Partitions

Reshaping States and Minds

Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Rada Ivekovic, Ranabir Samaddar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415348027
• eBook ISBN: 9781134276530
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The partition of the Indian subcontinent, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the reunification of Germany, the continuing feud between two Koreas, the Irish peace process, the case of Israel/Palestine and the lingering division of Cyprus, have together 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 cross-cutting issues such as: * violence * state formation * union and regional unification * geopolitics * transition.

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 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 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 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 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 self-conscious 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-for-the-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 dismembe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Partition as a Form of Transition
• 2 Partitions
• 3 The Undefined Acts of Partition and Dialogue
• 4 The Excess of Geopolitics
• Conclusion