The great black American ideologue W.E.B. Du Bois wrote “The problem
of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. I hold that
the problem of the twenty first century is the problem of minorities.
Let me first clarify what Du Bois had in mind in making his famous
statement. He was universalist in his outlook, not tribalist or narrowly
nationalist. By the colored he had in mind not only black Americans or
black Africans but also the colored peoples of Afro-Asia and of the rest
of the world. His prescience was shown by the end of the century. The
US was a short way away from having its first black President, the
decolonization of the coloured peoples of the world was virtually
completed by the mid ‘seventies, China has emerged as a great power, and
India is in the process of doing so. The colored peoples of the earth
have arisen.
That was part of the process of the wretched of the earth arising.
Actually the not-so-wretched of the earth also keep arising, so that we
are witnessing a revolutionary process that is going on right across the
globe. At this point I must make a clarification of my use of the word
“revolution” which the Marxists in particular would regard as
illegitimate. Their conception of revolution – or rather the
Marxist-Leninist conception – is that after the masses overthrow the
bourgeois regime the Marxist-Leninist vanguard Party takes over to
complete the revolution. That has led to dystopia practically everywhere
it has been tried out. But a revolutionary process has been going on
without mass revolution, of which there have been very few in history.
For instance, we cannot deny the term “revolutionary” to the enormous
changes effected by the feminist movement, but there was no mass
revolution behind that. Sri Lanka experienced revolutionary changes
during the last century without a mass revolution, and at present we are
talking about the January 8 Revolution, quite rightly I think because
the entrenching of democracy has to be seen as part of an ongoing
revolutionary process.
There
are, in my view, two major causative factors behind the continuing
global revolutionary process. One is education. Every government of the
third world gave importance to the spread of mass education after
gaining independence. The consequence is that the aspirations towards a
better life by ascending the socio-economic ladder has been widening.
Those aspirations start with literacy and primary education and keep
widening as the people ascend to the higher levels of education. The
second causative factor is the human ability to create wealth. In the
traditional society wealth was limited and the best that could be done
was to create a low-level equilibrium by meeting the basic needs of the
people and not much more than that while the ruling classes and groups
enjoyed the surplus. The human ability to create wealth came with the
modern industrial society, and with that came widening opportunities for
ascent up the socio-economic ladder. Those are the two major factors
behind the revolutionary process that are relevant to the problem of
minorities in the contemporary world.
So the colored peoples of the earth arose in the course of the last
century and ended the overt domination of the colored by the whites
which began in the sixteenth century. That was the result of the
revolutionary processes that I have outlined above. But the world is
far, far indeed from Utopia. The major reason is that the domination and
oppression of the colored by the white has been replaced by the
domination and oppression of the colored by the colored. That is why
today so many of the colored want to emigrate to the white West. In Sri
Lanka it is not only the minorities but a substantial proportion of the
Sinhalese who want to get the hell out of the Island Paradise and Go
West. The truth is that the proclivity to domination and oppression does
not recognize the color line. Both colored and whites can behave like
utter bastards, but for the time being the Western whites are less prone
to do so.
What has gone wrong? Power passed from the hands of the whites to the
colored, which was an entirely beneficent process. But it passed into
the hands of the colored elites, which could turn out to be a maleficent
process because elites can abuse power. More precisely the problem was
that power passed into the hands of the colored elites in the form of
the nation state, and the problem there was that the nation state
inevitably tends to privilege the majority ethnic group. The nation
state is a relatively new state formation, just about a couple of
centuries old though in some countries it existed in incipient form for
centuries. The reason why it tends to privilege the majority ethnic
group is that it is based on the concept that on the principle of
self-determination a nation is entitled to have its own state, and the
nation in practice means the majority ethnic group which usually has the
power to lord it over the minorities.
The exceptionally high degree of unity forged by the Western nation
states was a major factor behind their exceptionally high achievement
levels, which enabled them to dominate the rest of the globe.
Understandably after 1945 decolonization took place through the
establishment of nation states in Afro-Asia. Practically all of them
were multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, so
that all of them had to face the problem of creating unity in diversity
and a sense of national identity. It was a process that sometimes took
centuries for completion in the West. France for instance has forged a
high sense of national unity but as late as the French Revolution of
1789 less than half the French people were French-speaking. On the whole
the Afro-Asian countries have been failing in achieving the degree of
unity characteristic of the Western countries.
The main reason for this failure is the refusal or inability to give
fair and equal treatment to the ethnic minorities. What are the
implications of that fact? First of all we must take count of the fact
that there are very few countries in the world that are ethnically
homogeneous, with ethnic minorities that are too minuscule to pose any
serious problems. According to one count there are only four such
countries, according to another just twelve. Furthermore in many
countries the minorities are quite substantial in number, as in Sri
Lanka, with the potential to threaten their unity. Taking count of the
enormous Muslim minority in India, it appears that the minorities in the
world have to be counted by the hundred million. Next we must take into
account the revolutionary process that is going on right across the
globe, which I have outlined earlier in this article. As education
widens and economic opportunities increase, more and more of the ethnic
minorities will be demanding the good things of life. It has to be
expected that dissatisfied minorities can come to constitute a
disruptive and even revolutionary force in the course of this century.
What should be done about the problem of the minorities? It is a huge
subject on which I have to be very brief in the concluding part of this
article. In principle oppressed minorities should be allowed their own
nation states provided they have a legitimate claim to a homeland,
meaning a territory to which they are indigenous. But on that principle
there will be hundreds of nation states. That is evidently one of the
reasons why the international community has refused to recognize the
so-called principle of the right of self-determination.
Perhaps in a few cases, where everything else has failed and
majoritarian oppression is intolerable, the international community
should explicitly support and actively promote the setting up of new
nation states.
As I have pointed out there is an in-built propensity in the nation
state to privilege the dominant ethnic majority. On grounds of equity
therefore, bearing in mind the rights of minorities by the hundred
million, the proper place for the nation state is in the dustbin of
history. But that consummation is not in the offing, and besides in the
present phase of history the nation state has its use as a bulwark for
small nations against bullying and oppression by the big ones. Perhaps
the best that can be done under the circumstances is for the
international community to become much more active in promoting the
legitimate interests of minorities within the framework of the nation
state. That will entail a serious erosion of the sovereignty of nation
states – a welcome development surely considering that the racist nation
state has been, as in Sri Lanka, an abomination. The starting point in
giving the minorities their due should be recognition by the
international community that the problem of the twenty first century is
the problem of minorities. (Izeth Hussain)
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