with the state, and resolves grievances, preventing rather than promoting
secession (Ghai, 2000, p. 24).
Alternatively the state may resist separatism with repression. Ethnic
demands are partly a function of the state’s orientation to them, such as the
imposition of ‘nationality’ under the Ethiopian constitution (Ghai, 2000).
Responses to nationalism and separatism have ranged from genocide to
expulsion, assimilation, language policies, quotas in political and bureau-
cratic élites, revenue allocation formulae, positive discrimination, cultural
autonomy and political decentralization (Coakley, 1993). In South Asia,
governmental responses to secessionist movements have included military
action, police restrictions, constitutional obstacles, electoral manipulation,
economic subsidies, policy concessions (such as job quotas, the co-option
of separatist leaders, and language rights), constitutional accommodation
and, in principle only, the granting of autonomy (Wright, 1976, pp. 12–13;
Phadnis and Ganguly, 2001, pp. 145–202). Brass places state management
of ethnic conflict at the centre of attempts to understand nationalist political
mobilization, arguing that central élites (which in Third World countries
usually means bureaucrats, whether civil or military, partisan or profes-
sional) form alliances with local ethnic organizations, either to oppose or
support local élites. For Brass:
It is a principal task of research on ethnic groups and the state to deter-
mine how privileges are distributed among different ethnic categories,
with which élites within an ethnic group state leaders tend to collaborate,
and what the consequences are both for ethnic group identity formation
and political mobilization. (Brass, 1991, p. 256)It is unusual for national governments to approve the breaking away from
the nation-state of a distinctive region, especially if part of that region’s dis-
tinctiveness is its endowment with valuable natural or other economic
resources. Demands for independence are revolutionary from the perspec-
tive of the centre (Connor, 1973; Clay, 1989, pp. 230–1) and history teaches
us that ‘attempts at secession are generally seen by governmental leaders as
a threat to the authority of their regime which is so intolerable that it is
worth spilling blood to prevent it’ (Birch, 1978, p. 340). In South East Asia,
for instance, responses to separatism prove conclusively that ‘the nation-
state clings above all to territory’ (McVey, 1984, p. 13). In 1994 Morocco’s
King Hassan threatened a return to war if the people of the Western Sahara
voted for independence in any referendum which the UN might organize.
196 Understanding Third World Politics