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