Regional diversity is one of Ukraine’s most important characteristics. Regional diversity often embodies potential for friction and conflict, in particular when it involves territorialized ethnicity and divergent historical experiences. Political elites interested in stability and conflict-prevention must find ways to accommodate or control this diversity. Crimea was Ukraine’s most immediate and most serious centre-periphery challenge at the fall of communism. The multiethnic composition of Crimea, with a majority Russian population and significant Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities, created a widespread perception of Crimea as ‘a fateful peninsula’ that was prone to conflict in the early to mid-1990s.1 In July 1993, The Economist dramatically warned of a “long-running, acrimonious, possibly bloody and conceivably nuclear, dispute over Crimea.”2 Alarmist comparisons were also drawn with the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Kashmir.
Commentators pointed to a range of factors that are generally closely associated with the risk of conflict: the difficulty of reconciling competing historical and cultural claims to territory, a multi-ethnic society, demands for regional autonomy, the capacity for secession due to a peripheral location, depressed socioeconomic conditions (a bankrupt military-industrial complex, a once well-developed Soviet tourism industry that collapsed together with the Soviet Union, and a lack of energy and water resources), and the potentially destabilizing influence of external actors. In particular, Russian nationalists challenged the legality of Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea given that the region had been transferred from the jurisdiction of the RSFSR to Ukrainian SSR in 1954 by the then Soviet leadership in a largely non-transparent process. Moreover, the issue of the division of the Black Sea Fleet, stationed off the coast of Sevastopol, increased the tension in Russian-Ukrainian relations. These risk factors were operating during a transition period when institutions, power relations, and access to resources were undergoing a fundamental reordering.
A build-up of events in the early 1990s caused a spiral of mounting tension: Crimea’s referendum on autonomy in 1991, the establishment of an administrative autonomous region in early 1991 at a time when other Soviet-era autonomies were being dismantled in the context of the disintegration of the USSR, the return of over 200,000 Crimean Tatars to the region from which they had been deported under Stalin in 1944, and the rise of a Russian separatist movement in Crimea that peaked in 1994 and was fuelled by the rhetoric of Russian politicians in Moscow.
However, predictions of conflict in Crimea did not materialize. Incidents have been limited to a small number of clashes between Crimean Tatars and the local authorities or Slav youths. Kyiv has managed to integrate Crimea into the new Ukrainian polity. How did this happen, given the host of regional characteristics typically associated with conflict and a complex post-communist transition process?
The analysis of a widely expected conflict that did not occur is not the usual approach in conflict studies. However, understanding why conflicts do not occur is as important as analysing those that do, especially if the conflict potential includes the principal structural conditions that are typically regarded as the main causes of conflict.
The key to conflict-prevention in Crimea was the process of negotiating and formulating the region’s autonomous status. Here the institutional process was more important than the final institutional outcome, the weakly empowered Autonomous Republic of Crimea, as enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution of 1996 and the Crimean constitution of 1998. Conflict has been avoided in Crimea not so much because of the institution of autonomy as such, but because of the lengthy elite bargaining process involving national and regional elites that preceded the constitutional settlement. Elites at the national level kept open the political space for Crimean autonomy to be institutionalized. The centre was unable to expunge the idea of autonomy which had been supported broadly by Crimean political forces from the early 1990s.
Institutional linkages between central and regional elites were also forged by participation in the democratic transition. A total of 10 regional and national elections, plus a regional and a national referendum, were held in the period 1991 - 2002. While these elections shifted legitimacy back and forth between the regional and the national level of government, they steadily and peacefully secured Crimea’s gradual political integration into the Ukrainian polity.
Four key background conditions provided a favourable environment for resolving constitutional issues at the national and regional level in Ukraine. First, Crimea’s multi-ethnicity has prevented a clear-cut ethnopolitical polarization. Even at its peak, the regional Russian movement mobilized against the Ukrainian centre in Kyiv rather than against ethnic Ukrainians (mostly Russophones) living in Crimea. A territorial cleavage, consequently, was at the centre of political mobilization.
Second, Russian secessionist mobilization in Crimea proved unsustainable because of the inability of the movement’s leadership to address the bread-and-butter issues of the region’s socioeconomic problems, its lack of unity, and the vagueness of its goals. The “Russian idea” in Crimea has always been reflected in a plethora of “Russian” organizations. The intense political activity of well-organized Crimean Tatars presents a sharp counterpoint to the fragmentation of the Russian movement. The experience of ethnocide and ethnic discrimination has strengthened Crimean Tatar identity and united the community across different social strata and political and economic interests, and has guaranteed them representation in the regional assembly in the absence of electoral quota arrangements. The Russian secessionist movement, in contrast, was constructed around a confused Soviet-Russian identity with blurred political goals. Crimean Russians have been broadly in favour of improved links or integration with Russia, but there is no strong secessionist sentiment.
Third, the central elites in Kyiv chose a pragmatic approach and opted to bargain over cultural and linguistic concerns in Crimea rather than pursue an uncompromising Ukrainization strategy. Once the Russian separatist movement self-destructed in Crimea in 1994, Kyiv took the advantage and stabilized the region with a policy of institutional compromise. The principle of autonomy was conceded but not elaborated. By the time the status was finally inscribed in the constitutions of 1996 and 1998, regionalist and separatist movements had weakened and moved to the margins of politics.
Fourth, neither of the main external governmental actors, Russia and Turkey, actively supported regional political mobilization in Crimea. Crimea’s status may have been an issue in Russian domestic politics, but it has not been a major foreign policy concern, with the exception of the Black Sea Fleet issue. In any event, Russia’s attention during the key period of Crimean secessionist mobilization in the mid-1990s lay elsewhere, due to the military intervention in Chechnya. OSCE and UN mediation and integration programmes further internationalized the Crimean issue. Western involvement, especially under the auspices of the first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, helped to maintain the momentum for a constitutional settlement and to overcome the frequent stalemates during the protracted negotiations. Ukraine’s agreements with Russia, especially on Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Russia’s leasing of the bases in Sevastopol, also helped to defuse differences over Crimea.
The Crimean case demonstrates that regional diversity, even when politicized, need not destabilize a state. It also shows that, in a regionally diverse country, ethnicity is just one cleavage among many others available for political mobilization. However, while the process of autonomy-making in Crimea has contributed to the prevention of conflict, it has rendered the regional political economy of transition more complicated. Political mobilization and the attempts to defuse it have diverted attention from regional structural reforms and acted as a vehicle for the criminalization of Crimea’s economy. Moreover, the final autonomy status has had little to offer in terms of the Crimean Tatars’ demands for recognition and representation or effective participation in regional policy-making more generally.
In comparison with most other regional and ethnic conflicts in post-communist transitions, in which coercion and military force have been the norm, Ukraine’s management of the Crimean issue has had a distinct character. The Crimean experience supports the claim that institutions and elites play significant roles in transition and conflict prevention. We should be more cautious, however, about the role of institutional design: has Crimean autonomy prevented conflict in the region, or has autonomy resulted from the weakness of separatism and nationalism? This question is not easy to answer definitively. Crimea’s final autonomy status is symbolically significant but weak in terms of powers. It is part of an asymmetric arrangement in Ukraine that de facto perforates the unitary state set out in the 1996 constitution. Although there is a fair amount of scepticism about Crimean autonomy in Ukraine, there is a consensus that the removal of the region’s constitutionally guaranteed status would be destabilizing (as has been the case with the de-institutionalization of autonomous regions in the Caucasus, for example). The Crimean experience underscores the importance of regional and national constitution-making processes, involving changing sets of actors and institutional compromises, as key determinants of conflict-prevention, rather than the actual institutional outcome per se. This finding should be of relevance to other pre-conflict situations as well as attempts to manage hot conflict through institution-making.
However, the description of Crimea as a conflict that did not happen needs to be qualified. To date, various conflicts have been prevented in Crimea: a clash between Ukraine and Russia, intraregional political conflict among different ethnopolitical groups, internecine conflict among the Crimean Russian elites, and a centre-periphery conflict between Kyiv and Simferopol. A fourth potential for conflict involving the Crimean Tatar minority has only temporarily and intermittently been stabilized. The political and social integration of the Crimean Tatars is far from complete and remains one of –if not the– key risk factors for the future stability of Crimea.
Gwendolyn Sasse is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative European Politics at the London School of Economics and Deputy Editor of Development and Transition. She is the author of The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict, Harvard University Press, 2007 (forthcoming).
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