Consociational State

Basic Information

A Consociational State is a state which has major splits along ethnic, religious, cultural, or linguistic lines in a way that keeps one group from dominating the others, but which has still a functioning government because the rulers consult with the leaders of each of the distinct groups.

Examples include Belgium, Switzerland, Lebanon, and the Netherlands.

Sources

Bibliography

1. Wikipedia entry

Game and Story Use

• A diverse nation like this will make for more complicated and interesting politics - which, in turn, will result in more adventure seeds.
  • The failure of such a state - as seen in the former Yugoslavia - can also be an interesting backdrop to all sorts of things, although outright warfare needn't be the absolute outcome if a peaceful breakup can be managed: the balkanisation, ethnic strife and general assorted conflict can also become significant issues long before final collapse.
  • Possible failure states include: one faction or bloc manages to dominate all the others, division between factions becomes irreconcilable, friction between factions leaves the alliance unable to handle a crisis. The factions somehow blending into one is not a failure state as such, but the state will no longer be consociational.
• It gets even more interesting if the player characters originated from different factions within the nation.
• In fantasy and science fiction settings, the nation might even be divided among different species.
• Artificial consociational states - such as hasty alliances against a common problem, or those produced when occupiers carve up territory with no care for those living in it - may be constantly on the brink of failure.
• Alternatively, this sort of state may become aggressive as its leaders attempt to drive the construction of an alternative, national identity against an external foreign enemy - see, for example, the foreign policy of post unification Italy … or, for that matter, the treatment of Earth in a lot of Sci-fi as "EarthGov" attempts to persuade humanity to abandon their old national identities and unite in the face of alien species…