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.
No comments:
Post a Comment