Enforced Hierarchy

Enforced hierarchy is another term for ethnic dominance. When one ethnic group dominates the political office, the other group, whether majority or minority in terms of population, takes over the private sector. There has been uneasy balance and diminished harmonious interethnic relations in the past in places such as Trinidad and Tobago and Malaysia. While ethnic Malays dominated government bureaucracy, the minority Chinese had an upper hand in the business sector.

In developing countries, relative ethnic harmony resulting from uneasy balance in the social hierarchy created ethnic discrimination and tension. The dissipating levels of interethnic conflicts seen in nations such as Panama, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic between blacks who never climbed up the ladder of success in the political and economic order and the domineering other races who keep them at bay to uphold social cleavages, has been the harbinger for resentments, fractured community assimilations, and horrific atrocities.

The enveloping justification of authoritarian rule crippled many nations' political, military, and economic growth, according to modernization theorists. Authoritarianism gained momentum in much of Sub-Saharan Africa after raising their flags of independence in the late fifties and early sixties. Guided by personalistic dictators, the dominant one-party system became the norm in almost every Middle Eastern nation with Iraq's Saddam and Syria's Asad playing the unfettered political cards to their advantages.

In Latin America and Asia, socially detested brutal dictatorial leadership styles led to the creation of pro-democracy demonstrations that eventually conceived semidemocracies or pseudo-democracies. However, demonstrations in support of democracy failed in Communist China. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in mainland China, especially in Beijing, ended up in a massacre that was orchestrated by the military using tanks and assault rifles.

Leaders like Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Peruvian Alberto Fujimori, General Suharto of Indonesia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, and Carlos Menem of Argentina suffered the brunt of their poor leadership styles in one way or the other, while Charles Taylor of Liberia was tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands. Slobodan Milosevic, the man who rose to prominence after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, died mysteriously while awaiting trial.

Monarchical rules erupted in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, while Sudan and Egypt got engrossed in powerful single-party or dominant-party systems that flourished for a long time. Perhaps, oil rich Arab monarchical hierarchies will remain in existence for sometime as long as some European countries cling to their old kingdom traditions. Even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union, the enforced hierarchy factor still remains a dominant force in many parts of the world.