EDITORIAL Poverty, Difference, and Conflict

Religious fundamentalism, violence, and persecution of outgroups have been seen before. Their simultaneous breakout in many regions, however, provides a rare chance--albeit a distressing one--to search for common pathways. Both fundamentalism and hate may become more likely when people's expected standard of living is slipping away, beyond control. Extremism may spring from a need to ward off hopelessness when reality offers little.

Some propositions suggest themselves. To list a few:

• Sometimes religious fundamentalism and violence appear together; more often they are manifested in different subgroups of disenfran- chised or alienated sectors of a population.

• Religiosity and violence are linked to poverty: "Fundamentalism seems to thrive alongside the spread of poverty and unemployment" (The Maghreb, 1989, p. 52).

• Rapid population growth causes poverty, but centralized control of an economy will do it, too.

• A society can live with diversity while it is affluent, but poverty drives a wedge into every fault line.

• An impoverished society can fracture even without religious differences because other divisions become salient.

Historical and contemporary examples abound. The reader can add to the following selection or offer contrary cases.

In medieval Spain, the tripling of population and spreading poverty before 1492 gave rise to heightened religious fervor. Spanish Catholicism culminated, on the one hand, in individual mysticism and the monasticism of religious orders; on the other, it promoted the Inquisition and expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spanish soil.

In Algeria today, 7.5 million of 25 million inhabitants are unem- ployed, the disparity between rich and poor is rapidly increasing, and reli-

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gious fundamentalism now threatens to negate women's hard-won civil rights (Lemsine, 1992). Democracy is itself at stake: The 1991 election results were nullified because the government in power would not accept the strong electoral gains made by the party of the religious right. The widening circle of poverty which underlies these developments can be traced to population growth: Euphoria associated with independence from France in 1962 triggered very high fertility. Today, thirty years later, 70% of Algerians are under thirty years of age and the population growth rate in 1991 was 2.7% per year.

The gyrating fortunes of the Irish Roman Catholic church in the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries had similar roots in economic cycles and population growth. True, the English banned Catholicism after the Irish defeat at the Battle of Boyne, but the people kept faith for some genera- tions more. The Irish abandoned their priests and bishops only after intro- duction of the potato in 1745, which brought a windfall of unknown pro- portions to the subsistence farm economy. A forty-year period of exuberant expansion encouraged secularism and the lifting of socioreligious controls which had permitted only one son per family to marry. As more married, the fertility rate soared; farms were divided and subdivided to provide each young couple with a stake; and all at once farms became too small to comfortably support a family.

Within one decade of economic retrenchment, the fortunes of the Ro- man Catholic church rose: Seminaries were founded, priests found them- selves supported and honored by swelling congregations, social controls on premarital sex and marriage revived, and young people flocked to take the vows of celibacy and religious vocation. Intense religiosity survived even among Irish immigrants to the United States among whom, as late as World War II, it was every mother's wish that one son would be a priest. In Ireland today, unemployment runs at 25%. Religious warfare in Northern Ireland springs from renewed poverty barely ennobled by ancient wrongs.

In Somalia, population growth, desertification, and poverty have trig- gered civil war. In one hundred and fifty years, territory which was sparsely populated, dense jungle changed to treeless and nearly grassless wasteland; it cannot support its new millions. Who can doubt why re- source grabs happen? Most Somalis are Muslim, however, so divisions are drawn along clan-membership lines rather than religious belief.

Poverty has causes other than rapid population growth. In the former Eastern Bloc countries of Europe, political upheaval and collapsed econ- omies are feeding back on themselves and casting protagonists into rapidly hardening positions. Violence--predicated sometimes on religious, some- times on ethnic differences--threatens to engulf vast regions. The foot-

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soldiers in these acts of hate seem inspired not so much by ideology as by unemployment and despair.

Perhaps it is human nature to feel better when troubles can be blamed on an enemy. But when the real enemies are overpopulation and poverty, winners are few and far between.

Virginia Abernethy

REFERENCES

Abernethy, V. (1993). Population Politics: The Choices that Shape Our Future, N.Y: Plenum Press/Insight Books.

Lemsine, A. (March, 1992). God guard Islam from the Islamists. The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, pp. 14,16.

The Maghreb: How to ride Islam's tiger. (July 8, 1989). The Economist, p. 52.