Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

34 Michael Burgess‘federalism’ and ‘federation’, a distinction originally introduced into themainstream literature by Preston King in 1982. 26 Consequently we mustestablish what we mean by federalism and federation and how these conceptswill be used in what follows. I take federalism to mean the recommendationand (sometimes) the active promotion of support for federation. Afederation is a particular kind of state. It is ‘a distinctive organizational formor institutional fact the main purpose of which is to accommodate the constituentunits of a union in the decision-making procedure of the centralgovernment by means of constitutional entrenchment’. 27The relationship between federalism and federation is complex becausefederalism informs federation and vice versa. And there are many federalismsthat differ widely in their content. They reflect different constellationsand configurations of cleavage patterns that reflect distinct values, interestsand identities both in a territorial and a non-territorial sense. Like federation,federalism is rooted in context so that in order to understand eachfederalism we must locate the concept in its own distinct setting: historical,cultural, intellectual, philosophical, social, economic, legal and ideological.In this way we can begin to appreciate its huge multidimensional complexities.Federalism constitutes the socio-political reality of difference anddiversity, of the variety of interests and identities that mobilize to seek genuineautonomy, representation and participation in federation. Federation,too, is similarly complex and contextual. As tangible institutional fact, itcannot be reduced to the mere end product of federalism. We do not move ina simple straight line from federalism to federation. Federation itself is governedby purpose, what King calls ‘conscious self-direction’; it acts uponfederalism, helping to shape and reshape both its expression and its goals.The relationship between federalism and federation is therefore symbiotic;each impinges on the other in an unending fashion.The application of this conceptual analysis to the Russian Federationimmediately calls our attention to the relationship between federalism, federationand liberal democratic constitutionalism. In the first place this particularconceptual approach would take issue with previous statements suggestingthat the Soviet Union was ‘a federation without federalism’. 28 On the contrary,the USSR certainly had federalism – in the sense defined above of itsconspicuous ethno-territorialism as identity politics – which was, as we haveseen, the very raison d’etre of federation in 1922. But it was not an authenticfederal state. To adopt the structural trappings of a federation as an expedientwithout them being firmly embedded in a liberal democratic state thatcombined a written constitution with the rule of law and embraced localautonomy rooted in a division of powers between the central governmentand the constituent authorities, guaranteed free, fair and regular competitiveelections based upon the secret ballot and political choice among freelyformed political parties together with an independent judicial system andrepresentative political institutions, was merely to construct a façade.Consequently the Soviet Union was an example of federalism without federation.