Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

Between a rock and a hard place 41Federal Constitution established the federal supremacy clause that hasallowed the federal government to interfere in state legislation on almost anymatter; Article 76 that permits the federal government to encroach uponstate competences in pursuit of the uniformity of law; and Article 150 thatprovides the basis for proclamations of emergency granting both the parliamentand/or the federal government virtually unlimited powers. To thesemust be added tight central control of the police and armed forces, surveillanceof the media, influence on the law courts and evidence of politicalintimidation of legitimate opposition. Indeed, we could be forgiven forthinking that this is a broad-brush description of the Russian Federationrather than Malaysia.Nigeria brings into focus yet another historical legacy of centralization ina federation and this is an example of a federal model that has recentlyemerged in 1999 in the wake of chronic constitutional, political and governmentalinstability that stretches back before its independence from theBritish in 1960. Among the lessons learned from its past failures has beenthe need to defuse tribal, communal and multinational conflicts by increasingthe number of constituent units in the federation to thirty-six in 1996 andformally adopting in 1999 the institutional design of a presidential federationin the Federal Constitution of Nigeria that was intended to strengthennational unity and integration. Given that in four decades of independentstatehood Nigeria has had six separate federal constitutions, the level ofconcern for the future territorial integrity of the country more than matchesthat of the Russian Federation. Consequently the promotion of astrong executive presidency bequeathed by the Nigerian military was thelogical antidote to ethnic fragmentation. Rotimi Suberu summarized thelegacy:The most widely lamented feature of the Nigerian federation involvesthe massive, relentless, and comparatively unprecedented accumulationof powers by the centre at the expense of the states and the localities …The process of hypercentralization in Nigeria … has been virtually preserved… as the framework for Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. The repressivehypercentralization of that era not only put federalism virtually inabeyance … but also bequeathed a problematic institutional legacy forthe succeeding federal democratic dispensation. 48This section has demonstrated that the Russian Federation can be usefullyanalysed and assessed from the comparative perspective of historical legaciesof centralization in federations. It reveals that in this particular regard,Russia sits rather more comfortably among conventional federations if weutilize a spectrum or continuum of centralization–decentralization than wemight initially have expected. Viewed from this angle, the Russian Federationunder Putin’s regime emerges as less exceptional and no more extreme in itspredisposition toward centralization than many other federations.