A political, constitutional settlement

AK: How do you understand the 'national question'?
JW: In a country where you have different communities – whether you call them peoples or nations or national minorities – every community has an inherent right to due share of state power. When you have a community that is numerically smaller, which is dispersed, then there is no question of regional autonomy. Because they are dispersed, then aspirations haveSi to be met by, for example, an electoral system and checks with a strong bill of rights, as well as equality through better university education, etc. But the equation changes when you have communities that are geographically concentrated; the demand changes from equality to state power. Such a community would want to express its cultural identity in political form, and make a demand for its share of state power.

In most countries today, we have multi-cultural situations. And in almost all of these countries, the majority has initially refused to share power with the minorities. Majoritarianism is universal. But having said that, certain majorities come to terms with this reality sooner than later, and are bold enough to accommodate the other communities in terms of state power. That is what happened in Belgium and that is what happened in Spain, and a little later in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales. There, the majority communities reluctantly or otherwise understood that if the country is to move forward you have to solve the problem of state power. But some majorities simply refuse to address the question of state power – for example, the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia. That is the problem we have in Sri Lanka. I won't say the Sinhalese have gone to that extent, because there was a period of ten years, from 1994 to 2004, where about 50 percent of the Sri Lankan population came around to accepting power-sharing as the only way out. So for me, the national question is essentially a question of state power.