Реферат Decolonization in Soviet Borderlands

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InfoTrac Web: InfoTrac College Edition.

Source: PS: Political Science & Politics, Sept 1993 v26 n3 p522(4).

Title: Decolonization in the former Soviet Borderlands: Politics in
search of principles.
Author: Gregory W. Gleason and Susan J. Buck

Abstract: The new states formed following the dissolution of the Soviet
Union are struggling to establish administrative structures as they have had
no guidance under Soviet control and western models do not address their
special problems. The states are adopting market principles, although they do
not fully understand the concepts and there is a lack of clarity over how far
decentralization should extend.

Subjects: Central Asia - Political aspects
Eastern Europe - Political aspects
Soviet Union
Decentralization in government
Locations: Asia, Central; Soviet Union

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1993 American Political Science Association

Marx is reputed to have said that "there is nothing so practical as a good
theory." Seventy-odd years of Soviet theorizing have left little useful
practical theory behind, as demonstrated by the transformations currently
taking place in Russia's borderlands. As the Soviet Union crumbles, the
successor states face a unique and troubling situation. For over 70 years,
their administrative structures have been centralized; their economies,
transportation and communications systems, and the physical infrastructure all
controlled from Moscow under a coherent ideological regime. The successor
states find themselves adrift ideologically and administratively, but the
centralized physical infrastructure remains.

How are these states to design new administrative structures? How are they to
cope with the utter failure of their theoretical principles? How may they
cooperate in the use of the physical systems while establishing their
political independence? Soviet administrative theory - the "scientific theory
of socialism" as it was called - has been unable to provide even the most
basic guidance for the process, and western administrative theory is not
equipped to address the special problems of the new states. The insights of
the neo-institutionalists can provide guidelines for these urgent problems.

The Failure of Soviet

Administrative Science

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s in particular, Soviet society devoted immense
resources to innumerable social science institutes and bureaus that analyzed
such topics as the "scientific study of society," the "scientific organization
of labor," and the "optimalization of economic functioning." Yet Soviet
administrative science was unable to leave anything in the way of a
theoretical legacy. Scholars in the former Soviet lands find this disturbing,
although western scholars, who rejected the conceptual underpinnings of Soviet
administrative theory, are less surprised. Gripped by centrist ideology, the
Soviet academies could hardly be expected to design decentralized institutions
and administrative strategies.

More disturbing, however, is the realization that western scholars cannot
provide useful guidelines for the organizational changes. The rapidity of the
changes is partly to blame. Some of the blame may be attributed to the fact
that western theoretical constructs that should have wide applicability -
market theory and comparative administration, in particular - have not been
developed with sufficient generality to address the scope of the changes
introduced by the fall of totalitarian governments. Finally, western scholars
have failed to recognize the situation as a problem of decolonization.

On a practical level, the need to define new structures is urgent. The
withdrawal of centralized control from Moscow has left the new countries with
interruption of commercial relations, a breakdown in communication and
transportation, and an enormous environmental rectification burden. The aged
Soviet physical infrastructure is incapable of supporting the competitive
entrance of many industrial and agricultural sectors into the world market.

Attempts to apply market theory in the new states provide a good illustration
of the difficulties. "Privatization" and "transition to the market" are
offered as the solutions to the successor states' problems. In comprehending
the dynamics of these processes in the post-Soviet context, analysts tend to
rely upon the basic models of the privatization and decentralization processes
in western contexts (Bennett 1990; Cameron 1990; DeAlessi 1987; Fallenbuchl
and Fallenbuchl 1990; Heald 1990; Ohashi and Roth 1990; V. Ostrom 1976; Pirie
1985; Pryor 1991; Savas 1987; Schroeder 1988). Consequently, analysts speak in
terms of "restoring" property rights and "returning" to the natural
administrative boundaries that predated the Soviet collectivist experiment.
However, the post-soviet context is very different. In most of the newly
independent states, the political and administrative borders are artificial
products of the Soviet period. Private property arrangements have been
disrupted for more than a century, first by Russian colonialism and then by 70
years of Soviet-style socialism. Indeed, in many areas there is no historical
record at all of private property rights in water and agricultural land. In
most areas, geophysical and cadastral surveys of the land do not exist and may
never have existed. How can such land be privatized and deeded when there is
no way to describe the property legally?

In sum, the post-soviet countries face the intersection of profoundly
theoretical questions about defining the institutions of their future -
questions that would seem to require careful reflection-and the urgent
necessity to act quickly. At present, the process of institutional redesign is
neither theoretical reflection nor pragmatic administration. The process is
being guided by politics.

Decolonization

Post-Soviet Style

During the final year of the Soviet government, theoretical proposals for
political reform dominated public attention. Concepts of federal reform vied
with concepts of "refederalization", "confederalization," and
"defederalization." At the close of 1991, the leaders of 11 Soviet Socialist
republics created a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). This new group
was ambiguous from its very inception: the founding document (the Alma-Ata
Declaration of December 21, 1991) declared the CIS to be "neither a government
nor a supra-governmental organization." It seemed more an expression of
goodwill, or perhaps the final piton before the successor states could scale
an unfamiliar rock face.

Each of the successor states received diplomatic recognition from major world
powers and joined the United Nations. Each of the states has actively sought
cooperative assistance from international organizations such as the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And each of the states pledged
to uphold international standards of conduct such as the principles of the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

Yet, there is great uncertainty associated with the futures of these states.
Consider only the new states of Central Asia. All of these countries were
created during the Soviet period; none of these states existed as independent
entities prior to 1917. All are subject to strong centrifugal ethnic,
subnational, and religious pressures. All are linked by religious, cultural,
and linguistic bonds to countries beyond the former Soviet borders. And all
face delicate and dangerous relations with their neighbors over issues of
border security, trade relations, and transboundary resources such as water.
The parallels here with the decolonization of Africa earlier in the century
are striking.

Decolonization was one of the most significant global political events of this
century. The "decade of decolonization" began as African states were
integrated into the international community. In 1956, the Sudan, Tunisia,
Morocco, and the Gold Coast (

Ghana

) won independence. Guinea followed two
years later. In 1960, the French attempt to establish a commonwealth similar
to the British Commonwealth faltered. More than a dozen former colonies
rapidly became independent. In all, 47 nation states emerged from the former
empires.

If this decolonization process is adopted as the model for the new states of
Central Asia, it is clear that some of the patterns are similar, some
different. As in many decolonized areas, the national boundaries of the
Central Asian states are artificial structures, adopted primarily for the
convenience of the metropole, but no pre-existing national identities were
associated with these states. As in many decolonizing areas, there were
nationalist movements stirring, but political opposition was not the key to
change, and no powerful, charismatic, heroic leaders were swept into power
with a moral mandate. Like most decolonizing areas, there was a stratum of
metropolitan settlers in privileged positions, but those privileges were not
associated with private property and did not offer any advantages after
independence. Like most cases of decolonization, the metropole had grown
reliant, if not dependent, on a flow of raw materials from the colonies, but
Moscow had also extended its basic physical infrastructure of communication,
energy, transportation, and scientific research to these areas in such a way
that both the center and the periphery were vulnerable to dislocations.

One of the most compelling examples of the dislocation of government
institutions is the political fragmentation of the highly centralized water
management system in the states of the former Soviet southern tier, Central
Asia.(1) Now that the individual Central Asian states have sovereignty over
their natural resources, they find themselves at odds with one another in a
way that they never experienced while they were tributary states of the USSR.

Central Asia's two main river systems, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya,
irrigate roughly 75% of Central Asia's agriculture. Each of these rivers flows
through three of the five Central Asian states.(2) Due to agricultural draws,
the inflow to the Aral Sea from the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers fell to
near zero by 1982; the desiccation of the Aral Sea threatens the local economy
and the ecology of the entire Aral Sea basin, and it may have
hydrometeorological effects on a global scale (Micklin 1991). As long as the
Central Asian irrigation system was under the control of Moscow, it continued
to function without overt conflict among appropriators. With the transition to
political independence, conflicts that were previously resolvable by fiat from
Moscow became international transboundary conflicts.

Water management is not the only issue generating conflict between the
successor states. They also find themselves arrayed antagonistically in terms
of trade, security, and the allocation of other natural resources. These
pressures result in greater demands on the new capitals to solve pressing
problems. This tends to strengthen the "hard shell" of each of the new nation
states, turning them to a dangerous form of self-reliance when most nations
are moving toward interdependence.

Decentralization: In Search of

Institutional Equilibria

It is clear that the centralized economy controlled by Moscow has vanished and
that replacement institutions must be either salvaged from the old or created
with new ideas and structures. The colonial approach used by the Soviet
government did not encourage indigenous management regimes and the
Soviet-style bureaucratic institutions are entrenched in the new governments
of the borderlands. The successor states are eagerly embracing market
solutions, although they have an imperfect understanding of markets and
private property institutions. The level of decision making has moved out of
Moscow and into the new capitals. The central question now is: once
decentralization has started, how far should it proceed? Accepting market
solutions and private property institutions as defining optimal equilibria
fails to give any direction in deciding the optimal level for decision making.
The search for solutions to these questions requires a return to the logical
primitives of neo-classical and neo-institutional economics: market theory and
hierarchy theory.

Theoretical economists have emphasized the collective action trap encountered
by collectivist societies because of a disjunction between ownership and
incentives (Coase 1937; Olson 1965; Demsetz 1967; Alchian and Demsetz 1973;
Axelrod 1981). They have explored the theoretical relationships between
collective management institutions and the phenomena of free-riding, shirking,
opportunism, and risk-avoidance (Moe 1984; Eggertsson 1990; North 1990).
Recent re-analysis of the returns from the Soviet experiment of these past
seven decades has provided convincing empirical evidence for these economists'
theoretical conclusions: in the Soviet Union, the attempt to transfer all
categories of property into the category of "public" property led to massive
problems of free-riding and opportunistic behavior and, eventually, to
resource exhaustion on a scale far surpassing that of societies recognizing
private property conventions (Kaminski 1992; Kornai 1992).

More recent work in the neo-institutional tradition has led to theoretical
breakthroughs regarding the complex interplay of institutional design and
individual incentives (E. Ostrom 1986). Ostrom's empirical studies have
documented how cooperation may emerge on a local level in some political
subsystems while not in other parallel systems, without respect to the scale
of the system or other external variables (E. Ostrom 1990). She argues that
the specific set of decision rules (how the problems of opportunism and free
riding are addressed) determine whether a particular institutional
configuration leads to optimal outcomes, concluding that self-government
depends not upon a specific structural configuration but rather upon the
appropriateness of the rules in use. Types of durable, self-governing
political organizations may vary widely; nonetheless, the use rules of the
resource system are not merely important, they are the essence of the system.

Even once the dilemmas of collective action are clearly recognized and the
importance of institutional design in solving the dilemmas is accepted, there
is still the question of what principles should guide institutional
re-designers. The boundaries of the authority of any particular level of
government should be decided with respect to the contributors and
beneficiaries of a good or service. The problem is two-fold: what level of
institution most completely captures the maximum number of providers and
beneficiaries, and what level of institution is most efficient in the
administration of the provision of goods and services? Two principles guide
the definition of these groups: fiscal equivalence and fiscal accountability.

The principle of fiscal equivalence maintains that there is a need for a
governmental institution (agency, body, committee, commission, collective,
boss, and so on) for every collective good with a unique boundary, so that
there can be a match between those who receive the benefits of a collective
good and those who pay for it (Olson 1969). For example, the Central Asian
irrigation systems benefit cultivators in all of the new states; the principle
of fiscal equivalence suggests that the institution that governs the
allocation of irrigation water should be regional and transnational. Such an
institution would be able to monitor water use throughout the river basins and
could assess fees appropriately, without primary regard for the nationality of
the users (Buck and Gleason 1993). Any lower level of institution would
exclude some beneficiaries from the management institution, leading to some of
the compliance problems of commitment, monitoring, sanctioning, and conflict
resolution identified by Ostrom (E. Ostrom 1990).

The second postulate, fiscal accountability, states that only those who pay
for a good should benefit from it and only those who benefit should be
required to pay: free riding and spillovers are unacceptable on principled
grounds as well as economic ones. Adherence to fiscal accountability may be
relaxed in favor of redistributive policies, but even when it is suspended,
benefits should be proportional to payments. Thus institutions must be
established at the level that captures jurisdiction over the costs of
provision and the reception of benefits. In Central Asia, for example, the
benefits of irrigation have widespread economic implications throughout the
economies of all the new states. Management institutions constructed at a
purely national level would not adjust to the costs and benefits in
neighboring economies. The costs of misapplication of pesticides would be
borne by downstream water users, and the rewards for water conservation would
be dispersed to other sectors of the economy, for example, by increasing the
amount of water available for new housing construction or industrial
development. With a regional management institution, these costs and rewards
could be adjusted across borders.

Clearly, these two principles are complementary. By defining a unique boundary
for the good or service, the principle of fiscal accountability sets the
parameters of the management institution as small and as low in the hierarchy
as possible. By directing our attention to the possible inefficiencies caused
by externalities, the principle of fiscal equivalence encourages the designers
to cast their institutional nets more widely. The balance between the two is a
matter of judgment, but deliberate consideration of both principles fosters
enhanced institutional designs.

As the public and private institutions of the post-soviet world are
reconfigured, the prominence of local politics in determining who decides
what, when, and how may not necessarily be bad. Recent empirical analysis of
Third World public and private interaction has offered strong arguments that
local politics may determine the outlines of local government more efficiently
than centrally driven campaigns (de Soto 1989). The failure of the
collectivist experiment in Russia and its borderlands is a lesson of
importance for theoreticians and practitioners alike. Any analyst who truly
seeks to understand institutions, hierarchy, and collective forms of
management cannot afford to ignore it.

Notes

(*) This article draws upon a larger research project on natural resource
policies within the newly independent states. Support for this research was
provided by grants from the National Science Foundation (#SES-914766) and the
National Council on Soviet and Past European Research (#806-13). (1.) It is
traditional to speak of the southern tier republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and

Uzbekistan

as the core Central Asian republics. Many sources

include the southern veliatlar (formerly oblasts) of Kazakhstan in Central
Asia as well. Contemporary common usage in the new CIS states, however,
includes Kazakhstan as a whole in Central Asia. (2.) The Amu Darya flows from
Afghanistan through Tajikistan, through Uzbekistan, into Turkmenistan, back
into Uzebkistan, and then into Karakalpakstan before reaching the Aral Sea.
The Syr Darya flows from Kyrgyzstan and parts of China into Uzbekistan and
then into Kazakhstan.

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About the Authors

Gregory W. Gleason

Gregory W. Gleason is an associate professor of political science at the
University of New Mexico. He has written extensively on policy issues in
Central Asia. He is the author of Federalism and Nationalism: The Struggle for
Republican Rights in the USSR (Westview 1990) and Central Asian States: Common
Sovereignty in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
(Westview, forthcoming).

Susan J. Buck

Susan J. Buck is an associate professor of political science at the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro, specializing in environmental policy and law.
Her research is focused on management of common pool resource systems. She is
the author of Understanding Environmental Administration and Law (Island 1991)
and The Global Commons. Their Legal and Political History (University of South
Carolina Press, forthcoming).

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