The Politics of Dialogue

Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace

Ranabir Samaddar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138258655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351883849
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Offering a detailed analysis of post-colonial South Asia, The Politics of Dialogue discusses the creation and impact of borders and the pervasive tension between the new nations. Neither all-out war nor complete peace, this fragile condition makes political leaders and strategists feel claustrophobic - a war produces an end result but peace allows the rulers to carry out their policies for governing along their preferred path of development. The book shows how cartographic, communal and political lines are not only dividing countries, but that they are being replicated within countries, creating new visible and invisible internal frontiers. It argues that, in a situation where geopolitics constrains democracy, the political class becomes incapable of coping with the tension between the inside/outside, eg democracy appears as an internal problem and geopolitics appears as a problem related to the 'outside'.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Dialogue and the Continuum of War and Peace

This is a book that describes the politics of dialogue, congealed in its practices amidst conflicts, war, and peace. In the chapters that follow these practices are brought out in various forms - failures and relative successes, forms of accommodation and negotiation - and in their bearings on democracy. These dialogic practices, the book finally argues, are conditioned by the geopolitical history of our time. Geopolitics influences in a large way the dynamics of the dialogic self, because democracy by itself is parched on our geopolitical destiny. Democracy and geopolitics are, thus, the two themes that continuously make their appearance throughout this volume in discussions on the politics of dialogue, though I do not discuss these two themes independently. Their presence remains like the ever-present shadow. In this introductory chapter therefore I intend to spend some lines on the three-way relation between dialogue, democracy, and geopolitics.

Similarly, though the sub-title of the book refers to war and peace of our time, it does not describe any war; it does not wish to prescribe also how to bring in peace. In stead, the book inquires into conditions of our existence under these situations, and our dialogic practices in the milieu of wars, fragile peace, endemic and structural violence, and a pervasive condition of no war-no peace. Rulers, members of the political class, strategists, and even otherwise perfectly decent individuals are feeling claustrophobic - either wars should be allowed to produce clean results, or the peace should allow the rulers to carry on with their rules to pursue their policies for governance, development, and glory. The book is a comment on the tension, the dynamics of no war-no peace situation, about low-level fratricide, about the act of conducting war while conducting peace - about some of the less noticed aspects of statecraft in South Asia.

Yet there is a defence about this sub-title. After all modernity along with its many gifts has given us the complex of no war-no peace situation which from the time of Machiavelli and more particularly Kant has been marked as one of strategic ambiguity, where and when the politics of carrying out the policies of one situation (war/peace) through the politics of its reverse situation (peace/war) is mapped out. If our claim of belonging to an age of criticism is true, we must turn our attention to this situation of hybridity, claustrophobia, and this all-pervasive desire to 'come out or break clean' of a situation that one of the modern gurus of imperial power, Zbigniew Brzezinski describes in a related context as 'a black hole situation'.¹ The language of strategic studies fails in describing and analysing this. The language of international politics or regional politics similarly fails, for their nose extends very little beyond States and official multilateral institutions, and therefore fails to discern the mode of power being exercised in post-colonial regions like South Asia - the political technology of rule in this region. That is where criticism must begin its task, critiquing existing knowledge and languages, and pointing out the fatality of the philosophy that guides our understanding of the post-colonial politics of war and peace.

Dialogues are the marks of this hybrid condition. Plural dialogues carry the signs of a capillary situation of power, resistance, and contested conversations in politics. In itself no virtue, dialogue in all its complexities waits to be analysed as a pointer to how war and power grow out of dialogue in as much as plural dialogues may lead to accommodation, reconciliation, and peace. In making the politics of dialogue the subject of inquiry, the book in fact asks, what questions do the practices of dialogue present before the politics of our time, and what are the issues that it asks of politics today? In my study of issues and events such as partitions, lines of control, negotiations over ceasefires and peace accords, dynamics of separation and friendship, interventions by citizens' groups in the form of dialogues with the governments and militants, new forms of autonomy that can accommodate conflicting claims in a dialogic existence, and the need for conversation on issues of care and justice hitherto dealt in a unilateral manner in the field of humanitarian law and institutions, and the limits of a dominantly constitutional mode of accommodation, I have focused therefore on modes of dialogue. The aim is not to set up a grand theory of dialogue, but to find out how the human practice of dialogue is forcing the present time to face certain issues of contentious politics and demanding answers.

But why is it that studies of the politics of post-colonial regions never took up the theme of dialogue in a serious way? Why is such a major strategy for war or peace left unconsidered? We can think of several reasons. First, with the assumption of state power the political class that had been dialoguing within itself, among its own members, and was conversing with the leaders of communities and parties on broad anti-colonial issues, stopped conversing with groups, communities, and the nation. On the assumption of power after de-colonization, the political society intended to be an extremely reserved club; one could gatecrash, but never got entry purely by appeal or by sheer indulgence and goodwill of the members inside. Second, the reasons of state dictated that the citizens were to be governed well so that they became loyal to the state, and the administration could improve; also with each area of life open to rule, governance, and mediation, citizen and the state would enter in a transactional relation. Conversation would not be essential, because conversation would not be necessary except on specific occasions. The agenda of dialogue would be limited. Third, with the post-coloniai state embodying the highest will of the citizens, and thus the political truth of the time, there was no particular imperative to dialogue. Finally, the transition from colonialism to independence gradually signalled that the nation no longer required to feel itself bound with the memory of anti-colonial politics (in case of countries like Nepal with the age of pre-parliamentary democracy), so much so that dialogue, that traditional artefact of conversing with memory, became of very little consequence. All in all, silence and a kind of unilateral self replaced dialogic relation. Therefore, politics went back on its earlier modes of self-knowledge. 'Dialogue as a method of discovering truth' almost disappeared.² The imperial tradition of command, listening to the petitioner in silence, and the pervasive use of a juridical language that examines issues from the vantage point of an onlooker sums up the reality today of the post-colonial politics within and among nations. The pedagogy of the judge and the master has replaced that of the conversation.

Yet, as I try to show in these essays, the other side of silence is also there waiting to spread out its wings. One of the purposes of this exercise is to throw light on the practices of accommodation, reflection, and reconciliation, shaped as they are in the midst of conditions of war and peace. My argument in this case is motivated by a simple desire. Can we escape the binary of war and peace, and thus escape the fate of being a victim of the exclusivist discourse of either militarism or banal pacifism, and bring to light the conditions of war and peace, their alterability and mutuality, so that we can think of the conditions of justice, dialogue, and therefore sustainable peace? In this enterprise I have heavily drawn from existing narratives of several contentious situations of dialogue, for these situations as events produce a kind of abundance from within that they as events cannot exhaust. In retrieving that unaccounted space, we can only follow the technique of opening up a series of alternative possibilities from within the existing situations, possibilities that seemed to be closed. Thus we do here no comparison, make no analogy, no functional classification - in other words, we do not erect another system counter to the present states system producing violence and the no war-no peace condition in this region. Our task is to subject the received arguments and accounts to endless interrogations to show the unlimited range of possibilities other than the outcomes that these accounts record, contain and give seal of approval, so that we can see the dialogic possibilities within several historically contentious situations, appearing before us in forms of both war and peace. The binary of war and peace has been a curse for peace studies, precisely because the latter accepted the binary beyond criticism. Peace studies never agreed to become a study of flux. It never wanted to become political.

My argument is however not only methodological. Its existential concern is also clear. The discourse of civil society with various cultural attendants was the major site of dialogue in colonial times. In that enterprise the motto was to acquire identity and sovereign-hood. With the birth of the post-colonial state this was abruptly terminated.³ State discourse of constitution, parliament, election, party, law, and above all national security, replaced the earlier association-oriented conversation in politics. As against this, those who wanted to keep the earlier site of freedom intact and those who against the post-colonial state (for instance India) wanted to have their own State took recourse to a discourse of rights. Now it is clear that this post-colonial state like the earlier colonial state is determined to be the most vigilant guardian of privacy of the political society that thinks of the state as its private wealth. Various classes, communities, sections and individuals want an entry. Rights still remain the language of claim.

But in this world of entrance, exit, and counter-voice, more and more the terrain is shifting from claims and rights to justice. To claim is not enough. To show that the claim is just is equally important. The challenge to State from within and without is now on this new ground, which has the advantage of forcing the most reluctant power to converse and to communicate, also the advantage of sidestepping the awesome task of mounting challenge to the state with an army that can be equipped with only 3.3 rifles, at times with AK 47 and AK 56 rifles, hand grenades, some rocket launchers, in some cases with high frequency communication sets, and nothing more. As if the message from those who yearn for justice is, we are not out to destroy the world; all we want is justice, speak to us, give us political recognition. Such a notion of dialogic justice has the added advantage of crossing the limits of retributive justice by aiming to be restorative. In terms of political technique, it inverts the moral fabric of the reasons of the state. And in terms of a political ethic, this inversion is explosive. It replaces the state agenda with the agenda of expanding political community, violence with accommodation, revenge with reconciliation, and rights with justice. In this double inversion, nothing new is invented. The replacements appear possible with the reemergence of other prospects in the wake of the near exhaustion of state discourse. The possibilities of these replacements show that the architecture of politics of a post-colonial region such as South Asia has consumed whatever there was as sustenance in form of an anti-colonial legacy in the 'new' post-colonial politics consequent to de-colonization. With the exposure of the full form of its finitude, democracy must have other forms beyond constitutionalism, ethnic accords, militarism, security pacts and alliances, and an increasingly tattered electoral system. The significance of partitions, wars, borders, revolts, constitutionalism, accords and the elaborate system of law, order and security in post-colonial democratic politics is not only in the fact that these can co-exist with democracy as a complex reality in this region (to more or less degrees), but that in this expanding milieu of mass political culture, these have to prove themselves 'democratic'. The official discourse on these has to explain the legitimacy of State policy of renouncing various forms of dialogue, trans-border experiences, and the ethic of reconciliation. The structure of democracy in South Asia is now open before our eyes with its deficits. This book intends to argue that the issue is not that we are not democratic, or that our politics has certain anti-democratic features, but that our democracy is producing its deficit. Inquiry of the practices of dialogue therefore leads us on several occasions in this book to a discussion on democratic theory, specifically on how constitutional democracy is producing the deficit in democracy, a phenomenon known as the 'democratic deficit'.

Dialogue, Power, and the Reworking of the Arguments of Liberalism

How can a condition that is supposed to be marked by return of democracy (after 1989) be characterized by absence of dialogues? The paradox is intriguing, and we should take a look into this phenomenon.

We are living in a strange time when the original challengers to state theories of dominance have laid their weapons down, and those who have become the victors are trying to absorb the message of the challenge. Therefore liberals who won the great battle of ideas of the last century are, so to say, withdrawing from their positions inch by inch to reformulate their positions to go ahead. The lessons are to say the least instructive. In almost each of the positions worked out in this book therefore, I try to begin with an examination of the liberal position, which is being re-worked for reconciling the irreconcilable such as state/ community, universalism/particularism, globality/territoriality, nationalism/global morality, capital/labour, citizenship/alien-hood, and destruction/peace. I am not suggesting that there is nothing insightful in these reworking of positions. On the contrary I try to show, if one were to be critical enough, one would have to see if these reworked positions are adequate to meet the fallacies and inadequacies of the realist assumptions in international politics, and whether in the process of taking into account the Marxist formulations in international politics and the Left-wing challenges to realist-liberal paradigms, the liberals are not reconciling themselves to realist and neo-realist positions. Of course, we have to remember that there is no solid liberal camp engaged in the reworking of the problematic. There are all kinds of social theorists and social scientists who are not satisfied with the ruling neo-liberal strategies that rule international politics today. But the fact this endeavour is coming from various quarters as dispersed say from a figure like John Rawls to a more critical thinker like Jurgen Habermas shows the power of the revisionist current. Its fallacies, fatalities and misplaced hopes are therefore more liable to producing grave errors.

Rawls speaks of'Laws of Peoples'⁴ where his enterprise is to get over the distinction between what he thinks to be authoritarian polities and liberal polities in the interest of peace. Communitarians are pointing out that the abstract and apparently rootless individuals who figure in much liberal theory have to be reconciled with community identity, and hence group emotions, sentiments, and loyalties. If nationalism and ethnic allegiances are producing appalling bloodshed and devastations, then in the interest of multicultural harmony based on group rights an alternative form of loyalty and harmony has to be theorized which will be compatible with universal norms and yet capable of attracting people of a particular territory.⁵ Jurgen Habermas speaks of constitutional patriotism to 'fight nationalism on its own ground'.⁶ Michael Walzer revived few decades ago the Kantian position of just wars.⁷ In all these revisionist exercises, there is an attempt to reconcile morality and the facts of life through dialogic tropes - dialogues between the contradictory features in place of their antinomies mentioned above. And, in all these attempts there is a remarkable silence about the question of power.

Another variant of the liberal revival is the attempt to grasp current international politics through institutional approach, which is supposed to epitomize the post-1989 dialogic politics. Under the influence of great institution setting in Europe through European Union, Council of Europe, Organization of Cooperation and Security in Europe, the European Court, various treaties, conventions, and not the ieast NATO, the institutional argument has gained strength, and seems to suggest almost universal efficacy of the formula that institutional processes despite lack of consensus on critical issues of political life can lead to sustained cooperation and dialogue among nation-states under conditions that would be fairly defined. Indeed, to carry the institutional argument little more, institutional processes can define the conditions where they will work. Thus there was a near unanimous opinion after the Balkan tragedy, that new institutions should be set up, institutional processes and supervision would have to be strengthened, and erring nations would be gradually trained and disciplined in institutional behaviour, and cooperation and dialogue. Of course, the 'curious history of Europe', to borrow these recent words of the historian Hobsbawm, has been the particular backdrop against which hope on institutional efficacy has soared, also the anxiety of Europe about wars and disorders has led to an institutional emphasis and reinforcement....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Peace as the Political Question of Our Time
• 3 In the Time of the Partitioned Nations
• 4 The Ineluctable Logic of Geopolitics
• 5 Autonomy and the Requirements of Minimal Justice
• 6 Governing through Peace Accords
• 7 Two Ceasefires, One Story
• 8 Friends, Foes, and Understanding
• 9 The Non-dialogic World of the Humanitarian
• 10 Received Histories of War and Peace
• 11 Epilogue: Ten Principles
• Bibliography
• Index