Today, Swaminathan Aiyar has argued in favour of small Bhateeja States.
As my reader weighs the arguments on each side, allow me to buttress my stand with some lessons from history. We look at the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hapsburgs, circa 1900, when the aged Emperor Franz Joseph ruled over a huge territory comprising many ethnic and linguistic groups. These included Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Magyars, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes – apart from Germans. This empire is no more, and it might be useful to look into the causes of its downfall.
Note that Franz Joseph was a much respected monarch, held in awe by the bulk of his subjects. Describing conditions in Vienna those days, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, in his excellent biography of Mises, [free pdf here] quotes a contemporary, Felix Somary:
No more than 300 metres separated the University from the parliament building in the Vienna Ringstrasse; if the young people fought almost daily at the University, the conflicts of the deputies were of equal violence, and were battled with a fanatical passion unknown in other countries. If you went only a hundred steps further on from parliament, you could see every day—and usually more often—a carriage drawn by two horses drive out of the Hofburg. In it sat the old Emperor and his equally elderly adjutant, and they would set out for Schönbrunn at an easy trot, always at the same hour, and always down the same street. There was no security escort ahead of or behind the carriage, no policeman sat in the vehicle itself; any assassin would have had an easy job. But nobody took the opportunity.
Somary is quoted further in a footnote (p51 n52) where he says:
The leaders of our modern great empires are driven rapidly in bullet-proof cars, protected by countless bodyguards. Aristotle thus defined the difference between a monarch and a tyrant: the monarch protects his people; the tyrant has to protect himself from them.
The conclusion seems to be that the Kaiser was more a monarch than a tyrant.
Further, this Kaiser had done great things to improve the lot of his people. Hülsmann quotes another contemporary:
[Franz Joseph]… presided over the radical transformation of Austria that started after the revolution of 1848, and stretched until the very end of his reign in 1916, a transformation that left no sphere of social life untouched. A contemporary witness, himself a democrat born around the time Franz Joseph ascended the throne, recalls the awe that the emperor inspired in all his subjects: And the Kaiser had lived through—in fact co-sponsored— truly monumental changes. The almost feudal landed lordship with its peasants subject to the estate, sleepy little towns with their handicrafts organized in guilds, a capital city with concentric walls and bastions, with large ramparts and glacis, a society the ruling intellectual power of which was the Church and the materially moving power of which was still the stagecoach and the horse—all this formed the environment of the beginning reign of Francis Joseph, which was to encounter so many material and intellectual innovations. Almost all laws that created or made possible landed property for citizens, free peasants and country workers, handicrafts and industry, large-scale trade, railroads and steamship transport, and insurance and banking services were signed with his name. The tremendous development of modern capitalism fell into the period of his reign; and thereby the transformation of the absolutistic patrimonial state into a constitutional monarchy, the rise of the free citizenry, the flowering of the citizens’ parliament, the cultural unfolding of all nations of the Reich, along with the inevitable frictions of the maturing process and, finally, the rise of the working class, the spreading of the social idea, and the beginnings of social legislation. Whoever met Francis Joseph at my time felt the breath of a long and grand period of history that he has carried on. Seldom has a single human life encompassed such immensity.
Franz Joseph’s only failure lay in his inability to hold his diverse subjects together. His chosen method, decentralization to ethnically homogenous states, was a miserable failure – not least because, as Hülsmann points out, all these “states” were NOT homogenous. In each of these states, there were at least two, or even three, “nationalities.” The capital city of Vienna itself was now peopled by many different religious, ethnic and linguistic groups, including many Jews from the far flung provinces, like the Mises family.
The alternative political idea to “community” is “catallaxy.” In communities we know each other; in catallaxies all are strangers. It is the latter concept that the intellectuals of Vienna had not thought of then. Although all the “nationalities” that made up the empire comprised racially similar, white people, the empire could not hold together. These problems plague these regions right up to the present day. There is a deep lesson in this for modern India.
In India, we are not even of one race. We don’t have one religion. We have multiple languages. We first divided the sub-continent along religious lines - and it did not work. We then divided what remained into linguistic regions – and this hasn’t worked either. Hence the call for more homogenous smaller states. But this is the path towards sub-nationalism, of the kind of politics the Shiv Sena practices.
The other alternative is to proceed towards building urban catallaxies, wherein all strangers from all over are welcome. This is the path of internationalism, of globalization.
Note that even the Gorkhas, who want a Gorkhaland of their own, also want tourists to visit their land. They want outsiders to invest there. They also want Gorkha youth to be free to work in all Indian cities. All this can only be achieved by talking the language of catallaxy instead of community.
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