Link To Part I
Relevant Federal Experiences
(December, 27, Kandy, Sri Lanka Guardian) There are about twenty to twenty-five sovereign nation-states the constitutions of which are categorised as ‘federal’. Even a brief perusal of their political-economy would indicate that the experiences of only a few among them are of relevance to the present study from the viewpoint of understanding the nature of successes and failures of federalism in averting or resolving ethnic conflict.
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In fact, during progressive expansion of the United States, no new territorial units were admitted to the federation unless Anglo-Saxon Protestants constituted the majority of its population.___________________________
To refer briefly to the federal systems that are of only marginal relevance to the present study (and are, hence excluded from the collection of case studies presented in Section 4), there are, first, those such as the United States, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico where the accommodation of ethnic diversities in the affairs of government and/or managing ethnic conflict did not figure prominently as an objective of adopting a federal system. In this context, the distinction made by McGarry between federations which, at their inception, were aimed at the construction of nation-states, and those (such as Canada, India or Nigeria) that sought to establish multi-national states is of salience. The thirteen colonies that composed the original federation of the United States of America – the earliest in the former category, and a constitutional arrangement that served as a model for several other federations – made a conscious attempt to prevent the emergence of self-governing minorities. In fact, during progressive expansion of the United States, no new territorial units were admitted to the federation unless Anglo-Saxon Protestants constituted the majority of its population.
Moreover, most of the older federations such as those of the United States and Australia came into being as a result of the desire on the part of scattered self-governing communities with common ethnic identities to unite in order to pursue shared interests (economic, defence, security etc.), while preserving a measure of their heritage of autonomy. A variant of this process could be seen in the far more complex and tortuous evolution of Germany in which the decisive phase of national consolidation took the form of a ‘unification’ (associated with the military and diplomatic exploits of Otto Von Bismarck in the 19th century), and where a rough correspondence could be discerned between the pre-modern mosaic of regions in this part of Europe (such as Bavaria, Saxony, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia, Wurttemberg, etc.) and the basic spatial framework of the present federation (the 16 Lander or States). The economic prosperity and the well established traditions of democratic governance these countries display mean that their cohesiveness as nations, and the smoothness of the Centre-State relations they have acquired through prolonged evolutionary processes are of slender relevance to an assessment of federalism contextualised in situations of mass poverty and fragile democratic commitments.
About the Tsarist Empire that became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under communist rule, and the Portuguese and Spanish empires in South and Central America which their oligarchic ruling elites converted to Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico a brief mention would suffice primarily because, apart from a lack of concern on the political dimensions of ethnic diversities in the formative stages of their federal systems, over a greater part of their history, they have remained under the centralised autocratic rule of monolithic political parties, or tight-knit civilian and/or military elites that devoted scant attention to promoting representative government. Similarly, Malaysia’s federal design is a legacy of British colonial rule in the Malay peninsula and North Borneo which brought together a conglomerate of domains under hereditary sultans whose authority, though diminished in the recent past, needed to be formally recognised after independence for the sake of national cohesion. The United Arab Emirates is ‘federal’ because it is a loose coalition of sheikdoms. Factors of ‘geography’ loom large in the tiny archipelagic federations of Micronesia in the western Pacific, Comoros in the south-western Indian Ocean, and of St. Kitts and Nevis of the eastern Caribbean.
It could be argued that the constitutions of South Africa and Ethiopia are federal only in name because, featured as they are by a high concentration of power and authority at the Centre, both the range as well as the inviolability of the powers vested in their ‘regions’ are no more than those of local government bodies in many unitary nations. Moreover these constitutions have been in operation for too short a time for an evaluation of their impact on ethnic relations. The present constitution of South Africa, for example, came into effect only in October 1996. Its record since that time does not provide clues on how its power-sharing design (confined to a surprisingly narrow range of functions) has impacted upon the bewilderingly complex ethnic relations of the country. Further, as Westhuizen has asserted, “federalism has (hitherto) had a marred and highly contested reception in South Africa and this continues to be so, given its deeply divided polity.” We need also to take note of the observation made in several authoritative writings that the demarcation of the 9 constituent ‘Provinces’ of the South African federation has not been intended to correspond to racial or tribal boundaries. In the light of all these considerations it seems reasonable to suggest that the adoption of a federal constitution by itself has hitherto made no tangible contribution to redressing the glaring inequities of the apartheid legacy, except perhaps by way of meeting the demand of the Inkhata Freedom Party (which, at the time of constitution making, faced resistance from the Mandela-led African National Congress) for autonomy for the predominantly Zulu (but ethnically heterogeneous) province of Kwa Zulu-Natal. The present constitution of Ethiopia was proclaimed in August 1995. The demarcation of the nine member states of its federation does take account of the spatial pattern of ethnicity in the country. Yet, here again, what makes Ethiopia’s short record of federalism irrelevant to the present study is both the overwhelming power which the Centre has continued to exercise as well as Ethiopia’s continuing preoccupation with the Eritrean conflict and the endemicity of famine conditions caused by sub-Saharan desertification, both of which have involved, among other things, massive external intervention. Similar criteria of exclusion (brief existence, continuing political turmoil) also apply to the newly formed federation of Georgia, a successor state of the former Soviet Russia.
The medley of selected conflict situations presented below (in Section 4) which include those of India, Nigeria, Canada and western and central Europe could, in our view, provide a sufficiently wide spectrum of insights that are of relevance to the principal objective of the present study.
To be continued
(G. H. Peiris, Professor Emeritus, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka)
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