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| Sunday, 19 June 2005 |
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Editorial
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Genuine devolution - the need of the hour
by Athula K. Samarakoon The discursively constituted and ideologically driven deviations among the humans such as language, religion, caste, race or ethnicity are the most deep rooted and dreaded borderlines that run eternally with them. They may be imagined as conceptions but the material existence of them in the bloodiest form of patricidal wars forces us to view them seriously as the secular existence of the much eroded State and the world system has been threatened at present as never before.
The civilizational world map of humans shows that the culturally demarcated number of continents exceeds the territorial divisions of the political world. Today there are more than six major cultures with religious origin. An interesting study of this cultural nature of humane conflict has been researched by William P. Hungtington in his controversial article "The Clash of Civilization" which has stirred the liberal scholarly thought that propagated an end of history in haste negating Marxist view of a possible future Communist society. Fall of Russia With the fall of the Socialist Russia at the final quarter of the twentieth century the liberal scholars like Francis Fukuyama advocate that the ideological evolution of the humankind has come to its ultimate stage and liberal democracy would stay eternally as the final form of world governance. It is true that world over with the globalization process fuelled by the high technological communication, the liberal democratic governments have freely come into existence while dictatorships and other totalitarian governments are being challenged. However the liberalist propagation of the end of ideological evolution of humankind basically was challenged by the "clash of civilization" thesis of Hungtington. What might have gone wrong with the liberal thinkers of the present day world in predicting an end of history may be in their definitions of the ideology. The term ideology basically is of Marxist origin. Developed in the Marxist tradition, ideology refers to the power structured through cultural hegemony that can control a society with least conflict. The order of given society is what is created by the ideology of its dominant institutions through its values, conceptions and symbol system. As the ruling ideology becomes law society becomes more established and then its downfall should have to be expected only by challenging the ideological existence of the apparatus as Althusser has showed. The societies in our region of the world are mostly structured by the religions and other cultural codes. The liberal forms such as fast food, rock music, or human rights and other human liberties or emancipations that a thinker like Prof. Uyangoda upholds much in his weekend articles in alternative newspapers have still been unable to dominate the parochial religionism or narrow racism in the name of patriotism. Also in following what Benjamin Barber says (in Jihad Vs Mac world) about the fate of parochial identities a bogey of globalization we can argue that in our country the seed of Jihad or retribalization has gained ground on the pretext of patriotic movements and religious love. However the Lankan version of the retribalisation is not born against the global cultural hegemony but against the very neighbours of cultural contact that have existed for over thousands years according to the written history. Heterogenous country Ours is an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous country. But the ethnic conflict has never found its ideological origins in the religions. The two major constituent parties to the conflict Sinhalese and Tamils had no problems in keeping "Deva" and Buddha statues in the same shrine room. Buddhism and Hinduism are very liberally motivated religions, exclusion is not their principle but inclusion. The Lankan version of the conflict is not entirely a cultural construction as in the way the so called patriots have interpreted in an unscientific and arbitrary manner. Its root one can say lie in the mythologies. But unlike some other ferocious religious conflicts in the world the two parties have never thought each other due to others' religion (May be the 'terrorists' have committed such killings and not the average Tamil nor the Sinhalese). In a very realistic view we can see our conflict has lasted less than fifty years in our contemporary times. In fact the seeds and the solutions to the problem at once can be seen in power sharing, devolution. It is a problem that could have been solved much blood was shed by both parties due to the unwillingness for a negotiated settlement. The cultural border-lines of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be marked with religious or linguistic demarcations. Those who need to redefine the conflict which arose due to the discriminatory constitutional treatments to the minority need in the same vein to rethink of the unrealistic nature of their view points. The power hungry lunatics can only cling to their old aged myths while the real cultural threat is looming large on us with the Mac world fast changing our indigenous thought patterns. From a global point of view possibly a Marxist can suggest that the intensity of the much muddied ethnic issue which in the result of political opportunism since independence can be lesser than the challenge posed on parochial politics of Sinhalese or Tamils by global cultural and market forces. However the most immediate issue at hand is the internal conflict and its settlement should be reached along a path not stained with blood. Further delay is due to the fundamentalists who want to preserve the virginity of the European version of a nation state. What they never like to know is that the centralised power structure
favours only majoritarian interests against which a bloody war was waged for
decades. A genuine devolution is the need of the hour. |
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