Valerie Bunce
Status Quo, Reformist, or Secessionist Politics: Explaining Minority-State Bargaining in Multinational States
September 26, 2005
Abstract
Minority politics has become a central issue for American foreign policy. Over the past decade, the United States has intervened in a number of multinational states. While the reasons behind American military involvement in Bosnia, Serbia-Montenegro, Afghanistan, and Iraq, together with smaller-scale engagements in Liberia and Haiti, have varied, the dilemmas posed by these interventions for American foreign policy-makers have been remarkably similar—and similarly intractable. How can viable states and democracies be constructed in multinational settings where inter-group trust is low, a history of democracy is virtually non-existent, and national minorities are shared among neighboring states? The United States, moreover, is likely to revisit these problems in the future, given the Bush administration's commitment to democracy promotion—a commitment that will, given the preponderance of culturally diverse states in the international system, necessarily involve continuing engagement in multinational settings.
Scholarly interest in minority politics, therefore, is both ample and understandable. It is, therefore, puzzling that all of this attention has failed to produce a compelling answer to what is perhaps the most fundamental question about minority political behavior; why minority leaders embrace such different political agendas. Some, of course, take the radical step of demanding either states of their own or, less commonly, merger with a neighboring state. However, more common are two other options: accepting the status quo or seeking changes, such as greater cultural and political autonomy for their communities and/or expanded representation of their group in central-level political institutions.
Minority-state interactions, in short, vary—across country, within country, and over time. The purpose of this article is to explore the reasons behind such variations. It does so by comparing bargaining between central leaders and leaders of minority communities from 1989 to 2003 in three postcommunist states: Georgia (and the regions of Abkhazia, Adjaria, and southern Ossetia), Russia (and the regions of Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan) and Serbia-Montenegro (and the subunits of Kosovo, Montenegro, and Vojvodina).
The countries selected for this study, therefore, present a puzzle that helps us tease out some reasons why bargaining between the center and minority regions takes on different dynamics in multi-cultural state settings. The common circumstances of these states would all seem to predispose them to secessionist challenges from their subunits—which is one reason why all three feature at least one secessionist region. Secession remains, nonetheless, the exception, not the rule.