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by Dr. Brendan O'Duffy, Queen Mary University of London, Visiting Fellow, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo

(Continued from May 19)

They have a realistic expectation that they will be able to achieve through referenda what they could not achieve through war. But the achievement of a Catholic/nationalist majority in Northern Ireland will not automatically translate into support for Irish unification because, historically, approximately 15-20% of Catholic/nationalists have expressed support for continuing the union with Britain.

The point is that demographic uncertainty incentives both groups to focus on internal (regulative) sovereignty, federation and power-sharing rather than fixating on the numbers game.

On the other hand, the LTTE demand for external self-determination is not as deeply held as the Irish majority wish for territorial integrity and independence from Britain. In this sense, the nation-state goals are reversed as the IRA was fighting for the achievement of territorial reunification, claiming to fulfil the constitutional imperative to unity (Article 2 and 3) and consistent with a central ambition of the dominant party in Ireland: Fianna Fail.

By contrast, the LTTE's and other Tamil demands for Eelam emerged only after the failure to reach internal accommodation with the Sinhalese majority in the post-independence period.

The goal of Eelam was arguably a result, not a cause, of Tamil disaffection with majoritarian domination, just as Sinhalese majoritarianism was a result of the iniquitous divide and rule strategy of favouring Tamils within the British colonial administration. Concurrent-majority principles can thus be seen as a way of addressing deeper structural cause of historical conflict, specifically guarding against the type of majoritarianism that sewed deeper divisions.

Secondly the idea that the Sinhalese majority would never accede to Tamil self-determination dismisses the viability of what Ian Lustick identifies as 'state contraction' as an approach to state-craft. With the internationalisation of economies, the scale-advantages, attributed to large territorial states are less deterministic of growth than previously.

As a result, the same logic that applies to Tamil aspirations to become a Singapore or Hong Kong of South Asia has potentially equal implications for the Sinhalese-dominated regions of Sri Lanka. The current government's pursuit of regional economic links with South India and Japan is further testament to potential shifts away from an island-centric political economy. A divided Sri Lanka may be unthinkable for the majority, but constitutional mechanisms should be designed to take into account potential shifts in currently dominant conceptions of governmental and state sovereignty.

Against these forces of disintegration one has to recognise the particular stabilizing factors attributed to small islands. Adrian Guelke has written authoritatively on the bias in international politics for maintaining the integrity of small islands. The same pressures that promote international opinion in favour of Irish, Cypriot, Taiwanese (etc.) territorial integrity are likely to similarly promote the integrity of Sri Lanka.

So despite these counter-veiling potentials for integration or disintegration, the wider point is that the uncertainty of long-term prospects for either are best confronted and managed through political agreement which allows for either state-consolidation or state-contraction to be regulated rather than merely responded to.

2. Why would Sinhalese majority give the LTTE an excuse to pursue Eelam by force if a self-determination bid was continuously rejected by the rest of Sri Lanka? In other words, after a generation of refusals, Tamils could argue that force was justified because of the intransigence of the rest of Sri Lanka in preventing self-determination.

This is a version of the 'mega-constitutionalism' argument against consensual, inclusive governance. One (slightly optimistic) view is that if the LTTE were to abrogate their commitment to the constitutional mechanism for self-determination, their chances of recognition of any putative Eelam by the international community would be minimal. They would achieve, at best, the pariah status of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Against this view, it is clear that current international sanctions against state disintegration are insufficient to provide external security.

The break-up of Yugoslavia and Ethiopia despite explicit threats of non-recognition by the US did little to deter Slovenian, Crotian or Eritrean secession and almost overnight recognition by the international 'community'. The recognition of Bangladesh during the height of the Cold War moratorium on external self-determination gives further cause for doubt, highlighting once again the need for regulate certainty.

Regionally, Sri Lanka has, on balance, a crucial ally - India - whose interest in preventing a precedent-setting Tamil independence movement is likely to continue to act as an effective deterrence to a non-negotiated declaration of independence. Unlike the 'big brother' relationship between Turkey and TRNC, the Indian 'big brother' to Tamil separatists has a clear incentive to prevent Eelam as a bridge to a greater Tamil homeland. That is why a Lanka-India Accord, including improved formal and informal inter-governmental relations is central to managing the iterative process of conflict regulation.

More generally, the Indian experience supports the argument that a responsive and accommodative centre can reduce separatist demands by ethno-nationalists. Both the modifications of the federal system to reconfigure states along ethno-linguistic lines, and the subsequent practice of power-sharing at the centre, however informal, are consistent with the need to regulate, rather than reify sovereignty. Moreover, far from maintaining a strict moratorium on external self-determination, Kashmir was granted the right to hold a referendum on self-determination.

Even though it has not been implemented, the recognition of the right to external self-determination is potentially important precedent. On balance, this reactive, ambiguous and un-implemented policy also compares unfavourably to the regulated mechanism being proposed for Sri Lanka.

If we consider the most proximate comparator to the political and strategic calculus of Tamils in Sri Lanka - their co-ethnics in Tamil Nadu - we can offer further hope for the durability of a quasi-federal, substantively devolved settlement.

Against H. L. de Silva's pronouncement that devolution to ethnically concentrated groups will accentuate the trend towards separatism.

Atul Kohli has argued convincingly that separatism in Tamil Nadu has been successfully managed and reduced through the modifications to the federal system which offer incentives to cooperate within the federal union.

The reversal of the 'Hindi-first' language policies of the post-Nehru era, granting Tamil co-equal status with the official federal languages (Hindi and English), combined with the opening up to opportunities for non-Brahman castes within the state administration, effectively neutralised the independence demands of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). According to Kohli:

As the DMK settled down to rule, the predictable happened. Over time, the DMK lost much of its self-determination, anti-centre militancy, as well as its commitment to socio-economic reforms... Once national leaders made important concessions (though within firm limits) and the DMK achieved its major goal of securing increased power, realpolitik concerns took over and mobilising ideologies slowly lost their relevance for guiding governmental actions.

Like the IRA, and for a time the PLO, the DMK was transformed by changed political opportunity structures to shift from a military-political to a political-military movement. In Northern Ireland the resilience of the mechanism for self-determination is demonstrated by the reasonably solid public support for the Good friday Agreement and specifically, the solidity of the republican (Sinn Fein and IRA) commitment to it, despite the lower than anticipated census figures recently published.

Despite tactical appearances to the contrary, the IRA is trading weapons for significant electoral gains, police reform and demilitarisation, thus managing its grass-roots while deepening its stake in the Agreement.

It might lead to a united Ireland, but it might not, and in the margins of uncertainty there is a solid logic for power-sharing and federalism to transcend and changes to constitutive sovereignty. At the same time, the process of co-opting extreme ethno-nationalists into constitutional compromise was a reciprocal exchange. Both the British and Indian governments have had to concede significant aspects of regulative sovereignty, in terms of political autonomy, collective and individual rights protections.

By doing so they have made the prospects of international opprobrium much higher for any group that might assert a continued right to forceful separatism. Broadening the comparisons, we can posit that the best cure against external self-determination is the delivery of stable, regulated, internal self-determination.

Against those who assume that devolved autonomy or federation will lead to secession, comparative research suggests that when devolution or federal solutions fail, it is more often due to the refusal or inability of the centre to implement commitments to devolution or federalism than because of growing demands among separatists. The case of Sikh demands in India is illustrative.

It is the only case in the 11 cases studied by Ted Gurr and his colleagues, in which devolution or other autonomy arrangements led to subsequent demands for independence. Even if we add the recent cases of Chechnya and Georgia within the Russian Federation, we can conclude that even these exceptions support the argument that autonomy arrangements broke down because of the refusal of the centre to implement promised devolved authorities and not simply from the whetted appetites of unilateral separatists. More recent developments in the case of Sikhs in Punjab lend further support to the argument that a responsive centre can reduce demands for independence through substantive autonomy.

In the European context, federation or significant devolution to ethno-nationally homogenous territories has moderated demands for secession among Scots, Catalans, Basques and Flemish separatists. Even if we accept the special conditions which facilitate inter-governmental conflict regulation in Europe, we can also recognise that the South East Asian regional context is also conducive to regulating self-determination, compared for example to most of Africa or significant portions of the Middle East. Sri Lankan economic and political relations with India and Japan in particular are likely to add to the potential reward power necessary to distribute benefits necessary to underpin a political settlement.

In comparative and regional contexts, the joint Sri Lankan-Indian interest in regulating self-determination is a vital asset for conflict regulation because delivering an Indian recognition of the self-determination mechanism reinforces its constitutional sanctity. And inter-governmental co-operation in areas such as trade, infrastructure links, frontier (naval) controls will be necessary to provide psychic and physical security.

It is my contention that the establishment of inter-governmental agreement on the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, along with the principle of internal federation or entrenched devolution established with the 'Delhi Accords' in 1983, were important parameters and foundations for subsequent inter-governmental relations.

Two important indicators of the success in establishing these grundnorms are the failure (to date) of the attempted PA-JVP alliance, which looks likely to stall on the PA's commitment to its own federal principles and opinion polls that show rising support for Indian involvement in the constitutional process. Given that the PA is also in favour of a more prominent role for India, a Lanka-India treaty guarantee would re-enforce the bipartisan underpinning of a settlement, necessary to secure the two-thirds majority to ratify an agreement.

Where significant historical sovereignty claims have been sought consistently, and particularly where they are based on bi-national cleavages, the structures of settlement have to be built on these 'fault-lines' rather than wished away through assumed civic-national primacy.

Even for small islands. Those who advocate both strong, centralised, unitary state and/or strong local government assume agreement on the polity, when there is none. It is crucial to understand that the recognition of a right of self-determination does not mean acceptance of the veracity, historically, morally etc. of those claims, merely that they are felt subjectively by a named population (usually) living in a concentrated territorial space.

Instead, as has evolved in the Canadian-Quebec and the British-Irish constitutional relationships, once recognised and constitutionally entrenched, the principle of national self-determination can be regulated in practice by international treaty, domestic judiciary and mediated through routinised inter-governmentalism.

In these cases, it appears possible, indeed necessary, to constitute mechanisms for self-determination, while possibly disagreeing the trajectory of the nation-state. It is also clear that devolving or federating internal faces of sovereignty can be effective in reducing separatism, and thereby removing important sources of disagreement over the nation-state.

(This research for this paper is part of a larger project comparing inter-governmental approaches to conflict regulation in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Sri Lanka. The research is supported by the Leverhulme Trust (UK) and the British Academy).

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