THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY 319east and west oflndia. The partition of the subcontinent sent tidal waves of
frightened refugees across new borders to the supposed shelter of their core-
ligionists. In the tumult, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered within
weeks, and countless more rendered homeless, yet even this mayhem failed
to settle the questions raised by "the partition." Kashmir, for example, re-
mained in play, for it had a Hindu monarch but a predominantly Muslim
population. Which then should it be part of, India or Pakistan? The British
decided to wait and see how things shook out. Kashmir is still shaking.
It was not only decolonization that came to a head after World War II,
but "nation-statism." It's easy to forget that the organization of the world
into countries is less than a century old, but in fact this process was not
fully completed until this period. Between 1945 and 1975, some one hun-
dred new countries were born, and every inch of earth finally belonged to
some nation-state or other.^2
Unfortunately, the ideology of "nationalism" and the reality of "nation-
statism" matched up only approximately if at all. Many supposed countries
contained stifled sub-countries within their borders, ethnic minorities who
felt they ought to be separate and "self-governing." In many cases, people
on two sides of a border felt like they ought to be part of the same nation.
Where Syria, Iraq, and Turkey came together, for example, their borders tri-
sected a contiguous area inhabited by a people who spoke neither Arabic
nor Turkish but Kurdish, a distant variant of Persian, and these Kurds nat-
urally felt like members of some single nation that was "none of the above."
In some places, even the separate existence of given countries remained
open to question. Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan-these were still congealing.
Their borders existed, they had separate governments, but did their people
really think of themselves as different nations? Not dear.
In the Arab world, ever since Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, the
watchword had been self-rule, but this tricky concept presumed some de-
finition of a collective "self" accepted by all its supposed members. Na-
tionalists throughout Arab-inhabited lands were trying hard to consolidate
discrete states: Libya, Tunisia, Syria, even Egypt ... but the question always
came up: who was the bigger collective self? Was there "really" a Syrian na-
tion, given that the Syria seen on maps was created by Europeans? Could
there be such a thing as Jordanian nationalism? Was it true that people liv-
ing in Iraq were ruling themselves so long as their ruler spoke Arabic?