Class 10 Civics Notes - Democracy and Diversity

A Story from Mexico Olympics

• Racial discrimination in the United States
• Civil Rights Movement
• Olympics in Mexico 1968- Protest by US Athletes, winner of gold and bronze medals, to draw international attention to racial discrimination in the United States
• An Australian silver medalist Peter Norman to support the two Americans
• Action by International Olympic Association. 

Differences, Similarities, Divisions

• Origins of social differences
• Causes
  (a) Birth
  (b) Choice - atheists or following any religion, study, occupation
  (c) Different social groups - differences and similarities within it
• Overlapping and cross-cutting differences
  (a) Northern Ireland - Catholic to be poor
  (b) Netherlands - Catholic and Protestants equally to be poor and rich
  (c) Overlapping and social divisions but crosscutting and accommodation. 

Politics of Social Divisions

• Political parties’ competition can make social divisions into political divisions and lead to conflicts, violence, even disintegration.
• Range of outcomes
  (a) Northern Ireland - years of violent and bitter-ethnopolitical conflict
  (b) 1998 and peace
  (c) Yugoslavia and disintegration
• To avoid a mixture of social divisions and politics
• But not so in every case
• Social divisions reflect in politics - promises, effect on voting, preference for one party or other and no disintegration. 

Three Determinants

Three factors:

• How people perceive their identities, examples of Ireland and Belgium
• How political leaders raise their demand of any community: Examples of Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia
• Government’s reaction to demands: Example of Belgium accommodation and unity

In democracy expression of social divisions - normal and healthy.