The creation of unified polities in Asia remains a daunting challenge because of the numerous claims made by nations within state boundaries. None of the states in the case studies included in this book can claim unmitigated success in achieving harmonious reconciliation between the demands of sub-state nations seeking recognition and the goal of the central government to forge polities that transcend differences between these groups. In fact, there is much variance among states in Asia with respect to the willingness to recognize or accommodate sub-state nationalities. Contributors to this book have traced the roots of this variance, as well as the common traits that characterize many Asian states. Together, they suggest broad patterns and explanatory factors that are rooted in the domestic arena, based on which we suggest tentative generalizations based on the Asian experience.

Although we have found that historical trajectories and domestic political factors provide the strongest explanation of similarities and differences among Asian cases, the international environment has also to some extent conditioned the willingness and ability of Asian states to recognize their multinational status. As many of the contributors have shown, colonialism had a determining influence on the institutional choices made by post-colonial states. The Cold War in Asia, which quickly came to the fore with events such as the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Taiwan Strait Crises (1954–1955, 1958), exacerbated or dampened conflicts within multinational states, as the Bangladesh crisis of 1971 has demonstrated.

Those who study state policies toward sub-state national minorities typically focus on how responsive the state is to minorities that are already politically mobilized. This book is no exception; it follows a venerable tradition of examining groups that seek self-determination to consider the extent to which and the forms by which such groups are accommodated.

An already mobilized minority and degrees of state responsiveness are an important theoretical possibility, but one among many. States do more than react; they also act, sometimes decisively and with clear initiative and agency. When they do, their actions may be viewed as preceding, rather than following, the political mobilization of cultural groups.

If it is difficult to discern the empirical outlines of such proactive policies in some Asian cases, ex-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) brings them and their impact into sharp relief. The Leninist state in the Soviet Union sought – as a part of its ideological and coercive agenda – to be proactive in attending to minority groups, even in those regions where levels of nationalist mobilization were low, popular national identities were practically nonexistent, and local identities prevailed. In this chapter, I argue that these policies set in motion political processes that were ultimately beyond the ability of the Soviet state to control. Central Asia's political development since the Soviet collapse has been deeply conditioned by this Leninist legacy.

This chapter begins by addressing the blind spots in a literature that assumes that groups are already mobilized.

This chapter considers China's relations with Tibet, one of the most intractable problems faced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its minority nationalities policy. Among the fifty-five minority nationalities that are recognized by Chinese officials, Tibetans come the closest to constituting a sub-state nation seeking self-determination. Like all the other groups discussed in this book, Tibetans have made demands for the protection of their language, way of life, and culture. But in this case, religion has played a major role in Tibetan national identity, and, as this chapter argues, has represented a central element of Tibetan–Chinese relations for decades, even before the CCP took power. In addition, the Chinese state, under both the Republican regime and under the CCP since 1949, has made many promises to the Tibetans that, for the most part, have not been kept.

THE CREATION OF TIBETAN NATIONALISM

Since this volume focuses on the instability of multination states, it is especially appropriate to consider the issue of Tibet as a part of China. Like the long struggles of Palestinians and Kurds, the Tibetan sub-state nationalist movement has proven to be an enduring international issue in the contemporary era. While the Chinese state has asserted the primacy of a unitary nation-state, the strong tradition of an independent narrative history of Tibet largely revolving around its distinct religio-political system (as well as the de facto Tibetan independence from 1912 to 1951) has provided a powerful intellectual resource for the current Tibetan nationalist movement.

In Multicultural Odysseys, Will Kymlicka observes sharp differences in the way North America and western Europe, on the one hand, and eastern and central Europe and Africa and Asia, on the other, have responded to the claims of minority nations (Kymlicka 2007). Some multinational polities such as Canada, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Spain have come to see themselves not as nation-states, but as multination states and have, accordingly, given symbolic recognition to minority nations and reconfigured themselves constitutionally to reflect their multinational character. Other states have rejected and even suppressed – often violently – the political claims of minority nations. This appears to be particularly true in Asia. Kymlicka suggests that, with the notable exception of India, Asian states have been extremely resistant to the claims of minority nations, for a variety of reasons – the legacy of colonial divide-and-rule strategies which empowered minority ethnic groups, concerns over geopolitical security, fear of petty tyrannies, and the belief that ethnic mobilization would disappear as a result of modernization and development.

Sri Lanka is one of the many examples Kymlicka cites. It is not hard to understand why. Demographically, Sri Lanka fits his model of a multinational polity. It contains a large, Sinhala-speaking majority (74 percent of the population), as well as a large, Tamil-speaking minority (13 percent) who traditionally hail from the northeast of the island, where they constitute a majority. Both the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority are engaged in competing projects of nation-building.

There are many reasons for the crisis of several so-called border states in India. My objective in this chapter is not to summarize the causal narrative of these crises. Rather, I wish to draw the attention of the reader to one factor to which enough attention has not been paid. My very tentative claim appears to be in line with the main contention of the editors of this book: the governing elite in India, perhaps even the larger political elite, has always had a conceptual block about recognizing multiple nationalities in India. But this way of putting it may, in the Indian case, be too crude. I am not suggesting that India should have been named and understood as a multination state from its very inception. My point, I believe, is more subtle: given India's size and complexity, it should have recognized and worked with what might be called a deeply asymmetrical federalism that recognized some societies within it as nations but not others. Over time, the governing elite in India did imagine an inclusive-enough state in India, one that granted recognition to different cultural communities, but it just fell short of grasping the precise form of recognition for which some societies increasingly yearned. This was a political as much as a conceptual failure. Moreover, the hold of some conceptions was so strong that the elites could not imagine an even more inclusive variety of federalism.

Pakistan, one of two states that emerged from the breakup of the British Indian Empire, had been created as the putative homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. From its very genesis, the precise social and political dimensions of the state have been contested. If it is the “homeland” of the Muslims of South Asia then what status should it accord to its religious minorities, as well as to sub-state nations? How should it accommodate the demands of linguistic, sectarian, and regional minorities? Beyond the shared Islamic faith, what other attributes could serve as the constituent elements of nation building? And even if Islam constituted the unifying basis of the state, what role would it play in the everyday life and practices of its citizenry? These are questions to which the founders of the Pakistani state had paid scant attention. Yet they came to the fore almost immediately in the wake of Independence and Partition. They have also dogged the existence of the country ever since, and they have been the subject of vigorous and violent contestation (Ahmed, 1997). Sixty years after its creation, Pakistan is no closer to addressing these vital concerns. Instead they pose a continuing challenge to national identity and integration. Specifically, Pakistan still faces important sub-state national movements in Baluchistan, in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and Sindh.

Recent trends in Europe whereby established states have surrendered some powers toward a supranational Europe, on the one hand, and sub-national regions on the other, make it possible to speak of a relaxation of the “sovereign equality” model that dominated the post-war world in which nation-states were presumed to be the sole and equal possessors of sovereignty. We should, however, be very careful about generalizing this globally. In particular, the new states of Asia have been in an intense period of nation-building since 1945. The type of nationalism which Tønnesson and Antlov (1996) label “official,” I prefer to call “state nationalism” to avoid Anderson's (1991) negative use of the term, since it is the universal currency of states in seeking to create loyalty and homogeneity (Reid 2009). This type is still extremely vigorous in Asia, where the task of turning “peasants into Chinese” (or Indians, Indonesians, etc.) is by no means complete. The acceptance by China in 1997 and Indonesia in 2005 of a certain degree of asymmetry in the position of Hong Kong and Aceh, respectively, may look like pragmatic retreats from the nationalist project, but there is still profound resistance in both these states toward recognizing the validity of self-governing “nations” within established states.

It would be wrong to see this difference, however, as a consequence of either Asian cultural norms or long-term patterns of Asian statecraft.

Sub-state national groups usually seek some form of self-determination and recognition of their special status. Self-determination is sometimes expressed in calls for an independent state that would coincide with the territorial homeland of the nation. For the most part, however, such goals are unattainable. Instead, most groups settle for some form of autonomy or for federalism, where such structures already exist.

Autonomy allows the accommodation of ethno-nationalist demands by creating a new territorial unit with special powers, or by decentralizing additional powers to an existing territorial unit that corresponds to the group's homeland (Gurr 2000; Horowitz 1985). Asymmetrical federalism accomplishes the same goals. Groups not only obtain political control over their territorial homeland, but also, with their control of a sub-state government, they obtain the leverage to negotiate with the central government.

Autonomy also provides a territorially grounded recognition of national status, although this is mostly implicit. Many states are reluctant to formally recognize sub-state national groups as “nations.” The recent recognition of the Catalan nation by the Spanish state is a rare exception. Some states in Asia have recognized “multination” status but, as Laliberté and Thawnghmung have noted in the cases of China and Burma, they have, ironically, done so against a backdrop of strong centralizing tendencies and an actual denial of significant powers to accompany such recognition. This kind of recognition is typical of the Soviet-style model of recognition.

Since Taiwan embarked on its democratic journey in 1987, close to 90 percent of its citizens have refused the offer from the Beijing authorities for peaceful reunification. They know that they will not be recognized as a nation within the People's Republic of China (PRC). They also know that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will never give Taiwan even the symbolic form of recognition of the kind Tibetans receive, let alone the substantive powers of a real autonomy. These misgivings are grounded in the reality of the CCP's repeated position on the issue of “reunification” with Taiwan, which denies the Taiwanese any right of self-determination and promises military intervention if Taiwanese leaders declare independence. The PRC authorities' response to the Taiwanese aspirations for recognition of their distinctiveness highlights the limitations of an authoritarian government peacefully managing a multination state. It also points to the difficulty of defining a national identity that is determined by narrow cultural criteria. Although the PRC is officially a multinational state, it is also a unitary state in which one nationality, the Han Chinese, stands above the others. This unequal relationship between the Han and the other fifty-five nationalities in China is addressed in Chapter 9. This chapter discusses an equally problematic dimension of the Chinese national identity: the narrow definition of Han identity itself.