Political Transition in Post-Colonial Societies. Goa in Perspective (original) (raw)

Aureliano FERNANDES, Lusotopie 2000 : 341-358

Political Transition in Post-Colonial

Societies

Goa in Perspective*

Most post-colonial and post-modernist formulation of nations-states, certainly those that emerged with the collapse and shrinking of western colonial empires in Asia and Africa, mid twentieth-century onwards, necessarily retrospect on imperialism in an attempt to draw out the asymmetrical relationship of interdependence, past and present, between the materially advanced colonizing powers and themselves especially in the former's hegemonic ascendancy. These articulations, discursive and at times engagingly political, contextualize the multidimensional and ever growing complexities within colonial societies in their engagement with the construction of a cohesive political community.

Historically, these societies were not devoid of complexities as colonial dominions, but in recent times there has emerged what François Godement (1997) calls the «Asian Renaissance », which poses a fundamental challenge to Eurocentric, monolithic and unitary conceptions of state, nationalism and «rational » politico-administrative systems that have been operative here ever since they were negotiated in place in the post-colonial polity.

Most accounts of transitions inextricably emphasize the rise and fall of empires British, Spanish... and I may add Portuguese, clearly falling short of placing the process in a wider contemporary context (Low 1991). «The eclipse of empire is seen to constitute a major development in the history of the world », virtually marginalising the establishment of a new international system and the intense and at times potentially explosive and fragile and continuous negotiations and revisions that went into the making of «new political orders in which the greater part of humanity lives » (Low 1991). The new political orders entrenched in a colonial past had not only to redefine society to create a space for the varied culture world of its people, asserting diversity, but at times they had to engage with a problématique which was distinctly a formulation of imperialism. A problématique that involved the occupation and subsequent liberation at different time periods of fragments of the same nation, by multiple colonial powers, framing them in diverse histories, systems, processes and spaces. A problématique that is the operative point of conflict, in post-colonial societies, even to this day.