessarily a bad thing? Now, one may wonder how could it fail to be a bad thing. You think about all this blood pouring, about all this links being torn off, this tears being shared… But this seems not to be fully sufficient to convince economists. What they want to know, whether conflict is a bad thing or not, is what is the impact on GNP. And we were therefore treated to an interesting exercise about the GNP cost of Basque conflict [by Alberto Abadie].

I have found it an interesting exercise, even though you may say "we know that a violent conflict is a bad thing, why do we need to know what exactly the impact of it is on the GNP". But it was certainly a methodologically interesting exercise, because the common view seems to be "yes, of course, it has a negative impact on the GNP, just look at the fact that the Basque country declined in the economic pecking order of the Spanish autonomous regions". And this is often taken to be sufficient to demostrate that there is a negative impact on the GNP, or if there is a fall in the relative share in Spain's GNP and that comes from the Basque country. But I found the exercise that was done —constructing this countefactual, as well as one could, on the basis of the preterrorism association between the fate of the Basque country and some other regions of Spain—, I found it quite an interesting exercise, even if though it might have been improved in various ways that have been suggested. For example, by taking the rate of growth rather than the average absolute level of GNP, as indicative of the gaps. Now, speaking about the policy relevance of the exercises that have been done, one may be puzzled about the policy implications of these sort of assessment. Is this meant to indicate the level of the bill we are supposed to send to the ETA at the end of terrorism.

Perhaps it shouldn't be so obvious that even violent conflict is always a bad thing, all things considered

But talking of ETA, perhaps it shouldn't be so obvious that even violent conflict is always a bad thing, all things considered. After all, peace is not the supreme value and violence may sometimes be needed to achieve justice. This is related to David's earlier point about the fact that legal systems in certain circumstances can only be challenged by violence. This legal systems may be unjust and therefore violent conflict may be better than peace because it is more open in terms of the realization of something like justice. It is worth pondering, for example, in this respect -and without jumping too quickly to conclusions- whether the very costly, economically costly, rebasquification through the school system which grows on now at -it seems to me- a surprising rate would happen at anything like the same rate without the constant pressure that comes from terrorist acts or from the demonstrations we could have witnessed yesterday or the day before, had we not been in this room but rather in the streets of San Sebastian.

Just to put a little question mark about the two easy pressumptions that should be justified exclusively through its impact on conflict. Maybe conflict, even violent conflict, is not something bad per se…

[Debraj Ray] I want to point out the extraordinary informational role played by many forms of non-violent conflict. So you think of demonstrations, lobbies, some of this is waste, but some of this is gonna make information available. You can't presumptuously assume that the government has all the information that is supposed to have in order to make policies... [Inintelligible]

[PvP] So you could see it as a sort of correction of the information deficiencies of the electoral process, because the electoral process after all only reviews the existence of preferences one way or the other, but not the intensity of those preferences. And so if you look at the risks people are willing to take or the losses that are willing to incurr in order to promote their view, you get a sort of better hint, so even the people who have to take the decisions can do it on the basis of information which can only be conveyed this way.

[Ignacio Ortuño] If I understood you correctly, were you serious when you said that perhaps violence in the Basque case may have some good aspect?

[PvP] No, I did say without jumping too quickly to conclusions. Certainly, the opposite of violent conflict is something like peace. And I do not believe that peace is an end in itself. I think that justice comes before peace, and there may well be circumstances, precisely in those alluded to in David Schmeidler's remark, under which the upsetting of peace is justified in the name of justice. Now, there is a long way between saying that in general terms and applying it to the current Basque context by saying "fine, go ahead with terrorism".

Ok, but in a less dramatic way, I would like to problematize this idea that conflict is bad in another way, by bringing in the contribution made by Santiago Sánchez Pages, if I understood it properly, which suggests that even in a narrower material sense conflict albeit non violent may sometimes be beneficial. One reading of his model -tell me if it is a misreading- is that, under some assumptions, the greatly inefficient tragedy of the commons can be avoided through what he called in his paper an exclusion contest, that is, through the foregoing of a grande coalition and the conflictual exclusion of some of the groups. So the idea of proceeding into stages and having first this exclusion contest, which is a true conflict that turns out eliminating some people from the grande coalition, is a way of solving an inefficiency problem. So that conflict may even in that sort of model play in the hands of efficiency.

Now these remarks may invite to some cautious phrasing, but I shall nevertheless take for granted that conflict, understood as an interaction involving an unavoidable overall cost, is a bad thing. So if we can identify an important factor of conflict, preferebly one that leads itself to some degree of manipulation, precisely because of some potential policy relevance, than this would be most welcome. And even if we cannot manipulate it or cannot manipulate the circumstances under which this factor leads to conflict, we may be still interested in identifying it in the service of a less activist, perhaps more morose desire to understand why conflict, even violent conflict, arises when it does. One such factor, the one which the title of this curso de verano suggests we should consider is polarization. [Next]