Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies

1 Comparative Theory and Political Practice: Do We Need a ‘‘State-Nation’’ Model as Well as a ‘‘Nation-State’’ Model?

c h a p t e r o n e Comparative Theory and Political Practice Do We Need a ‘‘State-Nation’’ Model as Well as a ‘‘Nation-State’’ Model? One of the most urgent conceptual, normative, and political tasks of our day is to think anew about how polities that aspire to be democracies can accommodate great sociocultural, even multinational, diversity within one state. The need to think anew arises from a mismatch between the political realities of the world we live in and the old political wisdom that we have inherited. The old wisdom holds that the territorial boundaries of a state must coincide with the perceived cultural boundaries of a nation. This understanding requires that every state must contain within itself one and not more than one culturally homogeneous nation, that every state should be a nation, and that every nation should be a state. Given the reality of sociocultural diversity in many of the polities of the world, this widespread belief seems to us to be misguided, indeed dangerous, since, as we shall argue, many states in the world today do not conform to this expectation. While all independent democratic states have a degree of cultural diversity, for comparative purposes we can say that, at any given time, states may be divided analytically into three different categories: 1. States that have deep cultural diversity, some of which is territorially based and politically articulated by significant groups that, in the name of nationalism and self-determination, advance claims of independence; 2. States that are culturally quite diverse, but whose diversity is nowhere organized by territorially based politically significant groups mobilizing nationalist claims for independence; and 3. States in which a community, culturally homogeneous enough to con- 2 c r a f t i n g s ta t e - n a t i o n s sider itself a nation, dominates the state and no other significant group articulates similar claims. In this book, we will call countries, part of whose territory falls into the first category, ‘‘robustly multinational’’ societies. Canada (owing to Quebec), Spain (Basque Country and Catalonia), and Belgium (Flanders) are ‘‘robustly multinational .’’ India, due to the Kashmir Valley alone, merits classification in this category. Furthermore, at various times the Mizo and Naga struggle for independence in northeast India, the Khalistan movement in the Punjab, the onceseparatist Dravidian movement in southern India, and other secessionist movements have also given a robust multinational dimension to Indian politics. Switzerland and the United States are both sociologically diverse and multicultural . However, since neither country has significant territorially based groups mobilizing claims for independence, both countries clearly fall into the second and not the first category. Finally, countries such as Japan, Portugal, and most of the Scandinavian countries fall into the third category. It is not that these countries are devoid of ethnic minorities and regional differences, but as of now these differences are politically not very salient. What political implications do these three very different situations have for reconciling democracy with diversity? For us a major implication is that, if at the time of the inauguration of competitive elections, a polity has only one significant group that sees itself as a nation and there exists a relatively common sense of history and religion and a shared language throughout the territory, nation-state building and democracy building can be mutually reinforcing logics. However, if competitive elections are inaugurated under conditions that are already ‘‘politically robustly multinational,’’ nation-state building and democracy building are conflicting logics. This is so because only one of a given polity’s ‘‘nations’’ would be privileged in the nation-state-building effort, and the others would not be recognized or would even be marginalized. But before examining alternatives to the nation-state, we first need to explain the normative and political power of the nation-state. state-nation contrasted with nation-state The belief that every state should be a nation is perhaps the most widely accepted normative vision of a modern democratic state, that is, the nation-state. After the French Revolution, especially in the late nineteenth century, many policies were c o m pa r a t i v e t h e o r y a n d p o l i t i c a l p r a c t i c e 3 deployed to create a unitary nation-state in...