Federalism and Local Politics in Russia

44 Michael Burgesswhile the Walloons at 32 per cent are a large linguistic society to the souththat accommodates about 67,000 German speakers in Eupen and Malmedy.On the face of it, this seemingly intractable combination of cleavage patternsin which territoriality, language identity and socio-economic disparities donot augur well for legitimate and stable liberal democratic rule is actually ahighly successful multilingual federal polity. This is largely because of aninnovative federal design that is ably complemented and buttressed by arange of consociational practices. While Belgium is territorially a small federationwith a population of just over 10 million people compared with thegiant Russian mosaic, its judicious use of constitutional, legal and politicalprocedures, mechanisms and devices furnishes a battery of checks and balancesthat guarantee respect for the integrity of entrenched cultural identitiesand protect minority rights. The implications of this peculiar Belgian federationfor Russia suggest that it is possible to forge a compound unity byintegrating difference and diversity in the structures, institutions and practicesof a liberal democratic polity that facilitates genuine ethnonationalautonomy and internal self-determination. 56As a multilingual, multicultural, multinational federation whose populationof just over 1 billion people makes it the world’s largest liberal democraticfederation, India is clearly more analogous to Russia in its territorialand demographic size and in the sheer scale of its diversity than Belgium.Language combined with regional identity has proved to be the most significantcharacteristic of ethnic self-definition, with Hindus unquestionablythe dominant religious and linguistic social community. However, among thetwenty-eight constituent units that constitute India today, the Sikhs inPunjab, the Tamils in Tamil Nadu, the Bengalis in West Bengal and theNagas in Nagaland are a good representative sample of the strong sense ofsub-state nationhood that exists. Jammu-Kashmir is of course a notableexception to the customary practice of political accommodation in India,and its frontier location with Pakistan has its counterpart in Chechnya asone of a handful of Russian republics situated on an outer border. Bothcases of sub-state national identity are characterized by a complex combinationof historical, territorial, religious, economic and international factors.Like the Russian Federation, the idea of a strong centre in India has beendriven largely by past fears of its possible disintegration, especially after therupture with Pakistan, and as we have already noted above, this confers atleast a partial legitimacy on federal government with a battery of strongconstitutional powers designed to protect the security of the state. But it isalso worth noting that ethnic diversity and multi-nationalism in India havebeen successfully accommodated, as in Nigeria, by the practice of creatingnew states out of existing constituent units and, more recently, by localgovernment reform that introduced a third tier of government – the panchayats– enjoying formal constitutional recognition as another autonomousgovernmental form in its own right. The implications of federal rule in Indiafor the Russian Federation, then, suggest that it is possible to secure the