In this assortment of essays on diverse themes and subjects the contributors to the volume have shared a common concern about how, in recent times, contestation over territory by rival nations, communities or ethnic groups have disturbed the political equilibrium and unleashed forces of violence which have undermined the normal tenor of life in many parts of the world. Conflicts of this nature have been aggravated in certain cases by the collapse of an established political order. The history of the modern world is replete with examples of how in the context of the break down of a state system, competing claims over territories become linked with some form of irredentism. When a great state system begins to decline, regions on the periphery are usually the first to claim autonomy or even independence. An apt example from the nineteenth century should be the Austro-Hungarian exmpire where the polyglot system, after its collapse, was replaced by smaller nation states which in an earlier stage of development were merely conflicting ethnic groups. Or to take an example from recent history, the collapse of the Soviet Union has contributed to an endemic civil strife in many parts of the area which once belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence. In the south Asian zone, Afghanistan has been one region affected violently by the break down of the Soviet system of international relations. It is possible to maintain that the dissolution of political authority in Afghanistan was an offshoot of the withdrawal of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Later the disintegration of the Soviet Union reinforced the problems in Afghanistan. Afghani-stan is, of course an extreme example, yet the destablizing effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union in castern and central Europe are too well known to require any further elaboration. In our own history, the emergence of the two nation states of India and Pakistan after partitioning undivided India witnessed a violent civil strife of a very severe nature which in no small measure was aggravated by the decline of the colonial authority during the previous decade.
An important aspect of this conflict is the disputed frontier which by its very nature has usually heen vulnerable to military or demographic invasions from the 'other side. Such events have taken place with a good deal of regularity in the contemporary world and in the international system, governed, as it is by bellicose nation states, unstable international frontiers have always been major threats to international peace. Early in the last century or even perhaps in the later half of nineteenth century-in the age of high imperialism, when peace and stability was synonymous with balance of power, making and unmaking of frontiers of states were marked by military conflicts and upheavals in Europe and the overseas. This great game was played out by dominant powers in which nationalism emerged as a conveneint ideological weapon in the hands of the warring imperial powers, seeking out spheres of influence all over the world, partitioning territories which did not belong to them and carving new frontiers to suit their imperial needs. Very often they were illegitimate impositions on people who failed to make any sense out of such interventions. In most instances such territorial reconstructions by colonial powers established illegitimate barriers among pre-national communities which in any case were not familiar with such rigid boundaries. All the while imperial powers pursuing this game rallied supporters in the domestic sphere by using the appeal of nationalism. On this count the record of liberal Britain was not much different from authoritarian Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Things however, did not change to any major extent even as nationalism, once an imperialist weapon turned into the ideology of emancipation from imperial domination. As communities turned into nations in the age of de-colonization, deriving inflexible identities from colonial construction of territories, they retained the same territorial configuration inscribed on them by imperialism. The older contest over territory and frontier in the new context tended to become much more severe due to the involvement of populism of an aggressive nature in democratic or pseudo-democratic polities. The plebiscitory element made such contestation far more dangerous and explosive in the later half of the last century, even though nuclear deterrence ruled out possibilities of full scale wars of the kinds that had devastated the world in an earlier period.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist