What’s the future for divided nations?
I recently took a cab in London driven by a Tamil exile from Sri Lanka and we discussed the decades long conflict on that island. He surprised me by suggesting that the war was the result of Britain granting independence to what was then Ceylon as a single nation state in 1948 (it was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972).
He said that Britain should have done what it did in India where it attempted to separate out most of the Muslims into Pakistan leaving India as predominantly Hindu. In his view, Ceylon should have been divided into two states – one mainly Sinhalese and the other Tamil.
Of course, as I blogged here, the partition of India involved an horrific price: communal riots resulting in the death of around half a million and the displacement about 14.5 million, followed later by the war between west and east Pakistan, and the failed state that Pakistan continues to represent. If Ceylon had been divided, would it have fared better than has been the experience of Sri Lanka when some 60,000 have died in the long-running war?
I have speculated about the nature of nationhood and the resolution of ethnic conflict in an essay on my web site here.
March 27th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Will Russia one day be divided? See Moscow is ‘Losing’ the Russian Far East, Journalist Says.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Of course, the USSR has already divided into 15 separate nation states so a further break up of the huge territory of Russia must be a possibility.