You could say that Federalism strikes gold!
In these days of the Olympiad, when there is an orgy of nationalism of every sort being displayed on the world stage, and when Sri Lanka does not so much as register a blip in all this brouhaha, it is good a time as any to ask what this "nationalism'' is in the first place?

The opinion makers watching over Sri Lanka's current phase of no-war-no peace find themselves saying quite often that at the root of all of our tribulations is "nationalism''. They ask us to exorcise that particular impish devil.

The nation state they say is on the verge of disappearing. This is what a Professor of Canadian extraction said last week at a seminar held on aspects of federalism in India, Spain and Belgium. She said with a smile playing on her face and a deadpan delivery that with the European Union offering up a total new layer in the administrative apparatus of the countries such as Belgium, the second layer in governance which is the "nation state'' may be about to disappear.

Though she herself thought this to be an exaggeration, she stressed that there is a school of thought that subscribes to the view that future European governance could consist of two layers -- the European Union at the centre, and then the federated autonomous provinces, while the nation-state, the layer in the middle folds up. For instance, the EU will be running Belgium on a self-rule shared-rule basis with the Belgian provincial administrations, but the country or nation-state of Belgium itself will eventually vanish.

Makes me think, if this is the state of affairs, what drives the orgy of flag waving tear-jerking nationalism on display at the Olympic Games? Why the cry from the West for Sri Lanka to dismantle itself into still smaller units when in the West whole countries are coming together to form larger monolithic entities such as the European Union??

If the Olympics offer up a microcosm of life as lived in this planet, the other orgy of this and many Olympics past, is the orgy of excess of the economically developed nations.

India for instance being a country of one billion people, at the time of writing had not secured a single medal at this Olympics, while the economic powerhouses such as Germany, Japan and the United Sates are in a race to beat each other to pulp in arcane areas of physically-competitive sports such as synchronised swimming and Taekewando.

The Olympics in this way shows above everything else that whether in subtle or belligerent ways, the hegemony of the developed world is always felt upon the smaller and weaker nations of the planet
Sri Lanka for example is told-off for not federating soon enough, and this disqualifies the country for aid that has already been pledged.

This taken as a fact in itself should have been a curious state of affairs. What is a pledge if it is not to be honoured? Wasn't the Tokyo donor conference a gentleman's agreement that a certain amount of aid was being pledged to Sri Lanka for economic development based on its performance as a country with considerable economic potential at the time the aid was earmarked?

But now it turns out that the current canons of international relations do not consider a pledge to be a pledge anymore. It may be a fact that there is a gathering beat of war-drums being heard somewhere in Sri Lanka which has a natural tendency of making a lot of peaceful people nervous. Maybe Sri Lanka's future creditor status can be determined by the way the country behaves itself. But what of the plans already made for economic development in this country based on the Tokyo pledge?? These do not matter to the medal-winning international club of nations, because a nation has to fend for itself, and it can be trampled into insignificance at any time much the same way that a country like India is almost bullied by the big economic powerhouses into settling for a zero number of medals at the Olympic games!

So, in many ways the Olympics is the softer side of the hegemonic international order of the developed club of nations. The Olympics legitimises the fickle brute power that very much decides the fate of countries such as ours in matters such as war, peace and nation building.

When Sri Lanka is given an ultimatum to 'Federate or else' and warned that aid that had already been pledged will disappear, we are being made to comply with the prevailing fashion of the benevolent nations. Tomorrow it may well be another manthara for our salvation -- such as forming a grand union with India ,Pakistan and some other regional states. That may then be the prevailing wisdom for the survival of lesser nations when the West runs out of ideas seeing that all their considered nostrums are not helping in some parts of the world…

The giants have devised an ingenious way in which they could maintain their medal hegemony at the Olympic games. When the Kenyans and the Ethiopians outrun them with sheer muscle power and physical agility, the giants devise more sophisticated sports to keep their sacks of medals bulging. These sports require sophisticated equipment, and it's not the man but the machine that eventually gets gold! We are undoubtedly prone to an association of ideas when discussing matters of power and hegemony, but the way the global power houses play international realpolitik also shows shades of these same devices. One thing is that the goal posts keep changing all the time. Even as we are being told that Federalism is the best solution for Sri Lanka's fractious polity - -- there is a movement towards a different arrangement, sans the nation state. It may well be that this is the preferred arrangement of the European Nations particularly in their realisation that there is power in coming together to form a larger union.

So they are in the process of federating, and then dismantling their nation states. That's in the interests of the larger entity - the European Union. But the idea of dismantling nation states while federating is also impishly being grafted upon the lesser nations even though we do not have any such union anywhere in our radar at the moment. There is no grand union of SAARC states anywhere within our sights, that could form the United Sates of South Asia or the South Asian Union. But even so -- we are set upon the course, with the instrument of withheld-aid being used as the prod, to simultaneously Federate while gradually dismantling out nation states.

That's why words such as confederation are in vogue, and why countries such as Serbia-Montenegro are competing in today's Olympic games. Countries which we might mention, have seen their medal prospects diminish with each year due to the burgeoning strength of various players who might someday compete as the European Union, bringing with them container loads of equipment which compete with the size of their medal sacks!

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