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Victor Avksentyev,
D. Sc. (Phil.), Director, Institute of Socio-economic and Humanitarian Research, Southern Scientific Center of RAS; Valery Vasilchenko,
Ph. D. (Phil.), North Caucasian Federal University PROBLEMS OF FEDERALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF ETHNOPOLITICAL PROCESS IN THE SOUTH OF RUSSIA: POLITICAL & LEGAL ASPECTS
Close attention to the ethnonational problems in political literature shows that ethnicity is continues to be a characteristic feature of political processes in Russian society. The period of the depoliticization of ethnicity during the past decades of the existence of the Soviet Union changed during the perestroika and years of reforms into ethnic renaissance and the rapid intrusion of ethnic interests and ambitions in the sphere of public politics. The degradation of the economic and cultural ties engendered by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the growing political disintegration and social tension continue to dominate Russian public life and increase political consolidation on the basis of ethnocultural values, that is, politicization of ethnicity. Various national public and political organizations and associations take an active part in political processes and come out in the interests of ethnic groups.
The periods of the depoliticization of ethnicity existed in the first decade of this century. After the measures undertaken by President Putin to restore and improve governance and management of the country in the beginning of the first decade of this century, a short period of stabilization in ethnopolitical processes has set in. Another period of the depoliticization of ethnicity took place in the middle of the past decade. It was connected with a range of measures
implemented on the initiative of President Putin after the tragic events in Beslan in 2004. That period was aptly called "ethnopolitical timeout," and it gave a chance to adopt major decisions aimed at changing national-state relations, which has not been fully used. In 2007 a new period of the repoliticization of ethnicity began, which continues to this day.
The problems of the depoliticization and repoliticization of ethnicity are of major importance for the South Russian macroregion. In this connection the role and share of the political component of ethnic processes in the North Caucasus evoke special interest in the context of the territorial structure of the Russian state, inasmuch as the subject of national-state construction is of exceptional importance for the problems of security and progress of the country. Today it becomes increasingly clear that the existing type of the federation, including ethnicity as a source of political subjectness, is conflictogenic. And ways to overcome this situation are not clear as yet. The idea of dividing Russia into gubernias (provinces) widely popularized in the 1990s finds few supporters today even among those who recognize the need to "depart" from the existing type of federalism. The most widespread point of view is that "it is too early to be concerned with this. What should be done is to change principally the country's development and to understand what federalism, innovative climate, economics and budget relations really mean."
However, the conflictogenic nature of the existing nationalterritorial structure of the country constantly provokes, and will continue to provoke, conflicts and tension. A case in point is the territorial dispute between Chechnya and Ingushetia which began at the level of the political elites of these two republics at the end of summer in 2012, and turned into an acute ethnopolitical collision. The federal
authorities were unable do react to the confrontation between the two republics properly.
Agreeing with many experts and authors on the point that it is "not the proper time" to deal with the radical national-state restructuring, inasmuch as Russia, and especially its southern regions, is now "on the crest of the wave" of the repoliticization of ethnicity, we should note that the task of depoliticizing ethnicity and its "switching over" from the political and legal sphere to the socio-cultural one is very urgent. Without its solution any stabilization of interethnic relations in the South of Russia is impossible. This should lower social tension by reducing the ethnic components of political subjectness with due observance of the rights of ethnic minorities and their opportunities to choose freely cultural development and forms of self-determination within the borders of the Russian state. A reform of the state-territorial structure of Russia, in which ethnicity would remain one of the features of the country's territorial structure, but would not be a source of political and legal subjectness, could be the instrument of the realization of such program.
According to the political-legal doctrine, federation is a complex unified state with states-members or state formations as its components. A state-federation as a socio-state system with two levels of governance of one and the same territory, and governance at each level is guaranteed autonomy at least in one sphere of activity.
One of the most urgent and debatable questions of the theory of territorial organization of state power is the divisibility of sovereignty. This problem is of principal importance for solution of the problem of correlation between different methods of decentralization of state power, as well as for determination of the theoretical-legal status of federation.
Whether we recognize the divisibility of sovereignty or not, in the case of a federal state we deal with the division of political power "vertically."
The modern theory of the state and law believes that in the classification of the forms of the territorial structure of power the decisive elements will be the parameters of centralization / decentralization, namely, the sum total of stable relations between the central and regional bodies of state power. However, from the point of view of an analysis of historical material, the popular thesis affirming the priority of this classification scheme is counter-empirical. Its binary logic allows us to choose only one of the two, rejecting other possible variants. Meanwhile, modern Russia cannot be described either as a federation or a unitary state.
Certain legal experts suggest that along with federative and unitary states the so-called "states with autonomous units" should be classified as a new form of state structure. Unitary state can include autonomous units included in it. But the main concept is that there are only two forms of state structure: federal and unitary state. However, as we see a sate with autonomous units in it differs from both these types.
The concept of the state with autonomous units can be regarded as the foundation of the project of the reorganization of the stateterritorial structure of the Russian Federation which could be directed to the depoliticization of ethnicity and would contribute to lowering tension in interethnic relations.
Modern Russia is largely a federal state. The territorial units of Russia include republics, territories and regions. Moreover, there are also autonomies - autonomous regions and autonomous okrugs. These units have different legal status. As it is justly noted in special literature, the republics as units of the Russian Federation are nationalterritorial units by their status with the indivisible rights of the
autonomy, that is, definite political and legal independence with certain conditional features of statehood. The national republics within the Russian Federation are a kind of ethnocultural enclaves, autonomous "islands in the "sea" of the administrative unitary state.
The principle of federalism is one of the foundations of the constitutional structure of Russia. Its Constitution delimitates the subjects to be managed and regulated by the Federation and its parts. It should be said that federalism is to be examined not only, and not so much, from formal legal positions, as from realistic positions as a phenomenon actually existing in our life. The essence of this phenomenon lies not in formal legal features of federalism in one or another state-legal association or alliance of states, but in their practical implementation.
Ambiguity in such questions, in the problems of the nationalterritorial organization and structure of the state, and discrepancy between the de jure and de facto state of affairs is an extremely negative, even dangerous, phenomenon. The point is not the constantly increasing claims of representatives of one or another ethnos to the country's leadership on the pretext of inequality of the statuses of some or other ethnic groups, right up to exotic proposals, for example, to create a "Russian republic" within Russia, or transform Stavropol Territory into the Russian Republic within the North Caucasian Federal region. The very ambiguity of the legal parameters of nationalterritorial units creates conditions for ethnic aggregation, for the creation of an ethnos as an independent subject of political process with its own political interests, which is especially noticeable in the North Caucasus. Ethnicity as a political-legal factor gives rise to social tension and provokes conflicts.
It should be stated that the legal fuzziness of the state-territorial structure of Russia serves as a powerful factor of the politicization of
ethnicity. Getting rid of such conflictogenic phenomena demands the gradual transformation of the modern national-territorial structure. Theoretically, it can be achieved through the creation of actual federative structure with consecutive delimitation of the competence of the federal and regional bodies of power. Or it can be done in the form of official recognition of republics not as parts of the federation, but as territories with a special status - autonomous units.
We think that the realization of the first variant is unfeasible at present. Strict observance of the principles of federalism in public life is directly connected with the leveling of the competence of various subjects of the federation, that is, factual transformation of nationalterritorial units within the Russian Federation into purely territorial ones, with the elimination of national specificity from the sphere of state politics.
The fate of the project of transfer from federative structure of the state to the state with autonomous units seems different. The point is that autonomation is a rather flexible instrument of organization of political area, making it possible to vary quite broadly the limits of internal self-government of national territories, with due account of their concrete specificity - from political to national-cultural autonomy. In actual fact, it is revival on a new basis of the widely criticized idea of autonomation, but with due account of the 20th century experience. It was due to the realization of the plan of autonomation in the construction of the U.S.S.R. that the Soviet Union existed much longer after the failure of the Soviet economic project became seen and felt by people all around. And the legal form of the collapse of the Soviet project was the disintegration of the unified (federative) state.
In this connection it should be noted that the states with special political-territorial parts - autonomous units - are not rare in the modern world. There are autonomous districts in the PRC (Tiber, Inner
Mongolia, Xinjiang-Uighur, Guangxi-Zhuang, Ningxia-Hui), Ukraine (Autonomous Republic of the Crimea), Israel (Palestine Autonomy), and many other states. Usually, these states are regarded as unitary, although sometimes political autonomy has essential features of statehood: it has the right to adopt legislation on local questions, form parliament, etc. For example, the parliament of Scotland (which is part of Great Britain as political autonomy) issues laws on economic questions, finances and taxes in the region, public security, and some other problems. However, autonomies may and may not have considerable political rights, and my not even be forms of stateterritorial organization at all. The choice of a scheme of self-determination in this case depends on concrete circumstances.
Thus, transfer from a federative state to the model of a state with political and/or administrative autonomies will contribute to the elimination of a whole number of reasons for national tension through the establishment of more precise and at the same time more flexible schemes of the territorial organization of power more adaptable to concrete ethnic and cultural circumstances. Besides, the implementation of this program may create prerequisites for repoliticization of ethnicity, being the first step on the way to the elimination of the component of ethnicity and realization of ethnic self-determination in the form of cultural autonomy. There are two obstacles on the road of the implementation of this reform: the ideological, when ethnicity and political subjectness have firmly been entrenched in the minds of the ethnopolitical elites, and the legal connected with its inconsistency with the premises of the Constitutions of the Russian Federation. To overcome the former is much more difficult, and only after that would it be possible to tackle the legal aspect of the project.
"Nauchnaya mysl Kavkaza", Rostov-on-Don, 2012, No 4, pp. 54-59.
