Nationalism and Separatism
Sun-Ki Chai
The historical era following World War II is often referred to as the era of decolonization, the time when the former European powers, as well as America and
Japan, gave up their overseas empires and dozens of new sovereign countries
came into being. However, it could just as easily be called the era of nationalist
separatism, as the sheer number of ethnic and pan-ethnic movements seeking
independence from the political status quo multiplied greatly.
Relevance
The relevance of these movements is clear, since they fundamentally altered the
shape of the world’s geopolitical map. They brought into being dozens of new
countries and changed the boundaries of dozens of existing ones. They also altered the world balance of power by creating an “unaligned bloc” of independent
countries who were not willing to stand under the shadow of the United States or
its great Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. Finally, they set the stage for the
most recent period of post–Cold War history, in which ethnicity-based nationalism plays a major, or even dominant, role in international conflict.
Origins
While there were many causes for the origins of these various types of nationalism, they can be attributed to two major causes: The first related to the events
leading up to and following the dismantling of the colonization system, which
raised numerous questions about what the basis ought to be for the resulting
newly independent countries. The other major cause was the rise of cultural sentiments (particularly in Western countries), that placed a great deal of importance on cultural identity. This in turn strengthened the impetus for nationalist
movements even in well-established, modern countries.
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Dimensions
The separatisms and regionalisms that occurred were so varied that it is difficult
to make generalizations regarding their effects on different groups. However,
admittedly with some simplification, it is possible to divide them into three different major categories: the anticolonial, the postcolonial, and the modern industrialized versions. Even in each category, there are numerous dimensions of
variation that cannot be completely covered in a single chapter. Moreover, because of the huge number of movements that arose and changed shape during
this period, we will have to focus on discussing large cases and major trends
rather than encompass the entire picture.
Anticolonial Separatism and Regionalism
While process called “decolonization” is conveniently dated as beginning immediately after the surrender of the Axis forces in 1945, the dismantling of colonies
itself started earlier and has been a long and drawn-out one. Even if we exclude
Spain and Portugal’s loss of their Latin American colonies in the 19th century, there
had been some earlier attrition in the Western colonial project, most notably with
the nominal independence of Arab, post-Ottoman, League of Nations Mandates occurring in the 1930s and during the War itself. Mandates were territories that were
given special status under the Article 22 of the League’s covenant, which promised
most Mandates eventual independence. And while the single-largest ex-colony,
India and Pakistan, gained independence in 1947, most African colonies did not do
so until the 1960s or later. Even today, Western powers retain vestiges of their overseas possessions in the Pacific and Caribbean, so the process is not complete.
Because of the protracted dying throes of colonialism, much of the separatist
nationalism of the postwar era was originally directed against those colonial
powers that remained in place, or were aimed at shaping the political configuration and boundaries of postindependence states.
In British India, the focus by 1945 was on the latter. The devastation of the
British economy in the aftermath of World War II led to a quickly moving consensus within Britain that the maintenance of its huge colonial possessions in South
Asia, encompassing many times the population of the British Isles themselves,
was unsustainable and an impediment to postwar reconstruction. The defeat of
Winston Churchill by Clement Atlee’s Labour Party in the election of 1945 removed the main impediment to this divestment of what was increasingly seen as
an onerous responsibility by the British public.
In this atmosphere, Indian domestic politics turned into a jockeying for influence over the disposition of independent India. Most notable here was the conflict between the Congress Party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League,
led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, over Jinnah’s “two-nation” theory through which
he sought to promulgate the idea of a separate independent Muslim state, Pakistan. The origins of the Congress-Muslim League conflict were long-seated and
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complex, but what is important to note is that, despite the religion-based nature
of their conflict, both parties were led primarily not by religious extremists but by
men of quite pragmatic, and if we may say so, secular, outlooks. Nonetheless, by the
last preindependence elections of 1946, there was little room for compromise, as
Congress was committed to governing alone and the Muslim League was equally
committed to the idea that Muslims would be oppressed in an undivided India.
The communal slaughter that followed the partition into independent India
and Pakistan in 1947 was one of the great human tragedies of the 20th century.
Whether or not the human cost of maintaining an undivided India in an atmosphere of incessant religious strife would have been greater or lesser than the
cost of partition is a question that is very difficult to answer, though this has not
stopped many from trying. Moreover, the debate over the “two-nation” versus
unified vision of the subcontinent continues to be a boulder in the way of improving relations between the two countries, manifested in the way that each side
frames the status of Kashmir (a situation that is discussed in the next section).
The decolonization process in Northeast Asia, though smaller in scale than
that of South Asia, was equally seen as inevitable as World War II reached its conclusion. The defeat of Japan meant that the maintenance of its colonies in Korea,
Taiwan, and Manchuria was out of the question. Furthermore, due to the much
more constricted room for indigenous party politics that the Japanese colonial
powers had allowed, there was greater uncertainty over the outcome of contestation among local politicians regarding the post-Japanese political system.
The main question in the case of Taiwan, and to a lesser extent, Manchuria,
was whether possession would revert to whichever Chinese government would
be able to take power in the aftermath of the Japanese withdrawal. Taiwan was a
peripheral domain that had only been officially incorporated into Chinese territory in the 19th century, while Manchuria, the ancestral home of the deposed
Ching Dynasty, had therefore long maintained a separate identity from the ethnic
Chinese (Han) core, despite Manchuria and China being politically unified for
centuries. However, in neither case, at the time, was there a movement for Taiwanese or Manchurian separatism strong enough to seriously challenge the notion held by both the Communists and Nationalists that both territories were
“naturally” a part of China. Korea, on the other hand, was a historically unified
state with a strong sense of common identity, hence division of the peninsula as a
viable ideology was never seriously raised. This in turn made the partition into
North and South that occurred upon Japanese withdrawal much more traumatic
for Koreans than the division between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland that occurred a few years later.
In Southeast Asia, the situation in the Philippines was the closest to that of
South and Northeast Asia, with independence promised by an American government that was retreating into immediate postwar isolationism prior to the chill
of the Cold War. The Dutch and British East Indies were a different situation, as
various events conspired against immediate independence.
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The Indonesian nationalist movement for independence from the Dutch was
perhaps the strongest and most sustained in the colonized world next to that of
India, yet it was internally divided and faced a colonial power that was far less
willing to give up power than were the British. The active collaboration of many
Indonesian nationalist leaders, including Sukarno and Hatta, with the Japanese
was an additional factor that reduced international pressure for Dutch withdrawal in the postwar era. Hence, although the Japanese passed power over to
Indonesian nationalists as their own authority slipped away, the Dutch immediately sought to reassert their control over their erstwhile possessions. It was only
after four years of protracted warfare that the Dutch were forced to withdraw,
and independence was achieved.
In the British East Indies, the colonial power had promised independence by
1949, yet another eight years were required before that actually occurred. This
was not due to the lack of any nationalist political activity within the country, but
due in part to two factors. The first was the resistance among some ethnic Malay
leaders to the idea that postwar Malaysia would be a multiethnic, secular state,
with similar treatment given to Malays and to minorities of China and Indian ancestry, who had been brought in as immigrants through earlier British policies.
This conflict was exacerbated by the extended revolt by the Chinese-led Malayan
Communist Party (MCP), which threatened the ability of any postindependence
government. It is important to note, however, that the MCP was not a separatist
organization. After all, it would have been difficult to separate the Chinese population from the rest, since they were distributed throughout the Straits Settlements. Moreover, the flag-bearer of Malay ethnic nationalism, the United Malays
National Organization, soon formed an alliance with Chinese and Indian political parties, illustrating the complexities of the political situation as Malaysia
gained independence in 1957.
In French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), the Vietnamese Communist nationalist faction (Viet Minh) never allied itself with the Japanese occupation. However, it benefited from the undermining of established French authority
to assert its control over much of urban Vietnam soon after the end of the war.
This control was only temporary, and efforts to negotiate with the French broke
down over the French desire to retain its position in southern Vietnam (Cochinchina) while ceding authority to much of the North. A war of independence followed, reaching its conclusion in the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, as
well as the Geneva Agreement that left the country free from French rule, but divided between the Viet Minh government in the North and the regime in the South
led by the charismatic leader Ngo Dinh Diem. This division, however, did not reflect separatist sentiments in each region, but rather the outcome of external forces
on two competing regimes, both purporting to represent the entire Vietnamese
nation. Cambodia and Laos obtained independence at about the same time, but
remained internally divided as the inheritor regimes to whom the French handed
over power to were opposed on multiple fronts by domestic opposition forces.
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The toll exacted on French military and political resources by the Indochina
war created an opportunity for independence movements in a major group of its
colonies in a very different part of the world, North Africa. These colonies included Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. After banning the Tunisian nationalist NeoDestourian Party and imprisoning their leader, Habib Bourguiba, in 1952, the
colonial government two years later freed Bourguiba, unbanned the party, and
granted autonomy, effectively setting Tunisia on a clear path to independence.
Likewise, they allowed the nationalist sultan Muhammad V to return to power in
Morocco in 1956, setting off a similar pattern of events. In both cases the French
government made major concessions to nationalist movements, choosing to avoid
once again expending itself fighting against sustained insurgency. The situation
was quite different in Algeria, which had a much larger European-descended population and which France had long considered an integral part of its territory.
The brutal Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 until 1962, during
which French and world popular opinion turned increasingly against the violent
tactics used by both sides against civilian populations. Even independence and
the ascendancy of the Front de Libération Nationale to power did not bring about
peace, as a massive exodus of Europeans and reprisals against alleged collaborators followed soon after.
In contrast to events in the various regions of Asia and Northern Africa, independence in sub-Saharan Africa came relatively late. The first country to gain independence, Ghana, did not achieve this until 1957, while the Portuguese colonies
of Angola and Mozambique had to wait until 1976 to gain their independence.
There are perhaps a number of reasons for this, including the fact that, with a few
exceptions (e.g., Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party), nationalist parties in the
region were of relatively recent vintage and had not consolidated demands for independence during World War II in the way that parties in other parts of the
world had. Furthermore, many of the newer parties were organized around ethnic lines, which made it more difficult for them to claim legitimacy for a takeover
from imperial rule. This latter fact, which would come back to haunt postindependence Africa, was itself due in part to the largely arbitrary boundaries that the
colonial powers had drawn around their possessions. Finally, another reason can
be found in the presence of colonial powers, such as Belgium and Portugal, who
had deliberately prevented the rise of an educated indigenous class that could
take over the reigns of government. Hence decolonization here was a protracted
process, despite the fact that both the British and French governments had by
the mid-1950s publicly committed themselves to expediting decolonization in
sub-Saharan Africa.
The history of separatism and regionalism during the dying days of Western
colonialism is a complex one, since in many cases political parties were simultaneously fighting to gain independence for their nations while jockeying for influence over the postindependence dispensation. Overarching these struggles were
a few larger ideological forces that drove much of the process forward. Not the
least of these was the very idea of nationalism itself, which was by now quite faN AT IONS AND NAT IONALIS M: VOLUME 4 (1989–PRESENT)
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miliar to the educated indigenous elites. Nationalism as an organizing principle
that empowered the rhetoric of anticolonial leaders and allowed them to place
their aspirations in a framework that legitimized them according to universal
norms familiar to the publics of the Western powers. Nor was nationalist ideology simply a pragmatic tool for gaining external support; it was a powerful force
for unifying large and often disparate groups of people under a single banner
(though this would serve as a double-edged sword in the postcolonial era). Hence
it was an appropriate ideology for anticolonial struggles in a way that more parochial ideas on the one hand, and sweeping class analysis, on the other, were not.
Anticolonial Separatism and Regionalism
The “birth of the new states” after decolonization presented a variety of conundrums for intellectuals and policymakers, but perhaps the greatest concern to
both, after economic development, was that of how these often artificially created artifacts of colonial policies would resist political fragmentation without the
coercive hand of the Western powers holding them together. This concern was
multiplied (at least in the West) by the advent of the Cold War, and the fact that
each of these new states was seen as a potential ally, enemy, or even battleground
in the battle for world supremacy. In relation to this, there was a widespread belief that political chaos would leave these new states “ripe for Communism.”
Because of this, “nation-building” became the mantra of much of the political
development studies, with this term referring to the replacement of parochial
ties and loyalties with broader ties to larger political entities, particularly the
state. Visionary political leaders sought to “activate” their populations from becoming passive subjects to becoming participants in their country’s program of
transformation.
Almost immediately, however, the complexities and contradictions of the
nation-building exercise became clear. Once the process of national identity creation was set in place through education, media campaigns, and urbanization,
there was no way to contain it within a single set of entities corresponding to existing state units. The ideas and emotions of nationalism could just as easily, and
in many cases more easily, be harnessed to attract allegiance to racial, religious,
linguistic, and regional identities that were larger than the traditional parochial
ones, yet still incongruent with the aim of creating citizens of a unitary state.
Often these various types of ethnic identities were at a level below the state, but
just as often they cross-cut state boundaries, bringing into motion regional and
international conflicts that themselves threatened state integrity.
In South Asia, the partition of India and Pakistan did not bring an end to separatist sentiments, and indeed, it triggered a series of events that threatened the
territorial integrity of both countries. The most immediate source of such threats
was the accession of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory, to India, as
a result of the acquiescence of its traditional ruling leader, Maharajah Hari Singh.
This accession fundamentally went against Pakistan’s own self-proclaimed role as
defender of South Asia’s Muslim populations, as well as the apparent sentiments
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of the majority population in Kashmir itself. Because of its Muslim majority, the
disposition of Kashmir has often been viewed as a crucial case for the one-nation/
two-nation ideological battle between the two countries, and has led to war between the countries on three different occasions, the most recent being the 1998
Kargil conflict.
Pakistan suffered from an even greater threat to its boundaries in the form of
East Pakistan, the Bengali-speaking portion of the country, separated from the
West by India. Despite containing over half the population of the entire country,
East Pakistanis were marginalized in the halls of power, which were dominated
by Punjabis and Mohajirs (refugees from Urdu/Hindi-speaking areas of North
India). This sense of repression came to a head when the Bengali Awami League
under the leadership of Sheik Mujibur Rahman won a National Assembly majority in the 1970 election under the banner of autonomy for the East. This led to the
imposition of martial law and a bloody crackdown against Bengali nationalist interests by the Pakistani Army. The intervention of India, however, shifted the war
decisively against Pakistan and led to the creation of an independent Bangladesh
by the end of 1971. It is important to note, however, that while Bangladesh to a
great extent was a creation of Bengali nationalist impulses, this was more in the
context of the division of power within the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent rather than the expression of pan-Bengali sentiment. Indeed, the merger of
India’s Hindu-majority Bengali-speaking West Bengal into a greater Bangladesh
was never a notion put forward by actors on either side of the border.
The late 1970s saw the rise of another independence movement in India, the
movement for an independent Sikh homeland, Khalistan, in the Punjab. The origins of Sikh separatism were complex, but historical causes include a combination of memories of the grand Sikh-Punjabi kingdom of Ranjit Singh in the early
19th century, anger over the division of Punjab between India and Pakistan, and
discontent over the partition of Indian Punjab into multiple states. Proximate
causes included an economic downturn in the 1980s, as well as the emergence of
the radical Sikh separatist militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, whose followers
occupied the seat of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Operation
Blue Star, the attack in June 1984 by Indian troops on Bhindranwale’s followers,
succeeded in destroying them but also set off a Sikh radical backlash culminating
in the assassination of Indira Gandhi a few months later. Insurgency continued
on for a few years, but eventually died down due to a combination of policies, including a violent crackdown against Khalistani supporters and a simultaneous
effort by the Indian government to co-opt moderate nationalists from the Akali
Dal party.
Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) had always held a separate political status as a Crown
colony under British rule and attained independence separately in 1947. Almost
immediately, however, tension grew between the Sinhalese population, predominantly Buddhist, which held majority power in the new state, and minority Tamils, predominantly Hindu, who had enjoyed disproportionate status under British
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rules. Under the leadership of Sinhalese nationalist leaders, such as Nathan Bandaranaike, a series of laws were passed enshrining the Sinhalese language and the
Buddhist religion within the Sri Lankan state. Tamil political parties responded
by asserting a right to autonomy for Tamil-majority areas in the north and east of
the country. The most radical of these Tamil parties espoused separatism and the
creation of an independent Tamil state, or Eelam. This viewpoint was soon dominated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who launched a string of
increasingly successful military attacks against Sri Lankan armed forces, as well
as Tamil interests who questioned their vision of Tamil nationalism. The Indo-Sri
Lankan accords brought Indian troops into the country in 1987, but they were
forced to withdraw after the Sri Lankan government revoked its support. A number of uneasy ceasefires have held since the early part of the current century, but
the conflict remains far from settlement.
In Northeast Asia, the strength of separatist activity in the postcolonial era
has been far weaker than in South Asia for a variety of reasons. Both Japan and
Korea have long viewed themselves as relatively homogenous states with only
tiny minority populations. And while Korea is divided between North and South,
this is, like the former division between North and South Vietnam, not the result
of separatist politics but of a stalemate between two sides that each purport to
represent the entire country. Likewise, as long as the Kuomintang Party retained
Women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) march in October 2002. (AFP/
Getty Images)
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single-party power in Taiwan, the government there viewed itself as the legitimate
ruler of all China, hence did not express its opposition to the mainland Communist regime in separatist terms. And while the mainland itself was ethnically quite
plural, the coercive power of the Communist state effectively squelched all but
the mildest forms of Tibetan and Uygur nationalism until the end of the 1980s.
Southeast Asia, on the other hand, faced a variety of separatist movements,
most occurring on the peripheries of its large multiethnic peninsula and island
states. Perhaps the worst hit was Indonesia, with its wide expanse of islands
and almost incalculable diversity. Almost from its very outset, it faced a powerful and well-armed separatist movement in Aceh, one that had been going on
continuously against the previous Dutch occupiers since the beginning of the
20th century. Active insurgency began with the rise of the Free Aceh Movement
(GAM) in the mid-1970s, and continued without much letup until a movement
toward a peace agreement began in the wake of the devastating tsunami of late
2004. Another insurgency arose from Indonesia’s forcible annexation of East Timor
following the sudden withdrawal of its Portuguese colonial rulers in 1977, an extended fight against the FRETILIN (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente) separatist group resulted eventually in the granting of independence
to East Timor in 2002. In West Papua (Irian Jaya), short-lived independent status
was followed by occupation and attempts by the Indonesian government to bind
its predominantly Melanesian population to the state through a much-condemned
so-called Act of Free Choice and a policy of transmigration. This has led to a lowlevel guerilla war by the forces of the West Papuan Liberation Movement (OPM)
since the mid-1960s.
In the Philippines, the postindependence government faced opposition from
the Muslim populations of Southern Mindanao, which culturally had more in common with its neighbors to the south in Malaysia and Indonesia than to the predominately Catholic mainstream Philippine culture. A 1996 agreement between
the government and the largest Moro nationalist group, the Moro Nationalist
Liberation Front (MNLF) failed to halt the conflict, as other groups continued to
reject that basis for the agreement. In Thailand, a superficially similar situation
exists in the south, which contains a large Malay-speaking Muslim population in
a predominately Buddhist society. Yet large-scale Muslim nationalist insurgency
did not start there until the mid-1990s.
In North Africa, the major ethnic divide has long been seen as the one between Arab and Berber populations. Nonetheless, despite frequently expressed
grievances by Berber political parties throughout the region against Arabization
policies, this has rarely been expressed in separatist terms or as armed rebellion. Indeed, the longest-running separatist conflict in North Africa is outside of
the Arab-Berber divide, occurring continuously in the Western Sahara since the
1960s, and since the 1970s under the leadership of the Polisario Front against Moroccan occupation of this former Spanish colony. Another long-running separatist conflict, that between the primarily Nilotic groups of Southern Sudan and the
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Arab North, has recently been the subject of a much-awaited peace agreement.
Eritrean separatism from Ethiopia, ultimately successful, was in many ways a byproduct of the joint struggle of Eritrean, Amhara, and Tigrean forces against the
Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the ubiquity of ethnically based political parties within
political boundaries set by Western imperialists had made rampant separatism
seem like an inevitability. Yet while separatist movements have not been unknown,
most of the conflict between ethnic groups, though often quite violent, has taken
place within a larger acceptance of existing colonially drawn boundaries, as arbitrary as those boundaries may seem. The most notable exception to this rule was
the attempt by Igbo nationalists to split away from the Nigerian state to form the
independent state of Biafra, leading to the bloody civil war of 1967–1970. The earlier attempt by Katanga province, under Moise Tshombe, to secede from Zaire
was defeated over the course of 1960–1963 with the aid of United Nations (UN)
forces. Different as they were, one factor that these two cases had in common
was the relative wealth of the ethnic groups in whose names separatist movements functioned, the expressed desire of the leaders of these groups to withdraw
from what they viewed as the chaos of a multiethnic state where other groups
were poorer, less education, and yet, in the majority.
It can be argued with some justification that the process of decolonization,
given the way that it was carried out, left behind conditions under which separatist activity was inevitable in the new states. Boundaries had been drawn in a way
that reflected administrative convenience, and did not reflect the geographical
patterns of ethnic identities. The boundaries themselves had often been in flux
during the colonial period, and their final location was often the result of lastminute compromise. Within those boundaries were left new governments that
were internally divided and often lacked personnel with administrative experience. The very newness of postindependence political institutions brought in another element of instability. Hence, many postindependence governments had
difficulty enforcing their authority and were often subject to frequent challenges
both from within and without. Given these problems, it might seem a miracle
that separatism was not even more common in the postcolonial era.
Yet, in some ways, it could also be argued that the problems faced by postcolonial governments, at their most extreme, tended to limit separatist violence,
though often by substituting other forms of conflict. Where governments were
extremely weak and unstable, there was little incentive for opposition groups to
aim for control over a portion of the country’s territory when the entire territory
might be ripe for picking. Furthermore, even if a government agreed to autonomy
or independence for a portion of its territory, its ability to enforce and maintain
this agreement over time would be limited. The complexity of ethnic divisions
also tended to mitigate somewhat against separatism. The intertwining of residence patterns among different ethnic groups also made it difficult to clearly demarcate the homeland of one group from that of another. Furthermore, the sheer
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number of possible ways in which ethnicity could be mobilized sometimes meant
that it was difficult for political groups to enunciate a clearly understood demand
for a political homeland, one that would not be challenged by alternative, equally
appealing calls to identity among the same group of people.
Separatism and Regionalism in Modern, Industrialized States
Neither the preponderance of anticolonial separatist activity nor the continuation of nationalist movements within new states was a great surprise to social
theorists studying ethnicity, conflict, and development. Nationalism, after all,
was largely seen as a product of the “transitional stages” between tradition and
modernity, as mediated by the stresses and strains caused by the passing of the
old and introduction of the new. The extent of violence had perhaps been more
than was generally expected or hoped for, but it nonetheless did not require a
fundamental reworking of the findings of social theory.
However, beginning from approximately the late 1960s and early 1970s, there
took place a resurgence in nationalist separatist activity in the regions of the
world where it was least expected, the industrialized West, often in the very home
countries of the former colonial powers. True, the West was conventionally
viewed as the birthplace of nationalism, and had gone through massive nationalist ferment beginning from the period of the Napoleonic Wars until World War I.
However, the feeling had been, that with the advent of modernity, the era of nationalism had passed, with World War II and the Cold War being the harbingers
of more sweeping global ideologies, such as capitalism, communism, fascism,
and socialism.
The upsurge of Nationalist violence in Northern Ireland, the growth of Basque
separatism in Spain, and the movement for Québec independence were only
some of the strong and often violent movements that arose during the 1960s and
1970s. Numerous theories have been put forward for why this occurred, ranging
from those who saw no significant differences between the forces causing separatist nationalism in the industrialized world and that in developing countries to
those who saw these movements as a manifestation of a postmodern condition
of “identity politics” found predominantly in the West. In a way, however, each of
the major separatist movements in Western countries has its dynamics, and they
resist being placed within a single social change paradigm, whether it be modern
or postmodern.
The separatist movement by Catholic radicals in Northern Ireland is perhaps
the best known case of this kind of resurgent nationalist revolt. The height of this
movement, usually referred to as “The Troubles,” began during the 1960s and continued up until the mid-1990s, being brought (at least formally) to a close by the
Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It is hard to characterize the original causes of
this conflict as postmodern, since violent disputes over the partition of Ireland
date to the creation of the Free State in 1920. However, the upsurge in violence
can be traced to a chain of causation, beginning with rise of the Catholic civil
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rights movement and its suppression by the government, which moved to violent
clashes between Protestant and Catholic activists, leading to the direct introduction of British military forces. Disagreement among republicans over tactics led
to the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1970, whose
support base was greatly increased by the “Bloody Sunday” shooting deaths of
13 civilians by British soldiers during a protest march.
Besides the IRA, the best-known violent separatist movement in the industrialized West is ETA (Basque Nation and Freedom), active in the Basque region of
Spain and to a lesser extent France. The cause of Basque nationalism, like Irish
nationalism, dates prior to the 20th century, but like the rise of the Provisional
IRA, the rise of ETA was linked to social and cultural changes occurring in Western Europe, as well as in the atmosphere of repression under the postwar Francisco Franco regime in Spain. ETA began as a radical offshoot of the mainstream
nationalist movement, and it gained popularity during the 1960s, as its policy of
targeted violence against figures of Franco’s regime was regarded as legitimate by
large segments of the Western European public. This support has dropped greatly,
however, in the aftermath of democratization in 1977 and the split of ETA itself
into two factions.
Other major separatist and regionalist movements in the West during the
post–World War II period have been generally nonviolent in nature. Perhaps
the most prominent among these has been the Québec sovereignty movement,
which became an active voice in Canadian politics with the birth of the Parti
Québécois in 1968. The separatist message of the Parti Québécois gained the support of nearly half the province’s electorate during referendums on independence
in 1980 and 1994.
There is no doubt that these “new” separatisms were affected in some fashion
by the political upheavals and challenge to the status quo that took place across
Western Europe and North America during the 1960s. However, it is difficult to
argue for a simple causal relationship between the two, since the nationalist
movements in question also drew upon longer-running grievances as well as support groups that were quite different from those who supported the American
antiwar movement or the European radical uprisings of 1968. Perhaps the most
plausible argument that can be made is that the events of the 1960s legitimized
the rights of minorities to self-determination as well as the notion of “direct action” against established authorities, and hence contributed to, even if they were
not completely responsible for, the new wave of nationalisms in the West.
Consequences
As can be seen, despite the clear upsurge in separatist activity that occurred during the period under our review, it is difficult to attribute this upsurge to a simple
set of causes.
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It is intuitive that any force that destabilizes the existing political status quo
will tend to bring to the surface conflicting demands for recognition, which would
include ethnic identities based upon race, religion, language, and region. Needless to say, there were a number of events in the latter half of the 20th century that
tended to lead to such destabilization. It is tempting to group the many factors
that have been discussed under the broader rubrics of “modernization” or “postmodernization,” but this simply begs the question of identifying the nature of
such larger processes.
What is true without question is that events from the 1950s on set into motion a period of the most widespread sustained nationalist and separatist political activity in world history, one that continues to shape international politics to
the present day.
Selected Bibliography
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London: Verso.
Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New
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Connor, W. 1994. Ethnonationalism: A Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Furnivall, J. S. 1956. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. New York: New York University Press.
Geertz, C., ed. 1663. Old Societies and New States. New York: Free Press.
Hasan, M., ed. 2000. Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Hewitt, C., and T. Cheetham. 2000. Encyclopedia of Modern Separatist Movements. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Hodson, H. V. 1993. The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, D. L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kedourie, E. 1970. Nationalism in Asia and Africa. New York: World Publishing.
Khalidi, R., L. Anderson, M. Muslih, and R. Simon, eds. 1993. The Origins of Arab Nationalism.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Nairn, T. 1977. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. 2nd edition. London: New
Left Books.
Reid, A. J. S. 1974. Indonesian National Revolution, 1945–58. London: Longman.
Roff, W. R. 1967. The Origins on Malay Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Tiryakian, E. A., and R. Rogowski, eds. 1985. New Nationalisms of the Developed West: Towards
Explanation. Boston: Allen and Unwin.
Wallerstein, I. 1961. Africa: The Politics of Independence. New York: Vintage Books.
Young, C. 1976. The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
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