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Patterns of National Intergration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

The concept ‘integration’, which came into general usage in the social sciences by way of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, was eagerly seized upon as an heuristic device for the study of new states because it evoked the fundamental notion of making whole or entire by addition or combination. But the concept wears better as a signal of topical concern than as a building block in a rigorous theoretical edifice. The most obvious problem is that the very richness of suggestion embodied in the word ‘integration’ generates promiscuity.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

Page 449 note 1 Weiner, Myron, ‘Political Integration and Political Development,’ in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Philadelphia), 358, 03 1965, p. 53.Google Scholar He singles out five distinct current usages: (1) the process of bringing together culturally and socially discrete groups into a single territorial unit and the establishment of a national identity in the context of some sort of plural society or the prior existence of distinct independent political units; in this sense, ‘integration’ refers to subjective feelings; (2) the establishment of national central authority over subordinate political units or regions; ‘integration’ here refers to objective control by a central authority; (3) the problem of linking government with the governed, with special stress on the ‘élite-mass gap’; (4) the growth of minimal value consensus assumed to be required for the maintenance of a system; and (5) the capacity of people in a society to organise for some common purpose.

Page 449 note 2 Ibid., p. 54.

Page 450 note 1 Geertz, Clifford, ‘The Integrative Revolution: primordial sentiments and civil politics in the new states’, in Geertz, (ed.), Old Societies and New States (New York, 1963), p. 163.Google Scholar

Page 450 note 2 Ibid. p. 109.

Page 451 note 1 Smith, M. G., The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965)Google Scholar, especially preface and ch. IV.

Page 452 note 1 Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘Ethnicity and National Integration in West Africa’, reprinted in Eckstein, H. and Apter, D. (eds.), Comparative Politics (New York, 1963), p. 666.Google Scholar

Page 452 note 2 Mercier, Paul, ‘Remarques sur la signification du “tribalisme” actuel en Afrique noire’, in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie (Paris), 0712 1961, pp. 6180—my translation.Google Scholar

Page 452 note 3 Gallais, Jean, ‘Signification du groupe ethnique au Mali’, in L'Homme (Paris), II, 2, 0508 1962, pp. 106–29.Google Scholar

Page 453 note 1 Unless otherwise specified, the ethnographic discussion which follows is based on Baumann, H. and Westermann, D., Les Peuples et les civilisations de L'Afrique (Paris, Payot, 1957)Google Scholar, and Murdock, George P., Africa, its peoples and their culture history (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

Page 453 note 2 Both the Ivory coast and Mali are taken as they existed when their territory was defined after the reconstitution of Upper Volta in 1947. For details concerning the Ivory Coast, see Zolberg, Aristide R., One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton, 1964), pp. 1118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 454 note 1 Gallais, op. cit. p. 214. For the contributions of language to the reinforcement of this process, see Houis, Maurice, ‘Mouvements historiques et communautés linguistiques dans l'ouest africain’, in L'Homme, I, 3, 0912 1961, pp. 7292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 455 note 1 See Zolberg, op. cit. pp. 23–48. On educational recruitment, see Clignet, Rémi and Foster, Philip, The Fortunate Few (Evanston, 1966).Google Scholar

Page 456 note 1 See especially Karl W. Deutsch, ‘Social Mobilization and Political Development’, reprinted in Eckstein and Apter, op. cit. pp. 582–603.

Page 456 note 2 The discussion of Bamako is based on data presented by Meillassoux, Claude, ‘The Social Structure of Modern Bamako,’ in Africa (London), 2 04 1965, pp. 125–42.Google Scholar

Page 456 note 3 The great significance of this phenomenon, which is of course not unique to the Ivory Coast, was first stressed for that country by an African observer. See d'Aby, F. Amon, La Côte d'Ivoire dans la cité africaine (Paris, Larose, 1952), p. 36.Google Scholar

Page 457 note 1 Rouch, J., ‘Migrations au Ghana,’ in Journal de la société des africanistes (Paris), XXVI, 1–2, 1956, pp. 163–4.Google Scholar Wallerstein has correctly pointed out the misleading implications of this term, since the group from which the individual is ‘detribalised’ is not necessarily the same as the one into which he is ‘supertribalised’. But the term does have the advantage of pointing to a more specific phenomenon than ‘ethnicity’ and its usefulness should emerge from the discussion of Mali that follows.

Page 457 note 2 Gallais, op. cit.

Page 458 note 1 This statement is intended to be self-critical. Future studies might indicate that the colonial system, based on notions of territoriality, was more congruent with pre-existing modes of governmental organisation in Mali than in the Ivory Coast, and hence constituted less of a stress upon the former system than upon the latter. This may account in part for the sense of political continuity one encounters in Mali, and the greater ability of Malians to give an indigenous flavour to an imported administrative system. In the Ivory Coast, the administration appears much more artificial and contrived, French rather than African, even after recruitment was Africanised.

Page 458 note 2 The main sources for Ivory Coast politics are Morgenthau, Ruth Schachter, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar, Wallerstein, I., The Road to Independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast (The Hague, 1964)Google Scholar, and Zolberg, op. cit. For details of the ethnic coalition, see Aristide Zolberg, R., ‘Mass Parties and National Integration: the case of the Ivory Coast’, in The Journal of Politics (Gainesville), XXV, 1, 02 1963, pp. 3648.Google Scholar

Page 459 note 1 The main sources currently available on Malian politics are Morgenthau, op. cit.; Hodgkin, Thomas and Morgenthau, , ‘Mali’, in Coleman, James S. and Rosberg, Carl Jr. (eds.), Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), pp. 216–58Google Scholar; and Snyder, Frank, One Party Government in Mali (New Haven, 1965).Google Scholar See also Zolberg, Aristide R., ‘Political Revival in Mali,’ in Africa Report (Washington), X, 7, 07 1965, pp. 1520.Google Scholar

Page 460 note 1 A careful examination of this process is presented in Hopkins, Nicholas, ‘Government in Kita: structure and process in a Malian town’, unpublished dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago (1967).Google Scholar I am grateful to Dr Hopkins for his useful analytic suggestions concerning Mali.

Page 461 note 1 See, for example, the incident reported in Zolberg, ‘Mass Parties and National Integration’.

Page 461 note 2 See Zolberg, Aristide R., ‘The Political Use of Economic Planning in Mali’, in Johnson, Harry (ed.), Economic Nationalism in Old and New States (Chicago, 1967).Google Scholar

Page 462 note 1 The significance of the ideological level is stressed by Geertz, Clifford, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in Apter, David E. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964), pp. 4776Google Scholar; and by Binder, Leonard, ‘National Integration and Political Development’, in The American Political Science Review (Washington, D.C.), LVIII, 3, 09 1964, pp. 614–31.Google Scholar

Page 462 note 2 See, for example, Zolberg, Aristide R., Creating Political Order: the party states of West Africa (Chicago, 1966)Google Scholar, ch. II, and the literature cited therein.

Page 465 note 1 In mid-1967, the Political Bureau of the Union soudanaise was disbanded and the National Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, created in 1966 and headed by President Keita, asserted its authority over both party and Government. Similar changes appear to have been implemented at the local level. A tentative interpretation of these events is that they constitute a response to ‘leftist’ pressures, themselves stimulated by a ‘rightist’ reorientation of economic policy at the beginning of the year. More fundamentally, however, this constitutes another step in the direction of undifferentiated authority structures inherited from the colonial period.

Page 465 note 2 Mercier, op. cit.

Page 466 note 1 Wallerstein, in Eckstein and Apter, op. cit. p. 668.

Page 466 note 2 Young, Crawford, Politics in the Congo (Princeton, 1965), p. 272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 466 note 3 Geertz, , ‘The Integrative Revolution’, p. 154.Google Scholar See also Bouzon, Suzanne, ‘Modernisation et conflits tribaux en Afrique noir’, in Revue française de science politique (Paris), XVII, 5, 10 1967, pp. 862–88.Google Scholar

Page 467 note 1 I have discussed these issues in greater detail in ‘A View from the Congo’, in World Politics (Princeton), 10 1966Google Scholar; and in ‘The Structure of Political Conflict in Tropical Africa’, in The American Political Science Review, forthcoming, 1968.Google Scholar

Page 467 note 2 Geertz, , ‘The Integrative Revolution’, p. 167.Google Scholar