By I. William Zartman Elections make for conflict resolutions—and conflict resolutions make for elections. Elections make for conflict resolution in several ways. They can do so directly by serving to manage the conflict. Conflict management in its narrow sense means the reduction of conflict from violence to politics. It does not involve the resolution of the conflict but simply a demotion of the means of carrying it out.
Elections themselves are a prime example of conflict management. Formerly conflicts between contending candidates for governing bodies, including the leadership of the state, were carried out by violent means. The decision was by the elimination or at least the exile of one or more of the contenders. Recently, in historical terms, political societies have agreed to manage the conflict by banishing violent means and leaving the selection of the candidate up to political means in elections. As anybody who follows an electoral campaign and its aftermath knows, this does not resolve the conflict. The parties continue to stand for whatever they stood for before, and the losers attack the winners in the legislature, the press and other places for expressing opposition. But the conflict is managed by the election, and the decision is accepted as decisive (despite grumbling, as recent American history shows).
There are a number of other regimes for conflict management, that is, accepted norms, regulations, principles and expectations—a day in court or a truce or a cease-fire or an institutionalized relationship—but elections are prime mechanisms for the purpose.
Another way elections make for conflict resolution is by providing a means of judging the conflicting parties’ strength. It is not so much that the results provide victory for the presidency or a majority in parliament, but rather an indication of the strengths of the various contenders. Frequently, the core of a violent conflict is not some ideological or even a policy issue, but competing claims of strength. The parties may resort to riots, attacks and demonstrations to assert their claims of political strength, but they have no authoritative way of substantiating their claims. Elections serve the purpose.
In Morocco after independence in 1956 the competing branches of the nationalist movement all claimed their share of importance, except one, the Istiqlal or Independence Party, which claimed to be the exclusive representative of the nationalist current. The debate over elections involved demands by some for a popular poll and demands by others not to hold a vote because they feared it would show them to be weaker than they claimed. It took four years and a number of governmental changes before the elections could finally be held in 1960, by which time the exclusive claims of the Istiqlal had been eroded and the party itself had split into competing factions.
Similarly, in Mozambique 30 years later, the nationalist movement or Renamo claimed to represent a wave of public opposition to the authoritarian socialist policies of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique or Frelimo, the governing party, whereas Frelimo claimed to represent the entire nationalist movement and hence the entire country. It took three years of negotiations, 1990 to 1993, to bring the preceding 16 years of guerrilla warfare to an end and to show that Frelimo represented a good portion of the country, but Renamo was almost as strong. Many other examples can be cited.
A third way elections make for conflict resolution is as a means of gaining support, notably through the forms of an election focused on a particular issue in a referendum. Curiously, modern practice dictates that, unlike the repetitive exercises of democratic elections that give the voter a chance to choose but also a chance to repent, the referendum is a once-and-for-all electoral decision: There is no repenting. Thus the act of self-determination is generally associated with referenda, and referenda also serve to ratify particular decisions. A referendum consecrated the politico-military victory of the Algerian National Liberation Front over the French in 1962, as a referendum consolidated Zimbabwean independence in 1979.
Finally, in the opposite direction, elections also make for conflict management by being used as a delaying tactic. Parties negotiating together, presumably for the resolution of a conflict, can challenge the representativeness of the other party and insist that it face elections in order to show itself as a worthy party in negotiations. Since elections take a while to prepare, the tactic may significantly delay further steps toward the resolution of the conflict. One of the purposes of elections over autonomy after the 1978 Camp David Accords was to delay the implementation of autonomy and try to create domestic West Bank leadership to challenge the exiled leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Similarly, after 1993, elections were to be held for the Palestinian Authority before other steps in the Oslo agreement could be implemented, which in fact they were not. Installing New Leaders
Thus elections can serve in various ways to make for conflict resolution. But conflict resolution can also make for elections. Elections can change leadership to make conflict resolution possible. They can also change the support for moderate policies and for other measures of conflict resolution.
The issue of conflict resolution has often occasioned elections bringing important figures to power and thus has installed the leadership that has been able to draw one of the parties out of their conflict. The names that are associated with this process belong to significant figures in international affairs. Dwight David Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 on the platform that he would end the Korean War and the public, tired of the fighting and losses, elected him to do so. Similarly, Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 on the promise to end the Algerian War and four years later brought it to a conclusion. Willy Brandt was elected at the head of the Social Democratic Party majority in 1969 following a Great Coalition government in order to open up a new policy toward East Germany in his Ostpolitik and achieved a reduction of tensions—again, a conflict management rather than a conflict resolution measure—that was in sync with the first détente. Anwar Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 and, although subsequent elections were won against no opposition, he brought a tactical accommodation of policies that ended up in the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Similarly, Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992 on the promise that he would make an agreement with the Palestinians within his first year of office, leading to the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization. President Jimmy Carter was elected to office in 1976 with specific conflict resolution measures in his sights, including a conclusion of the negotiations begun by President Richard Nixon in regard to the Panama Canal and leading to the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977; Carter also held a sense of mission to continue the peace process in the Middle East that brought Israel and Egypt together at Camp David and finally to the 1979 Washington treaty. In fact, figures elected to office on a platform of conflict resolution have been for the most part historic figures that have brought a significant turn or development in their country’s foreign policy in the middle of a conflict.
Of course, some elections go the other way. The elections in Sri Lanka have been carried out over the past decade between hard-line and soft-line candidates for the presidency and then between the president and the prime minister. The result has been a pendular swing of policies by the Sri Lankan government followed or led by similar swings by the Tigers of Tamil Eelam, resulting in a frequently renewed stalemate that has characterized the Tamil rebellion for the last three decades.
Similarly, in Colombia elections repeatedly have brought to power a presidential candidate with a particular formula for ending the insurgency led above all by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Some candidates have promised an accommodative policy, a way of integrating the rebellion into the political system and paying attention to some of its more legitimate grievances; these include Belisario Betancur in 1982, Virgilio Barco in 1986, César Gaviria in 1990 and Andrés Pastrana in 1998. Others have sought conflict resolution through a hard-line policy that punishes the rebel and responds to popular fatigue translated into popular resentment against the rebels such as Alvaro Uribe in 2002 and 2006. Elections can play a positive role in making conflict resolution possible, usually as a result of public opinion swings that reflect citizen fatigue with the war. But they also can bring hard-line candidates and indecisive policies that do no service to conflict resolution.
Foreign Involvement
In addition to the change in leadership that enables conflict resolution to take place, conflict resolution makes for elections that crystallize public attitude and support specific policies that are part of the conflict itself. In these instances, elections often attract attention from the outside and frequently involve foreign support for particular parties or platforms at crucial moments. Probably the most famous of these elections was the 1948 parliamentary elections in Italy, where the United States and the Soviet Union poured significant sums of money into support for their preferred candidates: the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, respectively. In a year of communist successes elsewhere in Europe, the election was crucial as a Western effort to hold the line, and the pro-Western parties were victorious.
Such events also can signify lost opportunities that could be used to bring to power groups that would dilute the conflict or soften the government’s radical position. Such an event occurred in 1996 in Serbia, where the Zadenjo or “Together” movement expressed public dissatisfaction with the policies of Slobodan Milosevic. But the movement was inexperienced in the political game—driven by divisions from being out of power and rivalries over appropriate opposition policies—and the United States, with significant stakes in the elections, gave little or no support to the movement, which lost after some initial shows of strength.
In a broader sense, conflict resolution makes for elections through the frequently cited principle of democratic peace. Its effect can be examined from two angles. Democratic peace as a process is supposed to reflect the reigning political ethos in democracies, where conflicts are subject to conflict management measures such as elections rather than to violent attempts at resolution. Elections then are a sign of an ethos of conflict management that allows polities to resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence.
On the other hand, democratic peace as a conclusion indicates that democracies do not fight each other. While academics are still fighting each other over the definition of democracy and the strength of this finding, it has become a mantra for foreign policy and a guide for much current academic research. Whether democratic peace is a watertight law or not, there does appear to be a good deal of correlation between the presence of democracy and the absence of war among democratic countries (research also shows that democratic countries are at least as prone or perhaps more prone to fight nondemocratic countries because of the same effect of popular support for the system of government and opposition to foreign systems).
Conflict resolution then may well take over as a reigning ethos in international relations when all of the countries of the world become democratic. In the very long meanwhile, elections are more important in making for conflict resolution and as a result of conflict resolution than they are as an overall characteristic of a an idealized world.
I. William Zartman is the Jacob Blaustein Distinguished Professor of International Organizations and Conflict Resolution and director of the Conflict Management Program. |
