What is Wrong with the Concept of Multinational Federalism? Some Thoughts about the Interrelationship between the Concepts of (Multi-)Nationalism, Federalism, Power Sharing and Conflict Resolution

Abstract

This article deals with the theoretical and methodological problems in any effort to conceptualize a model of multinational federalism. This is shown through an exemplary review of scholarly literature frequently ending up in nothing else but tautological regressions and/or ideologically driven dichotomizations of basic terms and concepts such as ethnic group, community, nationality, minority or (co-)nation when using these terms interchangeably, in particular, through combinations such as ‘minority-nation’, in order to get hold of the phenomenon of overlapping social, political and cultural diversities. These problems of conceptualization, symbolized through the perennial question ‘What ‘is’ a nation or minority?’ in order to be able to establish an allegedly objective or universal definition, are trapped in what I call the ethnic–civic–national oxymoron following from political theories of nationalism and liberalism based on normative-ontological approaches. In order to overcome the mentioned theoretical and methodological trap(s) based on the confusion of epistemology and ontology, this article argues for the necessity to overcome ideological dichotomizations through the method of triangulation. In the end, based on this method, I try to develop an institutional model of multicultural instead of multinational federalism which allows from the very beginning to take the empirical processes of ethnification and/or de-ethnification as major drivers for ‘multiple diversity governance’ into account. This de-construction of the concept of multinational federalism and the re-conceptualization of a model of multicultural federalism also allows to overcome the theoretical battles in power sharing literature between so-called accomodationists and integrationists, based on the dichotomization of their policy prescriptions.