Age of (new) tribes?

The year was 1988, when the ancient word “tribe” made its comeback in the political arena. Michel Maffesoli, a French sociologist, interpreted the new phenomena of social groupings using ancestral metaphors. However, that approach had nothing to do with anthropology and was very much in tune with the sociologic outlook of contemporary collective life. In other words, we discovered that tribes are more a post-modern pattern of social behaviour than a reminiscence of the Iron Age. I think it is extremely useful to keep that in mind when we turn to the analysis of international relations, in the light of the turmoil in the Arab world. A sort of “primordialist” prejudice led us to understand the tribal structure of some societies as a sign of historical backwardness. Wrong assumption. Tribes can live side by side with information technology and high education standards. It is rather a matter of how people connect to each other. To this regard, it would be useful to make a clear distinction between the concepts of tribe and clan: the latter being a more concrete unit, which applies to different social contexts, from the top management of multi-national corporations to the structure of power in those societies designated by John Rawls as “decent hierarchical people” (for instance, the case of some “benign autocracies” in the Gulf). Beyond the ethno-anthropological viewpoint, the “tribal paradigm” is regaining a strategic role in the globalised world; as Michael Walzer put it as early as 1992 “all over the world today men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities.” This was the political-cultural version of the “new tribalism” in modern times. There is however a different way of looking at tribalism, which consists of considering it as an aspect of trans-national relations. This means, on the one side, that physical borders are less relevant in the eyes of “tribal” people, and, on the other side, that they can draw invisible lines inside a country or a society. Those invisible lines, politically irrelevant for most of the time, suddenly begin to bear a great relevance in crisis scenarios. Take the case of Libya, for instance. For many years under the Kaddafi regime it was almost forgotten the fact that the country includes multiple versions of “tribal” affiliation. Just to mention the most common of the relevant ones, think of the Senoussi sect in the region of Benghazi (who profess a specific variant of Islam) and of the ancient “trans-national” Berber people, present with different density in a vast region between Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Mali, Niger. Berbers usually call themselves “Imazighen”, the free people. Ironically, freedom was at the source of the Modern State. In the three principles of the French Revolution, liberty (of individuals) comes first, then goes equality (as a quality of “fair” societies) and - last but not least – fraternity (which is rather a communitarian concept). The strange joint declination of freedom, equalitarianism and strong communities ties poses a challenge to the Weberian hypothesis of the disenchantment of the world. Moreover, we should reconsider the core issues of two decades of fierce and fruitless debate between individualist-cosmopolitans and culturalist-communitarians. Perhaps this new age of tribes implies also a fresh understanding on how liberty, equality and fraternity could combine in a fragmented and yet integrated world.