Friday, March 15, 2019

Russian Regionalists as Diverse as Russia’s Regions and That is a Virtue, Omsk Journalist Says


Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 14 – Regionalists, Omsk journalist Viktor Korb says, are “people who cannot tolerate great power chauvinism, imperialism, unitarism and all forms and methods of ignoring and suppressing the free development of human communities on the basis of ethno-cultural and territorial self-determination.”

            They are thus united in opposition “against the empire and for the freedom of regions, against centralized diktat and for self-organization and self-administration of citizens in historically evolved territorial units,” he continues in an essay for the Region.Expert portal (region.expert/regionalists/).

            But despite these shared values which justifies speaking of them as a group, regionalists are an extremely varied lot, at least as varied as are Russia’s regions.  And while no one can yet prepared “’an atlas of Russian regionalism,’” Korb says, one can sketch out some of the ways in which regionalists vary and why.  

            One of the chief markers of regionalists -- and one that makes them different – is that almost all regionalists are attached to specific territory, Korb says. In principle, of course, there oculd be “an extraterritorial regionalist,” someone committed to regionalism as such but most regionalists begin with their own region and its distinctiveness and work from there.

            Regionalists share a common foe: the Russian empire and its hyper-centralized authoritarian.  But they differ on almost everything else. That is because they make variety a central element of their beliefs and what will work in once place will not necessarily work in all. In fact, regionalists almost totally reject the possibility that one size fits all.

            That makes it difficult for regionalists to unite into any common front and ensures that regionalists invariably find themselves at odds with other regionalists.  Sometimes these debates became very sharp, but they remain debates in which people are discussing matters rather than fighting and because there is the “common task of liquidating the imperial monster.”

            Regionalism thus adds to all other political discussions, enriching them; and for that reason too, it is not surprising to find regionalists among advocates of the most diverse ideological and political agendas, Korb argues, noting that this means that such people can differ on one thing but agree on another, a precondition for democratic development.

“There are regionalist-anarchists and regionalist-statists, supporters of small but strong states. There are regionalist democrats and regionalists who dream about a contemporary form of enlightened monarchy on the model of small European city states.  There are regionalist nationalists and regional libertarians,” and so on.

As a result, “regionalism doesn’t reduce ideological debates but gives them more content and makes them more specific and more purposeful and responsible.”  Regionalists don’t talk about some mythic future like “a Beautiful Russia” but about real people and places.

Because all this is so, Korb says, it is important to say something about himself because those who hear an argument must know why someone is making it. He is “a consistent but not orthodox libertarian, a supporter of a minimalist state and a maximum of personal freedom on the basis of present-day itnerpretations of ‘natural law’ and all-human culture.”

Moreover, he says, he is “a Siberian regionalist who thinks that one of the most important priorities” must be articulating arrangements that will prevent any power center from abusing the rights of those it controls and ensuring that there are arrangements put in place to prevent arbitrariness.

If others differ, so much the better for the discussion. Or, although Korb does not make reference to this, one can sum up his argument by paraphrasing what Otto Bauer said of the nation in his Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie more than a century ago, regionalism is not an explanation but rather something that must be explained.

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