The Politics of Reconstructing National Identity: A Corporatist Approach

In both liberal democracies like Australia and Canada and autocracies like Singapore, the state has stepped in to try to manage ethnic claims that had hitherto been marginalised or suppressed. Once the concept of corporatism is rescued from its recent economic-focused excursion, it provides a framework within which to examine new state strategies for managing ethnicity, and the resultant politics of national identity. The states have sought to license or create ethnic institutions as channels for ethnic interest articulation, for ethnic elite cooptation, and for the funding and political control of ethnic assertions. The corporatist strategies for ethnic management imply also attempts by the states to unify the disaggregated polyethnic societies by seeking new myths of organic national unity. The attempts to manage ethnic politics within these new institutional and ideological parameters generate tensions which exacerbate rather than ameliorate the decline in state authority.