Abstract
There appears to be a consensus that federalism as a political institution is the most appropriate solution to the internal ethnic, regional, cultural or religious diversity in a country. A federal structure allows the accommodation of demands for regional autonomy within the same territorial unit. “Politics of accommodation”1 is usually seen as a distinguishing feature of federalism. Furthermore, “federalism is also a way of decentralizing conflict and isolating continuous regional issues so that they do not ‘bubble up’ to disrupt national politics.”2
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Notes
Graham Smith, “Mapping the Federal Condition”, Graham Smith (ed.), Federalism: The Multiethnic Challenge (London and New York: Longman, 1995), p. 7.
Daniel J. Elazar (ed.), Federal Systems of the World. A Handbook of Federal, Confederal and Autonomy Arrangements (London: Longman, 1994), p. xv.
Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Democracy in a World Beyond Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism”, in Alastair McAuley (ed.), Soviet Federalism, Nationalism and Economic Decentralization (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1991), p. 3.
Ivo D. Duchacek, The Territorial Dimension of Politics: Within, Among and Across Nations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), p. 96.
Alain G. Gagnon, “The Political Uses of Federalism”, in Michael Burgess and Alain G. Gagnon (eds), Comparative Federalism and Federation: Competing Traditions and Future Directions (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 18.
“The Soviet state not only passively tolerated but actively institutionalized the existence of multiple nations and nationalities as constitutive elements of the state and its citizenry”. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 23.
Oksana Oracheva, “Rossiiskii Federalizm: Novoe v Politike Tsentra?”, Rossiiskii Regional’nyi Byulleten, 1, 1 February 1999, pp. 5–6.
Mikhail Afanasev, “Chto Stoit za Initsiativami po Ukreplenyu “Vlastnoi Vertikali”, Rossiiskii Regional’nyi Byulleten, 1, 8 March 1999, pp. 3–5.
For analysis of seven federal districts, see, for example, Oksana Oracheva, “The Dilemmas of Federalism: Moscow and the Regions in the Russian Federation”, in Yitzhak Brudny Jonathan Frankel and Steffani Hoffman (eds), Restructuring Post-Communist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 185–94.
I quote the English translation of the Russian 1993 Constitution, Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 395–429.
V.A. Kochev, “Obrazovanie novogo sub’ekta RF — Permskogo kraya: Pravovye aspekty”, in L.A. Fadeeva (ed.), Politicheskii al’manakhprikamia (Perm: Izdatel’stvo “pushka”, 2005), pp. 228–41.
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© 2007 Oksana Oracheva
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Oracheva, O. (2007). Federalism and Defederalization in a Country in Transition: the Russian Experience. In: Gill, G. (eds) Politics in the Russian Regions. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597280_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597280_3
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