A Nationalism without Politics?The illiberal consequences of liberal institutions in Sri Lanka
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01436590801931561
ISSN1360-2241
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
ResumoAbstract This paper examines the relationship between developmental and cultural nationalism through an extended case study of the Sri Lankan conflict. It highlights, in particular, the deeply political process of the construction of nations in which the usual opposition between politics and an anti-political realm of the nation or culture itself plays an important role. The conflict, it is argued, has to be understood first of all in political terms, as the outcome of a specific history of electoral politics which, from the 1930s on, was structured along ‘ethnic’ lines. Appeals to the national or the cultural, which often appear in rhetorical opposition to the divisive forces of everyday politics, are nevertheless themselves products of the very political processes they claim to transcend. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the other participants in the Victoria meetings for their stimulating insights. As well as making the whole wonderful event possible, Michael Bodden and Radhika Desai provided me with some especially thoughtful suggestions for improvement in this paper. Radhika in particular has been an exemplary editor, ever ready to engage and debate, and I am grateful for her many suggestions for improvement and clarification. Notes 1 A better sense of context for these opening illustrations can be found in J Spencer, A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. In returning to the events of the early 1980s, I have found Hoole's encyclopaedically detailed account of the long decay of Sri Lanka's political institutions an extremely helpful mnemonic. See R Hoole, Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power—Myths, Decadence and Murder, Colombo: University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), 2001. 2 K Jayawardena, Ethnicity and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka, Colombo: Sanjiva, 1985. 3 J Spencer, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Political Violence in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 4 A Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; and M Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cf C Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (first published 1932). 5 KM de Silva, ‘The history and politics of the transfer of power’, in de Silva (ed), University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, 3: From the Beginning of the 19th Century to 1948, Peradeniya: University of Ceylon Press Board, 1973, pp 493, 494. 6 T Nairn, ‘The modern Janus’, in Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, London: Verso, 1981, p 340. 7 Kumari Jayawardena has documented the anti-minority rhetoric of the 1930s, while Jane Russell's monograph on the politics of that period brings out the way in which ethnic fault lines emerged almost as soon as the new constitution was in place. Jayawardena, Ethnicity and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka; and J Russell, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution, 1931 – 47, Colombo: Tissa Prakasakayo, 1982. 8 For critical approaches to the arguments from history, see P Jeganathan & Q Ismail (eds), Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka, Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1995; and J Spencer (ed), Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, London: Routledge, 1990. 9 M Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 10 For an excellent overview of the post-ceasefire situation in Sri Lanka, see J Goodhand & B Klem et al, Aid, Conflict and Peace-Building in Sri Lanka, 2000 – 2005, Colombo: Asia Foundation, 2005. For a complementary emphasis on the local implications of conflict and peace, see M Mayer, D Rajasingham-Senanayake & Y Thangarajah (eds), Building Local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka, Delhi: Macmillan, 2003. 11 The referendum drew on a clause in the 1978 Constitution which was intended to make it hard for future governments to interfere with the regular cycle of elections. The same Constitution had also introduced a system of proportional representation which made it almost impossible for any future government to muster on its own the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed for constitutional amendments. Four years further into his reign Jayawardene seems to have found these safeguards a rather less attractive option, and used his lawyerly ingenuity to turn the referendum requirement into a device for evading electoral responsibility. 12 Or, in a mildly qualified version of the same, he often claimed the only thing he couldn't do as president was turn a man into a woman. A Abeysekara, Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002, p 94. 13 Amirthalingam and his fellow mps were effectively removed from parliament by the anti-separatist amendment to the constitution enacted a few months later. He himself was assassinated by the ltte in Colombo in 1989. As a prerequisite for the current ceasefire between the government and the ltte, his party, the tulf, signed up in 2001 to a new alliance of Tamil constitutional parties which explicitly acknowledged the ltte as the sole legitimate representative of the Tamil people. 14 The history of the term desapalanaya would bear further investigation. It does not appear in Carter's late 19th-century Sinhala – English Dictionary, or in Mendis Gunasekera's early 20th-century Dictionary, but it was already a frequent, if still rather malleable, point of reference in arguments about the relationship between ‘Buddhism’ and ‘politics’ in the mid-1940s. C Carter, A Sinhalese – English Dictionary, Colombo: MD Gunasena, 1965; AM Gunasekera, Sinhalese – English Dictionary, Balapitiya: Jwanadarasaya Press, 1915; and Abeysekera, Colors of the Robe, pp 67 – 108. 15 I have given a fuller account of this case in J Spencer, ‘Fatima and the enchanted toffees: an essay on contingency, narrative and therapy’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3 (4), 1997, pp 693 – 710. 16 Moore has provided one of the most judicious analyses of the jvp rising. Since that was published the party has reinvented itself (for at least the third time) and has played an increasingly central role in the breakdown of the 2002 ceasefire. M Moore, ‘Thoroughly modern revolutionaries: the jvp in Sri Lanka’,Modern Asian Studies, 27 (3), 1993, pp 593 – 642. Cf J Uyangoda, ‘Social conflict, radical resistance and projects of state power in southern Sri Lanka: the case of the jvp’, in Mayer et al, Building Local Capacities for Peace, pp 37 – 64. 17 Interview, The Week (India), 13 March 1986, reproduced on Eelamweb, at http://www.eelamweb.com/leader/interview/in_1986/, accessed 30 July 2004. 18 For a useful recent survey of this process, and its links with Indian variants of neoliberalism, see S Corbridge & J Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy, Cambridge: Polity, 2000. For a contrasting view, see R. Desai, ‘Forward march of Hindutva halted?’, New Left Review, 30, 2004, pp 49 – 67. 19 Abeysekera, Colors of the Robe. 20 S Tennekoon, ‘Rituals of development: the accelerated Mahavali development program of Sri Lanka’, American Ethnologist, 15 (2), 1988, pp 294 – 310; J Brow, Demons and Development: The Struggle for Community in a Sri Lankan Village, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996; and M Woost, ‘Nationalizing the local past in Sri Lanka: histories of nation and development in a Sinhalese village’, American Ethnologist, 20 (3), 1993, pp 502 – 521. 21 S Kemper, Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 22 N Gunasinghe, ‘The open economy and its impact on ethnic relations’, in D Winslow & M Woost (eds), Economy, Culture and Civil War in Sri Lanka, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, pp 99 – 114. 23 M Moore, ‘Economic liberalization versus political pluralism in Sri Lanka?’, Modern Asian Studies, 24 (2), 1990, pp 341 – 383. 24 R Herring, ‘Making Ethnic Conflict: The Civil War in Sri Lanka' In M Esman & R Herring (eds) Carrots, Sticks, and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking Development Assistance, Michigan: Ann Arbor, 2001. 25 D Rajasingham-Senanayake, ‘The dangers of devolution: the hidden economies of armed conflict’, in R Rotberg (ed), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999. 26 For an attempt to count the economic cost of the conflict, see S Kelegama, ‘Economic costs of conflict in Sri Lanka’, in Rotberg, Creating Peace in Sri Lanka, pp 71 – 87. 27 This summary is heavily dependent on D Sriskandarajah, ‘Towards a political economy of Sri Lanka's “ethnic” conflict’, Domains, 3, 2005. See also D Sriskandarajah, ‘Development, inequality and conflict in multi-ethnic developing countries’, DPhil thesis, Oxford, 2005; and S Bastian, The Economic Agenda and the Peace Process, Colombo: Asia Foundation, 2005. 28 World Bank, Sri Lanka Poverty Assessment—Engendering Growth with Equity: Opportunities and Challenges, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007. 29 P Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp 238 – 239. Cf Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed, 1986. 30 A Ruud, ‘Talking dirty about politics: a view from a Bengali village’, in C Fuller & V Beni (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, London: Hurst, 2001, p 116. Cf A Ruud, Poetics of Village Politics: The Making of West Bengal's Rural Communism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. 31 T Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p 229. 32 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 33 Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict, pp 4 – 5. 34 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p 26. 35 Mark Lilla provides a helpful, if highly critical, guide to the recent Schmitt revival. M Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. 36 J Spencer, Anthropology, Politics and the State. Cf C Mouffe, The Return of the Political, London: Verso, 1993; and Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000. 37 Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict, p 60. 38 See the gloomy assessment in J Uyangoda, ‘Sri Lanka: back to square one?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (24), 2007, pp 1800 – 1801.
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