Partitions: Reshaping States and Minds (Routledge Studies in Geopolitics)

Partitions The partition of the Indian subcontinent, the collapse of the Soviet Union and erstwhile Yugoslavia, the reunification of Germany, the continuing feud between the two Koreas, the Irish peace process, the case of Israel/Palestine and the lingering division of Cyprus have together fuelled new thinking on the strategy and acts of partitioning countries, states, nations and continuities. They have also given rise to a huge body of literature. However, studies of partitions have usually focused on individual cases. This innovative volume uses comparative analysis to fill the gap in partition studies and examines crosscutting issues such as: • Violence • State formation and state building • Regional politics • Union and regional unification • Peace policies • Transitional strategies • Geopolitics • Historical experiences of decolonization and transition Forms of violence and violent transition are worthy of analysis in their own right; the impact of various forms of violence on current politics, such as ethnological and territorial conflicts or religious pogroms, is not confined to a locality that witnesses the partition of polity – its impact is global. And as there is a strong link between partition, local violence and globalization, there is a real need for cutting-edge comparative framework that goes beyond area-centric readings but is gender sensitive, and sums up the experiences and implications of partition. This book will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, philosophers, policy-makers, international relations experts and peace building institutions and practitioners, and political scientists. Stefano Bianchini is Director of the Institute for Eastern and Central Europe at the University of Bologna, Italy. He has a Master’s Degree in Democracy and Human Rights from the Universities of Sarajevo and Bologna, and is the Director of the Institute for Studies on East Central and Balkan Europe at the University of Bologna. Sanjay Chaturvedi, a Leverhulme Fellow of the University of Cambridge, is Reader and Chairman in Political Science at the Punjab University, India. He is the author of Polar Regions: a Political Geography; and co-editor of Rethinking Boundaries: Geopolitics, Identities and Sustainability. Rada Iveković is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Saint Etienne, France. Her former affiliations include University of Paris 8 (Vincennes à Saint-Denis), and the University of Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Ranabir Samaddar, described by a reviewer as ‘India’s Boswell’, is Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu. He

was the founding editor of Refugee Watch, and has written the three-volume set A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–1997, and Paradoxes on Nationalist Time.

Frank Cass Studies in Geopolitics Series editors: David Newman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev and John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

Changes in the world political map, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and forces of globalization, have led to the renewed interest in the studies of the dynamic processes that are causing the reconfiguration of territories and states. For some, the world of nation-states has come to an end, and the globe is experiencing deterritorialization as we move into a ‘borderless’ world. For others, the territorial component of state structure remains an important part of global politics, as new states are formed and new boundaries are erected. National identities are re-emerging at local and regional levels, while the traditional state-system, based on the Westphalian model, is undergoing dramatic changes. Frank Cass Studies in Geopolitics seeks to examine these changing patterns of world politics. Scholars from related disciplines, such as International Relations, Political Geography and International Law, will present diverse perspectives on both the contemporary and historical dynamics of the world political map. Attention will also be given to the practitioners of geopolitics, past and present, scholars and diplomats, and their respective influences on global political change. Titles in the series include: Landlocked States of Africa and Asia Edited by Dick Hodder, Sarah J. Lloyd and Keith McLachlan, School of Oriental and African Studies, London Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity David Newman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev A special issue of the journal Geopolitics Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth Century The Changing World Political Map Edited by Nurit Kliot, Haifa University and David Newman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev From Geopolitics to Global Politics A French Connection Edited by Jacques Lévy, Reims University A special issue of the journal Geopolitics

The Changing Geopolitics of Eastern Europe Edited by Andrew H. Dawson and Rick Fawn, University of St Andrews A special issue of the journal Geopolitics Constructing Post-Soviet Geopolitics in Estonia Pami Aalto, University of Tampere, Finland The Marshall Plan Today Edited by John Agnew and J. Nicholas Entrikin, UCLA Geopolitics of Resource Wars Philippe Le Billon, University of British Columbia A special issue of the journal Geopolitics September 11th and its Aftermath The Geopolitics of Terror Stanley D. Brunn, University of Kentucky Partitions Reshaping States and Minds Stefano Bianchini, University of Bologna, Italy; Sanjay Chaturvedi, Punjab University, India; Rada Iveković, University of Saint Etienne, France; Ranabir Samaddar, South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu.

Partitions Reshaping states and minds

Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Rada Iveković and Ranabir Samaddar

First published 2005 by Frank Cass 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Frank Cass 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Frank Cass is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Rada Iveković and Ranabir Samaddar All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-33453-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-34802-1 (Print Edition)

Contents

1 2 3 4

Notes on authors

ix

Foreword STEFANO BIANCHINI, SANJAY CHATURVEDI, RADA IVEKOVIĆ, RANABIR SAMADDAR

x

Introduction: the infamous event RANABIR SAMADDAR Partition as a form of transition RADA IVEKOVIĆ Partitions: categories and destinies STEFANO BIANCHINI The undefined acts of partition and dialogue RANABIR SAMADDAR The excess of geopolitics: partition of ‘British India’ SANJAY CHATURVEDI Conclusion STEFANO BIANCHINI

1

Index

11 40 78 106 138

146

Notes on authors Stefano Bianchini is a Professor of East European History and Institutions at the University of Bologna, Italy, and the Director of the Centre for Studies on East Central and Balkan Europe there; he is also the central coordinator of the Europe and the Balkans International network, and author among others of La Question Yougoslave (Paris: Castermann, 1996) and Sarajevo, Le Radici dell’odio. Identità e Destino dei Popoli Balcanici (Rome: Edizioni Associate, 1996). He is also the co-editor of three well-known volumes in English: From the Adriatic to the Caucasus – The Dynamics of (De)stabilization (Ravenna: Longo, 2001), State Building in the Balkans (Ravenna: Longo, 1998) and The Yugoslav War, Europe and the Balkans – How to Achieve Security (Ravenna: Longo, 1995). Sanjay Chaturvedi, Reader in the Department of Political Science, Punjab University, Chandigarh and the Co-ordinator of the Centre for the Study of Geopolitics there, is a specialist in political geography and author of The Polar Regions: A Political Geography (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and co-editor of the volume, Rethinking Boundaries: Geopolitics, Identities and Sustainability (Delhi: Manohar, forthcoming). He is also on the editorial board of the journal Geopolitics, published by Frank Cass, London, and has contributed to various reputed journals including Third World Quarterly, Ocean Yearbook and the Journal of Economic and Social Geography. Rada Iveković is a philosopher. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Paris 8, and author of Orients: Critique de la Raison Postmoderne (Paris: Editions Noël Blandin, 1992) and Autopsia dei Balcani. Saggio di Psico-politica (Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 1999), also published in German as Autopsie des Balkans. Ein Psycho-Politischer Essay (Graz: Droschl, 2001). Ranabir Samaddar, Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu, and earlier a Professor of South Asian Studies at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta, is the author of a three-volume study of post-colonial nationalism in South Asia, Whose Asia is it Anyway: Nation and the Region in South Asia (Calcutta: Pearl Publishers, 1996), The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999) and the three-volume A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–97 (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001). He is also the editor of the well-known volume Reflections on Partition in the East (Delhi: Vikas, 1997).

Foreword The present book is the outcome of a joint research project, Partitions Compared and Lessons Learnt: Issues in the Politics of Dialogue and Peace, which was carried out in Paris, within the framework of the International Program for Advanced Studies at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) and the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall. The project was conceived in a planning meeting in Paris in October 2001 through deliberations among the noted historian Eric Hobsbawm, Maurice Aymard and Jean Luc Racine (both from MSH), Rada Iveković (University of Paris 8) and Ranabir Samaddar (Peace Studies Programme, South Asia Forum for Human Rights). Rada Iveković was the coordinator of the core team, which consisted of four researchers, authors of the present book. The members of the core team, who worked together for over three months from October 2001 to January 2002 on the themes of the study, drew up principles of comparing cases and experiences of partitions and dialogues, organized meetings and seminars, and prepared draft essays and finally a plan for a publication. While in Paris, the core team had regular meetings with other scholars, benefiting from the active contribution, among others, of Sia Anagnostoupoulou (University of Cyprus), Natasha Avtonomova (Academy of Sciences, Moscow), Etienne Balibar (University of Nanterre), Paula Banerjee (University of Calcutta), Urvashi Butalia (feminist historian and publisher, Kali for Women and Zubaan), Marie-Claire CalozTschopp (University of Geneva), Fabio Ciaramelli (University of Naples), Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes (Director, Transeuropéennes), Daho Djerbal (Algiers University and the journal Naqd), Goran Fejic (diplomat, former UN official and economist), Maurice Goldring (University of Paris 8), David Goodman (University of Sydney), Ali Guenoun (University of Paris 1), Dick Howard (State University of New York), Ivan Iveković (American University in Cairo), Christophe Jaffrelot (CERI), Danielle Haase Du-Bosc (Columbia University Institute at Reid Hall, Paris), Radha Kumar, (Council on Foreign Relations), Giacomo Marramao (University of Rome 3), Rama Melkote (Osmania University), Ritu Menon (feminist historian and publisher, Kali for Women), Julie Mostov (Drexel University, Philadelphia), Jacques Poulain (University of Paris 8), Francesco Privitera (Alma Mater, University of Bologna), Jean-Luc Racine (MSH), Paolo Rumiz (journalist, Trieste), Jacques Rupnik (CERI), Elias Sanbar (Chief Editor, Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes), Martine Spensky (University of Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand), Eleni Varikas (University of Paris 8), Sana Villavicencio (University of Buenos Aires), Chantal Mouffe (London University), Ernesto Laclau (University of Essex) and Oren Yiftachel (Ben Gurion University). Furthermore, and besides the sponsorship and the assistance provided by MSH and the Columbia University Institute for Scholars, a crucial collaboration for the achievement of the results included in the present volume came from (1) the University of Paris 8, where a three-year research and teaching project ‘Les partitions comparées – Une approche

d’anthropologie de la communication’ initiated by the Department of Philosophy was taking shape; (2) the association and the journal Transeuropéennes, which published a special issue on the topic (19/20, 2001) and triggered discussion on the theme; that special issue of the journal was subsequently reprinted in India by Oxford University Press in 2003 as a book edited by Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes and Rada Iveković, Divided Countries, Separated Cities. The Modern Legacy of Partition; and (3) the School of Political Science, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Forli Campus, and their Institute for East Central and Balkan Europe. Methodologically, the aim of involving so large a group of both individual scholars and institutions stemmed from the deep belief of the core team that only a wide scientific dialogue and intensive interactions would represent a potentially effective pathway able to offer a broad set of insights, appropriate for producing a collective and common research programme on partitions. In fact, thanks to this approach, it was possible to include into the researches of the core team the following issues: (1) a genealogical study of a political technology by which the modern state along with the patriarchal self appears in international politics in many parts of the world; (2) a study of the problems of transition; (3) a study of the durability of the technique and the form of partition, its reproductive capacity and its character of hosting co-existent time; (4) a study of a very conspicuously modern form of political violence and civil war; (5) a study of the relation of space, territory and power, or a site of many political meanings; and finally (6) a study of the interrelation between two political technologies, namely, partition and dialogue. As a result of this networking activity, the core team maintained the contacts with all the participants of the project, even when the research period in Paris was over. In the following months, the core team was able to meet again, concluding the book and presenting the main results of the research in international conventions, meetings and conferences in Europe and in the US. In the end, the core group thanks all those who have made the research possible with their own generous contributions, and the present book a reality. In this respect, the authors first thank MSH, for the scientific impetus given to the project and the hospitality offered to the book’s authors, as well as the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall, where the group worked as Reid Hall fellows making use of its excellent work facilities. The journal Transeuropéennes brought out a special issue on partitions that sparked debates and discussions on the theme leading to the group research. We remain indebted to the journal for its encouragement and constant companionship for the work. The Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8 conducted a three-month seminar for students on diverse aspects and experiences around the theme. Our thanks go to the members of the faculty, the students and other participants, and to the lecturers who undertook the trouble in participating in the series. The University of Bologna, particularly the Institute for East Central and Balkan Europe and the ‘Europe and the Balkans International Network’, remained a constant source of support and encouragement. The collective, Convergences Palenstine/Israel, in which some journals collaborated with the IFHR and the LDH-France, and of which Transeuropéennes was an initiator and a member, had also been a source of support and encouragement. Our debt is also to the radio programme France Culture: it organized a discussion on the work when it was complete. Finally, and not the least, our deep obligation remains to all who joined

our meetings, gave us ideas, shared their expertise, helped us with fresh insights, and dropped in to provide encouragement, and to those who could not come but maintained links with the programme. Thanks to all of them, the subject of this volume has been elaborated and defined, although – it is evident – only the authors are fully responsible for its content. Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Rada Iveković, Ranabir Samaddar

Introduction The infamous event Ranabir Samaddar At a time when the battle cry of dividing societies is making itself heard again through the demands for partition in a most zealous way, resuming the frenzy of what had been its mission always, namely, creating a heavenly identity at a point of fundamental divergence and rupture, as only God can testify, and therefore no dialogue can assuage, it will not be out of season to speak of some of the necessary things – this time in a milieu of political correctness sanctified by the god of identity, and linked to the idea of nation that has brought about a revolution in our political sense only comparable with the revolution in knowledge associated with the name of Copernicus. Possibly it can be said that, as a result of this discovery, it has become extremely difficult, if not almost impossible, and to think of the existences of other heavenly bodies beyond what this God has attested, and to think of political existence without the centre that this revolution has brought about. The commentaries of partition therefore often emanating from within the world of nation are only subsumed at a later stage within that world, and critiques emanating from outside that world remain very often unable to reach the dense clusters below – a strange case of void, as the void is filled up only by renewed emptiness. Why is it then, we must ask from as many possible ways, that writings of partition have to be bound by nationalist reasoning and have to move only in a closure? This volume is an attempt to understand that closure, the determining nature of that reason, the compelling character of the void, and the existence of nation in multiple or heterogeneous time that generates divisions and ruptures through which the nation dies and re-emerges, raising the prospect or the spectre of its demise only to belie it. The reasons that compel a nation to be partitioned in the form of the partition of the state are the reasons that guarantee the renewed life of the nation. This also ensures the near-permanent imprisonment of the critiques of partitions within nationalist reasoning. While this volume goes into the specifics of such a situation from several angles, we may anticipate here its one fundamental feature. The national space is certainly not a harmonious space produced by and mediated by multiple dialogues – it is a contentious space. Yet, we cannot be satisfied with telling only that it is a contentious space leading to divergences, ruptures and renewed formation of the nation-body. We must enter into the specifics of the dialogic situation and watch closely the dynamics, in as much as we must see, as this volume tries to, the specifics of the contention. In itself dialogue seems to involve a renunciation of force and a triumph of reason, and philosophy has always placed its hope on the merits of reason as alternative to force. The hope is that most serious maladies are also cured through dialogue, persuasion, communication, or some unity or understanding achieved by responding to appealing ideas and techniques. If this is the reason of all the modernist thinking of all times (we should not forget that all ages have their respective modernity), what is the specificity

Partitions: reshaping states and minds

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added to this in the time of the nation and in the world of nations? That time ensures that verbal dialectics will never challenge the truth that has appeared to the dialogists in the form of a nation – a truth that, by its nature, can assure them and propose to them that they can continue their exchange and correspondence with the fundamental intention of advancing to new existences within the nation-form, whose very limits they remain unaware of, and therefore the limits of their advance. This is the act of a sleepwalker. The voices of dialogue will be therefore heard for a time whose duration will remain at the discretion of the agency called the nation. In particular, it will soon become apparent that the truth of nation, by remaining above the discussants and by refraining from becoming a party to the contest or getting involved in any way, has influenced most forcefully the conversation with the aid of what we may call for want of better words the ‘constraints of truth’. These constraints then run counter to the desired end of the dialogists. The dialogists may have started with a variety of ideas of justice and rights, and about how to reconcile them, may have other interests and sympathies, that is to say interests in and sympathies for others, and yet, ironically at a moment when the dialogue seems be getting intense, the dialogists have been depersonalised, all expressions other than those congealed in the truth of the nation under which they are labouring have gone, and dialogue has reached a stage of impassability, because the nation-space in which the dialogue is progressing has reached a stage of impassability. Partition is the occasion when the participants to a dialogue have been robbed of all characteristics, their identities completely effaced, all expressions deprived, and an apathy has been brought about in the participants about all other existences, and the truth has appeared in an oracular form where any interpretative intervention about this truth becomes quite meaningless in the background of this apathy. The politics of partition played out under the regime of that truth seems to suggest to the dialogists to take upon themselves all the sins of nationhood, the satisfactions of suffering, and the thought of being freed through a passion or a new faith in the birth of a new body – the nation. It is not that there is no critique then of this absorbing scenario congealed in the act of partition, but, most of the time produced from the nation-space that has produced the partition also, the critique is confined to the ‘constraints of truth’. This failed or blocked dialectic of nation/partition, or dialogue/partition, therefore, raises the question, namely, can one critique nation from within? Will an ethno-logic or geo-logic or cosmo-logic that criticizes nationalist reasoning (it may seem ironic, but is perfectly natural that cosmo-logic brings about partition in the name of a rational solution to the nationalist conundrum) be enough as critique, or sufficient as a representative of newer notions of justice? Or, is this a case where, irrespective of where-from the critique has originated, or even though it has originated from within, the critique has to be one from outside, and has to force the truth of nation to face its own constraints and accept the prospect of its own dissolution? In other words, can a critique of partition be anything other than political, in the fullest sense of the term? So here in studying partitions, we are actually at a sensitive frontier between the truth of nation and the political knowledge that critiques it in theory and practice – a formulation that at first sight may seem absurd in face of the celestial revolution that this discovery of the idea of nation has brought out. Yet the fact that the historical truth of the birth of nation is still a sufficiently burning question for us, as the opening essay of this volume tells us, suggests the need to be aware that at that sensitive frontier a shift is

Introduction: the infamous event

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taking place. It is remarkable how little studies of nations in the past, engrossed as they were with cultural ingredients of nationalism, had attended to the issues of the institutional formation of boundaries, borders, partition, ethnicity and territory – as if these were separate registers – and therefore how little ethno-logic, geo-logic or cosmologic that fed into the nationalist logic, which is the logic of partition also, were considered in accounting for the historical truth of nationalism. The political historian Oren Yiftachel has rightly taken to task the chroniclers of nationalism for not taking seriously ‘territory as the kernel of the nation’. And it does not escape our eyes, how today emphasis has turned into a study of institutions and practices of boundary making by which a nation dies and is reborn. If yesterday the dynamics of unity (the constitution of the space) was the theme, today it is dynamics of division (the fault-lines in that space). The renewed interest in partition has come against this background. Partition being the nationalist resolution of a nationalist problematic, it could not have been otherwise. The increasing political knowledge of the closed world of the truth of nation now demands that the entire historical story of state formation be reopened, and that somewhat humorous formula that no citizen is supposed be ignorant of how his/her state came into being be investigated. Yet, in view of the long history of partitions it will be naive to assume simply that partition is the birth story and end story of nations often couched in a language of violence, and that it is only a nationalist resolution of a nationalist problematic. As the long essay by Stefano Bianchini in this volume reinforces the point, partition in modern times is connected to the interaction between statehood and nationhood. In other words, in partition we find in absolute clarity, nation as a problem for the state. Partition not only confronts us with the issue of how a nation becomes a fully empowered political society, but, more importantly, how a state can become a state on the basis of nationhood, with what minimum or maximum of nationhood it emerges as a state. Of course, as Bianchini shows in his very detailed study, determining this degree is a historical question, and not a matter that waits for a one-time rational answer. Here again, we are faced with the intractable question in politics: how do we define transition from one form to another? The lead essay by Rada Iveković connects with the following historical study of Bianchini by putting forth at the outset of the volume the difficulty inherent in viewing partition as a form of transition, while partition remains a form of transition. The important implication of her argument is that transition is transgression, and if there is any doubt as to the political implication of this formulation, readers will be advised to connect Rada Iveković’s argument with the geopolitical account written by Sanjay Chaturvedi, and seek out in Chaturvedi’s complicated story of the interplay of various logics in the annals of partition, which produces in his words the ‘excess’, the implication of the issue of transgression. Partition is ‘transgression’; it is an ‘excess’. Apart from the policy implications of the interplay that Chaturvedi narrates in exhaustive details, the implications of this argument in terms of political theory are significant. Again, we need not anticipate the themes here. We can restrict ourselves to a few remarks at this stage. Transition is transgression. What will be in barest outlines the implication of this? Partition in contemporary experience presents the truth of nation as a process of nature – a truth that was for long lingering in the shadows and hiding under various guises, until partition has brought the opportunity to claim the truth as ‘natural’, to which only God can attest, and therefore which is futile to contest, and which thus presents to the subjects

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the sole option to inherit it. In the light of partition the nation emerges as a mystic entity, which then carries to the limits of consciousness the individuality of nationhood – the individuality that is possible only through statehood. Yet, in this, what is lost, what is transformed or what is gained? The nation of course gains political sovereignty, though as the two essays here of Stefano Bianchini and Ranabir Samaddar point out the, such sovereignty is often impoverished. What is transformed is equally significant – the quality of democracy. Nation loses its federal character, and its dialogic space dramatically narrows down. On the sands of a dwindling democracy the successor states gain their individuality. Everywhere, as the experiences of Israel–Palestine, the Indian subcontinent, former Yugoslavia, or many other polities marked by partition tell us, the nation suffers in terms of its democratic quality. Built on partition, which is the other name for permanent fissure because of its capacity and function to reproduce partition as a mechanism of ‘final solution’ of the problem of difference, the state empties itself, not always dramatically, indeed many a time gradually, of objects, beings and spaces identified with federality, dialogue and democracy. Partition as a form of transgression performs two simultaneous functions – it prescribes the sole manner of discovering the political sacred, the particular form of politics that will henceforth rule and be worshipped; it removes at the same time all objects and spaces that do not belong to that sacred sphere, or at least drives them underground. Democracy has to search henceforth for non-national forms. Partition as transition poses challenge to democracy in its historical journey, more than it does to the nation-truth. The nation, one can argue, has suffered a split, but as truth it gains. The state, again one can argue, has suffered in terms of sovereignty or governing capacity, but as recipient of legitimacy it has profited. But democracy, as a space for deliberation, dialogue, and as federal organization of a political society, only loses. Its loss is double. It loses in terms of capacity; it also loses its ‘natural form’, which is the nation, and henceforth it has to make back-breaking efforts, whose end we have yet to see, towards gaining non-national forms. Transgression is thus an action that involves the limit – that narrow space where it displays in a flash its passage, its origin and its career. The extremely short duration of the action actually congeals the repeated trials by the nation to fly into statehood without suffering any diminution, to dispense with democracy by taking democracy to its furthest possible limit. This book speaks of these limits and few others, and the obstinacy, violation and exhaustion entailed in crossing the limits that remain unsurpassable. These are not therefore black and white stories on nationalism or modern statehood, but accounts of possibilities and impossibilities of modern political forms, and the sovereignty of political experiences of these possibilities and impossibilities – experiences that the profound silence that follows an act of partition cannot kill or deny. Everywhere the critique of partition arises from within after a lapse of time, when the act of transgression has passed into history, and political experience has regained its sovereignty. Again, one can see the way or the time that it has required in Israel (thirty-five years) or in the Indian subcontinent (nearly fifty years) for political criticism to emerge. Partition as an infamous event, much like the lives of Foucault’s ‘infamous men’, can only be known in shafts of light provided by on one hand the nation-truth which periodically denaturalizes itself, and on the other hand by political experience that exercises its sovereign capacity only after lapse of time and in sudden bursts.

Introduction: the infamous event

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As an event, partition can only lend itself to empirical study. Precisely because as an ensemble of experiences it is inexhaustible, empiricism is the only way to know the event, and in this case, probably as in many others, empiricism becomes a great creator of concepts whose force enables us to go beneath one mask after another in the event of partition – masks of politics that invariably constitute this event. Therefore, in drawing our attention to the amazing variety of forms of partition and in that context alluding to ‘interpretative categories’, Stefano Bianchini is making a fundamental point, namely, that the meaning of partition depends on context, being an event that represents a flux that plays upon nation, state, ethnicity, great power politics, democracy, self-determination, identity and the incorporeal political truths. The eternal quarrel about what is partition is nothing but the symptom of a fundamental process, whereby the act of interpretation in politics has been grafted on to the very existence of the political being – Paul Ricoeur would have said, a case of marriage of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Instead of asking, on what condition can the political subject understand the event, Bianchini’s essay asks, what kind of political being is one whose existence consists of eternal attempts to understand the event. Almost surreptitiously, Bianchini has changed the terms of discourse. He has presented us through tight drawing a map inhabited by subjects of partition, earlier inhabited by subjects of nation. In this way, he has carried forward some earlier works, for instance of Robert Shaeffer (Severed States – Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World, 1999), Metta Spencer (ed., Separatism – Democracy and Disintegration, 1998), and T.G. Fraser (Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine, 1984). From here will begin a long and inexhaustible story: partition as the other of nation, which must undergo fracture again and again to recompose, and the theatricality of the recomposition as the other of the banality of governmentality. (Our debt to Foucault and limits of the concept of governmentality are obvious here.) Hopefully this volume will not only indicate the need for a wider study of partitions, but a change in the terms of the discourse of studies of nationalism – from a study of ideas to a study of institutions, from a study of spirit to a study of practices of space-making, and from a study of imagination to a study of the interplay of territory, time and ethnicity. The implication of this shift will be a move away from the meta-theories that attempt to describe and explain nationalism and almost always falter when faced with the enormous diversity of polities operating under the title of ‘nation’. Oren Yiftachel tells us, rightly, that, in view of this diversity, it may be more fruitful to treat ‘nationalism’ as a broad shell – akin perhaps to the terms ‘society’ or ‘state’ – and explore in depth the concrete practices that are subsumed by the term. But by this token, dare I suggest, the implication of these four studies goes further, for further they prod us along this line to think further, that there cannot be any meta-theory or meta-history of partition. This too, as the other of nation, splits itself again and again in the world of the practices of space making. Another important and in this context relevant suggestion of Bianchini’s essay, also brought out in great detail by Chaturvedi in the particular study of the Indian partition, is that in this schizophrenia of the moment, which I have described also as the theatricality of recomposition of the nation, we have not only a breaking of bounds of codes and territories, but a molar form that carries strong traces of molecular partitions, such as neighbourhood partition, village partition, city partition, community partition, family partition, gender partition, and even partition of political parties and organizations – a proliferation of molecular partitions that work themselves out in interaction, skipping

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from one point to another, before resonating together and resuming their life in the infamous event of partition. Partitions are based on principles, readers will find Rada Iveković arguing, the first of which is the division of humankind. The geography of partition is not therefore that of a mountain amid plains, but of ‘a thousand plateaus’. The long shadow of partitions in the last century will be here to stay with us for a long time. We can briefly state some of the reasons. The attempts to overcome the marks, laws and logic of partition will require more time and space than the global politics of our time is willing to allow at present. What kind of politics of the subject is this that nobody is willing to shoulder its responsibility, yet everybody seems to accept it as the form of a resolution of a very fundamental problem, that of the political subject? The question is acute because many partitions are ‘long partitions’, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once put it in front of the research group whose collective product is this volume. As we say, the longer a dispute the more intractable it is, and we can add, more complicated is the history of responsibility. Shorter partitions are amenable to revisions. A determined effort from outside can in some cases undo it. Or, with the collapse of one successor state in its war with the co-successor state, the partition may be over. The issue of responsibility for every infamous thing linked with partition and that follows partition will be exhausted with victory of one successor (think of the massive corruption and scandal associated with Kohl administration in West Germany in its war against East Germany, or CIA’s war against Patrice Lumumba, now nothing but dead stories; stories of violence in building a state are finally dead stories), though such eventuality will pass off as reunification. One may even call it as restoration. But long partitions are sterner stuff. They are not only products of long history; they make long history. Long partition helps a nation to solidify by enabling the latter to create a permanent other. The most recent round of Balkan partition shows how creating a non-national or multinational but nonimperial state in today’s world is an extremely difficult enterprise. Indeed, the short histories of bi-national or multinational states show the paradox of the situation – these are the cases where, contrary to the nationalist common sense; a state is failing not because it is not congruent with a nation, but because the search for congruency is always failing here. Such search is almost doomed to failure, and again contrary to nationalist common sense; the state in cases like this cannot create a durable nation. In other words the state cannot be a ‘nationalizing state’; a state cannot be congruent with a nation. The implication of this rigmarole is that repeated partitions mark the long career of statehood, and not nationhood. These are the cases where one partition quickly leads to another, and the state seems to live in concentric circles joining and rejoining everything that goes with statehood, namely law, citizenship, territorial divisions, rights and obligations. The complexity is more. In short partitions the vivisected nations refuse to reconcile to partitioned existence; these are the cases where the state longs for a united nationhood as its basis. Standing the common wisdom on its head, one can say that in short partitions, such as Vietnam and Germany (probably Korea would also join the list), the nationalist journey succeeded; whereas in long partitions nation fails the state, because the project of harmonizing nation with the state becomes impossible, because of the continuous reproduction of political fissures within that stops the state from achieving nationhood. This is when the task of building the state through creating otherness becomes a serious

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business. This is also when the issue of responsibility gets blurred in the long history of the politics of otherness. The third essay of the volume begins with a brief discussion on how the politics of otherness is linked with partition, and a suggestion as to how we can gain from Linda Colley’s work on Great Britain. The point is significant, for, while the act of partition may in one case be of extremely short duration, in terms of a swelling politics of otherness (buttressed by governmental techniques), which makes partition potent and living long after it has been over, we can cast such a case as belonging to ‘long partitions’. Obviously, in identifying these two types, there is no cast-iron division; lines are blurred in many instances. The ‘length’ of a long partition is not merely a matter of time or duration (which will be always debatable), but more of the scope of play of the politics of otherness. The Irish experience with which Samaddar begins is significant. Like most narratives of national beginning, the modern story of British and Irish identities began on a mirror stage, which helped forge through ages the notion of a protoBritish English nation against the colonized Irish. Historians of otherness like Richard Kearney and Linda Colley tell us that the story of otherness goes as far back as the fourteenth century, and both (English and Irish) narratives, while reflecting the settler– native contradiction, masked a whole mix of successive migrations of the Vikings, Scots, Celts, Anglo-Normans, etc. Laws were constructed to mark out two distinct peoples, and the fantasy of Protestant purity characteristic of Cromwell’s age was succeeded by disenfranchising Irish Catholics en masse in favour of planter Protestants. It would take two hundred years after the failed rebellion of 1798 for Ireland and Britain to mutually renounce this long journey of hostile otherness and agree to a beginning of cohabitation. The long asymmetry of the colonizers and the colonized resulted in partition, and, though efforts to turn the wheels of history have started, it would require nothing less than a hard and long persistence in renouncing the past – if not as long as the history of separation, at least long enough to say that it will need the collective goodwill of an entire generation, and, besides the prudence of the once colonized, the unlikely compassion of the one-time colonizer. Reading national identities as contingent, relational and as interaction between several different histories is the best way to understand how long partitions work, and how a counter-history of accom-modation, which equally belongs to the zone of desire, can be put in the form of narrative. It is also possible then to see how, counter to the political history of partition, the political history of accommodation at every level is characterized by a specific desire to achieve a new subjectivity. The strategic benefit of an imperial power is not merely commercial, economic and political, but enormously psychic as well. The departing imperial power, leaves to the decolonized almost a permanent liability in form of an organization of rule, which rests, similar to the era of the departing power, on a conception of nationhood that is imperial and reflexive. The story of imperial nation does not end, even though we tend to believe that it came to a close in the three decades following the end of the Second World War; it renews its journey in the emergence of split nations whose drama we are just beginning to witness. Sixty years is too short a period to see the end of the play of estranged voices caricatured through imperial demands of a nation on its neighbours, on its subjects and on its constituents. The main difficulty here, it seems to me, is that decolonization, which carries within it the chronicles of long partitions, does not offer us any historical truth of responsibility.

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Contrary to current wisdom in which the great powers of today would like us to believe, it is not truth, but responsibility, which paves the way for the reconciliation that lies at the heart of any project of doing away with the legacy of partitions. Acknowledgement of responsibility, developed ironically in the non-essential areas of international law, is an undeveloped historical practice of powers that now want a change in the rules of the game. The most real and the most grotesque example of disowning responsibility for partition is of course Israel and the international community that has backed it since its birth. Long partitions hide or almost erase any mark of accountability or responsibility from formal political life, so much so that people come to accept the line handed down by the rulers that establishment of responsibility is an irretrievable proposition, and that therefore the people have no other way than to reconcile to the game of partition/dialogue/partition/split-nationhood. The way responsible government was introduced by colonial powers in the erstwhile colonies was a shameless charade of responsibility, as the history of British colonial rule in India teaches us. Each introduction of responsible rule – the Morley–Minto Reforms, the Montague–Chelmsford Reforms, the Simon Proposals, the Government of India Act of 1935 and the Independence Act of 1947 – introduced divisions and furthered them, and each of these Acts successfully hid or avoided the imperative of responsibility. We are witnessing a similar process in Palestine, and in many areas on earth today, where in the name of self-rule Bantustans are being created, and, like the carcass of a dead dog being thrown into the cleaning truck, the old decomposing state is being thrown out – it is said, to usher in responsible government. The story of partition is linked to this horror drama almost everywhere, most pronouncedly in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Depletion of sovereignty, introduction of constitutionalism from outside and partitioned state – the troika of home rule is thus marching ahead. In this long chronicle, the vanishing traces of responsibility for making enmity the permanent feature of our lives are becoming increasingly difficult to recover. One instance from the recent history of Palestine will make clear the point about erasure of the notion of responsibility by the event of partition. Israel has long denied its responsibility for the events of 1948 – the Nakbah that forced the Palestinian population away from Palestine at the point of Israeli guns. However, today, when recognition of the wrongs done to the Palestinians in 1948 is finally dawning, and when evidences of destroyed old cities, as in Haifa – once-beautiful buildings, and remnants of covered markets, mosques and churches – are uncovered, Israeli politicians are openly advocating a new ‘transfer option’, and saying that they do not understand what Nakbah means, that there was no judaization of the formerly Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods, and that there was no disaster, no catastrophe, no Nakbah. Therefore catastrophe is not alone in visiting partition’s victims – the erasure of any trace of catastrophe by administrative, military and cultural means accompany the disaster; to be precise they follow it. It has been in this way that the issue of the return of refugees of 1948 and thereafter was sidelined in the Oslo agreement and it has today removed any chance of speaking of accountability and working for reconciliation. Indeed, as an Israeli historian tells us, the Nakbah had been so efficiently kept off the agenda of the peace process that, when it suddenly appeared on it, the Israelis felt as if a Pandora’s box had been prised open in front of them. The worst fear of the Israeli negotiators has been that Israel’s responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe may become a negotiable issue. Therefore, in the Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, a consensus has been reached that no Israeli negotiator

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would be allowed even to discuss the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes they had occupied before 1948. Though there are cracks in the denial that pervades textbooks or school syllabus or public broadcast, the politics of ethnic cleansing has gone too deep, first by cleaning textbooks of any Palestinian trace – trace of the disaster, the infamous event. The same thing in a different way has happened in the Indian subcontinent where the public mind has been trained to shut down on the issue of responsibility for the genocide of 1947. Since one-sided accounts may be unbelievable, the strategy is one of creating silence about accountability. This indeed as governmental strategy is necessary since partitions and unities go hand in hand. The Palestinian partition solidified various types of Jews into Jew, various types of Muslims into Pakistani or Hindus into Indian, or, as Rada Iveković argues, Balkan partition unified Europe. In her words, the Balkans fell to partition in the 1990s, while Europe de-partitioned itself. Europe came to unite more substantially over and around the dismembered body of Yugoslavia. Had political Europe preceded the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the latter may not have happened. Europe made itself through successive moves regarding the Yugoslav quagmire, each decision over the latter being a further step towards the gradual constitution of a common European will. The great law about infamy is that, even though it may contain long periods whose traces have vanished under the labyrinth of happenings, strategies, and moves and counter-moves, infamy is finally an event that looks like a battlefield, which may have all kinds of preparation behind it, but illumines by itself without any reference to the planning rooms of generals and colonels. And, ironically, because it is an event unto itself, it dissuades political critique that threatens to go beyond narrative and its metaphors. That is why how to write about partition is linked to the agenda of political understanding of one of the crucial issues of our time. Those who think that by verbal or stylistic command they can dispense with politics in narrating partition can be ultimately dispensed with by it. This book therefore not only attempts four times to work round the theme, but in four different ways also to capture the politics of partition, which is, we can say, what remains after cultural, civilizational, ethnic and psychological explanations have exhausted themselves. The task of criticism here is a kind of halfway house between two forms of existence – the given or the banal and the outside or the exceptional. In mediating between the two, criticism of a political event inevitably creates a new discourse, which like the criticism that gives birth to it is half-real. The dialogue between the event and its criticism is the strangest, as the authors of this volume show in different ways – first, when criticism appears alongside the event and then is submerged in it, and then, when the event is final, settled and has reached a stage of non-negotiation, suddenly criticism reopens it. In that sense we must qualify what we said earlier about the internality and the externality of criticism. Criticism of partition is no longer a form of external judgement, which confers value on the event after the event and pronounces its own value. To critique it, as we show, is to question the conditions of its possibility as an event that has turned out to be inseparable from the experiences of the age in which the event has taken place. The usual complaint, therefore, is true that such criticism is no longer capable of judging; but then we have to remember that it no longer judges. It delves into conditions of possibility. It is in this sense that the last century could be called the century of partitions. As many writings in the last twenty years on the conditions of nation–truth and partition – borders, boundaries, divisions, circular spaces, friendships,

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enmities, killings, genocide, responsibility, publics and leaders, citizenship, territoriality, globalization and universality – testify, the history about this truth is opening up within history, already moving beyond value towards a strangely different and therefore unpredictable kind of affirmation. As the philosopher tells us, when we sleep night does not bother us; night also sleeps. Maurice Blanchot had added that we have to have the experience of bottomless deep sleep in order to put the ghost of night to rest. It is the deep experience of a strangely different voyage – so deep that it makes the infamies of the past irrelevant for us – that puts the nights to rest. Faith in such experience is not mysticism, but, were it to be so, what does it matter? The nation-truth’s gift to us; we who all had been its children, is partition, which we are unable to accept; it is a struggle in which we are engaged but whose finality is eluding us; a struggle still unknown to become an adequate description, since it is as familiar as it is foreign. Beyond genocide is thus not only a moral act; it is grounding in different experience that political struggles sometime lead people to. For want of better words, we may say it is an experiential act in happiness of trying to lead a different collective life. The heart of the aporia, it seems to me, lies in the following fact: there is as yet little alternative to sovereignty as the form of democracy, while democracy requires both selfdetermination and federality. Therefore we are presented with a closed world where sovereignty, borders, self-determination, democracy and federality allow us only tantalizing glimpses of new forms of political existence that will combine a new system of rights and the incipient forms of justice with classical attributes of citizenship – in other words, a new way of combining membership in historical communities with newer forms of association. The possibility of breaking out of the closed world is in fact the biggest challenge to democracy – more than to anything else. For, on the one hand, customs unions, free-trade areas, global trade regimes, unhindered rights of powerful democracies to intervene anywhere (The Foreign Affairs magazine expectedly salutes the interventionist democracy as the ‘reluctant imperialist’), and establishment of political unions by cartels are the factors dragging the unwilling nations or people and enticing the rest to the eldorado of unity and prosperity; on the other hand, with the spread of mass democracy people are demanding self-rule. This is the classic democratic paradox – partition is the combination of imperial and democratic politics. Absurd? Yes, but true. How to reconfigure and redefine democracy that will allow citizenship federality and rights with justice is the biggest question on the solution of which will depend whether the long century of partitions that still continues will come to an end. Readers will notice that the authors of the essays in this volume have all approached that contingency of the future with uncertainty, because, as I have tried to explain here, the future of the political subjecthood is now at a crossroads.

1 Partition as a form of transition Rada Iveković If Rwanda was the genocide that happened, then South Africa was the genocide that didn’t. M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 185

Speaking about partitions and transitions implies a modern Western episteme, which may be inadequate in the sense that it applies to other parts of the world Western criteria. It is self-understood, for example, that it is the Western type of modernity that is being globalized, and that is not wrong in a self-critical Western perspective. The following chapter is consciously written in the latter manner, while raising nevertheless some problems regarding the order of discourse. I have a general uneasiness about the term and the idea of ‘transitions’, which is not so much the difficulty or perhaps the recurrent emptiness of its many definitions, but rather its conceptual context. It presupposes the ‘end of history’ (transition to what?).1 Where do we locate, in the sense of a discipline, an area, a theoretical framework, thinking about transitions and, for that matter, also thinking about partitions? We are in an interdisciplinary composite field of research, and from the philosophical point of view I take it as a challenge that the term(s), or should I say the concept(s), of both transition and partition resist not only classification, but also serious theorization. I shall raise some of the problems connected with these terms, and I shall argue that protracted partitions are themselves meant to be transitions to a would-be non-partitionable state in the same way as a war is waged with the purpose of ending all wars. The debate usually goes in the direction of how to formally satisfy some international norms in institution building, in the implementation of democracy or of human and minority rights, etc. Needless to say that the norms come from international advicegivers. What remains largely undiscussed in pragmatic politics are the principles, premises and presuppositions of these discussions. What also remains non-transparent is the linkage between the conditions of the language on transition, and the conditions that brought a country to the situation it is in. It is difficult to take one’s distance from a logic when that logic is inherent in the language. Through partitions, ethnocracies have lately been established to end Socialist partitocracies, but have often themselves become partitocracies in their own right at best.2 Partitions perform a regional political reconfiguration through achieving independence for new states. They often institutionalize inequality (an injustice), whether inner or outer, or both. They usually settle for a transition period or a ‘temporary’ arrangement during which further partitions may happen or drag on. The partition may be thought of as temporary, and therefore entails the prompt recognition by neighbours and

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accomplices in the divorce. What we loosely call ‘transitions’ accompany post-partition situations. Partitioned states (and their respective political elites) after 1989, through willed secessions, have aimed at securing sovereignty for themselves, but paradoxically have achieved less of it than the parent-state had.3 The excess of geopolitics (as elaborated by Sanjay Chaturvedi in his contribution to this volume) results in a deficit of autonomy. Today, it is concerned more and more with the control of virtual fluxes and of new technologies of communication. The concept of sovereignty linked originally to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and peace precedes and roots not only the concrete state, but also the idea of nation-state. However, that treaty was important because it changed the face of Europe and curtailed the authority of the empires and of the Pope. It gave some states more authority than others. Subsequent states were organized along those lines of sovereignty. It also contributed to the development of the idea of individual freedom and consciousness. The idea of sovereignty, which was meant to ensure and fix the (nation)state, remains a permanent threat to it because it tends to descend upon even ‘lower’ levels of identification and destabilizes the state from within. Also, as put forth by Alain Brossat, ‘it is supported by a founding violence establishing a right’.4 On the other hand, since an excess of sovereignty may easily lead to war, higher offices, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, were soon conceived. The Nürnberg Tribunal, after the Second World War, accorded high legitimacy to the idea of international justice. Today, while an International Penal Tribunal, with all its underlying ideals, is still waiting to be established, international justice has been dealt with by the Tribunal for War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia (the Hague Tribunal), by the Tribunal for Rwanda, and sometimes even by national justice giving itself international competence. Partitioned histories of transitions When speaking of partitions or transitions, we really speak of recurrent doing and undoing of states, nations, identities and also of international configurations and reconfigurations. How a particular state is constituted (often through partitions of other states or nations) will depend, in different degrees, on how the community is integrated. The nation (constituted by the state or constituting it) is also a community to start with, and in modernity it is preferable to have it develop into an integrated society (with public space and democracy) in order to provide a solid basis for the state. I take community to be the immediacy of hierarchy and threat of violence, and society to be its possible cultural, symbolic and historic mediation. What actually holds the nucleus of the community together, and triggers the process of transforming a communal nation into a societal and political one, has been a matter of debate. It might be understood in terms of the ‘common’, or in the sense of Roberto Esposito’s astute comment that the common is precisely the other.5 It is as much as we give ourselves common ‘others’ that we constitute our identity, which is assembled around a unifying verticality (and masculinity). Ultimately, since the ‘other’ has to be eliminated, community arises around death. It is also about avoiding dying which, ultimately, means maintaining power. The association needs dissociation. What we experience as partitions and transitions are but segments of much longer processes. Hobbes shows the way here, since the ‘Leviathan’ discards any natural links, which need to be institutionalized and replaced by a contract in

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order to prevent a possible disintegration. But Locke’s idea of a tabula rasa exposes the binary and also the language distance and matrix. Its ‘void’ is unrepresentable, or unthinkable, yet it is ‘represented’ as the tabula rasa. From this zero point can we start counting or writing? Yet it is difficult to think of this ‘before’, as an unbearable anchorage of ‘Being’, visualized as ‘Naught’. Likewise, the sovereign state still needs other ‘sovereignties’ to confirm its contradicting itself, whereby a tacit commonality is acknowledged, like Gutenberg’s ‘empty page which has propagated itself through the whole world, or like the screen. A support that doesn’t count, for example a wrapping paper sold along with the merchandise, is not seen.’6 The Hobbesian logic being somehow circular through the dichotomy, later thinkers (Rousseau, but more so Kant) try to deconstruct it. Kant passes from the inner dimension of will to the outer, transcendental dimension of law, and abandons the philosophical brooding about origins. He now looks ahead, though without illusions, because the categorical imperative has no guaranteed contents or form. We have endless duties, never fulfilled, and the prescription of law gives an ideal which is in principle non-realizable: subjectivity itself is problematic, boiling down to individual differences, plagued by the fact that there is no safe and uniform connection between the practical and the theoretical reason. Have we moved much ahead of Kant even today? Continuity still relies not on so many discontinuities. The most striking one (but culturally invisible) is the discontinuity of the masculine lineage made a continuity through the Father’s name while decomposing the female continuity on which it feeds in order to recompose itself. Not only filiations, but also the states, though different, have the same origin. Two options in the constitution of the nation, and eventually of the state, will soon appear in Europe and will ultimately have a bearing on the configuration of statehood and nationhood in the whole world: the ‘naturalistic’ concept of the nation, upheld by Herder and by the Romantics, and having its ultimate possible and extreme historic consequences, though not as a fatality, in the Nazi project;7 and the French Revolution concept of a republican, secular and democratic nation. Both essentialize the ‘woman’, but not quite in the same way. The first nations in Europe have appeared together with modern states, which makes some contemporary authors (B. Anderson, E. Gellner and others) think that the nation is a modern product and that there is a radical shift from some very different premodernity. Alas, these authors have usually not gone into the study of how nation, statehood and citizenship apply to women, both theoretically and practically. Indeed, the move is not so radical and modernity uses ‘pre-modern’ devices in order to fulfil its ‘modern’ predicament. Likewise elsewhere, where in some cases nation-states are older than in Europe (as in the Americas) – they were established by Creoles and settlers who emancipated themselves from the European crowns because of their early capitalist economic interests, but without the local population, which was as good as non-existent for them. The Indios, in this case, were included as slaves and workers in a subordinate way (like women), and not given citizenship, although the latter was thought of as universal.8 This is how big divides were inbuilt in ‘modern’ institutions, preparing divisions along lines which were constructed in a complex way from the beginning, and at the same time class, ethnic or ‘racial’, religious, linguistic and gender divisions were also created. The complexity of these intertwined socioeconomic cleavages may sometimes take a long time before it is expressed as political. When it is not, it may turn to violence. This is also how a forgotten past may prepare future

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partitions and transitions. This doesn’t happen only in the Third World, but also in the Old World, and since the end of the Cold War in certain inner decolonizations of Europe (of the ‘European’ minds), by a return-effect of post-colonialism to where it all started – are more or less contemporary processes. But discourses other than the Western one are not bereft of a self-questioning capacity. If only we were used to speculating with concepts from these other universes, we would see that they have a usually neglected critical and political potential. Śruti (the order of hearing /of/ the Word, or Revelation) and darśana (the order of seeing, and thus of possible representation) are two different epistemes, operating together in a manner comparable to ‘pre-modernity’ or ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as a result of a hegemony negotiated between ‘lower’ classes and castes and the elites in ancient India. There is a tension between the two. With the Hindu popular reconfiguration or breakthrough into Brahmanism, at the time of the appearance of the order of darśana and in vernacular movements, we witness an autochthonous opening for the political.9 Indeed, sight/ viewing is both political and aesthetical, and it opens wide the question on representation in both spheres, as well as the question of its limits. However controversial, this could be seen as a type of early modernity. I am leaving aside the important question of how to define modernity, and have myself gone by different definitions in the past. The current question of modernity raises immediately the question of the relation to the West and to colonial powers, since it is Western modernity that it being globalized and universalized. But if we reject the usual essentialization by which some societies are considered intrinsically pre-modern and traditional and if we agree that our global (post-)modernity today creates new premodernities and ‘new traditions’, then the problem raised by this tension is much older and has the potentiality of emerging any time in history anywhere. The Taliban themselves are not some anachronistic pre-modern feature; they are, among other things, a desperate response to the challenge of Western modernity, an attempt to cope with it or to counter it through an intervention in both the order of hearing and that of seeing. From the latter they eliminate women completely, thus amputating themselves of a vital part of humanity. But one could argue that even theirs is a form of modernity. It will be useful to insert a comment on Hegel and the constitution of the state through the status he gives to the citizenship of women. According to Hegel, the family (and, in our sense, the community) is the locus par excellence of the ‘divine law’, where the sister is equal to the brother before being married but where, otherwise, masculine and ‘universal’ seniority prevails ‘naturally’, which means parents over children and the husband over the wife.10 Since the individual is real and substantial only as a citizen, says Hegel, when he is referred only to the family, he or she doesn’t represent anything. The real substance, which is absolute spirit, is the people.11 The latter, at the level of concrete existence, is involved in the ‘human law’, but at the state of the universal it has to do with custom (ethnicity), because any universality is custom. The family is the site of the selfconsciousness and awareness whose goal is the individual and where the links are not those of love, but of habit. The human law has as its contents the total people,12 while the divine law comprehends the individual behind reality and assigns it to pure abstraction. The relationship between a man and a woman as one between husband and wife is ‘natural’ and has in itself no reality (except in the child), and yet the family (as well as marriage) is something customary. In the customary sphere, the sister reigns unperturbed until marriage. After it, the sense of life of a woman is to take care of the universally

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abstract (the husband as such, the child as such, any: the office of a husband or of a child), because she is in charge of the continuity of the community. The individual sense is added without distinction to this superior sense that gives her universal responsibility. In the husband, on the contrary, as in the state, the two are separated, in that he is a citizen and owns that which the woman doesn’t have (though she serves him!) – the selfconscious power of the universal. He grants himself the right to desire and act in public, while the woman is deprived of the recognition by others. So, the brother ‘passes from the sphere of the divine law in which he lived, to human law. As for the sister, she becomes, or the woman remains, the directing office of the household and the guardian of the divine law’.13 So, it is after all paradoxically women who reconstruct, by their continuity and at each generation, the masculine discontinuity for them and for the community as a whole, because absolute freedom, says Hegel further, is this completely abstract self-consciousness, which eliminates in itself all the differences and even the existence of any difference. So, absolute liberty is its own object, and its flip-side is death. We think we are back at a symmetrical dichotomy, but it is not so, because the dialectics of the lord and the slave allows the reversal of the system – in favour of the slave, yes, but not so apparently in favour of the woman who still remains a Being-forthe-other, even though femaleness remains the eternal irony of the state wanting at the same time (justice) to ‘bring back to the universal the Being-for-itself that has strayed from the equilibrium’ and although she is in a way a ‘people’s government’ wishing for a justice she cannot achieve, being reduced to an unresolved singularity. A woman remains limited through divine law to singularity and has no superior recourse. As opposed to the slave, she cannot turn upside down her subjection. The equality of a woman as sister is secured in Hegel’s system. One could think that the equality of the man as brother is so too. But the image is not secular. A man is completely and always turned towards the public sphere. And if, in the relationship of the two (within the limits of the parental family?) there is no advantage of his over the sister, the equality ends there. Outside her brother, in rapport with whom she can be a juridical subject in heritage and in principle only, a woman is the equal of no man. If she doesn’t marry, she becomes again his junior. Not only is the state in Hegel (and in any patriarchy) established upon the subordination of women, and thus theorized and justified, but the unity of the state is also built upon inner cleavages, divisions and upon possible, if not probable, (future) partitions – partition as a matter of principle, the first of which is the division of humankind. The point of non-return from violence As Mahmood Mamdani points out, the events in Rwanda did not have to take a bloody turn, and also the record of independent Rwanda was rather impressive until the eighties.14 One could say the same of Yugoslavia, whose dismemberment was part of a general systemic breakdown of the dichotomy of ideological division of the world and of Europe. The Balkans fell to partition in the 1990s while Europe de-partitioned itself. Europe came to unite more substantially over and around the dismembered body of Yugoslavia. Had political Europe preceded the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the latter may not have happened. Europe made itself through successive moves regarding the Yugoslav

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quagmire, each decision over the latter being a further step towards the slow constitution of a common European will. The integration of Europe is complemented by partitions. It proceeds through a gentle ‘expansion’ to the East – gentle, not in the sense that it doesn’t provoke violence, but in the sense that most countries and populations to the East wish to be included and see it as a solution to their problems and as escaping poverty. In this sense it doesn’t appear to be a conquest. Geographic and imaginary Europe has no clear ‘natural’ border to the East and is not a separate continent from Asia towards which it slowly progresses. The process consists of (1) the dismemberment of the USSR, of Czechoslovakia and of Yugoslavia (at its outer border, as Europe is progressing eastwards); (2) a series of partitioned nations with or without a referent state, some prospectively within Western Europe (these, then are considered regional problems only), some in the East; for Europe, this means both internal fractures, as well as further delimitations to the East; and (3) the events after September 11, 2001, and the American war on Afghanistan, which are precipitating this process, but are also enhancing a supplementary de-subjectivization of Europe, losing sovereignty within the international configuration. At the same time, the ‘New’ Great Game around Afghanistan, the scramble over oil and other resources in Central Asian Republics, and the Russian war in Chechnya are causing reshuffling and the questioning of European boundaries more to the East, rather sooner than could have been expected after the Balkans crisis, while the partitioning of the latter, at the time of writing this chapter (2002), is still not finished. In addition to this, the American and Russian wars in Central Asia and on the borders of the Indian subcontinent may also be new partitions in the making. The ‘war on terrorism’ defends US hegemony, while reproducing terrorism and a binary. The main question that arises from the new configuration is who will be sovereign, who will be subjected? Foucault’s categories of discipline and biopower could profitably be applied here to larger units than individuals. The dislocation of Yugoslavia was not really more of a inevitability than the violence in Rwanda, yet both took place. Neither India in 1947 nor Yugoslavia in 1991 was doomed to be partitioned. What makes it look like ‘destiny’ is the retrospective viewpoint from the only scenario, among the many possible, that has become reality, plus the nationalist discourse on all sides and the received histories. Once the new names are given and the new states established, the logic of identity, self-determination and sovereignty takes over. There is an element of ‘self’-foundation here, by which a ‘right’ is acquired and self-assigned through partition and through accessing a name. This works inasmuch as in times of homogenization and violence no one interrogates the relationship between the state (in the making) and the population. Even though things are done in the name of the people, they are neither asked nor heard. Sovereignty is also declared in their name. Hegemony is then the negotiated and hierarchical balance of power-sharing that prevents sheer unmediated violence. The point of non-return of violence or of a failed power-negotiation is the type of violence which involves the breach or the definition of citizenship. Who will belong to the nation and under what conditions, and who will not (degrees and gendering of citizenship)? As Max Zins has shown in his paper, ‘The 1947 vivisection of India: the political usage of a carnage in the era of citizen-massacres’,15 in order to construct a nation and a state, citizens have to be counted as living bodies, and, if possible, the citizenship numbers of the ‘others’ have to be diminished, which means citizens

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eliminated and bodies ‘cut’. In the case of women, a symbolic dimension is added. Religious (Northern Ireland or Yugoslavia), linguistic (Belgium), historic (everywhere) or ‘ethnic’ arguments are instrumentalized with these aims in view (state and nation building), but are not in themselves essential. The gender divide is used in these matters as an ‘archetype’ and model for various other forms of inequality, building on the general consensus, which has it that women are ‘naturally’ subordinated. This is also why, more than on any other, partitioning violence, be it expressed in ethnic or religious terms, is inscribed on and cut into women’s bodies, territorialized as symbolic borders (India/Pakistan, Rwanda, the Balkans). Gender power relations and symbolic values reconfiguration are operated in order to achieve a new gender regime, which will be at the basis of power. The point of irreversibility of a partition under way seems to be reached through the cancellation of the question of citizenship, or, in other words, through violence that ‘cuts out others’ from ‘our’ nation and from shared citizenship in the making of the state. Violence as a possibility, not a fatality, is then at the core of political action or is itself political. Sovereignty While some areas and countries are treated as non-sovereign (Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kosova), while the sovereign countries of Russia and the US exercise a disciplining power of life and death over them, some others resist. ‘Transitional’ countries are those that have the least sovereignty. Those who resist more stubbornly and at the same time outgrow or escape, by their size, movement, organization, quantity or menace, a shape which can be disciplined, are those who fall under a global ‘planetsize bio-political power’. The globalizing world order controls (and also provokes) flows of population, refugees, deportees, expatriates and transnational industries, and closes northern borders to the immigration it itself entails, in the manner of bio-politics: as normalization, often medicalization (AIDS; anthrax; artificial limbs for mine-injured Afghans, etc.), and the directing, organizing (partly through centralization), institutionalizing of the life power of various populations. ‘Inner processes’ are also pushed by international agency or what seems to be a historic agenda. Under the guise of the making of the European Union, or of the activity of the ‘international community’, or finally as the will of the US, they have given a push to this or that possibility between the many open scenarios at the turning point, the point zero. In terms of international politics, it is all a question about the right to selfdetermination of a country; in other words, of sovereignty. But should it be state sovereignty? Or that of the people?16 This right to self-determination (of future states, meanwhile nations, more or less ethnic) was necessary and had been largely recognized in anti-colonial struggle. It is connected with a democratic principle (without being a guarantee for it, unfortunately). But can the right to self-determination be still posed in the same manner since the end of the Cold War? It seems not. Whether we have to do with a pluri-national state or with a ‘pure’ nation-state (should it be anything but imaginary) should seem indifferent at least in principle provided the same social and economic minimum, the same justice, the same living conditions, the same opportunities

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be guaranteed to everyone, in an egalitarian concern. That is what distinguishes a welfare state from a less fortunate country, but at the price of heavy protectionism (because welfare benefits couldn’t be shared with everyone without lowering the living standard of the beneficiaries17 of a welfare state). Europe is such a protectionist construction. Meanwhile, from the Balkans example, Europe has learnt at least this lesson (several wars too late) – that a concrete agenda for integration (i.e. for entering the rich boys’ club) may be the best way to prevent other wars, because these wars cost more than developing and integrating those countries in the long run. The result is that there seems to be no alternative to the integration of Europe, which marches to the East (where it is to meet, sooner than expected, China and the US), although including some only means excluding others and leaving them more and more brutally to their wars. In spite of its aura, the welfare state excludes both internally and externally. Its importance lies in the fact that, in a welfare state which is also a ‘state of law’, one is able to refer to that right to equality in public matters. The partitions, once achieved, in the quest of a ‘pure’ national state, in numerous cases of pluri-ethnic or pluri-national societies, generally don’t solve the problems, but reproduce and multiply them (by the number of states) in time and in space. As the example of the Indian subcontinent has shown, partitions often precipitate and replace negotiated political solutions through a preliminary and potentially violent consensus. Once allowed, they tend to be reproduced in a process of infinite fragmentation. One of the first conceptualizations of India’s partition was, characteristically, called the ‘Balkans project’.18 The Government of India Independence Act of 1947 had anticipated that each of the over 500 princely states should decide after independence whether or not to accede to India. As further history goes, only two turned problematic for quite different reasons, but both conditioning a merger with further divisions: Hyderabad and Kashmir. For all, independence came with partition before any choice could be made. The logics of partition The opposite and the antidote of an ongoing partition may not be unity (preserved) in itself, but effective universal democracy – a democracy non-qualified by religion, ethnicity, language, etc., since democracy can have no qualifications or pose conditions without limiting the access to some. The contemporary type of democracy under the conditions of general ethnicization, of state non-sovereignty, of massive desubjectivation, of deportations or prevented migrations and of globalization, at the same time, is not exempt from further dislocations and it even reproduces ‘religious’, ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ and similar fragmentations. The paradox is that wanting democracy now often promotes ethnocracy, because of the worldwide processes of transformation of the demos into an ethnos, which run parallel to greater integrations and as their part. It is also the case because the dimension and the aim of civitas (the political living together and sharing by individuals within the ‘city’ or the state – something of ‘civilization’) is lost sight of. The latter is what makes Will Kymlicka think that the West could teach Third World and formerly socialist states how to deal with them.19 But is ethnocracy a fatality? In spite of its progress, nothing proves it is. Yet democracy for some may not be so for others. Even as the Greeks invented it, it was never meant for all and it always involved a

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more or less (in)visible hierarchy and unequal citizenship rights. Democracy is a concept flawed at its core; indeed, it only exists in the form of a project to be realized in the future, all its concrete realizations being insufficient. The (near-)failure of the socialist, post-colonial and welfare states in fulfilling their own proclaimed aims is also the inability of different concepts of democracy to take root, none of them being satisfactory. The notion of democracy now increasingly includes guaranteeing minority rights. Maybe we should be reminded that, while differences have to be taken care of, they are nothing in themselves20 – being relational, they usually imply some hierarchy. Managing the differences doesn’t mean that difference can itself be the project. Difference is neither democratic nor anti-democratic. It shouldn’t imply inequality, and shouldn’t be used to enforce and support injustice (as a ‘proof’). The concepts of ‘difference’ (and ‘identity’) and of ‘inequality’ (and ‘equality’) are not of the same order. The concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘identity’ should be disentangled from a normative meaning they acquire through received and unquestioned value-systems (as ‘unequal’ and ‘equal’), as they are simply existential or refer to an experiential order of constructs. The concepts of ‘inequality’ and ‘equality’, on the other hand, refute or accept, but in any case acknowledge, a social, political, etc. prejudicial ‘difference’ that is harmful to some while privileging others. Therefore, difference can be neither a programme, nor an agency (subject), but it can be a sort of criterion in the articulation of a plurality of individual interests put in common in view of a project of construction of a society, of a civitas. Democracy is fragile by definition, and the concept of difference doesn’t in itself solve anything. It asks to be negotiated. These periods of negotiation are also transitions. They may take particular forms and try to introduce new kinds of political societies. This was particularly visible after the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, which was, in each of the successor states, also an attempt to build a ‘new’ society on new foundations. The workers’ control-socialist framework was discontinued, and a ‘new old’ continuity established with a pre-socialist (rather imaginary) capitalism thought to have existed once. Henceforth, the socialist interregnum was thought to have been a mere interruption in a ‘natural’, capitalist course of events. The social and political project was thus also ‘naturalized’ (with the best prospect to fail again), as much as the concept of the nation and as gender, its instrument. Although the socialist project had in itself been a form of modernity, the new nationalists and ethnocrats in the Balkans made it sound as if there was but one modernity: capitalist and Western. This partly explains why all sides resorted uninhibitedly and overnight to new racism. The former Yugoslavia had been non-aligned and pro-Third World. Since this was now officially out, nothing restrained the projection towards the inner or outer ‘other’ of all our evil thoughts. This is also the reason of the great success of the Huntingtonian thesis about the clashes of civilization, which suits perfectly the ethnocratic mind in this part of the world. In this way partitions, and especially protracted partitions, reshape not only the boundaries, the size of the country and the definition of the nation, but also and especially the minds. They reshape them with regard to identities, to the ‘higher office’, which will be recognized by all, and with regard to loyalty, to the gender relation and to power in general. The minds have been reshaped in a short time over the transition decade so as to fit smaller stately units (all claiming sovereignty), so as to construct rather a communal ‘ethnically’ or ‘religiously’ or ‘linguistically’ (or all) defined society. They have constructed communities rather than societies. Homogenization was a tool against Yugoslav identity. Individual freedom

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versus the community has not increased – on the contrary – and especially not so for women, the first to be caught within a process of purposeful re-traditionalization. ‘New old’ communities have made their appearance. Reshaped minds let go easily of a common past, and the second generation gets appropriately to learn only a onedimensional history. So has the international community sealed for a long time as realistic (and thus made real the impossible), a total confusion about names, by which one unit (the most numerous) was given the right to usurp the former common name and identity (‘Yugoslavia’). It means uncertainty and fear for the very people of Serbia-andMontenegro regarding their borders (since the ones of the country are much narrower since the series of partitions than the ones suggested by the name that has been kept), while at the same time legitimizing their hopes of making both coincide again in the future under their hegemony. Many minds are legitimately set on this. This new framework and new concrete conditions then change the ‘mindscapes’. But the mindscapes are also to a large extent still the same, inherited from a nonrecognized common past. Moreover, the logics of division and separation, though multiple and specific in each case, are shared. Inherent in all those logics is the self-renewing capacity of partitions reproducing the processes of identification and of exclusion and thus extending into a transition. It is the partition’s very attempt to achieve adequacy and identity for whoever is the subject (agency) that condemns them to produce the different from which the subjects will want to demarcate themselves – in order to reproduce the same. When negotiating the political comes to a dead end (as seems to be the case in 2001/2002 for Israel and Palestine), violence is the outcome. Massacres are the result of impossible attempts to perfectly match borders with ‘ethnic’ identity. Negotiations can highlight the difficulty of matching one type of logic, say, religious, with another type, say, territorial; this matching cannot be democratically done without renouncements on all sides. Time is essential here – peace and avoiding partitions takes time. When no time is given, it is war. War means the immediacy of a result wanted and imposed ‘now’21: it will be partition now (and a state, power), rather than negotiations over a long time and a sharing of power in a hypothetical future. In the shaping of minds (as much as of territories and states) we see new walls appear that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, usually to start with through reconfiguring the gender divide.22 We thus have a flattening of both the historic and the temporal dimensions in favour of a ‘rendering contemporary’ of parallel ethnicities and would-be ethnocracies. To stick together in the new configuration in a perfect new unity (‘we’ are now Croats or Serbs rather than former Yugoslavs) will then require ever new mobilization and fuite en avant. The new unity will be thought of at the same time as old, very old, ur-old. Many virtualities are here turned into facts. But the logics or techniques of the state and of the people in achieving this may not be the same. On the part of the latter they may not be voluntary. And the full adequacy, as much as full democracy, as much as the full nation, is never quite achieved. The incompleteness of the project is necessary particularly for those who are subordinated in citizenship: women, and other relatively disfavoured categories. It is through resisting the citizenship of women23 (or of the ‘others’, the minority, or of foreigners) that the hegemony is maintained and made efficient.

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Institution building and sovereignty: transnational or local justice? The problem with the new states will also be, among other things, institution building (and democratizing existing institutions), under the conditions of scarce or nonexistent state sovereignty, of growing inner fragmentation, of moving (or deported, migrant, refugee) populations, and of increasing numbers of ‘dispensable people’ everywhere (those who cannot even be exploited). Within other problematic institution-building efforts, justice is on the world agenda, and it is a problem even for the ‘developed’ countries, since the recent ‘de-sovereignization’ has produced an unprecedented proliferation of concern for human rights. There is no justice without a recognized higher authority. Such institutions are painstakingly being built through the establishment of the tribunals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, and through a future International Penal Tribunal founded in Rome. Indeed, they are needed because of the actual limitation of state sovereignty, which delegates their sovereignty to them. This new criminal justice is still in the making. The already existing tribunals should not only help in bringing justice to the areas they are competent for, but will serve as a pattern for the further building of the system and for the elaboration of an international criminal justice. An IPT will of course be better founded, as far as legitimacy is concerned, than the Yugoslav or Rwandan tribunals. The Hague tribunal was decided by the Security Council, which is a de facto limitation considering the scarce power of the UN, while the new IPT is independent from the UN, and decided by states – some 140 so far (counting on their sovereignty, and thus giving the individual states also a chance in cases where their criminals are arrested).24 The idea that human rights outgrow state borders has made its way. An international justice system would work towards transnational democracy, which is by now also needed in order to resist ‘deregulated’ globalization. A ‘global international community’ of states with only a relative and in some cases a practically non-existent sovereignty is now designed as a ‘diffused’ agency. However and unfortunately, though they are triggered from a concern with social justice, human rights are more often than not reduced to individual political rights in the perspective of liberal democracy.25 Yet the establishment of a concept of international justice necessarily brings to the fore the actual interdependence (both internally as well as internationally) between markets and human rights, and of the different agencies (public, private, civil), as well as the growing gap between civil and political rights on one side, and economic and social rights on the other,26 with ‘cultural (group) rights’ and ‘ethnic rights’ often shifting in status. Foucault interestingly distinguishes the classical type of sovereignty, giving the right over life and death and leading to disciplining individual bodies (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), from new forms (starting with the end of the eighteenth century) impregnated with biopolitics and with regulating techniques dealing with the population (and indeed, inventing it).27 The two become complementary. The sovereign’s absolute right over life and death is actually the field of (his) power. The subject is then in the sovereign’s hands, neither dead nor alive before the sovereign decides which. The exercise of (giving) death is ultimately decisive in that context. But the political configuration of the (Western) nineteenth century pays more attention to life as a process, and to the population as a whole. It is here that totalitarianism may (or may not) take root. Disciplining is not sufficient any more for this purpose (for the taming of economic and

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political resistances, of demographic explosion and of industrialization), so techniques of bio-political power are introduced. It is life itself that is the stake of these new techniques (not merely individual bodies). This implies the introduction of medicalization, insurance, securization, centralization, coordination, regulation, attention paid to birth rate and mortality, hygiene, care for the elderly, the handicapped and the ‘different’, with a view on the species and on the population as a whole for the sake of organizing work. The state now has to do with ‘the right to make live and let die’ its own population, while before it was all about ‘making die OR letting live’. Making die is removed beyond borders. Life is now ‘optimalized’ and made useful. The globalized world system – the international system of states – is itself a result of this. This new bio-political power also develops knowledge as its instrument, as well as institutions. The regulation of life itself (medical care, human rights, etc.) and not, any more, sovereignty over death now comes to the fore, though the two systems coexist. Death in large numbers is also the result of this system, as more and more human beings are now left without the scope of even exploitation, and are held as ‘superfluous’. But, says Foucault, imparting death now requires justification in principle. And that which allows killings (or war, or non-protection, etc.) he calls racism: ‘The deadly function of the state, when it functions on the basis of bio-power, can only be ensured through racism.’ ‘Racism is (…) introducing a cut, a section (coupure) within that sphere of life taken charge of by power: it is the cleft between that which should live and that which should die.’ Further, Foucault attributes to racism the ‘positive’ age-old and warring role of being the price for life (if we are to live, others must die).28 As a world system we are today in that situation. And it is in such conditions that some states suffering from the present crisis have to perform their transition from the socialist system towards a common denominator and a matching type of society, and others their transition from war to peace or from scarce, ‘pre-modern’ development. Transition and integration Transition countries want to be integrated – are invited to join a larger regional configuration – for example, the Yugoslav successor states into the European Union. Although this is in some cases rejected by traditionalists, transition is the way to Europe or the long waiting list for Europe. What is kept out of sight, here, is precisely that it is the only option under the circumstances, as long as these are not themselves questioned. And they are not. Yet the price for the integration of Europe has been the disintegration of its Eastern borders and the series of wars from the Balkans to Chechnya (which also had internal causes). The normalization of Europe is the permanent state of exception it creates. And in the nexus between exception and normalization, construction is violence. Could Europe have been negotiated differently? I tend to think that – as far as the violence part is involved, it could have, though I am not so sure about the disintegration/integration part. Also, in some cases, the violence itself becomes a cause in its own right (though it is a result in another chain of causality). As in the case of the former Yugoslavia, war itself – once it is there – puts an end to all efforts of regional integration and possible reconfiguration. But the war was itself not a fatality. Habermas proposes, indeed, a simple ‘constitutional patriotism’, giving up the idea of the nation as

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community in a larger sense, and he hopes for great integrations such as that of a postnational Europe. But the nation-state is only in crisis as much as is the state. For him, Europe would be united through a European Constitution (abhorred by the French Jacobins) and through a community of post-national states.29 It paradoxically means to transcend nationalism through such constructs as the Schengen Europe. Étienne Balibar is one of those philosophers who have reflected, under contemporary conditions, of the difficulties in the way of the integration of Europe after the Cold War (see note 16). Whose sovereignty will it be if there is no European demos? He eventually focuses on one or two main points: practically, the borders in question are those with Russia and with the Balkans (or: will Russia and the Balkans be in or out?), and with the Mediterranean, where the new Europe is itself the product of (its own) decolonization. In a broad sense, Europe is also a partitioned area, suffering from a constant displacement of borders both inner and outer. It is important to see the reciprocity of external and internal boundaries, where identity politics also play a growing role. Balibar doesn’t think, thought, that these are reducible to the effects of capitalism, but thinks there is in them something more fundamental: I shall develop further on the gender regime in this context. Balibar then speaks of the necessity to ‘democratize’ the borders, in the same sense in which he speaks about ‘civility’ and about the necessity to ‘civilize’ violence, since it is not possible to eradicate it.30 This makes the concrete task all the more difficult. Balibar is one of those who are also in favour of an opening of European citizenship to others: for example, for the Albanians from Kosovo at the peak of the crisis and for Algerians and others, but in any case for all those who live and work in Europe. Yet that is not the direction taken by Schengen Europe, which is based on closing borders. This is why Balibar criticizes Jürgen Habermas’s idea of a democratic Europe based on Schengen.31 Habermas thinks of how to make different ‘identities’ coexist and cooperate, thus taking them for granted, unsuspicious of the well-intentioned ‘consensus’ proposed. Giacomo Marramao, on the other hand, has been working on the conditions and stages necessary for the construction of a new Europe ‘beyond the Leviathan’,32 relying also on such work as Claus Offe’s.33 Europe should have an original new constitutional construction but without a state, and must have a multi-level system of government – federalism as well as a centralized state are now obsolete. We are in a post-Hobbesian order without an externality and a higher office.34 Both sovereignty and power are now dispersed and within. According to Marramao, Europe has to face two other systems of value in politics, economy and culture: the US and Asia. The old continent could have the advantage of being the first integrated non-identitarian global space. This leaves him with a question he, to our understanding, only displaced: how to convert into political value cultural differences in Europe. The three transitions Some features are shared by the two transitions – post-colonial (and Third World) on one side and post-socialist on the other – toutes proportions gardées depending on time and conditions. One is the international context where the new states are fitted; that is, a hegemonic configuration where the freshly partitioned states are lesser players. As much as colonial powers had determined the agencies in and of the countries they were leaving,

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some Western philosophers (not to speak about politicians) now give advice to Eastern European countries as to how to achieve ‘ethnocultural justice’ (Kymlicka, see note 19). ‘Transition’ is a word which has come back into usage after the dismantlement of the Berlin Wall, to denote what is now usually called ‘post-communist transition’. Before that, the term was first used to denote Latin-American transitions from dictatorships to democracy and post-colonial transition. The word is not a well-defined term, and it usually comprises some amount of triumphalism of Western capitalismrestoration. But the transitions are as many as there are countries, and they are basically three if we take it that three different systems loosely defined (capitalist, post-colonial or Third World, and post-socialist) are now undergoing it in different conditions. In the case of the former socialist bloc, we would rather speak of the European integration within the context of globalization than only of post-communist transition, which is indeed a limiting term for several reasons, not only because the Wall fell on both sides instead of merely on one of them, and because the whole Cold War dichotomy – East–West, communism–capitalism – received a blow. It is not as if communism alone had failed: the system of the communicating vessels equilibrium of a world system broke down. Also, the integration of Europe has its own larger framework, ‘globalization’. There is a resemblance in the different partitions and in the different transitions. The events of September 11 have added a new international context of reconfiguration, speeding up and escalating violence and threats, and precipitating the process. Differences and similarities between post-communist and Third World/post-colonial transitions The two transitions may be compared only after the Cold War, which was not only a European phenomenon and demarcation. The Cold War was rather brutal in the Third World. And in Europe the violence, mainly in Germany (Rote Armee Fraction), in Italy (Brigate Rosse and Black Violence), the generals’ regime in Greece, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968, and generally repression in communist countries were by no means small sideeffects of that system. The end of the Cold War coincided in form and also structurally with a new geopolitical, economic configuration of globalized neo-liberalism, which makes it difficult for developing countries of the Third World as much as for some of the former socialist countries to catch up (since that is what is now expected). The new resemblance of post-socialist transition is not with the first phase of post-colonialism. In the latter, nationalism was the agent of liberation and was legitimated all through the 1960s down to the same dividing line of more or less 1989, which was also decisive for Europe. Greater integration movements (Europe) and globalization at one end produce more and more disintegration, ethnicization, identitarian fundamentalism, etc. at the other end. They both impede free mobility and enforce mobility on threatened populations, war victims, etc.35 This is where there is a striking similarity between processes in the Third World today and tensions or war and violence within or among some ethnocracies36 in Eastern Europe. The main issues of civil war were expressed in terms of resistance to oppression and discrimination (victims of which were the poor and the indigenous population). Not that the conflicts have in themselves all of a sudden become ethnic, but the terminology has changed with globalization.

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The Cold War was also a strict division of two ideological blocks, a sort of partition or division in its own right, a freeze in terms of ideology and of mobility (the latter being limited within the sides; see Bianchini here). The world configuration since the end of the Cold War now favours major planetary integrations of capital, accompanied by a fragmentation on the local, social and geopolitical levels. In India, anti-colonial liberation nationalism legitimized a secular nation-building project, which is the equivalent of a non-racial project elsewhere. With its erosion over the past decades, which is globally contemporary with the end of the Cold War and locally with the liberalization of the economy by the state, various ethnic, communal, religious and sometimes fundamentalist projects have emerged. They are similar to those in Europe (including Western Europe, where particularisms have not always been integrated through happy regional and transnational adjustment); most European countries have some such examples. The complementarity is extended and goes on after the Cold War. Erosion of the socialist and post-colonial projects Following the Second World War, the socialist project and the project of the first postcolonial states share some features and ideals. They had in common how they respectively treated ‘nationality’ (or ‘ethnic identity’) and religion: both assumed a position of neutrality or equal treatment (secularism) of the state towards these realities. So India practised secularism with respect to religion, and Yugoslavia with respect to nation/ ethnicity. Another such project was Algeria. Both models (the socialist project, the first post-colonial non-racist and secular project) have so far failed in promoting and improving on their basic principles, as much as has the welfare state (of which both the other examples had elements). All three of these forms have shown weaknesses in the same field – the social and welfare. Also, each in a different way failed in translating the social, cultural and economic into the political and into democracy. This period starts with partitions for India and Pakistan, but ends in partition for the former Yugoslavia. In the case of the Great Lakes in Africa, partition or arbitrary borders dividing the population is the general post-colonial condition. In both cases – socialism and postcolonialism (in its first phase) – we have to do with forms of modernity, but it ends up among other things due to lack of real democratization and also of political reform. In a second phase (after 1989), post-socialism and post-colonialism coincide in further fragmentation, ethnicisms and nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms, etc., whereby the oligarchies of both try to preserve/ reshuffle themselves and to negotiate new hegemonies; all of it within a new worldwide process which now has at one end globalizing integrations, and at the other end identitarian fragmentations (which are really two aspects of the same). The erosion of the secular and non-racist project here corresponds to the erosion of the socialist project there. Claims for ethnic recognition are now fitted into a project of human rights and (liberal) democracy formally everywhere, but really emphatically so in areas of the Third World and of the former Eastern bloc. Both post-colonial transition (older, but now in a somewhat disillusioned phase) and post-socialist transition are capitalist transitions supposed to converge.

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The (nation-)state As for the inadequacy of the form of nation-state for Africa, it has been underlined by Mwayila Tshiyembe, who has also proposed the answer of multinational states as a possible solution for Africa: The multinational […] [p]ostnational state is articulated around the principle of unity in diversity. In this respect, it forms a federating space for nations, languages, religions, cultures, territories, norms for whom the state will have the charge of guaranteeing the survival. […] The problematique of the multinational state inscribes the African originality into globalization, which is a battlefield open to the frontal clash of cultures.37 Tshiyembe’s description of the ideal multinational state (nurturing Habermasian ideas about a voluntaristic and anticipated non-nationalistic ‘patriotic humanism’) resembles much the first Indian liberation pattern of a ‘secular’ state, or the anti-colonial ideal of a multinational, multiracial (non-racist) state of the first independence. But that type of state – the flagrant failures of which are the first and the second republic in Rwanda, and also the erosion of the Indian secular state in the face of rising fundamentalisms – is as much in need of reform as is the former socialist state or the Western welfare state. The multinational state is unfortunately not in itself a guarantee against partitions, wars, violence, nationalism, racism, ethnicization, etc., nor does it guarantee democracy. It all depends at which level of nominal integration the accent will be put – where the name will be fixed. Name-giving freezes identities, gives substantial international, makes visible and ‘legitimizes’ for all purposes. So Nehruvian India (a union of states with federal character) was constructed as one nation with no national divisions, but with a recognized religious plurality which nowadays turns also into ‘ethnic’ and religious claims, while Tito’s Yugoslavia was constructed as a multinational and transnational state, not as a nation. The partition in one case (Yugoslavia) and in the other case the shattering (India today, but there it all started through a partition in 1947/1948) happened exactly along the same lines (‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’).38 In the Balkans, the question of national, multinational or transnational identity is that which will decide about the status of future statal entities. It is partly also a matter of conflicting or different definitions of citizenship, for example for Albanians in the different countries, and it takes also partly the shape of territorial demands. I would like to point out Maurice Goldring’s assertion that partitions may not always be about territories (as in Northern Ireland) but may also be a matter of ‘conflicting definitions of citizenship’ (as in the Basque Country).39 The latter was the case in Rwanda for Tutsis and Hutus, in Kosovo and elsewhere. Giacomo Marramao asserts that the centralized state is now an exhausted possibility and improbable, since monolithic sovereignty has been shaken. In this sense, the nationstate has no future. Likewise, though not quite in the same way, for Habermas we should already be in the post-nation-state (or post-national) era. Will Europe be a state? According to Marramao, it should find some other kind of cohesion – no ‘superior’ office of sovereignty or of transfer of power (no Leviathan), but a reliance somehow from within on its own inner sources for legitimacy. Yet this can happen only if the

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geopolitical logic and the territorial logic are demobilized and made inoffensive and, ultimately, if identities are deconstructed, if violence is ‘civilized’ (Balibar) and if the identity principle and inertia of the same (in power) doesn’t persist.40 Relinquishing sovereignty is here not an outward fatality, but a need of the new reconfiguration. After the events of September 11, 2001, the process of reconfiguration of the world power-map is now very grossly precipitated through the American president’s ‘Goodand-Evil’ confrontation. Both the US and the alleged terrorists stick to the same binary construction, as if wanting a new world dichotomy. So far, China is not in the game, but, as before, it is probable that she would stand outside the divide, or might eventually become number two in a new couple. Significantly, the US talks to China as an equal (George W. Bush paid a visit at the early peak of the crisis), leaving Europe completely out as an agency: Europe indeed is out, having no common political will. This is repeated now on account of the Middle East. The new division is done in the name of ‘civilization’. ‘Civilization’ is an offence to the Third World in general, because it assumes the universality of the Western pattern and leaves others out. And, though the concepts of the First and Second World have been shattered, the same Third World is still out there.41 That peace and de-escalation are better achieved through a self-critical positioning and through dis-identification never occurs to those who retain power. Abrupt or gradual transition? Transition and justice We shall deal with only some aspects of transition in institution-building. A new type of international tribunal has appeared of late, but also international help and counselling in establishing local institutions able to deal with mass trauma. This is a necessity of globalization itself. The general framework is given by the globalization of capital itself. An international order beyond individual states (but in which some are more empowered than others) compels everyone within the rules of international capital. Human rights and particularly individual political rights are highly valued, and civil society is being promoted everywhere. But security matters, with increasing empowerment of police, ‘war against terrorism’, the closure of borders and the pressure on immigrants or refugees, are dealt with far away from public control in Western and Northern countries (law without the state, of sorts).42 At the same time, for and within countries where institutions are still to be built, such as South Africa, Burundi, the Balkans, etc., ‘transitional justice’ is being proposed. Partly, this concept seems to be complementary to the introduction of ‘reconciliation’ in places where too big a mass of the population may have been involved for it to be possibly put on trial.43 The definition of what is now called ‘transitional justice’ is related to the concept of transition in South Africa: ‘The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Alex Boraine writes, …should not be seen as a necessary evil, a second-best choice, when prosecution and general amnesty are politically problematic. It provided the only justice available in the context of a traumatic transition. The South African model is not an abdication of justice, it is a form of justice particularly suited to the uniqueness of the transitional context….44

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But Boraine also says elsewhere, and while dealing with the Balkans from his Center for Transitional Justice in New York, ‘So our approach is a much more holistic approach, where we do not deny the absolute necessity for justice when that is possible, but anybody must surely appreciate that full justice is never possible […]’. He says that, in his visits to the former Yugoslavia, he encountered widespread denial of the crimes committed against other ethnic groups, similar to the denial of whites in South Africa of the injustices suffered by blacks under the apartheid regime. By providing a major focus on victims telling their stories in public, Boraine says, an overwhelming body of testimony can counter the denials.45 Narration has a therapeutic effect too. Also, while social and political justice is desirable for all in the sense of equality, the conditions of even elementary equality are still not achieved, and an imperfect ‘transitional’ and provisional justice has to be implemented even in this regard, especially in post-conflict conditions. Transitional justice then also means delayed or incomplete justice, but it is at least a first attempt to bring impunity to a stop, and to introduce accountability for everyone. In a situation requiring ‘special’ transitional justice, we acknowledge as an ideal the modern concept of justice comprising equality. Yet this is done under restricted concrete conditions of inequality, i.e. under conditions of a nonWestern ‘imperfect’ democracy, where more developed Western welfare states are taken as the norm. The concept of ‘transitional justice’ has its limits at the outset as a Western ‘pro-otherhood’ concept: it cannot be imagined as universal, but as a necessary evil of deviation from a universal pattern yet to be achieved (but certainly promised). We have such situations in war-torn countries, in immediate post-conflict countries, in places where tribunals are not independent, where there is no free public sphere, etc. The expectations of transitional justice are not maximum, but rather minimum. Inasmuch as transition is a delayed democracy, transitional justice is delayed justice. At the same time, and paradoxically, one could argue that the whole world is permanently in transition. And in this global transition, higher, transnational judicial offices are sometimes gravely baffled, as is the case with President Bush junior’s decision that a military commission would try terrorism, especially in the case of foreign citizens, thus circumventing the Constitution.46 The concept of ‘transitional justice’ has been championed by some international NGOs working in areas of crisis (such as the International Crisis Grou,47 the International Center for Transitional Justice and others). ‘Transitional justice’ somehow forgot about the transition in the developed capitalist world, because that is the one giving the pattern to reproduce in the Second and Third Worlds. So, transitional justice is also the poor country’s justice, and the one to be applied when elementary social justice is still not available.48 Yet we can clearly see how judiciary power is being reconstructed, and has grown in independence with respect to executive power, at least in the cases of countries such as Italy and France over the past decade. Yet segmenting has been the approach adopted by the international community in its clumsy attempts at pacification of areas such as Rwanda or the Yugoslav space, which each function like a communicating vessel, producing partitions as a result. The ‘country by country’ approach as opposed to a more global (regional) approach and as opposed to an approach going into the causes (including the international causes, though the local ones are by no means slight) is bound to ensure the multiplication and spreading of the conflict, and sometimes its exportation. Many of the features in the two conflicts are

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strikingly similar, including what has been labelled genocide in Rwanda, unless of course one reckons that ‘genocide’ is something transcendentally different from ‘ordinary’ massacres and butcheries.49 Mahmood Mamdani, abandoning the usual ones while seeking new terms of justice, uses the terms survivors: ‘The notion of survivor seeks to transcend the bipolar notions of victim and perpetrator.’ Further: The difference between victor’s justice and survivor’s justice is clear if we look at the two major post-war paradigms of justice: deNazification and de-Sovietization. The former came into being at the onset of the Cold War. The latter marked the end of the Cold War. Simply put, the logic of de-Nazification is to blame the agent, that of de-Sovietization is to blame the system; de-Nazification requires identifying both victims and perpetrators. De-Sovietization is anchored first and foremost in the identity of survivors; it acknowledges victims, but no perpetrators. From this point of view, to identify individuals as perpetrators would be to demonize them. To pursue the logic of deNazification in contemporary Rwanda would be to identify the leadership of the genocide so as to hold it accountable. Such, indeed, is the purpose of the international court in Arusha and the local courts inside Rwanda. To pursue the logic of deSovietization would be to put emphasis, first and foremost, on the institutions of rule in Rwanda. Where survivors – victims and perpetrators from an earlier round of struggle – must learn to live together, ways must be found to reconcile the logic of reconciliation with that of justice.50 Can we seriously distinguish between a preferably de-Nazification or deSovietization approach? Opposing Nazism and Stalinism may be more accurate. Though it is not clear how he can treat as equal the Nazi system and the Soviet one, he argues that different principles of justice must be worked out in cases such as described by him: Survivor’s justice is different from revolutionary justice. It makes sense only in contexts where there have been few beneficiaries in the preceding civil war. I have already commented on the differences between South Africa and Rwanda on this score: one is struck by how few were the perpetrators of apartheid, and how many its beneficiaries,51 and conversely, how many were the perpetrators in Rwanda’s genocide and how few its beneficiaries. Where beneficiaries are many, reconciliation has to be social to be durable, which is the same thing as saying there can be no durable reconciliation without some form of social justice. But where beneficiaries are few, the key to reconciliation is political reconciliation. The prime requirement of political reconciliation is neither criminal justice nor social justice, but political justice.52 As a difference to Rwanda, individual responsibility of leaders and perpetrators, and also of many institutions, may be clearer on all sides in the former Yugoslavia, and the real beneficiaries are – all in all – few, if any at all. It is not clear at all that anyone has gained

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anything in that war, and all have lost (some at the hands of others, some at their own). Mamdani’s distinction between perpetrators and beneficiaries is not quite tenable in a theoretical sense, though it may be practically useful. Many are – indeed, whole populations – responsible in many a way without being guilty or even beneficiaries. There is a whole range of shades between perpetrators and beneficiaries, and everyone (even the guilty and the beneficiaries) are victims, sometimes merely of a gross miscalculation. The notion of survivor, the way Mamdani imagines it, tends to transcend the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. But many perpetrators are survivors too. The notion of survivor could indicate towards a definition of new political subjects. But in order to achieve this, he himself has to enlarge and redefine the concept, because as it is, usually and officially, it is only ‘us’ who are victims, and ‘they’ who are the perpetrators. This is true also not only of the conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, but of the new post-September 11 configuration as well. In the case of post-genocide Rwanda where mainly Tutsis are in power, officially only Tutsis were victims. People see themselves as victims regardless of the fact that they may have been or become perpetrators in their turn (whether first victims or not). There have also been attempts at ethnicizing justice. Will Kymlicka has raised the issue of ‘ethnocultural justice’.53 He thinks that the liberal-democratic nation-building model requires rethinking the issue of minority rights, and these are now evaluated by ‘ethnocultural justice’, abandoning ‘ethnocultural neutrality’. He announced the outline of a ‘new liberal theory of minority rights’. However transparent such positioning, ‘ethnic justice’ and ‘ethnic logics’ have now prevailed in a lot of what is being done both at the national and at the international levels. In the manner of ‘excessive geopolitics’, which injects a territorial economy into practically all aspects of social, economic, cultural and political life, excessive ethnicization now reduces all different agencies, movements, stakes and problems to only one aspect: the ‘ethnic’, ‘religious’, ‘culturally differential’ identity-related issue. At the same time the securitarian issues have become one of the nationally and internationally most important factors.54 According to Kymlicka: ‘What we need, in other words, is a consistent theory of permissible forms of nation-building within liberal democracies.’55 Thus, according to him, the West, having to do with metics and immigrants, developed forms of multination federalism (except France and Greece), which lead to multiculturalism, but which is not suited to – or not attainable by – nonWestern countries. What is at stake in nation-building but also in the exercise of justice is how (and for whom) citizenship is conceived. Violence as the turning point An interesting variation is the case of Croatian nationalists describing (not right at the beginning, but soon after) mainly Muslim women, rather than Croat women, as victims of Serbian war rapes. This case is also still a very sensitive topic, because deconstructing the whole discourse about mass rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina is still seen (in Croatia) as treason and as denying that there have been any rapes. Unfortunately, there is no way of denying rapes or their having been used as weapons of war. What can be analysed, however, is how the discourse about the rapes becomes itself part of the same ongoing war. It was first said that both Croat and Muslim women from Bosnia-Herzegovina were

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mass-raped by Serbs, but later the vindicators of the Croatian nationalist and statist cause insisted that Muslim women were raped.56 Why Muslim? By that time, not only was Serbia waging a war on a Bosnia-Herzegovina reduced to ‘Muslims’, but so was Croatia. Both were doing so, of course, through their various unofficial militias and local factions. Serbia and Croatia were fighting a war against each other in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and soon against the Bosnians too (who by that time had become identified as the Muslims). The official standpoint on women was then modified from a Croatian expansionist view about ‘Muslims’, a subaltern group, first allied with the Croats in defence against Serbian attacks, but then turned into enemies as a Greater Croatia was being carved out in Herzegovina much after the pattern of an already existing Greater Serbia. The Muslims were ‘those unable to defend their borders and their women’ (the definition of the enemy after this stereotype), and they should be conquered.57 Indeed, the Washington agreement, which was forced onto Bosnia and Croatia in 1994, froze a situation of fait accompli on the battleground (that of a Croatian supremacy – and this will get challenged only as the first democratic government comes to power in Croatia after ten years of Tudjman’s extreme nationalist power), but it also stopped the war (not the tension) between Croats and Bosnians. This enabled then the following process leading to the Dayton agreement in 1995, signed by Milosevic of rump Yugoslavia, Tudjman of Croatia and Izetbegovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international tutorship of the agreement gave these people, and especially the war criminals Milosevic and Tudjman, a second political life by giving them the power to decide for all. In a similar manner, though without a foreign agency, the presidents of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia proclaimed, at the end of 1991, the dissolution of the USSR (an act for which they had no legitimacy whatsoever).58 The real question is how to relinquish pretence to power linked to identity-building, and how to develop a discourse that is not in its turn warmongering and that can grasp both sides and at the same time outgrow the conflict. Unfortunately, those who can conduct a dialogue can also wage a war: there is no guarantee that a dialogue or negotiations will bestow peace and democracy. The Washington and Dayton agreements, meant to stop the war and to prevent partition, were treaties that in a way formalized and froze a de facto partition, transforming it into a durable administrative separation.59 This situation of ‘peace’ under control of the Union in the Balkans and elsewhere may be termed as transition. And, in terms of administration, of justice and of real life, ‘Thousands of people try to find their way daily through an immensely complicated labyrinth established by the three separate and very often conflicting legal systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).’60 The terms of the conflict used to explain it. Political v. ethnic conflict We have seen, in the Yugoslav case, as in other cases, how the language in which a political configuration is analyzed or criticized can limit its understanding, and how this language is more often than not informed and influenced in its very terms by the conflict it endeavours to describe and take its distance from. In short, the (political) language itself limits the political imagination of scholars and also of whole populations, by ethnicizing the concepts and denominations. This problem is of the same type as the

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question raised about the mainly Western perspective when speaking of modernity, and also as the tension mentioned between the order of seeing and that of hearing (the Word). While acknowledged events have been received and transmitted couched in terms that are themselves issued by the conflict, this violence of the discourse remains purposely invisible. That violence is governed by interests already dominant thanks to those conditions. I might propose a definition of violence – as being the reaction to the fact that ‘we’ are not self-generated, and being the attempt to compensate for it via the identity principle (i.e. sameness kept at any cost) and the struggle for (maintaining) power. We have here something very essential to the process that lies at the bottom of violence, of the ‘attraction of statehood’ and of the creation for this purpose of ‘identities’. Étienne Balibar is right in saying that ‘identity politics’ are much more fundamental than being simply the product of capitalism. This cannot be explained without introducing the concept of gender divide as ‘archetypal’ within a patriarchal setup. The will to power is an exacerbated self-centred positioning of a dominant subject unwilling to relinquish or share, and to whom power is even more important than life at the end of the day. Such subjectivity is constructed and self-established in a communitarian, patriarchal, vertical manner, essentially and by definition non-democratic. Its aim is full autonomy and sovereignty exercised by oneself, which, because impossible (since interdependence is the rule both of biology and of any culture), leads to the pretence to be born(e) of and by oneself, not by others. The ideal is here the origin in the same, which goes as far as denying mere neighbourhood with others. It is also, historically and within patriarchies, a masculine one, which links the males to power (if we had matriarchy, it could well be the other way round). All this refers to the circularity of the logos theorized along with its paradoxes by Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. What is this excess reproducing a ‘without’ past totality? It is an excess of self, presented as becoming: becoming oneself, a détour-return of self through the other. Power sits on propriety/property, which may include itself as object or subject. From here, politics is passion for those who are involved in it. It is therefore not surprising (quite independently from the gender issue) that sexuality, or eroticism, should be such a strong stake of power, which can go as far as taking a ‘religious’ form ‘sacralizing’, in its turn, the type of domination. Since otherhood assumes in culture, as one of its main figures, the ‘woman’ or other feminized and victimized categories, – owing life or anything to this other is felt as threat and alienation. In fact, it is outrageous for this mentality that it is women who should be giving birth and, moreover, birth not only to daughters, but also to sons. Namely, the only known ‘natural’ continuity in the reproduction of sameness is – women giving birth to girls. It is unbearable for those who claim exactly that as their motto – the ‘naturalness’ of the reproduction of the identical by the identical – that they should not be able to do it themselves. Violence (both physical and in the establishment of the predominance of a dominant unilateral and exclusive genealogy) is then the only resort, by which a social body can be cut to one’s convenience to reproduce the identical. This leads on one side to the exclusive patriarchal lineage, but on the other, in extreme cases, to a ‘culture of death’, which can be, indeed, historically, cultivated on a large scale. It is especially promoted at times of massacres and wars. These, intent on reconstructing power and putting it in ‘our’ hands, must therefore begin with the reconfiguration of the gender regime. This is usually announced much ahead, as it was in the case of the dismantlement of Yugoslavia and of the subsequent series of wars: women disappeared from public

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visibility and from egalitarian political involvement (mechanically promoted by socialism) at the same time as the first nationalist movements took shape. When this enterprise is particularly tough and violent, it can be seen that beyond the violence to others (killings) awaits self-violence: the suicide of a group, a nation or a country (independently of the fact that others will also readily give a hand). A vivid example were the Taliban, but any new social reconfiguration of power is. A great part of the Taliban’s political energy and ‘imagination’ was exhausted in the repression of women, which was also a sort of self-repression and deprived them of exchange and of the softer aspects of social and private life. In transition periods, the gender reconfiguration will particularly be taken care of and made to settle. After a while it will become a norm for quite some time, so as to allow for other inequalities to be built upon the analogy with and the general consensus about the subordination of all women to all men.61 A ‘tradition’ will have been established. Violently conflicting nationalisms are greatly profiting from the pseudotraditionalism permanently proposed by the transitional and yet ‘undecided’ mentality, because it helps them construct and claim through violence new ‘ancient’ roots in order to reorganize the declining patriarchy essential to the nationalist ‘project’: ‘Violence’, writes Radmomir Konstantinovic, serves the function of rendering real the problematic Ego, whose inner, psychic stage it links to the reality of the world. […] Violence, which is brutality brought to its peak, is the only way of creating a reality (stvaranja stvarnosti) which, though existentially absent, ‘ungraspable’, accepts to respond only to a big hit and, generally, only to greatness in anything: in words, gesture, position, defiance. The smaller the feeling of reality, the bigger the necessity for violence. With the strengthening of this feeling, the necessity for violence diminishes. Obviously, the ‘nonreality’ of the world is here nothing else but the non-reality of the subject […].62 ‘Non-reality of the subject’ means war. It means no public space, no political space, no time (for a process), no democracy and no citizenship. It means immediacy.63 It also means no time, as we saw before. But the non-reality of the subject is also the nonexistence of the citizen. It also means the possibility to eliminate, kill or massacre individuals or groups who are not considered citizens, or who are denied access to subjecthood and citizenships. They would then be only bodies, to be counted dead, if of ‘others’, or to be counted alive if ‘ours’, and in this case automatically thought of as citizens. Biopower intervenes before the definition of citizenship. The Yugoslav conflict, far from being irrational, as it was depicted, showed with precision that the partition could not be achieved without either violence or a gradual political process, and so also that the war was not a fatality. If it did occur, it is because the political process (which can also be described as the making of Europe) was speeded up, and entering Europe (euphemistically, the West, capitalism) was misunderstood as being possible overnight. Also, the regional aspect of the Yugoslav tangle was completely lost sight of. The war was, whether admittedly (Slovenia, Croatia) or not (Serbia), a claim to be in Europe, and, paradoxically, to have always been part of it. As in

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the case of Rwanda, the only salvation lay in politics, but, as in Rwanda, it was forcing and precipitating into war something that should have been a long process. The resistance to violence, to a dichotomous part of globalized capitalism, may come from yet non-identified and new subjects-agents. Says Samir Amin: These rejections could stem from cultural illusion, religious fundamentalism, ethnic aspirations or other forms. Nevertheless, taking into account the progressive potential of these struggles and the universal or potentially universal character, even if in fact they make no claims to be (one thinks, for example, of those who were present at the antiDavos forum, large movements which are both real, symbolic and diverse across the five continents…).64 Though it is difficult to imagine that fundamentalists may represent resistants to violence, some of the agencies we may not specially like or expect, which have come out as a result of various conflicts or of the new anti-globalization movements, or which represent intermediate identities, may contribute to building up the general resistance front of the future subjects. This includes possibly ethnicized and naturalized political subjects, responding to their distinct communities, sometimes the relict or reproduction from colonialism or from real socialism, not to speak of real capitalism. In the former Yugoslavia, indeed, a distinction was made between ‘nations’ (constitutive of the state and locally of the republic, with the formal right to secede) and ‘nationalities’, unofficially also considered as minorities until the ethnic vocabulary spreads with the dismantlement of the federal state (nationalities were non-constitutive, with no right to secession). This distinction – a euphemism which shows the constructed character of both identities as function of power and state – is still present in the first generation of constitutions of the now independent states, and has a hard time disappearing in favour of a more individual citizenship. ‘Nationalities’ have formally become subjects from objects, agents from non-agents. In the states of the Great Lakes, Africa, likewise, the reference of minorities to a Native Authority or customary law in regard of their ethnic citizenship gives each a communal (communitarian) character, and leaves those without such resort destitute in regard of ethnic citizenship, exercised collectively and as members of a group. But that, as well as the inherited and maintained colonial division of the population, be it on the basis of religion, nationality, race or ethnic group, does freeze, sometimes for good, identities and would-be political subjectivities into conflicting factions, separate constituencies, ethnic or religious (as opposed to civic) citizenship, ‘cultures’, parties and sometimes armies. Today, as the defeat of the Taliban is nearly achieved, and as all factions, ‘tribes’ and ‘ethnicities’ are invited to interact with a view of constituting a common and combined government representing all Afghans,65 the ethnic logic is not only adopted but also enforced and endorsed by the international community. Why does the ethnic logic? Because what is at stake is the sharing of power. The French specialist Olivier Roy says: ‘There is a growing awareness – except, of course, with the Taliban – that power must be shared and that the ethnic criterion will be dominant.’66 Yet the ‘ethnic criterion’ could never be said to be dominant in France without raising the problem of racism. With regard to power, then, women are no players, because they had no power to start with. They can be left out of the reconstitution of

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Afghanistan as they are no tribe. Also, the alternative to sharing power is only fighting for it. In the rough conditions of Afghanistan, everyone knows that life is conditioned by power. You are dead when you’ve lost it. The quality of power (for example, the level of democracy) is not a relevant problem under these conditions. Once again, we have the terms of the conflict not only ‘explaining’ it, but also taken as being the solution for it. Moreover, the Western, mainly American, intervention and dictation of the ethnic terms (taken and normativized from the Afghans themselves) as a solution, adds to it an impressive layer of constriction, because it repeats, adopts and enforces from outside that which was seen as being only an inner configuration. In India, to take another example, the distinct ‘Personal Rule’ of each religious community continues to govern private individual lives. This means that everyone’s life, property, land-status, marriage and kinship relations, etc. are regulated by Personal Rule even before being so by universal citizenship. It is particularly interesting and shocking because it is women, more than men, who are being differentiated by Personal Rule. Indeed, for them, citizenship is not altogether secular since it is underordained to religion and customary law. So an Indian Muslim woman may be repudiated by her husband without any substantiation, while a Hindu woman cannot be, etc. The citizenship of women is contingent on their religion even for some elementary rights. As a matter of fact, none is supposed not to belong to a religious community.67 A parallel could be made about women’s citizenship in the Yugoslav space and in the subcontinent: all elites anywhere – those of the ancient socialist regime and the new ethnocracies – were agreed on not really letting women exercise civic citizenship, or on subordinating them. Since the patriarchal consensus about the subordination of women to men was and still is fairly general in the Balkans, it was used in order to enforce its broader hierarchies – those that do not concern women only. In this sense, a gender regime operates as a sort of paradigm for other inequalities and as a model per analogy. Acknowledgement I thank Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Goran Fejic and Ranabir Samaddar for reading and discussing my paper and for giving excellent suggestions for its improvement. They are in no way accountable for the lacunae of the present chapter. Notes 1 Thanks to Goran Fejic for the remark. 2 Ivan Iveković, ‘Nešto o državi i o nagodbama elita’ (‘About the state and about the deals between elites’), manuscript 2002. 3 Stefano Bianchini (q.v.) even speaks of extreme cases of quasi-states, such as Kosova, Transdniestria, Chechnya and Northern Cyprus. Some more could be added in BosniaHerzegovina, such as Republika Srpska or Herceg-Bosna (the latter was officially dismantled, but had been the Croatian nationalist ethnocracy in Bosnia during this last war), or maybe the parallel ‘Maoist People’s Government’ [Maoist Janasarkar] districts declared in Nepal, of which some are guerrilla half-administered or ‘jointly declared’. 4 Alain Brossat, ‘Pour en finir avec les prisons’, La fabrique, Paris, 2001, p. 46.

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5 Roberto Esposito, Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità (Torino: Einaudi, 1998). I am indebted to him for part of the following. 6 Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990), and Le tiers instruit (Paris: Bourin, 1991). 7 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1978/1989), pp. 79–80. 8 An orientalist tradition has it that we never see anything coming from extraEuropean cultures as political; but a translation into political language is possible and necessary. 9 An orientalist tradition has it that we never see anything coming from extraEuropean cultures as political; but a translation into political language is possible and necessary. 10 G.W.F. Hegel, La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. par Gwendoline Jarczyk and PierreJean Labarrière, (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 11 Ibid., p. 409. 12 Ibid., p. 413. 13 Ibid., p. 417. 14 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 145. 15 In Mushirul Hasan (ed.), The Unfinished Agenda, (Delhi: Manohar, 2002). 16 Étienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple, (Paris: La découverte, 2001). 17 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London: Verso, 2000). 18 Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to this book: Dietmar Rothermund, Delhi agosto 15, 1947. La fine del colonialismo (Bologna: Mulino, 2000), p. 29, information by Anna Nadotti whom I thank. 19 Will Kymlicka, ‘Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe’, in W. Kymlicka and Magda Opalska (eds), Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported: Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, (London: Oxford University Press, 2001). According to him, former theorists were blinded by ‘the myth of “ethnocultural neutrality”’ and thought that ethnocultural claims would disappear with Western liberal democracy, which they didn’t. 20 While my generation (1968) proclaimed ‘Long live the difference’, the same slogan was, at the same time, cherished by apartheid ideologists in South Africa. 21 Examples of this are Pakistan and Slovenia. The Slovenian secessionist slogan in 1990/1991 was ‘Europa zdaj’, ‘Europe now’. But ‘now’ meant war, among other things because Europe was not ready. Had Europe at that time had a project (which it now has for a series of Eastern countries) about the terms and the timetable of including the then Yugoslavia within a reasonably negotiated foreseeable time accompanied appropriately by reforms, the war may have been avoided. But that is another story. 22 Julie Mostov, ‘“Our women”/“Their women”: symbolic boundaries, territorial markers and violence in the Balkans’, Peace and Change 20, 4, pp. 515–529. 23 Full active citizenship of women is resisted by any system even nowadays. Suffice it to have a glimpse of the composition of a parliament in any country (only Scandinavia having a better score). The French Revolution, which proclaimed ‘universal’ suffrage for all, never meant to apply it to women who were deprived of it in the name of their particularity, and Olympe de Gouges paid for it with her life. It took until the end of the Second World War in France for women to accede to their ‘universal’ right, which means some 160 years. It is safe to say that the human rights of women lag some 200 years behind those of men. 24 Both rely on a concept of sovereignty, but differently interpreted: in the case of the Hague tribunal, it is the state’s duty to deliver their (war) criminals, but this demand on the state too is based on the idea of its sovereignty.

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25 Nenad Miscevic, ‘Prema globalnoj pravednosti’ (‘Towards Global Justice’), an introduction to a monograph on The International Criminal Court published in Croatia: Krapac i suradnici, Medjunarodni kazneni sud, Hrvatski pravni centar, Zagreb 2001. 26 Mireille Delmas-Marty, ‘La difficile naissance du droit de demain’, Le Monde, 2001, November 16, p. 16. 27 Michel Foucault, ‘Cours du 17 mars 1976’, in ‘Il faut défendre la société.’ Cours au Collège de France. 1976, (Paris: Gallimard, Seuil), 1997, pp. 213–235. 28 Ibid., pp. 228, 227. 29 Jürgen Habermas, Après l’Etat-nation, (Paris: Fayard, 2000); L’Intégration républicaine. Essai de théorie politique, (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 30 Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx, (Paris: Galilée, 1997). In this short rendering of some problems raised by Balibar, I also relied on his presentation at the workshop on 9 December, 2001, ‘Nation, Partitions and Dialogue – Issues in the Politics of Peace Today’, organized as part of the international research project ‘Partitions and Dialogue – Issues in the Peace Questions Today’ (called informally ‘Partitions Compared’). In this debate, Ranabir Samaddar raised the pertinent question of the Western borders of Europe, i.e. America. 31 Habermas, Intégration républicaine. 32 Giacomo Marramao, Dopo il Leviatano, (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001); also a chapter entitled ‘Europe after the Leviathan’. Tecnica, politica e costituzione, in Una costituzione senza stato. Ricerca della Fondazione Lelio e Lisli BassoIssoco, a cura di Gabriella Bonacchi, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001). 33 Claus Offe and Martin Hartmann, Vertrauen. Die Grundlage des sozialen Zusammenhalts, (Campus, 2001). 34 Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, (Paris: Exils Editeur, 2001). 35 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences, (London: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998). 36 For a good definition of ethnocracies see Oren Yiftachel, ‘“Ethnocracy”: the Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’, Constellations 6, 1999, pp. 364–391. 37 Mwayila Tshiyembe, ‘L’Afrique face au défi de l’Etat multinational’, in: Le Monde diplomatique 558, 47e année, September 2000, p. 15. 38 Rada Iveković, ‘From the Nation to Partition, through Partition to the Nation’, Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2001. 39 Maurice Goldring, ‘Partitions, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country’, paper for 9 December 2001 (see note 30 for details). 40 Rada Iveković, Geschlechterdifferenz und nationale Differenz, in Chantal Mouffe and Jürgen Trinks (eds), Feministische Perspektiven, (Wein: Turia and Kant, 2001), pp. 140–159. 41 ‘Pour Silvio Berlusconi, la civilization occidentale est “supérieure” à l’islam’ (Reuters), Le Monde 27 September 2001: Here is what the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said on 26 September 2001 in Berlin: ‘We should be aware of the superiority of our civilisation (…), a value-system which brought to all the countries that have adopted it a large prosperity which guarantees the respect of human rights and of religious freedom.’ He then added: ‘that respect certainly doesn’t exist in Islamic countries’. 42 Flora Lewis speaks about a ‘strange presumption [by the US] that only citizens are entitled to benefit from the law. But reports that the Justice Department is looking for some territory outside the US to hold its military tribunals, such as the Guantánamo military base in Cuba, suggest that someone there realizes they can’t just rule out the judicial system (…).’, in F. Lewis, ‘Now Who Will Defend the Rule of Law?’, Herald Tribune, 7 December 7 2001, http://www.iht.com./ 43 I thank Goran Fejic for discussing these matters with me and explaining them. 44 Ford Foundation Report, ‘Peace & Social Justice’ – PSJ, Summer 2001: ‘What Kind of Justice? Experts probe the power of truth after political trauma’, by David C. Anderson

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(italics by me, R.I.), www.fordfound.org/publications. Boraine is the former deputy chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 45 In Robert McMahon, ‘Yugoslavia: Expert discusses truth and reconciliation in Balkans’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 7 August 2001 (italics by me, R.I.), http://www.reliefweb.int./ 46 Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘Contre les tribunaux militaires’, Libération, 21 November 2001:6. Flora Lewis, ibid. But constitutions themselves create exceptions and are flawed: B. Clavero, op. cit. 47 IGC: http://www.crisisweb.org/. 48 Josiane Boulad-Ayoub, ‘Justice’, http://www.mondialisations.org/, 26 February 2001. 49 Time and again we find some not wanting to acknowledge massacres or genocides that happened to others, or to compare them with those they suffered: ‘Our’ suffering and deaths are always magnified as compared to ‘theirs’. See Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Deaths in the Sky’, The Statesman (Delhi and Calcutta), 4 October 2001. 50 Mamdani, p. 273. 51 This statement by Mamdani also may be too hasty, but it is nevertheless poignant; it all depends on the definition of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’. Are perpetrators only the torturers in prison? Or (almost) the whole White population inasmuch as they didn’t protest? Should we count, among the beneficiaries, also the Black population, which enjoyed, though separately, some elements of a ‘state of law’, and social benefits greater than the rest of Africa? 52 Mamdani, p. 39. 53 Kymlicka, ibid. 54 Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, Les sans-Etat dans la philosophie d’Hannah Arendt. Les humains superflus, le droit d’avoir des droits et la citoyenneté, (Lausanne: Payot, 2000). 55 Kymlicka, ibid., italics by me (R.I.). 56 Catherine N. Niarchos, ‘Women, War, and Rape: Challenges Facing the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’, Human Rights Quarterly 17.4, 1995, pp. 649–690. 57 The nationalist interpretation of Croatia as a victim and as the ‘wounded mother’s body’ was to be replaced by a somewhat ‘softer’ pattern: Croatia as a heroic victim, yes, but also a proper nation capable of protecting its women and its borders. The villains remained the Serbs, and it was only they, allegedly, who raped at war. This ‘nationalist feminist’ view was taken up also by some foreign feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin; see, for example: In Harm’s Way. The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, (Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). Also, see Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women, (New York: Free Press, 1997) and Intercourse, (New York: Free Press, 1997), and MacKinnon, Only Words, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993), as well as other writings of these authors. 58 Stefano Bianchini in this book. Also, K.S. Karol, ‘Le rêve brisé de Gorbatchev’, Le Nouvel observateur, 27 December 2002, p. 49. 59 Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition, (London: Verso, 1997). 60 ‘Denied Justice: Individuals Lost in a Legal Maze’, an ICG Report (Bosnia), 23 February 2000, http://www.crisisweb.org./ 61 Colette Guillaumin, Sexe, Race et Pratique du pouvoir. L’idée de Nature, (Paris: Côtéfemmes, 1992). 62 Radmomir Konstantinovic, Filozofija palanke, (Beograd: Nolit., 1981), pp. 87–88. See two translations from this book into French: ‘Sur le nazisme serbe’, Lignes 6, October 2001, pp. 53–75; ‘Sur le style du bourg’, Transeuropéennes 21, 2001:129–139. 63 Fabio Ciaramelli, ‘La buona novella del desiderio nell’era globale’, Il manifesto, 26 June 2001. 64 Samir Amin, ‘An Internationalism for the 21st Century’, Counter Hegemony 3, 2000, p. 24. 65 Women are left out, since they do not correspond to the ethnic logic. It shows how much the latter prevails. No UN officials have called loudly for women to be taken into account in the

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construction of the new government, although some token women are on it: women medical doctors, we are told, although we are not informed about the profession of the men. For women, qualifications have to make up for being of the wrong gender. 66 Olivier Roy, ‘L’ONU vent aller trop vice’, interview in Liberation, 22 November 2001, p. 10. 67 Kumkum Sangari, ‘Politics of Diversity. Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 1995; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence. Voices from the Partition of India, (New Delhi: Viking, 1998); Veena Das, Critical Events. An Anthropological Perspective in Contemporary India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition, (London: Verso, 1998); Interventions. International Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Special Topic: ‘The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent’, edited by Ritu Menon, vol. 1, no. 2, 1999; R. Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries. Women in India’s Partition, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2001, on ‘Partitions’.

2 Partitions Categories and destinies Stefano Bianchini State partition is a very broad political category. Since the ancient times, historians have cited several examples of state partition, which have been provoked by different events, which took place under different circumstances, and which had different impacts. It should suffice to remind ourselves here of the partitions that characterized the fate of the great political constructions from Alexander the Great to the Holy Roman Empire, and from the Asoka Empire to the Djaghatai’s Khanat. In a sense, partition is a historical destiny, which has traditionally affected states when unable to survive their founder, to resist external attacks or inner rivalries, to preserve an efficient administration, or simply because they were divided among their heirs. In this perspective, partition sounds like an event, that simply requires an observation and a record. Nonetheless, state partition is a political phenomenon, which has increasingly occurred in modern times, following new patterns as long as a specific form of state has been established in Europe and spread worldwide as a lever for modernity, either through the communist experience or the process of decolonization, via colonization. This specific form is the nation-state, which is a dynamic, rather than a static construction of a political society. In fact, the nation-state has never been a stable pattern. On the contrary, it has continuously transformed itself in terms of elite selection, sets of values, institutional frameworks and sources of loyalties, since it emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. In this context, state partition shows a specific dynamics as a late phenomenon, stemming from the evolution of this modern political construction. There are no doubts that the industrial revolution and the predominance of the machine have deeply changed the role of state and the idea of politics, in terms of space, time and relations between rulers and ruled. As a watershed, the European changes at the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries have rapidly made incomparable the political life and the social organization before and after them. Truly, forms of long-term continuity had an impact, sometimes even relevant, on the following events. Nonetheless, the quality and the following increasingly pressing rhythm of the changes have been as much radical as indisputable. In this framework, the nation-state has proved for two centuries to be the most efficient political construction, able to adapt itself to the rapidity of the changes and interpret them accordingly. This dynamic capacity has expressed a new political fact, in contrast with the pre-modern societies, which appear static when observed from a modern angle.1 Therefore, at the beginning of modernity, the nation-state represented, in Europe, the alternative to the pre-modern great empires (the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian mainly); later, – in the other continents – to the colonial empires. At the same

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time, the nation-state absorbed, as continuity from the past, the most relevant legacy of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), by considering sovereignty as an absolute value.2 In this context, where the principle of sovereignty and the ‘revolutionary’ dimension of the nation-state met, liberalism and democracy encouraged radical changes in the public sphere, in terms of people representation and selection of ruling classes. The divine legitimization of powers was dismantled, universal suffrage was gradually introduced, and a compulsory educational system was created. As a result, even the dictatorships – when established – were forced to cope with the problem of consensus, while absolute monarchies disappeared. Admittedly, the appeals of rulers to people, which often sounds like a broad and generic category, have encouraged a search of factors for a more ‘efficient’ selfdefinition of a community. Within this process, ethnicity has gradually played a key role in determining loyalties, power legitimization and the sense of belonging. In other words, during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the modern nation-state has become a sovereign political society, requiring a form of legitimization from below with a crucial ethnic component.3 Therefore, sovereignty, people consensus (not necessarily expressed through democratic institutions, but which includes the controversial idea of self-determination) and ethnicity have emerged as the three main characteristics of the modern state. Nonetheless, how deeply ethnicity – as a determinant of nationhood – is relevant in a nation-state differs from country to country, with the exception of the ‘immigrant countries par excellence’ (namely the US, Australia and New Zealand), where ethnicity is not politically relevant in terms of nationhood. The melting pot is, in fact, predominant in countries of immigrants, although even here ethnicity plays a role, for instance, in determining racial dynamics, in spite of the fact that these dynamics are not connected to territory. In this evolving framework, however, state partition has increasingly taken place, and has been claimed and rejected, showing a strong mobilizing capacity and a great potential influence on the system of international relations. In conclusion, the dynamics of the modern political society require a specific attention to the phenomenon of the partition, by distinguishing it from apparently similar events of the pre-modern times. Then, the following attempt of systematizing a series of interpretative categories on state partition refers exclusively to the political experience nurtured by modernity.4 I Interpretative categories 1 Dividing without partitioning In the outlined context of the modern nation-state, the political category of partition embodies the political will of distinguishing a group from another territorially, by meeting group identities, group loyalties and power needs of the elites. However, this process should not be merely extended to any kind of separation, which has occurred for different historical or ideological reasons, even in the period of modernity. As an example, the concept of partition does not include separations stemming from ideological conflicts. In this event, in fact, opposite groups generally claim their legitimacy over the same territory. The distinction of sovereignties originates from

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contrasts concerning the ways in which society should be organized, and occurs when one part is unable to prevail on the other. However, both preserve the will of unifying the country in an undetermined future, perceiving the separation as a temporary effect. In this respect, the cases of China/Taiwan, the two Koreas and the two Germanys cannot be considered examples of partition, at least until their conflicting parties, although physically divided, claim sovereignty over the same territory.5 In other words, when a distinctiveness in the state-building process historically occurs, its meaning varies according to whether the parties consider the separation as a forced, but temporary event, or the ‘natural’ outcome of history and the achievement of a ‘historical dream’. In the former, territory is an irrelevant factor, because ideals and social issues predominate; in the latter, territorial claims have a different rationality, because they are understood as a substantial part of the process of redefining loyalties and the conditions for wielding power (see section2a). In this case, territorial claims are pursued by irredentism, which connects collective security to ethnocultural homogeneity. As a result, separation and partition mirror quite different political situations, although both are connected to a state-building process, embodied in the modern discourse. 2 Applied forms of partition State partition is not connected to incompatible visions of social organization (as in the case of capitalism and communism). Rather, the modern dynamics, which characterize this event, suggest that partition is a political conception, which refers both to statehood and nationhood. Nonetheless, these two categories do not necessarily coincide in terms of territory. Therefore, partition has to cope with nationhood and statehood by considering them either in strict connection, or separately. In conclusion, partition may refer to: a aims of territorial fragmentation of pre-existing political societies (empires and nationstates) or b ethnic groups territorially scattered in different nation-states. 2.1 Partitioned states, conflicting perceptions and interests When considering aims of territorial fragmentation of political societies in modern times, the main historical reference is to the collapse of (a) the great multinational dynasties, (b) the colonial empires and (c) the socialist federations. All these events were provoked and followed by a series of partitions, whose perceptions of, and aspirations to, statehood and nationhood have played a determinant role. In general terms, two kinds of subjects have claimed and pursued this political goal, interpreting and justifying it differently. The first subject (or group) is an inner one: in this case, its request for partition has been justified as a tool for getting independence (as, for instance, in the Pakistani and Croatian examples). The second subject, instead, is an outer one and it is generally identified with one or more great powers. Basically, the interest in encouraging partition is nurtured, in this case, by the will of weakening the enemy and, simultaneously, establishing a control over the separated territory from the partitioned country. This has been the case of Germany, which tried to penetrate East European territories by imposing the partition of the Russian Empire with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, and a sort of independence for Ukraine. Similarly, winners partitioned the German colonial Empire

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after the First World War in order to satisfy their own interests. Admittedly, because power politics pre-existed modernity, we have similar examples before modernity: one of them is the partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. This partition, however, has been promoted by outer subjects. On the contrary, modernity has strengthened inner dynamics of partition, by connecting them to statehood and nationhood. 2.2 Partitioned nations Partition, however, may also refer to ethnic groups, territorially scattered in different nation-states. This case is different from state-partition, where the claim of independence is predominant. By contrast, partitioned nations contest the relation between ethnicity and territory. In other words, partitioned nations referred primarily to the lack of institutional and territorial unity of an ethnic group, while partitioned states referred primarily to the loss of institutional control over a territory by an existing political society.6 From their own perspective, the elites of partitioned ethnic groups claim a reconfiguration of state borders, following criteria and priorities that are different from those that historically have prevailed since then. Because this claim, if carried out, is achieved through a partition of other existing states, other ethnic groups might be partitioned or might change their social position unwillingly. As a result, such claims often give birth to tensions, wars and further partitions. Ethnic cleansing is a possible, and consistent, consequence of the efforts made by leaderships (or ‘ethnocracies’), aiming to establish territorial ethnic unities. Pursued either through violent tools or negotiations (as in the cases of the Yugoslav collapse or the Treaty of Lausanne, respectively), it has been historically, and legally, justified by the need to make the new geo-demographic arrangement irreversible, by avoiding opposite ‘ethnoterritorial’ claims from neighbouring countries.7 In the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, different groups (political parties, cultural, religious and social movements, illegally armed bands, and youth and intellectual associations) have believed that the state-territory they belong to does not coincide with the territory where their own ethno-nation lives. Accordingly, they have claimed a geopolitical redefinition. East Central Europe is one of the areas where a chain of partitioned ethno-nations links the cases of Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Russians and Romanians. Similar situations can be noted in Asia and in Africa, as for Tamil, Pashtuni, Bengali, Somali, Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. However, there are two different kinds of partitioned ethnic groups. The first one is based on scattered ethnic groups, which may rely on an existing nation-state, often defined as ‘motherland’. This is the case of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Russians, Romanians and Albanians, just to mention a few. The second is based on partitioned ethnic groups without any state territory, as in the case of the Basques and the Kurds or many ethnic groups in Africa. 3 The fragility of terminology The uncertainties of terminology in defining partition, as already observed while using separation and partition, are multiplied further when fragmentation, dissolution, disintegration, break-up and dismemberment are used.8 Understanding to what extent this

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plurality of words reveals different aspects of the same phenomenon, or is to be considered just a set of synonyms, is quite a difficult exercise, as one can note in the following examples. Dismemberment, in particular, is a very interesting word, widely used by scholars. The idea suggested by the term sounds strictly related to the bodies of human beings; dismemberment is, in fact, an organic image, which mirrors feelings of pain and sufferance, and suggests the idea of death. On the contrary, partition sounds more ‘neutral’ or ‘technical’ in terms of feeling, because it is connected to things that should be separated, in order to have a clearer, and maybe better, organized environment (or world). Truly, the concept of dismemberment was evoked in the literature in order to define the end of either the pre-modern great empires (the so-called great multinational dynasties) or socialist federations (Yugoslavia, the USSR and Czechoslovakia). Nonetheless, in the former case, the role played by external subjects and international events (the First World War) was crucial in provoking state dismemberment, while the legitimacy of partition was based primarily on the winners’ rights. On the contrary, in the case of socialist federations dismemberment starts as a process provoked by domestic dynamics, stemming from the inner collapse of communism. In this case, the legitimacy of dismemberment apparently lies in the communist constitutions, which recognize the existence of different nations (as ethnic groups) within the communist federative state. The discourse leads to self-determination and secession, namely two conceptions included in communist constitutions, even if in a declarative way only. No rules were established in order to make the right accessible. Lenin himself stated that secession was not in the interest of the working class.9 Nonetheless, the communist power-sharing system was based on territory, ethnic ratio and co-optation on ethnic basis (in both the Stalinist and Titoist systems); as a result, local ethno-interests have become increasingly relevant in the legitimacy of local elite, while communist ideology was loosing relevance. Therefore, ethno-nationalism – nurtured by communism – has become a source of state re-legitimization and state partition, regardless of the limited constitutional provisions. Again however, as for terminology, dismemberment is a word that has been used to point out a variety of state partitions, provoked both from outer and/or inner factors. To a certain extent, partition and dismemberment might be considered semantically different. An attempt at classifying the meaning of these two terms might be as follows: Partition refers to: (a) a violent or negotiated state fragmentation between two subjects (as in the cases of Sweden and Norway in 1905 or the Czech and Slovak republics in 1993) or (b) a state dissolution imposed by two or more outer subjects (as in Poland in the eighteenth century). Dismemberment refers to: (a) a most probably violent then negotiated state fragmentation, imposed by more than two inner subjects (as in the cases of Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1991) or (b) a state dissolution, which has been the outcome of the interactions of a plurality of both inner and outer subjects. This was the case with the Ottoman Empire, but also with the Austrian and Russian Empires.

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The variants (a) of both partition and dismemberment require the reference to the concept of state fragmentation, because at least the predominant part of the pre-existing state survives the territorial and demographic loss (see the cases of Sweden, the Czech republic, Russia, and Serbia-and-Montenegro through the FRY). The variants (b) of both partition and dismemberment require the reference to the concept of state dissolution, because the process ends with the complete destruction of the pre-existing state (as for the great multinational dynasties). However, this attempt at defining differences between these concepts has to cope with the variety of perceptions that characterize the subjects involved in the event. In fact, Yugoslavia is a term that refers to a complex area geographically extending from the Karavanke Mountains to Gevgelija. Many experts (personally I am among those) have interpreted the fact that Serbia-and-Montenegro declared the FRY in April 1992 as an attempt to ‘steal’ a political idea and a legacy shared by a plurality of subjects. In this case, we cannot speak of state fragmentation, but of state dissolution. Similarly, the term partition includes the concept of ‘secession’ (secession of one subject from another, following a process that is consistent with the political persistence of a part of the pre-existing state). Nonetheless, even in the case of dismemberment, the concept of secession has been used. Reference, in this case, is to either inner subjects, which claimed independence (as Slovenia or Lithuania), or those pretending to a monopolist legacy over the pre-existing state, despite its substantial dissolution (as in the case of Milosevic’s Serbia towards Yugoslavia). Still, state dissolution is a category that might also be applied to the USSR, because the state disappeared when Russia, Ukraine and Belarus decided to dissolve the Union.10 As a matter of fact, El’cyn claimed Russian sovereignty from the USSR since 1990, making it evident that Russia did not pretend to the legacy of the country (although this was not completely true later, when Moscow pretended to the preservation of control over nuclear power, the Crimean peninsula and the Black Sea navy). In other words, despite the fact that scholars might try to establish a semantic differentiation between similar conceptions, a clear distinction and a classification remain uncertain, mainly because the variety of local perception is so strong that it deeply influences both the terminology and its rationality. II The attractiveness of partition 1 The interaction of statehood and nationhood As mentioned above, partition and dismemberment in modern times are strictly connected to the interaction between statehood and nationhood. This interaction has become particularly attractive during the twentieth century. There are many reasons for it, and they require a systematic and broad analysis. Although such a goal cannot be achieved within the size of this chapter, some aspects will be explored here, focusing the attention on three main issues. The first deals with the ties that connect territory, people’s loyalty and the exercise of power; the second deals with morality, and in particular with the morality of nations’ equality; and the third deals with substantial interests of the

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ruling class in the access of resources. All these aspects significantly contribute to make attractive statehood and, consequently, the idea of partition. The nexus between territory, people’s loyalty and the exercise of power is particularly connected with the nationhood construction. The idea of a well-defined territory where the state exercises the highest authority is a product of modernity. The sacredness of the ‘space’ and the inviolability of boundaries have been emphasized in the modern mythology of the nation-state, whose origins have to be traced in Europe.11 In this continent, territory did not enjoy such an absolute consideration in politics during the Middle Ages. Although relevant, borders remained porous because of the difficulty of getting their control systematically and because different authorities had the possibility of exercising their power over the same territory, in spite of the fact that they were enjoying different degrees of limitations. In a sense, the relation between the ‘Prince’ (in Machiavellian terms) and the territory mirrored the fact that a piece of land, however large, was exploited by a hierarchical order of figures, from the Emperor to the peasant, who exercised a right over it and considered themselves ‘owner’ of it. This was the so-called ‘possession’, which was gradually substituted – starting from British enclosures – by private property, where the uniqueness of the owner became the rule. Similarly, the states – becoming international sovereign subjects after the decline of the Emperor–Pope consociation – got the unique ownership over their territory and tried to make them inviolable. In other words, the substantially parallel evolution from possession to property and from the Middle Ages to the modern system of states is helpful in understanding how the sense of territory gradually changed, according to the European influence worldwide. Meanwhile, the sources of legitimization modified and people’s loyalty became increasingly crucial for the stability of a state. Sense of belonging and both state and group (nation) identities were rapidly strengthened through the interaction between state and nation, in such a way that they became extremely powerful tools for homogenizing a group and making easier the control over it by the ruling class. Instead of the ancient slogan, Cuius regio, eius religio, the interaction between nationhood and statehood has transformed this political goal into a similar one, Cuius regio, eius natio or Cuius natio, eius regio. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century the interdependence of territory and nationhood was encouraged by other strong and efficient tools, such as political myths and symbols, which showed effectiveness in supporting the legitimization of the political powers. In addition, they contributed significantly in guaranteeing the political consensus in societies where the right to vote had to be recognized in a few decades for all adult members, regardless of gender, beliefs and race. Accordingly, this process has encouraged a gradual and consistent identification between ruled and rulers, in terms of political identity and, at the same time, of language, religion, culture, history and ethnicity.12 The idea that rulers should be the expression of the people offered a wide range of possibilities, according to the interpretation of the notion of ‘people’. The family transnational connection among monarchies was rapidly overthrown and the ruled–rulers identification increasingly strengthened. In this context, different outcomes occurred. The idea that sets of rules and codes have to be shared by a political society was differently interpreted, according to the relevance attributed to common rights or to a common culture. National revolutionaries, such as Mazzini and Kossuth, became aware,

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particularly after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, of the risks connected to extreme interpretations given to the idea of nation in terms of ethnicity. Concerns over a possible ‘matrioshka’ process, generating endless partitions, had emerged significantly already in the middle of the nineteenth century.13 Cultural homogeneity in nation-state politics traces back its origins to that period. It has a centurylong evolution, which began with Herder’s description of people’s bias as a value and goes on with the emergence of the idea of national missions, the spreading of social Darwinism and the implementation of imperialist policies. Within this framework of reference, two main exacerbating prospects developed: the Nazi one, with the homogeneity summarized in a well-known slogan, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, and the ethno-nationalist one, where ethnicity becomes the determinant of nationhood and, through this process, claims a statehood based on ethnic homogeneity. Nazism, as an extreme variant of nationalism, has significantly contributed to connecting the idea of belonging to a group with the need to separate it from the ‘others’, by emphasizing a racist approach. Although defeated at the end of the Second World War and rejected with disgust by humanity, its political praxis has primed far-reaching consequences by rooting the idea that minorities are a sort of ‘fifth column’ of neighbouring countries, which can use them for modifying state borders to their benefit.14 Ethno-nationalist variant has assimilated the belief that minorities are potentially a threat to inner state stability, while the nexus of the nation and the ‘Prince’ have encouraged those policy makers who are ethnonationalist oriented to arrogate the exclusiveness of representing nationhood. Consistently with these premises (connected with people’s loyalty and territorial inviolability), they require individuals to accept cultural homogenization within a community. For those who do not accept – for cultural, ethnic, religious or ideological reasons – this framework of reference, discrimination and unequal treatments are the consequences. In this case, discrimination does not concern only members of minorities who are included in a certain territory. It concerns also other categories of people, as for instance free thinkers and members of mixed marriages, who have difficulties in identifying themselves within the parameters offered by a preestablished grid of codes associated to a unique identity. As a result, diversity and ‘otherness’ have become factors of exclusion and inequality, consistent with the premises of the interaction between statehood and nationhood, where ethnicity is a determinant. The mechanism of partition begins for act exactly when a decision of identification is required for the population and this decision implies the acceptance of a unique identity. Families and individuals are forced to make a decision, which is not easy and often creates tensions, wars, exchange of population, ethnic cleansing, migration flows, brain drain and stateless people. In this context, even the categories of continuity and discontinuity take a dramatic, and simultaneously ironic, dimension. In fact, continuity is claimed and emphasized by nationalism as a crucial factor in state identity. The continuity of a community is presented to the population either by revising, if necessary, history, culture and arts, or by emphasizing the purity of language and the relations with one religion, as the pillars of the group identity. This continuity, however, nurtures a crucial source of discontinuity. By pursuing a historical and cultural continuity of a group – as a political determinant in defining a state, a territory and a loyalty – a simultaneous discontinuity is imposed on relationships with otherness. The influences of other groups (living side by side with a

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community) and streams, received and elaborated over time in terms of culture, religions, customs and techniques, are cut off and often rejected as an expression of contamination. In the long run, the interaction between nationhood and statehood has implied discrimination of the otherness and inequality of treatment between included and excluded. According to countries and local situations, policy makers and political institutions have adopted a wide range of measures that comprise specific discriminatory regulations, going as far as apartheid, violence, rape, ethnic cleansing and genocide.15 2 Equality and inequality in partitioning processes The relation between the aforementioned categories of discrimination, inequality, inclusion and exclusion is quite complicated, because their perception varies dramatically according to the sensitivity of groups and/or individuals. As an example, and despite a widespread belief, not only those who are not belonging to the mainstream feel themselves discriminated against; in addition to ‘minorities’, which have been commonly identified with the ‘rejected otherness’, we have also examples of those, being a majority, who feel themselves discriminated against. This is, in particular, the case of Serbian and Russian nationalists, who claimed at the end of the 1980s that their nation enjoyed a discriminated position respectively in socialist Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union to the benefit of the other nations.16 Serb nationalists, for instance, complained of exclusion from economic or financial centres of powers, from leading positions in the Ministry of Interior, or an unequal treatment in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia. Russian nationalists complained of the absence of a Russian communist party, the restrictions imposed on Russians in the access to their resources, and the discrimination against Russian cultural peculiarities to the benefit of either Central Asia and Caucasus or the westernization of the country.17 These perceptions are important in understanding the reasons why multinational states collapsed in the first phase of post-communist transition. Crucially, the decision made by policy makers of the most relevant – at least in terms of demography and politics – nations of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to claim sovereignty both for Serbia and Russia, has made the dissolution of the two federations possible. The Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science, the policy of Greater Serbia and the policy of sovereignty adopted by El’cyn in 1990 are an evident confirmation of it. Therefore, it is highly questionable whether the claims for independence of the Baltic States or Slovenia would have led to the dismemberment of the two federations, without the agreement and the active contribution of Russia and Serbia.18 In whatever manner the reasons of the collapse of these federations are interpreted, it is a matter of fact that self-victimization has played a key role in mobilizing people’s consent for claiming independence. Victimization, in fact, requires that misbehaviours should be amended. Therefore, according to this view, amendment can be guaranteed by the (re-)establishment of equality; and equality can be achieved only through statehood. In other words, if Latvians and Croats, as well as Serbs and Russians, feel themselves discriminated against as an ethnic community comprised within a broader political society, the ethno-nationalist discourse promises the achievement of fairness by creating separate states. As a result, discrimination and/or the perception of discrimination are good levers for encouraging and spreading the belief that group equality can be achieved

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only thanks to a distinguished state-building process. In these terms, separatists have interpreted self-determination as a democratic goal by itself, because they regard it as a guarantee for achieving either equality with otherness, or distinctiveness from otherness. In sum, collective emotions and expectations cooperate in making the state a magnet. Sense of being discriminated against and self-victim-ization strengthen consent to political self-determination, and contribute to rooting the idea that multinational coexistence is impossible, both at the domestic level and in the international arena. The failure of pre-modern great empires and communist federations in Europe sounds like a confirmation of this belief. In addition, partition/dismemberment is, apparently, an efficient tool for achieving protection and security, because separatists believe that a society founded on identical members (in cultural terms) makes serious conflicts impossible. Such an approach has also been presented, in the earlier phases of postcommunism in Eastern Europe, as a reference for making democracy work. In other terms, separatists claim that democracy can be obtained only when a society is culturally (which means ethnically) homogeneous: Germany and Poland have been often presented as clear examples of it.19 The thesis is clear and legitimizes violence: in fact, both Germany and Poland have achieved homogenization through drastic changes of borders, ethnic cleansing, forced migrations and genocide. As a result, however, Germany has not been homogenized: Berlin is currently the second Turkish city of Europe, while the process of absorbing Eastern Länder is far from completion ten years after the German unification. As for Poland, the situation seems currently stable, but the country has radically changed since the Second World War in terms of demography, territory and social structure. Then, according to this thesis, Milosevic, Karadzic and Tudjman should be considered heroes and not criminals, and the ICTY should not have been established. However, and regardless of the political ‘reading’ of this thesis, concerns emerge from the theoretical point of view when the attention turns to two issues that interact significantly in this reasoning. On the one hand, in fact, the idea that democracy can be carried out in homogeneous countries leads to the conclusion that homogeneity has to be established first and then democracy works. On the other, collective security and stability depends strictly on the level of homogeneity of a country. In the first case, democracy appears to be powerless in dealing with differences within a society and should be ‘suspended’ before the accomplishment of the basic conditions for its enforcement. In the second, the exclusion of otherness (including immigrants) is presented as a precondition for stability and meets the uncertainties of a society when crossed by deep social troubles. Therefore, the appeals to a high level of group self-identification become particularly attractive for wide strata of the population who are willing to accept it.20 In particular, a homogenized identity offers a convincing set of codes for groups unable to adapt themselves to the rapid changes of modernity, interdependence and innovation. By redefining the relation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, clearly perceivable borders are established and this makes uncertain population culturally confident of its own self. The fear of globalization and mobility is a powerful feeling, which encourages culturally unprepared people to believe that fragmentation is a factor of group protection. Thus, the way for imposing national homogeneity is paved through a process where group identity, territoriality and the morality of equality connect, regardless of the fact whether – or to what extent – the perceptions of the ‘self’ are founded in truth.

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Crucially, in this reasoning, no one can predict when a process of partition/dismemberment can stop. Whenever a set of priorities contributes to the definition of a group identity, the rooting of a set of feelings as a discriminated group makes increasingly attractive the wish of state. The examples of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the 1990s seem to be a confirmation of this trend, as do the cases of Chechnya, Transnistria, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia. Similarly, Cyprus, Kurdistan, Pashtunistan, Beluchistan, Kashmir, Assam, Punjab and Tamil Nadu are areas, to mention just a few, where state building remains attractive. In this context, national homogeneity nurtures and develops new homogeneities on behalf of the morality of equality and this process – in modern times – is strictly related to the growing relevance of ethnicity as a dominant factor of nationhood. As a result, the content of statehood changes, according to the interpretations given to the criteria adopted in establishing when a collectivity becomes a political subject. The aspiration to collective equality between groups is additionally strengthened by the increasing ability of the state to present itself as the distributor and the guarantor of rights. Citizenship and welfare have strongly contributed to growing the state capacity of penetrating into the society, and ruling and controlling it.21 The regulations that establish who, when and how individuals can enjoy fundamental rights – to property, work, healthcare, assistance, even mobility (by getting a passport) – strictly depend on the state, which may connect the access to these rights to a request for cultural loyalty. Generally, this is what happens immediately when a partition is carried out. The newly established state needs to declare its own property and where the property is. Within this space, individuals are treated as goods that belong to the ‘owner’, namely the state. Truly, individuals can freely decide otherwise and reject re-inclusion under these conditions. However, exclusion from the access to rights is the consequence and they have to face isolation, or move elsewhere and try to adapt themselves to new conditions abroad.22 By contrast, from a collective point of view, the newly established state appears to be efficient and consistent with the power management and the sense of group security. As a result, the nation-state remains politically attractive, and the morality of groups’ equality through its multiplication, via partition/dismemberment sounds acceptable to many policy makers and members of a collectivity. In the end, statehood – through nationhood, via ethnicity – may appear the winner of this process, whose attraction depends on the interaction of different needs, including the ethnic collective wish of being simultaneously equals to the ‘others’ and protected in their own difference. However, whether this perception of statehood is indeed the ‘winner’ is still to be seen, because the process of reshaping geopolitics and loyalties may have endless consequences. 3 Multiplying states or the attractiveness of purity The emotional dimension, as well as the interaction of statehood and nationhood, is not the sole factor that makes state multiplication attractive. In order to implement partition/dismemberment, a key role is played by the will, or the need of local elites to protect their position and their control over the available resources. In other words, partition and/or dismemberment become attractive when strong material interests of the local elites meet the moral expectations of group equality and the cultural vacuum of the population, in a context where democracy does not work or works badly. By local elites,

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we mean mainly policy makers, public administrators and intellectuals, while entrepreneurs do not seem to have contributed actively and predominantly in partitioning processes. At least, the experiences of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia offer evident examples of the role played by local and intellectual elite in encouraging fragmentation. Truly, one can argue that entrepreneurship did not exist in the communist world. However, technocrats were increasingly influential and wielded a significant control over the levers of power. Nonetheless, they have been generally pushed to the background by administrators and humanists who controlled two crucial fields for implementing partition: the territory and the mythology. Claims to history, to a long-term continuity of a community and to group equality are part of the symbolic effort of attracting consensus for the implementation of this alternative. In the political contexts where the bourgeoisie has been traditionally weak or absent, representatives of studies in philosophy, literature, philology, history of arts and history of the Middle Ages have repeatedly pretended to interpret the ‘consciousness of the people’, its sense of continuity and belonging. Their key role was however threatened by the increasing relevance of technocrats in the late communist societies. It was not a case that intellectuals of humanities were among the first to outline alternative political programmes to communist leaders in both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Consistently with primordialism, they appealed to emotions and a specific interpretation of cultural peculiarities in order to maintain an influential role over the population, mobilize it and develop an alliance with public administrators against technocrats. The ‘purity’ of culture and the purity of nation has been proposed to the population as a fundamental factor of collective protection, stability and security. In their turn, public administrators found the proposal consistent with their interests, which were solidifying thanks to the communist deregulation of politics.23 In fact, with the deregulation of politics in the 1960s and 1970s, European communist societies accomplished different degrees of devolution of the economic system, which had an unpredicted effect on the local administrators. Indeed, in a context deprived of democratic rules and mechanisms, local leaderships were encouraged by devolution to strengthen dependence on territory and local resources, in order to preserve power and get support from the population. Ideally, communism remained, in these conditions, the most powerful social glue. However, when communism collapsed, those societies where cultural plurality cohabited with economic devolution had suddenly to cope with a widely perceived sense of vacuum, while the functioning of democracy had still to be established.24 In these conditions, the call to purity offered a new opportunity of mobilizing the consent of the population, giving to the people the sense, or the illusion, that the cultural vacuum can be rapidly overcome. Meanwhile, a merciless struggle for reforms could start in order to define the lines of development and the source of power during the transition phase to democracy and market economy. Within this context, political leaderships generally identified their power basis with the control over local resources and their legitimacy with local group identities. The Czechoslovak case was only in part different from the Soviet and the Yugoslav in the sense that the alliance between administrators and intellectuals of humanities played a less devastating role than in the others. Indeed, the legacies of the Prague spring and the experience of ‘Charta 77’ allowed the dissent to follow different patterns of reference from the nationalist one. Therefore, sensitivity to ethno cultural contrasts had restricted

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opportunities to develop. This is why the decision of partition/ dismemberment has been more confined to the political/administrative sphere and the spreading of hatred has been contained.25 On the contrary, in Yugoslavia, in the Caucasus and in Moldavia the alliance between intellectuals of humanities and local administrators was established in a persuasive way. Accordingly, this event has proved how the interpretation of culture as a factor of separateness can be used for strengthening animosities, rivalries and violence. Instead, thanks to the legacy of Khrushchevism and the critical support to perestroika given by a significant part of the intelligentsia, Russia has suffered less than Yugoslavia from the alliance between administration and intellectuals, at least in terms of violence. In the end, the communist experience shows that nationhood and state dismemberment become extremely attractive, when the pre-existing deregulation of politics meets the collapse of ideological legitimization. Moreover, the fact that local material interests meet a society affected by a deep ideological crisis, when democracy is not functioning or is inefficient, makes the geopolitical reshaping of statehood/nationhood a powerful instrument in the hands of administrators and local officials. Meanwhile, intellectuals of humanities offer to them the key for achieving legitimization and controlling loyalties. In these terms, the process of partition/dismemberment seems to be connected to what extent statehood, nationhood and the will of the ruling class or the political elite (to preserve or establish their control over the access to the resources in a certain territory) mutually interact. In addition to that, there is room for the persistence of an ideological vacuum and the rooting of hopeless feelings in the population if democracy proves to be inefficient in the struggle against socially sanctioned phenomena, such as criminality or corruption. Especially in newly democratic countries, the uncertain situation in terms of security may open the doors to new clashes for reforms and the controls over the levers of power, which might imply a redefinition of territories and loyalties. In this context, leading political communities have to face further partition/dismemberment steps. As a result, the ‘matrioshka’ process confirms to be – under these conditions – an endless process. 4 Political destinies of partition The historical experience of the last two centuries shows that partition is an event that has far-reaching consequences. As a result, states threatened by partitions and successor states may have quite different destinies. Even the pattern followed in implementing partition is different, although violence is generally the rule. In other words, history shows that, with the exception of the examples of the kingdom of Sweden in 1905 and the federal republic of Czechoslovakia in 1993, partition is a violent event. This event is preceded by increasing sharp contrasts and implemented through bloodshed, wars (which often occurs repeatedly in the decades that follow the partition itself) and an increasing victimization of the civil population, rather than the military. In this context, and according to both the political experience and the pathways in action worldwide, it is possible to draw a map of the destinies that have or may have an impact on geopolitics, statehood and identities, by influencing or even upsetting the everyday life of individuals and families. The map may include the following destinies: a. States rejecting partition. History has plenty of examples of violent crackdown on claims and attempts at secession, which is considered the most ideological and substantial

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tool used for the accomplishment of a state partition. Resistance to partition is part of the ‘struggle for survival’ that existing political societies engage in. Sometimes, we have examples of a peacefully rejected partition: this is the case in Italy which avoided the secession of Sicily, after the Second World War, by granting a specific status to the island. On the contrary, Italy was unable to avoid peacefully the attempts at secession from Südtirol in the 1960s, when terrorism exploded, so that both crackdown and negotiation (with Austria) had to be pursued. By contrast, Nigeria and the fate of Biafra in the 1960s are a significant example of violent state behaviour to protect itself. Similarly, for the (Belgian) Congo and Katanga. Other cases are characterized by a long period of tensions and war, stemming from the fact that both resistance to, and attempts at, secession may last for decades, because no one is able to prevail. Amongst these cases, we can recall those of Sri Lanka and the Tamils, or of Ethiopia and the Eritreans. In the former, resistance has shown to be more successful; in the latter, secession has been achieved, at least in a long run. In other words, secession (or the fear of it) encourages resistance, but the outcome is unpredictable and depends on the balance of power, which is evolving, either domestically or internationally, according to the events. b. States dissolved by partition. This is the opposite case to the previous one. It occurs when a state is unable to resist partition and consequently dissolves. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are the most recent examples. Actually, the latter peacefully disappeared, while the Soviet Union attempted to resist by using both negotiations and force. However, violence remained limited to a few episodes (the most relevant of these was the crackdown that occurred in Lithuania in January 1991). The negotiation was sanctioned by the Treaty of Novo-Ogarëvo, which was never signed because of the palace coup of August 1991. In the end, the USSR disappeared because its most relevant component, Russia, was interested in dismantling it. As for Yugoslavia, we can have two different interpretation of its dissolution, according to whether Serbian and Yugoslav interests are identified. If they are identified, Yugoslavia collapsed during a long and bloody civil war; if they are not, resistance has characterized the attempt of the federation to stop by the use of force the Slovene secession only. When the attempt failed, in a couple of weeks, the federation collapsed. The armed conflicts, which followed chronologically, should be interpreted in the light of the incompatible aims of the successor states and the prevailing trend of ‘matrioshka’-proliferating secessions (see section e). c. States partitioned into two subjects. This was the case in Sweden in 1905, when Norway became independent; or, again, this was the case in Czechoslovakia in 1993. Both were implemented peacefully. A similar destiny of partition might be predicted for Israeli and Palestine, in the event that UN decisions are carried out in the years to come. In this case, however, violence – instead of a peaceful agreement – is the rule that precedes a possible partition, as for the United Kingdom and Ireland in 1921. Similarly, partition and violence threaten the Philippines, which have to cope with Southern Muslim secession claims, while Cyprus, where a Northern Turkish republic was established in 1983, suffers from a constant low level of violence mainly along the entities’ borders. In Europe, another potential case of partition is that of Belgium, where the tensions between Flamand and Vallon communities threatened the stability of the state in the 1990s. d. States partitioned into more subjects. This is a case stemming from a variety of claims of independence nourished by different groups. These groups are generally withdrawing

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into broad-sized states or states where the authority is difficult to establish, either because of weak and discredited leaderships or because of a fragmented territory difficult to be controlled. One possible example of the former category of broad-sized states is China, threatened by the independent claims of Tibet and Sinkjang. In the latter category are Indonesia, which has to face claims from Irian Jaya and Timor, and Zaire-Congo after the Mobutu overthrow. Nonetheless, the variety of states that potentially may suffer from a similar destiny is broader than one may expect: in principle, in fact, both Spain and Great Britain – which are ‘strong’ states in terms of effectiveness and exercise of powers – may face challenges from Catalonia, Euzkadi, Scotland or Wales. e. Partitions generating partitions. Historically, this option seems to have been the most frequent one. In general, partitions were successfully achieved, although the use of force and different degrees of violence have characterized the event. The partition of Yugoslavia, for example, did not generate only a series of successor states. These states also suffered from similar processes of partition. Croatia had to deal with the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Bosnia-Herzegovina faced the creation of Republika Srpska and HercegBosna, as well as the project of Muslimanija. Rump Yugoslavia faced the issue of Kosovo and ran the risk of facing additional controversies with Vojvodina, Montenegro and Sandjak; Macedonia had to cope with the aspirations of Ilirida. Similarly, British India suffered from Indian and Pakistani partition; then, Pakistan suffered from Bangladeshi secession. Still, the fates of Kashmir, Beluchistan, Punjab, Assam and Tamil Nadu are on the agenda, although with a different capacity of influencing the context. In its turn, the democratic and developed Canada is threatened by similar prospects. The claim for independence from Quebec has encouraged Cree and Inuit populations of Quebec to claim independence, in the event that Quebec got it at the referendum, which was held in 1995. Since then, they stay firmly in their position. Another example that confirms how partitions can generate partitions is that of the Soviet Union. Its collapse has been followed not only by the emergence of fifteen successor states, but also by a new phase of partitions; Moldavia suffered from the secession of Transnistria and Gagauzia; Azerbaijan from NagornoKarabakh; and Georgia from Abkhazia and Ajaria. Russia itself had to cope with the independent claims of Chechnya, Daghestan, Bashkiria and, to a certain extent, even of Iacutia-Sakha. f. Partitions imposed by partitions. This is a specific case, which occurs when the will of partitioning a state generates the need for partitioning subregions. British India experimented with this trend when India and Pakistan had to establish their borders. The Punjab was partitioned, while Western Bengal was excluded from Eastern Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Similarly, the independence of Slovenia and Croatia has provoked the partition of Istria, while at the end of the Second World War the newly established Yugoslav federation split Sandjak into two parts, between Serbia and Montenegro. Similarly, many projects of partitioning Kosovo were discussed between Serbian and Albanian representatives in the 1990s, and the prospect is still on the agenda. g. Partitions generating international frameworks of states. This is the case of the British Empire, whose partition worldwide has generated the Commonwealth as a weaker form of links aimed at maintaining a certain degree of contacts (and, possibly, dependence) between the Centre and its colonies. A similar process characterized the Soviet collapse, when the three presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed the Belovezhkaya Accords. Then, a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was set up as a new

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international regime aimed at liquidating the Soviet Union by consensus and preserving a connection among its constitutive republics under a possible Russian hegemony. h. Partitions generating different state aggregations. In this case, partitions do not divide states only, but operate as a geopolitical reshaping of the neighbouring countries, which are not necessarily affected by partition but can benefit territorially from it, by including partly or totally the newly partitioned area. As an example, the partition of the Austrian and Russian Empires in 1917–1918 made possible the unification of Polish lands and the creation of a Great Romania through the inclusion of Bessarabia and Transylvania in the Regat (the old kingdom). The supporters of a Great Serbia and a Great Croatia have actively pursued a similar goal during the twentieth century, as did the supporters of a Great Albania, by trying to carry out either the separation of Kosovo from Serbia or of Ilirida from Macedonia. ‘Partitioned nations’ without a state are other potential protagonists of similar outcomes. In this case, they need to rely on a series of secessions, which have to affect two or more neighbouring states in a region, in order to start a new process of aggregation. Kurdistan and Euzkadi are just two potential candidates of such a pathway. i. Hidden partitions. This case should be taken into consideration in principle, although there are no successful examples to be mentioned. The attempts at creating confederations are a sort of hidden partition, in the sense that they promote very weak ties by substituting pre-existing links. In fact, confederations configure a separation of two or more political subjects despite the preservation of a common ‘roof’, which is more a formality than a reality. A pre-modern example of confederation was the Holy Roman Empire. In modernity, a similar status has been claimed by the Sonderbund in Switzerland or by the Confederate States of the United States on the eve of the civil war. Similar prospects were nourished by Slovenia towards Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s. In recent times, something similar to a confederation has emerged within rump Yugoslavia, whose constituent republics, namely Serbia and Montenegro, were de facto divided, in spite of the fact that common institutions still formally exist. The map of possible destinies that states might experience when partition is emerging as a substantial political event is wide indeed, and no one can predict how it should be implemented. We don’t have here any pretension of offering to the reader an exhaustive and systematic map of all the possible partitions worldwide. Instead, by reconsidering historical facts and potential claims, the aim is to explore the variety of ways out that partitions offer to the existing political societies. It is quite evident that, in principle, all countries may be threatened by such a phenomenon, but the outcome may not be the same. Still, ethnic and religious identities appear to be the most powerful levers of partitions, although they need to meet substantial interests of a political elite, in order to achieve the goal, as described in the previous paragraphs. In other words, should partition be pursued substantially, statehood must become attractive. At the same time, it has to be stressed that the outcome of a partition will not necessarily be the accomplishment of a sovereign state or an internationally recognized state. On the contrary, we have many examples of partitions that have generated pseudostates, namely states that enjoy very low, or any, international recognition. This is a quite different notion from that used by authors who studied the post-colonial world and referred to the lack of marks and merits of sovereignty, as emerged in Europe after the Westphalian Peace Treaty.26 By contrast, the main reference is here to a specific situation

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based on the existence of a high level of territorial control established by a local leadership, in spite of, or against, the decisions of the international community agencies. In this respect, Northern Cyprus is the most evident case.27 Other pseudostates have been recently created in Europe, and particularly in Kosovo, Transdniestria and Chechnya, where the isolation of the local ruling class, its need to preserve the power and the persistence of armed conflicts with neighbours have created a situation based on violence, as well as grounds for the development of criminality and illegal traffic in arms, drugs and bodies. Sometimes pseudo-states have not lasted long, as in the case of Southern Albania during the 1997 collapse, but their impacts have had far-reaching consequences in the wider regional context. Consequently, pseudo-states are also a potential destiny of a partition process, when this event, even if temporary, takes place in marginalized and destructured areas, where clashing international interests are low, or too dangerous for world peace (because they can provoke a nuclear confrontation between great powers). In the end, the map of the possible state reconfigurations through partition emphasizes the fact that its main lever is crucially represented by the nation-state; namely, a form of state which is considered – by the political elite and a significant part of the population – as a goal in itself. This goal has shown effectiveness in granting legitimacy to ruling classes in modern times. In addition, this goal is perceived as an expression of democracy, because it is connected to the idea of self-determination. As a result, the nexus of partition and democracy requires a specific investigation that needs to take into consideration the empirical dynamics that characterize the impressive and rapid changes that occurred in social, economic and cultural relations in the twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries. III Challenges for a changing world 1 Partition and democracy Robert K. Shaeffer, in the introduction to his book on partitions, says that ‘Great Britain partitioned Ireland, India and Palestine along ethnic lines, largely to solve problems associated with “decolonization”…’.28 It has to be noted that not one of the ethnic partitions promoted by Great Britain has been successful. On the contrary, they have generated new tensions and rivalries, which are still upsetting the agendas of the international community. It seems an irony that the country where democracy in the form of originated the Magna Carta (1215), and individual rights have been consistently developed since then, through the liberal thought and the idea of the civic nation, has ultimately decided to use ethnicity as a criterion for partition. To make the issue worse, many studies confirm that the United Kingdom has supported and constructed ethnic divisions in its colonies, before transferring the power to independence movements.29 The fact that a country where the individual rights are the rule has promoted ethnic collective rights worldwide is the first paradox. A second paradox concerns democratic countries as a whole, in the sense that they have no convincing and effective policies when partition is appearing on the agenda elsewhere. No strategies, for instance, have been prepared for preventing or, at least,

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managing either the Yugoslav partition, or the Ethiopian, either the Cypriot or the Palestinian, and either the Irish or the Indian. In few words, democracy seems to have no tools in facing partition. When the Yugoslav collapse began, a shared opinion in Europe (stimulated by partitioners) believed that partition was the only feasible solution to avoid war when two or more ethic or religious groups declare the impossibility of living together.30 According to this view, the risk of war was inherent in the resistance of the pre-existing state in permitting partition. As a result, the reasoning has attributed to the state the role of antidemocratic force and to the secessionists the role of democrats. Truly, the fact that Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were, at that time, still led by a communist leadership (although open-minded and promoting reform) helped in identifying the pre-existing state as an anti-democratic force. However, democracies in the West greatly underestimated the risk of the proliferation of ethnic claims of independence. Still, there are plenty of examples where (ethnic) secessionists do not recognize rights to their own minorities, oppose their claim to partition or provoke wars with neighbours in order to settle pre-existing territorial accounts. In fact, this happened. Nonetheless, the confusion between an anti-democratic political legacy and the idea that common institutions should have to be dismantled instead of being reformed the significantly contributed to spread of an oversimplified picture of ethnic secessionism as a democratic movement.31 Incidentally, it should be noted that only two peaceful examples of partition along ethnic lines occurred in the world during the twentieth century, so that Sweden and Czechoslovakia appear to be just the exceptions that confirm the rule. However, even in these cases the appeals to democracy require caution. In fact, when Norway and Sweden split after holding a referendum in 1905, the partition concerned a personal dynastic union, established in 1814 with quite different characteristics from those of the nation-state. As for Czechoslovakia, the country experimented with a peaceful secession without democratic performance. Actually, secession was carried out under a decision made by two political parties in a few weeks. These parties, which got a relative majority in their districts only, opted for the partition of the country once they had verified the incompatibility of their economic and social programmes. Without any electoral campaign in favour of or against the federation, and without holding a referendum (as required by the constitutional law no. 327/91), they mutually convened that the dismemberment was preferable, despite the polls revealing that the majority of both Czech and Slovaks opposed the dissolution of the state.32 It can be convincingly argued that, as we saw in the previous pages, limitations in the exercise of democratic rule and lack of democratic attitudes create a favourable environment for the accomplishment of claims for secession in the so-called multinational countries. The communist experience, irrespective of the Czechoslovak exception, has confirmed this assumption. The post-colonial world had a similar experience. In this case, countries with democratic traditions, for example the United Kingdom and France, did not root democracy in their colonies. Rather, through their imperial conduct, an authoritarian behaviour has characterized the administration of the colonies: in these contexts, animosities along ethnic or religious lines have been encouraged, when necessary, on the basis of the motto ‘divide and rule’.

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In contrast to these backgrounds, the Western experience shows that democracy, at least, may help in containing tensions. This has been the case of Canada/Quebec, which has so far avoided partition, despite the persistence of a fluctuating degree of animosity between the Anglophone, Francophone and Native American communities. Spain, in turn, has been able to find a viable solution with the Catalan community, although the question of the Basque Provinces remains open and a request for holding a referendum has been raised by local Basque authorities.33 In sum, democracy is powerless when confronting partition claims. States mostly improvise the situation and act according to the existing balance of powers, despite the fact that international law restricts the access to the right of self-determination to the peoples subjugated to a colonial power, or under a foreign or racist domination.34 Crucially, partition lacks mechanisms that permit or reject this option democratically. Western democratic constitutions do not include the right of secession. A partial exception is that of Canada, where the answers of the Supreme Court to three questions submitted by the Canadian government in 1996 have given the floor to some basic rules to be followed in the event of partition. The Supreme Court, in fact, strictly connected the principles of democracy to the federal framework of the Canadian state. Consistent with this, the Supreme Court stated that a referendum does not offer a legal basis for a unilateral secession, but only a ‘clear orientation’ of the majority of the population in a province. The consequence of such a referendum, according to the Reference Jurisdiction of 1998, leads to a compulsory commitment of all parties of the federation to start negotiations on constitutional amendments in order to secede by constitutional means. Negotiations should concern topics such as federalism, democracy, constitutionalism, the rule of law and the respect of minorities, as well as the reconciliation of various rights and obligations. Nonetheless, the Canadian Court admits the possibility that negotiations fail: whether such an event would occur, the Court lacks the ability to offer viable alternative legal solutions. The issue involves politics and the willingness of the international community to grant or withhold recognition to a de facto secession. In conclusion, the Court significantly admits that ‘such recognition, even if granted, would not however provide any retroactive justification for the act of secession, either under the Constitution of Canada or at international law’.35 Still, the Constitution of the United States does not provide any legitimacy to other nations. Furthermore, the United States faced a civil war in order to prevent state partition in the nineteenth century. Switzerland experienced similar developments in 1847 at the time of the Sonderbund riot. However paradoxical it may sound, partition has been opposed militarily by countries that have made democracy part of their myths of legitimization and political praxis. This contradictory background is relevant in order to explain why democracy is powerless in treating the question of self-determination. Statehood and separation – or the right of preservation and the right of dismantling pre-existing orders – are conflicting. The democratic political praxis has a contradictory experience and democratic theories are largely unsatisfactory in dealing with the matter. President Woodrow Wilson, when drafting his Fourteen Points Address on 8 January, 1918, restricted significantly the right to independence to Poland only, whereas, so far, both Central Empires and the Entente nations have sought to encourage partitions not as a right, but instrumentally, in order to weaken the enemy and establish protectorates over

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the severed territories. Wilson’s statement caught the world by surprise and disappointed many allies, in particular the Czechs, Slovaks and Southern Slavs, who claimed independence. Nonetheless, his aim was to hinder the eventual attraction of the peoples of Central Europe to Bolshevism. For this reason he decided to compete with Lenin’s declaration on the ‘Rights of Peoples of Russia to Self-determination’, made on 15 November 1917, using his own terminology. In fact, Wilson did not want to dismember countries, including Austria, and, consistently with this premise, he restricted his formulation to the ‘opportunity for autonomous development’ of the other peoples (as in his Point 10). The fact that, ten months later, he was forced by the events to reformulate exactly Point 10 is a clear sign of the powerless effort made by him, in order to limit the implementation of this right.36 Since then, democratic countries adopted uncertain positions, sometimes supporting, sometimes opposing self-determination. It is a matter of fact that, when the negotiation for the Charter of the UN started, the proposal submitted to Dumbarton Oaks did not include any statement on self-determination. Its inclusion was connected to the need for facing the emergence of post-colonial independence and due mostly, if not exclusively, to the requests of the Soviet Union.37 Still, at the end of the century, facing the beginning of the Yugoslav secession war, it was the turn of the Prime Minister of Spain, Felipe Gonzales, to express doubts on the applicability of self-determination. Once again, his concern was mainly related to the risk of a ‘matrioshka’ process, namely an endless proliferation of state partitions.38 Like democratic countries, even the communist world, while proclaiming the right of secession, never established mechanisms for its possible implementation. This was consistent with the Lenin statement, which warned the working class to consider that the claim might not correspond to its interest, because a state needed a ‘minimum size’ for surviving. As a personality with a background largely rooted in the nineteenth-century political culture, the Bolshevik leader suggested a thesis, which had been expressed by Mazzini five decades earlier. This thesis still had validity; it mirrored an idea of state based on a self-capacity of production and consumption through protectionist policies. By the way, this experience – along with the internationally imposed isolation – significantly contributed to the construction of a communist protectionism in economics in the decades to follow. Ideologically, the communist Yugoslav position on self-determination was Leninist both in form and in content; and self-determination was mentioned by a short sentence in the constitutional introduction of 1974, just to stress that the will of the people had made the creation of Yugoslavia possible. No other details have been added. Czechoslovak constitutional law adopted a slightly similar approach in 1968: its introduction specifies that federal links are the expression of the rights of self-determination and equality between the two nations of the Czechs and Slovaks.39 As a result, however, communist constitutions did not provide regulations on self-determination at all. Meanwhile, the claims of self-determination, which stemmed from the decolonization process and emerged in the territories under the jurisdiction of the colonial empires, strengthened a worldwide perception that the process of colonies’ independence mirrored a democratization of international relations. This perception, however, was restricted – once more – to the administrative entities of the colonial empires, and openly rejected when claims of independence affected their integrity (as in many cases in Africa),

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because of the increasing concerns related to the risks of a ‘matrioshka’ process, as a legacy of the criteria used by great powers in drawing their colonial maps. Similarly, when communism collapsed, the Western world positively commented on the claims of independence of Slovenia, Croatia, the Baltic States and later Ukraine as expression of the freedom of people, who wanted to join the ‘democratic world’ and abandon the ‘Eastern autocracy’. The reaction was to a large extent instrumental to the political confrontation against communism, as Brzezinski pointed out in a conference in Stockholm in the mid 1980s; when commenting on Yugoslavia, he suggested following a double strategy based on support for local communism against the USSR and simultaneous support for the competing Southern Slavs’ nationalisms against local communism.40 Later, when Yugoslav communism became a bloody event and a chain of secessions with far-reaching consequences on the regional plan had been experimented with as a ‘matrioshka’ process, Western behaviour changed again and enthusiasms for self-determination froze. As in politics, the relationship between independence and democracy has not been solved in theory either. Different contributions related to liberal theory have tried to outline democratic rules and procedures for carrying out secession. These efforts are well known. They have been commented on and discussed extensively in academic journals, but the issue has remained controversial.41 In particular, the substantial problems of minorities within minorities, and that of population transfers, have challenged the efforts for a democratic, or liberal, theory of secession. The similarities, which emerged in the first half of the 1990s between the cases of Serbs in Yugoslavia, Serbs in Croatia and Croats in Serbian Krajina (just to make an example), and the chain of the Canada– Quebec– Cree and Inuit areas, have clarified how even democracy is powerless in facing the perspective of an endless process of statehood/nationhood. Furthermore, political praxis and theory in the democratic field have no answers about the rights of people who must adapt their national identity according to the triumphant partitioned solution. When India and Pakistan split, many individuals and family were compelled to accept Indian or Pakistan identity only. Any other identity was denied, although there were plenty of them in British India. Otherwise, people had to agree to become a minority or stateless. A similar destiny has been experienced by those who have declared themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ and by ethnically mixed families of former Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs lost their identity when the state collapsed. They lost even the name of their identity because Milosevic stole the name of the country for political reasons and they did not wanted to identify themselves with his policy. At the same time, ethnically mixed families dramatically faced the situation, suffered from their own ‘inner’ partition, or were forced to flee the country or had to face tremendous efforts in order to save their stability.42 On these issues, democracy has dramatically failed in the 1990s. No ideas have been provided in order to protect the rights of this part of the population. In fact, their human rights have been denied and democracy was unable to protect them. Crucially, state partition/dismemberment is not only a question of rules. Democracy cannot be evoked only in relation to the procedures for dissolving a political community. The dramatic event of a partition shows that democracy is intimately connected to the ways in which a political society is constructed. These societies are required to manage differences because plurality is a norm in any context where individuals share a set of

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values and codes. In other words, the intensification of partition as a political phenomenon (following the pattern of the ‘matrioshka’ process) is compelling democracy to reshape a set of rules of conduct, representation and coexistence, which should be able to deal with the complexity of a society, granting equality of treatment. This challenge is a cornerstone for democracy in our time. 2 Sharing differences and secularizing relationships The question of democracy and plurality can also be seen from a different angle, connected with the compatibility, or incompatibility, between democracy and nation-state homogenization. To what extent, in fact, can the homogenization required by a nationstate interact with an increasing plural society, where multiple identities, interests and needs work simultaneously, without depressing or even violating them? To what extent can the respect of differences and the shared sense of belonging to a community be managed, before the dissolution prevails? When these questions arise, the main references of the nation-state and its legitimacy are deeply questioned, because this state form appears powerless in offering democratic solutions to them, without affecting its peculiarities. Conceptually, ‘homogenization’ means that one culture, one religion, one language and one history make a nation. This approach has been emphasized in political documents since the American Constitution of 1789 that ‘undermined the monistic interpretation of the people’s will’ as Gale Stokes admits.43 Since then, the predominance of a patriarchal set of values, based on a hierarchical structure of monistic (or homogeneous) categories, has informed the nation-state-building process. Nonetheless, democracy and the will of participation/inclusion in the institutional framework of a society have gradually challenged this reference. Individuals and groups, claiming the respect of their rights and their collective freedom of sharing sets of values, have become increasingly aware that nation and people do not coincide with the existence of the ‘one’. ‘One’ implies uniqueness, while the idea of ‘sharing’ implies the consciousness of a coexistence of both plurality and communality. Take, for instance, religion. Some prescriptions can easily be followed by the whole political society, but others are quite difficult to accept. If murder and theft are generally sanctioned and social solidarity may be supported, issues like divorce, abortion, offences against the body or food obligations are deeply controversial. In this context, it is practically impossible to identify democracy with the homogenization of a society to religious prescriptions. By contrast, democracy can easily be identified with a shared set of rules that permit the peaceful interactions of different religions and beliefs. A similar approach can be considered for identities. A state should not have necessarily one identity only. Individuals and groups have more identities and should have the right to express all of them. In addition, ‘outer’ subjects cannot establish hierarchical relations of identities on their behalf. Gender theories are strongly challenging, in this respect, nation-state homogenization as a product of a hierarchical male approach. Patriarchy has played a crucial role in this sense. The evidence – stressed by the feminist approach to gender relations and state construction – that differences in thinking, in the organization of labour and in the ways of conduct are related to the body has far-reaching consequences for the future reshaping of societal relationships.

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According to whether a body is prepared for receiving, at least temporarily, another life or not, the implications for the sense of ‘self’ and the sense of ‘other’ differ.44 Starting from this consideration, gender roles and gender relations in a society tend to be recast, with a significant impact on the perceptions of singularity and plurality. In fact, once both genders have the right to actively participate in the decision-making of a society on the basis of the recognition that they are different in views and needs but equal in rights, a crucial determinant of heterogeneity has been introduced in the existing set of rules and codes. At this point heterogeneity begins to play a new role as a determinant of a political society. Implications are far-reaching, because politics is expected to accept plurality as a wealth for their future, recast the contents of societal relationships and concentrate on the regulations that allow the interaction of differences to work with equal rights. As a result, how to manage differences within a shared set of rules, values and codes becomes a strong commitment for democracy. Heterogeneity, instead of homogeneity, emerges as a basic characteristic of a democratic state, where nationhood appears to be one, however important, but not unique component. Consequently, a crucial pillar of the nation-state (namely, the uniqueness of nationhood) becomes obsolescent in comparison with the democratic needs of a developed articulated society. In this context, gender theories appear to be better equipped than the traditional liberal theory to interpret the social changes that are characterizing the post-nation-state societies. They offer new insight in the relations between the singular and the plural, forcing the group to review beliefs, expectations, foci of identification and their cultural perceptions.45 The existence of multiple identities and their right to be expressed by individuals and groups, instead of accepting an imposed homogeneity, is one of the innovative approaches, which has emerged in the years when partition has extensively characterized the post-Cold War period. The search of the ‘pure atom’, which has obsessed Balkan nationalisms and religious fanaticism worldwide, is contrasted by a view that emphasizes social plurality and rights equality. The consideration has further implication for the codes that, opposing the ethnos to the demos, denote the common origin of a political community and attribute to it a determinant role in the distinction from otherness. Culture is among these codes. The partition process in Eastern Europe has systematically taken its first steps from culture and the will of protecting cultural specificities. The Balkan anthropologists of the beginning of the nineteenth century, the role played by the reading rooms (~itaonice, ~italnice, etc.) in the midst of that century, the creation of the Rada and Rukh movements in Ukraine in 1917 and, in the 1980s, of Pamjat in Russia, and the role played by the Serbian Academy of Science are just a few examples of it. In Asia the process was similar, in the sense that religion, in its claim for Hindu, Pakistani or Kalistan nations, has however informed culture. The basic argument in all these cases has been that different nations have different cultures. Then, a second argument has been added in order to justify the request for partition: this argument was based on the threats of cultural extinction suffered by a minority, which claims its own state in order to preserve it. In this view, culture is based on customs, traditions, a strong religious identification, a distinguished historical continuity, and a peculiarity of arts and handcrafts. Generally, this is a ‘constructed’ culture, often reduced to just folklore, and

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which erases all the components and the contributions that came gradually from the outer world. By contrast and consistently with the gender approach, culture is however a multiple product of the human experience in a certain territory. The ability of the performance is based on the degree of elaboration and the plurality of suggestions received and the syncretism, which is stemming from the elaboration itself. The culture of the Adriatic basin, which is considered one of the highest expressions of world culture, has been generated by a wide series of contributions. A distinction of these contributions is impossible, unless the regional culture itself is evicted and annihilated. Once again, a pillar of nation-state homogeneity is questioned, as the pretended uniqueness of culture, in a broad sense, might become a serious source of animosities, rivalries and even armed confrontations. In this framework, the secularization of the societal relationships in religion, culture and identities becomes a cornerstone for the survival of a society. Secularization allows the coexistence of differences, and encourages their interaction and a flow of communication in plural contexts. In these terms, secularization is not a new religion (as sometimes claimed, for example in France) or a tool for giving preferences to a belief at the detriment of another one. On the contrary, the secularization of relationships is a method of working that recognizes the plurality and deals with it, by building a mutual trust between groups and encouraging the identification of the rules for a common life. As a result, ‘sharing differences’ is not a paradox, but a pathway for recognizing differences and granting equal rights within a common framework of values and rules. In turn, secularization appears to be a crucial tool that allows relationships to work and hinders attempts to worship the uniqueness of religion, language, culture, identity and history as a pattern for priming endless, or ‘matrioshka’, partitions. 3 Sovereignty reshaped The process of partitioning countries is furthermore connected to sovereignty, which secessionists lay claim to. Their arguments are generally based on a right that should be ‘re-established’, since sovereignty has been extorted in the past from their nation by an empire or a neighbouring country, or simply because sovereignty can guarantee security and the protection of a – so far – threatened group. This claimed sovereignty is identified with its absolute principle, as it emerged in Europe after the Westphalia Treaty of 1648. Nonetheless, partitioned states enjoy in most cases a relative sovereignty, both because they are weaker than the previous political entities and because the exercise of sovereignty after the Second World War, but mostly after the Cold War, has been reshaped, shifting to different levels.46 In other words, the process of sovereignty containment is not only a question of balance of power that allows the US to enjoy a definitively higher degree of sovereignty than San Marino. Instead, it is a question connected, once again, to the changes that are occurring in societal relationships worldwide.47 In Europe, successor states of former socialist federations wield sovereignty in restricted forms, in comparison to the previous federations. As an example, Croatia or Serbia today are much less sovereign than former Yugoslavia and have to adapt themselves to the requests of international agencies (such as the World Bank or the

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ICTY) or the international community. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo are de facto international protectorates. However, even countries that did not face partition are enjoying a relative sovereignty: Romania and Bulgaria do not control their currency, since an international board has been established. Candidate countries to the European Union are dealing with negotiations that are based on harmonization, while twelve EU member-states have shifted their sovereignty to a supranational level with the establishment of the Euro. As for post-colonial countries, plenty of studies have distinguished positive from negative sovereignty and analysed the substantial limitations within which the newly independent states may act autonomously. Scholars have used the term of quasi-state in order to refer properly to this specific situation.48 Incidentally, it should also be noted that the nation-state did not exist yet, when absolute sovereignty emerged as a predominant category in international relations (1648). At that time, however, the main concern was connected to the need for avoiding new religious wars in Europe. The decision to put an end to the dual legitimacy of the Emperor and the Pope and substitute it with a balanced framework of sovereign states, whose ‘Prince’ received the legitimization directly from God, was at the origin of the absolute principle of sovereignty. However, when the nation-state emerged, sovereignty gradually assumed a new meaning, because the source of power legitimization radically changed. Appeals to the people, la patrie, or the nations have made sovereignty increasingly popular in connection with the ability of political leader-ships in getting loyalty from the population, in a context where economic protectionism was possible. This connection has been based on a search for cultural and identity homogenization, which was consistent with the needs of the industrial revolution and the sense of security.49 Since then, however, further radical social transformations have taken place. Ideological homogenization has generated Nazism and the Second World War, while communist attempts at homogenizing populations rapidly failed, with many phenomena of resistance, including dissent and the formation of an underground society. When communism collapsed, ethnicity – as a determinant of nationhood – sought to establish new forms of homogenization and provoke a chain of violent partitions. Meanwhile, political societies have become increasingly articulated and plural. Interdependence and mobility (as extensively discussed in the pages to follow) are playing an influential role in international relations. All these factors and the historical experience have increasingly clarified that state homogenization has become a factor of insecurity and instability. In the end, the changes that took place particularly in the second half of the twentieth century have initiated a process of reshaping the content of statehood and sovereignty. The former has been influenced by a growing plurality in terms of societal relationships, and the latter by the European integration, or attempts to shift power controls in smaller political units though state partition. In any case, the nation-state form has been significantly challenged and its exercise of sovereignty weakened. 4 From nation-states to networking societies Since nation-states have been established, the flow of social, economic and cultural relations in Europe (and in the world) has been drastically transformed, in terms of form

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and content. Mobility, in particular, has emerged as a key factor of innovation, labour organization and mutual knowledge. Truly, mobility has always characterized human relations, since prehistoric ages. By itself, mobility is not a new phenomenon, and it is inherent to the human nature. Also, the need to seize the control over lands wealthy of food and the increasing commercial interests have been the main levers of mobility for centuries. However, what has been changed in the last decades only is the degree of world mobility, in terms of intensification of cross-border and transnational relationships, with a mass dimension. Actually, over a long historical period, predominant agricultural activities have strongly encouraged the settlement of populations. A significant change took place at the time of the industrial revolution, when mobility was strengthened by the new inventions and the intensifying use of machines. In less than a century, from the end of the nineteenth to the second half of the twentieth century, the speed of moving increased more than thirty times, growing from the 25 km per hour of the horse-drawn carriage to the 800 km per hour of a plane. Nonetheless, the main flows of mobility took place within the growing nation-states and along the rural–urban line. In addition, emigration, for social or political reasons, and the will of conquest – stemming from power politics, or religious politics, or both – have characterized the cross-border and, since then, even ‘trans’national mobility. Within this framework, the nation-states operated up to the end of the Cold War. The Cold War itself powerfully contributed to maintaining settled populations, limiting the flows of mobility within the camps. The situation drastically changed when the Cold War was over. Capitalist–communist ideological contrasts were no longer able to contain mobility, as the iron curtain between the camps suddenly disappeared. A sense of openness spread worldwide. Meanwhile, economics were transforming and overcoming not only state boundaries but also continents, as transnational companies intensively restructured the system of production and labour organization. Along with this, new communication systems were making mobility possible both in physical and virtual terms. The worldwide growth of the internet gave relationships a new dimension, making them unbelievably faster, and more intense and effective. Entrepreneurs, executive leaders and officials; experts, professors and students; and tourists, even workers and heads of departments have started to move, along with the ‘traditional’ mobile personnel, as policy makers, diplomats, immigrants, traders and journalists. In turn, criminality has become an increasingly strong, well-rooted transnational phenomenon and the struggle against it has required the adoption of crucial transnational strategies.50 In this context, the ‘space’ (intended as a territory and a ground for action) of the modern nation-state has become too narrow. Its borders are increasingly crossed, physically or virtually, legally or illegally. As a result, mutual contacts, mutual knowledge and interdependence grow. Individuals worldwide create their own group of reference, or try to be included in other different groups, acting on different subjects. Therefore, networking is emerging as a new form of social relationship. Networks are both physical and virtual. People can meet or communicate in person or at a distance, or both. Most of these networks are transnational, crossing national boundaries and making them obsolete. As a result, identities transform. They may change, or multiply, or enrich. However, they do not stay and they differentiate themselves from structured national identities. Gradually, people involved in networks build a new sense of belonging, which

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is not a negation of the previous (national) one, but is not any more homogeneous, and/or consistent with it. As a result, social and cultural differences, which traditionally articulate a political society by strata within the context of a nation-state, take on a new dimension. They become increasingly transnational, linking the people involved in networks. Making state boundaries porous, social and cultural differences move boundaries from geopolitics to society. Consequently, divisions increase within nationstates and diminish within the members of a network. In other words, thanks to mobility and the needs of mobility expressed by innovation and development, the transnational networking of social relationships is crossing the system of relations established within the nation-state sphere in a variety of forms and contents.51 This change is substantially emphasized by the radical transformation of the systems of transport. High-speed connections and the increasing numbers of flights are overthrowing geography; cities, and particularly the most relevant cities of different countries, enjoy a growing closeness, despite their physical distance in kilometres or miles, while their relations with the countryside are weakening. A sense of distance and alienation between the urban centres and the province has often emerged accordingly. De facto, networking and transport are drawing new lines of social communication and separation. At the same time, these lines do not correspond to state borders and do not take care of existing boundaries. As a result, the pre-existing relations between flexibility and inflexibility, between included and excluded, move to different dimensions. They do not coincide necessarily with the state borders but, developing transnational ties, they create or may create new distinctions within nation-state societies. Simultaneously, they found a constraint in the existing state rigidities and have to adapt themselves to the still inadequate context. The complexity of these societal dynamics tends to generate four main consequences. First, innovation is increasingly dependent on it. Interactive relations are the lever for developing higher technologies, high cultural standards and an improvement in the quality of the life, although with different impacts worldwide. Second, by contrast, inequality within nation-states and in the world becomes more visible and primes increasing social and economic tensions, frustration, animosities and desire for revenge. Fundamentalisms of different origins trace back their origin in this context. It is not by chance that terrorism, as a military arm of these feelings, has tried to hinder mobility, forcing people to ‘stay home’. From the attacks on Italian railway stations or the French metro, to the bombs in planes or the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, it is evident that a common logic is directed against mobility and networking. Third, intercommunication increases cultural contamination or, if we want to use a less crude terminology, international métissage. It is a matter of fact that the flows of relationships influence the language, the cooking, the customs, the way of thinking and the way of looking at reality. Sharing cultural approaches is a new dimension of living together; it is a consequence of international cooperation and networking. As a result, interconnection is a pathway for dialogue and encourages new solidarities across the borders. In a sense, an elite is emerging from the system of contacts worldwide. The ‘new nomadism’ is a typical phenomenon of our time and still needs time to deepen the awareness of the ‘self’, although the process has already started and its impact on the future societal organization is quite difficult to predict.

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Fourth, and a result of the aforementioned trends, the access to development is increasingly connected to innovation and cultural interconnections. In other words, interdependence becomes the only way for inclusion in a developed world. By reaction, a fear of contamination – intended as a fear of loosing specificities – is growing in different countries of the world. The sense of insecurity that is emerging encourages groups of the population and religious personalities to claim protection from the state, or other possible subjects, against otherness. In their view, the ‘new nomadism’ is a way of losing roots and betraying the ‘real’ collective origins of individuals. In order to avoid this risk, they claim the re-establishment, or the protection, of the local peculiarities of the group by raising walls and, if necessary, by dividing societies, in search of the ‘pure atom’. The coexistence of these contradictory aspects is the outcome of a situation where new and old trends interact simultaneously, influencing the whole societal relationship. This paradoxical coexistence can be represented and summarized by the table below. Globalization, in this context, is a quite complex phenomenon, where a simultaneous interaction of different needs and expectations, foci of identification and beliefs, attractiveness and rejection of otherness take place. Consistently, both trends towards integration and fragmentation coexist because of the complexity of the changes that have just started. Furthermore, globalization is a process that occurs worldwide, but it is not connected to an existing form of state. Presumably, it will emerge in the years to come. Nonetheless, the unique form of state that currently exists is the nation-state. And the nation-state, however interpreted, is inadequate to face challenges connected to the increasing globalization of economic, social and cultural relationships. In other words, politics is powerless in tools and interpretative categories for understanding and leading global changes. By contrast, politics deals with tried and tested tools and interpretative categories, although they are connected with the past, rather than with the future. Within this contradictory framework, partition – as a political phenomenon – has been increasingly experimented with or has appeared attractive throughout the world since the end of the Cold War. Thus, partition should also be analysed extensively under this light. The fact that the state by itself is widely considered the only source of rights, able to guarantee and to distribute them, along with the feeling that specificities are threatened while meeting otherness, creates the conditions that generate partitions. Nonetheless, once a partition has been made, the new state is often unable to guarantee, in toto or partially, fundamental rights to its citizens, especially the protection of human rights, so that international agencies have to start to monitor, denounce to and possibly sanction the behaviour of local political leaderships. In some tragic cases, as in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, the United Nations has established international courts, because the local level was unable to guarantee justice. Even existing powerful nation-states have had to accept the idea that justice cannot be guaranteed exclusively at the existing state level. For example, the Court of Luxembourg of the European Union has increasingly intervened in the last decade in order to protect citizens against member-state discriminations. Similar anxieties, shared worldwide, have suggested starting the procedures for establishing an International Crime Tribunal (ICT) and more than forty countries have ratified it within a few years.52 At the same time, the attractiveness of innovation and new communication systems is extremely high, because they guarantee development and opportunities for a better future, encourage networking, and increase

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interdependence and the need to explore new state-building processes through integration. Nation-state societal trends

Post-nation-state societal trends

Absolute sovereignty

Globalization (relativity of sovereignty) Social and other (cultural, social, mental …) (inner) borders Transnational relationships and needsof transnational control over the resources Networking as a form of transnational of relationship along with inter-state relations Plurality of loyalties Plurality of cultures High and intense mobility (new nomadism) Production/development through mobility worldwide Coexistence within societies. Secularized relations for granting peaceful multireligious relationships

Territory and geographical (outer) borders Elites and the access to resources in a territory Nation-state as a monopolistic form international relations Uniqueness of loyalties Uniqueness of culture Settled populations and contained mobility Nation-state (and economic protectionism) Competition and coexistence among nations (idea and homogeneity’s requirements for a collectivity)

Paradoxically enough, partitioned states and political movements supporting partitions often claim their readiness to join globalization, once the new reconfigured state of their hopes has been established. In Canada, for example, Quebec sovereignists openly support NAFTA and continental free trade.53 In Croatia, Tudjman has always proclaimed his Europeanness and the wish to be included in the European integration process. Almost all European separatist nationalisms (in Slovakia, in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Catalonia or Scotland) have made similar statements, in spite of the fact that they interpret their feelings to the detriment of their neighbours and in order to exclude them. However, this paradox should be seen again in the light of the contradictions created by a fast-changing world. Partition seems in this context a convincing tool, able to guarantee the collective protection of homogeneous groups, while the ‘desperate’ need of development and growth encourages a quite opposite approach and the search of inclusion in integration processes.54 Still, contradictions are not over. When ‘no global’ protest against the WTO in Seattle spread worldwide (and particularly in Europe), sovereignists and political parties supporting partitions in Europe (for example in Croatia and Serbia) have joined them with the argument that globalization is a threat to the specificity and the ‘purity’ of (ethnic) nations. In particular, they argue that globalization is an attempt at destroying cultural differences that should be, instead, protected and perpetuated. In other words, they see the ‘no global’ movement as a confirmation of their position, namely a ‘spontaneous’ popular reaction to Americanization and the threats of otherness.55 Actually, they miss noting that globalization is a plural and multilateral, not singular and unilateral, process. Nonetheless, their argument is an interesting paradox, because it claims a legitimization of partition from a global approach, by affirming the global value

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of a right of secession, regardless of the fact that partitioners strongly oppose the implementation of this right, when neighbouring peoples or minorities claim it in their turn. In conclusion, global arguments and partitioning ideas meet each other, in a context of increasing networking, cross-boundary communications and interdependence. As a result, the uselessness of partition coexists with its proliferation, as the expression of an age where societal relationships are rapidly changing, while an inadequate state form survives and a new, convincing or experimented one has not emerged yet. 5 Recasting statehood: the European challenge The fact that societal relationships are changing, but not yet stabilized, creates the conditions for old and new attitudes, behaviours and expectations to meet and clash. As seen, partition is an attempt at answering the fear of interdependence and networking. Partition might also be interpreted as an attempt at rejecting substantially, although not formally (as said), the ‘deep meaning’ (in Braudel terms) of the transformations or, at least, the fear of learning how to deal with the new situation. Because economic structure and economic needs are not any more those of the beginning of the twentieth century, newly partitioned countries generally show poor economic performance, with great dependence on international aid and support. The standard of living for their populations generally declines. However, some of them, in Europe, seem to have had a better destiny, as in the cases of Slovakia and the Czech Republics. Nonetheless, what is interesting in these cases to observe is that a crucial lever for a better economic performance has been offered by the prospect of being included in the first wave of the enlargement of the European Union. Without this goal and the consequent financial support arranged by the European Union through different programmes it is hard to say if similar outcomes would have been achieved. In other words, integration, networking and interdependence could not be avoided. Along with the Czech case, and paradoxically enough, even Slovakia has shown a good performance, for similar reasons and thanks to a significant change of attitudes of the local political leadership. In fact, Slovakia is another possible candidate for inclusion into the EU at the first wave. In a sense, the Czech and Slovak Republics ‘run the risk’ of finding themselves united again in afew years, although within a different, and broader, framework. A similar destiny can be easily predicted, even if in the long run, to the Yugoslavs. In other words, the European experience shows that the existence of a broad institutional framework of integration, however weak and imperfect, is able to attract partitioned states and, through policies of conditionality and specific programmes of sustainability, to gradually erase the conse-quences of previous divisions. The European case is specific, indeed. In fact, this is the most relevant and peaceful attempt at integration, at the continental level, with great ambition, because it aims at attracting closed and self-nourished entities into an interdependent framework, where a significant group of the population moves freely. In doing so and in order to be successful, the project requires a readjustment of institutions and statehood. In other words, in the European context, the only existing alternative to the attempt at imposing ethnic homogenization (as the determinant of

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nationhood) and a distorting democracy – as a set of rules that can be carried out only in homogenized societies – is represented by the European Union, if the EU is able to become a new form of state. The dual policy synthesized in the words of ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ makes clear that EU member states and the Commission aim to make an effort in order to draw a framework able to face a variety of possible challenges coming from a changing world. In this perspective, European integration is not only stemming from the need to cope with economics. Definitely, networking and mobility characterize the large majority of the programmes supported by the Commission. The common currency represents another crucial step towards a common market, which aspires to compete worldwide with the US dollar and US market. However, economics is only part of the experiment that is characterizing relationships in Europe. The other part is strictly related to the need to grant security by avoiding any further military confrontation between France and Germany and the re-emergence of a competing destabilizing policy among European states. In this context, the European Union is a tool for overcoming endless state partition/dismemberment in the continent and the temptation of re-establishing a balance of power, which provoked two terrible wars during the twentieth century. The attempt is under construction, so that both success and failure are possible. Nonetheless, the consequences of a failure are well known, because the collapse of integrative processes will lead inevitably to the experienced balance of power politics. Instead, the way for success has still to be traced and largely depends on the capacity and the will of member-states to define new common rules to make the European Union function. Actually, the EU needs transparency and a consistent support from the population, who are largely sceptical, when the attention is concentrated on the efficiency of institutions. Incidentally, it is a shared opinion that ‘Europe’ is weak or absent from international and domestic affairs, when events need a presence. The consideration is founded on truth. However, this is because the existing balance of power between common institutions and nation-states is drastically in favor the latter. As a result, the balance needs to be redrawn and adapted to the incoming needs, in order to make the EU function more effectively. Indeed, the question is on the agenda of policy makers. It is useful to be reminded here of the controversies related to the decision-making system, to the politics of representation of member-states within the Commission, to the role of the European Parliament, and to the harmonization of the fiscal policies, juridical systems, university and school systems and social policies. Politics pays attention to a few of the core issues. Apparently, all of these issues imply a reconsideration of state prerogatives and a redistribution of sovereignties, loyalties and exercise of powers. The fact that at the Laeken summit of the EU member states in December 2001, at the end of the Belgian presidency, the question of a European Constitution was raised and a specific commission (the European Convention under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing) was set up, in order to find viable proposals for a series of open issues, is a clear-cut confirmation that the prospect of an integrated state is not any more a taboo.56 In this context, it is quite possible that candidate countries will be included in the club after the rules have been changed. In other words, candidate countries are negotiating with a subject that is under construction and this construction may occur before negotiations end. However, in order to avoid this sense of separation the Laeken summit

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has established that candidate countries will participate with their representatives in the works of the European Convention. In sum, it is evident that only an efficient system of rules can support the task of managing an interactive society of more than 300 million inhabitants. This evolution of events may become an attractive framework for stabilizing the weak areas of Europe. The Balkans, in particular, need a perspective, in order to overcome the destiny of a ‘matrioshka’ process of partition, which does not seem to end, once personalities with higher responsibilities in the war (such as Tudjman and Milosević) have died or been put in jail. It is a matter of fact that this process, which started with the collapse of Yugoslavia, does not depend solely on the behaviour of some leaders (however relevant it may appear), rather on a shared political culture stemming from nation-state perceptions. The specific interdependence of the partition mechanism in the Balkans makes any solution impossible within the framework of the newly created states. The security of Bosnia-herzegovina is strictly connected to the political fluctuations in Croatia and Serbia. Similarly, a stable future cannot be guaranteed to Kosovo simply by relying on a local mediation among the parties, and avoiding the settlement of the whole Serbian, Albanian and Macedonian triangle. As far as Cyprus is concerned, the complex negotiation with the island’s authorities for the EU accession cannot cancel the fact that a pseudo-state has been established on the same island, so that a European strategy towards both Greece and Turkey is required. In this context, it is interesting to note that the new agreement for a federation of Serbia-and-Montenegro has established a specific arbitrary role for the European Union. Namely, the document outlines temporary solutions as a bridge to a EU integration. In general terms, the process of recasting statehood within the broad European context implies a differentiation between statehood and nationhood, which overcomes the patterns experimented with after the French Revolution. A redistribution of the contents of statehood and nationhood is likely to define an alternative to the current state-building construction, which is inspiring partitioning leaders and movements. As a result, the controversial issue of collective and individual rights and of majority/ minority relations could be explored under a different light and in a new perspective. It is a fact, however, that the existing European Union institutions have had nothing to say on the Catholic– Protestant confrontation in Northern Ireland, despite the participation of both Great Britain and Ireland in the integration process. Still, the main reason of this weakness lies in the lack of both substantial tools and political courage to face the cultural (including religious) homogeneous component of nationhood, as a determinant of statehood. A second reason lies in the still widespread state’s rejection of interference in domestic affairs. A third reason lies in the increasing attitudes of rejection of otherness through xenophobia and ethno-racial intolerance, which can misarticulate intra-European relations and affect the plurality of democracy.57 In the first case, a European institution-building process may offer a unique opportunity for reconfiguring societal relationships through a plurality of institutions and a new set of rules and codes, able to mirror the plurality of a mobile society. In this context, nationhood is doomed to be secularized, enjoying a place as just one of the possible components of statehood, in which a plurality of identities coexist, rather than a pretended or constructed homogeneity.

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In the second case, a European institution-building process represents an overcoming of the controversy over interferences, because group animosities or rivalries have an impact on the European construction, as a framework where differences naturally meet and require to be managed within a plural democratic set of rules and codes. Consequently, integration creates the conditions for common institutions to assist and cooperate with nation-states in search of solutions, which concern problems of general interest; an inter-religious or inter-ethnic confrontation is inevitably part of these concerns. In the third case, a European institution-building process may contain the emergence of a potentially hysterical attitude in the most relevant countries of the continent against ‘outer subjects’ and encourage the secularization of both cultural and religious relations. Europe, in fact, is experimenting with post-communist transition, in terms of plurality, mobility and networking. Culturally, European countries are not prepared to face the challenges of their time and potentially xenophobia can meet ethnic apartheid and isolation. Nonetheless, the EU has launched in Laeken a discussion of common institution building, putting on the agenda a new set of controversial political, economical and cultural issues. These issues are connected to the reconfiguration of statehood, along lines that will have to be faced, should integration be strengthened. The existing nation-state form will be furthermore challenged and doomed to adapt itself. Still, an alternative to partition trends exists and can more convincingly operate in a democratic environment. To what extent depends on the success of the European convention spirit, on the balance of power that will be established both within the continent and at the international level, and on the development of a political culture based on plurality and secularization. For this reason, the outcome remains to be seen. Notes 1 Compare David Held, Democrazia e ordine globale (Democracy and the Global Order), (Trieste: Asterios, 1999) and David Harvey, La crisi della modernità (The Condition of Postmodernity), (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1997), especially pp. 285–346. 2 A key study in Italy on sovereignty is that of Luigi Ferrarjoli, La sovranità nel mondo moderno. Nascita e crisi dello Stato nazionale, (Bari: Laterza, 1997). The international literature on the topics is broad indeed. See also, among others, John Hoffman, Sovereignty, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Alan James, Sovereign Statehood, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (2nd edn), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3 A wide literature has discussed the issue. See particularly Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov, From Gender to Nation, (Ravenna: Angelo Longo, 2002); George Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power, (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Karl Cordell (ed.), Ethnicity and Democratisation in the New Europe, (London: Routledge, 1999); Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (eds), The Morality of Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Dusan Kecmanovic, Masovna psihologija nacionalizma, (Beograd: Vreme, 1995); Dusan, Janjic, Renik, (Beograd: SSO Srbije, 1988); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the

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State, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); Joseph Rotschild, Ethnopolitics, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 4 On modernity see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity, an Incomplete Project’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983); Richard Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 5 Significantly enough, during the decadent phase of communism in the 1980s, the communist party of the DDR began to emphasize a specific past, the Prussian one, in order to start a process aimed at legitimizing the idea of two distinctive German nations. The attempt proved to be powerless within a few years, but it is revealing the emergence of a communist stream, which was inclined to make the ideological separation a state partition. 6 See Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States. Minorities at Risk in the New Century, (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2000) and Montserrat Guibernau, Nations without States. Political Communities in a Global Age, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 7 For a comparison between different areas, as for instance Israel, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, see Mahmud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Oren Yftachel, ‘Ethnocracy: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’, Constellations 6, 1999, pp. 364–391; Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing, (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1999); Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Politics of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, (College Station TX: A&M University Press, 1995); George Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide. Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Mihail Ivanov, ‘Politiceska nacija ili “etnonacija”’, in Hristo Bonev, Etnokultura i tolerantnost, (Sofija: Izdatelstvo na SU sv. Klement Ohridski, 1994); V.K. Volkov, ‘Etnokratija, nepredvidennyj fenomen posttotalitarnogo mira’, Polis 2, 1993, pp. 40–48. 8 The complexity of terminology is mirrored in the following examples: in the book edited by Jiri Musil, The End of Czechoslovakia, (Budapest: CEU, 1995), authors refer to disintegration, while the book edited by Michael Kraus and Allison Stanger under the title Irreconcilable Differences?, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), refers to Czechoslovakia’s dissolution. Betty Miller Unterberger in her The United States, Revolutionary Russia and the Rise of Czechoslovakia, (College Station, TX: A&M University Press, 2000) discusses Wilson’s policy of self-determination, denying his will to dismember Austria. Dismemberment is used also by C. McCartney in his book The Habsburg Empire, (Milano: Garzanti, 1981) and by Victor-Lucien Tapié in Monarchie et peuples du Danube, (Paris: Fayard, 1969). Leo Valiani prefers dissolution in his famous book, La dissoluzione dell’Austria-Ungheria, (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1966). H.N. Howard explicitly mentions the word partition in his book The Partition of Turkey. A Diplomatic History, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931); similarly to Angelo Tamborra, in his L’Europa Centro-Orientale nei secoli XIX e XX, (Milano: Vallardi, 1971). Disintegration and dismemberment are the most used words for explaining the Yugoslav collapse (see Sabrina Ramet, Lenard Cohen, Dusan Janjic, Laszlo Sekelj, just to mention a few). 9 See the collection of texts by Renato Montleone, Marxismo, internazionalismo e questione nazionale, (Torino: Loescher, 1982), p. 213 and Lenin, Il diritto delle nazioni all’autodeterminazione, (Roma: Newton Compton, 1978). Amongst the scholars, see Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Disunione sovietica, Rizzoli, (Milano, 1991), p. 32 and Iurii M. Garushiants, The National Programme of Leninism, in Henry Huttenbach and Francesco Privitera, Self-Determination. From Versailles to Dayton, Its Historical Legacy, (Ravenna: Longo, 1999), pp. 31–47.

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10 See Michael McFaul, ‘The Sovereignty Script: Red Book for Russian Revolutionaries’, in Stephen D. Krasner, Problematic Sovereignty. Contested Rules and Political Possibilities, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 194–223. 11 On the impact of the European idea of borders out from the Old Continent see Paula Banarjee, Frontiers and Borders: Some Concepts and, of the same author, Borders as Unsettled Markers – The Sino-Indian Border, both papers distributed for the research ‘Partition and Dialogue’, Paris, 2001. As for Europe see George W. White, Nationalism and Territory, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) with Bozidar Jaksic, Frontiers: The Challenge of Interculturality, (Belgrade: Forum za Etnicke Odnose, 1997). See also Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (eds), Myths and Nationhood, (London: Hurst, 1997); Paul Henri Stahl, Terra, società, miti nei Balcani, (Messina: Rubettino, 1993). 12 George Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power, (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Anna Krasteva, Communities and Identities, (Sofia: Petekston, 1998); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Carlo Tullio-Altan, Ethnos e civiltà, (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995); Jean Plumyène, Les nations romantiques, (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 13 Stefano Bianchini, Sarajevo, le radici dell’odio, (Roma: Edizioni Associate, 1996), pp. 198– 206. 14 Compare the analysis of the roots of Indian nationalism of Claude Markovits, (‘La partition de l’Inde’/The Partition of India), Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2000, pp. 65–79 with Umberto Corsini and Davide Zaffi (eds), Le minoranze fra le due guerre, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994) and Susanna Mancini, Minoranze autoctone e stato, (Milano: Giuffrè, 1996). See also Ian Cuthbertson and Jane Leibowitz (eds), Minorities: the New Europe’s Old Issue, (Prague: Institute for East West Studies, 1993) and Milton J. Esman and Shibley Tlhami (eds), International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). See also Nenad Miscevic, Nationalism and Beyond, (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001) and Silvo Devetak, Manjine, Ljudska Prava i demokratija, (Sarajevo: Oslobodjenje, 1989). 15 See particularly Stevan M. Weine, When History is a Nightmare. Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Arif Smajkic, Health and Social Consequences of the War, (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1996). 16 Compare Yitzhak M. Budny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State: 1953–1991, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Nebojsa Popov, Srpska strana rata, (Beograd: Republika, 1996). 17 Compare ‘Memorandum SANU’, Nase teme, 1–2, 1989, pp. 128–164 and Aldo Ferrari, La rinascita del nazionalismo russo, (Parma: Edizioni all’insegna del Veltro, 1990), Aleksandr Solzenicyn, Come ricostruire la nostra Russia?, (Milano: Rizzoli, 1990) and Aleksandr Dugin, Continente Russia, (Parma: Edizioni all’insegna del Veltro, 1991). 18 See John Löwenhardt, The Reincarnation of Russia, (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 82–109 and the excellent study of Michael McFaul, The Sovereignty Script, ibid., pp. 194–223. 19 This argument has been elaborated by Gale Stokes in his presentation to the conference ‘The Future of the US Presence in the Balkans’, organized by the US Army War College at Columbia University, New York, 26–27 February 2001. 20 See Nenad Miscevic, Nationalism and Beyond, (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001), Ivan Iveković, Ethnic and Regional Conflicts in Yugoslavia and Transcaucasia, (Ravenna: Longo, 2000) and Leokadia Drobizheva, Rose Gottemoeller, Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Lee Walker, Ethnic Conflict in the Post-Soviet World, (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1998). 21 David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Charles Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

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22 Michael Waller, Bruno Coppieters and Alexei Malashenko (eds), Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia, (London: Frank Cass, 1998). 23 See Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions. The Design and the Destruction of the Socialism and the State, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 24 See Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Geoffrey Pridham and Tom Gallagher (eds), Experimenting with Democracy. Regime Change in the Balkans, (London: Routledge, 2000). 25 See Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 26 See Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Compare with Vladimir Kolossov, ‘A Small State vs a Self-proclaimed Republic: Nation Building, Territorial Identities and Prospects of Conflict Resolution (the Case of Moldova-Transniestria)’, in Stefano Bianchini, From the Adriatic to the Caucasus. The Dynamics of (De)Stabilization, (Ravenna: Angelo Longo, 2001), pp. 87–114. 27 See Ermanno Cabiaia, Costituzione internazionalmente ottriata e indipendenza (Cipro), (Bologna: Clueb, 1992) with the Constitutions of the two Cyprus republics. 28 Robert K. Shaeffer, Severed States. Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 1. See also T.G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine, (London: MacMillan Press, 1984). 29 Compare Max Jean Zins, The 1947 Vivisection of India: the Political Usage of a Carnage in the Era of Citizen-Massacres, paper distributed for the research ‘Partition and Dialogue’, Paris, 2001, p. 10 and Sanjay Chaturvedi, Indian Geopolitics: ‘Nation-State’ and Colonial Legacy, particularly pp. 12ff. and, of the same author, Performing Partitions after the Partition: Geopolitics, Territoriality and Identities in South Asia, both papers distributed for the research ‘Partition and Dialogue’, Paris, 2001. See also Robert K. Shaeffer, Severed States, ibid., pp. 41–47. 30 See for instance Viktor Mayer, Yugoslavia. A History of its Demise, (London: Routledge, 1999) (first published in Germany in 1995); Joze Pirjevec, Il giorno di San Vito, (Rai: Nuova Eri, 1993); Christopher Cviic, Remaking the Balkans, (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991). On the issue Radha Kumar has reported extensively, see ‘Pacifier les hostilités issues d’une partition: les lećons aux options (Settling Partition Hostilities: Lessons Learnt, the Options Ahead)’, Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2000, pp. 9–28 and of the same author, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annal of Partition, (London: Verso, 1997). 31 This idea funded a justification of the historical experience of communist reformist movements, which were systematically repressed by interventions of orthodox communists, by using military force or mobilizing support from bureaucracy. As a result, the will of a radical change in the communist world has encouraged part of the opposition to think that it would be possible to guarantee the success of reforms only by destroying the state. In this context, a federal state became particularly exposed to collapse, while ethnicity, as a predominant factor of nationhood, was able to present itself to the population as a viable tool for achieving democracy. 32 See Petr Pithart and Metta Spencer, ‘The Partition of Czechoslovakia’, in Metta Spencer (ed.), Separatism. Democracy and Disintegration, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 185–203; Pierre Allan and Jan Skaloud (eds), The Making of Democracy, (Prague: Czech Political Science Association, 1997); Violette Rey (ed.), Transition, fragmentation: récomposition, (Fonteney Saint Cloud: ENS Editions, 1994). 33 David Turton and Julia González (ed.), Ethnic Diversity in Europe: Challenges to the Nation State, (Bilbao: Humanitarian Net, 2000). See also Montserrat Guibernau, ‘Catalan Nationalism and the Democratization Process in Spain’, in Karl Cordell (ed.), Ethnicity and Democratisation, ibid., pp. 77–90; Rag Witaker, ibid., ‘Quebec: A Unique Case of

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Secessionism’, in Metta Spencer, Partition, ibid., pp. 281–305 and Daniele Petrosino, Stati, Nazioni, Etnie, (Milano: Angeli, 1991). 34 A. Cassese, Il diritto internazionale nel mondo contemporaneo, (Bologna: Il Mulino 1984), pp. 154ff. See also: Daniele Petrosino, Razzismi, (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1999); W.A Van Horne (ed.), Global Convulsions: Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism, at the End of the 20th Century, (Albany, NY: State University, 1997). 35 Supreme Court Act, ‘Reference re Secession of Quebec’, 217, 1998, LexUM. See also Daniele Petrosino, ‘Secession and Accommodation in Multiethnic Societies’, in S. Bianchini and G. Schöpflin (eds), State Building in the Balkans, (Ravenna: Longo, 1998), pp. 108–110. 36 Compare Betty Miller Unterberger, The United States, Revolutionary Russia and the Rise of Czechoslovakia, (College Station, TX: Texas University Press, 2000), pp. 83–98; Allen Lynch, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of “National Self-Determination” as Applied to Habsburg Europe’, in H. Huttenbach and F. Privitera (eds), Self-determination. From Versailles to Dayton, its Historical Legacy, (Ravenna: Longo, 1999), pp. 16–30. 37 Susanna Mancini, Minoranze autoctone, ibid., p. 235. 38 Robert K. Shaeffer, ‘Separatism: Rationality and Irony’, in M. Spencer, Separatism, p. 54 and Daniele Petrosino, Stati in frantumi, (Bari: Palomar, 1998). 39 Constitutional law no. 143/68, 27 October 1968. 40 See Raif Dizdarevic, Od smrti Tita do smrti Jugoslavije, (Sarajevo: Oko, 1999). 41 Suffice to remind here, among the wide bibliography available, see the works of Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Allen Buchanan, Secession, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); H. Beran, ‘A Liberal Theory of Secession’, Political Studies 32, 1984. A.H. Birch, ‘Another Liberal Theory of Secession’, in ibid.; L.C. Buchheit, Secession, the Legitimacy of Self-Determination, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978). 42 Ranabir Samaddar, ‘In the Time of the Partitioned Nations’, and, by the same author, ‘The Ineluctable Logic of Geopolitics’, both papers distributed for the research ‘Partition and Dialogue’, Paris, 2001. The first paper has been partially published under the title ‘Le cri de victoire sans fin (The Last Hurrah that Continues)’, in Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2000, pp. 31–47. See, in the same number of the journal Transeuropéennes, the articles by Syed Sikander Mehdi, ‘La mémoire des réfugiés d’Inde et du Pakistan (Refugee Memory in India and Pakistan)’, pp. 117–142 and Ritu Memon, ‘La dynamique de la division (The Dynamics of Division)’, pp. 155–173 and compare with Ozren Kebo, ‘Mostar ou le Berlin du XXIe siècle (The Mostar Story or the Twenty-first Century Berlin)’, again in Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2000, pp. 143–153. See also Mostralija (Ahmid Drljevic), Luciferov Pohod na Mostar, (Mostar: Drustvene Djelatnosti, 1998); Luca Rastello, La guerra in casa, (Torino: Einaudi, 1998); Alekandar Jovanovic, Ratne pshitraume i porodica, Zaduzbina Andrejevic, (Beograd, 1997); Claudio Bazzocchi (a cura di), Mostar: una scuola vicino ad un ponte, (Forli: Provincia di Forl-Cesena, 1995). 43 Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 149. 44 Jasmina Tesanovic, Me and My Multicultural Street, (Beograd: Feministicka 94, 2001) and Zarana Papic, ‘Europe after 1989: Ethnic Wars, Fascisation of Social Life and the Body Politics in Serbia’, paper distributed for the research ‘Partition and Dialogue’, Paris, 2001. See also Subhoranjan Dasgupta, ‘Le traumatisme de la victoire: vécus de femmes (Women’s Trauma and Triumph)’, Transeuropéennes 19/20, 2001, pp. 175–185; Chris Corrin, Gender and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Stasa Zajovic (ed.), Zene za mir, Zene u Crnom, (Beograd, 1997); Rada Iveković, La balcanizzazione della ragione, (Roma: Manifestolibri, 1995); Ruzica Rosandic and Vesna Pesic (eds), Warfare, Patriotism and Patriarchy, (Beograd: Center for Antiwar Action, 1994). 45 See Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov (eds), From Gender to Nation, (Ravenna: Longo, 2002).

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46 Franco Alberto Cappelletti (ed.), Diritti umani e sovranità. Per una ridefinizione del politico, (Torino: Giappichelli, 2000) and Altiero Spinelli, La crisi degli Stati nazionali. Germania, Italia, Francia, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991). 47 A provocative study is that by Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty. Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 48 On quasi-states see H. Bull and A. Watson, The Expansion of the International Society, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robert H. Jackson, ‘Quasistates, dual regimes, and neoclassical theory’, International Organization, 41, autumn 1987, pp. 514–549; and the same author, Quasi-States (see note 26). 49 Compare Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country. An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 50 Compare Ulrich Beck, Che cos’è la globalizzazione, (Roma: Carocci 1999); Arianna Dagnino, I nuovi nomadi, (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1996); Rosi Braidotti, Soggetto nomade, (Roma: Donzelli, 1995); Alain Touraine, Critique de la modernité, (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Antony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 51 See Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhkler (eds) Re-imagining Political Community: Studies on Cosmopolitan Democracy, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); David Held, Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 52 Michele Marchesiello, Politica e legalità internazionale. L’esperienza del tribunale per la ex Jugoslavia, (Roma: Seam, 1999). 53 See Reg Whitaker, ‘Quebec: a unique case of Secessionism’, in Metta Spencer (ed.), Separatism. Democracy and Disintegration, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 298. 54 Csaba Gombár, Elemér Hankiss, László Lengyel and Györgyi Várnai (eds), The Appeal of Sovereignty. Hungary, Austria and Russia, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 55 See Eduard Ponarin, ‘Novyj ruskij nacionalism kak reakcija na globalizaciju: istocniki, mehanizmy rasprostranenija i scenarii razvitija’, Ab Imperio 1, 2002, pp. 421–439. 56 See the number devoted to ‘A Union of Europeans’ (a collection of speeches by Giuliano Amato, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Lionel Jospin, Johannes Rau and A.Y. Meshkov), Aspenia 14–15, 2001, pp. 8–47. An interesting analysis of the European process is that of Elisabeth Pond, The Rebirth of Europe, (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). 57 Compare Étienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le Peuple, (Paris: Découverte & Syros, 2001) and Gérard Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration. Vers une histoire du pouvoir, (Paris: Berlin, 2001).

3 The undefined acts of partition and dialogue Ranabir Samaddar In the crowd of the historians of Indian partition, Gyanendra Pandey has dropped a bombshell by claiming a definitive statement on the partition of the subcontinent – almost a final account on the relation between violence and community, irrevocably associating violence with formation of a political community – by questioning the accounts of independence and partition that present partition as legitimate, but represent violence as ‘an illegitimate outbreak’ that ‘goes against the fundamentals of Indian (or Pakistani) tradition and history’,1 and by implication declaring that violence was almost the ‘normal’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘natural’ thing to accompany the establishment of the two independent states of Indian and Pakistan, in his words, ‘the procedures of nationhood, history, and particular form of sociality’. Violence marked the moves that were ‘made to nationalize populations, culture and history in the context of this (legitimate) claim to nation-statehood and the establishment of the nation-state’.2 In brief, the arguments in his discomforting book, Remembering Partition, are: • Genocidal violence marks the moment of rupture, the termination of one regime and inauguration of another, or more in its place. • Violence and community constitute each other, and they do so in different ways. • Violence is the language that constitutes and reconstitutes the subject – not only the historical subject, but also the ‘non-historical’ subject. • The relationship between memory and history in a study of such violence has always been an unstable one. • Partition is a history of struggle, of people fighting to cope, to survive, and to build anew – a history of the everyday in the language of the extraordinary. • There was not one partition, but three partitions: first, the idea of partition as a homeland of the Muslims – an idea that originated just seven years ago before the year of partition, then quickly gathered momentum amid all negotiations; second, partition that entailed the splitting up of the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal; and third, partition as massacres, mass displacement and the nightmares that people would have to live through for decades to come. • These three different conceptions of partition are not easily separable. • The relatively small ‘face to face’ communities of the past have given way to the relatively large-scale, bureaucratized communities of the present; these are, in his word ‘perhaps’, lived in and not lived as communities, nonetheless they are political constructs.

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• Finally, it is necessary to ask after all these studies of partition, whether it is possible to recover a different kind of national past, recalling not suicide and murder, and the fixed collective subject, but labour and creativity, and varied and internally differentiated communities, made up of thinking, acting, changing and fallible human beings. Gyanendra Pandey has done well in building upon many earlier works that suggest what he has argued for and narrated in Remembering Partition, and that have enabled him to come out with definitive arguments on a crucial issue for the politics of the decolonized. Such a book was needed, and, given the dissatisfaction with the banal accounts, this was to come today or tomorrow. Yet, in this enterprise of making a definitive account of partition, based on an analysis of the three-way relation between community, violence, and nation and the nation-state, there is a gloss that raises discomfort. A close reader may, in such a feeling of discomfort, take up this model of a three-way relation for scrutiny, or may choose to accept it as inherent in the situation that Pandey has studied so admirably. In this essay, however, I take a different route, which will sometimes remind the readers of Pandey’s contentions, and at other times will allow us to think of the account along different lines bearing promise of making the account more contentious, thereby more political, and will allow us to raise the problem of the extent to which such a subject can be knowable. I The Indian nationalists, who, later on, embraced partition, were always enamoured of Irish nationalism. It will be good therefore to spend some time on the political life of a country far away from the hot and humid lands of India and on the saga of whose distant shores had such an attraction for the Indian nationalists – from the monk to the politician. The Irish national movement, as we know, had its origins in the violent repression and expropriation of the Irish people that continued with ruthlessness in the seventeenth century. The war of 1689–1690 between supporters of James II and those of his son-inlaw William of Orange still continues, as the summer marching season in Northern Ireland reminds us each year, as a critical reference point for the national identity of Ireland. To the Unionists, the threat posed by the Catholic supporters of James in the seventeenth century justifies even today the British drive for hegemony, symbolized by the celebration of William’s camp’s victories. For nationalists, the war marked the beginning of a still-continuing period of subjection and oppression symbolized by surrender and the broken treaty. The rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798 following attempts at reconciliation between the English and Irish and between the Protestants and Catholics resulted in the constitutional union between Ireland and Great Britain that lasted till 1921 – a union resented by all Irish. Irish lands were the property of English landlords, and the Irish parliamentary representatives were condemned to minority status. This was a classic case of a clash between the interests of the state and a national principle, and, though some Irish derived their ancestry from Protestant English and Scottish settlers, there was no clear geographical division of settlements between the Catholic Irish and the descendant Protestants. And whenever the rule of Catholic Celtic majority showed possibilities of becoming reality, antagonism flared up. Though land

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laws were gradually changed, and the Land Purchase Law of 1903 of Lord Balfour’s government enabled peasants to buy back land cheaply from landlords, the prospect of Home Rule was scary enough for the settlers to organize their private army for resistance against Home Rule, eventually Irish independence. The Home Rule Bill was passed, but war intervened; the Ulster opposition was meanwhile backed with support and encouragement, Irish independence was postponed, and all these left no other way for the Irish nationalists but to turn into radical nationalism and radical republicanism – the path of the Sinn Fein. Ireland’s incorporation into Great Britain lasted from 1801 to 1921. Irish nationalism, which grew especially from the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and developed military capability, ultimately made the country free, except the six counties in the north, though British military and political resources far exceeded Ireland’s, and the size and geography of the latter had made occupation feasible. Continuing violence in Ireland received less and less home support in Great Britain. The King and the Archbishop of Canterbury also objected to occupation, and wanted some sort of solution that helped set the stage for the negotiations in 1921. Reforms based on Gladstone’s ideas and Home Rule suddenly looked extremely inadequate, and, when Home Rule finally became law in 1920, it was irrelevant to a situation where Irish nationalists with their power in Dublin were breaking off relations with existing bodies and institutions representing governmental authority. Ulster prepared for partition, and the northern part was annexed to Great Britain with a parliament of its own – the sort of Home Rule that the liberals had envisaged for the entire country. Violence and counter-violence by nationalists and the armed constabulary of the occupying country began. And though Ireland was to become a Free State, representing the dominion status that other settler colonies had gained within the empire, the Republic was not recognized, the Crown’s suzerainty was once more acknowledged, and, most significantly, Northern Ireland was not incorporated within this Free State. It had to remain satisfied with the constitutional status gained in 1920. But the seeds of the poison tree had been sown. The founders of the Irish independence movement, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, agreed to this limited independence of a partitioned Ireland, and fell victim to the revolutionary methods of the Republicans who soon became the unquestioned leaders of Irish nationalism. They came to power in 1932, but could do nothing to undo partition except, in a rage, to conduct a tariff war against Great Britain, change the oath of loyalty to the King to that to the Republic, and then demand withdrawal of British garrisons from Irish ports to ultimately declare neutrality n the war against Hitler. On the other hand, with a substantial Catholic minority, the British found it impossible to create a six-county or nine-county Ulster that would not have in it a different population demanding the same protection that the British had wanted to extend to the Protestants. De Valera was said to have remarked that Lloyd-George could not take six counties, not even four, not even Belfast, because he would not find a complete Ulster representation anywhere; he would not find the boundary of his Ulster, for his homogeneous Ulster did not exist. In the event, Lloyd-George, Balfour and Churchill offered dominion status to Sinn Fein, if they accepted partition and the creation of a separate Ulster, and the offer came with a carrot and a stick. The carrot was the British promise that they would hold a reunification referendum in the North and the South to determine if there could be reunion of the two parts two years after partition would go into effect. The stick was that, if the offer were

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not accepted immediately, the British would abrogate ceasefire, send troops to Ireland and crush the rebellion by force. The decision to accept partition split Sinn Fein. Meanwhile the British reneged on their promise of holding a referendum, and the countrywide referendum was never held. There we have the situation now standing still for more than half a century, of course with violence continuing in the North for much of this time, followed now by a standstill agreement, and a power-sharing formula, and through all these years Irish Republicans, Ulstermen, Orangemen and the British Army have battled with each other, most of the time the last two of the three battling it out with the first, and an entire stratum of population depending for protection of their existence on the permanent presence of a kindred foreign power. Home Rule had succeeded in creating many homes. And we cannot say for certain if Northern Ireland will acquire a new political identity – the common home for all, a society that has graduated from a deeply fractured politics either to reunite with the other part, or become a new nation tolerated by the two kindred souls, Great Britain and the Irish Republic – or become a distinctly different unit of the erstwhile colonial power, in the process deeply altering the political structure of the latter. In any case, it is clear that the history of partition is in much of its sense the history that it creates – a history of dialogues engaging perennially with the continuing truths of partition. It is not difficult to see why the Indian nationalists found their own history in the history of the Irish independence movement. But before we think that the story is enough to show us the familiar strains, we must go through some more pages, not exactly on Ireland, but pages connected to its history, to see the ironies of this tale – the tale of the partitioned politics of our time, but this time the face of the partitioned politics seen from another angle. II The country that was instrumental in partitioning Ireland, Great Britain, has of course another story of otherness to tell us. British national identity, like any other, has been relational and contingent. By reference the British have decided who they are, and who they would like to be. And this preference has been decided most of all by wars, for we must not forget that there have been few modern states other than Great Britain and its promotion the United Kingdom that have been as extraordinarily war-like, fighting all kinds of wars intermittently and sometimes concurrently. Imperial control and imperial internalization have insulated the British subject against others, and, if they have ever imagined the existence of others, these existences have been dismissed mostly as imaginary others, or at most the result of a benign interaction of several peoples and several histories. This interaction is said to have been among the white peoples of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – the suburbs, neighbourhoods, fraternal souls and, of course, empires and colonies. English events are now British events, English summers are British summers, and, though with the rise of nationalism in Wales and Scotland and a significant fall in support for the Tories in these areas we have the beginnings of a redefined British-hood, it is quite impossible for British identity to be non-white or to be more than a four-nation (England, Wales,

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Scotland and Ireland) approach. In the rest of Europe, the otherness and connections to otherness had always been emphatic, and therefore identities have remained necessarily incomplete owing to the presence of strong local and regional ties, and the existence of what Eric Wolfe had called ‘people without histories’. But it is difficult to see how British loyalty, while tolerating an assertive Scot, can accommodate the non-whiteness of others in British identity – a matter altogether different from recomposing British nationalism with quadruple loyalties. Because, here, it is not a case of dealing with, say, a ‘Celtic fringe’ or ‘Irish madness’, but with something lodged deeply inside the history of modern Great Britain and the United Kingdom, which is the metropolitan history of colonies, decolonization, commonwealth and immigration – that something being the black and brown histories of separation followed by these histories claiming back space within the cosmopolitan sphere by claiming place within the metropolis. This vital and external dimension of British development is obscured by concentration on the internal history of the Isles. The colonial and the wider context in which Britishness was forged is absolutely central to why that particular nation has acted in a particular way, we may say, not in a European way, but in ‘British way’. The centrality of Protestantism, loyalty around institutions including the monarchy, the surviving scare of a Catholic restoration, the ‘habit of looking through the Catholic glass darkly’, and the fear and actuality of recurrent wars with countries of Europe and rebels in colonies – all these have made British politics what it is, namely a distinctly individualistic politics based on separation with others, which is almost a straight development from imperial mechanisms in defining identity, in other words a politics of parting company. This imperial mentality has undeniably ensured stability, and an incremental attitude to change. The dialogues that this identity therefore enters into are based on these fears, cleavages and conceptions of otherness. They are at times rearguard actions while holding the front intact. Clearly, the ‘post-imperial fog’ of European union and the dissolution of Britishness into an Atlantic-ness by holding on to the American apron strings is just the beginning of its ‘long march out of history’. And it is too early to say that the redefined Britishness will result in a complete partition of its imperial and cosmopolitan personality, and Great Britain, the power that had most promoted partition as a technique to solve incorrigible dilemmas and successfully walk out of closed histories, will now take the poison to cure itself of burdens and belongings to become irretrievably European and Atlanticist. Speaking of ‘Britishness and otherness’, Linda Colley has reminded us: As a character in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses remarks: ‘The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.’ …Unless we appreciate their contact with the imaginary Other, we will fail to understand them, and they will scarcely be able to understand themselves.3 In short, externalities in nation-formation are significant in understanding the strategies of partition, and dialogues of the part-partitioned, part-connected selves. We should not be surprised therefore if the story of Indian-ness and otherness has gone along similar lines, for, not only have we learnt from them how to become modern, our others were also very much modelled along the lines in which the others of the parent-power were modelled.

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We learnt through the vivisection in 1947, jointly enacted by three nationalisms, how to define permanent otherness, how to live with partition, and how to frame our dialogue with others who are deep within us – the others, whom we thought of as aliens, but who are within as internals only in order to remind us that they remain externals to the nation with whom the nation has to engage in dialogue. Partition, otherness and dialogues combine into the story of how modern states arise out of nationhood, which is only a different way of saying, how nations come of age.4 III The imperative to engage in dialogue is a complex phenomenon. Not only is it a matter of speaking to someone whom we had considered as an external presence but whose compelling presence inside forces one to engage in dialogue with it, but the imperative also flows from the fact that partition has occurred in a situation that is marked by other possibilities – possibilities that refuse to die with the accomplishment of the reality of partition and therefore force the partitioned selves to engage in dialogue. In speaking of partition that induces dialogue, and impels dialogue to come to terms with partitioned realities, we are in effect suggesting a return to the moment that was characterized with several possibilities and happenings, and therefore had offered us the suggestion that partition and dialogue had emerged along with each other. In the seeming finality of the moment when partition had appeared as the act of God, the axe of history and the irrevocable action for the final solution – as if we have staring before us the bottomless pit, the void – we have with us not only the suggestion of eternal feud, but also the guarantee of conversation. Seemingly contradictory, a study of partition therefore is not only a study of structures, but also of a moment that will be perhaps never historically exhausted as a subject of knowledge. We must therefore repeatedly return to the moment to understand not only how otherness was defined, but also how dialogues of partitioned selves have renewed their moments of origin like the murderer visiting the site of murder again and again. Let us therefore without much embarrassment visit one more familiar story, once again in its briefest outlines, to see how partition and dialogue have translated into each other, the manifold character of boundaries have become manifest in these acts of translation, space and time have played with each other, and small and grand politics while ensuring each other’s presence have cancelled out the other’s finality. To say this in different words is to say that dialogue challenges the finalized outcome by renewing conversation with the final, thereby making it provisional, and that it can do so only by playing with possibilities that became possible because of a certain impending event, the result, the outcome, the void – in this case decolonization. Decolonization was not only the end of old colonialism and the emergence of independent states, but a meeting of several dimensions, emergence of several phenomena, and the relational games resulting from that. It should be clear by now that I am pushing for a thoroughly relational understanding of the act known as partition. Let us work round our story again. The summer of 1914 saw the beginning of one of the most devastating wars, and also the beginning of one of the most contentious enactments of decolonization in modern times. The Allies had declared war on Ottoman Turkey following the bombardment of

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Odessa on 28 October by a German-Turkish fleet under German command. The solution of the ‘eastern question’ by decolonizing the Middle East through partition and liquidation of the Ottoman Empire became one of the most important aims of war and peace, all the more because the defeat of Ottoman rule was linked to German presence in the Near East, whose big ships in the harbours and waters of Constantinople reminded Turkish and other powers how a restructuring of imperial power in the region was an essential part of both decolonization and world relations. The big question was, if the Ottomans were to go, who would fill in the void and what were to be the arrangements with which the void was to be filled? The Zionists in London, the Arab leaders, the imperial nations like Great Britain and France, and the emerging big power on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States, all had their particular sense of the impending departure of old power structure, and therefore their different ideas of war and peace. Not without reason the British statesman Lord Balfour had asked if separate negotiations could be held with Turkey, Austria and Bulgaria. Peace terms meant a complete plan for the division of Asia Minor, the detailed settlement of which was going to be one of the principal war aims. To an angry Lenin, this was the conspiracy of the Anglo-French imperialists who were ready to slay further millions of Russian workers and peasants, so as to obtain possession of Constantinople for Guchkov, Syria for the French, and Mesopotamia for the British capitalists. To the Allied interests, however, it meant that the respective settlements in the region had to be defined – the interests of the British in the valley of the Euphrates, of Russia in the Armenian region, and of France in Syria and the settlement of the Christians in the entire eastern Mediterranean. Thus Turkey was to be reorganized and the fate of subject nationalities was to be decided in a Peace Congress, as Point 13 of the Fourteen Points specifically referred to the Eastern Question. AlsaceLorraine and Asia Minor became by the strange fate of war parts of a same peace. Thus, while Alsace-Lorraine was to go to France, Constantinople and the Straits were to be internationalized, the eastern terminals of the Central Powers were to be transferred to friendly administrations, a ‘guaranteed autonomy’ for the Armenians was to be secured, and it was necessary to free the ‘subject races’, as they were called in those days in that strange phrase, from Turkish oppression and misrule by placing the protection of Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia in the hands of ‘civilized nations’. Turkey was to be given a new start by considerably reducing it in size, without power to misgovern ‘alien races’ and therefore ‘free to concentrate upon the needs of her own population’.5 National self-determination, internationalization of trade routes, reallocation of imperial responsibilities, and international monitoring through the mandate system thus went hand in hand in this process of decolonization through partition. Though the Fourteen Points Address, with some justification because it was a public statement of policy, claimed a permanent place in the chronicles of diplomacy, the actual practices by which decolonization was carried out and partition was given a very significant place in the strategy to decolonize remained more important for study, the practices themselves the results of policies and much more, because in decolonization through partition war aims and peace aims had converged. If self-determination and autonomy were to arrive through peace in the case we are describing, it was clear that, while the Straits and Constantinople were to be under nominal Turkish control, they were to be effectively and by mandate internationalized; Anatolia was to be reserved for Turks, while some coastal lands were to go to Greece;

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Armenia was to be put under some protection, and was to be given a port on the Mediterranean; Syria was to be guided by the French with British agreement; Great Britain was to be the best mandatory for Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia; and there would have to be a general code of guarantees binding upon all countries in Asia Minor – emerging and imperial – written into any treaty of peace along with a general provision for minorities duly acknowledged. When the Turks signed an armistice on board a British warship anchored off the island of Mudros in 1918, it signalled more than a defeat of an old colonial power in the name of Ottoman Turkey. It marked an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, collectively known to us by the word partition, ranging from the disposal of German colonies by the Peace Conference to the dismemberment of an empire, and from the fate of Ottoman lands to a decision about status and needs of the mandatory powers, and to the emergence of some nations into the panoply of the most politically recognized communities on earth. Thus Russia, while renouncing imperial ambitions, got Armenia, France received all of present day Syria and part of Central Anatolia, and Britain received all of Iraq together with the territory between the French area and the Hejaz and Nejd stretching from the Persian frontier to Aqaba on the Red Sea and the northern boundary of Palestine. Amid revolts and rebellions, Arab independence came guided by the British and their compradors, such as the Sheriff of Mecca, and a person called Emir Faisal, the Chief Delegate of the delegation of the Hejaz, son of the King of Hejaz, who wisely advised his son to think of the politics of peace in strict consonance with British line in everything, including accommodating Zionist demands in Palestine through long lunches and dinners with Lord Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann. One has to only study carefully the arguments in the Peace Conference for a Jewish national home in Palestine with mangled boundary-making in Arab lands to appreciate the fact that war aims peace aims, national aims, and imperial aims converge in determining the partitioning outcome of post-colonial histories. We should not be surprised therefore if we find strong legacies of this convergence. After all, when Britain as the erstwhile mandatory power was asked by the UN after the Second World War to supervise the implementation of its own Peel Commission report of 1937, which the UN report of May 1947 essentially was, the erstwhile colonial power backed off. Rejecting the minority recommendation of the UN committee for a bi-national federal state of Palestine, Lenin’s heirs, thinking that in this case partition would be a realization of selfdetermination, joined the Americans for a partition of Palestine. The day before the British withdrew, Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence, announced the formation of Israel, and war broke out. No boundary commission was established. It was left to Zionist and Arab military forces to draw the lines. Suffice it to say that when the first Arab–Israeli war ended in 1949, Israel was 20 per cent larger than the territory assigned to it by the UN plan of partition and occupied 80 per cent of the area assigned to Palestine under the League mandate. The result of that convergence of war aims and peace aims is now for all of us to see. One state of the UN plan exists, the other does not, and today’s peace will be decided again in terms of the convergence of war and peace aims. But we need not anticipate here that well-known tragic story of what happened later, all that happened after the end of the Second World War, the Judaization of the land, and the intifada of today. Meanwhile a nationalist Turkey fought with the Greeks, and the nationalist forces securely based in Anatolia were not ready to listen to everything that the Armistice

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Commission in Constantinople had to say. The Greeks in 1919 landed their forces in Smyrna under the protection of British, French and Greek ships, and began to advance far into Anatolia, and thus began three years of warfare between Turks and Greeks that laid the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Those in the Peace Conference who, as today, thought that partition could be averted, argued that good governance was the need of the hour, while nationalism decided the fate of the decolonized land. It would take only a little time for the old and new imperial powers to readjust themselves to the changed reality. Oil, trade routes, Bolshevism, nationalism and a renewed hostility in Europe between Allied and Central Powers ensured that the results of the partition of Turkey were to last for a long time. And, as to the question of what to do with the old legacy of the direct presence of colonial troops in that part of the world, the issue was not to be finally settled until Anglo-French forces bombarded the Suez from the air in 1956, and then within a short time American marines landed in Beirut, to be precise in July 1958. Nationalist Turkey of course arrived, as everyone knows, among other things by murdering countless Armenians. In the historical inquiry into nationalism as an Ottoman problem and the Ottoman response, what has to be noticed also is that nationalism arrived with a diminution of citizenship. The transition from Ottoman political form to nationalism, effected through partition, was accompanied by the departure from the political stage of all systems whereby, for example, Christians could become Muslims, or regional and religious particularisms could coexist (known as the millet system), and the imperial great culture would not exhaust the ‘little cultures’. This was no great discourse of equality; indeed economic, particularly land, inequality and fiscal squeeze put an end to the efforts to reform Ottoman Turkey along national-modern lines, the idea behind which was to bring about a political system that would maintain the ‘circle of justice’, whereby subjects of the state, while continuing to get protection and justice and providing obedience and fiscal resources, would now be able to enjoy political equality – the first requirement of citizenship of the nation. Besides the structural causes of the intensification of differences, the eventual dismemberment of the empire lay much in the decline and the collapse of the old dialogic form of coexistence, something that was hastened by the British liberals like Gladstone, and finally the war – the extraordinary occasion, almost a hundred years ago, of convergence of war aims, peace aims and aims of competing nationalisms. History is the business of going forward, while politics is often the venture of contra-history, explorations into possibilities. The fortunes of dialogic politics that is most of the time connected to the politics of partitions are therefore often matters of conjecture also. The search for non-national state form was always there. In the half-realized chronicle of dialogues we have the traces of that search.6 The Treaty of Sevres (1919), which was to reshape the destiny of the Ottoman lands by marking the fate of peoples and minorities in new political–territorial configurations in a hypothetical theme of eternally partitioned lands, was not the only one of that type at that time. The dismemberment of the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly the Hungarian population in several political–territorial units through the Treaty of Trianon, had happened around the same time. The collapse of empires is always an occasion of great instability. The removal of Ottoman power in the Balkans and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the marks of what Lenin was to call a situation of ‘revolutionary crisis’. Revolutionary or not, these are crisis situations in

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which politics has two fates – revolution or passive revolution (which means not only counter-revolution, but more). The critical architect of the destruction of AustriaHungary, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, wanted a federation, but of Slavs only, thinking that this was the best that could be salvaged of the empire – a particular partition with which the new political formation was to be created; the virtual partition by which there could be empire without the empire. While Austria went on with fruitless constitutional experiments in order to save a multinational empire, culture wars were waged in Germany. Germany’s Polish minority was persecuted, many members of whom were Jews, so that they could be moved out of Germany – an ethnic cleansing (which accompanies partitions) that pioneered the Weimar Republic’s Constitution and that had among its advocates, not surprisingly, one of the principal theorists of rationality, the noted soci-ologist and one of the framers of the Weimar Constitution – Max Weber. If one were to take into account the partition of Czechoslovakia in this double chronicle of partition and passive revolution, conventional understanding of partition as only an event of ethnic separation faces even more complexity. Bloodless and velvet – words expressing the pacific nature of separation – only conceal long enduring patterns of inequality and strategies of domination of one by the other, acquisition when necessary and disposal when convenient. By the Treaty of Trianon (1920), some 1.7 million people of Magyar origin found themselves in Romania, close to 900,000 in Czechoslovakia, around 550,000 in the Southern Slav Kingdom, and 26,000 in Austria. Majorities became minorities, minorities were to become majorities, and ethnicity became the main justification of frontier lines proposed anywhere, as at that time in Paris, creating in the process revisionist dreams in future nationalist polities. Both inter-war Germany and inter-war Hungary bore these dreams, and, though the Second World War settled for the next forty years frontiers, borders, and boundary-making in Europe, these dreams were to haunt the statesmen of Europe who realized, as scores of OSCE documents, the European Charter on Minority Rights, and, not the least, the quarrels among the new nationalist regimes of the erstwhile AustroHungarian Empire on treatment of ‘their minorities’ were to testify, that protection of minorities, a new-federalization of polities and framework treaties of inter-state relations binding them to the duty of protecting rights of minorities were going to be crucial in preventing any further revision of frontiers. Post-partition realities will have to remain busy for even more years to come to exorcise themselves of the ghost of multicultural and multinational Transylvania, till the elusive entity called Europe decides to do away altogether with frontiers and boundary-making politics. For the present, as policy makers without distinction agree, the politics of the border regime of Europe will remain connected with its politics of enlargement, with the result that revision of borders within Europe and the persistence of the minority question will keep the hour of the materialization of the European dream still some distance away. Till that day, borders to be sure will not only define what they are, but where they are, with territory proving to be a stubborn factor – the ‘inflammable material’ of world politics. War, political reforms and the agenda of forming state/s thus besides liquidating old formations, drive a wedge between communities, groups and peoples. As devolution of imperial power approached, and we must remember that democracy came to large parts of the world through that route, the new modular form of settlement could erect its ‘newness’ largely on the imperial form itself. If the imperial powers sought to quickly

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disengage themselves from a potentially self-annihilating scenario, and partition seemed the best option for that disengagement, this was also at the same time the only way to devolve, divide and weaken power. The imperial powers have thus for better or worse found themselves the masters and servants of this weird form of exit and re-entry – the form that combines in it ethnopolitics and geopolitics. Therefore we are not just dealing with a void, contending lines of otherness and the periodic returns to the moments of origin of nations, in understanding how partition occupies a major place of attention in the peace question today. We are also dealing with one of the most contentious issues in modern politics – dialogic relation between the two patterns of global politics, globalization and democracy. IV When the Indian nationalists mainly under the Congress flag and through the Nehru Report were trying to settle in 1928 the question of minorities and other communities in a future India, their main anxiety was to take on to their side Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who they thought would be able to deliver the Muslims to the nationalist cause. Jinnah had already proposed that one third of the elected representatives in both houses of the Central Legislature should be Muslims, that there should be reserved seats for Muslims in Punjab and Bengal, that residuary powers should be left to the provinces and not with the Central Legislature, and that the Nehru Report should embody the spirit of communal pacts. And when appeals were made to him to accommodate the nationalist cause by making the Muslim League a willing partner to the overall nationalist vision of a future independent India, he reminded the nationalists (who were overwhelmingly Hindus) that no country had succeeded in establishing independence without making provision for its minorities. When the nationalists assumed that Jinnah in any case was with them, and therefore there was no dire need to make any undue compromise with minorities, that is the Muslims, Jinnah brought out the entire paradox embedded in the politics of representation by these words to the nationalists: It is essential that you must get not only the Muslim League but the Musulmans of India and here I am not speaking as a Musulman but as an Indian. And it is my desire to see that we get seven crores of Musulmans to march along with us in the struggle for freedom. Would you be content if I were to say, I am with you? Do you want or do you not want Muslim India to go along with you?7 Of course we know today what the nationalist response was. They rejected Jinnah’s offer and created circumstances that forced Jinnah into the wilderness and brought him to the parting of ways. But I am not here speaking of the loss of one constitutional politician from the nationalist ranks. My intention is to draw the paradoxes inscribed in the politics of representation. Jinnah’s isolation was not of one individual, but an isolation of a representative politics produced by the distancing of low politics from high politics, of constitutionalism from politics of mass appeal, both being needed in turn by the nationalists, of the politics of internal boundary-making from nation-making that was

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meant to subsume all boundaries, of the individual from the party, of the party from the community, and, finally, of the politics of bargaining and coexistence from that of separation. We need to spend a few moments on this and see how all these took shape amid a global scenario of partitioning politics of decolonization and the emerging nations. If the authors of the Nehru Report, particularly Motilal Nehru, and, following in the father’s footsteps, the illustrious son Jawaharlal Nehru, had a grand vision of an independent nationalist India, this grand politics was cohabited by small politics also – politics of communities, minorities, sections, groups and localities. And, as researches on Jinnah by both David Page and Ayesha Jalal show in different ways, the locality was forcibly disconnected from grand politics, and, in order to survive, locality had to assume a competing central form to negotiate with the ‘centre’, whereby Jinnah became the ‘sole spokesman’. Also it is to be noted that Jinnah, a constitutional politician, like Chittaranjan Das of Bengal, was a firm believer in communal pacts, and it was the failure of constitutionalism in modifying the republican profile of high nationalism that led the former to propose partition in order to secure its place under the nationalist sun. Probably, we have to inquire further. After all, the period of operation of the Montague–Chelmsford Reforms was also the period when political interests consolidated, and ideas of autonomy, democracy, self-rule and constitutionalism crystallized and came up against the republican articulation of high nationalism. With a new system of control through negotiation of deputations, petitions, protests and disobediences, and through limited franchise and limited representative institutions along with traditional means of force, the colonial power went on to rule from the 1920s. But this system satisfied neither the constitutionalists, nor the nationalists, not to speak of the militant Left. This was the classic bind – the deadlock – in which the moment of partition appeared. Meanwhile, internal boundary-making was continuing as a process, because, while constitutionalists recognized social and cultural boundaries and attempted to negotiate them with constitutional modes, republicans disdained such attempts, because in their mind the nation as the elect body, with differentiating lines to distinguish it from others, could not brook any other differentiating line within. By the same token, the emerging nation-form could not accommodate the three–tier politics of representation also as the structure of nationalist politics. The Indian National Congress could have accommodated Jinnah just as it had accommodated Abul Kalam Azad, as a nationalist individual only; if needed, it could accommodate certain parties as platforms also, but it was not ready to have an individual as a representative of a party in the nationalist army, and a party as representative of a separate community with a distinct place within the nation. That is why republican politics has never tolerated internal bargaining, and has preferred separation to accommodation and coexistence. ‘Who speaks for the nation?’ has been therefore always the most exasperating question before the nation that is engaged in securing its own political identity from a colonial power. It is in such dilemma and situation of paradox, that the global politics of democracy and representation resolves for the nation many of the antinomies. Jinnah was a constitutionalist and a lawyer. When Gandhi and others publicly expressed hope that with the arrival of freedom all intercommunity problems would disappear, Jinnah invoked the right of the Muslims to selfdetermination. In his presidential address in Lahore in 1940 he said:

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Babu Rajendra Prasad…only a few days ago said, ‘Oh, what more do the Musalmans want?’ I will read you his words. Referring to the minority question, he says: ‘If British would concede our right of selfdetermination surely all these differences should disappear.’ How will our differences disappear? …The word ‘nationalist’ has now become the play of conjurers in politics. …The problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character, and must be treated as such. So long as this basic and fundamental truth is not realized, any constitution that may be built will result in disaster and will prove harmful not only to the Musalmans, but also to the British and Hindus… Musalmans are not a minority…Musalmans are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.8 If the experiences of the last hundred years of the history of this region are remembered, the ramifications of Jinnah’s poser will be clear, and the political deadlock obvious. If nation is the locus of self-determination (this is the basis of popular sovereignty), how does this lead, as it does, to the recognition of state as the representative of everyone (this is the basis of liberal democracy) as the goal of determination? Or, to put the question from another angle, if state is the locus of self-determination, then should this be the site on which complex issues of forms of autonomy, right of nationalities to statehood, and international intervention to enforce the global norms of self-determination or political respect of cultural differences be judged? Clearly, philosophical suppositions did not prove enough for the colonized who aspired to both nationhood and statehood, and to whom achievement of independence came always with a deficit in the sovereignty that they gained. Embedded in social, economic, political and institutional processes, the relation between the right of self-determination and the act of partition as the means to gaining statehood could only be ambiguous. In brief, this is the sort of bind, a situation of closure, in which partition appears as the act of destiny. Its inevitability is in reality the inescapability from a bind – the remorseless character of a reasoning that almost overshadows all other forms of reasoning, and makes a territorial solution the only solution to the bind. Ironically, it is also a situation in which, as I have suggested, more dialogues lead to a more rapid race to partition. But, as I said, almost, and that is where we have still one part of our story unsaid, which will hopefully come out in the rest of this account. V Before that, however, we have one more slice on the escape route. Let us go back to the experiences of Bengal prior to the partition in 1947. We are recounting, once again in the briefest outline, the political experiences of the partition of British Bengal that preceded the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. We are speaking of the Bengal partition of 1905

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that lasted until 1911. My purpose is to show how democracy and partition have played games with each other, and by the same token, partition and dialogue. The Presidency of Fort William, through which British colonial rule had established itself, became a huge single administrative unit – from the river Sutlej in the northwest to Assam in the north-east and the Arakan in the southeast. With an enormous mass of population inhabiting this area, without any effective central administration, local insurgencies and other disturbances often rearing their heads, and local cultural–political identities clamouring for recognition, the Charter Act of 1833 created a separate Presidency, the Agra Presidency, later renamed as the Northwestern Provinces. Yet the Bengal Presidency remained huge and ungovernable. A separate secretariat was created for Bengal in 1843. In 1853 local government was taken away from the office of the Governor General and a Lieutenant Governor was appointed for Bengal. Yet, calamities like the famine of 1866, and the peasant mutinies between 1845 and 1875 proved the inadequacy of the remedy of 1853 for toning up the administration of Bengal. Arakan was separated from Bengal in 1862, again for better administration, and was included in the newly created Chief Commissionership of Burma. And then in 1874 the districts of Cachar, Sylhet, Goalpara and the Garo Hills were separated from Bengal and put in Assam, which became a Chief Commissioner’s province. A fixed frontier policy in respect of Arakan, Chittagong, Cachar and the Lushai Hills was formulated. But Assam remained inconvenienced by a lack of trained administrative personnel, and the ChinLushai Conference of 1892 in the background of annexation of the Lushai Hills decided to lessen further the existing administrative burden on Bengal by transfer of Chittagong and the Chittagong Hill Tracts from Bengal to Assam. The Assam–Bengal Railway was finished. It was suggested that even the Dhaka and Mymensing divisions be also transferred. All these provided the backdrop to Lord Curzon’s decision for sweeping readjustment of territorial boundaries in eastern and north-eastern parts of British India. His original scheme proposed inclusion of the Chittagong Division, Dhaka, Mymensing, Faridpur, Bakargunj, Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Jalpaiguri and Malda in Assam, which was to be now a new province. Subsequently amended, Curzon’s final proposal for the partition of Bengal in 1905 followed his tour of Eastern Bengal. It resulted in an amalgam of reasons of administrative expediency, communal considerations, of political control over the rising nationalist sentiments in Bengal, recognition of linguistic communities and a new frontier policy to the north-east. Initially both Hindus and Muslims opposed the partition of Bengal, but, later, organized Muslim opinion changed its mind. Meanwhile, Assam acquired its distinct political identity within the British setup, and Bihar and Orissa became separate units. By the time partition was revoked, it was found by the Bengal nationalists that the most important political-administrative arrangement in the British Empire in India had been substantially restructured. The capital had been transferred from Calcutta to Delhi, and one could see the first hints of a subsequent state-reorganization of independent India. Once again the escape from a situation of bind had been found.

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VI The interesting point for a political historian is to see how paradoxes worked in all this. First, administrative rationality was undeniable, and yet, knowing today the hate among communities in India that all these partitions have left in their wake, we have to adjust ourselves to the fact that rationality could produce the most maddening acts in politics – the communal killings that became frequent in Bengal in the 1920s and 1930s, became gruesome in 1940s, and continued until as late as the 1980s, when the massacres of Nellie and Mongoldoi took place in Assam. After all, when Sir Cyril Radcliffe was chosen to head the two Boundary Commissions in the partition of India – Punjab and the Bengal Commissions – his greatest virtue was, besides ‘his great legal abilities, right personality, and wide administrative experience’, his total lack of direct knowledge of India and experience in arbitration on boundaries, which bore to the rulers promise of neutrality, so much so that, when he had arrived on his fateful mission, he had been housed not in the Viceroy’s palace in Delhi or the Governor’s lodge in Calcutta, but elsewhere so that his neutrality could be clear to all. Expertise in constitutional law was considered crucial to boundary-making. Even the fifty-fifty formula in composing the Punjab Boundary Commission – two nominated by the Muslim League and two by Congress – to be headed by an independent chairman was considered a rational formula. In the event Justice Din Muhammad and Justice Muhammad Munir (nominated by the League), Justice Mehar Chand Mahajan (representing Congress) and Justice Teja Singh (representing the Sikhs) only resulted in the communalization of deliberations. Jinnah’s proposal for a three-member commission to be appointed by the UN had been turned down. The Commission could not come to an agreement as to what were to be the ‘other factors’ in settling boundaries besides communal composition. And, when the rational act was performed through rational procedure, it was found that the Sikh community in Punjab, too scattered in the province, had split the community down the middle with two million on the wrong side of the border, though it had formed 10 per cent of the population in eight districts west of the Beas Sutlej. Administrative rationality of boundary-making, bureaucratic brutality, anxiety, fear and revenge – all proved what the Governor of Punjab Evan Jenkins had warned all through. As a chronicler wrote: The declaration of the Boundary Commission Award shook the confidence of the minority, which found itself in other ‘homelands’, physical violence only completed the process of demobilization. Even though defence was difficult, particularly in the case of the partiality of the police and the military, the minorities in most cases, did not even try to hold to their ‘pockets’. In a lightening flash, it came to them that the game was up, everything seemed alien to them, the civil administration, the police, the army; even their homes frightened them as a potential prison or slaughter house; the assassin’s knife was receiving a fresh edge on the stone; the fire raising brigade might be at the door any minute. As the instinct of self-preservation was roused the attachment to earthly possessions suddenly became atrophied. In the countryside, an anxious

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call pierced the summer air like a fireball in the night. ‘To the border!’ In the twinkling of an eye, an interminable queue of carts and cattle, men, women, children form on the road leading to the frontier.9 The paradox of this combination of rationality and irrationality drew from the fact that the imagination of new political existence almost everywhere was to a significant extent the prisoner of old forms of politics, particularly imperial forms, so that the imperial legacy of achieving congruence of territorial power and cultural power was seen as an essential attribute of statehood. Violence had to be too violent, as in the case of the Indian partition, to invite a new form of rule through division of land, which means, in other words, that there had to be an irrationality to justify the rational act of partition. Thus, as I show in the brief account of the first partition of Bengal, the legacy of divide and rule had deeper geopolitical implications, notably in terms of influencing imaginations of ethnic futures. Once the form of partition arrived, subsequent politics assumed its shape greatly within this form. And when the hour of great partition arrived, it was found to be the combined hour of apparently two different phenomena – ethnopolitics and geopolitics. The internality of the nation-form (the ethnopolitics) and the externality of the nationform (geopolitics) were at once the same and different, at once ready to swap each other’s place while emphasizing the distinctness of each. Each was the other’s supplement, each the form of the other’s excess, each looking separate while at the same time each being produced from within the other – the dangerous supplement. Second, and this is linked to the first paradox, representational politics that lies at the heart of nationalist politics became so self-enclosed that representation and dialogue, which are supposed to complement each other, became one another’s foe. Dialogists are the representatives of a community, group, solidarity or nation. Totalizing the interests of the represented, the representative acquires legitimacy. Therefore, dialogues to avert partition more often than not succeed in reaching, as if in a remorseless way, the decision to partition. This act of democratic legitimation of partition happened in colonial India on the eve of her independence in 1946. One might suppose that the history of (almost ritualized) talks, discussions and negotiated settlements should have been easy enough to arrive at a democratic management of differences and settlements, particularly on territorial frontiers. The reverse is the case, partly because wars and dialogues continue to complement each other in fashioning boundaries of political identities, and partly because new institutional processes and mechanisms to combine difference and representation lack their presence. Thus even after partition became an accomplished reality, dialogues to overcome the bitter divides created in the wake of partition became prey to partitioned time. Nothing can be more illustrative of this than the history of the India–Pakistan summits, where the mechanics of dialogue have been to primarily maintain, or reinforce, or strengthen, or alter the configuration of power obtaining in the political relation between the two feuding countries. In 1953, in the context of the dispute on Kashmir and a possible solution through its partition, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: One has to keep partition in view, though we need not talk about it directly. If it is a question of partition, then the views of the people naturally have a great say but not a final say about every area.

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Again in 1955, when Sheikh Abdullah wanted to know from prison, where Nehru had put him for his intransigence, what crime he had committed, Nehru in reply had referred to a confidential note of 1952, and had remarked that he was determined to maintain the status quo then existing: We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power. But that superiority is not so great as to produce results quickly either in war or by the fear of war. Therefore our national interest demands that we should adopt a peaceful policy towards Pakistan and, at the same time, add to our strength. Strength ultimately comes not from the defence forces, but the industrial and economic background behind them. As we grow in strength, and we are likely to do so, Pakistan will feel less and less inclined to threaten or harass us, and a time will come when, through sheer force of circumstances, it will be in a mood to accept a settlement which we consider fair, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere.10 It is a different matter that Nehru’s hope is still to materialize, but these indicative remarks show that dialogues do not necessarily work against violent and bitter separations. Indeed, dialogues are sometimes the necessary prelude to partition. The dialogists are representatives of their respective nations; they are like warlords. As the innumerable rounds of discussions during the visit of the Cabinet Mission to India (1946) showed, they don’t mind talking, while preparing for the act. In fact, like the warlords, they too sometimes enjoy a truce. The reward is legitimacy – international, but more importantly, legitimacy in the eyes of their nations. To return again to the Cabinet Mission days, the longer they stayed around the table, the better their chances became to strengthen that legitimacy. Step by step, from negotiators of a compromise, they would grow into negotiators on much more substantive issues: territorial arrangements, constitutional guarantees and recognition by the states system. Of course, fundamental claims do not vanish, and they did not vanish then. At the appropriate moment, the truce was to be broken as if to conquer another slice of territory, accompanied by, if necessary, a couple of additional massacres, and then a return to the negotiating table. These representatives of respective nations constantly weigh the pros and cons. ‘Usually, they are much better poker players than the international mediators.’ They can go back and forth an innumerable number of times, which was to become again amply evident during the Balkan wars nearly fifty years later. Exactly like the Cabinet Mission parleyed in the Indian subcontinent nearly fifty years ago, the Hague Conference on Yugoslavia (1991), under the patronage of the European Community (EC), was marked by the theme of dialogue on the act of Balkan partition. The Conference finally succumbed to it. Constantly obliged to launch appeals to stop the ongoing war in Croatia, the Hague dialogues could not engage with more substantive issues. ‘The ferocity of the combats, the continuous shelling of Dubrovnik and the destruction of Vukovar, contributed to a shift of the general mood of the European Community. From the previously dominant French position in favour of maintaining the integrity of the former Yugoslavia, the EC evolved towards embracing what used to be a German inclination and to propose full recognition of the independence of Croatia and “all those who wish to be recognized as independent states”. That move, as we well know today, was not enough to stop the war.

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On the contrary, the conflict spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina and it took three more years to negotiate the Dayton accords which, to this day, have proved viable only with the support of tens of thousands of NATO troops’11. This is exactly like the situation in the subcontinent, where even with hundreds and thousands of troops with all modern weaponry, UN appeals, and the watchful and constant engagement of Big Brother one has not been able to devour the other. And yet, as we know, that is not the only fate of dialogue. It remains true that the territorial and non-territorial frontiers of political formations, which these new nations are, are marked by mixed presence of all kinds. The greater the attempt to create a clean partition, the less clean it is, because politics of territory is bound inextricably with politics of representation. Partition of empire to partition of modern states – the history is roughly the same in this respect.12 Modern nation-states may take pride in the fact that what they are trying to achieve through partition is new, representative of popular will, and therefore democratic. But from the point of formation of states, the dismemberment of dynastic states and dual monarchies, partition of nations, and the simultaneous processes of devolution and division of political power show a continuity of dynamics. What is important therefore is not a semantic quibbling over the name, but a study of new forms and mechanics of dialogue in the context of warpaths to forming new political societies. Indeed the sense of discomfort with which the use of the term ‘partition’ is greeted by self-righteous political classes in many countries in discussions on their origin betrays bad faith. Third, partition made what was disaster to one democracy into a godsend for another. If partition appeared as a curse to the Indians in the post-partition subcontinent, it signified freedom to the people of Pakistan; or, if the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 appeared as an act of dismemberment of Pakistan to the people of West Pakistan and therefore unwelcome to them, it was independence to the people of East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. In other words, the relation between democracy and partition has to be looked at not in a static way, but what may appear as tautology – in a relational context. Thus, without democratic yearnings, there could not have been the strong republican sentiment among the nationalists. By the same token, it was again the spread of democracy among Muslim masses that led to the demand for provincial autonomy, and, again by the same token, partition appeared as the signal for the peasant utopia to the Muslim peasantry in late 1940s in the subcontinent. More often than not we forget that what was being partitioned was not an undifferentiated mass, often conjured up through the term subcontinent, but the formal act of division of a differentiated mass, known to us as British India. Therefore, in such circumstances, democracy encouraged partition as well as providing points of encounters with the strategies and acts of partition. In all these, we find not one partition, not even two, nor even three as Gyanendra Pandey claims, but several partitions – partitions of several territories, several units, several solidarities, several identities, several entities and several visions; and not one discourse of democracy, but several with contested ideas around issues of citizenship, political participation, borders and frontiers, and legitimacy. Fourth, the very plurality of partitions indicated points of resistance to the grand geopolitical vision of forming new states through readjustments of territorial entities and boundaries. Because these partitions rested on existing and developing fault-lines, the grand vision had to bear with its weaknesses from which sprang other imaginations about a possible post-colonial nation, in this case the possible India. Thus, as researches have

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brought out, communities such as Meos had their own vision in those years. So had Dalits in some places, and so had a politician like Gandhi his own idea of a future India, while politicians like Sarat Chandra Bose and Fazlul Haq had a vision of independent Bengal in order to escape the severely limited alternatives. Peasant mutinies had their own particular hopes, communist rebellions had their own vision, peoples and princes including those of Kashmir had their own plans for a different future, and even refugees, who fled homes and hearths and left behind their meagre or abundant wealth, did not leave behind their dream of return, but carried it with them, while subsequent immigrants by their sheer act of migration disputed the finality of the act. In the same way, new regions emerged in geopolitical imaginations, some of which I discuss in detail in the concluding chapter of A Biography of the Indian Nation, 1947–97 and in The Marginal Nation, and which made the finality of the geopolitical vision of 1947 null and void. A dialogue with emerging partitioned realities becomes in such a situation the act of reopening a settled question, going back to the origin, not in order to return to prepartitioned time, but to turn to times that would be marks of other realities and providences. Partition is said to have arrived because of ‘excessive geopolitics’.13 The trimming of excess in this case – the excess of the ‘excessive geopolitics’ – is to make the phenomenon redundant, irrelevant at least for the time being. Political criticism in such context means not to take a pure moral stand on the ethicality of the act, which I try to show to be nearly impossible, but to criticize the reasoning, which assumes a normal geopolitical state of politics followed or severely disturbed by an excess, and to show how that normalcy produces out of it an abundance, an excess, and how the politics of nationhood and statehood is a process of representation and its contesting other – dialogue. Indeed one can go even further. The assumption of a ‘normal geopolitical state of politics’ shows the existence of two things: first, the normal is often the reflection of the regime of the normal, whereby the extraordinary, the excess, has been normalized, at least attempts are very much on; and, second, the regime of the normal is often the strategy to gloss over the fault-lines in the extraordinary. To find out how the ‘excess’ or the ‘extraordinary’ is sought to be normalized, and yet how that strategy is never at peace with itself because of the continuing contestations, it is important that we specifically probe simultaneously the normalizing accounts of the abnormal, and the splits in the profile of the extraordinary. We shall see, in the course of such interrogation, acts of dialogue negotiating with realities of separation in those events, and the still-continuing confrontation of the reality of a normalizing regime by other visions and other realities whose dialogic forms are the first hints to reach us. Let us delve a little more into the paradox that I am trying to suggest. We all know how states and nations have often been in the past in search of ‘natural’ frontiers; sometimes they have searched for a ‘scientific frontier’, subsequently claimed as the ‘natural frontier’. Rome was said to have searched for its scientific frontier, and, nearly two thousand years later, Lord Roberts, British commander in the second Afghan War of 1890, attempting to push the northwestern frontier of British India beyond the ‘natural line’ of the Sulaiman Mountains, thought that the scientific line lay between Kabul and Kandahar, well beyond the outer boundary of India. Though Roberts’ line was abandoned because military strategists could not agree on its precise location and how to cover the logistics of military, civil and administrative supplies, even the political frontier of the Durand line (1893) could not correspond with any demarcating line, leading Lord Curzon

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to comment ruefully on the lack of adequate control over the line.14 This is how ‘excessive geopolitics’ becomes self-defeating. Partition results in not only the redrawing of boundaries and borders; it impels the contending parties to contend the dividing line at each place, at each level, defeating the rationality of the act itself. Thus, as I try to show in The Marginal Nation or as Joya Chatterji and Ishtiaq Ahmed tell us in their remarkable essays on drawing the partitioning boundaries in Bengal and Punjab,15 the act becomes grotesque in its extended operation. A divided country in the dark glass of partition becomes a ‘broken nation’, a broken nation becomes a ‘broken area’, a broken area becomes a ‘broken village’, and a broken village becomes a ‘broken people’.16 As the Radcliffe line was being carved out in India, thana (area of jurisdiction of a police station) by thana, and village by village, it was also producing the early signs of the passage from the ‘rational stage’ to the stage of reason’s absurdity. For the purpose of partition, in Punjab for example, a district-wise notional majority (that is a numerical majority according to the 1941 census) determined votes on the resolution in the Punjab Assembly, and this occurred against the background of the communally fast-polarizing atmosphere of 1941, which had led to exaggerated claims of mutual strength by both Muslims and non-Muslims, and which the Census Commissioner Yeatts had called a ‘census war’. Without an ‘obvious boundary line’, separation by districts and divisions became a bloody affair (Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan divisions held a Muslim majority and Ambala and Jullundur divisions held a Hindu majority, with Amritsar district in Lahore division holding a Hindu majority and Gurudaspur district in Lahore division going to India by the Gurudaspur Award). Demands of contiguity, communal majority, peasant proprietorship, transfer of ‘floating population’, the issue of language and shrines, claims over tehsils, canals and colonies, and finally ‘other factors’ were to bring out the excess that a rational policy was producing from within. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was presiding over the theatre, in speaking of boundarydemarcation in the west said: In my judgment the truly debatable grounds in the end lie in and around the area between the Beas and Sutlej rivers on the one hand and the river Ravi on the other. The fixing of a boundary in this area was further complicated by the existence of canal systems, so vital to the life of the Punjab but developed only under the conception of a single administration, and of systems of road and rail communication, which have been planned in the same way….I have hesitated long over those not inconsiderable areas east of the Sutlej River and in the angle of the Beas and Sutlej rivers in which Muslim majorities are found. But on the whole I have come to the conclusion that it would be in the true interests of neither state to extend the territories of West Punjab to a strip on the far side of the Sutlej….I have not found it possible to preserve undivided the irrigation system of the Upper Bari Doab Canal, which extends from Madhopur in the Pathankot Tehsil to the western border of the district of Lahore, although I have made small adjustments of the Lahore–Amritsar district boundary to mitigate some of the consequences of this severance.17

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We know now that, while this search for some sort of ‘natural frontier’ led Cyril Radcliffe to choose the boundary at Ravi rather than Chenab in the west (as the Congress and the Sikhs wanted) or at Sutlej in the east (as the Muslim League wanted), as the novelist Rajinder Puri commented later, the Punjabis vanished. In West Punjab they became Pakistanis, in East Punjab they became Hindus and Sikhs, Akalis, Congressmen, Arya Samajists and Jan Sanghis, never Punjabis. Lord Mountbatten had blithely observed on 3 March 1947: When the Muslim League demanded the partition of India, the Congress used the same arguments for demanding in the event the partition of certain Provinces. To my mind this argument is unassailable. …I am of course opposed to the partition of the Provinces as I am to the partition of India herself…just as I felt there is an Indian consciousness which should transcend communal differences so I feel there is a Punjabi and Bengali consciousness…. We have given careful consideration to the position of the Sikhs. The valiant community forms about an eighth of the population of Punjab, but they are so distributed that any partition of the province will inevitably divide them. All of us who have the good of Sikh community at heart are very sorry to think that the partition of the Punjab, which they themselves desire, cannot avoid splitting them to a greater or lesser extent. The exact degree of the split will be left to the Boundary Commission on which they will of course be represented….18 Thus, while the architects of partition remained unmindful of the eventuality, the absurdity of the geography was heralding the beginning of its decline. Fifth, partition as an act appears always to the area concerned a local and unique act, so much is its centrality as an event in the time it takes place. But as Robert Schaeffer in his work on partitions around the world, Severed States – Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World (1999), shows, partition comes in batches, as events in a series of creating otherness, as marks of a particular global time. Thus, partitions of empires, of countries in the wake of decolonization, cold war partitions, of states into ethnically conjured-up nations, into habitations of settlers and indigenous peoples, of ‘recalcitrant rogue states’, and not the least the case of division of countries into warlords’ estates resulting in virtual partitions – all these have come not as isolated or exotic cases of geopolitics, but as regular events with externalities and internalities playing their roles in the formation of events. The acts of dialogue are therefore as much bearers of these externalities and internalities, as the partitions are. Ireland, Turkey, Bengal or Palestine – these are randomly selected lands, yet why do acts of dialogue in all these cases bear the mark of negotiating with the partitioned realities and never succumbing to them? Why do the acts of discovery of the borders and the discovery of neighbours remain the intermixing tales, making the hegemonic apparatus of rule an eternally unstable chronicle? It is here where we must again and again visit the dual site of the global and the local, and the symbolic and the material, not only to understand the reasoning of partition, but the reasoning of its other also, namely dialogue. Therefore, to the question as to whether we study partition as conflict cases only, the answer probably would be that this is a false poser, because it is only a dialogic imperative that impels us to study conflict – in this case –

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partition, and the dialogues that led to partition, dialogues that encountered the act of partition and dialogues that followed partition. Mythic history battles with history, history battles with law, law battles with dialogue, dialogue with monologue, multilogue with dialogue, the local with the global, and the country with the region – the intermingled world of representation and resistance is marked by all these contests. Sixth, modern partitions that characterize themselves from earlier partitions of countries, kingdoms, principalities and empires, by being associated with nationalism, are closely connected with the puzzle of self-determination. Partition can be seen as collective action, hastened by policy decisions, designed towards rendering the boundaries of a nation congruent with those of its governing unit. This congruence is attained by a paradoxical process – on one hand the discovery of the nation proceeds with the discovery of its boundaries, and, on the other hand, the governing unit is shaped through this discovery. Thus, most of the time, nationalism is marked by incipient, real, virtual, hidden – all kinds of partitions, for that is how nation determines its self. It is a matter of time when the soulmate of nation arrives in the form of a partition – with independence, earlier to independence, later to independence. Nation gains, nation shrinks – that is what Derrida would have called the dangerous supplement. Therefore, in the debate as to whether the dark side of the nation can be contained, it often appears that we, in referring to national self-determination, refer to another object, as if that object is standing there apart from us – the nation, and not to our own history of the last few hundred years of statehood, sovereignty and the emergence of the modern political self – a history that is characterized by bureaucratic, cultural and governmental marks. We need to be reminded at those times, to borrow a few words from Charles Tilly, of ‘national self-determination as a problem for all of us’.19 And, therefore, the final paradox is that partition is never seen as a bundle of paradoxes, but as a straight case of evil or good, necessity or hindrance. Policies fail because they rarely take into account the paradoxes; as a response of a government, policies like to build on general truths. Thus conventional policy response to partition can never assuredly answer the question, is partition a solution to conflict, or by itself a conflict? Is it a classic separation of forces agreement to be followed by peace, or a lengthy process of face-to-face positioning of forces? Similarly, is thirdparty involvement in partition a token of its efficacy, or a token of disaster? Is the law of self-determination a way forward to democracy, or a testimony, that as law the concept of self-determination shows its deficit, in as much as it shows deficit in democracy? Finally, is partition an instance of excess, an abnormality or a supplement of geopolitics that returns in one form or another? These paradoxes show the varying ways in which partition appears as a contentious history. And there I part company with Gyanendra Pandey, because, while I too believe that partition offers deep insights when read as a chronicle of violence and collective action, the claim to the finality of such reading misses the contentions that refuse to stop at the narratives of violence, which by its very nature cannot be cast simply in a uniform tale. In probing ‘who kills’, ‘who is killed’, ‘how one kills’, ‘how one dies’ and ‘how killing becomes accepted as the way to live and die’, we are not only inquiring into the process in which murder and death are inscribed in the formation of nations and states (remember how war, famine and, finally, the Great Calcutta killings made death banal in the nationalist chronicle), we are in fact trying to come to terms with the undefined and

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undefinability of the acts of partition and dialogue. Violence in an event tempts final reading. By inquiring why the event of partition always tempts a final reading, always therefore a moral reading, we shall gain in terms of historical understanding of the act, though in that task of gaining critical understanding, I doubt, while history may work and help, that historians do. The perceptual geopolitics of partition is the double gaze of Janus. We live in partitioned times. The rending asunder of common territories and histories in the name of imaginary ethnic imperatives – and nothing is more real than the imaginary – has been one of the most traumatic and yet paradigmatic experiences of the past century; so widespread, indeed, that our age seems better served, as I have elsewhere argued, by the phrase ‘partitioned times’ than the more prevalent ‘post-colonial times’. From India to Yugoslavia, Ethiopia to Rwanda, Cyprus to Ireland, and Palestine to Korea, the vivisected regions that colour the world map have been shaped in a substantive way by the great-power strategy of partition exerted as the institutionalized form of the universally dominant geopolitical will. Therefore, in addressing the issue of partition not only as event but as a sign, we shall be managing to concentrate our perception into a highly ‘distilled’ diptych – as if the confrontation of two (or more) images, texts or sound pieces were the most adequate way of grasping partition’s Janusfaced structure that is embedded in the historical present. Janus, of course, was an ancient deity of doors and entrances, represented with a face on the front and another on the back of his head; the doors of his temple were always open in time of war, and shut in time of peace. In some respects, the currency of partition has made Janus the emblematic figure of our age, where asymmetrical gazes look narcissistically back at themselves even as they feign to stare down at the other. Gyanendra Pandey is right but inadequate in telling the outcome of a self-fulfilling prophecy, partition, that entails a proactive and irredentist erasure of how people have invented communities beyond difference – however that may be construed. In Pandey’s account, resistance is absent; partition arrives as the nationalist fate. It arrives without the historically accompanying chronicles of revolts, the parallel and at times intersecting journeys of nationalism and democracy, of history and contra-history. Partition, at once an event and a sign, belongs to that set of phenomena, which contemporary time, because this time is both concrete and elliptic, excels at recasting acts and events in a fresh and unexpected light beyond the pale of fear studies. Partition in the fullest sense of the term is a global issue; as such, it seems appropriate that we think hard of ways to denaturalize our perception of this political byproduct of globalization.20 VII Writings on partition are determined in at least seven ways: 1 contextually (they draw and recreate meaningful social milieu out of the geo-body); 2 rhetorically (they use literary-expressive conventions, and the mental borders become in these accounts the prehistory of the partition, and often assume mythic forms); 3 institutionally (one writes of institutions, disciplines, laws and audiences); 4 generically (that is to say an ethnography of partition distinguishable from historical or travel accounts);

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5 geographically (space and territory surfacing as the main unit of analysis, and turning the analysis into a geography of domination); 6 historically (all the above conventions and milieus placing their imprint); 7 politically (contesting and critiquing all the authorities of partitions who share unequal spaces in these accounts and acts). It is important to take note of these ways in which acts of partition have been written about, and the inherent ambiguity in defining the act. Hence is the requirement to study the act, the practice and the site in singularity and multiplicity. Why do we need to visit old tales of partition, histories and their differential reasoning reflected in the different ways in which accounts of partition are written, as briefly mentioned above? Because, first, we must make more efforts than ever before to understand institutions of rule that make partitions the inevitable result of differences, particularly differences in political identity. The historicized political legacy of these institutions and forms of rule need more rigorous study.21 Partition not only symbolizes the collapse of a state, this collapse is of a particular state – in some case, the form of colonial rule, in some others, other forms of rule of the departing power. Second, we must also realize that partitions symbolize not only the collapse of a particular state, but its restructuring – the reformation and reconstitution of a particular form of state through passive revolution. Third, these histories tell us that this reconstitution is not only of one particular form of state, they tell of a specific way of reconstitution also, a reconstitution that reflects the continuities and discontinuities in the transition – the mimetic histories and the virtual realities of politics that make sovereignty a juridical-political reality as well as a reality that suffers deficit through particular forms of transition to political realities of post-colonialism and underdevelopment. Fourth, these histories, especially in their memorial form, suggest possible forms of transition and the impossible attempts at transition along with that – memories, labour of memory, and ambiguities in that labour. In our engagements in political criticism we must be aware of easy generalities that may suggest themselves from comparison of experiences of transition. Possibly, the only important generality is the reality of differences in these events, within them, among them – differences resulting from the variations within the imagined politics of transition to other forms of politics. And this reciprocity too is a paradox. Therefore allow me to take a last look at this briefest of the brief history of various partitions that purports to tell us general lessons on partitions. I refer to some of the cases from Radha Kumar’s article on ‘Settling Partition Hostilities – Lessons Learnt, the Options Ahead’, the instructive study that she has done for us.22 For Ireland, a policy perspective suggests that, in the past Home Rule was the best option (particularly in 1912); for India–Pakistan the best option was a federation with Jinnah as the Prime Minister; for Israel–Palestine a UN-sponsored partition with binational state and economic union, and for Cyprus a unitary state with full minority rights guarantee and power-sharing arrangements. And the worst-case scenarios were then, for Ireland continuing civil war with a huge British army presence; for India–Pakistan, a decentralized federation of religious states with the likelihood of a long disintegrative partition war; for Israel–Palestine, unilateral British withdrawal and non-intervention by the UN; and, for Cyprus, a de jure partition or handing over Cyprus to the Greeks. Today, she says the best-case scenario in these instances would be, for Ireland, implementation of a framework agreement with decommissioning of arms, reform of police, phased

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withdrawal of British troops, and making Northern Ireland a part of ‘Europe of the Regions’; for India–Pakistan, renewal of the Lahore process, Pakistan stopping support for jehadis, all-party talks towards autonomy for Kashmir, settling Siachen and other bilateral disputes and, over time, giving substance to SAARC; for Israel–Palestine, Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Golan, security- and water-sharing agreements with Syria, dual citizenship for settlements, the right to return, and a bi-national, bi-communal state; and, for Cyprus, a similar bi-communal and bi-national state, with the countervailing force of EU membership, and the demilitarization and reintegration of Nicosia. And what is the worst-case scenario now? For Ireland, breakdown of reforms, more hitches to the decommissioning of arms, and continued internal displacement of Protestants; for India– Pakistan, refusal to talk, continued low-intensity conflict, threat of wider war leading to more instability; for Israel–Palestine, partition of the West Bank, bantustans, and an attempt to settle Jerusalem and refugee issues through final status; and, for Cyprus, endless proximity talks without results, and unilateral accession of Cyprus to the EU, thus strengthening partition. In all these cases, if the worst-case scenario could not permanently materialize, that is, why we can think of other ways today, the reason is that there was an alternate politics to permanent partition – a politics of resistance that engaged with the state-centric policy of partition – sometimes through arms, but often through dialogue based on notions of rights and justice. If 1912 could not permanently ensure the worst-case scenario in Ireland, if the two feuding countries of South Asia have still not destroyed each other, if Israel’s policy of racism, theocracy and occupation has not succeeded in silencing dissent, and if the partition question of Cyprus still remains an unsettled question, more than policy the politics of reopening a ‘settled’ history is responsible. That task is at once archival as well as political, because it engages in finding out, by concentrating on fault-lines in the accomplishment of the act, why the ‘best’-case scenario did not happen, and why the ‘worst’-case scenario repeatedly changes. Contrary to the current trend of becoming busy with analysis of why communities the world over are trying to become ethnically homogeneous states, it is necessary to find out and study the alternative forms of politics that movements for independence, democracy and justice are throwing up, or the choices that are opening up in the process. These choices range from reunification, shared sovereignty, diverse forms of autonomy, multi-level democratization, and new ways of constitution-making in democratizing polities, to other non-nationalized forms of statehood. In the anonymous murmur of the everyday conversation across the divides, we have traces of other possibilities of politics, where the right to be different and separate does not mean the violent drawing of the scalpel, where boundaries are accommodated in other forms of existence. In 1960, thirteen years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, reflecting on the concurrence of the Indian National Congress in 1947 to the partition of the country is said to have told Leonard Mosley, a British author: The truth is that we were tired men, and we were getting on in years too. Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again – and if we had stood out for a united India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited

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us. We saw the fires burning in the Punjab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it. When the countdown to partition had begun that year, Gandhi was in the riot-torn area of Noakhali in the eastern part of Bengal and he wrote in his diary on 2 January of the eventful year: Have been awake since 2 a.m. God’s grace alone is sustaining me. I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All around me is utter darkness. When will God take me out of this darkness into His light? And then, a few months later, declining an invitation to join Nehru and Patel in Mussoorie, he wrote on 25 May, ‘I am quite well though in boiling heat. I must not think of Mussoorie or any other similar climate’, and then, ‘I see no place for myself in what is happening around us today … I have no wish to live if India is to be submerged in a deluge of violence, as is now threatened’, and still again, ‘I am in the midst of a raging fire. Is it God’s mercy or irony of fate that the flames do not consume me?’ Sardar Baldev Singh, the defence minister in the Interim Government who was reasonably confident that large-scale troop deployment would ensure peace during division of the country, had endorsed the plan of partition amid massive violence, particularly in Punjab, with these words, ‘It does not please everybody, not the Sikh community anyway. But it is certainly worthwhile. Let us take it’. The Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, concerned himself so much with the safety of the British in the subcontinent after British withdrawal on 14–15 August, rather than concerning himself with saving human lives amid that unprecedented destruction and carnage, that the General Officer Commanding of the Eastern Command, appalled at such a one-eyed attitude, could only forecast ‘a bloody massacre in Punjab’.23 Should it astonish us that these visions of peace marked the time of partition – what Max Jean Jins calls the time of ‘citizen-massacres’ – and that, differing widely between themselves, these visions converged on accepting the act, and thus made it inevitable? If political criticism has to make any sense of out of this – these political possibilities and impossibilities – it has to appreciate the fault-lines at that moment that these remarks for example suggest – fault-lines that tell us not only ways of dialoguing, but ways of imagining accommodation and coexistence that make the closed world of partition, segregation, diminished citizenship and what Robert Schaeffer calls ‘schizophrenic states’ increasingly irrelevant for a political existence in the new century. These are also the traces of attempts made to escape the closure brought upon our ways of imagining and building political community amid the forms given to statehood by passive revolution, whose one form has been partition in recent history – partition that has been defined as [a] political act in which a single unit on the map is divided into two or more parts, the division being imposed either by agreement between two groups or military action, bringing with it several consequences from the geographical, cultural, and social through the economic and administrative, and that has been symbolized by newly created boundaries in mind and on earth.24

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Acknowledgement I am grateful for comments from Étienne Balibar and Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes on an earlier draft of this chapter. I am also grateful to Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi and Rada Iveković, who worked with me on a comparative study on partitions and closely read this essay. Notes 1 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition – Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–4. 2 Ibid. p. 1. 3 Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness – An Argument’, in Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan (eds), Nations and Nationalisms – France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth Century Context (London: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), p. 77. 4 On imperial otherness, it is always worth rereading Jean Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), later included in Jean Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001); on Sartre’s contribution to a radical anti-colonial politics and to a subsequent radical post-colonial theory, see Robert J.C. Young’s preface to Colonialism and Neocolonialism. 5 All the phrases within quotation marks are taken from a memorandum prepared by Walter Lippmann for President Wilson, 1917, cited in Laurence Evans, United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914–1924 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 74. 6 On this, see a remarkable collection of essays by W.W. Haddad and W. Ochsenwald (eds), Nationalism in a Non-national State – The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977). 7 Cited in David Page, Prelude to Partition – The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control 1920–1932 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 191. 8 Reprinted in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition – Process, Strategy and Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 44–58. 9 J. Nanda, Punjab Uprooted – A Survey of the Punjab Riots and Rehabilitation Problems (Bombay, 1948), pp. 52–53, cited in Tan Tai Yong, ‘“Sir Cyril Goes to India” – Partition, Boundary-making and Disruptions in the Punjab’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 4 (1), 1997, p. 16 (quotation marks added). 10 These two quotations are cited in A.G. Noorani’s two-part review article on Vol. 28 (second series) of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), published in Frontline, 3 August (p. 74) and 17 August, 2001 (p. 99). 11 These quotations are from the notes of a Balkan diplomat, Goran Fejic, ‘Peace Processes in the Era of Globalisation – Negotiating with Warlords’ (unpublished). 12 One may profitably study in this context the history of the breakdown of the frontiers of the Roman Empire. See C.R. Whitaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire – A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chapter 6, ‘The Collapse of the Frontiers’, pp. 192–242. 13 I borrow this term from Sanjay Chaturvedi. 14 Nathaniel Curzon, Frontiers (Oxford: Romanes Lecture, 1907), p. 40. 15 Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier – The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies, 33 (1), 1999; on the Punjab Boundary Commission arguments, Ishtiaq Ahmed, ‘The 1947 Partition of Punjab – Arguments put Forth before the Punjab Boundary Commission by the Parties Involved’, in Ian Talbot and

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Gurharpal Singh (eds), Region and Partition of the Subcontinent – Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 116–167. 16 The colonial administrator McAlpine first used the term ‘broken village’ in his report on the condition of tribes in eastern India in 1905. 17 From the documents collected and published in the four-volume The Partition of Punjab 1947 (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publication, 1993), Vol. 3, pp. 283–284. For greater detail on this see Ahmed, ‘The 1947 Partition of Punjab’. 18 The Partition of Punjab 1947, Vol. 1, pp. 1–2. 19 Charles Tilly, ‘National Self-Determination as a Problem for All of Us’, Daedalus, 122, pp. 29–36. 20 I am indebted for these lines to Stephen Wright, who edited and co-translated my earlier essay on partition, ‘The Last Hurrah of the Westminster Model that Refuses to Die’ for Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, and sent me his comments on partitioned time. 21 Mahmood Mamdani, in a recent essay, ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities – Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (4), October 2001, pp. 651–664, speaks of the problematic of transition from colonialism and stresses the need to understand the implications of the continuity of some of crucial institutional forms of rule in terms of building identities, and their hostilities. 22 Radha Kumar, ‘Settling Partition Hostilities – Lessons Learnt, the Options Ahead’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, p. 28. 23 These quotations are from Ajit Bhattacharjea, Countdown to Partition – The Final Days (Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 1997), pp. 1–31. 24 Stanley Waterman, ‘Partitioned States’, Political Geography Quarterly, 6 (2), April 1987, pp. 151–152.

4 The excess of geopolitics Partition of ‘British India’ Sanjay Chaturvedi Introduction The key intention of this chapter is to critically examine the role of excessive geopolitics in the partition of ‘British India’, an imperial spatial formation, mapped, sustained and legitimized through a reductionist geopolitical reasoning, and forced upon highly diverse and complex social-cultural landscapes and their inhabitants, historically resistant to centralizing tendencies. The paper argues that the ‘moment’ of territorial partition finally arrived on the subcontinent when non-geopolitical reasoning and various forms of resistance either succumbed to or were subsumed within the overall geopolitical reasoning and representations deployed by hegemonic group(s). For the purposes of this chapter, geopolitics is defined as politics (ab)using spatial-territorial reasoning, arguments and representations for power-political purposes. Geopolitics is invariably intertwined with certain hegemonic forms of masculinity, whereas practices of statecraft are also practices of man-crafting. Territory and its representations are at the heart of geopolitics. Often resorted to by the powers engaged in pursuit of primacy, understood largely in territorial terms, excessive geopolitics feeds into, and in return, is sustained by the discourse and practices of reflexive otherness.1 Even though excessive geopolitics does not mean the total absence of resistance to geopolitical discourse or geopolitical representations, it does imply, however, that various alternative reasonings and representations – related to federalism, cultural autonomy, struggles against feudal oppression, local/ regional identities, gender domination/discrimination, etc. – get subsumed temporarily under excessive geopolitics but reassert their ambitions and agendas afterwards. The chapter is divided into four parts. It begins with a brief elaboration of the notion of excessive geopolitics. Part two of the chapter attempts to answer the following question: whose territory was being partitioned in 1947? If the partitioned entity was ‘India’, then, one might ask: whose India? ‘British India’ of imperial imagination and mapping? Akhand Bharat (indivisible India) or Bharat Mata (Mother India) of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindu, right-wing, patriarchic, imagination? ‘Dinia’ of Chaudhry Rahmat Ali’s imagination? ‘Achhutistan’ – the imagined homeland of the untouchables? None of these? Some of these? All of these? The intention here is to critically examine various geopolitical imaginations and representations of ‘India’, and to see how each one of them approached the ‘imperatives’ of partition in terms of its own exclusivist logic, resisting alternative reasonings/representations, but not without inviting resistance to its own. Part three takes a closer look at the factors and forces that eventually lead to the

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defining moment of partition or the triumph of geopolitical reasoning, in its state of excess, over other lines and arguments, which were subsumed temporarily under excessive geopolitics but would rear their heads afterwards to reassert their presence and functions. The concluding part of the chapter reflects briefly on the problematic of how to prevent, contain and eliminate the excess of geopolitics. Excessive geopolitics and territorial partitions: reasoning, representation and resistance French geographer Yves Lacoste has made a powerful case in favour of the geopolitical approach or what he calls a ‘new’ or ‘another way of seeing the world and complexity of its conflicts’.2 According to Lacoste, in many cases where geopolitics is spoken of today, it is in fact a question of rivalries between powers for land and for those who live there. In these political power confrontations, each power uses different means, particularly arguments, to prove that it is right to keep or conquer a given territory and that conversely its rival’s claims are illegitimate.3 Such power rivalries for possession and control of certain territory, both official and unofficial, develop not only between states but also within many states, between major political parties, between ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ groups, or between minority groups. In some cases, what might be common to such geopolitical rivalries with apparently diverse discourses such as ‘autonomy’ or ‘independence’, or ‘escape from domination by the Other’ or ‘tyranny of majority’ is the ‘historic rights’ that they contradictorily claim to have over one and the same territory. To quote Lacoste: To understand a geopolitical conflict or rivalry, it is not sufficient to specify and map what is at stake; it is also necessary to try … particularly when the causes are complex, to understand the reasons and ideas of its main protagonists – heads of state, leaders of regionalist, autonomist and independence movements, and so on – each both reflecting and influencing the frame of mind of that section of public opinion which they represent. The role of ideas [which Lacoste later terms as representations], even mistaken ones, is crucial in geopolitics because it is they that explain plans and, as much as material data, determine the choice of strategies.4 Drawing upon insights such as offered by a critical geopolitical approach to the study of partition, thus draws attention to the supremacy of territoriality in the discourse and practices of partition. Accordingly, one needs to approach and analyse ‘partition’ not as the end (product) of a geopolitical conflict or rivalry but rather as a means of resolving or managing that conflict; accepted by various ‘parties’ to a partition, either as a matter of choice, or due to persuasion or pressure. In other words, partition is to be seen not as an inevitable consequence of actual or imagined ‘predestined’ differences but as a consciously developed and deliberately deployed spatial strategy of eliminating real or

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imagined differences; a method being preferred over other methods including ‘mutuality/ consociation/power sharing’. There are, therefore, several – and not just one – partitionists with their respective ‘core values’; perceiving partition either as an escape route from the hegemony and domination of the ‘others’ or as the opportunity to establish their own. The logic of partition, according to Rada Iveković, means that one arrives at totality and commensurateness with oneself by separation from another self who, at a certain point…begins to be looked upon as a stranger…the common past is repudiated as a time of oppression in which ‘we’ were simply innocent victims of the wicked ‘others’ (and never active protagonists).5 What excessive geopolitics does is to inject a heavy doze of territoriality into the logic(s) of partition. Ideological conflicts are transformed over a period of time into geopolitical rivalries over ‘our territory’ versus ‘their territory’. In any case, as Denis Retaillé describes, geopolitics, as a geohistoric rationale for a political plan, is as old as the political discourse on territory and power. According to him, it could even be argued that there is actually no geopolitics unless the state [or reasons of state] is involved either as an actor or as an aim, with the state having a significant territorial component through the institutionalization of territory.6 Or, as Bertrand Badie puts it, ‘incontestably, only state logic can confer on a territory its clearest political identity’.7 Furthermore, a useful distinction might be drawn with ‘ethnopolitics’, which takes as its starting point not territory but the boundaries of identity groups. Thus geopolitics includes ethnopolitics, and ethnopolitics can only lead to geopolitics. However, to say that ethnopolitics leads to geopolitics, especially in cases where the former needs the latter to contain or suppress the subversive potential of sociocultural diversity, implies in most cases a temporary marriage of convenience and not a perfect union. Once cast in the hegemonic and hegemonizing terms of excessive geopolitics, human beings are discursively transformed into inhabitants of a territorial container, devoid of cultural moorings; to be used as dehumanized pawns on the geopolitical chessboard of territorial rivalries. In such situations, the cold-blooded logic of ‘territory for the sake of territory’ or Lebensraum, subsumes the alternative, more humane, logics of common habitat or shared spaces. In short, excessive geopolitics turns ‘topophilia’ – literally meaning ‘love of place’ or the emotions and meanings associated with particular places that have become significant to individuals through their daily lives – into some kind of a ‘topomania’; sustained by the illusion that partition alone can ensure harmonization between boundaries of imagined territorial realm and identity groups.8 Whose territory was being partitioned in 1947? According to Michel Foucher, ‘it usually takes two [or even more] to draw a border. The boundary marking the partition of India, drawn by Radcliffe, would be better called the Nehru–Jinnah line’.9 One may or may not agree with this statement, but it is good to be reminded, at the very outset that ‘geopolitical representations, like its discourse, are not

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initially the work of a “state” or a “people” but of individuals or small groups who have formulated or implanted them’.10 Such elitist representation(s) might eventually be widely disseminated, and critically or uncritically adopted, by the vast majority of people, yet they are still primarily the brainchild of politicians (or their advisers) or intellectuals of statecraft – in many cases geographers or historians – who, besides posing as sole spokesmen of the state or religious-cultural group they are out to serve, express their personal ways of seeing things. From yet another critical perspective, such representations can also be seen as highly elitist mental maps seeking popular mandate or legitimacy. Correspondingly, there is no single geography or identity of a ‘place’ but several geographies and identities. As Yong Tan and Kudasiya point out, places are not mere ‘fragments of physical space’ but rather socially constructed entities invested with a range of meanings by the people who inhabit them. Such meanings transform physical space into ‘place’ by imparting a distinct identity with which a place comes to be associated. Partition transforms these individual identities of places.11 The very fact that an overwhelming number of people in the Punjab and Bengal perceived the event as a partition (vibhajan or batwara) rather than the arrival of independence of any kind proves the point. ‘British India’: imperial imaginations, representations and resistance What was ‘India’ and where was India before the British came? In the context of the British conquest of ‘South Asia’ in the hundred years or so after 1750, the East India Company undertook a massive intellectual campaign to transform a land of bewildering complexity into a cartographic image of ‘India’ as a specific region of the globe. Territorial annexation of over 60 per cent of the territory of the Indian subcontinent, from 1757 to 1857, by the English East India Company was achieved in conjunction with the annexation of ‘Indian’ in imperial knowledge systems. Between 1757 and 1857 the English East India Company serially annexed some 2.5 million square kilometres or one million square miles – over 60 per cent of the territory of the subcontinent containing over three-quarters of its people.12 It was not until 1899 that an Act of Parliament converted ‘India’ from a name given to a kaleidoscopic entity of remarkably diverse cultural landscapes into a geographically bounded, political territory. However, the British were aware that the territorial annexation of India was not enough and had to be supplemented by the annexation of ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ into imperial knowledge systems.13 Matthew Edney has provided a scholarly account of how the East India Company, using imperial technologies of observation and measurement, attempted to transform the exotic and largely unknown diversity of the subcontinent into a passive but well-defined and knowable (and thereby controllable) geographical entity. The British, ably assisted by the ‘certainty and correctness granted by the Enlightenment epistemology’ made themselves the intellectual masters of the Indian landscape. The geographical unity of India was achieved through the British project of mapping the Empire.14 Edney further points out that, since imperialism and map-making are fundamentally concerned with territory and knowledge (after all, one must know

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territories in order to govern them), the manner in which the two intersect needs to be critically examined. His key argument is that what the British attempted to represent was their India; ‘their’ because they mapped the India that they perceived and that they intended to govern. Unless a region is first conceived of and named, it cannot become the specific subject of a map. Conversely, a mapped region gains prominence in the public eye. The ‘framing of India’ by James Rennell (1782–1788), as Surveyor General of Bengal, was, for example, accomplished through the construction of the image of the subcontinent and not through the ‘scientific’ and systematic observation and measurement of land. Accordingly, the triangulation-based systematic surveys were rooted, like all other modes of cartographic practice, in cultural conceptions of space and in the politics of manipulating spatial representations. The British-imperial examination of this landscape – through scientific, picturesque and geographical gazes – was thoroughly ideological in character and deeply implicated in their military, economic and political power. According to Edney, each instance of observation was backed by the desire to improve India. The British engineer-surveyor looked at Indian landscape as a surgeon looks at his patient, as an item to be thoroughly investigated, measured, and prodded so that maladies and imperfections might be identified, understood, adjusted, controlled and so cured.15 Various surveying practices and the related technologies of observation were used as ideological tools by the British for representing not only their empire, but also their superior imperial Self (self-imagined as a powerful and cogent observer and efficient governors of imperial space) in opposition to the inferior (defined en masse as being incapable of independent and autonomous action) Indian Other. The British, however, were wrong in their belief that, through their archive for South Asia’s geography (which comprised various images, maps, sketches, censuses and textual descriptions), they could replicate the complexity of the Indian landscape. Moreover, Indians were not the passive and docile objects of the potent British vision that the British ontologically assumed them to be. They could and did resist in various ways the British conquest of the subcontinent and the reconstruction of the imperial space. There was, for example, resistance put up by villagers in various parts of the subcontinent against the surveys conducted from the hilltops; on account of the belief that the sacred geography of their native land was being violated. A detailed account of various instances of resistance to imperial mapping, many of which are held in the East India Company’s records, is yet to be written. Moreover, there were some areas of knowledge (such as the naming of rivers) that could not be reconciled with the ordered and structured space of an imperial geographical archive. Apparently, a point that the British had missed altogether perhaps was that mapping the land of India has not been simply the domain of the cartographers of empires. One finds that, in a range of Hindu traditions, map-making has been the domain of both cosmologists and mythmakers, and the imagined landscape they have created – a landscape shaped by the duplication and repetition of its features – is far more culturally powerful than that displayed on the Bartholomew’s map of India. One good example of

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duplication and replication is Ganga, considered as the most sacred river by the Hindus. Ganga as a whole is duplicated throughout India with seven major ‘Gangas’ and numberless other rivers called Ganga. Furthermore, in this landscape networks of pilgrimage places have generated a powerful sense of land and location, not as a nationstate in the modern usage of the term, but as a shared, living landscape, with all its cultural and regional complexity. To quote Diana Eck: The past 1,000 years of India’s history have also included the flowering of an extensive Indo-Muslim culture with its own mental composition of the land, and with its own imagined landscape – a land enlivened with the heritage of kings and kingdoms, palaces and gardens, heroes and saints…there are many places where what we have come to call ‘Muslim,’ Hindu, Sikh or Christian traditions through the retrojective labelling of history have a lived-history and lived-reality of their own in which devotion has not subscribed to the boundaries of what we call the ‘religions’ …local examples of the confluence and layering of religious traditions around sacred sites abound.16 The first histories of India – i.e. rational, positivist or ‘scientific’ histories – too were composed at the initiative of the British colonial state beginning in the later eighteenth century. The practical and pressing need faced by the English East India Company to consolidate its power over its newly acquired territories also necessitated the careful construction of its past. This led to the first colonialist histories of India. Among other things, these ‘histories’ pointed out that a properly defined concept of history had been completely lacking among the ancient Indians or Hindus, and that this was an indication of their lack of development or inferiority. Representation of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, as two different, rather rival, political communities, was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the imperial mapping of ‘British India’ – a project essentially aimed at transforming a highly pluralist and diverse civilizational entity into a knowable, thereby controllable, but inferior colonial object. It was only with the coming of British rule, from the late eighteenth century on, that the idea of two opposed and self-contained communities of the ‘Hindus’ and the ‘Muslims’ in India acquired a definite shape.17 The two religious communities were defined, demarcated and demonized in terms of certain basic differences: Muslims were violent, despotic and masculine; whereas Hindus were indolent, passive and effeminate. Religious identification was accordingly taken as more than a matter of belief; it determined membership more generally in a larger community and also offered valid explanations for the way Indians acted. In short, it was the centrality of religious community, along with that of caste, which for the British marked out India’s distinctive status as fundamentally different as to land and peoples. To quote Mushirul Hasan: In a sense, the British created a sense of communatarian identity: by asking you what your religion was, what your past was, what your tribe was…. These were new constructions. The idea of being a Muslim, or being a Brahmin, existed in pre-British times…. But the homogenisation of these categories was a British invention. More important still is that the

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construction of this Muslimness was translated into formal constitutional arrangements [by granting the Muslims separate electorates]. In other words, Muslims were given preferential treatment in the power structures to legitimise their separate and distinct identity.18 In the British imperial myth, India was an ‘ancient country of many nations’, lacking in coherent communality except that supplied under the integrating system of the imperial crown.19 By projecting Hindus and Muslims as ‘naturally inclined to reciprocal intolerance, the British found justification for superimposing their own order, necessary to avoid a possible final disaster. In doing so, they contributed to foster, rather than placate, communal hatred’.20 The census exercise in colonial India also introduced the concepts and categories of religion according to colonial perception of Indian society as primordial pre-capitalist entities. The intention was to transform the so-called ‘fuzzy’ communities, with obscure boundaries and incoherent socio-spatial consciousness, into enumerated ‘cohesive’ communities through census and later into political communities by the instruments and mechanisms of colonial policy of divide and rule and quit. To quote R.B. Bhagat: The ‘fuzzy’ communities also did not require any developed theory of ‘otherness’. Colonialism changed this blissful state of social ignorance through census. Enumeration and categorisation for reasons of state had a deep social impact. It is in this context that the very concept of majority and minority in religious terms is an outcome of a modern consciousness of population numeracy, in particular of the census exercises that were taken in the nineteenth century. Numbers became a political tool as Hindus were told that they constituted a majority and an effort was made to persuade them to act as a uniform community regardless of sect, caste or class affiliation. Before head counts of people were announced, it was neither possible nor necessary for communities across the land to identify themselves with any degree of preciseness and to seek similarities or differences with others outside their immediate kin… . The censuses however, not only counted people but also pigeonholed them and made it possible for them to seek self-definition in terms that were set for them by external enumerations.21 The first time the British introduced elections in India – at the local government level – in 1883, they created a separate electorate for the Muslims. Elections were introduced in the provincial and the central councils in 1909 along with separate electorates for the Muslims. Subsequently separate electorates were introduced for the other interests and communities. As David Page succinctly puts it: With each stage of devolution, Indian was set against Indian, caste against caste, community against community. But as each area of government and administration was ceded to Indian control, it was followed by demands for more concessions. Ultimately even the Raj’s closest allies were only allies for a purpose. In 1947, the Raj withdrew, ceding its dominant

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position to those who had triumphed in the electoral arena. But the final act of devolution was also a final act of division.22 As the British devolved and ‘transferred’ power in Ireland, India and Palestine, they also divided it, advancing many of the same reasons: to protect minorities, reward war-time allies, avert civil war and garner political support in Britain.23 As a supplement to imperial construction and manipulation of ethnopolitical identities, yet another key feature of the imperial ‘divide and quit’ project was not simply the systematic construction and cultivation of the binary geographies of fear among the imperial populations, along a ‘minority/majority’ axis, but also making the geopolitical ‘divide’ look permanently irreconcilable. While bringing the demographic divide to the centre stage of communal politics, the British seemed aware that their rule over India would have to end one day. Lord Hastings wrote in India in 1818: A time not very remote will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the dominion which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country and from which can not at present recede.24 In 1844 Henry Lawrence remarked: We can not expect to hold India for ever. Let us conduct ourselves …as, when the connexion ceases, it may do so not with convulsions but with mutual esteem and affection, and that England may then have in India a nobly, enlightened and brought into scale of nations under her guidance and fostering care.25 In both the above-cited imperial geopolitical imaginations, one finds an underlying assumption that an India left behind would be a single India, because, as Graham Chapman points out, that was what the British had to some degree created, and were both intentionally and unintentionally cementing. But the policy by which such a goal could be achieved was not seen, and indeed the goal seemed so remote that there seemed little point in trying to define prematurely the form or forms of the successor states.26 But there were also few who anticipated not one but several post-imperial states on the subcontinent in the wake of the British withdrawal. John Bright, a parliamentarian, had the following to observe in 1877: Thus, if the time should come – and it will come – when the power of England, from some causes or the other, is withdrawn from India, then each one of those states would be able to sustain itself as a compact, as a self-governing community. You would have five or six great states there,

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as you have five or six great states in Europe: but that would be a thousand times better than our being withdrawn from it now when there is no coherence among those twenty nations, and when we should find the whole country, in all probability, lapse into chaos or anarchy and into sanguinary and interminable warfare.27 A critical analysis of the role and contribution of imperial geopolitical reasoning towards the partition of the subcontinent must take into account the broader and deeper geopolitical designs and motives of the British Empire. After all, the British had founded an Empire and seen most of it become a Commonwealth, an imperial grouping of states that evolved through a ‘colonial model’ to (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) Dominion status, that is to say self-governing Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, all linked to the Crown, and all contributing to a global–strategic defence network. India, to quote Graham Chapman, was of course different – a thing unto itself, sui-generis – by accident part of this Empire, but not settled by white English-speaking people and with such an ancient and strong culture of its own, and yet such a valuable part of the Empire, particularly in terms of global defense strategies, to say nothing of its economic and psychological value. Here was a parent with a wayward child, anxious that he should grow up to be a partner in the family firm.28 Secular-nationalist imaginings: ‘unity in diversity’ If the British imperial discourse projected India as a chaotic, multinational diversity, which could be ‘ordered’ and ‘disciplined’ only under the colonial rule, the counter hegemonic – nonetheless homogenizing – discourse of the Indian nationalists was that there was ‘unity in diversity’. As Manfred B. Steger has pointed out, those who fully subscribed to the idea that India could be united into a single, independent community belonged to India’s modern, educated, urban elite, whose mental maps were coloured by the fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity.29 Yet, there existed among the nationalist elite diverse, and often contending, definitions of what exactly constituted Indianness and of how swaraj was best to be achieved. Moreover, they employed different styles of imagining their ideal community. These competing ideas of India, all attempted to address the paramount question of the day, namely the relations between several cultural communities and to which community the ‘Indian nation’ actually belonged. Following their own intuitions, the midwives of Indian nationalism had to invent and fashion their public selves in interaction with their respective traditions and audiences.30 The secular-nationalists under the leadership of India’s first Prime Minster, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed India to be a secular state. In the secular imagination, the territorial notion of India, emphasized for twenty-five hundred years and more, was that of a land

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stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin) in the south, and from the Arabian Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east. What makes Indian civilization unique, according to this imagination, are the virtues of syncretism, pluralism and tolerance reflected in the cultural expression: Sarva Dharma Sambhava (equal respect for all religions). Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1981) is a good example of the secular-nationalist ‘construction’ of India’s national identity.31 Nehru ‘discovers’ India’s unity as lying in culture and not in religion and for him the heroes of India’s history subscribe to a variety of Indian faiths.32 Of all the characteristics of a ‘nation’, unity is considered as the most essential: no unity, no nation. Thus, the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Nehru not only staked the claim of representing all the Indians, irrespective of their religious moorings, but also canvassed the need for a strong all-India centre in order to protect and promote the unity. Muslim imaginings and assertions of territorial sovereignty A big blow to the secular dimension of the ‘Indian National Movement’, and its underlying geopolitical discourse of ‘unity in diversity’, was the articulation and assertion of the ‘idea(s)’ of Muslim Pakistan during the 1940s. Until very late in the decolonization process, the creation of Pakistan as a sovereign nation-state was never a likelihood, let alone a certainty.33 Equally well known is the fact that the impetus for Pakistan had come from Muslim-minority areas, which would remain in India, whereas the Muslim-majority areas, which eventually became part of Pakistan, had traditionally been least supportive of the Muslim League. Various assertions of religiously informed cultural identities and the politics of contested sovereignty – especially in the wake of the Congress triumph at the polls in 1937 – in certain regions of British India, seriously undermined the calculations of the Indian National Congress and Nehru at the all-India centre. Whereas a good deal has been written about the motivations and compulsions behind the Muslim claim to ‘nationhood’, the contours and contradictions of various Muslim ethnopolitical imaginings, using religiously informed cultural differences to stake geopolitical claims for territorial sovereignty, have not received the attention they deserve.34 The key argument in this section of the chapter, therefore, is that the full impact and implications of such imaginings – including the two-nation theory demanding separate Muslim statehood – can only be grasped against the backdrop of geopolitics becoming excessive and exclusive during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Divided into two territorial realms, the ‘maimed, mutilated and motheaten Pakistan’ (as Jinnah would describe the newly founded Holy Land), ‘seemed to represent the triumph of ideology over geography’.35 How come that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the selfproclaimed ‘sole spokesman’ of Muslims of the subcontinent, who in January 1940 could still ‘write of India as the “common motherland” of Muslims and Hindus’,36 would eventually be prepared to accept a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan? According to Yunas Samad, [i]n colonial India, British rule was challenged by a counter-hegemonic discourse represented by nationalism that was primarily located in civil society. However, the hegemonic position of the Congress was challenged by another discourse articulated by religious nationalism. What is important to emphasize is that within Indian nationalism, the discourse

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was exclusive and was not prepared to accommodate religious difference. The consequence was that the processes of exclusion reinforced and intensified the focus on identity politics articulated by the Muslim League.37 According to the two-nation logic, which was popularized by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, both the Hindus and the Muslims were two not only radically different, but mutually exclusive, diametrically opposite nations, inherently incapable of a peaceful coexistence. However, as Joya Chatterji points out succinctly, ‘there were almost as many images of Pakistan as Jinnah had followers’.38 In other words, Jinnah never had a precise geopolitical vision of Pakistan. The famed Lahore Declaration of 23 March 1940, in which the demand for a separate Muslim state was first formally expressed, made no mention of partition as such, but did lay down the following basic principle in relation to territory: That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustment as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Moslems are numerically in a majority, as in the northwestern and eastern zones in India, should be grouped to constitute ‘independent’ states.39 Even though Jinnah had asserted, with the full emphasis at his command, that India was not only never united, it was for centuries divided between ‘Muslim India’ and ‘Hindu India’, and would remain so in the future, it was not easy for him to ‘locate’ the two nations in their respective, unambiguous, contiguous geo-bodies. For Jinnah, ‘transforming this cul-tural nationalism [rather religious nationalism] into a territorial nationalism was not self-evident, because the religious communities lived in a fairly intermingled fashion over the entire Indian territory’.40 Or, as R.J. Moore put it, it is a paradox that the demand for separate Muslim statehood based on the existing Muslim provinces with territorial adjustments should finally have found recognition in a Pakistan truncated to a degree never envisaged by Jinnah and the League. It is inconceivable that they did not realize that the truncation was the logical corollary of the distribution of the peoples of the two nations.41 But Jinnah was not the only one, and definitely not the first one, to talk about Pakistan. The credit for introducing the idea of ‘Pakistan’ into the public discourse goes to a Punjabi Muslim student at the University of Cambridge, England – Chaudhry Rahmat Ali (1897–1951). Founder President of the Pakistan National Movement, Rahmat Ali had been promoting his ideas by publishing pamphlets from Cambridge. In 1933 he wrote a book entitled, P.A.K.I.S.T.A.N, The Fatherland of Pak Nation,42 in which he proposed an Islamic Federation of all contiguous Islamic territory that lay on the eastern flank of the heartland of Islam. He wanted freedom of the five Muslim ‘Indian’ homelands in Northwest India, namely Punjab, Afghanistan (including the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan from British colonial rule, followed

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by their reintegration with the three Muslim ‘Asian’ homelands of Afghanistan, Iran and Tukharistan. The first edition of his short pamphlet, entitled What Does the Pakistan National Movement Stand For?, was published in 1933. The following quotations by Rahmat Ali should be seen in conjunction with the map reproduced in this chapter, as well as approached in the light of insightful observation of Ranabir Samaddar that, [t]he result of 1947 was not only a partition of the territory, but the foundation of a new states-system in the region, prone to be revised again and again. The superimposing maps of dreamland states drawn by Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, now hanging in the Lahore Museum, speak of the strength of the geopolitical imagination active in the subcontinent. What is surprising therefore is not the uniqueness of Rehmat Ali’s imagination, but the extraordinary similarity of the spirit of those maps with the inherent instability of the geopolitical imagination of the nation in South Asia.43 Rahmat Ali preferred the term ‘South Asia’ to ‘Indian subcontinent’. In his geopolitical imagination, ‘Indianism’ represented the forces of caste Hinduism in north India. He argued that all the nations of South Asia should claim their independence from this ‘yoke’. The map on the front of his aforementioned pamphlet made the same point: Pakistan was only one of the nations that should be freed. In the south was Dravidia, in the northeast Bang-I-Islma (by grouping Bengal and Assam), and in the west Rajiistan, Maharashtar and Guruistan – the latter being his name for a Sikh state. The would-be sovereign state of Hyderabad Deccan was to be named as ‘Osmanistan’. As Ayesha Jalal points out, [c]olorfully named Muslim states like Sadiqustan, Faruqistan, Muinistan, Mappallistan, Safistan and Nasiristan, were to be carved out of an area covering British and princely India as well as presentday Sri Lanka. Rahmat Ali’s ‘Pakistan’ was nothing less than the territorial embodiment of the Muslim notion of a worldwide ummah. Creating half a dozen Muslim states in India and consolidating them into a ‘Pakistan Commonwealth of Nations’ was only the first step to his ‘original Pakistan’. The Muslim Commonwealth was eventually to be integrated with Central Asia and West Asia.44 To quote Rahmat Ali, [the] Pakistan National Movement has…made it a principle to admit the birth right of each and every nation to (its own territory)…to support by all legitimate means the realization of this right by all such nations: furthermore to acknowledge this right even in the case of the Sikhs, of the Christians, of the Dravidians, and of the Depressed Classes (untouchables: Harijans), who, though morally and numerically qualified to form distinct nations of their own, cannot at present do that because they are so scattered that they can neither possess a majority in any province nor

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claim a part a province as exclusively as their own….The Movement…conceded their right to as of the area of the land of their birth as may correspond to the numerical ratio of their people to the total population of the province concerned… even if their birthright may have been satisfied, as in the case of the Sikhs, at the expense of Pakistan itself.45 If realized, Rahmat Ali’s geopolitical imagination of the homelands for the scattered nations, which reaffirms the principle of territorially contiguous nations, would have led to a far more bloody mass cross-migration, as the communities adjusted to the territorial blocks they were allotted. Rahmat Ali had also warned about the dangers of the integration of East Pakistan with West Pakistan, in a book he wrote in 1950 (twenty-one years before the dismemberment of Pakistan), entitled Pakistan or Pastan Destiny or Disintegration. He argued that, while the integration of West Pakistan (Pastan) and East Bengal (Bangistan) had its advantages, the losses far outweighed the gains. He offered the following geopolitical arguments against integrating the two wings. First, at least 1,000 miles by air and 3,000 miles by sea separate the two wings. There might have been empires with far-flung colonies and dominions, but never a country with one half of its territory lying so far from the other. Moreover, every inch of it runs through the Hinduruled air or territory, or over the Hindu-dominated seas. He further pointed out that, the national capital of Bangistan is in Pastan, and for a country to have its national capital outside its own confines is dangerous both to itself and to its partner in whose territory that capital lies. The very fact of its supreme Government being outside its frontiers creates among its people the humiliating and subservient feeling that they are a colony of that other country. Rahmat Ali refused to accept that a community of religion between the two wings could easily overcome the differences between the two wings in terms of outlook, interests and economics, and the centrifugal forces arising therefrom. Finally, the ultimate destinies of Pastan and Bangistan lie in different directions. Geography and history dictate that Bangistan turns towards the neighbouring Muslim countries to the north-east and Pastan towards those in the north-west. To ignore this dictate is to court disaster.46 Literally meaning the ‘land of the pure’, the ‘Pakistan’ scheme of Rahmat Ali, despite its seductive-reductionist geopolitical appeal, was ridiculed and rejected by many in the formal domains of British Indian politics. Whatever sympathy and support – though largely disorganized – the idea of a Muslim state of Pakistan dominated by Punjab could garner was in the informal arenas, whereas resistance came in plenty from the nonMuslim as well as Muslim quarters.47 Perhaps conscious of the difficulty of both providing a contiguous territorial basis to a heterogeneous community aspiring to be a homogeneous nation on the one hand, and ensuring non-domination as the fundamental principle of governance in the envisaged state of Pakistan on the other hand, the Sindhi Muslim

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leader, Ghulam Hussain Hidaytullah, rejected outright the idea of one large Islamic province in the northwest in favour of ‘ownership of our own home’. He is said to have remarked in a meeting of the Sind Azad Conference in July 1934 that it would be political disaster for the Sindhi Muslims to enter into alliance with Punjab Muslims.48 The Khudai Khidmatgars, or Servants of God, in the NWFP, under the leadership of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as the Frontier Gandhi, expressed preference for dealing directly with the Congress. Against the backdrop of growing Muslim anxieties over the community’s constitutional future in an independent India, the late 1930s saw several imaginative alternatives of power sharing by religiously marked ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’. What was common to such an ethnopolitical scheme was the quest for some kind of a geopolitical anchoring; identifying areas over which territorial sovereignty could realistically be asserted. Having said that, far from being ‘separatist’, several proposed alternatives were compatible with an eventual all-India arrangement, provided of course some resolution of power sharing between centre and region, and within the region among the different religious communities, could be worked out. For example, one finds no traces of secession in the geopolitical imagination of a ‘United States of South Asia’, put forward by Aga Khan as early as 1935. Aga Khan could visualize that Indian Muslims needed an entirely new basis on which to make their demands. He thought it politically prudent as well as expedient to take full advantage of the ‘impregnable’ position of Muslims in the northwestern regions and in Bengal. In his scheme of things, Muslims were to be ‘out and out federalists’ at the Centre and ‘make India what she is’, i.e. a ‘United States of South Asia’, where the Muslims would use the majority provinces against the Centre. But, for Aga Khan, ‘our Indian patriotism, of course, should never leave any doubt and our Hindu countrymen must realize that the welfare of India as a whole…is as dear to us as it is to them…’.49 Sikander Hayat Khan’s scheme, published in the summer of 1939, advocated the loosest of federations with a weak centre and ‘blocks’ of provinces which would have regional or zonal legislatures dealing with common subjects. The Punjab in this way would dominate the northwestern ‘block’ (which would include Sind, the NWFP and Baluchistan) and enjoy many of the attributes of sovereignty that belonged to the Centre. It is important to conclude on the note that, none of this had much to offer Muslims in the minority provinces. As small scattered islands in a non-Muslim ocean, their dilemma was underlined by the impossible knots into which they tied themselves when they tried to deploy the idea of Muslims as a nation in their own interest.50 ‘Hindu India’: one land, one culture, one nation In the Hindu-nationalist geopolitical imagination, India is originally the land of Hindus, and it is the only land that the Hindus can call their own.51 According to V.D. Savarkar, the ideological father of Hindu nationalism, ‘the ultimate criterion for being a Hindu was the definition of a “holy land” (pitrubhumi), which is the geographical location of the sacred shrines and myths of one’s religion’.52 In order to qualify as a ‘Hindu’ a person or a group must meet three criteria: territorial (land between the Indus and the Seas),

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genealogical (‘fatherland’) and religious (‘holy land’). Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism were born in India and meet all the three criteria, whereas Christians and Muslims had potentially ‘extraterritorial loyalties’, as their ‘holy lands’ were outside the territory of India, and therefore could not be counted as Hindus. Marzia Casolari has shown how Hindu nationalism turned militant in the 1930s, borrowing from European fascism to transform ‘different’ people into enemies, and how leaders of militant Hinduism repeatedly showered praise on authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler and on the fascist model of society.53 The following excerpts from various speeches by Savarkar, cited by Casolari, are self-explanatory: The Indian Muslims are on the whole more inclined to identify themselves and their interest with Muslims outside India than Hindus who live next door, like Jews in Germany…their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin…German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the mot, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.54 According to some scholars, it was the contradictions and structural peculiarities that eventually led to the creation of Pakistan,55 but a closer look at the historical process leading to the partition seems to suggest that ‘apart from Muslim communalism, Hindu communalism was an active player in the social and political life of the country… . Partition was the outcome of configuration of different forces among which Hindu communalism was also an important element.’56 Joya Chatterji’s thesis on the partition of Bengal (1995) also reminds us that, the inwardness of Partition cannot be fully understood through a study of the motives of those in Delhi and in London who put the priorities of India and empire above the interests of Bengal. Nor do investigations into Muslim separatism tell the whole story. Partition, at least in one important province [Bengal], was the considered choice of large and powerful sections of the Hindu population. When push came to shove, Bhadralok Hindus preferred to carve up Bengal rather than to accept the indignity of being ruled by Muslims.57 What about Punjab? Imagining the Sikh homeland As the events of the 1940s unfolded on the subcontinent, increasingly communalized geographies of fear, ably assisted by the growing assertions of religiously informed

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cultural identities, were being popularized by a politics of difference, not accommodation. In the wake of the Lahore declaration of March 1940, or the so-called ‘Pakistan Declaration’, the prospect of an independent state in the northwestern zone of India was turning out to be a nightmare, especially for the Sikhs, in Punjab. The fear among the Sikhs was aroused not only by the thought of the vivisection of India and their ‘holy land’, but of a permanent subjection to Muslim domination. Soon after the Lahore declaration, Master Tara Singh, the then President of the Shiromani Akali Dal, is said to have declared that ‘the Muslims would have to cross an ocean of blood if they tried to establish their rule’.58 Around the same time, a pamphlet of about forty pages, entitled ‘Khalistan’, and authored by a medical doctor, V.S. Bhatti, also appeared.59 This imagined homeland for the Sikhs – comprising the central and eastern districts of Punjab; all lying between the Chenab and Yamuna, the princely states of Patiala, Jind, Nabha, Kalsia, Faridkot and Malerkotla, and the Shimla hill state – was meant to serve as a buffer state between India and Pakistan. In the geopolitical reasoning deployed by Bhatti, the landlocked, theocratic state of Khalistan, composed of a number of federating units, was to have access to the Arabian Sea through a narrow ‘corridor’. Even though Bhatti’s political inclinations remain unknown, his idea was picked up by Baba Gurdit Singh, a very well-known figure of the Komagata Maru episode of the Ghadar Movement.60 A convention was called to propagate the idea of Khalistan in May 1940 and the boundaries of the imagined homeland for the Sikhs was extended to include Jammu in the north and Jamrud on the west. However, ‘the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Punjab Provincial Congress reacted promptly to make it clear that they disapproved of the idea of Khalistan’.61 The population of Punjab province under British rule was 52 per cent Muslim, 30 per cent Hindu and 14 per cent Sikh. As the awareness slowly but surely dawned upon the Sikh political elite in Punjab that they did not fit into the two great camps, which were increasingly seen by the British as the only legitimate contenders for power, the Shiromani Akali Dal, having emerged an important political party after the passing of the 1925 Act, proposed in July 1942 the creation of a new territorial unit called ‘Azad Punjab’, or ‘Free Punjab’, through a re-demarcation of the boundaries of Punjab. Master Tara Singh, one of the most prominent Akali leaders, declared that, although Sikhs were a nation, they did not constitute a majority and hence did not have the right to demand a Sikh state. Therefore, Azad Punjab was not intended to be a separate Sikh state but a new province between the Yamuna and Chenab rivers, under the authority of the central government, basically to prevent the constitutional domination by a single community and thus bolster Sikh influence. Even though the key geopolitical reas-oning behind the scheme was to deal with the logic of majorities and minorities through redefining provincial boundaries, many Sikh leaders feared that, since ‘it might involve the risk of the Pakistan scheme being accepted’, the best option was to resist the emergence of Pakistan.62 During 1942–1943, the Azad Punjab scheme was condemned as communal, anti-Hindu, anti-national, reactionary and opportunistic by the Congress and the communist Sikhs, the protagonists of the Akhand Bharat (undivided India), and the Hindu leaders of the Punjab, and was resisted by the Sikhs of the Rawalpindi division, which was situated on the other side of the river Chenab.

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Voices from the margin: demand for Achhutistan! One aspect that demands and deserves critical attention in the ethnopolitical annals of the partition of ‘British India’, but is often ignored, relates to the hegemonizing and homogenizing nature of ‘tri-polar imagination’; implying that no other identity except Hindu, Sikh and Muslim men existed and mattered as the dominant communities. All groups other than these three are thus made culturally invisible and politically peripheral. One such group of some twenty crore out of roughly thirty crore Hindus in India, happened to be the scheduled castes, or untouchables, or Harijans, or Dalits. The British imperial mapping had granted some visibility to the Dalits as a ‘separate’ group in 1932 through the award of a separate electorate, much to the displeasure of certain Hindu leaders who refused to see Harijans as separate, or different, from Hindus. The process of making the ‘untouchables’ truly invisible, initiated under the Poona Pact, was given further impetus by the resolve of the Cabinet Mission Plan to recognize only three main communities in India for the purposes of deciding ‘representation’ on the Constituent Assembly: General, Muslim and Sikh. Those excluded by the categories Muslim and Sikh came to be placed under the term General or Hindu. The fact that the Congress, which had registered its own political visibility through opposition to the Muslim League too was inclined to draw Dalits under its umbrella, underlined the collusion between colonial map-makers and the ‘nationalist’ map-makers; between imperial othering of ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ and ‘internal’ othering. It has been argued that the partition constituted…crystallization which represented processes that had long been at work. This was crystallization in one historical juncture. Societal processes on this vast scale, however, are not necessarily open-ended, their conclusion seldom foregone. Given a somewhat different mix of political and social skills, and a somewhat higher level of mutual trust, a rather different crystallization might well have prevailed.63 According to S. Saberwal, among several aspects that contributed to the social and political deadlock, leading eventually to the partition, the durability of the caste system and its ability to retain its inner logic and dynamism despite periodic conquests and the unwillingness of many rulers to abide by it, played an important role. Moreover, says Saberwal, …it [the caste system] found niches, at its margins, even for religious groups which repudiated completely the ideology which governed the caste system; their participation in the flow of everyday life and activities was thus made possible; and consequently, in several regions, animosities between Hindus and Muslims could stay bottled up for long centuries…the caste system, and the imperatives of neighbourliness, provided, then, a framework for organizing basic social and economic cooperation, keeping the agrarian cycle, commerce, revenue collection and so forth going. Alongside all this, at certain time and places, the

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society could carry attitudes coloured with antagonism. What could seem to be a happily functioning community one day could erupt into violence the next day; the antagonisms could escape their caste jackets. On such occasions there always was a local excuse – exploitative landlords, local rivalries, a young couple eloping, or whatever. Order usually returned to the locality soon enough.64 But what about the margins of the caste system; historically subjected to the geographies of domination and discrimination? Full credit goes to the seminal work of Urvashi Butalia65 for having pointed out that there is a need not only to make the invisible aspects of the partition of British India in official accounts visible, but also to question whether there were any identities other than the Hindu, Sikhs and Muslims. She narrates the stories of those who have remained ‘untouchable’ both in the hierarchical Indian social order and in the dominant historiography of the partition. In November 1946, an All India Achhutistan Movement was launched and its founder, Mr Beah Lall, issued the following statement in the same month: It is justifiable to observe that India was the place of Achhut masses and it must be handed over to them. The Achhutistan is derived from the word ‘Achhut’, the literal meaning of which in India is ‘Not Impure’. But it was made impure by the mixture of Hindustan, Pakistan and Englishstan. It is foolishness on the part of Mr. Jinnah to demand Pakistan only and does not remember Achhutistan. The problem of Achhutistan is the first than that of Hindustan. The latter three thanas have tried and tried their best to crush the people of the former Thanas, by making their power strong and utilizing guns and instruments of fighting… . What are the conditions of Mehtars, sweepers and Chamars? They are being compelled by the organizations of Municipality and District boards…in the towns, and the Chamars in the villages, to take away their latrines from houses from houses and dead bodies of their animals. Begaris are being taken by the landlords who are generally the people of Hindustan, Pakistan a d Englishstan. The existence of power awakens by different organizations of the people of Achhutistan in the shape of schedule caste, depressed class and Harijans but their power is always tried to be usurped by the above three powers. The Hindustan people want to emerge [sic] them by calling them Harijans, the Pakistan people by calling them schedule caste and converting them into Islam and the Englishstan people by making them depressed classes.66 Apparently the rising discourse of ‘Achhut identity’ too had failed to escape the fatal attraction of geopolitics being articulated through the discursive formation of various Thans; especially at a time when ethnopolitical mobilizations were simultaneously causing integration and fragmentation of identities; for example, conceptions of Dalit communities, which prevailed among them in the 1930s and earlier were revisited and reframed in the 1940s into a new notion of a ‘unified’ and far more inclusive community:

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If the mahasabhas of the Jatavas, the Chamars and Ravidassis had earlier represented ‘fragmented’ communities, split along the lines of caste identity, the emergence of SCF [Scheduled Caste Federation] in UP [Uttar Pradesh] and its articulation and mobilization of new pressing political issues suggested a new conception of achhut community… . The assertion of an achhut identity became the fulcrum of a new Dalit [geo]politics.67 In one of the letters to the Governor of Punjab in Lahore, it was even pointed out that the scheduled castes could be given a separate independent state consisting of Jallandhar and Ambala divisions, which are mostly inhabited by the scheduled caste people. The government should bear the expenses for the transmigration of scheduled caste people to their ‘independent’ states from different parts of the province and provide protection, board and lodging till they are satisfactorily established. The government should also compensate the loss undergone by the scheduled caste people during transmigration. However, it appears that the scheduled castes in Punjab were more concerned with securing concrete assurances and concessions from the premier nationalist organization than with the aptness of their anti-colonialism. Moreover, with Dr B.R. Ambedkar supporting ‘Pakistan’, the scheduled castes perhaps saw little reason to oppose it if it could prove handy in securing important concessions from upper-caste Hindus. To quote Ambedkar, the Hindus and the Muslims regard each other as a menace. The second is that to meet this menace, both have suspended the cause of removing the social evils with which they are infested…. The exigencies of a common front by Musalmans against Hindus and by Hindus against Musalmans generate – and is bound to generate – a conspiracy of silence over social evils…. How long will this menace last? It is sure to last as long as Hindus and Muslims are required to live as members of one country under the mantle of a single constitution…. If this is so, Pakistan is the obvious remedy…. Unless there is unification of the Muslims who wish to separate from the Hindus and unless there is liberation of each from the fear of the domination by the other, there can no doubt that this malaise of social stagnation will not be set right.68 What makes the partition of ‘British India’ such an intricate and complex phenomenon, therefore, is the convergence through the collision of several discourses of inclusions and exclusions, framed and flagged by the imperialists, nationalists and communalists alike. In other words, several competing logics of partition were simultaneously striving to arrive at ‘totality with oneself by separation from another self’. Each logic was backed up with a set of geopolitical reasoning and geopolitical imagination on how places and peoples on the subcontinent should be territorially differentiated and ‘fixed’ as communities and nations and where the boundaries between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Others’ ought to be drawn. For greater insight into this matter, let us turn next to a brief but critical reflection on how the rituals of independence were soon overshadowed by the ‘cartographic anxieties’ that preceded the award of the Boundary Commissions. How were the political boundaries of post-colonial South Asia debated and discursively drawn,

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before they became tangible geopolitical realities on the ground? How was the mandate of the Boundary Commissions, as well as the deliberations that followed, hampered by its ambiguous and sometimes contradictory terms of reference and geopolitically motivated, conflicting claims put forth by the various ‘stakeholders’ in the partition? Parties to the partition(s): constructions and contestations at the Boundary Commissions It is useful to begin with an account of what transpired within the Bengal and Punjab Boundary Commissions, in the wake of Indian leaders accepting Lord Louis Mountbatten’s plan of 3 June 1947, with Joya Chatterji’s statement that, ‘political concerns were in play at every stage and at all levels of very protracted process of partition’.69 The intention here is to revisit such political concerns and contestations in order examine how geopolitical excess was produced discursively, either intentionally or unintentionally. However, before doing so, one might recall that, although the first partition of Bengal in 1905 into two provinces – Bengal in the west and East Bengal and Assam in the East – was justified by the colonial authorities on the grounds of ‘administrative convenience’ (the undivided province with an area of 189,000 square miles and a population of 79 million was seen as a problem for ‘effective’ governance), there too were important (geo)political considerations behind the decision.70 Growing nationalist sentiment in Bengal, led by the Hindu middle classes, which, in the wake of partition, would lead to the first mass nationalist agitation – namely Swadeshi – was being perceived as a major threat by the imperial powers. The colonial strategy of partition was therefore directed at not only preempting nationalist opposition but also, to quote Curzon, the viceroy, ‘to invest the Mohammedans in East Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman viceroys and kings’.71 Assuming that the first partition of 1905 was largely the outcome of a colonial strategy of divide and rule, it is important to emphasize one of its major geopolitical fallouts. To quote Partha Chatterjee: That strategy [divide and rule] can already be seen to be playing with the varying possibilities of congruence between territories and culturally marked populations. The historically significant point here is not whether there already existed one nation of Bengalis or two. Rather, the point is that even as the project of imagining the nation into existence got under way, it found itself on a political field where, contending strategies could be devised to contest or disrupt that project by enabling the rival imagining of rival nations – one, on a principle of linguistic nationalism, the other that of religious nationalism.72 At the same time, the resistance put up by the Swadeshi movement to the divide and rule strategy – which led to the undoing of the first partition in six years – produced a dominant unitary conception of imagined nation, ‘which contained, at one and the same time, an Indian nationalism, built around a “natural history” of Aryan-Hindu tradition, a linguistic nationalism valorizing Bengal’s cultural unity and a rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim

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unity’.73 However, various fault-lines soon emerged. How does one explain imagined or real ‘complementarities’ of post-1905 partition of Bengal being transformed into antagonistic ‘contradictions’, leading eventually to the second partition? According to Partha Chatterjee, it is against the backdrop of the prolonged depression of the 1930s and the eruption of agrarian class conflict in East Bengal, that one needs to critically examine the role played by the convergence, on the one hand, between class and communal identities, and, on the other, between elite and popular communalism.74 As the Muslim peasantry responded to the appeals of religion, marking the end of its ‘symbiotic relationship’ with the predominantly Hindu landlords, moneylenders and traders, the entire population was virtually polarized around two communal blocks, each led by respective elites. To return to the moments of second partition, Lord Mountbatten came to India in March 1947 with a belief that the prospects of transferring power to a unitary India had become virtually hopeless, and British India had to be dismantled as quickly as possible. What followed soon thereafter was the Mountbatten plan of 3 June 1947, which was publicly endorsed by Nehru, Jinnah and the Sikh leader, Sardar Baldev Singh. The plan, which contained a provision for partition, brought together all parties concerned on the principle that ‘communal majorities would provide the basis for a territorial division of the subcontinent’. In a subtle but significant way, as the discussion to follow would attempt to illustrate, the 3 June plan brought into circular motion a vicious interplay between ethnopolitics and geopolitics. In an apparent bid to ‘democratize’ and ‘constitutionalize’ the divisive logic – to which different elites had already agreed for different reasons – the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal, Punjab, Sind, NWFP and Baluchistan were to be asked to decide whether they wished to have a future constitution framed by the existing Constituent Assembly (that is, for a united India) or by a ‘new and separate Constituent Assembly. Skipping details, ably recorded elsewhere’,75 it should suffice perhaps to point out that, not unexpectedly, all the Muslim-majority provinces opted unanimously for joining Pakistan, which up until then was a territorially ambiguous imagined entity, while non-Muslim halves of Bengal and Punjab voted decidedly for partitioning their respective provinces. On the basis of this vote – after which the Boundary Commissions was set up to determine the ‘real’ or final border between the two Bengals and Punjabs – it was assumed that the ‘popular will’ to partition had been sufficiently established. Such an assumption no doubt was seriously flawed in many respects. To quote Joya Chatterji: The vote that was taken to establish their will to partition had been cast in an Assembly temporarily or notionally divided into two parts. Before the Boundary Commission had given its award, there was no knowing to what extent these notional units would match the final shape of the two partitioned states. The partition vote was therefore necessarily an imperfect one because members of the notional West Bengal Assembly voted for partition without knowing for certain whether their constituencies would continue to be in West Bengal when the Award was finally made. It is also significant that the two voting blocks were divided, in the first instance, on territorial lines. This is noteworthy because every one agrees

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that the basis for partition was to satisfy a communal demand for autonomy; that its purpose was to ensure, for those who demanded it, a communal right to self-determination. But from the very start of the process of implementing the partition, this principle had to be tempered by a host of other consideration, among which the territorial questions were paramount. The two voting groups into which the Bengal Assembly was divided were composed of the representatives of territorial rather than communal units: Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority districts respectively.76 The quotation raises some critical issues, which in turn compel us to return to the issue of interplay between ethnopolitics and geopolitics. It is useful to recall the point made earlier in the chapter that geopolitics (rivalry over territory and its material or symbolic value) includes ethnopolitics (competing notions of communal autonomy) and ethnopolitics can only lead to geopolitics. Normally ethnopolitics takes as its starting point not territory but the boundaries of group identities, as happened in the case initially with various ‘indigenous’ parties to the partition plan. But soon, as the Radcliffe line came to acquire some shape, the notion of communal autonomy was given up in favour of territorial sovereignty. As Joya Chatterji has argued forcefully, ‘the arguments and appeals presented before the Boundary Commission [for Bengal] demonstrated, if anything, how quickly communal solidarity could fall apart along lines of territory, party faction and personal ambition when it ran into the reality of partition’.77 The Bengal Boundary Commission’s brief (similar to that of the Punjab Boundary Commission) was to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of [the province] on the basis of ascertaining contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’ while also taking into account ‘other factors’. Both the Muslim League and the Hindu ‘Coordination Committee’ chose to exploit the ambiguity inherent in ‘other factors’ to claim territories that could not have been otherwise claimed on the grounds that they were contiguous majority areas. The Muslim League, representing the ‘Muslim’ case, pleaded vehemently for East Bengal as much territory as possible. The Muslim League, making full use of ‘other factors’, made a bid for the whole of Calcutta’s urban areas – in order to acquire a share of the provincial revenue proportionate to its share of Bengal’s population – as well as for areas west of Calcutta, where jute mills, military installations, ordnance factories, railway workshops and lines were located on the grounds of economy, internal communications and defence. In short, what the Muslim League was asking for was all the territory east of the Hooghly and Bhagirathi rivers. Were the representatives of the Muslim League not aware that such a scheme would place roughly two-thirds of the Hindu population of West Bengal in East Pakistan? Of course they were. The following quotation reveals how ethno-national reasoning deployed initially by the Muslim League, through the flagging of the two-nation theory, eventually contradicted itself and willingly fell into the geopolitical–territorial trap: in order to claim for East-Bengal the greatest possible amount of territory, the Muslim members of the Commission were driven to insist that the aim of the partition was not to ensure self-determination for the largest number of each community, apparently reversing the Muslim League’s

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proclaimed objectives. Their reasons for taking this position become clearer if it is borne in mind that the party has opposed the partition of Bengal. It had good reasons for this. Muslims constituted a majority of roughly 55% in Bengal as a whole. If Bengal were not divided, a government elected by the Muslim majority would exercise sovereignty over the entire territory of Bengal … a partition could only serve to reduce the extent of territory over which the League’s sovereignty could extend. Once the partition of Bengal had to be accepted in principle, the logical aim for Muslim spokesmen was to limit, as far as possible, the loss of territory and assets to West Bengal. By claiming almost four-fifths of the province, they had nothing to lose but everything to gain.78 At the same time, the Hindu members of the Commission were bent upon securing a ‘homeland’ for the Hindus of Bengal in such a way that there was ‘enough’ territory to sustain a ‘viable economy’ for a sizeable ‘Hindu majority’. But they too seemed to be totally at a loss for a magical formula that would balance the imperatives of communal majority against the requirements of space and economic rationality. As one would expect, there were noticeable differences among the ‘spokesmen’ for Hindu interests – the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Indian Association and the New Bengal Association – on what would be the best deal. The geopolitical vision of small parties such as the Mahasabha and the New Bengal Association showed how racial arguments were being combined with spatial reasoning to claim that Hindu Bengalis were a distinct race of people, and that in order to fulfil its destiny it was crucial for these people to have enough Lebensraum (living space). Yet, when it came to making a choice out of the socalled ‘other factors’ (economic rationality, geographical coherence/territorial contiguity, strategic necessity), the representatives of all the four parties mentioned above, driven as they were also by party-political, factional and personal ambitions, failed to arrived at a consensus on several occasions. Yet, when it came to Murshidabad, a Muslim majority district, they all insisted that it should be included in West Bengal, in clear violation of the fundamental principles of partition, namely contiguity and communal majority. The reason was that Murshidabad had a strategic significance due to its location at the site of the head-quarters of the Hooghly, and the survival of the Hooghly partly (and of Calcutta as an entrepôt of trade) depended on its link with the River Ganges, which flowed through the northern edges of Murshidabad. All the four spokesmen of the ‘Hindus’ it seems had agreed that, if it came to a trade off, they would even be prepared to exchange Khulna, a large Hindu-majority district, for Murshidabad, which they eventually did. The anger and protest of the Hindus and Muslims, who had good reasons to believe that their particular thanas, sub-divisions and districts had reasonable grounds to demand inclusion in West and East Bengal respectively, but who found themselves on the wrong side after independence, were understandable. For example, if the Muslims of Murshidabad were angry to discover that their district had gone to West Bengal, the Hindus of Khulana too were up in arms. They had become victims of excessive geopolitics, being used as pawns in the highly elitist geopolitical–territorial tradeoffs made by the politicians, who in turn, for reasons of convenience, had shown little hesitation in abandoning large sections of the religious communities they claimed to represent.

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The negotiations over who got what, where and how from the partition, in the Punjab Boundary Commission, to which we turn next, are equally suggestive of how the principle of contiguous Muslim and non-Muslim areas could not be applied neatly to Punjab, where historically communal segregation was the exception while pluralism was the rule. They reveal how geo-historical and geo-economic arguments, which cleverly draw upon indigenous socio-cultural resources, are deployed in order to stake and defend territorial claims. And how territorial rivalries are discursively worked out, as contradictory maps of meaning are implanted on the same landscape. At the very outset in the presentations made before the Commission, sharp differences arose over the ‘reliability’ of the 1941 census, according to which there was an overall Muslim majority of 57.1 per cent in Punjab. Mr Setalvad, the counsel for the Congress, which was also to represent the interests of the Sikhs, did admit, however, that both the Hindu and the Muslim sides had exaggerated the numbers. While both the sides used arguments related to security and economic stability, what did stand out in the negotiations was the special religious-cultural claims of the Sikh community over Punjab. Now if India was the homeland of Hindus and Pakistan was the homeland of the Muslims, then, Sardar Harnam Singh, the leading counsel for the Sikhs (Sikhs Assembly party), argued that the area between the Chenab and Beas rivers was the homeland of the Sikhs. Citing different books and official documents in which the Majha region of Punjab, with Amritsar as its core, had been described as the Sikh country, he argued that, when a particular community believed in a particular territory as its homeland and asserted rights over it, that claim could not be denied merely on the basis of another community being in greater numbers in it. Emphasizing the sacred geography of the Sikh homeland, with some of the most holy places and shrines located in Lahore, Sardar Harnam Singh remarked: Therefore I submit that when you are considering the question, the special features of the Sikh community should be taken into account. I have the greatest possible respect for all religious denominations and for everybody’s sentiments. But for the past two decades I have several times heard Muslim boys singing ‘Ya Rab Mecca Madina le chal mujhe’ (O God take me Mecca and Madina). They have been looking westwards. They say, we are living in a strange country, in an alien country, we have no national home. Our national home is Arabia. I am not hurting the feelings of my Hindu brethren when I say that they look to Hardwar and Benaras for their pilgrimage and the Muslim look to Mecca and Madina. But for the Sikhs, the city of Amritsar, the city of Kartarpur in Shakargarh tehsil of Gurdaspur district, are their Mecca and Madina and their Hardwar and Benaras.79 In their actual claims, one finds that all parties deviated from the unit of demarcation proposed by them, and invoked ‘other factors’ including security, economic stability and, above all, historical claims to territory. The Sikhs, however, were the only group that demanded concessions on the basis of what they called special claims on Punjab. Surprisingly, and not surprisingly perhaps, Congress did not invoke any religious rights

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of Hindus in western Punjab. In short, ethnopolitics had been subsumed, even though temporarily, by its own geopolitics. In the shadow of the partition: concluding the inconclusive Wherever and whenever partitions have been made to happen, a largescale destruction of socio-cultural landscapes has invariably followed. On the subcontinent, the partition was announced within months of a formal agreement, before borders had been finalized or fixed and without any concern for the population involved. Within six months of the announcement, ‘a partition on paper had to be fought through on the ground before it could be achieved’.80 The partition left behind a trail of unimaginable destruction, with at least one million dead and ten million displaced. Such figures of loss of life, honour, especially for women,81 livelihood and home were perhaps unparalleled in history. To quote Ayesha Jalal: all said and done, the commonality of masculinity was stronger than the bond of religion. Men of all three communities delighted in their momentary sense of power over vulnerable women; such was the courage of these citizens of newly independent states. Gender eroded the barriers that religion had been forced to create.82 The architect of the partition, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chose to decide the destiny of places and peoples in Punjab and Bengal, which he had neither known nor visited, within less than the six weeks allotted to him.83 According to Ranabir Samaddar, [w]e live in partitioned times. It is within our post-colonial being, in our agony, pessimism and strivings. Once can of course write, when writing of Partition, of its prelude, or of the imperial process of divide and quit, or its residue, or the trauma, the violence, the human sufferings and the catharsis. But this history is lost in the quagmire of the present that does not allow Partition to become a thing of the historical past. Partition’s history is thus an incomplete one. At once an event of the past and a sign of the present time. Partition lives on in post-colonial times to such an extent that we should truly prefer the phrase ‘partitioned times’ to the more common ‘post-colonial times’.84 Among several icons of ‘partitioned times’ are millions of refugees scattered on the subcontinent, who continue to live with bitter memories of loot, plunder, rape and murder, and in whom such memories live.85 Then there are tens of thousands of stateless people living in dozens of India–Bangladesh enclaves, who, even after fifty years of ‘independence’, are struggling to come to terms with the peculiar nature of state and nation formation in the subcontinent. Against the backdrop of highly volatile and hostile nationalisms, where the Muslims were invited to identify with the ‘Pakistani nation’, and non-Muslims with the ‘Indian nation’, these victims of geopolitical obsession with ‘territorial contiguity’ remind us that history is witness to the fact that, throughout the

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subcontinent, there has always been a poor fit between territory, religious community and national identity. They are a painful reminder of the sheer inability of these states to come to terms with the territorial discontinuity.86 Territorial partitions the world over are, more often than not, the result of serious disagreements, rather than agreement, over who owns or ought to be owning which territory. Such disagreements are seldom over with the act of partitioning, and with the passage of time acquire greater complexity and contestation. In South Asia, as Samaddar puts it so insightfully, ‘the logic of territory, namely standardization, formalization, centralization and configuration, euphemistically described in the region as “territorial integrity”, has now turned into a statist strategy to rationalize, affect, influence and control’.87 It is important, however, not to lose sight of the other side of the geopolitical map of South Asia, where not one but several strands of territorial consciousness, not necessarily related to the ‘nation’, continue to make claims on space and resources. Correspondingly, one finds not one but several logics of territory, which are neither in complete harmony nor in total conflict with each other. The appeal of partition and the underlying reductionist geopolitical– territorial reasoning lies in its self-proclaimed ability to provide relatively simple and straightforward solutions to complex ethnopolitical conflicts. Excessive geopolitics gives rise to the politics of difference, undermines the politics of accommodation, creates absolute locations and generates the illusion of purity in racial or ethnic or religious terms. As communal identities become territorially rigid and ideologically aggressive, the prospects for political organization of a territory, one that will permit multiple overlapping identities to exist peacefully in shared space, diminish considerably. How does one encounter, contest, contain and possibly eliminate excessive geopolitics? How does one restore voices, perspectives and struggles that have been silenced and marginalized by excessive geopolitics? Democracy and dialogue, as critically informed ongoing practices, no doubt, remain central to ensuring that geo-cultural plurality is not subsumed by geopolitical centralism and territorial impositions. Yet, one must not be tempted to assume that democracy and dialogue per se are some kind of an antidote to excessive geopolitics. On the contrary, in some cases, democracy, especially when understood and practised exclusively in terms of majority rule, facilitates political debate among citizens over contradictory representations of who gets what, when, where and how. As Lacoste points out, [t]erritorial rivalries can be seriously aggravated if their representations – at least in one of the opposing ‘camps’ – are constructed in a particularly impressive way and if, in a certain political context, they are broadcast by the media and by leaders in such a powerful and profound way that a group or population internalise them as supreme values. The fact that a significant proportion of a population is well informed locally of what is at stake in terms of power and territory is not necessarily favourable to the respect of human rights. The proof of this is the ferocity with which the detachments of popular Serbs, Croat and Muslim militia fought each other in former Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia-Herzogovina.88

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The partition introduced on the subcontinent a particular politics of representation, where the nation was projected as ideologically and symbolically fixed and territorially immutable. Pakistan remains even today a state in search of its national identity.89 Even after five decades of its existence, the question remains ‘whether Pakistan is land for the Muslims or a nation of Muslims moving towards its destiny as an Islamic state? Language and religion, rather than providing a panacea for unity in plural society, have opened a Pandora’s box of conflicting sectarian, ethnic and tribal identities.90 Centrist state structures have reinforced a sense in Sind, Baluchistan and NWFP that Pakistani nationalism is being imposed from above in the service of the “Punjabisation” of the state… . Successive bouts of authoritarian rule have reinforced centrifugal ethnic, linguistic and regional.’91 In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Voluntary Corp), also known as Sangh Parivar (family), has emerged since its inception in 1925 as the organization articulating Hindu revivalism. The destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid (Mosque), situated in the town of Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), on 6 December 1992 by a militant crowd of Hindu communalists on the alleged plea that the mosque was built after destroying the Ramjanmbhoomi (birthplace) temple of the Hindus, which stood exactly on that site, reveals beyond doubt that Hindu nationalism is no longer a mere undercurrent in Indian politics. ‘Hindutva’ is ‘seeking to redefine the nation-space…that is, to rearticulate the link between an imagined community and its territorial domain’.92 The ‘nation-state’ narrative of Hindu nationalism, the RSS and what it chooses to call ‘Sangh Inspired Organisations’, like VHP and Bajrang Dal, is a notion of otherness that is framed in religious-cultural terms. Young minds in South Asia continue to be indoctrinated in order to achieve some kind of congruence between physical-territorial maps and the popular mental maps.93 Pakistan’s obsession with twonation logic allows for little classificatory ambiguity in the educational texts. At virtually every level, racial and cultural differences between Hindus and Muslims are blown out of reasonable proportions while undermining commonality. History thus becomes the victim of state ideology and partition logic. A critical as well as comparative assessment of various partitions also reveals the manner in which socio-spatial underpinnings of the majority– minority equation are rigidified historically under the gaze of excessive geopolitics. Driven and dictated by the real or imagined geographies of fear, a minority might find the idea of partition irresistible as the one and only escape route towards ‘majority-nation’ status. It might as well happen that, once the goal is achieved, which, more often than not, turns out to be violent, it might treat the minority or minorities in exactly the same way in which it had been (mal)treated by the dominant ethno-nationalist majority of the pre-partition era. The proverbial billion-dollar question then becomes whether partition actually leads to a paradigm shift from domination to non-domination as a fundamental principle of governance at all levels. Or whether it simply enforces a refurbished territorialgeopolitical order with realigned borders, at the service of a newly born ‘ethnocracy’; a non-democratic regime with democratic pretensions, highly resistant to equal citizenship or the protection of minorities, engaged in the relentless pursuit of disproportionate ethnopolitical control over a contested territoriality of multi-ethnic landscapes.94 The taming and trimming of the excess of geopolitics requires among other things an acknowledgement of the fact that we shy away from talking about partition, which has

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become a taboo word, whereas the need of the hour is to encourage people, belonging to both the partition and post-partition generations, to share their views and experiences across the divide, both physical and mental, with an open mind. Such a need becomes far more pressing because ‘South Asians’ by and large appear reluctant to learn from the partitions of yesteryear. Take Sri Lanka, for example. Already partitioned in terms of the logics of otherness, once the most favourite colony of the British, multi-ethnic, multicultural Sri Lanka today raises many questions similar to those examined in this chapter. The geopolitical–territorial rivalries, aided and abetted by the polarized socio-spatial consciousness of majoritarianism and minoritarianism, between the Buddhist Sinahalese and Hindu Tamilians – joined recently by the Muslim minority in Tamil-dominated areas – bodes nothing but ill for the future of India’s immediate southern neighbour. The geopolitical imagination of the historic homeland of ‘Tamil Elam’, even if realized, while making a minority the majority, would fail to provide a territorially contiguous geobody to the Tamilian nation. Very similarly, to pre-1971 Pakistan, it will be a territorially truncated nation with a sizeable Muslim minority in the ‘eastern’ side. Rather bloody recent events give little hope that Tamilian majoritarianism would be qualitatively different from Sinhalese ethnocracy! The intricate web of entangled geographies of ethnocracy, fearful minorities, state-sponsored violence and equally violent resistance is yet another reminder – to those willing to see – that partitions create many more problems than they claim to resolve, and it might be easier to prevent than tame excessive geopolitics. South Asia remains in search of a philosophy, an attitude and a set of values, which involve a coexistence of broadly understood differences, a tolerance (a respect for otherness) and civility of inter-group relations. This implies affirmation of differences as natural social phenomena that should be equally valued and dealt with on the basis of partnership rather than domination. A return to a situation of geopolitical normalcy (where geopolitical reasoning remains one among several other forms of reasoning) in South Asia demands that we strive to bring back, through a dialogic mode of questioning and reasoning, perspectives and voices silenced or subsumed earlier by the dominant geopolitical reasoning. There is a need to de-territorialize imaginations and articulate new spatial geographies of peaceful coexistence. What South Asia needs today is a more emancipatory geopolitics; one that envisions the politics of space not as the production of fixed locations, and defines nation not as fixed and enclosed but dynamic and open.95 On the contrary, an attempt to homogenize various forms of ethnopolitics on the one hand, and allow it to be subsumed by a singular state-centric geopolitics on the other is likely to produce excessive geopolitics and eventually partition(s). How many more partitions can South Asia afford? It is for the human will and human agency to decide, as it is they who must choose between the geopolitics of difference or the politics of accommodation. Notes 1 Sanjay Chaturvedi, ‘Processing Otherness in India-Pakistan Relations’, Journal of Economic and Social Geography, 93(2), 2002. 2 Yves Lacoste, ‘Rivalries for Territory’, Geopolitics, 5(2), Autumn 2000, pp. 120–121. 3 Ibid., p. 121. 4 Ibid., p. 122.

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5 Rada Iveković, ‘From the Nation to Partition; Through Partition to the Nation: Readings’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, p. 201. 6 Denis Retaille, ‘Geopolitics in History’, Geopolitics, 5(2), Autumn 2000, p. 35. 7 Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 61. 8 Paul Knox and Sallie Marston, Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Perspective, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 244. 9 Michel Foucher, ‘The Geopolitics of Front Lines and Borderlines’, Geopolitics 5(2), Autumn 2000, p. 159. 10 Yves Lacoste, ‘Rivalries for Territory’, Geopolitics, 5 (2), Autumn 2000, p. 154. 11 Tai Yong Tan and Ganesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 24. 12 M.H. Fisher, The Politics of the British Annexation of India 1757–1857, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 1. 13 See Bernard S. Cohen, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Thomas T. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge History of India), 1995). 14 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). 15 Ibid., pp. 52–53. 16 Diana L. Eck, ‘The Imagined Landscape: Patterns in the Construction of Hindu Sacred Geography’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32(2), 1998, p. 167. 17 Gyanender Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 23–65. 18 Mushirul Hasan, ‘Asymmetrical Nationhood in India and Pakistan (Interview)’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, pp. 189–190. 19 See Thomas T. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20 Marzia Casolari, ‘Role of Benares in Constructing Political Hindu Identity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(15), 13 April 2002, p. 1413. 21 R.B. Bhagat, ‘Census and the Construction of Communalism in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 36(46–47), 24 November 2001, p. 4353. 22 David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920–1932, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 264. 23 Robert K. Schaeffer, Severed States: Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), p. 42. 24 Cited in Graham P. Chapman, The Geopolitics of South Asia: From Early Empires to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 128. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., pp. 128–129. 28 Graham P. Chapman, The Geopolitics of South Asia: From Early Empires to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 129. 29 Manfred B. Steger, Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 89–90. 30 Ibid. 31 See Sanjay Chaturvedi, ‘Representing Post-Colonial India: Inclusive/Exclusive Geopolitical Imaginations’, in Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (eds) Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 211–236. 32 Ashutosh Varshney, ‘Contesting Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety’, Daedalus, 122(3), 1993, p. 236.

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33 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 34 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 388–400. 35 R. Mallick, Development, Ethnicity and Human Rights in South Asia, (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), p. 150. 36 Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 168. 37 Yunus Samad, ‘Reflections on Partition: Pakistan’s Perspective’, in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (eds) Religion and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 381. 38 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 226. 39 Cited in Tai Yong Tan and Ganesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 82. 40 Claude Markovits, ‘The Partition of India’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, p. 69. 41 R.J. Moore, ‘Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand’, in Mushriul Hasan (ed.) India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 193. 42 Rahmat Ali, (internet source: http://www.khyber.demon.co.uk/history/pakistan/). 43 Ranabir Samaddar, A Biography of the Indian Nation 1947–1997, (New Delhi: Sage, 2001), p. 33. 44 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 393. 45 Rahmat Ali, in the third edition of his 1933 pamphlet (1942), p. 7 (internet source: http://www.khyber.demon.co.uk/history/pakistan/). 46 Ibid. 47 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 392. 48 Ibid. 49 Cited in Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 52. 50 Ibid., p. 53. 51 D.D. Pattanaik, Hindu Nationalism in India: Conceptual Foundation, (New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1998), pp. 43–50. 52 V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva, (Bombay: Savarkar Prakashan, 5th edn, 1969), p. 100; T.B. Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 78. 53 Marzia Casolari, ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(4), 22 January 2000, pp. 218–228. 54 Ibid., p. 224. 55 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 165. 56 K.L. Tuteja, ‘Hindu Consciousness, the Congress and Partition’, in A. Singh (ed.) The Partition in Retrospect, (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd., 2000), p. 5. 57 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 266. 58 R.S. Grewal and Indu Banga, ‘Pakistan, Khalistan and Partition’, in A. Singh (ed.), The Partition in Retrospect, (New Delhi: Anamika Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd, 2000), p. 160. 59 Ibid.

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60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 433. 63 S. Saberwal, ‘The Long Road to the Partition: Social and Historical Perspective’, South Asian Survey, 8(2), 2001, p. 238 (emphasis added). 64 Ibid., p. 239. 65 Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of the Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, (New Delhi: Viking-Penguin, 1998), pp. 297–298. 66 Ibid. 67 R.S. Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Achut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Caste Federation and Dalit Politics in UP, 1946–48’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 133. 68 B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India, (Bombay: Thacker & Co. Ltd., 1946), pp. 237–238. 69 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 187. 70 See Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Second Partition of Bengal’, in R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on Partition in the East, (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1997), and S. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908, (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). 71 Cited in Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Second Partition of Bengal’, in R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on Partition in the East, (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1997), p. 36. 72 Ibid., pp. 36–37. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 See Tai Yong Tan and Ganesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 80–81. 76 Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape: 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies, 33(1), February 1999, p. 189 (emphasis added). 77 Ibid., p. 247. 78 Ibid., p. 199. 79 Cited in Ishtiaq Ahmad, ‘The 1947 Partition of Punjab: Arguments Put Forth Before the Punjab Boundary Commission by the Parties Involved’, in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (eds) Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent, (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 133. 80 R. Kumar, ‘State Formation in India: Retrospect and Prospect’, in M. Doornbos and S. Kaviraj (eds) Dynamics of State Formation: India and Europe Compared, (New Delhi: Sage, 1997), p. 20. 81 See Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); and Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of the Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, (New Delhi: Viking-Penguin, 1998). 82 Ayesha Jalal, ‘Nation, Reason and Religion: The Punjab’s Role in the Partition of India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(32), August 8–14, 1998, pp. 2189–2190. 83 Tai Yong Tan and Ganesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, (London: Routledge, 2000). 84 Ranabir Samaddar, ‘The Last Hurrah that Continues’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001, p. 31. 85 Syed Sikander Mehdi, ‘Refugee Memory in India and Pakistan’, Transeuropéennes, 19–20, Winter 2000–2001.

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86 Willem Van Schendel, ‘Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the IndiaBangladesh Enclaves’, paper presented at Border Regions in Transition V, on Mapping Borders Between Territories, Discourses and Practices, Tartu, Estonia, 28 June–1 July 2001. 87 Ranabir Samaddar, A Biography of the Indian Nation 1947–1997, (New Delhi: Sage, 2001), p. 33. 88 Yves Lacoste, ‘Rivalries for Territory’, Geopolitics, 5(2), Autumn 2000, p. 143. 89 Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1. 90 Akbar, S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: the Search for Saladin, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 171, and Feroz Ahmed, Ethnicity and Politics in Pakistan, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 91 Ian Talbot, Pakistan, A Modern History, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1. 92 Satish Deshpande, ‘Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth Century India’, in P. Chatterjee and P. Jeganathan (eds) Community, Gender and Violence, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 167. 93 Hoodbhoy, Parvez ‘The Menace of Education: What Are They Teaching in Pakistani Schools Today?’, The News (Lahore), 11 June 2000, p. 3. 94 Oren Yiftachel, ‘Territory as the Kernel of the Nations: Space, Time and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine’, Geopolitics, 7(2), Autumn 2002, pp. 215–248. 95 R. Oza, ‘Showcasing India: Gender, Geography and Globalization’, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(4), 2001:1067–1095.

Conclusion Stefano Bianchini Investigating the nature of partitions is a key challenge for a study devoted to state dismemberment. In order to achieve this aim, the authors of the present book have made an attempt to analyse this process with a multidisciplinary and comparative approach. In particular, as we have seen, the attention has been focused on categories and destinies of partition; the role of geopolitics; the opportunities of dialogue; and the context of ‘transition’, intended as a general framework where partition mainly takes place. Then, what is the nature of partitions? What are the conclusions that one could draw from various chapters of the book? Actually, the first conclusion is simple in terms, because partition, as an interpretative category, is quite a complex phenomenon, presenting a wide variety of aspects. However, the second conclusion, which is stemming from the first one, implies further, and has broader, implications. The variety of aspects, in fact, shows that politics is only one possible dimension of partition. Reductionism, in other words, is not a good approach in understanding a process that deals simultaneously with politics, culture, law, religion, territory, representations and images – of the Self and the otherness, violence, gender relations, the organization and the functioning of democracy, individual and collective psychologies, beliefs and expectations. Therefore, this variety (which is highly attractive for academic studies) is at the origin of the difficulties of treating the subject ‘partition’, both in theoretical studies and – particularly – in the praxis, where the everyday life of individuals and groups is substantially (and dramatically) involved and challenged. In addition to all that, the complexity of partition is emphasized by the fact that the mechanisms, which might generate, or implement – or only encourage – claims of partitions, follow common patterns, despite the role played by local peculiarities, events and/or protagonists. Comparing the examples of partition experimented with up to now all around the world, the reader can easily note that, from British India to Yugoslavia, from Canada to Ireland, from Nigeria to Rwanda, from the Soviet Union to Palestine, all these cases confirm that partition, when pursued and/or carried out, follows a pattern of development along lines which makes it a complex and global phenomenon. In a sense, the globalization of partition is not a contradiction in terms; rather, it is part of the radical changes that characterize the evolution of the system of international relations. Paradoxically and increasingly, this evolution is generating a globalization of the attractiveness of local peculiarities, based on beliefs, expectations and mentalities, which respond to sets of precepts very close in content, although different in form. Moreover, partition is not a singular, but a plural act, both in terms of mechanisms and implications. All the authors of the present book have stressed this dimension in their respective chapters, dwelling on the conditions behind the reasons for conflict – politically presented by their promoters as a consequence of ‘irreconcilable’ differences – and how they follow a similar pattern.

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As seen, the political sphere of partition includes a set of issues and values related to territory, sense of security, sources of power legitimization and organization of citizens’ loyalty to the state. If the reader adopts a comparative approach to them, as the authors of the present book, in their respective analyses, have done, it would reveal impressive similarities in terms of reasoning. The case of Croatian and Pakistani claims of separation is widely recognized as a cornerstone in this respect. Nonetheless, and however paradoxical it may sound, similarity has to be extended to the arguments raised by ‘formal’ enemies – Croatian and Serbian leaderships on the one hand, or Pakqistani and Hindu nationalists on the other. Both the mentioned attitudes are expressions of the same pattern of reference, where the use of similar bias, or stereotypes, marks an unwilled attempt at establishing interchangeable symbols and myths of powers in societies where multicultural inputs are the rule. Again, the excess of geopolitics that Sanjay Chaturvedi describes effectively in the case of British India can be applied, with similar effective outcomes, to Yugoslavia or Palestine. Territory, in fact, is a crucial topic in the process of disrupting and reshaping states and loyalties. The spatial dimension of the political community is increasingly connected to the sources of legitimization of political power, since the selection of the elites is stemming from the universal suffrage, rather than from a divine authority, however identified. This process explains why ruling elites connect territory to legitimization in order either to establish their control over the access to resources, or to attract popular consensus. Moreover, the book argues that the process of partition cannot be reduced to a state separation event (as in the cases of Pakistan and India, Serbia and Croatia, Ireland and Britain or potentially Canada and Quebec). In fact, all mentioned examples confirm that this process has to deal with additional regional sub-partitions, family divisions and religious contrasts. Partitioning British India, for instance, has generated a subsequent partition of Kashmir, Punjab and Bengal. Similarly, the partition of Yugoslavia has implied the sub-partition of Istria, Krajinas and Sandzak, and of Yugoslav populations and minorities. In addition to that, although Jinnah had, at least at the beginning, a secular idea of Pakistan, the partition of British India along religious lines in 1947 has recast territories and the demographic distribution of the population drastically. Similar events occurred in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s, where religion(s) played a crucial role not as much in generating partition, as in justifying it. Sub-partition of territories was also a possibility in Canada (where the Catholic– Protestant confrontation was not so sharp as in other cases), both on the eve of the referendum for the Quebec independence in 1995 and in the days that followed the communication of the ballot. Before voting, Creek and Inuit populations claimed secession in case of a victory of Quebecois separatists, while, after the vote, Quebecois separatists explained their defeat with the participation of the Quebec Anglophone population in the ballot. As a result, they threatened the Anglophone people with expulsion, in order to prepare the ground for a victory of separatism in a new referendum. Although expressed in an emotional moment of disappointment, the reasoning confirms that partition follows similar lines of development, regardless of the fact that a country threatened by partition has a colonial, communist or democratic background.

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Culturally the representation of the Self in partitioning processes operates accordingly. Ranabir Samaddar, for example, has described the impact that the Orangist march has every year on Catholic–Protestant relations in Northern Ireland. A similar role is played in the Balkans by the myth of Kosovo, whose structure is, by the way, very close to the stories described in the Chansons de geste in France or in the traditional theatre of the Sicilian puppets. In turn, Rada Iveković insists on the trends aimed at making homogenization a fact in the phases that announce and follow a state partition. During these phases, groups are invited to redefine themselves according to a set of values, which is offered to the population by ruling elites as guidelines for establishing a sense of Self in opposition to the otherness. This process is pursued with both psychological and physical violence, and implies a reconfiguration of gender relations through the establishment of new/old social hierarchies. In this context, violence becomes the rule. Historically, there are very few examples of partition where violence has been avoided. As such – at this stage of the human experience – a peaceful partition has to be considered a tiny, although a possible, exception. On the contrary, the moment when violence occurs it becomes the front line, whose trespassing makes partition an inevitable act. In other words, violence is a determinant for reconfiguring political societies, where territory (or geopolitics), sources of loyalties and collective/individual psychology are forced to reshape and modify. The fact that violence is so relevant in the process of state reconfiguration through partitions is easy to understand and, at the same time, it becomes consistent with the reasoning that suggests a partition. In fact, because partition is an act of division, it implies dismemberment of what has pre-existed and requires a drastic severance of the ties previously established within a community. The incision is comprehensive and refers to all the aspects of the life within a defined space. Individuals and groups living in this space are partitioned, sometimes even dissected, in order to be re-aggregated under new sets of priorities, new values and new symbols. Paradoxically, this process occurs with the support of a significant part of the population, which sincerely believes that separation can lead to a better future, at least for itself. Nonetheless, whether partially supported or not, the process of creating homogeneities under new priorities in a short time leads inevitably to violence. The reason lies mainly in the fact that the sense of belonging and the web of relations within a collectivity have generally been built through a long-lasting process. The perception of time, in fact, has been accelerated drastically only since modernization has substituted the horse with machines. In addition, partition is by itself a quick event, which is in open contrast with the experience of a shared past. This relation between time evolving and the individual dimension is crucial in understanding how deeply partition deals with life. As Rada Iveković reminds us, partition is a dramatic event that destroys families, friendships, the sense of belonging and ideas of country. To a certain extent, the more pre-existing ties were strong in a region, the more violence is necessary, in order to construct new sources of identifications by redrawing maps. The cases of Yugoslavia and British India are, in this respect, quite significant. Despite the fact that partition has been prepared politically and/or administratively in previous decades, the violence erupted particularly in the areas where groups perceived themselves as physically threatened and/or were forced to leave, in order to permit the reconfiguration of homogeneous territories under new priorities. At

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the same time, the high degree of violence has been consistent with the political aim of constructing new walls as prerequisites for homogenization, particularly in the areas where common life has roots. In other words, because the sense of the Self is built in contrast with the Other, the more this sense of the Self has been historically and culturally softened, conditioned, evaporated, influenced by the otherness or can be identified with difficulty, the more violence is necessary for breaking ties. Under these conditions, the room for dialogue shrinks, sometimes even drastically. The relaunch of dialogue can be postponed for long periods and Ranabir Samaddar tries to work out the theoretical conditions (or, indeed, impossibilities) of its establishment and development. In this sense, partition might be considered a way of re-establishing new conditions for dialogue. The fact that, under certain historical circumstances, groups of population believe that a common political experience cannot be shared any more may seem a way of creating, by dividing people and putting them under a different context, new opportunities for dialogue. The Czechoslovak case sounds like a confirmation of this argument. Nonetheless, this is an exception, rather than a rule. The success of the exception lays mainly in the fact that two (and not multiple) subjects were involved in the negotiation for partitions and, then, that an attractive external subject (namely the European Union, with its policy of conditionality) has been able to influence their bilateral relations deeply. In many other cases, partition did not open the room for new forms of dialogue, unless we consider a dialogue the endless (sometimes forced) negotiation for a peaceful settlement in the area. In this group of cases we include the experience of Ireland, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Somalia, British India, and, to a large extent, even the former Soviet Union. In these cases, at times, the international community has sought to impose a peace process (at Dayton or Oslo), or sometimes has offered a framework of reference (the Stability Pact or a ground for mediation), or militarily intervened (as in Cyprus). Nonetheless, in the specific case of Ireland, the international intervention was limited: the United States supported the peace process, which started in 1993, and Clinton visited Northern Ireland two years later. As for the European Union, the shared political opinion that Northern Ireland is a domestic issue of the United Kingdom has made Brussels unable even to provide a room for mediation. In contrast, with Cyprus the EU is currently seeking to encourage forms of dialogue between the Turkish and the Greek parts, because otherwise the whole project of enlargement could be substantially threatened. Nonetheless, turning back to the case of Northern Ireland, the negotiations (which started after decades of violence and war) continued to be systematically marked by violence from both sides. In other words, the fact that leaders of the conflicting groups tried to establish the basic rules of dialogue interacted with extremists’ actions aimed at hindering peace. Violence, in fact, had the support of a part of the population, as in the cases of Yugoslavia or Palestine, although the degree of support has been different in the three aforementioned examples, with tensions in Yugoslavia and Palestine being more radical. This leads to the consideration that, regardless of the level of violence, the extremism of confrontations – in a context of state partition – handles powerful emotional and symbolic tools, which justifies their use of violence, at least in the eyes of a significant part of the population. As a result, extremism is able not only to get a certain degree of support through the act of partitioning, but also to blackmail moderate political

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wings, which might be willing to negotiate for a compromise, by accusing them as traitors. In order to make their message more convincing, the extremists do not hesitate to use violence against members of their own ethnic or religious group. This has been the case with the Irish Catholic or Protestant killed by Catholic and Protestant respectively, as well as with the Albanians in Kosovo killed by Albanian guerrillas. In conclusion, violence is an effective tool both for strengthening the homogenization of the group and for maintaining a high level of confrontation between groups in the perspective of state partition. Therefore, even when negotiations are pursued, their outcomes and effectiveness can be postponed for a long while. Under these condi-tions, the dialogue remains a prospect, a hope, rather than a reality or an achieved basis for peace. In fact, the act of partition cannot be followed easily by new forms of dialogue, simply because states lack mechanisms of implementation, both in legal terms, and in the political, cultural and psychological spheres. As a result, partition remains a dramatic act by itself. The right to self-determination has been mentioned many times by the authors of the book. Nonetheless, as is well known, the implementation of this right is conditioned by opposite principles, internationally recognized as equally legitimate. One of these principles is the respect of territorial integrity. In addition, the access to selfdetermination is restricted by the international law to specific cases, such as colonial status or a serious threat of genocide. However, colonial status cannot be claimed for justifying either the India–Pakistan or the Pakistan–Bangladesh partitions. In fact, Pakistan was not an Indian colony, nor Bangladesh a Pakistani colony. Similarly, reference to genocide threats cannot be used to legitimate the secession of Slovenia or Estonia, simply because genocide never occurred. At the same time, and considering the complex system of ethnic inclusion under communist authoritarianism, neither Slovenian nor Estonian governments can easily argue (although some scholars tried to offer some arguments) that their countries were colonies of Belgrade or Moscow respectively. Interestingly enough, the recent decision of the Canadian Supreme Court emphasizes the relevance of political negotiations, in order to pave the road to a consensual partition. However, the same Court ‘appears’ powerless in case of failure of negotiations. In other words, the world of partition lacks regulations, because its implementation depends largely on the balance of power that is locally and internationally established in a specific historical period. In spite of their recent efforts, liberal theories (as well as other modern or postmodern theories) are not able to provide an ideological framework for selfdetermination and appear powerless in facing the challenge. Countries do not like to be divided, or to lose the control over territories and resources. In this context, not by chance, democratic countries do not include this right in their own constitutions. Even the European integration process and its monetary union do not foresee any regulating mechanism in case a member state would like to withdraw. Truly, partition is – from a theoretical point of view – a frustrating event, difficult to classify and analyse, in spite of the fact that it is able to influence tremendously the fate of groups and individuals. In this sense, Ranabir Samaddar defines appropriately both partition and dialogue as ‘undefinable acts’. At the same time, the variety of elements that characterizes partition confirms that partition is a global process, both because it has become a world event and because it tries to reconfigure societal relations by adopting a similarity of mechanisms. ‘Similarity’, however, does not relate to the implementation phase only. It might be expanded to the concerned mechanisms. As we have seen in the

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book, the rationality of British administration in India has created basic conditions for partitioning territories and populations, and the devolution and the deregulation of politics in the communist world have provoked similar effects. A mixture of aspirations, which includes claims of decentralization, fear of otherness and the will of homogeneity, is at the basis of the Herri Batasuna claims for independence. Although Spain is a democratic country, included in a framework of continental integration, the threat of partition is still influencing its inner societal relations, with eventual regional impacts. In addition to that, partition threat in Spain, although weaker than that in the Balkans (at least at the beginning of the twenty-first century), confirms that partitions have similarities in pathways and impacts, as stressed previously for other cases. This consideration about Spain, however, along with the inability of the governments in London and Dublin to face Ireland’s partition, suggests the persistence of the aspiration to divide states and how this persistence affects different political environments: namely, post-colonial, post-communist and democratic societies. Therefore, partition shows a specific relevance to political theory and to the study of human political societies. Ranabir Samaddar concludes that we are living in ‘partitioned times’, rather than in post-communist or post-colonial times. Actually, partition is a possible event that cannot be restricted only to the areas where colonial empires or communist dictatorships evaporated or collapsed. The phenomenon shows wider implications, which affect democratic societies as well, both within the European Union and outside it (as in the case of Canada). Is, then, partition an event of transitional societies? Rada Iveković broadens the conception of transition. In her opinion, transition cannot be restricted to post-colonial and post-communist societies, but also refers to the European continent as a whole, because of the openness of the integration process. The consideration is challenging, particularly because it connects the complexity of transformations, which characterize the world, to the new polarization of globalism and parochialism. Within this context, even the case of Canada finds a place where it can be located. Transition, in other words, is a difficult interpretative category, because it requires a clear definition of the two poles between which the transition occurs. In our case, because we are living in a changing world, we know only the beginning but not the end of the ‘transition’. At the same time, we are aware that our societies, either post-colonial, postcommunist or with a consolidated democratic experience, are radically transforming themselves. Within this framework of ‘transition’, the international system of state is challenged. This system identifies itself with the political idea of the nation. Nonetheless, both nation and state are questioned from different angles. Globalization and localisms, migrations, criminality, labour organization and off-shore production, claims for both citizenship and their restrictions, the information society and trends of establishing networking societies, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and the increasingly sharp contrast between civic and ethnic nationalism – all these factors contribute to influence radically the political organization of society. The nation-state, which has been in most cases an imperial and colonial state, is losing or has already lost the main characteristics that it has spread all over the world, while becoming a successful pattern of political organization. Successor nation-states, created on the cinders of the colonial empires, are finding it increasingly difficulty to manage a

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differentiated society. A similar situation characterizes the successor nation-states of the post-communist world as well as the democratic nation-states of Western Europe, both being involved in a process of integration, which affects old and well-rooted behaviours, based on principles of absolute sovereignty and national security. Even terrorism, after September 11, has challenged the system of states, and its ability and effectiveness in reacting to a threat, which is slipping from the logic of the system of states. Paradoxically enough, within this context of the nation-state crisis, the increasing attractiveness of partition reveals a persistent attractiveness of the state as a goal in itself, although reconfigured under different conditions and different priorities, in terms of rulers–ruled relations, territory and cultural contents. In fact, the efforts in redefining the forms of collective government, through partitions, mirror the simultaneous will of fleeing a cohabitation of diversities and guaranteeing collective security by stressing ethnic and/or religious identification. The nationalist radicalism (and its cultural homologue, racism), which affects existing nation-states, is in this respect a global expression of local fears of otherness, while the globalization of information and production opposes this process and even makes it useless by affecting increasingly the exercise of sovereignty. In conclusion, partition is not the expression of clashes of civilization. Rather, it is a local, but widespread, attempt at reacting against globalization by local/global means, patterns, symbols and beliefs. In addition, the act of partition is a warning sign that the nation-state is unable to govern the complexity of political societies through its traditional tools. Accordingly, partition becomes a lever for multiplying states in a community of states in crisis and unable to govern the world. Therefore, partition is also a global phenomenon that requires global policies and strategies in order to avoid the risk of multiplying the political cells of human society, as a fortress of incommunicability in a world of networks and webs. In this sense, partition is a cancer, which needs radical remedies by transforming societies. In the end, partition is – with its dramatic dimension – a litmus paper that human beings need for testing new forms of political organization, representation and mediation.

Index accountability, political 9–10 Achhutistan 144–145 Afghanistan 19, 41 Africa 31, 41, 62; Rwanda 18, 25, 34–35, 36, 40 Aga Khan III 140 All India Achhutistan Movement 144–145 Alsace-Lorraine 99 Ambedkar, Dr B.R. 145–146 Amin, Samir 40 Anatolia 100 Arabia 99, 100 Armenia 100 Asia Minor 99, 100 Assam 107–108 Auchinleck, Claude, Field Marshal 122 Austro-Hungarian Empire 102 Azad Punjab (Free Punjab) 142–143 Babri Masjid, Uttar Pradesh 155 Balibar, Étienne 27–28 Balkans 31, 42, 59, 64, 84, 111–112; sovereignty 76; war crimes 33, 36–37, 45 n. 57; see also Yugoslavia Bangistan 138–139 Bangladesh (E. Bengal/E. Pakistan) 112, 138–139, 147 Basque provinces, Spain 68 Bengal 107–108, 112, 138–139, 141, 147; Boundary Commission 108, 146–151 Berlin Wall 28–29 Berlusconi, Silvio 44n. 41 Bhagat, R.B. 132 Bhatti, V.S. 142 Bianchini, Stefano vii, 47–91, 161–169 bio-politics 20, 26 Boraine, Alex 33 Bosnia-Herzegovina, war crime 36–37 Boundary Commissions, Bengal/Punjab 108–109, 146–152 Bright, John 133–134 Britain see Great Britain British Commonwealth 134 British Empire 65, 96, 107–109, 114–116, 122, 125–160

Index Britishness 8, 96–97 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 71 Bush, George W. 34 Butalia, Urvashi 144 Cabinet Mission to India (1946) 111 Canada, Quebec 64, 68, 69, 163 Casolari, Marzia 141 caste system, India 143–146 Catholics, Ireland 8, 85, 93–95, 165 censuses, India 132, 151 Chapman, Graham 133, 134 Charter Act (1833) 107 Chatterjee, Joya 141, 148–149 Chatterjee, Partha 147 Chaturvedi, Sanjay vii, 125–160 China 32 Chin-Lushai Conference (1892) 107 CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) 65 citizenship 20, 31, 41; women 17–18, 42, 43n. 23 civil war 29, 35 civitas 22, 23 Cold War 29–30, 77 Colley, Linda 97 Collins, Michael 95 colonialism 71, 96–97; post-colonial transition 28, 29–30, 68; see also imperialism ‘common’, as ‘other’ 15 Commonwealth, British 134 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 65 communication growth 77–79 communism 52, 60–61, 70–71, 76, 86n. 5, 89n. 31; post-communist transition 28–30, 57 community 14–15 conflict see violence; war Constantinople 99 ‘constraints of truth’ 2–3 continuity/discontinuity 56, 60; gender 15, 18, 38–39 crimes, war 33, 36–37, 45n. 57; tribunals 14, 25 critique, partition 2–3, 5, 11 Croatia 111; war crimes 36–37, 45n. 57 culture 61, 74–75; and mobility 79 Curzon, George Nathaniel, Lord 108 Cyprus 84, 120

147

Index

148

Czechoslovakia 61, 68, 70–71, 103 Czech Republic 82 Dalits (scheduled castes), India 143–146 darsćana (order of seeing) 16–17 Dayton agreement (1995) 37 death, rights over 26 decolonization 9, 98–100 democracy 4–5, 12, 22–23, 61–62, 67–72, 154; and homogeneity 58, 72–73 de-Nazification 34–35 de-Sovietization 34–35 de Valera, Eamon 95 dialogists 111 dialogue 2, 98, 110–112, 113–114, 116, 154, 164–165 difference 22–23; respect for 72–75 discontinuity/continuity 56, 60; gender 15, 18, 38–39 discrimination 55–56, 56–57, 57–58 dismemberment 51–52, 61–62 dissolution, state 52–53 divide and rule strategy 147 ‘divine law’ 17–18 East India Company 128–129, 131 EC see European Community Eck, Diana L. 130–131 economics 82 Edney, Matthew 129–130 elections, India 132 elites, intellectual 60, 61 Empires 65; Austro-Hungarian 102; British 65, 96, 107–109, 114–116, 122, 125–160; Ottoman 99, 100, 101–102 England see Great Britain entrepreneurship 60 equality/inequality 22–23, 56–59, 79 ethnic cleansing 10, 51, 102 ethnicities 41, 48, 55–56, 59 ethnic secessionism 67–68 ethnocracy 22, 23 ethnocultural justice 36 ethno-nationalism 52, 57 ethnopolitics 110, 127, 149 EU see European Union Europe 14, 30, 32, 74; border regime 103; integration 19, 21, 27–28, 82–86; sovereignty 75–76;

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149

and Yugoslavia 18–19, 40 European Community (EC) 111–112 European Union (EU) 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 165 ‘excessive geopolitics’ 113–114, 125–156 extremism 165; see also violence Faisal, Emir 100 family, ‘divine law’ 17 First World War 99 Foucault, Michel 26 Fourteen Points Address, Woodrow Wilson 69–70, 100 fragmentation, state 52–53 France 43n. 23, 99, 100 frontiers, natural/scientific 114 Gandhi, Mahatma 121–122 Ganga (Ganges), river 130 gender 16, 73–74; ‘divine law’ 17–18; power relations 20, 38–39, 42, 152; see also women genocide 34, 35, 92 geopolitics 110; ‘excessive’ 113–114, 125–156 Germany 50, 58, 141; First World War 99; Polish minority 102–103 globalization 32, 80, 81–82, 162 Goldring, Maurice 31 Gonzales, Felipe 70 Government of India Independence Act (1947) 21–22 Great Britain 67, 99, 100; identity 96–97; and Palestine 100–101; see also British Empire; Ireland Greece 84, 101, 120 Griffith, Arthur 95 Habermas, Jürgen 27, 28, 31 Hague Conference on Yugoslavia (1991) 111 Harijans (scheduled castes), India 143–146 Hasan, Mushirul 131 Hastings, Francis, Lord 133 hearing, order of 16–17 Hegel, G.W.F. 17–18, 38 Herzegovina see Bosnia-Herzegovina heterogeneity 73–74 Hidaytullah, Ghulam Hussain 139 Hindus, India 131–132, 136, 146, 150–151;

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150

nationalism 140–141, 155 Hobbes, Thomas 15 Home Rule, Ireland 94 homogeneity/homogenization 55–56, 58–59, 72–73, 76 human rights 25, 81 Hungary 102 Huntingtonian thesis 23 identities, cultural/ethnic/national 8–9, 22–23, 24, 31, 41, 56, 73–74; British 96–97; homogenized 58, 163–164; and networking 78; Yugoslavs 72 identity politics 38 imperialism 9, 103–104; see also colonialism; Empires independence 71; India 21–22; Ireland 95 India 21–22, 30, 31, 64, 92, 112–113, 120, 121–122; Bengal 107–108, 138–139, 141, 146–151; ‘excessive geopolitics’ 125–156; hearing/seeing 16–17; Kashmir dispute 110–111; nationalism 93, 104–106, 134–135, 136–137, 140–141, 155; Personal Law 41–42; Punjab 108–109, 114–116, 122, 140, 142–143, 145–146, 151–152 Indian National Congress 105, 135 industrial revolution 77 inequality/equality 22–23, 56–59, 79 institution building 25–26, 32–33; Europe 85–86 integration, Europe 19, 21, 27–28, 82–86 intellectual elites 60, 61 international justice system 14, 25, 32–36, 81 International Penal Tribunals (IPTs) 25 Iraq 100 Ireland 8, 85, 120; nationalism 93–95; violence 165 Islam see Muslims Israel 101, 120; Nakbah 10 Italy 62 Ivekovič, Rada vii, 13–46, 127 Jalal, Ayesha 138, 152 Janus 118 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 104–106, 136–137 justice, international 14, 25, 32–36, 81

Index

151

Kant, Immanuel 15 Kashmir dispute 110–111 Khalistan 142 Khan, Sir Sikander Hayat 140 Konstantinovic, Radmomir 39–40 Kudaisya, Ganesh 128 Kumar, Radha 120 Kymlicka, Will 22, 36 Lacoste, Yves 126, 154 Laeken summit (2001) 84 Lahore declaration (1940) 136, 142 Lall, Beah 144–145 language, conflict 37–38; see also dialogue Lawrence, Sir Henry 133 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 70, 99 Lewis, Flora 44n. 42 Lloyd-George, David 95 Locke, John 15 logics of partition 3, 22–25, 127 ‘long partitions’ 7, 8, 9 Magyars 103 Mamdani, Mahmood 34–35 map-making, British Empire 129–130, 131, 143 Marramao, Giacomo 28, 32 Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue 102 ‘matrioshka’ process 55, 84 men: ‘divine law’ 17–18; see also gender Mesopotamia 99, 100 Milosevic, Slobodan 37 minorities 55–56, 103; ‘majority-nation’ status 155 mobility, populations 77–79 modernity 2, 16–17, 49, 50 Montague-Chelmsford Reforms 105 Moore, R.J. 137 Moslems see Muslims Mountbatten, Louis, Lord 115–116; plan (1947) 148 multinational states 31 Murshidabad 150–151 Muslim League 104, 108–109, 115, 136, 149–150 Muslims: India 92, 104, 106, 112, 115, 131–132, 136, 141, 146, 148, 149–151; Pakistan 135–140; war rape, Croatia 36–37

Index

152

Nakbah, Israel 10 nationalism 3, 6, 30; ethno-nationalism 52, 57; India 93, 104–106, 134–135, 136–137, 140–141, 155; Ireland 93–95 ‘nationalities’ 41 National Voluntary Corp, India 155 nation-building 36 nationhood 4, 14–15, 15–16, 49, 50, 74, 85; vs. statehood 7–8, 53–56 nation-states 31–32, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 168; mobility 77–79; post-nation-state societies 74–75, 80; purity 60–62; sovereignty 76; see also states nation-truth 2–3, 4, 5, 11–12 ‘natural’ frontiers 114 Nazism 34–35, 55 Nehru, Jawaharlal 110–111, 121, 135 Nehru Report 105 networking 77–79 ‘new nomadism’ 79 ‘new old’ communities 23–24 ‘no global’ movement 81–82 Northern Ireland 8, 85, 120; nationalism 93–95; violence 165 Norway 68 Novo-Ogarëvo, Treaty of 63 ‘other’, ‘common’ as 15 otherhood/ness 8, 38–39, 56, 58, 79; Great Britain 96–97 Ottoman Empire 99, 100, 101–102 Page, David 132–133 Pakistan 64, 71–72, 112, 120, 141, 146, 154; Kashmir dispute 110–111; Muslims 135–140 Pakistan National Movement 137, 138 Pakistan Resolution see Lahore declaration Palestine 10, 99, 100–101, 120 Pandey, Gyanendra 92–93, 118 Pastan 138–139 patriarchy 17–18, 38–39, 42, 73 Peace Conference (1919) 100, 101 people consensus 48 perpetrators vs. victims 34–36 Personal Law, India 41–42

Index place, identity of 128 Poland 58 Polish minority, Germany 102–103 politics 5–6, 11, 62–67; bio-politics 20, 26; ethnopolitics 110, 127, 149; geopolitics 110, 113–114, 125–156; Great Britain 97; otherness 8; responsibility 9–10 possession, territory 54 post-colonial transition 28, 29–30, 68 post-communist transition 28–30, 57 post-nation-state societies 74–75 post-socialist transition 28, 30 power: bio-political 20, 26; Europe 83; geopolitical 126 power relations, gender 20, 38–39, 42, 152 Protestants, Ireland 8, 85, 93–95, 165 pseudo-states 66 Punjab 114–116, 122, 140; Boundary Commission 108–109, 151–152; scheduled castes 145–146; Sikhs 142–143 ‘purity’ of nation 60–62 Quebec, Canada 64, 68, 69, 163 race see ethnic…; ethno… racism 26, 55, 168 Radcliffe, Sir Cyril 108, 115, 152–153 Radcliffe line 114–115, 128 Rahmat Ali, Chaudhry 137, 138–139 rape, war 36–37 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India 155 refugees, Palestinian 10 religion 73; Catholics vs. Protestants, Ireland 8, 85, 93–95, 165; Hindus vs. Muslims, India 131–132, 136–137 Rennell, James 129 reproduction, continuity 38–39 Republicans, Ireland 95 responsibility, political 9–10 rights: over death 26; human 25, 59, 81; voting 54–55

153

Index

154

Roberts, Frederick Sleigh, Lord 114 Roy, Olivier 41 RSS see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Rushdie, Salman 97 Russia see USSR Rwanda 18, 25, 34–35, 36, 40 Saberwal, S. 144 Samad, Yunas 136 Samaddar, Ranabir vii-viii, 1–12, 92–124, 137, 153 Sangh Parivar, India 155 Savarkar, V.D. 140, 141 scheduled castes, India 143–146 Schengen Europe 27–28 ‘scientific’ frontiers 114 secession 53, 62–63 secessionism, ethnic 67–68 secularization, society 75 secular-nationalism, India 134–135 seeing, order of 16–17 Self see identities self-determination 21, 70–71, 106, 117, 166 separatism 57–58 September 11 attacks 32 Serbia 56–57; war crimes 36–37 Serbia-and-Montenegro 24 Sevres, Treaty of (1919) 102 Shaeffer, Robert K. 67 Shiromani Akali Dal, Punjab 142 Sikander Hayat Khan, Sir 140 Sikhs, India 142–143, 151–152 Singh, Master Tara 142 Singh, Sardar Baldev 122 Singh, Sardar Harnam 151–152 Sinn Fein 95 Slovak Republic 82 Slovenia 43n. 21 socialism 23; post-socialist transition 28, 30 South Africa 33, 35 South Asia 140, 156; see also India; Pakistan sovereignty 4, 5, 12, 14, 20–22, 25–26, 48, 75–77 Soviet system 34–35 Soviet Union see USSR Spain 68, 167 Sri Lanka 156 Śruti (order of hearing) 16–17 statehood 15–16, 49, 50, 59;

Index

155

Europe 82–86; vs. nationhood 7–8, 53–56 states: fragmentation/dissolution 52–53; multinational 31; pseudo- 66; see also nation-states Steger, Manfred B. 134–135 ‘survivors’ 34–35 Swadeshi movement 147 Sweden 68 Syria 99, 100 tabula rasa 15 Taliban 17, 39, 41 Tamils 156 terminology 51–53 territory 49, 54, 127–128, 153, 162 terrorism 79 Third World 32; transition 28, 29–30 transition 4–5, 13–46, 57, 167–168 transport growth 78–79 Treaty of Novo-Ogarëvo 63 Treaty of Sevres (1919) 102 Treaty of Trianon (1920) 103 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 14, 48 Trianon, Treaty of (1920) 103 tribunals, war crimes 14, 25 truth of nation 2–3, 4, 5, 11–12 Tshiyembe, Mwayila 31 Tudjman, Franjo 37 Turkey 84, 99–100, 101–102 Ulster see Northern Ireland United Kingdom see Great Britain; Northern Ireland United Nations (UN), and Palestine 101 United States of South Asia 140 untouchables, India 143–145 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 53, 56–57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 99, 100 victimization 57 victims vs. perpetrators 34–36 violence 18–20, 38, 39–40, 62–63, 92–93, 117–118, 163–164, 165–166; genocide 34, 35, 92; against women 36–37 voting rights 54–55

Index

156

war 24, 27, 39, 40, 99; civil 29, 35 war crimes 33, 36–37, 45n. 57; tribunals 14, 25 Washington agreement (1994) 37 Weimar Republic 103 welfare states 21, 30 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 14, 48 Wilson, Woodrow 69–70 women: citizenship 16, 42, 43n. 23; ‘divine law’ 17–18; ethnic logic 46n. 65; war rape, Croatia 36–37; see also gender World Trade Center attacks 32 World War, First 99 writings on partition 119 Yiftachel, Oren 6 Yong Tan, Tai 128 Yugoslavia 18–19, 23–24, 27, 31, 35, 40, 41, 43n. 21, 53, 56–57, 61, 63, 67, 70, 72; see also Balkans Zins, Max 20