irrelevant.5 As argued in the previous chapter, despite a weak and dissolute party system, majoritarian institutions of government, and an extremely high degree of ethnic fragmentation, on many indicators of democratic consolidation PNG is one of the best- established democracies in the developing world. In this sense, PNG boasts a successful democratic record which represents a significant deviant case for students of democracy and comparative politics. How do we explain this apparent conundrum?
This chapter suggests that the reason for PNG’s democratic success lies in a combination of favourable structural, social and historical factors. Foremost among these is the sheer diversity of PNG’s ethnic structure, which virtually guarantees that no one group will ever be able to single-handedly gain control of political power. Social organisational factors — particularly the competitive and often egalitarian nature of traditional society exemplified by the ‘big-man’ model of leadership — are also adjudged to be an advantage. In addition, the Australian colonial administration was, it is argued, relatively successful in inculcating a respect for constitutionalism and willingness to play by the ‘rules of the game’ amongst PNG’s indigenous elite. By contrast, a serious weakness for democratic consolidation is posed by the increasing weakness of the PNG party system, and particularly the failure of PNG parties to penetrate to any meaningful level into PNG society, or to develop the necessary coherence to act as disciplined parliamentary machines. The combination of PNG’s weak party system with its robust history of competitive democracy also represents a challenge to the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between a well- developed party system and democratic sustainability.
Democracy and ethnic conflict in PNG
Ethnically-divided states can be structured in very different ways, and the PNG case represents a situation in which a large number of ethnic groups are included within the state “with no single group dominant” (May 1996a, 10). Ethnic groups in PNG are “both small and multiple” (Regan 1995, 9). With no common history of statehood, “its people are fragmented into hundreds of often mutually antipathetic ethnic groupings” (Hegarty 1979, 188). At the latest count there were approximately 840 distinct languages spoken in PNG, around a quarter of the world’s stock, reflecting enormous
cultural divisions: “in a very real sense the country is a nation of minorities” (Minority Rights Group 1997, 682). Deklin writes that “PNG is a land of many cultures and, if we take the number of languages in the country as a rough criterion, there are some 1,000 cultures” (1992, 35).
Defining what constitutes an ‘ethnic group’ in PNG is no easy task. According to Lijphart, an ethnic group can be defined as a group of people who see themselves as a distinct cultural community, often sharing a “common language, religion, kinship, and/or physical characteristics (such as skin colour); and who tend to harbour negative and hostile feelings towards members of other groups” (Lijphart 1995b, 853). This is quite a broad definition of ethnicity, including as it does reference to factors such as race and religion. Esman has contrasted this to a ‘narrower definition’ of ethnic identity which denotes a community that claims common origins, possesses distinctive and valued cultural markers such as customs, dress and, especially, language, and that expects to share a common destiny (Esman 1994, 15). This narrower definition may be more applicable to PNG, where groups are divided less on overt ascriptive criteria such as race or religion than on kinship, custom, language and region. Levine writes that
if ethnic communities are understood to be groups possessing a distinctive language, custom and memories — traits that give its members a sense o f unity and cause them to distinguish themselves (and be distinguished by) others — then PNG may have more than one thousand such ethnic groups within its borders (1997,479).
Part of the difficulty of defining what constitutes an ethnic group in PNG is the sheer variation of its ethnic structure, which limits the ability to make generalisations. For example, in lowlands areas the population of ethno-linguistic units normally ranges from a few hundred to four or five thousand, whereas in the highlands these groups may number up to 60,000 members (de Lepervanche 1973, 1065). In the highlands regions the largest autonomous groups have tended to be defined in the scholarly literature as ‘tribes’, ‘phratries’, or ‘clans’; in coastal areas the literature more often refers to ‘villages’, ‘territories’, ‘neighbourhoods’ or similar terms (Langness 1973, 924). For the purposes of this thesis, an ‘ethnic group’ constitutes any of these larger or smaller cultural-linguistic groupings which tend to act collectively fo r political purposes, such as voting in elections. My concern here is not to overly generalise about PNG’s extremely complex social structure, but rather to provide a common unit of analysis across all the cases cited in this thesis. This definition of ‘ethnic group’ draws on my
earlier definition of a divided society: that is, a society in which ethnicity is a politically salient cleavage and in which ethnic groups act collectively for political purposes.
Ethnic structure in PNG
PNG exhibits one of the most ethnically fragmented social structures known in the world today. At the root of this social structure are unilateral descent groups usually described as ‘clans’ — ascriptive extended family networks which are the primary, and sometimes the only, unit of political and social loyalty in many areas.6 Considering the lack of overt racial distinction between them, the depth of cleavages between groups is often striking, and can be partly explained by two related factors: geography and language. PNG has some of the world’s most dramatic terrain, with a vast range of mountains and valleys running though the middle of the mainland and an extensive arc of populated volcanic islands off the coast — all of which create severe difficulties in terms of isolation, access and transport. Accordingly, “most groups developed their own physical and cultural identity in isolation ... communities living on different sides of the same highland valley sometimes speak languages as distinct from one another as Spanish is from Italian” (Souter 1963, 49). While few groups were entirely isolated, and many had ‘ally’ groups with which they conducted trade and marriage, relations between many were characterised as much by hostility as by co-operation. Traditional contact in the highlands, for example, often took the form of intermittent tribal warfare between clan groups.7 Moreover, within the main language groups themselves, there
are also often deep and bitter internal divisions.8
There has been little detailed assessment of the total number of ethnic groups in PNG, but estimates from informed observers are in the region of 5000-7000 separate groups.9 This means that PNG is probably the world’s most heterogeneous society in terms of the number of distinct polities (which continue to be based, overwhelmingly, on ascriptive ethnic identities), with estimates of the number of separate ‘political units’ ranging from 2000 to 18000.10 If a larger unit of base measurement is used, such as ‘tribes’ (i.e.
6 See Hogbin 1973, 23.