Political institutions and social cohesion

 

The Government is on a quest to increase social cohesion here. A week ago, the Minister tasked with achieving this happy circumstance sent out invitations to a number of individuals she selected to form a “Social Cohesion Peer Group (SCPG), an informal network of professionals who will be involved in advising the Ministry of Social Cohesion in its formulation of a 5-year Strategic Plan.”

It is hoped the minister will be more forthcoming with the workings and formulations of the SCPG than she was with the results of the claimed massively attended “Social Cohesion Conclave Roundtable Discussion” at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre last September. That also was supposed to produce a “Five-year Strategic Plan for Social Cohesion”. Did it die stillborn?

This newspaper believes Guyana remains a “divided society” fifty years after independence. And that this (ethnic) division is one of the primary reasons for its comparative lack of progress among the cohort of nations which also became independent in that era. It hopes to stimulate wider discussion on “social cohesion”.

While the original notion of “social cohesion” was mooted by the European Union to deal with “minorities” occasioned by new immigrants into countries that had been formed in some “hoary past”, of recent their analysis and proposals have also been adjusted and applied to divided plural societies as Guyana. One formulation from the latter school describes social cohesion as “the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper.”

The authors conclude, “Social cohesion is said to be high when nearly all members of a society voluntarily “play by the rules of the game,” and when tolerance for differences is demonstrated in the day-to-day interactions across social groups within that society.” From this expansive perspective, it is clear that social cohesion has to be inculcated through institutions embedded in several dimensions that include political, social, cultural and economic ones where the “rules of the game” would be explicit.

In Guyana, the political institutions would appear to be quite high on the agenda for inducing social cohesion since at the most visible level it is in the political realm, especially during elections, that the division’s along ethnic lines are most visible. The most important political institutions in Guyana are political parties and the institutions of the state, namely the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.

From the beginning of modern political mobilisation in 1950, when the first political party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was launched, it sought to increase social cohesion through bringing representatives of the various ethnic groups into its leadership ranks. However, that soon changed when the party was split and even though each new party – as well as the original PPP – attempted to replicate that original unity, it has proved impossible up to the present. The Guyanese electorate insisted in voting along ethnic lines for parties that became de facto ethnic parties.

Because of that facticity, some theorists proposed that social cohesion could possibly be furthered by ensuring as wide an agglomeration of representatives of the various groups be created in the composition of the Executive and the Legislature. In our Parliamentary system, the Executive emanates out of the latter at General Elections. Electoral innovations, divisions of the electorate, grand coalitions, decentralisation and federalism have all been proffered to effect social cohesion from this angle.

Because of the coterminous nature of the Executive and the Legislature in Guyana, it is also felt that the adversarial rules of the latter, especially during the public debates on legislation before the house or the budget, is divisive. It has been suggested this might lead to lack of social cohesion since the electorate may be influenced by the fractiousness in that forum.

Some have proposed that the extant parliamentary committee system, which operates along more collegial lines, might be strengthened and its work publicised to also counter centrifugal tendencies.