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TAMIL
NATION LIBRARY: Nations & Nationalism
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[see also
Tamil Eelam: Right to Self Determination]
Book Review
This is an important book and will be essential reading for many in the
Tamil diaspora. It contains a collection of articles on the central issues
relating to national self determination and secession. Do nations have a
right to collective self-determination? If they do, what is it about
nations that entitles them to this right? If not, are there any conditions
in which a group can justifiably secede from a state?
The book is edited by Margaret Moore, Associate Professor of Political
Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada and includes articles by
Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los
Angeles; Donald L.Horowitz, Professor of Law and Political
Science, Duke University; David Miller, Official Fellow in Social and
Political Theory, Nuffield College, Oxford.
In her introduction, Margaret Moore rightly points out, that the issues
discussed in the book are of pressing importance. She adds:
"... Between 1947 and 1991, only one instance of secession occurred
(Bangladesh). In that period, the superpowers were committed to
upholding existing state boundaries, and they encouraged the development
of international law and practice in which borders were viewed as
permanent - not negotiable - features of the international state system.
Since 1991, however, numerous multinational states have disintegrated
along national lines - the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,
Ethiopia - and
the process may not have exhausted itself yet, as many of the successor
states are as multinational as the states they left behind. Nor is
this limited to former communist countries. There are numerous
secessionist struggles across the globe: in the First World (e.g.
Quebec, Northern Ireland, Flanders, Catalonia, the Spanish Basque
country, Israel/Palestine); and in the Third World (e.g. Sudan,
Sri Lanka, Kashmir
and Punjab, and the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey)..."
In an acutely perceptive review of the book, Josep R. Llobera, University
College, London remarks in
Nations and Nationalism, Volume 6 Part 2, April 2000:
"While self-determination is a vague expression in which it is not
clear who is the 'self' and what 'determination' entails, the meaning of
the word secession is plain enough and, of course, it involves the
removal of part of the population and part of the territory of an
existing state. Not surprisingly, states are reluctant, for a variety of
economic, political and prestige reasons, to allow secessionist
movements to triumph. At the international level, the United Nations,
which consists of states and not nations, has consistently opposed
secession, at least until very recently. The only type of separation
that the UN could accept, and even encourage, was decolonisation, though
as the disintegration of the USSR attests, even that process was rather
selective.
The collapse of the Soviet order in Central and Eastern Europe
between 1989 and 1991 has made the 1990s into the decade of secession.
The effects of what happened in that part of Eurasia have reverberated
all over the world, particularly in the ex-colonial world (riddled with
multinational and multiethnic contraptions wishfully called
'nation-states'), but also in the West. Whether this will lead to a
major movement in the direction of the total or partial dismantling of
the existing Third World states remains to be seen. By and large, the UN
have not changed their attitude towards the undesirability of secession,
though in practice this has been tempered with a certain amount of
realism...
The book edited by Margaret Moore contains eleven chapters written by
well-known political scientists and philosophers, and it is presented as
a serious effort in the direction of analysing the conditions that make
secession ethically acceptable The book concentrates on two main areas
what does the principle of self-determination mean for nationalists'?
And can secession be morally justified?..."
He concludes:
"Most of the arguments in the book are conducted in an
idealised political world ruled by liberal and democratic principles
History shows, however, that secessionist movements tend to come, on the
whole, in waves which are provoked by specific political conjunctures
(wars, revolutions, collapse of empires, etc ). The
predatory and expansive nature of the state has no other limits than
the presence of a stronger state or a coalition of states. On the other
hand, we have learned from Leo Kuper Pierre van dell Berghe and
Walker O Connor among others that genocidal states are
historically the rule rather than the exception and that things are not
much different today. For
those
at the receiving end of extermination policies, it mattered little
whether the state was liberal-democratic or despotic, though admittedly
the latter was arguably more ruthless and arbitrary.
It would seem to me that in the light of historical evidence the
international order has consistently opposed any form of secession. Some
years ago normative theories of nationalism (and particularly the issues
of secession) were rare. At present this is no longer the case. But
sometimes I have the impression that the discussions are taking place in
a rarefied, lofty environment, far away from the
world of
realpolitik. Many of the authors in the book are either against the
principle of separation or impose so many conditions on its
implementation as to make it unpractical. This position is, of course,
perfectly defensible, though in the meantime Rome keeps burning."
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