Governing Associations and Ideology: Reflections on Discriminatory and Exclusionary Practices in Cote d'Ivoire(<Special Theme>The Problematique of Intermediate Groups)

Abstract

In Cote d'Ivoire, since the 1990s, violent incidents have occurred frequently, targeting the French, immigrants from neighboring African countries and nationals from the northern part of the country. Recognizing the importance of the fact that the government and governing political parties systematically engaged in those discriminatory and exclusionary practices, this article focuses attention on the ideologies of the governing associations to explain the background of that phenomenon. We start from the hypothesis that, for a political association, the governing position has a structural relationship with the perpetrators of the discriminatory and exclusionary practices. In this case, the objects of examination are the Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire (PDCI) under President Henri Konan Bedie, and the actual governing party, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), and its satellite organizations, known collectively as "young patriots." The most important analytical concepts are "governing association" and "ideology." The former is defined here as a political association in the position of governing a country. In a situation in which numbers of political associations compete for mass support, each association is actually but one "part," unless it acquires a total support, in that it represents only some limited portion of the people. The same is true for the most successful one, which can be duly authorized to take over the governing position. However, that position logically requires the association to behave in the name of the "whole." As a result of that, the association has to construct an ideology that defines the "whole" that it represents and, at the same time, legitimatizes its representativeness. Such an ideology is necessarily the one defining "the governing collective subject," in other words, "the legitimate dominant group of the country." In the modern political history of Cote d'Ivoire, three particular forms of governing association ideology followed one after another. Each form defined the governing collective subject of the day, designated as the "African Black" (from the 1950s to mid-1960s), the "Ivorian national" (from the consolidation of Houphouet-Boigny's rule in the mid-1960s to the eve of democratization, fulfilled in 1990), and the "Ivorian-born and bred" (after democratization to the present). Despite its appearance, that transition should not be interpreted as a series of discriminatory thoughts shifting successively from race, via nation, to ethnicity. It is true that, in the era of "the African Black" ideology, the governing association of the day, the PDCI, had been trying to diminish the number of French expatriates working in the Ivorian public sector. That policy has not fully been fulfilled, as demonstrated by the fact that even now, a considerable number of the French still reside in the country. In the era of the "Ivorian national" ideology, the PDCI did curb immigrants from Burkina Faso and other neighboring countries from entering the labor market for formal sector jobs. But, it didn't want them to leave the country, either. Rather, it encouraged them to settle in rural areas in anticipation of their contribution to agricultural production. Those observations suggest that the "call" of the ideologies in those days was directed not only to "the governing collective subject," but also to "the other people in the subaltern position in the country." That suggestion invites us to think that such ideologies functioned to incorporate those two categories into "the national." We want to call this logical structure "meta-nationalism." The ideologies that contain such a type of logical structure seem to be constructed in conformity with the structure of

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