Practicality of 'federalism'

The Constitutional Madhouse - Part 8

 

By C. A. Chandraprema-March 28, 2019, 7:20 pm

The present constitutional reform process in Sri Lanka is driven entirely by the Northern lobby which is one reason why it has failed to get off the ground. The Muslims and the Up-country Tamils are largely indifferent to the reform proposals. There is little or no appetite among the Sinhala population as well for the devolution proposals that go hand in hand with this constitutional reform process. The Sinhala majority which sees the devolution proposals in the new constitution as a stepping stone to separatism should perhaps be thankful for the self-centered and blinkered attitude of the Northern lobby pushing the constitutional reform process because they have ensured that these reform proposals will not have the support of the vast mass of the minority communities in the country much less that of the Sinhala majority. The proposed new constitution is often described as a ‘federal constitution’. It is certainly that in all but name.

No one should be misled by the rhetoric of the promoters and think that a federal constitution is being proposed for Sri Lanka because federalism is a better form of government than a unitary state. A federal constitution is being proposed only as a measure meant to appease the Northern lobby, to provide a kind of consolation prize after losing a decades long war to carve out a separate state in the North and East of Sri Lanka. None of the other minority communities have aspired to a separate state and in fact when it comes to the Muslims living in the North and East, the creation of a federal state is directly antithetical to their own interests. Clause 237(3) in the proposed draft constitution which provides for the merger of the North and East, subject to a referendum to be held in each of the provinces that are to be merged, is proof that the concerns of the other minority communities have not been taken into account in drafting them.

If the merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces actually takes place, the end result will be that the Tamils will be united in one merged province whereas the Sinhalese will be divided into seven different federal units and the Muslims in the North and East will find themselves a minority within a Tamil majority unit. The origin of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress was due to the setting up of the provincial councils system and what was described at the time as the ‘sell out’ of the Muslims in the North and East.

Federalism can come in two forms; there is the kind of federalism when previously independent entities join to create a federal state of their own free will. Australia, Canada and the United States of America are prime examples of that. The other kind of federalism is where a previously unitary state is broken up into federal units as a way to settle conflicts and demands for separation. In the past several decades, the Western powers have seen federalism as the cure all solution to resolve conflicts within a country. After the end of the cold war in the late 1980s, most of the conflicts that raged in various parts of the world were internal conflicts within states rather than conflicts between states. Thus, federalism came to enjoy a boom as a conflict resolution measure. As the one-size-fits-all solution that the Western powers have for any internal conflict, federalism was imposed from outside on countries like Bosnia -Herzegovina. Sri Lanka is also a country on which the devolution of power (which stops short of fully fledged federalism) was imposed from outside with the Indian intervention of the 1980s.

Federalism as a failed ‘cure all’

Even today, the resolutions and reports against Sri Lanka presented to the UN Human Rights Council routinely includes a call for more devolution of power in Sri Lanka. Given half a chance, the Western powers would impose a federal solution on Sri Lanka as they did in Bosnia-Herzegovina. One important matter that all advocates of federalism in Sri Lanka both local and foreign tends to overlook is that a federal system will never work in Sri Lanka because of the intermixed nature of the population. Even though the call for federalism is driven by the Northern lobby, large numbers of Tamils live outside the North and East. The entire Indian Tamil population is resident outside the North and East. The vast majority of the Muslims live outside the East. Even the war that raged in this country for over 30 years, did not alter the demographics of the country. Even at the height of the war, large numbers of Tamils continued to migrate from the North and East to Colombo.

Theoretically, or at least according to the propaganda of its proponents, federalism is supposed to give minority groups limited control over their own economic, political and social affairs, while maintaining the territorial integrity of the extant state. But what happens when the majority of the minority population (in the case of Sri Lanka Tamils) who are supposed to be the recipients of the devolved power, permanently live outside the proposed Tamil majority federal unit/s? When Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia, in 1992, there was no call for a federal state because Bosnia’s population was intermixed and there were no ethnically homogeneous enclaves. However a civil war broke out in Bosnia soon after independence and very soon there were homogeneous ethnic enclaves due to ethnic cleansing.

Scholars have pointed out that it was the ethnic cleansing of the war that made a federal system possible in Bosnia-Herzegovina Bosnia.

We, too, had a war that would have made anything that took place in Bosnia look like a picnic. But no ethnic cleansing took place except in the North. The majority of ethnic Tamils still live outside the North and East and the majority of the Muslims outside the East. When Bosnia was in a similar situation, the leaders of that country were sensible enough not to even talk of federalism. In fact, the Bosnian people or leaders had never wanted federalism at all and federalism was imposed on Bosnia-Herzegovina from outside as a solution to Serb and Croat separatism.

In India, the vast majority of Tamils live in Tamil Nadu even though there are sizable Tamil communities living in neighbouring states like Karnataka and Kerala and further away in places like Delhi and Mumbai. In Switzerland, there are 26-Cantons and of these, 17 are German speaking, four are French speaking, one Italian speaking, and there three bilingual Cantons and one trilingual Canton. That would give an idea of how little communal dispersal there is in Switzerland with the speakers of the various languages living in clearly defined communities.

If power is to be devolved on a territorial basis to confer rights on a minority community then it makes sense to expect the recipients of that power to be living within that territorial unit. How is a territory based devolution of power to succeed if the majority of the recipients of the devolved power are permanently resident outside that unit?

In any event, many scholars are skeptical of the efficacy of federalism as a conflict resolution strategy, especially in societies where a general will to live together in the same state is missing. We all know that in Sri Lanka, the Northern lobby wants a separate state and federalism is being demanded only as a consolation prize and a possible stepping stone to a separate state in the future. As many scholars have pointed out, it is an illusion to assume that federalism will be able to solve all problems in deeply divided societies, especially those that have endured violent ethnic conflict. Challenges to territorial integrity and calls for secession will not disappear despite the establishment of federal systems and this truth applies in equal measure to prosperous democracies such as Canada, Spain and the UK as well as to new federations in post-conflict societies, such as Bosnia and Iraq. We saw what happened in Spain during the Catalonian revolt of 2017. There is a lesson in all this for Sri Lanka.

(Concluded)