Primacy vs. Partition
Earlier in this chapter we listed 42 successful secessions.
Here we have 60 ongoing struggles. Together that's over a hundred, far too many
to be called an exception. The drive for partition
or
secession --- something of an aberration during the Age of
Empire --- appears to have become the
rule. Economically, nation-states
are coming together: witness the European Union, NAFTA, and
ASEAN. Politically, however, more
and more countries --- especially multicultural
states ---
are being challenged by fragmentation. The Age of
Self-Determination, far from having reached its apex, proceeds. This is
thoroughly understandable: because the instinct for identity is as uni-versal as
love of liberty, its drive is inexorable. If anything characterizes global
geopolitics in this century, it is this: strife and struggle will continue to
divide societies, challenge governments, and exact their price until the world's
fabricated states learn to share power with their captive nations, or to set
them free.
Partition --- whether by
agreement of the parties concerned [e.g., Singapore's separation from Malaysia]
or imposed by a superior external force [the internationally-mandated creation
of Israel] --- is obviously and eminently preferable to
secession. Many luminaries in the scholastic world offer partition as an
immensely more acceptable alternative to the horrific cost of nearly all
separatist conflicts. These include John J. Mersheimer and Stephen Van Evera
["When Peace Means War," New
Republic, December 1995]; Chaim Kaufmann
["Possible and Impos- sible solutions to Ethnic Civil
Wars," International
Security, Spring 1996, and "When All Else
Fails," International Security, Fall 1998]; and the eminent Samuel P. Huntington
["Civil Vio- lence and the Process of Development," London: International
Institute for Strategic Studies, 1971]. To the influential theorist Donald L.
Horowitz in Ethnic Groups in
Conflict [Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1985], where a given conflict
is so
problematical, if the constraints on policy innovation are many . . . perhaps it
is a mistake to seek accommodation among the antagonists. If it is impossible
for groups to live together in
a heterogeneous state, perhaps it is
better for them to live apart in more than one homogenous state, even if this
necessitates population transfers. Separating the antagonists --- partition
---
is an option increasingly recommended for consideration . .
.
In 1992, some of the world's leading geographers
acknowledged this trend. "What we're dealing with is the re-creation of
countries," said William B. Wood, the State Department's chief geog- rapher.
Over the next 25 to 30 years, the world roster may increase by 50% or more.
"There'll be more than 300 countries," predicted Saul B. Cohen, past president
of the Assn. of American Geographers. . . . "
"Borders of
present countries or so-called natural boundaries will increasingly lose their
im- portance when they do not correspond to well-recognized linguistic and
territorial identities," said Fabrizio Eva, an Italian geographer. . . .
Commented George Demko, a geographer and director of the Rockefeller Center at
Dartmouth College, "The current changes in the political and economic geography
of the world are as significant as what the world went through after the Treaty
of Westphalia," the 1648 peace accord ending Europe's Thirty Years War and a
turning point in the rise of modern states. "As we're challenging the
traditional ideas of state sovereignty, globalizing economies and
communications, and breaking up the last empires, the geography of the world is
unhooking old connections and hooking up new
ones."
Among the break-ups they predict: the
Catalan and Basque regions from Spain; Brittany from France; Punjab and Kashmir
from India; Tibet and Xinjiang from China; Katanga from Zaire;
and --- no surprise --- the Muslim region of
Mindanao from our country. "What is striking" about the Philippines, wrote
Demko, "is the configuration of a social formation disintegrated by class,
language, ideology, religion, and colonial depradations," concluding that the
net result of an en- forced and artificial unity is "the suffering of the
majority of citizens."
The customary reaction to the challenge of
separatism --- captive nations asserting their polit- ical and
cultural rights --- has been for imperiled governments to
equate partitionist demands or secessionist struggles with sheer evil. The more
fabricated the State, the more malevolence it attributes to separatism, whether
as concept or as cause. As a result, it has become such a neg- atively-loaded
word-concept. Thanks to political statements like George Bush's "Those who are
not with us are against us," to a brand of journalism more committed to
"patriotism" than to truth, and to largely gullible audiences, the critical
distinction between secession and terrorism has become
blurred --- all because there are extremists, as there always
are, in virtually all mass movements. On July 6, 2000 --- long
before the horrific events of
"9/11" --- the New York
Times reported:
Presidents Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia and Jiang Zemin of China joined the leaders of three Central
Asian countries today in promising to fight terrorism, drug trafficking and
separatism.
In these two governments'
perverted judgment, secessionists belong to the exact same category as drug
traffickers and terrorists, and by inference deserve the same contempt.
Washington has come very close to saying the same thing, but has so far declined
to use identical language. Per- haps America hasn't forgotten that the men who
drafted their Declaration of Independence and won freedom from England were all
secessionists. "We must remember," writes Thomas A. Bailey, "that America was
founded and built by generations of nonconformists." Perhaps they realize,
after all, that love of liberty is a fixed feature of the human soul, an
embedded element
of the human spirit, not a peculiar monopoly of the
American psyche. There are unsung Wash-ingtons and Jeffersons in the Chechnyas
and Tibets and Bangsamoros of this world, men and women branded as terrorists by
their governments but whose true crime is struggling, bleeding, and dying for
their nations' freedom.
For as long as captive nations are oppressed,
they will resist. For every action constituting insti- tutional injustice, there
will, over time, be an equal and opposite reaction. This is a reality that much
of today's world has apparently refused, at severe social cost, to
learn.
During the last
century, the rallying cry of colonies striving for self-rule was "Independence!"
Today, for a growing number of the world's captive
nations --- awakened, provoked, and denied genuine
power-sharing or demands for partition --- their battle cry is
"Secession!" The second
is no less noble than the first. They are one and the
same struggle. Both are driven by the uni- versally-acknowledged principle of
self-determination. Both are inspired by the same impulse. What Americans refer
to as their "Revolutionary War" or "War of Independence" was seces- sion in one
of its finest and most admirable manifestations. And it all began when they no
longer saw themselves, or called themselves, English or Dutch or Scots and so
on. It all started when they recognized that they had forged
an identity of their own, when they first
began to call them- selves Americans.
