Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 14, 2015 12:09:16 GMT 5.5
The state-building ideals the leaders of the insurgent organizations operating in the north-eastern region of India seem to be modeled on very old and now impracticable principles of the nation-state building history witnessed in Western European countries, such as England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., when things were far simpler. These nation states in this region evolved through a very long, bloody process of homogenization before the birth of conscious nationalism (a word born only in the late eighteenth century between 1779 and 1799).
Amid the unprecedented tumultuous historical events of the late nineteenth century through the even more tumultuous inter-war period twentieth century, there arose several states new in various senses in central and eastern Europe. These new states in short were largely the result of the wars including the First World War and the Second World War among others that displaced millions and millions of people, mixing nations with nations, strangers with strangers. Therefore, when these new states of multiple nations were emerging, they could not model themselves on the old unitary nation models of the western European countries mentioned above. Thus, the multi-national state-building process of the new states (such as Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania among others) in central and eastern Europe in late 19th and early twentieth centuries offers an interesting case for study when we examine the philosophy and behavior of the insurgent organizations operational in the north-eastern region of India and think of possible solutions.
In all this, it would be of course naive to expect the models of these central and eastern European states to provide a ready-made solution to the issues we are having at hand now. However, these states provide a possibility far better than the very old models the insurgent organizations in the north-eastern region of India are sticking to.
Considering it is worth studying (at least in the face of the failure of the old models), I have started, under the board Nation, State and Ethnic Diversity, a series of threads for major political writings of some political theorists/scientists and social scientists (who are largely unknown to the rest of the world) from these regions of that time, who helped the central and eastern European states in question take shape.