Statehood at stake: Democratization, secession and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Why does democratization cause some ethnic regions of a multinational state to secede but not others? This dissertation argues that democratization traps regionally concentrated nationality groups in an "ethnic security dilemma" since it forces regional leaders to compete for local popular support at the same time that it opens up the possibility that one group might "capture" the state in order to exploit other groups. This makes continued integration risky. Within a given multiethnic state, the poorest ethnic regions tend to be the most willing to take on this risk since they have the least to lose and the most to gain by associating with the other regions. The theory thus predicts that democratization will drive relatively rich regions to secede from a multiethnic state, while the poorer ones have greater incentive to stay. The only kind of group "exempt" from the security dilemma is a hegemonic group with a huge advantage in population, since it has little reason to believe that it would be exploited after democratization occurs. The dissertation employs both statistical and interpretive analytical methods to test this theory using the "natural laboratory" of the former USSR. The quantitative test examines data on nearly all of the USSR's 53 ethnically defined regions. The qualitative study rigorously compares the cases of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in the process generates significant new insights into the emergence of these countries as independent states. Both the statistical and the case studies find strong support for the theory. The first concluding chapter restates the central argument of the dissertation in light of the totality of the evidence and then explores other factors found to have affected decisions on secession in the late Soviet period, speculating on what a more comprehensive theory of secession might resemble. In the second conclusion, the author argues that this theory of secessionism can also explain why democratization destroys some ethnofederal states and not others, accounting for the cases of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Russia. This theory, it argues, has important implications for China should it liberalize in the future.