Democracy, Majority Rule, and Gorbachev's Referendum

...in France it is the other way around...

...For Gorbachev to say that the Soviet Union is the proper unit, and therefore a majority of its people are entitled to decide the matter, simply begs the question...

...Because of protests arising internationally and within the Soviet Union, it may not be possible for Gorbachev or his successors to hold the Soviet empire together by naked force...

...Force, after all, was the American solution in 1861...

...In 1905 the Norwegian people insisted on and gained full independence from Sweden because they wanted their country to be governed by majorities of their own people, and their own people were Norwegians...

...or the coercion imposed by the Central Country fails and new boundaries are drawn, which in due time become more or less acceptable to the Group...

...Even if force has been a common solution in the past, today Gorbachev is unlikely to get away with the argument that he is entitled to use it in order to hold his empire together...

...In short, if coercion, whether physical or economic, is the only card the Soviet leadership has to play it probably cannot prevent the republics from seceding, though it may persuade them to engage in negotiations...

...If they do, then the central authorities would surely be entitled to remove the weapons and disarm the facilities...

...All of the republics other than Russia itself export a high proportion of their output to other republics: the amount is over 60 percent for the three Baltic republics, Moldavia, and Armenia...

...Surely, you might say, there must be a principle on which we can reasonably try to decide questions about the proper boundaries for political units, about relations between what, for the sake of convenience we might call the Group and the Central Country...

...And so on...

...In any case, Soviet leaders cannot reasonably justify their use of coercion, military or economic, by spurious arguments about majority rule...

...For one thing, nuclear weapons and facilities for producing them are said to be scattered around the country...

...Some members of Congress, perhaps with an eye to their constituents, may make the opposite judgment...

...In some such fashion one can, of course, reach judgments, even though they would not be defensible on democratic grounds...

...A crisp, unimpeachable solution would be a marvelous achievement of political theory or practice...

...David Blumenfeld/IMPAcT VISUALS FALL • 1991 • 495 Gorbachev's Referendum so to speak, the new Central Country vis-à-vis minority groups within its jurisdiction...

...Consider pollution, to take only one example, or monopoly control over a natural resource like water, or public health and the spread of contagious diseases...

...If autonomy is fair for the Group (now the Central Country), then it is fair for a minority within its boundaries (now the Group vis-à-vis the new Central Country...

...Their exports abroad, on the other hand, are small, ranging from less than 6 percent for Moldavia to 1.3 percent for Armenia...

...The potentiality of harming one's neighbors is a consequence so relevant to the case of the Soviet Union that I want to come back to it later on...

...The union treaty resulting from these negotiations was to be open for signature on August 20...

...Even if we ignore the practical issues, the idea of majority rule as a solution quickly runs into deep difficulties...

...Gorbachev (along with many others) appears not to understand that the principle of majority rule cannot rightly be used to decide its own domain...

...For one thing (and this is the third question a democrat needs to ask), are we satisfied that the people within the proposed unit really intend to govern themselves democratically...

...The problem of what constitutes a proper political unit surfaces in all sorts of places, expected and unexpected...

...Why isn't Lithuania...

...For there are good grounds for rejecting a claim to political autonomy even if it is backed by a majority of the people in the proposed political unit...

...Sooner or later, then, the boundaries of every state would rest on the unanimous consent of its members...

...While Gorbachev's initial attempt to apply the principle of majority rule to the question of independence was a practical failure, it raised a number of issues relevant not only to the Soviet Union but to other countries confronting claims to autonomy or outright independence — Canada, for example, or Yugoslavia...

...they are probably committed to it more strongly than Gorbachev himself, but they want the principle to be applied within a properly constituted unit: Lithuania...

...Can we extract a solution from the venerable idea of consent...

...Confronted by the obvious practical fact that his claim was not accepted by the people in the republics asserting their right to secession and independence, Gorbachev soon turned to the more realistic and appropriate process of negotiations among the nine republics favorable to maintaining the union...

...In short, neither the American Bill of Rights nor the Helsinki agreement 492 • DISSENT Gorbachev's Referendum endorses philosophical anarchism...

...Lithuania, for example, could not sell its dairy products at the prices prevailing in the European Economic Community...

...To be sure, the will of the majority may be morally binding on those who consent to be governed by the principle of majority rule, even when they are outvoted...

...My point, however, is not to recast the American Civil War into what it was not...

...On November 24, 1990, the Kremlin proposed a "Draft Union Treaty...

...First, we must ask whether the territorial must be resolved...

...From the seventeenth century onward, the notion of consent was used to provide a moral foundation for the idea of a democratic state...

...We can hardly insist that the Soviets adhere to principles that are not upheld anywhere else in the world...

...If they are contested, then a fair settlement may require negotiations, arbitration, or adjudication...

...It would surely be imprudent to try...

...Or bullying one's neighbors with the threat of nuclear arms...

...Here we circle back to the majority principle and its problems...

...Because of these difficulties (and for other reasons as well) no country guarantees autonomy to minorities as an absolute right, nor is any likely to...

...The third question implies a fourth...

...Just as the Kremlin has no a priori right to prevent the secession of republics that have been incorporated by force into the union, so the republics have no a priori right to secede without entering into negotiations in good faith...

...In principle they apply to any center and any group...

...His clear and often stated object was not the abolition of slavery...

...One lethal difficulty with fissiparous anarchism is that an independent political association (let me avoid the term state for the moment) might have the unanimous consent of its members and still inflict great harm on people outside the association...

...In all likelihood they have already done so...

...In the United States we insist that school systems should be controlled by officials accountable to local not national majorities...

...I think not...

...Furthermore, minorities are not necessarily ethnic minorities: in democratic countries there is a minority view on virtually every public issue (otherwise it wouldn't be an issue...

...Are there good reasons for believing that autonomy for the Group would result in serious harm to people in the Central Country...

...Are we, then, entirely bereft of standards more embedded in democratic values and aspirations...

...496 • DISSENT...

...Gorbachev likes to buttress his case with constitutional arguments...

...There is no strong reason—from a democratic point of view, at any rate —to support a group's demands for political autonomy if we have good grounds for believing that the outcome of autonomy would be a nondemocratic regime, in which, ironically, the principle of majority rule would itself be inoperative...

...This is an enticing doctrine...

...Might we not ensure consent by treating political autonomy as an absolute right...

...Second, do we have satisfactory grounds for believing that the people within these boundaries clearly want autonomy, and, if so, do we know whether they want complete independence or only a more limited form of autonomy (as with provinces, cantons, or federated states, for example...

...There are several relevant questions that an advocate of democracy should try to answer in attempting to reach a morally justifiable judgment about contests for autonomy between a group and the country of which it is a part...

...To be sure, answers to these questions will not produce irrefutable and unambiguous judgments...

...Quite the contrary: at the outset Lincoln was prepared to guarantee the seceding states a constitutional right to slavery if that had to be the price of keeping the slave states in the Union...

...For if the Group achieves its autonomy, it becomes, Tanks prepare to leave the Russian Parliament area as the coup fails...

...We Americans like to forget what historians of the Civil War keep telling us: during the first two years of that bloody civil strife, the war aims of Lincoln, and probably of most northerners, did not include the abolition of slavery...

...More broadly, does every nationality in the Soviet Union have a right to independence if a majority of that nationality wants it...

...Although Gorbachev was certainly not entitled to insist that negotiations follow the protracted process outlined in a law enacted under a constitution that has no moral validity, surely he is right in saying that the republics ought to be willing to negotiate over the terms of a settlement...

...Putting aside the ambiguity in the wording of the referendum itself, by invoking the principle of majority rule to support his claim to authority over the six republics seeking independence, Gorbachev triggered a process of questioning that failed to produce the solutions he intended...

...People in Quebec insist on greater autonomy, perhaps even independence, not because they reject majority rule but because they do not believe that they should be governed by English-speaking majorities of Canadians...

...What is more, even if the republics were freed from the economic demands of the central government, they would find it difficult for some years to be economically independent of the Soviet Union for the simple reason that their products are generally not competitive in foreign markets...

...The smaller republics are, however, highly vulnerable to economic coercion...

...over 50 percent for Georgia...

...q Ed...

...Yet as Americans know, legal-minded southerners managed to construe a Constitution that contained no explicit right to secession as implying the existence of just such a right...

...Since any group held against its will within an existing state would be entitled to leave that state and form its own unit, compulsory membership in a state would be eliminated...

...The southern states had at least ratified the Constitution in conventions that by the standards of the time were taken as sufficient to signify their consent...

...If secession fails to be adopted, "a new referendum on the question may be held not less than 10 years after the holding of the previous referendum...

...And so on...

...But to oblige people to obey laws to which they have not given their consent violates (and who should know better than Americans...

...Nations have been cobbled together by rulers and, by means of coercion, boundaries have been made to stick long enough for the old loyalties to weaken until they no longer pose a substantial threat...

...These disputes entail genuine conflicts of legitimate interests on both sides...

...At the outset we confront the intractable problem of the legitimacy or propriety of the political unit within which majority rule operates...

...Conversely, of course, a republic is likely to have an interest in maintaining its outlet in the Soviet Union...

...A further difficulty: unlike the Georgians or the Ossettians, discontented minorities do not necessarily occupy a piece of common territory...

...or tensions are eased by allowing the Group local autonomy short of outright independence, in the form of regions, provinces, states, cantons, and the like...

...The White House and Secretary Baker may decide that maintaining tolerable relations with the Kremlin is more important to American interests than maintaining tolerable relations with Vilnius...

...It may seem paradoxical, but the questions I am posing apply not only to the dispute between the Central Country and the Group demanding autonomy...

...The difficulty with this solution is that the defects of the majority principle cut both ways: if majority rule can't rightly be used to decide what constitutes a political unit and therefore can't justify a decision about the boundaries of a larger entity like the USSR, then the principle also can't justify a decision about the boundaries of a the smaller unit like Lithuania...

...But what does it mean to say that "the people clearly want" autonomy in some form...

...If Gorbachev is wrong, does this mean the republics demanding independence are necessarily right...

...Gorbachev's referendum cannot possibly provide the answer...

...The Soviet authorities have a legitimate interest in ensuring that autonomy does not leave the rest of the union at the mercy of the monopolistic or oligopolistic power of suppliers in a seceding republic...

...Are we satisfied that if the Group achieves the autonomy it demands, the rights of minorities within the now autonomous unit will be adequately protected...

...Confronted by claims and counterclaims that have no grounds in democratic principles, values, or practices, one can of course make judgments on other grounds: on strategic or geopolitical grounds, for example, or by judging which of two undemocratic regimes is likely to be the less objectionable...

...or the energies of the Group are diverted to nationalist political parties operating within the political system...

...The independent Republic of Georgia would have to grant independence to the South Ossettians, Russia to the North Ossettians, and a new Republic of Ossettia would be formed...

...Or are they contested...

...A justifiable decision on the question of the proper political unit cannot be arrived at by majority vote, because the principle itself presupposes that a proper unit already exists...

...494 • DISSENT Gorbachev's Referendum boundaries claimed by the Group are clear and mutually understood...

...If minorities were to have an absolute right to form an association independent of the larger group, at least on matters most important to them, either that right would have to be restricted arbitrarily to the members of minorities occupying an identifiable piece of ground, or else the right would apply equally to minorities of all kinds...

...Some minorities are persistently on the losing side, like opponents of the federal income tax in the United States...

...We will have further analyses in future issues of the magazine...

...a very fundamental democratic principle...

...Alas, no altogether satisfactory solution seems to exist...

...and so on...

...It has been estimated that about one-fifth of the people in the Soviet Union live outside the boundaries of their ethnic republics...

...At a minimum, demands for political autonomy, whether for full independence or only partial autonomy, can hardly be justified unless it can be shown that a majority of people in the proposed unit definitely want autonomy, and would choose it given a reasonable understanding of the likely consequences...

...Attempts to employ force will produce outrage abroad and at home...

...JULY 1991 But should it obligate those who refuse their consent, not because they deny the validity of majority rule within a properly constituted democratic unit but because the political unit is itself seen as illegitimate...

...If the high ground of majority rule cannot reasonably be used for building a sound case for either side—secession or enforced membership— are democrats, whether inside or outside the Soviet Union, left entirely without grounds for reasonable judgments on this perplexing matter...

...While one should not be overly impressed by the Kremlin's sudden conversion to the cause of minority rights in the republics, the prospect of discrimination and, worse, of uncontrollable ethnic violence is a matter in which not only the Kremlin has a legitimate concern but the rest of the world as well...

...Although Soviet leaders may exaggerate the risks, they do have some legitimate concerns...

...Although a "basic principle" is "the inalienable right of every people to self-determination, selfgovernment, and the autonomous resolution of all questions of its development," the powers granted to the union could, if broadly interpreted, considerably restrict the autonomy of the republics...

...In attempting to dissuade the republics from leaving the union, therefore, the Soviet leadership may choose to apply economic coercion: by cutting off crucial energy supplies, for example...

...Indeed, according to remarks made in FALL • 1991 • 493 Gorbachev's Referendum Moscow last March by a high party official to a half dozen Yale political scientists, a commission charged with exactly that function was already in the process of being established...

...Note: Events in the Soviet Union overtook us as we went to press...

...In practice, as distinct from theory, the usual solution has been force plus time...

...Instead they often live intermingled with the members of the majority, like the Russians in Lithuania or the Ukraine, the Moslems in India, and the Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and the Soviet Union...

...But if the right were applied to all, then any group that opposed a law could insist that since the law lacked its consent, its members must be exempt from the application of the law, even though the law had been passed by a majority or their representatives, and quite possibly an overwhelming majority...

...We can readily imagine a Lithuanian, for example, responding to Gorbachev, "Of course I believe in majority rule, and I'm more than willing to consent to it—but the only majority I will agree to obey is a majority of my people in my country, not a majority of people in your empire...

...Article 9 provides that "the Congress of USSR People's Deputies lays down a transitional period not exceeding five years within which questions arising in connection with the republic's secession from the USSR because that constitution lacks any shred of democratic legitimacy—least of all in countries annexed to the Soviet Union by force...

...On this assumption, autonomy would have to be granted to any group wishing it, provided only that the group could show convincingly that its new unit would be democratically governed...

...Following the referendum on the union held last March, President Mikhail Gorbachev and his supporters claimed that the outcome demonstrated that a majority of the people in the Soviet Union wanted to maintain the union...

...Whether they exist in any republic likely to seek independence I am not in a position to know...

...But the appropriate arrangements will not come about without negotations...

...but they can help a democrat to arrive at the messy mixtures of prudence, principle, and hunch that are the essence of most judgments on complex political questions...

...For convenience, hereafter I'll refer to the Group and the Central Country...

...Although the northern cause was ultimately ennobled by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, we need to ask ourselves whether the sacrifice of six hundred thousand lives would have been justifiable if, in the absence of that ennobling outcome, the only justification for the slaughter had been to keep certain states from forming an independent nation...

...and in the end neither constitutional debate nor Chief Justice Taney's absurd attempt to resolve the issue in the Dred Scott decision prevented civil war...

...Gorbachev's constitutional case against secession is even weaker than Lincoln's, not only because the 1977 constitution explicitly acknowledges such a right* but even more * On April 3, 1990, Gorbachev signed a law passed by the Congress of USSR People's Deputies establishing "the procedure for resolving questions connected with a Union republic's secession from the USSR in accordance with Article 72 of the USSR Constitution...

...It would be a mistake to assume, then, that disputes over autonomy in the Soviet Union could be reasonably and justly settled if only the leadership in the Kremlin and the republics would abide by simple, straightforward, democratic principles...

...Although economic coercion may be easier to conceal than military coercion, particularly in the chaotic economic circumstances now prevailing in the Soviet Union, it cannot be hidden indefinitely, and it too is bound to create serious criticism at home and abroad...

...In federal systems the appropriate majorities are sometimes state, provincial, or cantonal, sometimes national...

...In addition, their own consumption and production in these smaller republics depends highly on imports from elsewhere in the Soviet Union, particularly Russia and the Ukraine...

...What constitutes adequate protection for minority rights is a question so thorny that I am not going to attempt an answer...

...Consequently, at a minimum, minorities should have the full and equal rights of citizenship in a democratic order, including the right to unforced emigration...

...Article 6 requires that "the decision on the Union republic's secession from the USSR be deemed to be adopted by means of a referendum if at least two-thirds of the USSR citizens permanently resident on the republic's territory . . . vote in favor of it...

...Why, a Lithuanian is entitled to ask, is the Soviet Union the proper unit of government...

...But for the reasons I've already suggested, although necessary, the choice of a majority can hardly be sufficient to justify autonomy...

...A more intractable problem may be posed by industries in which a high proportion of output comes from a single producer— a result of one of the most egregious follies of Soviet central planners and their infatuation with giantism...

...Sometimes, of course, no solution works, and the conflict and killings go on and on, as in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Sri Lanka, Spain and the Basque region...

...it was the preservation of the union...

...The fourth question in turn suggests a fifth that a democrat is obliged to ask...

...Minorities within the republics also pose a problem...

...It is called anarchism...

...I wish only to suggest that our Civil War does not provide an analogy from which to draw conclusions relevant to the question of secession in the Soviet Union today...

...FALL • 1991 • 491 Gorbachev's Referendum The Lithuanians, it appears, are committed to majority rule...