Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice

Abstract

THE DESIRABILITY OF A RUSSIAN FEDERATION structured in part to accommodate ethnic or national minorities, and whether such a model of governance is compatible with a defensible form of social justice, are issues that continue to provoke considerable debate within Russia but which have received little attention within post-Soviet studies.l Much of the focus of this debate centres on the merits of constructing part of what has been labelled 'a mixed federation' on the basis of 21 ethnorepublics and on whether the particular privileges which these constituent units have secured in relation to the federation's remaining administratively-defined regions (oblasti) and other constituent units are compatible with federal maintenance, social stability and distributive justice.2 Federalists in Russia who question the value of such a federated multiculturalism tend to focus on two sets of arguments. First, it is claimed, institutionalising part of the federation along ethnorepublic lines promotes nationalism, which increases the likelihood of inter-ethnic violence and even the prospects of secession.3 Not only do such arrangements tend to solidify and make what might be temporary or partial group identities permanent, they also allow key policy areas to be hijacked by partisan ethnorepublic elites and thus increase the probability of tyranny by the minority, both in relation to federal politics in general and within the ethnorepublics, where in most cases the titular nation constitutes a demographic minority.4 As Fedorov argues, such ethnorepublic elites have a tendency to use their federated status to obtain special privileges and rights through bargaining and striking political deals with the centre. Thus they are in a position to ignore basic federal obligations, resulting in inequities in contributions to the federal budget, which is detrimental to the interests both of the federation and of its poorer constituent units.5 Second, it is argued that by empowering particular ethnorepublic minorities the federal arrangement imposes limits on genuinely pluralist interests, since the demands and concerns of other forms of identity politics are downgraded or marginalised. Thus the capacity of the federal system to represent forms of collective identities other than those of the dominant ethnorepublic minority are invariably disadvantaged. In short, for proponents of a liberal variant of federalism, of uppermost concern is countering domination by either nationalist-minded minorities or the majority national group (Russians) by