Since the early 1960s, the term plural society has been used to describe societies, usually at the level of independent states or colonial territories, characterized by sharp internal cleavages between ethnic, racial, religious or linguistic groups. By the criterion of 90 per cent or more of the population speaking the same language, at best 10 per cent of the 150-odd states represented at the United Nations are genuine nationstates. The remainder exhibit various degrees of cultural and social pluralism, ranging from the extreme fragmentation of countries like Nigeria, Zaire, India and the former Soviet Union, with scores of ethnic groups, often unrelated to each other, to less heterogeneous states like Belgium, Switzerland or Canada, made up of two or three related language groups.
That broad spectrum of societies has, of course, been studied from a wide variety of perspectives, each with its own vocabulary. Marxists have generally preferred the term ‘multinational states’, and the thrust of their analysis has been to explain the cleavages and conflicts of these societies by reference to a combination of internal class cleavages and unequal exchanges between the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ of the ‘capitalist world-system’ (Frank 1967; Lenin 1969 [1916]; Wallerstein 1974). They have treated ethnic, linguistic, racial or religious differences as either residues of past epochs with vanishing significance, or as labels of false consciousness masking class differences.
A number of liberal scholars, however, when dealing with ‘bourgeois democracies’ of Western Europe and North America have dealt with pluralism as a condition of the political give-and-take of competition and conflict between contending interest groups (Kornhauser 1960; Lipset 1963). By pluralism, however, they have meant not so much ethnic or racial cleavages. Indeed, they often ignored these. Rather, they referred principally to the diversity of political views and of specialized interest groups competing for resources in the political arena of parliamentary democracies.
Yet another tradition has dealt with the accommodation of ethnic conflicts in what it called consociational or proportional democracies (Lijphart 1977). Scholars in this tradition worked mostly in the advanced industrial countries of Europe (such as Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria), characterized by only a moderate degree of pluralism and a high degree of equality between the constituent linguistic or religious collectivities.
Most closely associated with the label plural society is a group of social scientists who have studied principally the highly fragmented societies of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, societies generally characterized by a history of violent conquest, followed by colonialism, slavery, indenture and other forms of highly institutionalized segmentation and inequality between ethnic or racial groups (Furnivall 1948; Kuper and Smith 1969; Schermerhorn 1970; van den Berghe 1974). Not unexpectedly, these scholars stress conflict and the coercive role of the state in maintaining a system of social inequality and economic exploitation. Although their analysis shares a number of features with that of the Marxists, they tend to emphasize cultural and racial lines of cleavage more than class lines and to ascribe causal priority to political relations over economic relations. That is, they tend to regard unequal relations to the means of production as derivative of unequal power relations, rather than vice versa. They also generally insist on treating class and ethnicity as two distinct bases of social organization, which in practice overlap, but which can also vary independently.
Pierre van den Berghe
University of Washington
References
Frank, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Under development in Latin America, New York.
Furnivall, J.S. (1948) Colonial Policy and Practice, London.
Kornhauser, W. (1960) The Politics of Mass Society, London.
Kuper, L. and Smith, M.G. (eds) (1969) Pluralism in Africa, Berkeley CA.
Lenin, V.I. (1969 [1916]) Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Peking.
Lijphart, A. (1977) Democracy in Plural Societies, New Haven, CT.
Lipset, S.M. (1963) The First New Nation, New York.
Schermerhorn, R.A. (1970) Comparative Ethnic Relations, New York,
van den Berghe, P.L. (1974) ‘Pluralism’, in J.J.Honigmann (ed.) Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Chicago.
Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System, New York.
