The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal States: Why Russia Survives Where the USSR Fell
@article{Hale2005TheMA, title={The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal States: Why Russia Survives Where the USSR Fell}, author={Henry E. Hale}, journal={Perspectives on Politics}, year={2005}, volume={3}, pages={55 - 70} }
Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies in the design of ethnofederal institutions. The USSR contained a core ethnic region, the “Russian Republic,” a single region with a far greater population…
45 Citations
The Unexpectedly Underwhelming Role of Ethnicity in Russian Politics, 1991-2011
- Sociology
- 2012
In the twenty years of Russia's existence, one of its most notable yet underappreciated achievements is the fact that ethnicity has played a very minor and non-divisive role in Russian politics. The…
Unresolved ethnic conflict and religious revival in Russia the Chechen element
- Sociology, Political Science
- 2007
Abstract : As social, cultural and political issues have resurfaced between contemporary ethnic Russians and members of the Northern Caucasus-Chechen minority group, this…
Yeltsin, Putin, and Clinton: Presidential Leadership and Russian Democratization in Comparative Perspective
- Political SciencePerspectives on Politics
- 2009
Immediately after coming to power, the Clinton administration declared the consolidation of market and democratic institutions in Russia to be a vital American interest. The administration's central…
Ethnofederalism: The Worst Form of Institutional Arrangement…?
- SociologyInternational Security
- 2014
Scholars are divided on the merits of ethnofederalism as an institutional approach to the management of ethnically divided societies. For some, ethnofederalism is a potentially workable compromise…
Ethnofederalism, separatism, and conflict: what have we learned from the Soviet and Yugoslav experiences?
- Sociology
- 2012
The breakups of Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as the violent conflicts that took place on their ruins, spurred a large number of studies claiming that the ethnofederal designs of these states were…
Beyond Subversive Institutions: Understanding Categorical Factors of State Dismemberment in Europe
- Political Science
- 2009
As a number of scholars have shown, institutions played a central role in the breakups of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union in the 1990s. This paper builds on that work to explore in…
National Minorities and European Union Accession: A Consideration of Communist Legacies and EU Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe
- Political Science
- 2020
The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe prompted Western Europe to integrate the region with European Union (EU) expansion. The collapse of the Eastern bloc was concerning to the West,…
Iraq as a New Multinational State: A Cautious Defence
- Political Science
- 2010
This book had its origins in a conference titled ‘Beyond the Nation?’ The question mark was appropriate. Nations, as vehicles of popular sovereignty and as subjects of collective self-determination,…
The Fall and Rise of Regionalism?
- Political Science
- 2010
The centralization of power and the decline of regionalism were two of Vladimir Putin's principal achievements during his presidency. These achievements are now threatened by the global financial…
Consociational Theory and Peace Agreements in Pluri-National Places: Northern Ireland and Other Cases
- Sociology
- 2008
This paper examines consociational theory, primarily as developed by Arend Lijphart,1 and its relevance in the context of pluri-national places. A pluri-national place has more than one mobilized…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 142 REFERENCES
Minorities at risk: A global view of ethnopolitical conflicts
- Sociology
- 1993
The turmoil in Yugoslavia, the rebellions of the Kurds and Shi???is in Iraq, the ongoing struggle in South Africa???ethnic conflict continues unabated in many areas of the world.To help us understand…
After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia
- Political Science
- 1999
"After the Deluge" offers a new, provocative interpretation of Russia's struggle in the 1990s to construct a democratic system of government in the largest and most geographically divided country in…
Democratization and Disintegration in Multinational States: The Breakup of the Communist Federations
- Political Science
- 1999
One of the challenges presented to democratization theory by the collapse of communist regimes is the need to take into account the impact of ethnonational diversity on the processes of transition.…
Russia's "Ethnic Revival": The Separatist Activism of Regional Leaders in a Postcommunist Order
- Political Science
- 1997
Since 1990 Russia has experienced an unexpected "ethnic revival." Varying widely in geography, culture, economic development, and institutional history, the country's thirty-two ethnic regions offer…
The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union?
- Political Science
- 2002
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin improvised a system of "asymmetric federalism" to help maintain its successor state, the Russian Federation. However, when sparks of…
Russia: Confronting a Loss of Empire, 1987-1991
- History
- 1993
Since 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev's programs of glasnost and democratization began to set off chain reactions of convulsive political change, ethnic Russians have been a people in quest of an…
Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars
- Political ScienceInternational Security
- 1996
Ethnic civil wars are burning in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Sudan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and are threatening to break out…
The Parade of Sovereignties: Testing Theories of Secession in the Soviet Setting
- SociologyBritish Journal of Political Science
- 2000
This article asks why some ethnically distinct regions fight fiercely to secede while others struggle to save the same multinational state. It tests competing explanations using a new dataset…
Divided We Stand: Institutional Sources of Ethnofederal State Survival and Collapse
- Sociology
- 2004
Federal states in which component regions are invested with distinct ethnic content are more likely to collapse when they contain a core ethnic region, a single ethnic region enjoying pronounced…
Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization
- Sociology, Political Science
- 1991
Central among recent changes in the Soviet Union is an expanding and increasingly public politics of federalism. The Soviet developmental strategy assigned federalism and the cadres of…