Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Imagination and Democratic Alternatives For Sri Lanka

Futures 37 (2005) 959988 www.elsevier.
com/locate/futures
Ethnic conict, ethnic imagination and democratic alternatives for Sri Lanka
Jayadeva Uyangoda*
Social Scientists Association, 425/15 Thimbirigasyaya Road, Colombo 5, Sri Lanka Available online 14 June 2005
Abstract Sri Lankas unitary state and consequently much of its pluralist contestations are products of a precise colonial legacy, particularly the organization and reproduction of the constitutional principle of European/British unitary state in the island. Only after decades of violent ethnic conicts between the minority Tamils and the majoritarian Sinhalese population did the Sinhalese ruling elite realize the need for altering the unitarist bases of the Sri Lankan state within a framework of ethnicity-based power sharing. Although concepts of devolution and federalism have entered the mainstream political discourse, which is indeed a healthy sign, but these are of limited use unless there is a democratic re-constitution of the modern state by reforming and federalizing it from within, in its foundations, at its center and importantly at its periphery and regions. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Contemporary Sri Lanka presents a key disjuncture in the experience of modern nationstate formation as seen in many other societies as well. It refers to the fundamental dichotomy between the multiple ethnic constitution of society and the unitarist organization of state power. Sri Lankas unitarism of the state derives its foundations from the constitutional principle of European/British unitary state which enunciated a model of political organization in which legislative and executive powers were centralized. In that model, decentralization of administration was accommodated only for municipal and local government affairs. After several decades of conictual ethnic politics and two decades of a protracted civil war, leading sections of the Sinhalese ruling elite have come to realize the need for altering the unitarist bases of the Sri Lankan state within a framework of ethnicity-based power sharing. Concepts of devolution
* Tel.: C94 11 2 501339; fax: C94 11 2 595563. E-mail address: uyangoda@cmb.ac.lk.
0016-3287/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2005.01.018
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J. Uyangoda / Futures 37 (2005) 959988
and federalism that have recently entered Sri Lankas mainstream political discourse, encapsulate this ruling class shift away from unitarist statism. At negotiations between the government of Sri Lanka and Tamil nationalist rebels, proposals for re-designing the constitutional architecture of the Sri Lankan state have also sprung up. Linking a negotiated settlement with constitutional reform initiatives is denitely a constructive strategy of engaging the core political issue of the ethnic conict, namely the question of sharing state power between Sinhalese and Tamil political elites. There is a pervasive belief among sections of Sinhalese political leaders, civil society peace constituencies and international custodians of Sri Lankas peace process that political negotiations of 20022003 are most likely to move in such a direction of working out a constitutional compromise between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. They also seem to view the constitutional compromise as a rather unproblematic outcome of negotiations. In this paper, I will critically examine this proposition of the possibility for constitutional compromise, focusing on some complex dimensions of state power that have emerged in the backdrop of Sri Lankas protracted ethnic conict. I begin this paper with a simple illustration of the complexity of a negotiated compromise in Sri Lankas ethnic conict. Sri Lankas negotiation practice has been developed in accordance with the idea that the resolution of the ethnic conict should primarily be the responsibility and the task of the ruling party in Colombo and the LTTE that controls the politics of the Tamil society. In all negotiation attempts, the settlement effort has been conned to these two principal parties to the conict. Colombos oppositionist political parties as well as Muslim political groups have sharply and repeatedly challenged this practice throughout the 1990s and during the 20022003 negotiation effort as well. Yet the conict settlement efforts have not yet been made inclusive or pluralistic by any government. The ruling parties in Colombo appear to believe that the regimes have the privileged monopoly of negotiating peace. They have also acted on the assumption that the LTTE is the sole negotiation partner, the dominant party to the conict from the Tamil polity. But this approach has generated resistance and rejection. As repeatedly demonstrated in 19952000 peace initiatives as well as during the 20022003 negotiations, the Sinhalese political parties in the parliamentary opposition have been acting on the belief that undermining the ruling party efforts towards a negotiated compromise with the LTTE is a fair game of normal parliamentary-electoral politics. This particularly problematic behavior of the parliamentary opposition stands constantly counterpoised with a formidable constitutional hurdle that any ruling party willing to enter into a negotiated deal with the LTTE would face, namely the need to obtain a parliamentary majority of two-thirds of the total number of MPs, in order to constitutionalize the settlement agreement. Without their active participation in the peace process, the parliamentary opposition parties has also acted as spoilers to undermine the negotiation effort as well as its outcome. The habit of the opposition parties to politicize the negotiation process for partisan and electoral gains has also deprived popular legitimacy for regime efforts towards managing the conict through political means. This poses a fundamental problem about the political conditions that are necessary to end Sri Lankas ethnic war through political-constitutional measures. The difcult question concerns whether the Sinhalese societys political class is really ready to engage the LTTE in a serious political encounter. To put it more sharply, is the Sinhalese political class
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willing to make radical political compromises with the Tamil minority in order to bring the war to an end? Meanwhile, there has emerged increasing resistance by radicalizing Muslim groups in the Eastern province to a possible deal between the Colombo government and the LTTE. The Muslim fear is based on the possibility that the governmentLTTE deal will grant monopoly of power in the Northern and Eastern provinces to the LTTE, without arrangements for Muslim autonomy rights in the Eastern Province. Indeed, of the settlement agreement between the government and the LTTE fails to address the Muslim claims for autonomy rights, such an agreement will not only be undemocratic, but also be difcult to implement. This leads to the thesis that although the ethnic war has been fought between two sidesthe Sinhalese state and the militant Tamil nationalistsa solution to manage the ethnic conict needs to be minimally tripartite, encompassing Sinhalese, Tamil as well as Muslim communities. However, the proposition of a tripartite settlement would radically undermine the Tamil nationalist claim to monopolize representation of the Tamil-speaking peoplea formulation designed to incorporate the Muslim community in the North and East within the political framework of Tamil homeland. This leads to a searching question about the politics of the Tamil nationalist project: are Sri Lankan Tamil nationalists willing to accept the right to autonomy of ethnic minorities within the territorial unit that will come under their jurisdiction? Answers to the above two questions concerning the dominant political classes of Sinhalese and Tamil societies are not very clear. However, they can hardly be in the afrmative. Indeed, there exists a great deal of unwillingness on the part of major sections of the Sinhalese and Tamil political elites to deviate from nationalist visions of the state. Yet, the ethnic conict has also given rise to other dimensions of the political reality, pointing to agendas of reform, change and transformation that have certain objective dimensions in the sense that they should be treated as beyond the partisan agendas and subjective wishes of conict actors. For example, if a project of state reform were to be meaningful in the context of the islands ethnic conict, a paradigm shift in the way in which the question of state power is understood in Sri Lankas Sinhalese and Tamil nationalist frames would be absolutely necessary. Similarly, de-centering of state power at national and regional levels, on the principle of dispersed and shared sovereignty, is a principle through which the organization of the emerging Sri Lankan state could be radically re-imagined. These propositions indeed call for radial re-envisioning of politics. As a counter to the Sinhalese-reformist and Tamil nationalist approaches to the postconict state in Sri Lanka, I will make an argument for re-making the Sri Lankan state linking it with the task of laying a democratically stable foundation for ethnic conict resolution. The problem I examine in this paper concerns the inadequacy of the conventional nation-state-centric political imagination to offer alternatives to the present nation-state in crisis in Sri Lanka. I will propose a mode of political imagination that will assist us to move away from the existing form of the nation-state that privileges numerically dominant ethnic communities at state as well as sub-state levels of political power. My proposal treats all ethnic-identity communities as political communities of equal moral worth, while treating the political entity of the state as a voluntary, as opposed to coercive, political association of equal political communities. With this claim, I posit the idea of deep federalization to suggest a framework of democratic governance that can
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overcome the limitations of majoritarian democracy at national as well as sub-national dimensions. The concept of deep federalization also seeks to address the limitations of Sri Lankas mainstream constitutionalist approach to territorial federalism. In Sri Lankas debate on ethnicity-based power sharing, the position of Tamil nationalism, which originated as a minoritarian response to Sinhalese majority domination, is quite ambiguous about devolution of power to the smaller minority of Muslims in the Tamil majority areas. The Muslim fear that the Tamils in a regional unit consisting of Northern and Eastern provinces are likely to exercise on them hegemony and control has in recent years developed into a demand for regional autonomy for Sri Lankan Muslims. The interesting dynamic of emerging TamilMuslim politics in Sri Lankas Northern and Eastern provinces is that while the LTTE wants to incorporate the Muslim identity within the larger linguistic identity of Tamil-speaking people, the Muslim political parties resist it. They are deeply suspicious of the Tamil nationalist projects consequences for the regional minorities. The point that has become visible in Sri Lankas emerging trajectories of power-sharing is that there in fact exists the real possibility of a regime of regional majoritarianism being established by the Tamil minority under a scheme of federalism. The alternative I develop in this chapter is one of deep federalization, which enunciates the proposal that the Sri Lankan state could ideally be federalized at national, regional and local levels. For that purposes I propose a constitutional framework that will creatively combine the territorial and non-territorial forms of power-sharing. At the outset, it must be stated that a program of deep democratization/deep federalization will entail re-making of Sri Lankas post-colonial state. The space for stateremaking initiatives needs to be found in a process of political transformation that is interwoven with the political settlement of the civil war by means of a negotiated compromise. Indeed, it is possible to envision an organic link between civil war termination, political management of the ethnic conict and a thrust towards state remaking reforms. One can perhaps assume that a project of re-making the state in Sri Lanka might best be imagined as constituting three interrelated, overlapping tasks. The rst is the termination, or substantial de-escalation, of the war through negotiations between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Negotiated termination and sustained de-escalation of the war will provide continuing space for the emergence of political and social conditions that would effectively de-link the ethnic conict from war and violence. This may be termed as a phase of transitional negative peace. The second proposes reforming the state through a constitutional covenant worked out by means of a consensus among all or most of the islands national-ethnic communities in order to determine the nature of power sharing in the future state. This idea of a constitutional covenant will not only suggest a way to obtain popular sanctity to the new constitution as a federalizing charter; it will also enable regional/local minority communities, i.e. numerically small identity groupsto participate in the new polity not as minorities in the liberal constitutionalist sense, but as moral equals whose consent is worthy of being counted. In this second phase, constitutional foundations of the post-conict state could be dened while creatively synthesizing the territorial and non-territorial forms of federalism. The third phase can be viewed as one of transition from negative peace to positive peace. It proposes a relatively long period of post-settlement reconstruction of the state and political communities in which the terms of the peace settlement and the new
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constitution are effectively implemented. Linking the three phases together are tasks of political reconstruction, specic to each phase, yet facilitating transition from civil war to negative peace and then from negative peace to positive, sustainable peace. In the framing of my argument I dene negative peace as the absence of war, agreed upon by the parties to the civil war as a prelude to negotiations seeking a settlement. Positive peace is dened as a sustainable condition of democracy and pluralism, strengthened by the absence of legitimate reasons for returning to civil war as a means to resolve social and ethnic grievances. In introducing the above three tasks of Sri Lankas post-conict state re-making efforts, I also posit them as a critique of the dominant paradigm of conict resolution shared by the government leaders as well as liberal constitutionalists. A key assumption in the mainstream approach to negotiation, which was present in Sri Lankas 19941995 negotiation attempt as well as the 20022003 peace process, is that once a cease-re agreement is in place and the negotiations on track, a formal legal process should take over the trajectories of politics in order to extend, with some alterations, the existing state of the Sinhalese South to the Northern and Eastern provinces. Excessive faith in unilateralist constitution drafting as well as the pre-eminence accorded to constitutional lawyers in designing the future Sri Lankan state is only an outward manifestation of an issue that continues to characterize Sri Lankas current political debates on conict resolution. It refers to the inability of the Sinhalese political elites to grasp the point that the 20 years of ethnic war itself has been an integral phase in Sri Lankas post-colonial process of state formation. I argue that in order to grasp the dimensions of this process of state formation under conditions of a protracted conict, it is quite useful to acknowledge that while the secessionist war has radically undermined the foundations of the post-colonial unitary state in Sri Lanka, it has also given rise to new and conicting directions, as well as new political realities, of state formation. The concept of state formation is dened here to mean continuing processes of shaping the conceptualization, organization as well as structures of state power in response to social conict, class struggle, ideological battles and group mobilization. The directions of state formation have been conditioned by a host of disjunctures in the politics of postcolonial Sri Lanka. The primary disjuncture has developed in the mutually antagonistic processes of state formation in Sinhalese and Tamil societies. The spread of ethnic conict and then the ethnic war exacerbated this process of disjuncture. It manifested itself in a variety of ways. The primary among them is the presence of the Sri Lankan state in the Northern and Eastern provinces since 1983that is, since the civil war began exclusively as a coercive military entity that engaged in war and occupation of what Tamil nationalists view as the homeland of Sri Lankan Tamils. In the context of the war, Sri Lankan states democratic institutions and practices have been largely withdrawn from the Northern Province and most of the Eastern province for nearly two decades. In the circumstances of the civil war, the Tamil society in Sri Lankas North and East has also produced its own alternative state that has taken a particularly deformed character. Built on the LTTEs guerilla and counter-state military institutions, the emerging, alternative state in the North and East has been primarily constituted by institutions as well as practices of primitive accumulation of state power through guerilla warfare. The regular deployment of extreme violence and coercion against the populace, the presence of
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extensive networks of espionage, control, discipline and punishment, the deployment of annihilatory violence [15] and the existence of vast networks of extortion, protection rackets and economic control have been some of the dynamics that have shaped the nature of the emerging Tamil ethnic state under conditions of the secessionist war. These were indeed practices associated with all Tamil militant groups, military institutions of the Sri Lankan state as well as the Indian army that occupied these areas for 3 years. Meanwhile, whenever the LTTE established control over civilian populations in the North and East, they also established primitive institutions of governance and administration in order to maintain public order, taxation, social welfare, policing and crime control, administration of justice and imprisoning convicts and political opponents, provision of health and educational facilities. These were institutions of an emerging state that appeared to function at a rudimentary and underdeveloped level, yet with deadly efciency in ensuring social control, mass domestication and social obedience. The LTTE holds the view that this parallel state, however incomplete or deformed it may appear, represents the key historical achievement of the Sri Lankan Tamil nation. In the LTTEs understanding, it is the state that has grown out of the Tamil nationalist struggle for sovereignty. Its dismantling and subsequent replacement with the institutions of the Sri Lankan state would amount to dissolving the most important gains of the 20 years nationalist struggle of Sri Lankan Tamils [29]. From the LTTEs perspective, any settlement to the conict will have to grant legitimacy and acceptance to their institutions and structures of state power in the North and East. Being a militarily unvanquished minority nationalist movement, the LTTE can hardly be expected to welcome the extension of the failed Sri Lankan state to what the Tamils consider as their homeland. Even the LTTEs most conciliatory option pre-supposes the relative retreat of the Sri Lankan state from the North and East. In this backdrop, a credible political settlement to the civil war in Sri Lanka will require to be worked out within a framework that will enable the discovery of a common ground between the existing state and the emerging regional state. Although it can be argued that a way out may be found in the concept of shared sovereignty, the Sinhalese political class, that includes the dominant ruling elites of the UNP and the SLFP as well as the secondary ruling elites of the JVP, is unlikely to concede such a radical position concerning state power. The above discussion has far-reaching implications for the way in which the idea of sovereignty would be understood in relation to the emerging, post-conict Sri Lankan state. Firstly, the Sinhalese nationalist concept of unied and undivided sovereignty cannot accommodate the Tamil nationalisms claim to sovereignty even within a framework of regional autonomy. Secondly, the Muslim communities, particularly those in the Eastern Province, are most likely to resist the Tamil nationalist claim to regional autonomy as sovereignty. The Muslim political demands have been evolved during the ethnic war primarily in opposition to the theory and practice of Tamil secessionist politics that produced anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing, massacres, land grabbing and antagonisms grounded in fears of collaboration as well as betrayal. The continuing group violence, which has dened recent TamilMuslim relations in the Northern and Eastern provinces, has also been a dimension of alternative state formation in Sri Lankas conict zone. Linked to ethnic cleansing have been the expropriation of land and private property belonging to the rival ethnic community, planned destruction of multi-cultural settlements
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and the emergence in their place of mono-ethnic community life forms [23] that have been integral dimensions of the sociology and culture of this particular pattern of state formation. It dees, and indeed antithetical to, multi-culturalism and pluralism. It is a dimension of state formation developed under conditions of a violent and protracted ethnic conict that cannot provide any impetus for democratic state formation under post-conict conditions. Thus, an agenda of democratization that links itself with the resolution of the ethnic conict cannot escape contradictory and disjunctured processes of state formation that have occurred particularly in the Northern and Eastern provinces under the conditions of war. The difcult task of post-conict democratic state formation involves delineating and differentiating democratic and pluralistic tendencies from authoritarian ones and creating political and social conditions for their consolidation. It suggests a transformative political agenda that can inclusively and creatively link democratic impulses developed in all ethnic formations in Sri Lanka. In the rest of the chapter we will explore into this possibility. Before doing that, let us further examine some of the comparative perspectives on the complex dimensions of ethnic conict resolution ion deeply divided societies in civil war.
1. Protracted conicts and the question of state power In the recent literature on protracted social conicts, there has emerged a considerable emphasis on the political reform dimensions required for their resolution. The assumption shared by scholars in the 1970s and 1980s that inter-state or intra-state conicts were amenable to resolution through negotiation and mediation came to be re-examined in the 1990s against the backdrop of post-agreement difculties in instances like Northern Ireland and IsraelPalestine. Failure of negotiation as well as the breakdown of settlement accords has been so frequent that in a recent study Darby acknowledges that [o]f the forty formal peace accords signed between January 1988 and December 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years [3]. In a study of 41 civil wars between 1940 and 1990, Walter has found that combatants of only 17 had initiated negotiations designed to end their ghting [30]. While in eight of these 17 cases (47%), the adversaries had signed and implemented successful peace agreements, in nine other cases (53%), the parties returned to war. Walter makes two signicant observations on this experience of civil war settlements. First, despite all the impediments to cooperation, combatants involved in almost half of all peace negotiations did succeed in ending their conict off the battleeld. Second, despite the high costs of ghting, including the possibility of elimination in the battleeld, more than half of the combatants involved in negotiations chose to return to war [31]. Sri Lanka provides further insights into complexities in negotiation to end civil war through a repeated cycle of war, negotiation, mediation, accord making, returning to war and returning to the negotiation table. Among scholars who have attempted to grapple with the new challenges of ending protracted conicts, William Zartman has emphasized the crucial need of what he calls returning to normal politics. Internal conicts begin, in Zartmans insightful formulation, with the breakdown of normal politics [32], with the inability of or unwillingness of
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the government to handle social grievances to the satisfaction of the aggrieved. Characterized by dynamics of asymmetry, protracted internal civil wars have become the most difcult of conicts to negotiate. Zartman points out that only a quarter to a third of modern civil wars have found their way to negotiation. About two-thirds of the internal; conicts have ended in the surrender or elimination of one of the parties involved. However, in protracted conicts based on issues of deprivation, discrimination and identity, the defeat of the rebellion merely drives the cause further undergroundor even abroad, in contemporary conditions of globalizationonly to emerge at a later stage. As Zartman says in fairly straightforward terms, it is the governments job to be responsive to the grievances of its people; it is the insurgents purpose to draw attention to their grievances and gain redress. Negotiation is the natural meeting point of these needs, an extension of the normal politics that should characterize a well-functioning polity [33]. However, as Zartman acknowledges, internal conict works against its best outcome. The process of resolving internal conicts through negotiation and assisted by mediationa long, arduous and complex processpresupposes a return to normal politics: The eventual key to the effectiveness of mediators and negotiators is an outcome that returns the conict to normal politics. In this respect, too, civil wars differ from many other conicts. Internal conict cannot be resolved by some wise judgment on an outstanding issue, such as the location of a boundary, the exchange of disarmament quotas, or the terms of a treaty. Rather, the outcome must provide for the integration of the insurgency into a new body politic and for mechanisms that allow the conict to shift from violence back to politics. Generally, this involves creating a new political system in which the parties to the conict feel they have a stake, thus in a very positive sense co-opting all parties government and rebelsin a new creation.[A] stable outcome must be a joint creation with benets for both sides to hold them to the agreement [34]. In this paper, I take Zartmans insight of returning to normal politics further to argue that in protracted ethnic conicts that involve the question of state poweroften conceptualized in demands for autonomy or separationnormalization of politics should mean reconstitution of the political order. It presupposes not a return to the old order, or some slightly altered version of it, but rather creating a new political systemor, to put it in different terms, re-working the associational bases of the state. To explain the last point, let us ask the following question: why should the associational bases of the state be re-worked in a post-conict Sri Lanka? The answer to this question is not a difcult one to discern, although it is not adequately acknowledged in Sri Lankas conict resolution discourse. A majoritarian nation-state that has been in a path to dissolution under the pressure of a minoritarian secessionist project can hardly restore its political viability without widening its ethnic associational bases. Actually, one way of understanding Sri Lankas contemporary political crisis is to view the protracted ethnic conict as a direct outcome of the continuing disjuncture between nation-building and state making. Its dening characteristic has been the political incommensurability of two nations that have been struggling to exist in one territorial state. Sinhalese and Tamil nations, unable to reconcile each other in a mode of cooperation as one nation or two cooperative nations, have been locked in a self-destructive war for nearly two decades. This incommensurability and mutual exclusivity of these two nation projects in a way represents a key political dimension of the intractability of Sri Lankas ethnic conict.
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What are the possibilities for grappling with this problem of incommensurability of Sinhalese and Tamil nation projects? Negotiation for a political compromise can obviously offer the most productive space for overcoming the problem of incommensurability. Yet, the leaders of Sinhalese and Tamil communities will have to nd a language of communication, and a framework of conversation, in order to discover concrete possibilities of compromise. In such a dialogue for compromise, the question of the state, and the mechanisms for sharing state power, are certain to gure in as a central concern. This will necessitate the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to invent something new, enabling the two hostile political entitiesthe existing state and the emerging counterstateto co-exist. We can only conjecture that it will have to be a form of federalism that can merge together two relatively independent and competing processes of state formation. Such a future for Sri Lanka can only be premised on the possibility that ethno-nationalist projects, in their majoritarian as well as minoritarian manifestations, go through a radical transformation so as to accommodate multi-culturalism and pluralism. In this regard, a lesson of great importance may be learnt from the political experience of Sri Lankas protracted ethnic conict: although ethno-nationalist insurgent projects highlight, in a larger-than-life fashion, ethnic grievances and injustices, they can rarely offer democratically emancipatory solutions or alternatives. There are a number of reasons for this fundamental inability of counter-state ethnic insurgencies to carry forward the democratic struggle. The rst is closely linked to the foundational dynamics of ethnonationalism of minority politics. Minoritarian nationalisms, as in the case of the LTTE version of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka, in multi-nation states has the potential for imagining their political futures in the master image of the pre-existing unitarist nationstate. They are indeed mini ethnic state projects in which the oppressed minority yesterday wishes to be transformed into an oppressive, or at least majoritarian, majority tomorrow in its own homeland. The desire of the oppressed minority to establish its own liberation may not necessarily ensure the minorities within that liberated minority framework the right to autonomy or even limited self-determination. In Sri Lankas experience, this has been the enduring anxiety and complaint of the Muslim minority in the Eastern Province. A lesson that can be derived from this critique of Sri Lankas Tamil minoritarian project is that ethnic conicts demand democratic solutions and not a retreat to ethnicized re-constitution of the political community. Democratization of the political community, pluralization of the state and sharing of sovereignty are three programmatic goals around which non-ethnic solutions to ethnic problems could be imagined and worked out. These solutions are non-ethnic in two perspectives. Firstly, they are not viewed through an ethnic zero-sum prism. In other words, they do not give rise to ethnic jealousies in terms of who gets more than the others. Secondly, they are pre-conditions for the political emancipation of all ethnic communities and therefore they liberate political emancipation from narrow ethnicity and make it an egalitarian desire among all identity communities. The second reason why ethnic insurgent projects engaged in protracted struggles have failed to offer emancipatory alternatives is the general tendency among them to be authoritarian during the struggle for national emancipation as a programmatic-strategic necessity. Engaged in an asymmetrical war with the state, secessionist rebels hardly practice even a modicum of democracy and pluralism. As the experience of Sri Lankas Tamil insurgent groups clearly indicatesthe LTTE has not been alone in thisthe
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deployment of untrammeled violence within their own ethnic community has been accepted and legitimized as a liberationist privilege. Extreme practices of annihilatory violence, total denial of democracy and pluralism, and the scorn for institutions of accountability have been legitimized as politically necessary dimensions of the liberation struggle. These ethnic insurgents work on the premise that the deferment of democracy and human rights until the liberation is achieved is both necessary and legitimate. This presupposes what Krishna formulates as the logic of deferrencethe endless deferment of the very possibility of democratization in any concrete sense of political and institutional practice [16]. Although this logic of deferment may be understandable as a ploy for self-preservation of rebels in a counter-state civil war, it does not explain why ethnic emancipatory projects should be authoritarian and absolutist.
2. Pluralizing the ethnic bases of the state At this stage of the discussion, I shift the focus towards suggesting some conditions of possibility for a program to recreate the associational bases of the Sri Lankan state for reasons of ethnic reconciliation, peace, pluralism and democracy. This discussion is built around three assertions. The rst, as I have already suggested, is that ethnic conicts do not seem to have what we may call ethnic solutions that can deliver political emancipation to minority nations in multi-nation states. It implies that conict resolution and political reforms in societies in ethnic conict require democratic alternatives that can accommodate ethnic identity aspirations of all communities while protecting political struggle for emancipation from being transformed into ethnically-conceived programs for hegemony. The second is that pluralist federalization of Sri Lankas state presupposes political re-association of the three main ethnic communities of the islands societythe Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslimsin active cooperation with regional, local and other minorities. At present, the Sri Lankan state is a fragile association of the three main ethnic communities and the states continuity as a viable political entity has been in constant jeopardy while its break-up has also found a place in the historical agenda. In such a backdrop, there is little acknowledgement even in the democratic political discourse of the need to extend the entitlements of democracy to regional and local minorities. Meanwhile, to arrest the Sri Lanka states trajectory of disintegration, the re-creation of the associational bases of state beyond bi-ethnicity has become a historical necessity. The third assertion points towards the idea of state remaking. It argues that the state remaking project should be politically open enough for the unitarist majority, the secessionist minority as well as other ethnic and identity communities to discover a mutually enabling framework of political association in the form of an associational covenant. The covenantbased re-association should provide the ethnic communities a mutually agreed ground for sustainable cooperation and solidarity while discouraging inter-ethnic enmity, suspicion and antagonism. My state-remaking proposal is further linked to the argument that covenantal re-association would enable all ethnic and identity communities who constitute the social grounding of the state to treat each other as political communities of equal worth, equal rights and equal consequences.
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To clarify my emphasis on regional and local minorities, it is important to recognize the political mistake of framing community identities as well as community identity-based democratic political claims only in terms of macro-ethnic categories such as Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim. This in Sri Lanka has resulted in two counter-democratic consequences in ethnic relations. Firstly, it has established in the polity an ethnic hierarchical order in a discourse of majority and minority that is essentially inegalitarian in its political practice. Secondly, it totally obliterates shifting power relations of communities in situation where majority minority classication becomes meaningless under local circumstances. For example, a community who would belong to the majority in the macro sense of ethnic categorization would in fact nd itself in a minority in a multi-ethnic regional setting, like the Sinhalese communities in Sri Lankas Eastern Province. Similarly, a community which is a minority in a macro sense, like the Tamils in Sri Lanka, would nd itself a majority in a regional context. In the logic of group politics, there are not only a majority and minorities, but many minorities, minorities even within the majority framed in such existential categories as region, caste, religion, language and other identities. One radically subversive way to overcome the undemocratic majorityminority hierarchy and re-ground group relations in an egalitarian imagination is to treat all communities as constituted by multiple minorities. I will discuss the constitutional implications of this position as well as constitutional options it offers in the section Deep Federalization and Non-Territorial Power-Sharing.
3. Conict resolution and democracy Although a proposal for de-ethnicizing political emancipation initially sound attractive, it might pose enormous political difculties when it comes to actual practice of it in concrete terms. Indeed, democratic re-constitution of political communities under conditions of a bitter, protracted and intractable ethnic conict like in Sri Lanka is, by no means, is an easy task. I propose two ways to grapple with this difcult task in Sri Lanka. The rst is to view the Sri Lankan state as the institutional embodiment of certain normative principles that would bring all communities together to from a collective political association. This approach may seek to answer the question as to why Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and other regional ethnic/identity communities should stay together to form a political community even after two decades of war and violence. Or to put the question more bluntly, why should Sinhalese and Tamil communities, or Muslim and Tamil communities, who have experienced years of enmity in the recent past, should decide to stay together within a single state form? The answer to this question should be one that can transcend pragmatic or coercive bases of political union among communities. Pragmatic political unions have no lasting foundations to survive circumstances and conditions of crisis. Indeed, pragmatic political union can easily rationalize political disunion too, on pragmatic, utilitarian grounds. In contrast, normative principles of political union are higher goals, secular-transcendental valueslike justice, fairness, equality, tolerance and collective happinessthat can best be achieved collectively when ethnic communities, to put in the language of Hannah Arendt, act in unison. The second approach is to discover, believe in and be convinced of the virtues of continuing democratization of the political spherethe state, its institutions, structures and practices,
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political relations among communities and statesociety relations, etc. in a continuing life of democratic reinvention. In this view, relentless democratization is not a weakness, an evil, but a source of strength, a virtue. This I propose is one sure way in which identity politics among ethnic groups can be re-humanized and the fact of their inter-community differences turned into enabling resources of the democratic populace in diversity. This twin approach to ethnic conict resolution and democratic reform for Sri Lanka as suggested above necessitates a norm-based political agenda the broad outlines of which may be formulated as follows. Firstly, there should be a fresh envisioningindeed, re-envisioningof the state as a voluntary democratic political association of all ethnic and other identity groups. Secondly, the re-envisioning of the state should be a cooperative project among all identity communities in which categories of political imagination should be derived from the future possibilities of greater democratization and political voluntarism, and not from the pre-independence or pre-colonial past inhabited in the historical unconscious. This presupposes, at least for the sake of a new political imagination, the erection of a veil of ignorance concerning most of the past of inter-ethnic encounters, from yesterday backwards. Thirdly, political and social emancipation of all identity communities as well as individual citizens should be inscribed in all spheres of state and civil society interventions. Fourthly, and nally, is the re-democratization of the politics of Sri Lankas Tamil society, which is crucial to sustaining the democratic impulses of Sinhalese and Muslim societies. Sri Lankas Tamil society has lost most of its democratic bearings in the context of a protracted and destructive war. As long as the politics and everyday life of Tamil society remains militarized, democratic impulses in Sinhalese and Tamil societies are most likely to remain weak and vulnerable. De-linking the ethnic question from the war is an essential pre-condition for the re-democratization of Sri Lankas Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese polities. The formulation of a new democratic agenda in the above outline is a difcult yet productive enterprise. Its creative aspect can be derived from the fact that it will have to immediately confront and politically negotiate two powerful nation-ist fantasies, produced by two energetic appropriative desires of the state: the Sinhala-centric unitary state and the Tamil-centric separate state [14]. Being ethnic fantasies, these two projects cannot reconcile with each other in the real world of democratic politics. De-fantasizing these nation projects is therefore fundamentally important for Sri Lankas democratic political future. But, who will de-fantasize Sri Lankas future? In a polity where the ruling class groups have abdicated their key class responsibilities, the question of the historical agency for democratic re-envisioning of the state should come to the fore in any serious discussion on Sri Lankas political tomorrow. Similarly, there is also the need for a modernizing collective fantasy of democracy, around which the mass political energies can be remobilized. This is indeed where the social emancipatory ideals of democracy need to be summoned back to dene our terms of political imagination.
4. Four models for conict resolution and constitutional reform In this section, I will briey outline, with critical comments, four perspectives, or models that seek to combine the goal of ethnic conict resolution with a program of power
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sharing and constitutional reform. The rst is the liberal peace model, which is being pursued by the international community. The second is the consociational model which has a powerful theoretical presence in legal and political science discussions on ethnic accommodation in plural societies. The third is the justice model which has primarily emerged in relation to South Africa, but nds resonance in human rights approach to peace and democracy. The fourth is the contractarianism which seeks to link contemporary concerns of ethnic peace and democratic accommodation in a value-based political covenant. These models may have considerable overlapping in terms of the issues they seek to address; yet they differ in their political conclusions and their implications for program-oriented proposals for reform. 4.1. The agenda of liberal peace A liberal peace program for Sri Lanka, linked to the neo-liberal project of global governance and global humanitarian action, is underway with the participation of the international community. Its objective is to manage Sri Lankas conict within a framework acceptable to regional and global powers. Begun in early 2000, this liberal peace program is built on the following components: (i) Application of pressure by the international community on the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to work out a mutually acceptable compromise through negotiation; (ii) A negotiated peace settlement between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, mediated and underwritten by the international custodians of Sri Lankas peace; (iii) A Constitutional guarantee of federalism through the creation of regional councils to persuade the LTTE to give up its separatist goal; (iv) The promise of massive international donor support for post-conict reconstruction, rehabilitation and resettlement in the conict areas. There appears to be a crucial political assumption that has animated this particular framework of internationally mediate peace: there should not be a new ethnic state in South Asia and therefore Sri Lankas present crisis should not lead to the island states territorial disintegration. Thus, the solution envisaged for Sri Lanka rules out the separate state project of Tamil nationalism. The envisaged solution is built on the devolutionthrough-regional councils approach of the present Sri Lankan government. While it is too early to predict the success or failure of this initiative, recent experiences of internationally mediated conict settlement efforts, particularly in the Irish and Israeli Palestinian conicts, may enable us to be cautious and skeptical about the outcome of negotiation. Building peace after the settlement agreement is signed might be as complex as the path to negotiation itself, because the post-settlement process is sure to enter a period of profound uncertainty and unpredictability. One paradox of protracted conicts is that when the conict is on, the protagonists maintain a certain control over its course and trajectories whereas a peace agreement might subvert the certainty and continuity of control that existed under conditions of conict, violence and war. An agreement may also create new space for re-activation for the social and political forces that are linked to
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the war and violence. The initial shortcomings in the implementation of the agreement, or the disequilibrium created by the peace accord itself, can set in motion the spoiler dynamics against the settlement agreement. Other likely difculties would involve the decline of public support for peace when the implementation begins to face obstacles, diminishing enthusiasm among international custodians and support constituencies, change of regimes with political goals framed outside the settlement process and last, but not the least, the new fears concerning the outcome of the settlement itself. Usually, the settlement-implementation process is a slow, complex and often a painful one. Its proper and unhindered implementation will require an unwavering commitment to peace and conict resolution at the expense of partisan or unilateral goals. International mediation is not a guarantee to ensure that parties to the settlement agreement will stick to its terms and envisaged outcomes; the presence of international custodians of peace is only a necessary but not sufcient condition for the success of a negotiated peace process. In a long-drawn out process of post-settlement complexities, it is ultimately the domestic political forces that could make the peace process a lasting success. The challenge for Sri Lanka is not merely to conclude a negotiation process between the government and the LTTE in a settlement agreement. Neither is it one merely concerned with constitutional reform. It indeed concerns the re-building of Sri Lankan state in such a manner that all ethnic communities could identify themselves with the state while relating to each other in a spirit of solidarity and cooperation. Termination of the war, resolution of the conict, reconciliation of ethnic relations, deep-federalizing the state, addressing the root causes of the conict, prevention of conict repetitionthese are tasks that will require a framework with both institutional-structural as well as normative foundations. A key policy conclusion to be drawn from the above discussion is that, for Sri Lanka, the two projects of ethnic conict resolution and constitutional reform can be approached from a mutually linked two-stage perspective. The focus of stage one could be on seeking and building processes, institutions, practices and structures necessary for conict negotiation, settlement-making and implementation, economic and community reconstruction, constitutional reform and peace-building. The stage two is concerned with the laying down of a rm political-normative foundation for the post-civil war Sri Lankan state that can bind in a common purpose all ethnic communities with each other as well as the state. The agenda for the second stage presupposes a program that goes beyond an internationally mediated and minimally reformist liberal peace framework. How should Sri Lanka enter into a phase of political reconstruction beyond a minimally reformist liberal agenda? I reect on this question in the next section of this paper in discussing three models, appropriate for reection, for conict resolution and redemocratization in societies of ethnic conict. 4.2. Consociational constitutions for ethnically divided societies What kind of democracy would Sri Lanka nd politically relevant in grappling with the task of restoring ethnic peace? How could Sri Lanka work towards pluralizing the postcivil war state in a mode of deep federalization while erasing the possibilities for majoritarian democracy to emerge at national, regional as well as local levels? Consociationalism offers options that are worth examining for Sri Lanka. It is based on
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the idea of a grand consensus among ethnic political elites. Arendt Lijphart began to propose consociational democratic alternatives in the early 1970s, for societies which were ethnically divided. As Lijphart observed in his comparative study of democracies, a key problem of democracy in plural societies was the emergence of majoritarian democracy [19]. Particularly in societies that had parliamentary governments of the Westminster model, majoritarian democracy had meant the rule of ethnic majorities that had in turn made democracies unstable. Lijphart also argued that the majoritarian plural democracies lacked the most basic premise for the functioning of the democratic system: shifting majorities. Under these circumstances, majoritarian democracies tended to create permanent minorities. Almost as a rule they happened to be ethnic minorities with no say in government, and with no hope of being in the governing majority. In this winner-takesall system, ethnic minorities are usually excluded from political power and the conicts involving the minorities are easily channeled into extra-parliamentary and violent forms. To manage the conicts that have arisen out of the contradictions of the majoritarian democracy, Lijphart suggested a four-point formula on which the governments could be re-arranged. They are: (i) The creation of a grand ethnic coalition of all ethnic groups. This meant to facilitate coalitions not among political parties, but among ethnic groups with the aim of managing ethnic conicts. (ii) Powers and the ofces of the government should be proportionately shared and distributed among ethnic groups. (iii) Each ethnic group in the coalition should have the power to veto public policy, in order to safeguard its own ethnic interests. (iv) The guarantee of ethnic autonomy, or segmented autonomy, in a system of federalism or devolution. The consociational proposal has a fundamental premise concerning conicts. It is exceedingly difcult to resolve conicts in deeply divided societies where conicts are often seen as intractable. Therefore, it is appropriate and meaningful for ethnically divided societies to accept and live with, instead of ignoring, the fact that ethnic divisions are a social reality. Ethnic cleavages are an inescapable reality and therefore it is only prudent to design the system of government and public policy to deal with that reality. It then assumes that the task of conict management should start from the top, with leaders of ethnic groups. Understanding and accommodation among leaders would provide the best starting point for a stable political order. It is much easier and even pragmatic for leaders, than for the followers, to accommodate. In that sense, as the consociational model further assumes, it is wrong to suggest that democracy is unworkable in plural societies with ethnic cleavages. What needs to be done is to re-work the systems of democratic representation and regime formation so that no signicant sub-group or minority in society is left out without a say in government. This requires the building of political institutions for both democracy and conict management. Federalism and proportional representation are meant to promote political institution building. Other key elements of a consociational, federalized polity are the proportional electoral system, constitutionally mandated minority representation in the executive branch of the government, minority protection
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through the mechanism of minority veto and segmented autonomy for ethnic groups in the internal matters of government. Quite apart from the limited vision of conict management implied in the consociational model, the idea of a Grand Ethnic Coalition could easily become a grand authoritarian alliance [13]. Consociationalist authoritarianism can come in a variety of forms. Malaysia is a case in point. Malaysia has an ethnic coalition as the ruling alliance; it also has a semi-federalist governmental structure. Yet, the ruling alliance is a corporatist entity with its own authoritarian version of Asian democracy. The primary characteristic of the Malaysian corporatism is the premise that only the ruling alliance has a legitimate claim to rule the country. Rather than accommodation, a consociational alliance may even re-ensure for the hegemonic ethnic majority its own dominant status while enabling, through segmented autonomy, territorialized minority rule to practice intolerant hegemony over local and social minorities. Without constitutional guarantees for individual rights as well as rights of the local-peripheral minorities, the principle of segmented autonomy may run the risk of transforming minorities with territorialized power into authoritarian majorities in regional ethnic enclaves. The Muslim fear of Tamil hegemony in the Eastern province is based on this possibility inherent in the principle of segmented sovereignty. Without constitutional protection, local and cultural minorities that are not resourceful enough to enter the grand ethnic coalition would suffer insecurity, discrimination and even oppression. As Bellamy points out, consociationalism may prove a largely negative and doubly exclusionary strategy because it works by excluding new and potentially less manageable groups from attaining a political voice, and on the other hand by encouraging an increasingly exclusive identity amongst the various segments it does recognize [1]. Another difculty with consociationalism is that it is essentially a utilitarian enterprise; it assumes that the political institutions can and should be manipulated for the maximum benet of the largest possible number. This is a dangerous premise, both politically and philosophically. The consociational alliance and the sharing of power among leaders of ethnic communities are pragmatic enterprises, which may often lack lasting moral, or normative, bases required for and by a democratic-plural polity. They are also devoid of explicit ethical-normative links between the ethnic leaders and larger society that is made of many ethnic communities. It runs the danger of valorizing and essentializing ethnicity in post-conict conditions as well. Similarly, the consociational approach does not say why the minority leaders should trust the majority leaders at all. Finally, there has already emerged a proto-consociational model in Sri Lanka providing some valuable insights into the political validity of ethnic coalitions. Since 1994, the Sri Lankan government has been organized in such a way that political parties representing all ethnic communitiesSinhalese, North-East Tamil, Plantation Tamil and Muslimhave been in a coalition, sharing positions in the legislature as well as the Cabinet. In the balance of power in parliament, ethnic minority parties wield considerable leverage, because no Sinhalese political party can form a government without entering into a coalition with Tamil and Muslim political parties to secure a parliamentary majority and survive. Even with that political leverage, the political capacity of minority parties to effect and shape public policy has been insignicant. In a competitive and corrupt political culture in which the articulation and mobilization of ethnic demands can easily turn into
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a means of sheer accumulation of political power and pecuniary gains, there is no compelling reason for ethnic parties in coalition regimes to dene their behavior and conduct in accordance with consociational goals. 4.3. Justice through the state model Conict resolution in societies with institutionalized oppression, inequalities and violence requires the creation of new political and constitutional structures that enshrine social and political justice as well as human rights. The constitutional model developed for South Africa by Justice Albie Sachs advocated a procedure for transforming South African society into a more just scheme of cooperation so that in the new order social stability depends on a democratic social structure respecting individual human rights and distributing opportunities and social goods reasonably fairly among citizens [7]. Sachs seeks to combine political justice with social justice against a backdrop of devastating poverty, racial and social oppression and inequality that had been major causes of conict in South Africa. For Sachs, a meaningful change required that these issues were addressed by the state. It was therefore necessary to construct a constitution that ensured a potent government with maximum ability for political action, a legal framework that secures the direction of change, while safeguarding basic rights of the individual against the state [8]. Thus, democratic state building is a major theme in Sachs model of political change. The state should be transformed into a powerful instrument of social change and of safeguarding citizens rights and liberties from illegitimate state intervention. In apartheid South Africa, the historical experience of the state has been one in which the state was never allowed to carry out any social change function. Instead, the state was the supreme instrument of social oppression and extreme inequalities. Against this historical backdrop, Sachs sought a transformation of the post-apartheid South African state. His project was to turn the post-apartheid state into an agent of democratic change. Therefore, in Sachs constitutional scheme, the state should be unitary and it was expected to remain relatively centralized. This unitarist approach was based on a specic critique of federalism in South Africa where the ethnic majority, the black nation, was seeking political power in the new democratic order. The old order was not one of majoritarian democracy in the sense of Lijphart, but a minoritarian system of oppressive exclusion. Sachs critique of federalism is that it was a way of depriving majority rule in South Africa of any meaning, by drawing boundaries around race and ethnicity. Federalism was also thought to prevent the emergence of a national government, keep the black population divided, prevent any economic restructuring of the country, and free the economically prosperous areas of the country of any responsibility for helping develop the vast poverty-stricken areas [25]. Sachs proposal for democratization for South Africa was to have a strong Bill of Rights in the Constitution, setting up of a government based on the principle of separation of powers, and creating decentralization and institutions of local democracy [26]. Gloppen notes that Sachs constitutional proposal for South Africa was guided by the twin concerns of distributive justice and the protection of individual rights and freedoms [9]. This is exactly where some Rawlsian inuence on Sachs may also be seen. Sachs wanted to base his constitutional proposals on a set of normative principles and in that
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justice was central. The primacy of justice should give legitimacy to the state, because the political order is seen as fair. But the system should be seen fair by the majority of the South African population. Unless the basic rules of society are seen as just and fair by the majority, and indeed serve the majoritywho had remained dispossessed under the White minority rulethey are unlikely to generate the support and legitimacy necessary for stability. This position took Sachs along a course that is counter to the consociational scheme, which interestingly had an appeal to the South African white minority. Sachs called it multiracial apartheid and described the consociational devises proposed by the Whites as having two fundamental principles: there shall be no majority rule and there shall be no rapid moves to end the inequalities produced by apartheid [27]. The actual post-settlement constitutional reform process in South Africa offers extremely useful lessons concerning the working of constitutional models for societies in political transition. In the South African constitution-making process, there were sharp debates between contending schools of the justice and consociational models. The interim Constitution of 1993, which was essentially a statement of constitutional principles, contained federal as well as consociational principles while reiterating the commitment to democracy, human rights, universal suffrage, equality before the law, non-discrimination and afrmative action. However, in the second phase of constitution-making, which started in April 1994 with the Constituent assembly, the consociational scheme, mainly preferred by the National Party of the white minority suffered setbacks while the ANCs justice model had more support in the Constituent Assembly. The overall structure of the nal constitution adopted in May 1996, according to Gloppen, resembles Albie Sachs justice model. It provides for a basically centralist and majoritarian political structure, with no grand coalition requirements. It also proposes a strong reliance on the legal system, both in terms of balancing the powers of the government through judicial review and in terms of facilitating social change [10]. 4.4. Contractarian model of ethnic justice and fairness Formulated by this writer a few years ago in relation to Sri Lanka, this approach is premised on the belief that ethnic conict resolution in deeply divided societies calls for a fresh re-conguration of the bases of political association among different identity communities [28]. This approach also posits that ethnic conict resolution would require a new social contract to provide the moral and political bases for the post-conict state. It was developed as an attempt to appropriate Lockean contractarianism, particularly the liberal premise that the government was a trusteeship arrangement among equal citizens, through the Rawlsian concept of justice. The liberal notion of a contract serves in this model as a mode of conceptual imagination, a metaphor, to signify the proposal for the restoration of the politico-normative foundations of the state. In societies that have internal rebellions and separatist movements, there are sections of the society who do not accept the moral authority of the state. They refuse political obligation to the state and in fact project dis-obligation as the legitimate response to the state. The willingness to disassociation from the state by communities is, paradoxically, one of the major problems of the modern state. And, those dis-associationists often happen to be ethnic minorities. This background congures the political project of conict resolution and political reform into
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a unied goal that goes beyond the social engineering objectives of the consociational enterprise. The contractarian models insistence on ethnic justice and ethnic fairness is justied on two grounds. Firstly, it is important for any society to formulate a set of moral and normative standards, not pragmatic or utilitarian, against which the institutions and processes, which are created for conict resolution, can be evaluated and their performance appraised. The second reason is linked to the political appeal of the claims to fairness and justice made by the minorities. The task of bringing secessionist minorities back to the state requires moral basis so that the minorities can politically return as equals with equal worth. Thus, ethnic fairness and justice can very well provide the normative framework for the terms of an egalitarian ethnic/social contract. In this contractarian imagination, the state is a political association the membership of which is obtained by all individuals as well as all ethnic groups as moral equals and equally valuable agents. The state should be an association which is both fair and just so that each individual and ethnic group is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty of others. How should the concepts of ethnic justice and ethnic fairness be determined and by whom? The perspective offered by the contractarian perspective assumes a two-phase approachignoring ethnicity and subsequent return to ethnicity. Initially, a de-ethnic approach is necessary to recongure all ethnic groups in the polity are moral equals and equally valuable. Therefore, they do not need to consider their ethnic identity when joining the association of the state through the new social contract. In other words, to be equals and equally valuable, the ethnic groups would disregard whether they are Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims. The communities enter the contract with the privilege of ignorance of their ethnic identity and become participants to the contract behind a veil of ethnic ignorance. Thus, the privilege of ignorance enables them to choose the principles of ethnic justice/injustice while being in a position to dene fairness untainted by ethnic interests or prejudices. This stage of ignoring ethnic identities to enter into the contract for political association is analogous to the State of Nature in the classical contract theory and to the Original Position in Rawls theory of justice. In determining ethnic justice and ethnic fairness, a Rawlsian bargaining process is possible. For example, each ethnic group is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Similarly, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benet of the least advantaged, and attached to ofces and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. Finally, all social goodsliberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respectare to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored. In this perspective of ethnic justice, the insistence is on two counts. Firstly, a measure of egalitarianism among ethnic groups of unequal sizes and strength is determined by a principle of shared distribution of opportunities and disadvantages. Secondly, just institutions and practices should be the object of a unanimous agreement among effected communities. This approach to group justice seeks to de-ethnicize the reasons for ethnic communities to stay together in a state. For Sri Lankas immediate politics, there are three main implications of this contractarian approach. First, the process for constitutional reforms and conict resolution should be transformed into a process of
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negotiating a new social contract. Second, the Constitution should be a charter of ethnic fairness and justice. It should also be a peace treaty among ethnic and political communities in conict. And third, sharing and devolution of state power, its institutions of governance, just electoral processes and public policythe ultimate standard to measure their validity and performance should the a consensus arrived at by all ethnic groups acting as equals.
5. Covenantal federalism for Sri Lanka Taken together, the three models of conict resolution and political reform discussed above offer some vital impetus for imagining afresh the way in which the political communities could be re-built in Sri Lanka as well as other societies in conict. They all suggest, with varying degree of emphasis, that power sharing should be the kernel of any meaningful political agenda for reform. They also suggest, with different degrees of intensity, that power sharing alone would not be adequate to resolve conicts and reform political structures. From the liberal peace models notion of agreementit may be interpreted as commitment to mutual promises made by parties to a peace dealto the contractarian models notion of de-ethnicized ethnic justice and fairness, there is the underlying assumption of sustainability of the peace and political reform programs. For sustainability, I argue that treating a peace treaty as well as an extensively power-sharing constitution as components of covenant, inviolable but alterable, has an advantage. Since all communities as well as individuals are subscribing to the covenant, they have an ownership-holding relationship to political institutions. This will in turn make reforms feasible, lasting and sustainable. Covenantal approach merely seeks to make all citizens stakeholders to peace and democratic reform. Indeed, the political re-association of estranged ethnic communities within a re-invented nation-state can be best imagined through terms and categories available in the covenantal tradition of politics. Although the covenantal tradition has roots in the South Asian intellectual history, it has been mostly appropriated in recent years by individual politicians to legitimize their corporatist political goals [6]. My proposal is to ground the federalistcontractarian proposals on the covenantal foundation so that the idea of re-working the modern states associational bases could be vernacularized and in turn brought to the center of the indigenous discourse of democratic constitutionalism. One of the greatest advantages of the covenant model is its premise of absolute egalitarianism among actors who join together to form the political association of the state. Daniel J. Elazar, the leading contemporary exponent of the covenant model writes: The Covenantal model functions on an entirely different basis [from the Westminster-style parliamentarism], characterized schematically by a matrix, a group of equal cells framed by common institutions. Its founding comes about because equal individuals or individual entities join together through a covenant or political compact as equals to unite and establish common governing institutions without sacricing their respective integrities. For the matrix model, the constitution is preeminent since it embodies the agreement that joins the entities or individuals
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together and establishes agreed upon rules of the game which all have to observe. Its politics that ows from that constitution is a politics of equals based on negotiation and bargaining and designed to be as open as possible, where all the actors will know what is happening. Administration is dependent upon the constitution of its authority and politics for its powers. This system is not hierarchical, even if hierarchies are sometimes organized within it. Nor does its have a single center. Rather it is based upon multiple centers, each constitutionally protected. Its apotheosis is a federal system in which the constituent units are represented in the framing government and also preserve their own existence, authority, and powers in those areas which are not delegated to the framing institutions [4]. The long quote from Elazar is worth for its simple re-statement of principles and virtues that a federal political community, rebuilt on the image of a covenant, should contain and nourish. All are non-hierarchical and egalitarian partners to the covenant. Their political conduct is open, transparent and does not transgress limits and capacity already agreed upon. It is poli-centric, which is one of the most important qualities for a state in plural societies in conict over sovereignty. The practical, working implications of the covenantal proposal is not particularly complicated. Some of the procedural and institutional aspects required for its initial formation are already there. It suggests two basic steps: (i). There should be a peace treaty involving all communities and seeking the termination of the conict and the new constitution re-dening the foundations of the state. It should be conceived and written around the normative principles and political virtues that emanate from the concrete needs of peace, reconciliation and democratization. For example, peace and reconciliation among all, distribution of democratic rights and entitlements on principles of ethnic justice and fairness, inclusion and pluralism, sharing of sovereignty, delity to mutual political promises are some of the norms and virtues that can give collective ethical sanction to the terms of political re-association. In this approach, the constitution is both a peace treaty and a covenant while the peace treaty is the normative preface to the constitution which is the covenant giving expression to virtues of the political community. (ii) Since both the peace treaty and the constitution form together the covenant of the pluralistic political community, they need to be legitimized through a plebiscital consent of the people. The constitution should be drafted by a popularly elected Constituent Assembly and approved by the people at a Referendum. This will make the people, not only the ethnic leaders, stake holders for the terms, institutions and processes of peace-making and democratization. It is ultimately the popular legitimacy that will turn a constitution into a covenant. It will also give the covenant the character of a charter for political emancipation.
6. Deep federalization and non-territorial power-sharing In Sri Lankas present debate on federalism and power sharing, the main focus continues to remain on political relations between the Sinhalese majority community and the Tamil community, or the state and the Tamil community. This debate has a number of features that do not bring to attention the possibilities of multi-level, multi-community,
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power sharing arrangements. Firstly, there is a peculiar and of course incomplete cartographic imagination of the special plurality of the island, which is often expressed in the idea that Sri Lankas ethnic conict is territorially constituted in terms of NorthEast and the South. Secondly, the two territorial entities of North and East and the South are also often imagined as ethnically undifferentiated social-geographical entities. Muslim communities in the Eastern Province have often challenged this particular political mapping of Sri Lanka, reminding, at times in violent ways, that Muslims represent a third ethnic group in the equation in the political settlement to the ethnic conict. Thirdly, federalist options are understood primarily as constituting a bi-nation future for Sri Lanka in which Sinhalese and Tamil nations would nd a constitutional arrangement of regional autonomy through negotiations among Sinhalese and Tamil political elites. This constitutes the fourth characteristic of Sri Lankas present debate on power sharing: it is indeed a form of top-down federalism, or federalism from above. Those limitations notwithstanding, the present federalist debate is indeed concerned with re-fashioning Sri Lankas future political architecture. While recognizing the limits of the debate, it is important to generate a process of political thinking so that in the emerging new architecture of Sri Lankan state, the regional/local ethnic minorities are not excluded from power sharing arrangements. This calls for a form of inclusive federalism, or as already proposed in this chapter, a process of deep federalization. Before exploring constitutional options that can address the issue of multiple minorities leading to deep and inclusive federalist arrangements, let us rst examine how the question minority representation and participation in power-sharing has begun to gure in Sri Lankas political debate as well as in constitutional theory. In an insightful essay on the political-economy, cultural and social consequences of Sri Lankas protracted ethnic war, Rajasingham-Senanayake has drawn our attention to the need in any devolution plan to eschew the dominant political wisdom which had long believed the Sinhalese to be an absolute majority and Tamils, Muslims and all others as absolute minorities in Sri Lanka [22]. Rajasingham-Senanayake asserts that for devolution to work the magic of peace in Sri Lanka, it must focus on localized minorities [24]. The concern that Rajasingham-Senanayake expressed is that Sri Lankas devolution proposals that were drafted in the late 1990s did not take into account the rights of local minorities. In this critique, the devolution discourse as evolved in Sri Lanka has been founded along the logic of ethnic nationalists of Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities, with the consequence that it turned the concept of ethnic self-determination into territorialized ethnic enclaves, or ethnic homelands. The outcome of that process would make ofcial the ethnic enclave mentality as well as fears, suspicions and cultural differences that have been built in the course of the protracted war and violence. In this argument, devolution for multi-culturalism and pluralism should have arrangements to safeguard the rights of local minorities while ensuring their safety and security from the hegemonic possibilities of the local majorities. Indeed, the question of the possibility of minorities persecuting or oppressing their own minorities under arrangements of federalism, or regional autonomy, has in recent years been a concern among political theorists. Dening rights of the minorities in opposition to the majority, even against the legitimate claims of the majority, is only one side of the complex story of minority rights. The other side of it is that federalist power-sharing
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arrangements are meant, consciously and by design, to make a national minority a regional majority. Meanwhile, an ethnic minority can very well be a pluralist community in its ethno-social composition. As Green points out, the minority groups whose claims are dened against the majority are rarely homogeneous [11]. They often contain other minorities. Green calls them internal minorities. We may also call them marginal minorities in the sense that they are marginalized in the mainstream discourse of minority rights as well as in most of the constitutional arrangements of minority-oriented power sharing. By posing the issue of internal minorities, Green also seeks to address a theoretical concern about modern liberal constitutionalism: doesnt the contemporary liberalisms concern with the protection of minority collectivities or groups itself result in illiberal consequences? For instance, social groups that it protects and promotes can themselves be enemies of liberal values. As feminists argue, liberal theory and practice secures the family from the interference of the state, but rarely protects women and children from the predations of the family. Liberalism also secures religious liberty, but permits religions to suppress their minority members. The discourse of minority rights assumes that minorities have rights even when they are minorities, as well as because they are members of certain minority groups. The protection of internal minorities from the predations of the larger minority is a complex challenge to modern liberalism and Green concludes by saying that without respect for internal minorities, a liberal society risks becoming a mosaic of tyrannies.The task of making respect for minority rights real is one that falls not just to the majority but also to the minority groups themselves [12]. However, there is an inherent inadequacy of the conventional federalist model when it comes to the power-sharing possibilities for smaller, regional and dispersed minorities. In a nutshell, the classical federalist principle is about spatial organization of state power. It is often called upon to mediate in conicts between majority and minority ethnic communities within nation states. In a way, the democratic ideal of minority protection is now being viewed as a particular task of federalism. When democratic and minority protection tasks of federalism are put together, and further when both federalism and democracy interpreted as constituting principles, an interesting problem arises: Can the equality of all citizens be understood in a way that permits also local, i.e. group liberty [5]? If federal democracys underlying basis is defense of liberty by preserving diversity, then it has to be respectful for both individual and minority rights. However, territorial federalism has an inherent dilemma, because it operates with nested entities without allowing overlapping constitutive units. As we noted earlier, although territorialized distribution and sharing of state power is viewed as a solution to conict among major ethnic or national groups, it has a potential to leave out local, dispersed or internal minorities. This question is clearer in the case of bi-national states. The mere fact that there are two national groups in a state does not necessarily mean that the state is a binational or multinational one. The question of local minorities poses itself in another way, giving rise to their status of being what has been called double minorities [20]. While the traditional idea of federalism is based on the notion of territory-based regional autonomy, in instances where the federal units are not ethnically homogenous, the territorial principle of federalism is likely to be inadequate to address ethnic heterogeneity. Indeed, it may even generate
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tension among communities living within the federal unit since a federal system has a tendency to providing incentives for structuring group/class conicts along territorial lines [2]. A potential basis for such inter-ethnic tension within federal units would be the feeling among small ethnic communities of being a minority within their federal unit while being members of a national minority. They might remain un-represented even within a system of power sharing. They might feel their cultures under threat. More important, they might feel insecure and even unprotected. The other related question is that there is always the possibility of signicant proportions of a minority to live outside the federal unit that is controlled by their larger, federated community. In multi-ethnic societies with the freedom of movement and spatial mobility, and due to economic and historical reasons, as well as a result of how provincial or administrative units are territorially organized, there may exist dispersed minorities. Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka constitute such dispersed minorities in a number of provinces, particularly in the Western, Southern, Sabaragamuwa, Uva and Central provinces. As McGarry points out, one way of addressing the problem of such dispersed minorities is the re-drawing of the initial internal boundaries of the federal system, as it has been done in Nigeria, India and Switzerland, so that the minority and constituent unit coincide better [21]. But, this option can be a complex one, depending on the specicities of the context. Provincial boundaries in societies of deep ethnic cleavages can be contested by some groups while some other groups might view them as historically given, unalterable and xed. Altering internal borders in Sri Lankas context are a difcult proposition to negotiate. There is also the specic case of Sri Lankas plantation Tamil community that has not been overtly discussed in the present debate on power sharing. As we already noted, the focus of the dominant power-sharing debate has been on a bi-national, or bi-community, federalist arrangement. But the peculiarity of the Sri Lankan case of power sharing is that seven units of devolution have been established in the Sinhalese majority region of the island, on the territorial basis of provincial boundaries. In these seven provinces, representatives of the plantation community have found their way to the devolved provincial assemblies only in two provinces, in the Central and Uva provinces. However, there are sizeable plantation Tamil minorities living in Sabaragamuwa (in Kegalle and Ratnapura districts), Southern (in Matara and Galle districts) and Western (Kalutara district) provinces. Political claims of the plantation Tamil community have not been an integral part of Sri Lankas mainstream Tamil nationalist struggle either, although occasionally their citizenship issue has been raised. Even if the mainstream Tamil nationalism represented plantation Tamil interests and political aspirations, working out of a system of power sharing on the basis of political homogeneity of the two Tamil communities would have been a complex issue, primarily due to the geographic incontiguity of regions which they inhabit. Even within federal units, linguistic and cultural minorities can be discriminated. As Sri Lankas own experience demonstrates, forming a bi-national state through federalist power-sharing is an exceedingly difcult issue, although at the heart of the conict between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil nationalist is the question of two nations forming two separate states or a one, federalist state. Even assuming that a bi-national federal state is formed with the consent of the two national groups, constitutional and political measures will have to be put in place to avoid the tyranny of the majority and
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the majoritys control over the minority at sub-national levels. As political and constitutional theorists argue, this cannot be achieved through mere goodwill, but only by means of consensus that has institutional foundations. Combination of territorial and non-territorial forms of federalism is one creative option for institutionalizing consensus among multiple minorities in a system of power-sharing. A case that exemplies such synthesis is the Belgium model of power-sharing. The Belgium constitution has a unique feature that combines conventional territorial federalism with a non-territorial form of federalism which is quite innovative. Belgiums federalism is a recognition of one of the central features of its politics since the 19th century, namely, the tension between Dutch, French and German speaking linguistic communities. Religion and class have also contributed to deep divisions in multi-cultural Belgium. Intercommunity tensions had also historically created nationalist/regionalist politics, gradually leading to the recent federalization of the Belgium state [17]. Indeed, the novel power-sharing arrangements of the present Belgium constitution could be understood against the background of Dutch speaking Flemish movements historical struggle for cultural/linguistic identity and the more recent Walloon movement of German speaking people for economic autonomy. It reects the specic process of state formation in Belgium in which regionsFlanders, Wallonia and Brusselsand linguistic identity communitiesFrench, Dutch and German-speakinghave been seen as the building blocks on which a decentralized state would have to be built. The Belgium experiment of territorial as well as non-territorial federalism is found in the peculiar arrangement that involves two different types of constituent units: Communities and Regions. Communities were initially created in 1970 and later constitutionalized in 1993. There are three CommunitiesFlemish, French and German and three RegionsFlanders, Wallonia and Brussels. Communities have powers going beyond territorial units, encompassing the linguistic communities who live across Regions. Community competencies include powers over language, culture, education and personal affairs that covers health care and social services. The Regions have power over regional economic development, urban planning, the administration of provinces and communes, housing, public works, water, energy, transportation, the environment, vocational training, agricultural policy and international trade. The Federal government has retained powers over nancial and monetary policy, justice, social security, some aspects of health care, some public corporations, national defense, and the direction of foreign relations. Regions and Communities have limited powers to conclude international treaties [18]. The principle of territorial and non-territorial power sharing in Belgium is reected at the level of central or national institutions of governance as well. Its main aspect relates to the composition as well as the role of the Senate. Introduced with the constitutional reform of 1993, the new Belgium Senate includes different categories of Senators, accommodating both Regions and Communities. Forty of the Senators are directly elected while 21 are drawn from the Community Councils. Of the 21 Senators representing Community Councils, 20 are from both the French and Flemish Community Councils (10 from each) and one from the German-speaking community. In Sri Lanka, there are three primary areas in which any future solution to the minority problems needs to be concerned with. They are representational rights, security guarantees and access to state power. The rst calls for constitutional guarantees for all minorities to
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secure representation in the assemblies of governance in parliament, provincial councils as well as local government bodies. To ensure the translation of such constitutional guarantees into institutional practice, it is necessary to reform the electoral system. There are mechanisms for special representation for smaller minorities, who would not stand a chance in the normal electoral systems, that a new Sri Lankan system could creatively incorporate. The question of security guarantees for smaller minorities can be partially addressed by means of ensuring representational rights at the three levels of governance by assemblynational, provincial and local. To ensure greater security for them, measures of afrmative action should be provided for, particularly through non-territorial mechanisms of federalism. Access to state power encompasses representation, legislative decisionmaking and participation in executive process, all at national, provincial as well as local levels. In concrete terms, this calls for (i) territorial as well as non-territorial federalism, and (ii) federalizing national, provincial and local assemblies of governance. In framing these constitutional arrangements, the general principle that could be adopted is binational multi-community federalism. This principle can provide for power-sharing arrangements between Sinhalese and Tamil communities on a two-nation approach to constitutional foundations of the state while ensuring power-sharing for regional, local and dispersed minorities as well.
7. Conclusions Sri Lankas experience in recent decades points to a number of key paradoxes as well as possibilities in the politics of power sharing in an ethnically divided society in conict. The countrys modern political and constitutional debate has gone through a history of nearly a century within a framework of ethno-identity interests. Over 50 years of that debate has been on the question of unitarism vs. federalism. But the debate even today remains inconclusive, given the incommensurability of communication between the island nations two main ethno-nationalist projects. However, the countrys constitution has incorporated the principle of power-sharing in its framework of devolution. This, as this paper points out, has two key dimensions. Firstly, even after nearly a century of constitutional and political debate, the opposition to power-sharing with minority communities continues to remain a major obstacle to the real federalization of the polity. Secondly, even though the constitution has created institutions of power sharing in the form of Provincial Councils, the power sharing arrangements remain weak, underdeveloped and subjected to the central government. The issue which this paper raises in this context is that power sharing in a deeply divided society in conict is more than an exercise in altering or re-writing its constitution. It requires the re-constitution of political communities in equality and solidarity. This paper has also argued that federal power sharing in an ethnically divided society is a highly complex political exercise, because of the ethnic political fears generated by the presence in society of a protracted ethnic conict. This paradox is further complicated by the fact that political communities think and act as ethnic communities rst. Their political worth is believed to derive from their ethnicity. In other words, their worlds of political imagination and action are ethnicized. In such a political world of ethnicization,
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the discourse of federalism nds no legitimacy among ethnic majoritarian forces. Indeed, in Sri Lanka, the argument for federalization of the polity has emerged from the Tamil ethnic minority and the pressure for federalist reforms originate from outside entities, the states and institutions of global civil society. Its consequence is felt in the way in which Sinhalese majoritarian political forces have successfully managed to delegitimize the very idea of federalism. Indeed, one conclusion one may arrive at through the Sri Lankan experience is that federalism is not an ethnically neutral concept of constitutionalism. It is an acutely ethnicized category. This paper indeed argued for de-ethnicization of democratic solutions to ethnic questions. However, a process of de-ethnicizing democratic solutions to ethnic grievances cannot even begin without framing the initial package of political-constitutional options partly in ethnic-identity terms. It means, as this paper argued, the working out, at the very outset of a settlement process, of a system of federalist power-sharing among ethnic communities on the basis of their ethnicity. The paradox of ethnic politics is that while it has provided the framework for conict and has failed to provide democratically emancipatory options, it is also the framework within which a solution to the conict has to be initially conceptualized. This paper argued for acknowledging the limits of ethnic imagination in bringing about democratic alternatives to ethnic grievances. It also made a case for recognizing the validity of ethnicity as an organizing principle of post-conict state power. The proposal for both territorial and non-territorial forms of federalism is based on this duplex nature of ethnicitys limitation as well as unavoidability. The idea of deep federalization, proposed in this chapter, is both the recognition of, and a way out from, this dilemma. The challenge for Sri Lanka, as I assert in this paper, is not just about reforming the existing constitutional structures of power sharing, but merging the task of ethnic conict resolution with the transition of the state to post-conict conditions. This calls for the state to be both the subject and object of change at the same timeto be an agent of change while transforming itself. Sri Lankas ruling parties as well as the international community view constitutional reform for power sharing as a necessary pre-condition for ethnic conict resolution. That constitutional reform project has been repeatedly stalled in Sri Lanka precisely because the ethnic conict dees an early constitutionalist settlement. The conclusion one may arrive at from this observation is that in Sri Lanka ethnic conict resolution and constitutional reform are so closely interwoven that one cannot precede or follow the other. I have, however, argued that the link between ethnic conict resolution and political reforms for ethnicity-based power-sharing is so fragile that its realization requires a qualitatively new political consensus, sort of a new social contract, a fresh covenant for political association. Some ideas concerning this symbolic social covenant are outlined in this paper. An imaginatively consociational option in the image of a new ethnic-social covenant would help radicalize the inter-ethnic political consensus for conict resolution as well as deeply federalized power sharing. The discussion developed in this paper also leads to a host of critical and unconventional premises on the state, citizenship, ethnicity, ethnic politics, constitutionalism, power-sharing and legal order. A few may be re-stated as follows in order to recapture the ow of my analysis and argument: Sri Lankas experience of ethnic conict as well as failed attempts at constitutional reform suggest that the existing forms of
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the nation-state as models of political association have already become outdated in the historical context of a protracted ethnic conict. This has been a global historical tendency of state formation during the recent decades. New forms of political organization are likely to emerge out of nation-states in crisis. Among the forms of the state likely to emerge are mono-ethnic mini-states in post-conict societies. But, this form of the state is unlikely to offer a democratic alternative. A key challenge which any new form of the state will be compelled to confront and negotiate concerns the democratic accommodation of ethnic plurality and diversity while pushing to the background exclusively ethnic imaginations of political futures of communities. But, there remains a larger issue that has not yet been adequately dealt with in political or constitutional thinking. It concerns whether ethnic politics could offer democratic alternatives for political emancipation of identity communities. I have pointed out in this paper that Sri Lankas question of power-sharing and federalism is integrally linked with ethnic conict resolution and reconstitution of the post-colonial state. This state reconstitution agenda is framed in historical transition of Sri Lankas post-colonial state to a post-conict state. In that transition, the resolution of Sri Lankas ethnic questions requires democratic solutions to ethnic political grievances and demands of a multiplicity of communities, with overlapping majorityminority status as well as continuing fears of being marginal minorities. Thus, the working out of democratic solutions to ethnic issues will also mean democratic re-constitution of the modern state by reforming and federalizing it from within, in its foundations, at its center and importantly at its periphery and regions. Therefore there is a compelling need to reimagine the project of state in fresh and emancipatory terms. As for my own contribution to this conversation, I have proposed in this chapter a mode of covenantal re-imagination of the state. Yet, such a radically re-constructionist project of politics requires a historical agency that will undertake as integral components of its politics the dual task of ethnic conict resolution and constitutional reform. Whether the Sinhalese ruling class is capable of such a task still remains problematic.
References
[1] R. Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism, Towards a Politics of Compromise, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 126127. [2] Cited in, A. Murphy, Belgiums regional divergence: along the road to federation, In: G. Smith (Ed.), Federalism: The Multiethnic Challenge, Longman, London, 1995, p. 93. [3] J. Darby, The Effect of Violence on Peace Processes, The US Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, 2001, p. 8. [4] D.J. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism, The Great Frontier and the Matrix of Federal Democracy, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1998, pp. 23. This is volume III of Elazars four volume series on The Covenant Tradition in Politics. [5] T. Fleiner, L.R.B. Fleiner, Federalism federal states and decentralization,, In: T. Fleiner, L.R.B. Fleiner (Eds.), Federalism and Multiethnic States, The Case of Switzerland, Institute of Federalism, Fribourg, 2002, p. 39. [6] For example, Sri Lankas President Ranasinghe Premadasa invoked the Sri Lankan tradition of covenantal politics to authenticate his own interpretation of democratic governance as rule by consensus. He argued that democracy was basically consensual politicsjanasannathavadaya in Sinhalesewhich meant a form of authoritarianism derived from the societys total submission to the ruler.
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[7] S. Gloppen, South Africa: the Battle over the Constitution, Dartmouth, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, p. 58. Justice Albie Sachs was a member of ANCs Constitutional Committee and after political transition became a member of the Constitutional Court. He did not offer a fully edged model as such, but his writings contain a framework for justice-based constitutional model. This discussion on the Sachs model is largely indebted to Gloppens work. Among Sachs major writings are: Towards the constitutional reconstruction of South Africa, Lesotho Law Journal 2 (1986); Post-apartheid South Africa, a constitutional framework, World Policy Journal 6(3) (1989); Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1990; Advancing Human Rights in South Africa, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. [8] S. Gloppen, South Africa: the Battle over the Constitution, Dartmouth, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, p. 60. [9] S. Gloppen, South Africa: the Battle over the Constitution, Dartmouth, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, p. 71. [10] S. Gloppen, South Africa: the Battle over the Constitution, Dartmouth, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, p. 215. [11] L. Green, Internal minorities and their rights, In: W. Kymlicka (Ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. [12] L. Green, Internal minorities and their rights, In: W. Kymlicka (Ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 270. [13] Horowitz notes: In democratic conditions, grand coalitions are unlikely, because of the dynamics of intraethnic competition. The very act of forming a multiethnic coalition generates intra-ethnic competition ankingif it does not already exist; what is more, the Asian or African regime which declares that it has a grand coalition probably has, not a consociational democracy, but an ethnically exclusive dictatorship. See, D. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conict, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985. [14] I use the term fantasy here not in its political-pejorative sense, but as a metaphor to describe Sinhalese and Tamil nation-ist imaginations. In using this metaphor, I also have in the back of my mind the horrendous fact that both nationalist projects have succeeded in sending thousands of young men and women to death. Death in custody, in battle eld, under most sadistic torture and in suicide, almost as a voluntary exercise preferred by young men and women to seek the ultimate meaning in life in the negation of individual life. [15] S. Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999. [16] S. Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 17. [17] A. Lecours, Belgium Kingdom of Belgium,, In: A.L. Grifth, K. Nerenberg (Eds.), Handbook of Federal Countries, Forum of Federations, Montreal, 2002. [18] A. Lecours, Belgium Kingdom of Belgium,, In: A.L. Grifth, K. Nerenberg (Eds.), Handbook of Federal Countries, Forum of Federations, Montreal, 2002. [19] A. Lijphart, Consociational democracy, World Politics, 21 (1969) 207225; See also, A. Lijphart, Consociational democracy, In: R.J. Jackson, M.B. Stein (Eds.), Issues in Comparative Politics, St. Martins Press, New York, 1971; A. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, a Comparative Exploration,, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977. [20] J. McGarry, Federal political systems and the accommodation of national minorities, In: A.L. Grifths, K. Nerenberg (Eds.), Handbook of Federal Counties 2002, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2002, p. 425. [21] J. McGarry, Federal political systems and the accommodation of national minorities, In: A.L. Grifths, K. Nerenberg (Eds.), Handbook of Federal Counties 2002, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2002, p. 425. [22] D. Rahasingham-Senanayake, The dangers of devolution: the hidden economies of armed conict, In: R.I. Rotberg (Ed.), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1999. [23] D. Rahasingham-Senanayake, The dangers of devolution: the hidden economies of armed conict, In: R.I. Rotberg (Ed.), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1999. [24] D. Rahasingham-Senanayake, The dangers of devolution: the hidden economies of armed conict, In: R.I. Rotberg (Ed.), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1999, pp. 6667.
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[25] A. Sachs, Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1990, pp. 152153. [26] Sachs counter-federalist arguments ran parallel to some of the old socialist and contemporary Sinhalese nationalist arguments in Sri Lanka. To quote Sachs: [The] concern about the importance of maintaining grass-roots democracy and avoiding the emergence of an over-centralized and unduly bureaucratic state has come strongly from community-based sections of the anti-apartheid movement, giving rise to the possibility that strong forms of local democracy can be developed without dividing the country up into a myriad of political group areas. See, A. Sachs, Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1990. p. 153, emphasis added. [27] A. Sachs, Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1990. p. 5. [28] The contractarian argument I am presenting in this paper has been developed through two previous occasions. It was rst presented in my SWRD Bandaranaike Memorial Lecture held in Colombo on September 26, 1992. A further development of that argument was presented at my paper, Democracy and the State in Multi-Ethnic Societies in Conict: Perspectives from Sri Lanka, presented at the international conference on Democracy and the Rule of Law in a Changing World Order, organized by the Library of Congress and the New York University School of Law and held on March 610, 2000 in Washington, DC and New York. For a critical response to my contractarian argument see, D. Scott, Fashioning Futures, Criticism after Postcolonial, Princeton University Press, 1999. Chapter 7. [29] These observations are also based on the authors interactions with the LTTE leaders as well as sympathizers in JanuaryApril, 1995 and in 2003. [30] B.F. Walter, Designing transition from civil war: demobilization, democratization and commitments to peace, International Security 24 (1999) 1. [31] B.F. Walter, Designing transition from civil war: demobilization, democratization and commitments to peace, International Security 24 (1999) 127. [32] I.W. Zartman, Dynamics and constraints in negotiations in internal conicts, In: I.W. Zartman (Ed.), Elusive Peace, Negotiating an End to Civil Wars, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1995, p. 5. [33] I.W. Zartman, Dynamics and constraints in negotiations in internal conicts, In: I.W. Zartman (Ed.), Elusive Peace, Negotiating an End to Civil Wars, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1995, p. 3. [34] I.W. Zartman, Dynamics and constraints in negotiations in internal conicts, In: I.W. Zartman (Ed.), Elusive Peace, Negotiating an End to Civil Wars, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 2122. emphasis added.

Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Imagination and Democratic Alternatives For Sri Lanka

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* Tel.: C94 11 2 501339; fax: C94 11 2 595563. E-mail address: uyangoda@cmb.ac.lk.

J. Uyangoda / Futures 37 (2005) 959988

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