Ethnic Independence Is Not the Only Out in Hot Spots : Soviet Union: Its evolution shows we should push federalism, confederation.

The relationship between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian legislature sets a new standard for the word gridlock, but in fact, important changes are under way. Slowly and inexorably, the Soviet Union is coming back together in a new and more decentralized form, and order is being restored. It is a favorable development, and one that provides clues about the kind of policy we should follow in other multiethnic conflicts such as Bosnia.

The most recent dramatic event in the non-Russian republics was the landslide election this month of the former communist leader, Algirdas Brazauskas, as the president of Lithuania, the most nationalist of all the former republics. Brazauskas now says that he has become a social democrat--and no doubt he has--but he campaigned on the promise of a closer relationship of Lithuania to Russia.

The nationalist movements are also in decline in other successor states. Rukh in Ukraine always held a minority position, but now the prime minister, Leonid Kuchma, is the director of Ukraine’s largest rocket factory and a proponent of economic integration with Russia. The leader in Georgia is the former communist first secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze. The Moldovan Popular Front controlled the legislature and spoke of union with Romania. Now pragmatic officials are coming to the fore. The Armenian nationalists, who came to power on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, are facing an increasing backlash because of the economic disaster their policy has produced at home.

In Muslim Central Asia, nationalist movements haven’t gained power, but a combination of Islamic fundamentalists and democrats has organized against government. In most states, they have been kept under tight control, but in Tajikistan they were supplied with weapons by their Tajik compatriots in Afghanistan and were able to conduct a long civil war. This rebellion, too, now seems over.

Westerners have had the impression of uncontrollable chaos, but the areas affected are quite small. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Moldova and Tadzhikistan together comprise only 12% of the population of the former Soviet Union.

The Russian army is still stationed in all these new countries. In the one case where Russians were under attack (Moldova), the army intervened decisively, and in Tadzhikistan it made sure that the “right” side won. In the other cases, it has deliberately let the fighting among the non-Russians go on to teach them an object lesson.

Russia has provided very substantial economic subsidies to the new states that have been cooperative, but it has used the oil weapon (that is, charged free-market prices for oil) when, as in Lithuania, it wanted to drive home the point about the cost of independence. As a result, Lithuanian production is down 53% in two years. Russia has cooperated in blockades in Armenia and Georgia designed to exact a high cost for what it considers unacceptable behavior toward other republics.

It is a cynical strategy, but one with a large chance of success. In all likelihood, we are seeing the last gasp of the European nationalisms of the 1920s and 1930s, not a new upsurge. When Franco died in 1975, the fascist-communist conflict of the 1930s re-emerged as if the Spanish people had awakened from a long sleep. But within five years, the Spaniards were thinking and voting like other West Europeans.

The smaller nationalities of Eastern Europe act as if they have awakened from an even longer sleep and think that the sovereignty of 1939 is possible. However, England, France and Germany don’t have the sovereignty of ‘39, and the Lithuanians now know that they will be no different.

We should not be afraid of this development in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet economy was so integrated that it desperately needs a common market. Once that is established, it will be the non-Russians who push for central political institutions so that they can have an influence over economic policy. It is hoped that the former Soviet Union will come to look like the Western Europe that we envisage for the future--a confederated or even federal system with sovereign states that are members of the United Nations.

It is federalism and confederation that we should be pushing--not ethnic independence. We should be tentatively exploring whether some type of Yugoslav confederation is a solution that would make it easier for different ethnic groups to live together in the new states.

The problems we see in Bosnia are nothing compared to the bloodshed--and the danger of fascists coming into control of nuclear weapons--that would occur if huge multiethnic countries like India, Pakistan and Indonesia start disintegrating.