1 - Ireland, Palestine and the antinomies of self-determination in ‘the badlands of modernity’

Summary

The subject of partition receives little attention in the remarkable corpus of writing on nations and nationalism that has emerged over the past two decades or so. In the now canonical works of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom Nairn, Anthony D. Smith, Miroslav Hroch and Liah Greenfeld the topic never emerges as an issue for serious reflection. More surprisingly perhaps, it is also ignored in the more influential works on anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism – such as those by Partha Chatterjee, Homi Bhabha, James M. Blaut and Basil Davidson – that have emerged in the same period, and only in John Breuilly's brief survey of Indian nationalism in Nationalism and the State does it receive any consideration. The tendency to bypass the topic in these studies is curious since partition has played an important role in the annals of British decolonisation especially, and because it raises serious theoretical questions about the nature of postcolonial state formation, state division and nation-building.

One of the reasons why the subject of partition tends to be bypassed in contemporary studies of nationalism, it would appear, is that it is taken for granted in most of these works that the newly independent postcolonial states inherited the territorial boundaries of the colonial states that preceded them. In Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, the single most influential work on nations and nationalism in recent times, this continuity between colonial and postcolonial state borders is axiomatic.