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rfmcdonaldRecent discussions on the--thankfully, aborted--introduction of shari'a law in Ontario have reminded me of the Ottoman Empire's millet system, described here by the relevant Wikipedia article.
I'm not surprised that the Ottoman Empire came apart exceptionally violently, with multiple genocides and ethnic cleansings inflicted on the vulnerable post-Ottoman populations of southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. At least the peoples of the former Austria-Hungary were able to wait a generation for their bout of round-robin genocide. How could the Ottoman Empire avoid a conflagration without a system of government that placed all individuals on an equal footing, relative to the state, to each other, and to the various collective bodies with a vested interest in maintaining themselves forever apart?
It was with a bit of incredulity that the right-wing blog Kesher Talk observed that Jews and Arabs couldn't marry each other in Israel. This isn't true. What is true is that people of different faiths cannot marry each other within Israel without one partner converting to the other's religion, since Israel is unique among democracies in not having an institution of civil marriage.
This fits the goals of bigots well. As anyone who's been watching the debate over same-sex civil marriage in Canada knows, the permissibility and acceptability of homosexuality and of the homosexual and of homophobia. Israel has had well over a half-century to change its laws. If Israelis of all religions were really interested in co-existing with their neighbours, surely they'd unite behind the goal of letting intimate relationships develop normally? They haven't, simply because of prejudice, because of indifference to the sufferings of others who really shouldn't be doing what they insist on doing, and because of the self-interest of religious hierarchies and group leaders in maintaining their own self-contained groups. Mischlings and métèques are never popular with ethnic nationalists and religious bigots.
The poisonous effects of the millet system extends well beyond marriage to other areas of Israeli life. Daniel Pipes praised the millet system in 1991, saying that Israeli Jews and Arabs wanted to live apart in separate communities. What he didn't bother to note is that Jews and Arabs didn't live together because they weren't allowed, because of a complicated system of land ownership and legal bans that amounted to nothing short of systematic segregation, and the abuse of Israeli Arabs. Israelis shouldn't have been surprised when Israel's Arabs rioted in October of 2000 even as the second intifadeh began. Happy, well-treated minorities never riot when their country is at war.
It should be noted that Israel is easily the most democratic and civilized of the Ottoman successor states in Asia. What other Ottoman successor states, and other countries with similar traditions, have done with this social system need only be imagined. Iran's millet system, for instance, isn't known for its benevolence towards the (recognized) Jews and (unrecognized) Baha'is, or for people who want to live outside the confines of the religious groups into which they were born. The millet system is a dead end.
The Republic of Estonia, founded in 1918, could be a forward-looking polity at the best of times. Of particular interest was its legislation granting self-government in cultural affairs to Estonia's ethnic minorities, describedhere by the Estonian Institute:
Had Estonia the good luck to enjoy a sustained period of freedom, independence, and democracy, interesting things could have happened. In the brief two decades separating two periods of conflict in the West's 20th century civil wars, the dominant institutional model concerned with the collective rights of minorities in Europe was the "minority treaties" system, which charged the various post-imperial successor states with extending certain cultural rights to minorities. As Boris Tsilevich observed in his EUMap article "EU Enlargement and the Protection of National Minorities: Opportunities, Myths, and Prospects", this system was flawed, applying only to the successor states, ignoring stateless minorities, and transforming hapless populations into fifth columns with calamitous results. The Estonian system was different, not only because the Estonian minorities in question were relatively dispersed--certain Estonian minorities had concentrations in certain parts of the country, yes, but they weren't confined to these areas. Estonia seems to have been unique in all of Europe in granting self-government in cultural affairs to ethnic minorities lacking territorial nuclei.
Alas, the Soviet Union invaded Estonia in 1939, annexed it in 1940, and went on to make the Nazis look kind and benevolent overlords. That put an end to that worthy experiment. If only Estonia had remained independent--perhaps, then, we'd have working models for a consociationalism that was rooted in a strictly ethnic definitions while still managing to exist in a liberal constitutional society. It's worth noting, however, that the abortive Estonian solution was limited to culture and to language. Law remained a purview of the Estonian state, which treated all citizens equally.
Jonathan Edelstein wrote in his fifth Lebanon post that "in countries with strong group identities, simple majority rule can be an oppressive rather than a democratic concept. Where majorities are formed around ethnic, religious or other social groups rather than cross-sectorial ideological factions, majority rule without constraints translates to rule for the benefit of the dominant group. One has only to look to the theoretically unitary states of post-colonial Africa and Asia, many of which are effectively controlled by the majority ethnic group or a politically dominant minority, to see how the Enlightenment ideal can break down in practice."
With respect to Jonathan, I'd argue that strong group identities aren't the problem. Rather, it's the lack of respect for strong group identities, or of anything that interferes with the totalitarian or authoritarian state's desire to control and regiment its entire subject population. Thus, Louis XIV garrisoning soldiers in the homes of Huguenots, Cromwell razing Drogheda, Saddam Hussein gassing Kurdish villages, Armenians sent on forced marches into the Syrian desert, the KGB taking wreckers into the basement of the Lubyanka, and Cambodians with a fourth-grade education getting pickaxed in the head. The lack of respect for group identities is only one manifestation of a general problem with the idea of the rule of law, certainly for a rule of law that would pass constitutional review in your standard democratic polity.
There are certain polities where laying the framework for communal institutions readily conquerable by the self-righteous is the only way to avert massacre. Iraq which, as described by Kanan Makiya, is a society where the underrepresentation of different groups has led like clockwork to their massacre. Mass violence against vulnerable minorities in the name of state-building has a long history in modern Iraq. In fact, it's the first of these instances of mass violence, the 1933 slaughter of the Assyrians, that prompted Raphael Lemkin to develop the word and concept of "genocide." Where the only way to avoid serial genocide in an illiberal polity is to grant said polity's component groups elements of sovereign power, that may well be the least bad thing to do.
One thing that we should never do is that we shouldn't pretend that we won't get countries like modern Iraq, where the three major ethnoreligious communities are given more-or-less complete autonomy from a dysfunctional central state. As it turns out, it isn't the benevolent and comparatively liberal clerics and community leaders who end up in charge. No, it's the totalitarian bigots who take power, the ones who favour honour killings and the mandatory veiling of women as part of a necessary withdrawal of the more vulnerable sex from professional life.
Do we really need this in liberal societies, though? In societies where the rule of law can be made universally accessible to anyone regardless of origins, and very nearly is, it's difficult to reconcile different standards of civil and criminal law with a morality that isn't synonymous with "fuck the weak," of a neo-liberalism taken far beyond the borders of conventional morality to an entirely new realm. If what people can get is limited to what they can afford--to the amount of capital, whether financial or cultural, they can expend--then it stands to reason that differing systems of law will end in differing levels of human rights. We get the Ottoman Empire, in short.
How can I do anything but agree with the arguments expressed in Toronto weekly eye's most recent editorial?
Millet (stress on the e) is an Ottoman Turkish term for a legally protected religious minority. It comes from the Arabic word milla for confessional community. The Arabic term is a very general one, the Jewish neighbourhoods in Morocco and Tunisia were named mellah.
The millet was an alternative to autonomous territories that has long been the European norm for dealing with minority groups. The millet system has a long history in the Middle East, and is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non-Muslim minorities. The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government.
The main millets were the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian ones. A wide array of other groups such as Catholics, Karaites and Samaritans were also represented, but not the non-Sunni Muslim communities (Shi'as, Druzes, Alawis, Alevis, Yezidis, etc.) which had no official existence in this Sunni [Muslim] Caliphate even if the Druzes of the Djebel Druze and the Mount Lebanon enjoyed a rather feudal-type autonomy, like the (Christian) Assyrian villages under Mar Shimun in the Hakkiari mountains. These groups were spread across the empire with significant minorities in most of the major cities. Autonomy for these groups was thus impossible to base on a territorial region.
Each millet was under the supervision of a leader, most often a religious patriarch, who reported directly to the Ottoman Sultan. The millets had a great deal of power - they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was insisted was loyalty to the Empire. When a member of one millet committed a crime against a member of another the law of the damaged person applied. The Muslim majority was seen as paramount and any dispute involving a Muslim fell under their law.
The millet system was altered by the increasing influence of European powers in the Middle East. The various European powers declared themselves protectors of their religious cohorts in the Empire. Thus the Russians became guardians of the Eastern Orthodox groups, the French of the Catholics, and the British of the Jews and other groups. New millets were created in the XIXth century for several uniate and protestant Christian communities, then for the separate national Eastern Orthodox Bulgarian Church, recognized as a Millet by an Ottoman firman (decree) in 1870 and excommunicated two years later by the Ecumenical Patriarcate as adherents of phyletism (national or ethnic principle in church organization). This altered the balance of power as the Millet became wealthy and outside Ottoman law.
I'm not surprised that the Ottoman Empire came apart exceptionally violently, with multiple genocides and ethnic cleansings inflicted on the vulnerable post-Ottoman populations of southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. At least the peoples of the former Austria-Hungary were able to wait a generation for their bout of round-robin genocide. How could the Ottoman Empire avoid a conflagration without a system of government that placed all individuals on an equal footing, relative to the state, to each other, and to the various collective bodies with a vested interest in maintaining themselves forever apart?
It was with a bit of incredulity that the right-wing blog Kesher Talk observed that Jews and Arabs couldn't marry each other in Israel. This isn't true. What is true is that people of different faiths cannot marry each other within Israel without one partner converting to the other's religion, since Israel is unique among democracies in not having an institution of civil marriage.
This fits the goals of bigots well. As anyone who's been watching the debate over same-sex civil marriage in Canada knows, the permissibility and acceptability of homosexuality and of the homosexual and of homophobia. Israel has had well over a half-century to change its laws. If Israelis of all religions were really interested in co-existing with their neighbours, surely they'd unite behind the goal of letting intimate relationships develop normally? They haven't, simply because of prejudice, because of indifference to the sufferings of others who really shouldn't be doing what they insist on doing, and because of the self-interest of religious hierarchies and group leaders in maintaining their own self-contained groups. Mischlings and métèques are never popular with ethnic nationalists and religious bigots.
The poisonous effects of the millet system extends well beyond marriage to other areas of Israeli life. Daniel Pipes praised the millet system in 1991, saying that Israeli Jews and Arabs wanted to live apart in separate communities. What he didn't bother to note is that Jews and Arabs didn't live together because they weren't allowed, because of a complicated system of land ownership and legal bans that amounted to nothing short of systematic segregation, and the abuse of Israeli Arabs. Israelis shouldn't have been surprised when Israel's Arabs rioted in October of 2000 even as the second intifadeh began. Happy, well-treated minorities never riot when their country is at war.
It should be noted that Israel is easily the most democratic and civilized of the Ottoman successor states in Asia. What other Ottoman successor states, and other countries with similar traditions, have done with this social system need only be imagined. Iran's millet system, for instance, isn't known for its benevolence towards the (recognized) Jews and (unrecognized) Baha'is, or for people who want to live outside the confines of the religious groups into which they were born. The millet system is a dead end.
The Republic of Estonia, founded in 1918, could be a forward-looking polity at the best of times. Of particular interest was its legislation granting self-government in cultural affairs to Estonia's ethnic minorities, describedhere by the Estonian Institute:
The policy of cultural autonomy was a cornerstone of Estonian ethnic policy, and in 1925 the Cultural Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities Act was enacted, giving minority groups whose membership exceeded 3000 the right to self-determination in cultural matters, with financial support provided by the state. The Cultural Autonomy Act also made provisions for receiving education in indigenous languages. Germans and Jews were the two groups who made full use of the Act. Apart from Estonian language education, it was possible to receive education in four minority languages - German, Russian, Swedish and Yiddish.
Had Estonia the good luck to enjoy a sustained period of freedom, independence, and democracy, interesting things could have happened. In the brief two decades separating two periods of conflict in the West's 20th century civil wars, the dominant institutional model concerned with the collective rights of minorities in Europe was the "minority treaties" system, which charged the various post-imperial successor states with extending certain cultural rights to minorities. As Boris Tsilevich observed in his EUMap article "EU Enlargement and the Protection of National Minorities: Opportunities, Myths, and Prospects", this system was flawed, applying only to the successor states, ignoring stateless minorities, and transforming hapless populations into fifth columns with calamitous results. The Estonian system was different, not only because the Estonian minorities in question were relatively dispersed--certain Estonian minorities had concentrations in certain parts of the country, yes, but they weren't confined to these areas. Estonia seems to have been unique in all of Europe in granting self-government in cultural affairs to ethnic minorities lacking territorial nuclei.
Alas, the Soviet Union invaded Estonia in 1939, annexed it in 1940, and went on to make the Nazis look kind and benevolent overlords. That put an end to that worthy experiment. If only Estonia had remained independent--perhaps, then, we'd have working models for a consociationalism that was rooted in a strictly ethnic definitions while still managing to exist in a liberal constitutional society. It's worth noting, however, that the abortive Estonian solution was limited to culture and to language. Law remained a purview of the Estonian state, which treated all citizens equally.
Jonathan Edelstein wrote in his fifth Lebanon post that "in countries with strong group identities, simple majority rule can be an oppressive rather than a democratic concept. Where majorities are formed around ethnic, religious or other social groups rather than cross-sectorial ideological factions, majority rule without constraints translates to rule for the benefit of the dominant group. One has only to look to the theoretically unitary states of post-colonial Africa and Asia, many of which are effectively controlled by the majority ethnic group or a politically dominant minority, to see how the Enlightenment ideal can break down in practice."
With respect to Jonathan, I'd argue that strong group identities aren't the problem. Rather, it's the lack of respect for strong group identities, or of anything that interferes with the totalitarian or authoritarian state's desire to control and regiment its entire subject population. Thus, Louis XIV garrisoning soldiers in the homes of Huguenots, Cromwell razing Drogheda, Saddam Hussein gassing Kurdish villages, Armenians sent on forced marches into the Syrian desert, the KGB taking wreckers into the basement of the Lubyanka, and Cambodians with a fourth-grade education getting pickaxed in the head. The lack of respect for group identities is only one manifestation of a general problem with the idea of the rule of law, certainly for a rule of law that would pass constitutional review in your standard democratic polity.
There are certain polities where laying the framework for communal institutions readily conquerable by the self-righteous is the only way to avert massacre. Iraq which, as described by Kanan Makiya, is a society where the underrepresentation of different groups has led like clockwork to their massacre. Mass violence against vulnerable minorities in the name of state-building has a long history in modern Iraq. In fact, it's the first of these instances of mass violence, the 1933 slaughter of the Assyrians, that prompted Raphael Lemkin to develop the word and concept of "genocide." Where the only way to avoid serial genocide in an illiberal polity is to grant said polity's component groups elements of sovereign power, that may well be the least bad thing to do.
One thing that we should never do is that we shouldn't pretend that we won't get countries like modern Iraq, where the three major ethnoreligious communities are given more-or-less complete autonomy from a dysfunctional central state. As it turns out, it isn't the benevolent and comparatively liberal clerics and community leaders who end up in charge. No, it's the totalitarian bigots who take power, the ones who favour honour killings and the mandatory veiling of women as part of a necessary withdrawal of the more vulnerable sex from professional life.
Do we really need this in liberal societies, though? In societies where the rule of law can be made universally accessible to anyone regardless of origins, and very nearly is, it's difficult to reconcile different standards of civil and criminal law with a morality that isn't synonymous with "fuck the weak," of a neo-liberalism taken far beyond the borders of conventional morality to an entirely new realm. If what people can get is limited to what they can afford--to the amount of capital, whether financial or cultural, they can expend--then it stands to reason that differing systems of law will end in differing levels of human rights. We get the Ottoman Empire, in short.
How can I do anything but agree with the arguments expressed in Toronto weekly eye's most recent editorial?
We have a set of common principles, laid out in our laws, that all Ontarians agree will govern our affairs. These are based on certain secular ideals and centuries of evolving common and parliamentary laws. The most crucial of these are codified in our constitution. Our government must never recognize the legitimacy of other laws based on blind faith in the revealed truths of supernatural entities as recorded in books that some group or another considers sacred. This may seem to be an obvious point. Yet, for 14 years, the government has recognized a parallel religious court system for family law, lending the coercive authority of the government to decisions based on scripture. McGuinty is right to correct this error.
[. . .]
Removing religious arbitration from the formal government court system does nothing to infringe on the rights of believers to behave in accordance with their faiths. Catholics, whose church forbids divorce, are free to stay married if that is what they choose. Jews are free to not eat pork. Muslim women are free to give whatever inheritance to which they might be legally entitled to whomever their faith tells them to, if that's what their conscience tells them they should do. But our court system should not be deputizing religious figures, nor should it be enforcing their dictates. Let the gods enforce their own laws, using whatever divine powers they may possess. Our government should stick to enforcing the laws we've come up with together, the laws that govern us all, believers and non-believers alike.
