National elites often vie for personal gain under popular slogans of self-determination; however, they are playing a dangerous game, and in doing so, they risk losing everything they have. Yevgeny Shestakov, host of the RG Discussion Club, speaks with Alexei Miller, Ph.D. in History and professor at the Central European University and the Russian State University of the Humanities, on how multiethnic countries such as Russia can prevent disintegration.
Yevgeny Shestakov: Almost every year we see certain territories splitting off from existing internationally recognized states and declaring themselves independent. Is this a pattern or are these simply individual events that are not typical of a global development?
Alexei Miller: I would like to rephrase your question as follows: Can we speak of a set of circumstances that encourages the emergence of new states? These events are not merely coincidental, but I would not consider them a growing tendency or suggest a snowball effect.
Shestakov: Why not? The tendency is evident - Sudan split into two parts, Yugoslavia no longer exists, Abkhazia and South Ossetia effectively split off from Georgia. One gets the impression that these are not individual events and that more and more nations want self-determination.
Miller: Nations cannot want anything; they do not exist as political actors. All the examples you cited are very different from each other, and each of them needs to be considered individually. For example, Russia played an important role in the conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In that case, we had a country that, on the one hand, had tensions with its ethnic minorities and, on the other hand, had a standoff with its large neighbor who was ready to back these ethnic minorities. This is only one example.
Another example is Yugoslavia, in which many actors had their hands, including the United States.
Finally, there is Sudan which, to my mind, became a split state long ago. The recent referendum was an attempt to establish more efficient entities in that space. I would also like to cite Czechoslovakia, which peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia without any further conflict between the two. This is why I say that the set of factors that causes existing countries to fall apart and new ones to emerge is unique in each case. So, the one-size-fits-all approach does not work here.
Shestakov: Are there indeed no universal factors that lead to the emergence of new states?
Miller: There are no universal factors. The reason can be that a government does not fulfill its obligations to its people, and so the state starts falling apart. There can also be outside intervention that backs the separatist intent of a certain region. Or there can be an escalation of tensions between two different groups within a country. So, we need to consider in each case why these things happen. A professional political scientist will never say that the Georgian and Abkhaz peoples have always hated one another. At some point in history, they indeed did, but at other points, they enjoyed quite friendly relations. It is inappropriate to use the notion of a nation for the purposes of political analysis. It is usually a certain group of people that acts while claiming to speak on behalf of a nation.
Shestakov: In any case, we cannot deny the influence of national or religious motives in separatism, as was the case in Sudan.
Miller: You can also add the ethnic or tribal factor. But when considering this factor, it would be more appropriate to ask who exacerbates it and how.
Shetakov: How would you answer this question?
Miller: It takes certain politically established and active entities. These can be groups of political leaders who form the elite of a certain ethnic group. These can also be organized forces from the outside. It is rare that an ethnic conflict results in the disintegration of a state. There are many examples in which young people from one tribe have fought with young people from another tribe and then peacefully return home until the next conflict. If nobody tries to leverage this conflict for political purposes, it will not result in the country coming apart.
National elites often vie for personal gain under popular slogans of self-determination; however, they are playing a dangerous game, and in doing so, they risk losing everything they have. This means that the central government can come to terms with them by offering them, and other peripheral elites, certain privileges within the single state. The examples of separatist groups coming to terms with a government are as common as examples of countries falling apart.
Shestakov: You said that one reason for separatism is the failure of the government to fulfill its obligations to the people. What obligations did you have in mind?
Miller: I can cite Russia in the early 1990s as an example.
It is easier to list the obligations that the government did fulfill back then. Thank God, central heating systems were functional. Other than that, the government was failing in every area of public service - essential supplies, healthcare, and others. The country was coming apart. Mobsters were racketeering emerging businesses. Salaries were not paid for months. Some people say that Boris Yeltsin made a mistake by offering Russia’s regions as much sovereignty as they would like. But, in fact, he saved the country because he did so under circumstances in which he had nothing else to offer and no other ways to defuse separatist sentiment. In a certain sense, he was simply playing the hand he was dealt.
When the first signs of stabilization emerged in the mid-1990s, separatist tendencies subsided. This was in part a reaction to the events in Chechnya because Russia’s regions, including the regional elites, did not want a similar conflict at their doorstep. The tragic war in Chechnya shocked everyone, including separatist-minded elites, and made them take pause. Such are the cynical paradoxes of history.
Shestakov: Does this mean that the more severely a government pursues a centralization policy, the less inclined separatists will be to dismantle a country? How can multiethnic countries such as Russia prevent disintegration?
Miller: Let’s first make it clear what a nation is because what we are discussing are in fact ethnic groups.
The borders of ethnic groups and nations can coincide and can differ. For example, if we speak about the Russian nation, then it includes all citizens of Russia. If we speak about the Ukrainian nation in a political sense, then the eight million Russians living in Ukraine constitute a part of it. The idea that political borders should coincide with those of ethnic groups is certainly part of nationalist thought. In fact, it is almost never so in actuality.
All heterogeneity is a source of conflict, but we also know that society cannot be homogeneous in any sense, including its ethnic composition. Any society inevitably breaks down into social groups with different incomes, which is also a potential source of conflict. The same is true of religions. No one will say there can be only one religion in society. This is why the most important thing is what you do with all these differences. And the size of a country also matters. I would even put it this way: the bigger the country, the smaller the threat of disintegration because its size implies its ability to protect itself from foreign intervention as long as the country is functioning properly. The bombings in Yugoslavia went unpunished, but you cannot bomb Moscow and get away with it. China can have certain internal problems, but nobody would think of assaulting it.
Don’t look for simple answers because there aren’t any. The main thing that I’m trying to say in this interview is that there are no simple rules for new states emerging and existing states falling apart. It always takes a very complex combination of factors. Naturally, nationalists adhere to the idea that nations within a state are something homogeneous. And this is what leads to disintegration. Many countries are built on recognizing their differences. I’m referring not only to Switzerland but also to India, where all differences are recognized and taken into account. We have inherited much from the Soviet Union, including national autonomies. But abolishing these institutionally clumsy territorial entities will only create new problems.
Shestakov: What should be done if a new state emerges? How should relations with it be established? Should it be recognized or kept out of global politics so that its example discourages others?
Miller: Let’s turn to real life instead of going into abstract theories. What does it mean to recognize a state or refuse to do so? Sometimes a coalition is built to support such a state, as was the case with Kosovo. At the same time, there are still many countries that disagree with that decision. In other cases, a broad coalition is not formed, as was the case with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, for example. Nevertheless, it is evident that the international community does not intend to force them back into Georgia.
When speaking about recognition, we have to understand that there is a large array of political options between a total boycott or even intervention and international recognition. A state can remain unrecognized officially but have economic ties with other countries. I believe that when a rift opens up, the international community accepts it as a fact of life. What follows is a long and often cynical process of integrating this new entity into global relations that are not always official.
Some actors can even benefit from a state with a weak position and without an official status. When a new entity emerges with its own peculiarities, there are always actors, not necessarily national ones, who will try to take advantage of the situation, including arms and drug dealers or international corporations. This is a new phenomenon. Before we did not know that in Africa one tribe disliked another tribe because nobody was interested. But now we pay attention to such standoffs because the territory these two tribes occupy is rich in oil or diamonds or something else.
The international community needs to build relations with unrecognized states for the simple reason that such states are a home to people. When we speak of an economic boycott, there is always the question of how to import medications. Or will you buy agricultural products from these people? Or are they to starve to death? That is why such territorial entities inevitably get integrated into global relations.