Ethnic Conflict Helps Bacteria Cooperate

A recent Science News piece reports research indicating that “bacteria assassinating each other when crowded together ironically can favor the evolution of cooperation.” This happens when different strains of bacteria are initially mixed randomly. Using their own brand of natural antibiotic, each bacterium launches an attack on its neighbors from different strains. This eventually leads – through a kind of bacterial ethnic conflict – to clumps of same strain bacteria that can then shift from expending energy on warfare with opposing clumps to cooperating with each other in its same-strain clump. As the researcher summed up: “This resulting clumpy distribution, despite its murderous origin, favors the rise of cooperation, such as secreting substances useful to a whole community.”

This seems quite clear and while not really surprising – like prefers like – also suggests a possibly illuminating thought experiment. Imagine a beneficent bacterial power – lets call it the USA (Union for Safe Association) – that seeks to use carrots and sticks – super-antibacterial agents plus sugar – to push the different strains into coexisting rather than trying to kill each other. This would require maintaining an unnatural balance and might never succeed in making each bacterium focus its energies on anything but finding other ways to win living space. Perhaps it could work as long as the USA worked diligently, non-stop and forever. But should the effort lag, nature would probably just take its course.

Despite billions of years of evolution, identity-specific living organisms – strains – seem to follow the same imperative to clump. This is the state of nature. Past human experience suggests that there are only a few ways to establish a stable order out of mixture: strong, perhaps brutal central rule (whether from inside or outside, a Leviathan), sufficient nutrient (wealth) to allow all strains a piece of the pie (Western liberal democracy), or letting nature take its course (“ethnic” conflict finally ending in more or less homogeneous entities that at least have that to be proud of). Does the human species suggest better?

Mistakes Were Made II

The US is now in the process of choosing its next president. Everyone – in America and beyond – should insist that all the candidates clearly define their notion of national interest and explain how it addresses limitations as well as possibilities. Then the American people must choose very wisely. The 21st Century appears to be just beginning a wild ride.


Full piece in TransConflict.

Africa by 2100?

Talked recently with a young man originally from Ethiopia but now living in the US. He keeps up with his native land and was just back from a visit. I asked him how things were. He said: “It's Africa, you know what that means, corruption and conflict.” He spoke of the 2005 election and the resulting denial and repression of those he termed the “winners” and lamented the current situation in which, as he put it, the third largest ethnic group rules over the rest of the “80 tribes” that live in Ethiopia.

It is easy to see why someone might see Africa – mired in poverty, corruption and violence – as a land without much of a future. It's hard to name one functioning multi-ethnic democracy on the continent. Some countries have elections but these serve either to anoint those already in control and holding all the advantages of state power – official and otherwise – or to simply provide a patina of legitimacy for autocratic, tribally based rulers and cliques. African countries remain on the periphery of the global economy. As such they must earn their living in an environment where rapid technological change and the built-in advantages of the already developed core leave them little room for much more than the export of raw materials and the importation of finished goods. This may produce some wealth but it runs into the hands of those with the local monopoly. At best, it may feature as a form of primitive capital accumulation but even then the trickle down cannot keep up with rising populations and expectations. It would take an extraordinary amount of good governance, popular support and patience for even gradual economic development to lift these countries to the level of societal well-being basic to sustaining democratic norms, procedures and results.

History dealt Africa two cruel blows. The first was the slave traffic. Slavery certainly existed before the outsiders – European and Arab – brought it to the continent. But the tremendous demand created especially by the traffic to the New World magnified the level of violence already existing among the many native groupings. Slavery also was the entry point of European expansion into Africa, followed by the exploitation of natural resources and colonization. This was the second blow, the carving up of Africa into territorial units that took no regard of existing tribal patterns and political arrangements. There had been empires and nascent states before colonization but these were based on local realities with their own ebb and flow. Once this was super-ceded by the state boundaries drawn up by the Europeans, disparate peoples found themselves lumped together inside arbitrarily chosen fences. After independence – with almost no experience of political participation or democracy – they were left in the hands of those willing and able to use identity politics and violence to seize and hold power. Corruption, poverty and repression within the framework of tribally-based competition for space – economic and political – became the norm.

Some see democracy as the way to move forward. But democracy requires a level of economic development and political maturity (especially a willingness to see someone not like yourself win power). In a context of scarce resources, winner-take-all, tribal politics democracy is likely either to fail or simply produce further conflict between winners and losers. It would be nice if some model of power-sharing might work within federal or confederal arrangements. But such mechanisms also require an extraordinary degree of tolerance and political experience to function in a sustained fashion, especially in the context of economic underdevelopment.

In the history of Europe, stable states grew from heterogeneous tribes only through the growth of centralized states imposing a “national” culture and language. For the future of Africa, it may be necessary for the West to temper efforts to export “democracy” with an understanding of its own history. Acting against genocide or gross human rights abuse is an international responsibility. But it will also be necessary to recognize that over the next decades that African states will have to find their own way of constructing nations within the confines of the colonial fences left them.

The Killer Species: Us vs Them

The human species has a long record of Us vs Them conflict. Indeed, our species of Homo sapiens is the only surviving one from a long period in which various other kinds of humans shared the evolutionary record. For whatever reason, we emerged the sole survivor. We had various advantages. Deprived of in-built weapons such as claws and saber teeth, we evolved as especially inventive and effective tool-using killers. Our social organization – depending very much on our ability to use symbols and language to reaffirm in-group bonds and work effectively in coordinated activities – plus our advancing toolset made us formidable hunters and gatherers. While some of these advantages may have characterized the other members of the Homo genus, we did them better. Even our closest relative, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, may not have had our full capacity for the advanced suite. After coexisting with us for some 160,000 years, the Neanderthals joined the long list of the extinct other humans.

Since our arriving on the scene some 200 thousand years ago, we have succeeded in eliminating, replacing and enslaving Them. Recent discoveries have pushed back the known origins of warfare within our own species to 10,000 years ago. The University of Cambridge anthropologist who discovered the evidence suggested that “lethal raids by competing groups were part of life for hunter-gatherer communities at the time.” A recent excavation in France of 6000 year old remains provides signs of violence including against women and children and perhaps ritual dismemberment. But it would be surprising if we were not already – and since the beginning – omni-predators of anything not Us.

We have come up with various reasons and motives for using violence against others. We want their food, water, land, gold, women, men. But these have often been overlaid or supplemented by the simple desire to rid ourselves of Them. We tend, all too frequently, to establish who we are by defining who we are not. Attacking Them reaffirms our identity. In the Hobbesian state of nature, nothing prevents the war of all against all. Within a society, a stable governing order – the Leviathan – can regularize this war. (Regularize, not end. Witness the current political conflict between Red and Blue in America or the current wave of xenophobia sweeping through the EU.) Between societies in conflict, or when internal order breaks down, the simplest way to distinguish the enemy is to focus on Them.

The conflicts of the last 100 years have been mainly of this Us vs Them kind, primarily over identity: ethnic, tribal or religious. They have spun from control when the regimes that ruled over multi-ethnic states have fallen or been seized or overthrown. Once identity conflicts begin, they quickly turn zero-sum. Violence begets violence and the possibility of achieving a political solution recedes beyond the horizon. In the globalized and technologically complex 21st Century, these conflicts tend to produce regional and global insecurity.

It should seem obvious that international relations requires a version of the Leviathan, an internationally acceptable way to manage conflict between and within states and address the tensions that allow conflict to emerge along identity lines. The UN provides a mechanism to do both. Seems that our choice may be to use it better and act more multi-laterally or perhaps see that we have all become the universal Them on the way to our own demise.

The US and Russia

In 1991, the USSR dissolved into a collection of independent states leaving the Russian Federation as its internationally recognized successor. (As the legal successor state, Russia inherited the Soviet Union's seat on the UN Security Council.) The states of the former Eastern Bloc had already broken free of Soviet control. German unification was a fact. It might have seemed that the Cold War was over with NATO's mission of protecting the West from Soviet aggression no longer needed. But NATO did not disappear. Instead it began moving east into the former Warsaw Pact countries. In Washington, the judgement was that the US had “won” the Cold War, the USSR had “lost” and Russia was now just a second class power of little consequence. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in 1999. By 2004, NATO took in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania thereby moving well beyond the former boundaries of the USSR. Albania and Croatia were admitted in 2009. Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia are on on the doorstep. Reaching deeper into the former USSR, NATO unilaterally decided to eventually bring in the Ukraine and Georgia.

It demands great credulity to believe that Russia would not have seen this expansion east as a form of aggression. Russia has a long history and a deep culture. It also possess a formidable military, nuclear weapons, and that seat on the Security Council. Moscow essentially swallowed the first waves of NATO expansion but balked at Georgia (where Stalin was born) and in 2014 drew the line in Ukraine. None of this should have been surprising. That President Putin, for partly political reasons, played to Russian nationalism in his reaction to NATO's pretensions should not hide the fact that Russia and the Russian people had good reason to feel brazenly provoked.

During the Yeltsin years, the US made efforts to support Russian “reform.” But we Americans have little appreciation of the particularities of other countries – historical, social, cultural, political – and expected too much and gave too little. With Putin the trajectory has been mostly down. But the events in Ukraine, Russian resilience to sanctions, and Moscow's reclaimed role in the Mideast suggest that it was always foolish to see Russia as simply a second class power of no consequence. The US and Europe – as at least the Germans understand – need Russia.

Russia and the US have a deep shared interest in their own and global security. They form, in effect, the Western and Eastern flanks of the Atlantic community. Conflict between the two helps neither. We face a common threat from Islamic fundamentalism and the regional chaos in Syria and Iraq. We both must contend with the “rise” of China. That the two countries have different political systems is not unusual and reflects our very different histories. It should not take Donald Trump to note that the Russian people have chosen their president and still support him. Sanctions have not weakened Putin because the Russian people need little help in seeing in them another example of US aggression.

What should be done? Washington's political class should make up its collective mind to deal with the Russia that is rather then the one it might wish. NATO expansion into Ukraine is not required by US national interests and should be dropped. EU membership for Ukraine should be left to the EU to process (or not). Sanctions should be rolled back. The US played a large part in Syria and Iraq's descent into chaos. There, Washington should accept that Russia has interests and that Assad's fate needs to be negotiated. More generally, the US should commit itself to working multilaterally and with it's partners on the UN Security Council, especially Russia. Achieving compromise approaches may not be easy. Trust has frayed. But as our work together on Iran nuclear shows, things can get done. And the US needs partners that don't always simply say “yes.” Those “coalitions of the willing” are not adequate protection from making mistakes. 

Note:  An earlier version of this appeared in TransConflict.