South Ossetia Update: “Independent” Elections in an “Independent” State—Russian Style

Things in South Ossetia have reached a crisis.  Increasingly angry crowds are demanding that the candidate who clearly won the election, Alla Dzhioyeva, be allowed to take office as president.  In fact, her supporters claim that she is president, after winning 56.7% of the vote in the November 27th election, and that the outgoing authoritarian regime’s annulment of the results, because of supposed irregularities by Dzhioyeva’s supporters, is illegitimate.

Russian and South Ossetian officials are trying to calm the crisis, but it is beginning to look a lot like Ukraine’s 2004-05 “Orange Revolution,” when street protests reversed a corrupt election which had tried to place a Moscow-backed candidate into office.  That revolution was a defeat for Vladimir Putin in his goal of preventing Ukraine from allying itself with the west, and Putin has never really gotten over it.

South Ossetia, recall, is the autonomous region which most of the world recognizes as part of the Republic of Georgia but which, along with another such region, Abkhazia, had been a de facto independent state for many years.  No one can agree who fired the first shots in the 2008 South Ossetia War, but the upshot was that Georgia tried to assert control over the two territories, but a Russian invasion prevented that, followed by Russia formally recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.  Currently, only Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Nauru recognize the two countries.  The last three Pacific island nations are doing so merely to court Russian investment, while Nicaragua and Venezuela are interested only in thumbing their nose at the United States.  Not even the most toadying Moscow lapdog client-states like Belarus and Serbia are sending diplomats.

Ironically, South Ossetia and Abkhazia were freer before they were formally declared “independent.”  At least then, they were just the dangerous neighborhood in Georgia where even the cops didn’t want to go.  They ran their own affairs.  But instead of just repelling the Georgian forces and restoring the status quo, Russia has turned them into Soviet-style satellite states.  The tacit understanding, from Putin’s perspective, has seemed to be, “Do whatever we say and remember that you couldn’t even exist without us.  And we’ll both pretend that this is ‘independence.’”  But Putin never factored in one possible wild card: the South Ossetian people.  The peoples of the Caucasus in recent decades have been fractious and ineffective, almost laughably so.  Georgia has been falling apart, while Dagestan rivals Somalia as one of the world’s worst multi-ethnic basket cases.  No one thought that South Ossetians would have their shit together sufficiently to use people power to reject Russian influence in the way that Baltic, Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and other peoples have during the fall of Communism.  But now they are.  And no one quite knows how to react.

It seems that South Ossetia would like to be independent in the full sense of the word.  The next few days may determine whether they will be able to, or whether Putin will use the scorched-earth policy he used in Chechnya to keep North Caucasus nations within his empire.

One Missing Line

As those of my readers who are themselves bloggers will already know, Blogspot provides its bloggers with a map showing various statistics about a blog’s readers.  Below is a snapshot showing the geographical distribution of this readers.

But in addition to being pleased to have readers on nearly every continent, I am mystified by one thing: if the whole rest of the world, including the United Nations has recognized the Republic of South Sudan’s independence, why won’t Blogspot?

Oh, wait, I almost forgot:

Whew.  That was a close one.

Founding of “Free State of Australia” in New South Wales Stems from Zoning Dispute

[The following article is from November 2011.  See my more recent, July 2012 article on the F.S.A., covering new developments.]

News has just reached us of a new micronation in Australia.  The new country is known as the Free State of Australia and was apparently (though media reports differ) founded within the past week by a resident of the shire of Kyogle, in northeastern New South Wales, on the rural property of a commune leader named simply “Jonathan,” with, by his insistence, a lower-case j.  (News reports do not tell us what his name was before a recent name change.  In accordance with this blog’s house style, attempts to adopt initial-lower-case names are not indulged.  (Sorry, Bell Hooks.))

Jonathan, a 65-year-old minister in the Uniting Church (which in Australia means Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians), had long threatened to secede—in a blog entry of his dated November 4, 2011, he seemed on the brink of taking the step—and now it seems he has done it, though the F.S.A. is also reported to have been founded in August.  (This probably refers to his secession from the Shire of Kyogle, not the later total secession from Australia.)  The whole chain of events goes back to Jonathan’s anger at a local shire council, which, citing “old-growth forest and fire management issues,” refused him a building permit for a 22-home intentional community on his plot of land in rural Eden Creek in Kyogle Shire.  He appealed the decision to the state level but then halted the appeal proceedings in favor of secession.

Jonathan’s commune is apparently part of the Zeitgeist Movement, a new communalist movement which seems to mix elements of anarchism, libertarianism, and technocracy.  The movement, which has made appearances at Occupy Wall Street and related events, seeks an end to the money system but not to private property, as well as a society based on reason, consensus, and something called “social cybernation,” in which work and decision-making are eventually delegated to artificial intelligence.  The Zeitgeist Movement, in alliance with something called the Venus Project, has been energized in recent months by the OWS protests and the European currency crisis, which they see as vindicating their vision of a utopian moneyless future.  The New York Times, reporting on a Zeitgeist event in 2009, called it “a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his ‘Imagine’ days to do no less than redesign the underlying structure of planetary life.”

For the time being, the Kyogle Shire Council refuses to recognize the secession and claims its permit regulations apply fully to Jonathan’s property.  Jonathan says the Free State of Australia will be run by a council of elders and that it will continue to use Australian currency and stamps, though its 100 or so citizens will be issued new F.S.A. drivers’ licenses.  We will keep you posted.


Oh, and since I promised at least one map and at least one flag in each blog post—and since there is as yet no Free State of Australia flag that I know of—here is the flag of New South Wales, which in my opinion is rather nice.  Still, I’m still looking forward to seeing what Jonathan or his council of elders comes up with in the flag department.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Remembering Odumegwu Ojukwu: On Biafra and on an African Continent Riven by European Borders

Africans are mourning the death last week of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, at the age of 78, in a London hospital.  The Igbo leader was president of the Republic of Biafra from its declaration of independence from Nigeria in 1967 until its reabsorption into Nigeria in 1970 after one of the most brutal wars of even that most brutal of centuries, the 20th.  He lived in exile until his return to Nigeria in 1982, dreams of a separate Igbo state by that point having long since withered.

Since there is no current significant Igbo separatist movement, African leaders have felt free to praise Ojukwu as they buried him.  Nigeria is now debating whether to give Odumegwu-Ojukwu, who waged war on the Nigerian state, a state funeral, as many would like—Igbo and non-Igbo alike.  But the Biafran freedom-fighter’s life and death remind us that post-colonial African history has not erased the scars of history left scrawled across it by European cartographers.

Like many African populist leaders of the 1960s, Odumegwu-Ojukwu was bicultural, his biography a mix of African and European cultural influences.  He attended an élite preparatory school in England and earned a degree in history at Oxford University, where, the New York Times notes, classmates recall “he was popular, dressed stylishly, drove a bright red MG sports car, and loved discussions of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Louis XIV, and Shakespeare.”  He was a fluent speaker of English, French, Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa—though such multilingualism is common in sub-Saharan Africa.  His choice of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” as the Biafran national anthem is the type of factoid that causes more traditionalist African intellectuals to bemoan a version of the Stockholm (or in this case perhaps Helsinki) Syndrome.  But Odumegwu-Ojukwu for a while achieved what almost no African leader has done before or since: replace a European-drawn international border in Africa with an African-drawn one.

As most students of history know, European empires carved up Africa with little regard to the extents and boundaries of the continent’s already existing kingdoms, states, and ethnic territories.  Although the tale that Mt. Kilimanjaro is part of Tanzania rather than Kenya because of a birthday present from Queen Victoria to her cousin, the Kaiser of Germany, is apocryphal, nonetheless the arbitrariness and ridiculousness of many African colonial borders can serve to excuse anyone for believing the story on first hearing.

Since the wave of African independence in the early 1960s, numerous secession movements have tried to draw new boundaries, but these nearly always follow half-forgotten lines drawn by the same European cartographers.  When Eritrea split from Ethiopia in 1991, the new border (which separates national groups so sloppily as to cause several costly wars which still have not budged it, incidentally) in a way merely sacralized cease-fire lines negotiated between Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini.  The Polisario Front’s decades-long struggle against Moroccan kings to establish the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in what was once the Spanish Sahara is in fact a battle to reinscribe a line negotiated between French and Spanish empires.  Namibia’s independence from South African control in 1990 merely restored the old boundary between Deutsch-Südwestafrika and Britain’s Cape Colony.

And most of the separatist movements in Africa today that are having any kind of success get traction from tracing old divisions between European colonies.  Ambazonian and Ambazanian (sic) separatists in Cameroon seek a state using the exact boundaries between English and French zones of occupation in Kamerun after the Germans lost the First World War.  Zambians who want to establish an independent Barotseland draw the lines where British colonizers set apart a special economic zone within Northern Rhodesia.  The Barotses’ brethren just to the west in Namibia would like to establish a new state in the Caprivi Strip, the precise awkward shard of land that Germany purchased from Britain in 1890 as a supply route between South-West Africa and Tanganyika.  Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland separatists argue that they were a separate colony until Cecil Rhodes folded them into Southern Rhodesia on a whim.  And the international community might not tolerate the de facto independence of Somaliland to the extent that they do if it did not draw its border precisely on the old boundary between British and Italian pieces of what is now the dysfunctional Somali Republic.

The game-changer in this regard was the birth, in July 2011, of the Republic of South Sudan, comprising the southern, non-Muslim, non-Arab portions of a Republic of Sudan whose boundaries had been drawn by the English.  Sudan’s irreconcilable cultural chasm between north and south was only the most bloodily contested of a whole string of European-designed countries running the length of Africa, where northern Muslims and Arabs are asked to share power with vastly cultural different sub-Saharan peoples to the south.  This has been the cause of brutal conflicts in Chad, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Mali, to say nothing of Nigeria, which, if it does ever split apart, might well do so with the secession of the increasingly violent Hausa Muslims in the more arid north of the country.

So why did South Sudan get to do what no other African separatists have done—win international (i.e. Western) approval of a separate state using African-drawn divisions between national and ethnic groups?  Well, for one thing it isn’t entirely an African-drawn boundary.  For another, we can thank George W. Bush, who during his presidency stepped up support for South Sudan separatists and arm-twisted Khartoum to accept a referendum on southern independence—since held and implemented under Barack Obama’s sponsorship—mainly as a way to punish an increasingly Islamist state which had long harbored al-Qaeda and its affiliates within its vast borders.  (Remember when Bill Clinton timed the bombing of what turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory in northern Sudan in 1998 so that it would chase Monica Lewinsky’s congressional testimony off the newspapers’ front pages?  Ah, those were simpler times.)  South Sudan, though it had been fighting for a separate state for decades, was hurried along the final, critical stages of the secession process to serve America’s War on Terror.  The demarcation between north and south that the international community agreed upon rather lazily followed a line of demarcation between northern and southern provinces agreed upon when Britain allowed the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to become the Republic of Sudan in 1956.  And it is South Sudanese themselves—who are now waging battle against better-armed northerners along nearly the entirety of the poorly drawn and cursorily negotiated new boundary—who are paying the price in blood every day.

The South Sudan debacle quite rightly worries African leaders who fear that their own violent separatists might be emboldened.  But luckily, even the fanatics of the northern Nigerian Islamist separatist movement Boko Haram know better than to seek Western approval and oversight for their struggle.  They’d rather have no border at all than a Hausa republic whose boundaries are scrawled out in haste by Hillary Rodham Clinton as part of some global chess game.

Africans may not be perfect, and their politics may at times range from the tragic to the absurd, but, as even Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu knew, there is no way they could cock up Africa more than the Europeans have.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Quebec Cracks Down on Crimes against the State—Like Playing Hopscotch in English

The largest school district in Quebec, Canada’s sometimes-secessionist province, has invited controversy by banning the use of English not just in classrooms but in cafeterias and hallways and on playgrounds.  The Commission Scolaire de Montréal, responsible for over 100,000 students, ranging from kindergarten—oops, sorry, jardins des enfants!—to high school, has introduced the new rules to a chorus of objections from English-speaking Canadians in Quebec and elsewhere.

The school board’s chairperson, Diane De Courcy, promises, “There will be no language police.  If they are automatically switching to another language, the monitor will gently tap them on the shoulder to tell them, ‘Remember, we speak French.  It’s good for you.’”  There is no mention of what happens if the first tap doesn’t work.  (We can also forgive a non-native English speaker for using “they” and “them” as singular pronouns, seeming to imply that some group of people shares a single collective shoulder.)

It is true that many such quibbles between Anglophones and Francophones in Canada are tempests in teapots.  Anglophones have been known to get their knickers in a twist over the severe imposition of having French writing on the backs of their cereal boxes (or, as they are known in French, des faces avant des paquets de céréale).  And it is true that single-language schools are nothing unusual in the world—even in the “free world” (a phrase which for many Anglophone Canadians means all of the modern industrialized democracies minus Quebec).  After all, immigrants tend to want to acquire their new homeland’s language, and throughout Anglophone Canada there are French-immersion schools with precisely the rules Montreal has only just now instituted.

But Quebec’s public immersion schools are not voluntary.  Plus, the 53% of Montreal’s public-school students whose first language is not French are not all immigrants, and their first languages are not all Vietnamese, Arabic, or Spanish.  In fact, about 7.7% of Quebec’s population is native English speaking, and 10.4% speak mostly English at home.  In Montreal, the figures are higher: there, 13.2% call English their first language.  (These figures are from Canada’s 2006 census.)  Nor is that 13.2% all carpetbaggers from Ontario or Pennsylvania.  Thousands of English-speaking Montrealers live in neighborhoods and districts that have been Anglophone for as long as they can remember.  There have been English-speakers in Montreal for essentially as long as there have been French-speakers, as is evidenced by institutions such as McGill University.

Canada’s French-speakers have wrenched more concessions in language policy from their central government than any other linguistic minority in world history (excluding extreme cases such as, say, the Manchu-speaking royal family in imperial China).  Mostly by dangling the threat of secession, Francophone Canadians have extended government services in French from their one relatively small area (only the extreme south of one province, truth be told) to every corner of the second-largest country in the world.  This includes places—from cowboy ranches in British Columbian scrubland to remote outposts in the howling Arctic—where not a word of French has ever been uttered.  And Quebec is the only Canadian province or territory with only one official language.  In 1993, in fact, the United Nations Human Rights Commission condemned a draconian provincial law which essentially banned all English signage.  (Quebec gave in, but modified the law to require French translations in lettering twice as large.  Which means that this scene from the comedy film Canadian Bacon is only a slight exaggeration.)

The Francophone world itself offers chilling counterexamples.  Go to France and ask any Breton or Basque of middle age or older—or any Innu or Inuk in northern Quebec, for that matter—about the “gentle taps” received for using his or her mother tongue on the playground.

Of course, everyone in Quebec should know French.  Everyone agrees with that.  And, with few exceptions, everyone there wants to and does (or, in the case of immigrants, soon will).  French in Canada is hardly a threatened or endangered language; it is the opposite.  Most Montrealers are proud to live in a bilingual—indeed, multilingual—city in what is arguably the most tolerant and progressive country in the world.  Quebec’s schools excel in producing fluent French speakers who almost always command English as well.  Those who patrol Montreal’s school playgrounds should be glad to see that there are students who gossip with their friends in the world’s lingua franca and then when the bell rings take their seats and display mastery of their home province’s first language.  Sounds to me like Canada at its best.  No gentle taps needed.

P.S.: Because I have promised that every blog entry will have at least one map and at least one flag, here is the flag of Montreal.  It very inclusively features a fleur de lis to represent the French, a shamrock for the Irish, a thistle for the Scots, and a rose for the English.  Note that the fleur de lis gets the pride of place in the upper left.  But Anglophones can take heart: a St. George’s Cross presides over the whole operation.  Quelle horreur!

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Vanillinois: Why Do Downstaters Want Chicago to Be Its Own State?

Of all 51st-state proposals, this has to be one of the oddest.  As reported on the WJBC-FM website and in other sources, two state representatives in Illinois, the United States’ fifth most populous state, proposed on November 22nd that Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago as well as 40.5% of Illinois’s population, be “kicked out” and made to be the 51st state of the Union.  The two Republican lawmakers—Adam Brown, representing the city of Decatur, in the center of the state, and Bill Mitchell, whose district centers on the Decatur suburb of Forsyth—claim that Chicago’s inability to govern is dragging the rest of the state down.  More concretely, they cite tussles over school funding as well as Chicago lawmakers and voters who stand in the way of both “welfare reform” and gun rights.  They claim Chicago has “declared war” on the rest of Illinois.  (You can read the full text of House Joint Resolution HJ0052 here.)

What makes this proposal odd is that Mitchell and Brown are not fighting to secede from the rest of Illinois; they are the rest of Illinois.  They want to evict Cook County from the state.  I’m trying to remember if there are precedents for this.  It’s not really secession if the “secessionists” live in the part with the capital in it, is it?  Plus, there is no indication whatsoever that Cook County wants to secede from Illinois.

On the contrary, Chicagoans have responded angrily.  One commentator proposes that Decatur itself be ejected from the Land of Lincoln, “due to its offensive odor.  ...  There’d be no way to prevent the stench of roasting corn and soybeans from wafting across our new state lines.  But at least we could keep its nonsensical geopolitical schemes out of the General Assembly.”  Another suggests other areas, out of step culturally and politically with the rest of their respective states, who are just as ripe for secession: Austin, Orlando, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Colonial Williamsburg, Las Vegas, and the suburban-Chicago parts of Indiana known as “the Region” (and which are already in Illinois’s time zone, not Indiana’s).

In many ways, the rest-of-Illinois separatists are an example of what I call “prosperity secessionism”—the more prosperous and less politically chaotic parts of a nation or state hankering to split off.  And let me take this opportunity now to just admit that Chicago’s Democratic-dominated politics are corrupt and dysfunctional to an almost Third World degree.  Remember, this is the town where Rep. Dan Rostenkowski ran a re-election campaign while under indictment on federal corruption charges—and almost won.

Other examples of prosperity secessionism have: included the Czech Republic’s eagerness to be done with the less prosperous and more corrupt Slovak Republic, contributing to Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Divorce” of 1993; Italy’s Northern League, which would like to split off from the poorer, crime-ridden south, where Rome is; and English separatists, who are tired of supporting the poor of Wales and Northern Ireland with their taxes.  This is to say nothing of northerners and westerners in the U.S. who respond to the idea of reviving the Southern Confederacy by saying, essentially, “Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.”

But there is really mainly partisan politics behind the Chicago-statehood proposal.  Like the new “South California” secession movement, which aims to form a separate state out of the Golden State’s most Republican counties, this is a cry for help from a G.O.P. that has millions of followers but, because of Chicago, will always be a disenfranchised minority in Illinois.  Here, below, are maps showing county and district breakdowns in recent Illinois elections, where red is Republican and blue is Democratic.  Keeping in mind that Cook County has nearly half the state’s population, you can see why many Illinois Republicans feel that it’s barely worth voting.

There is also a heavy racial subtext which no one in Illinois can fail to grasp, however much Republicans might try to deny it: Mitchell and Brown’s proposal would quite handily expel nearly all of Illinois’s African-Americans—including the present First Lady’s extended family, as well as “troublemakers” like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.  Oh, and most of Illinois’s queers and foreigners, too.  What Mitchell and Brown want is, essentially, Vanillinois.  Here is a map of Illinois counties, with the counties shaded based on proportion of the population that is African-American:

The proposal will fail, of course.  Mitchell and Brown’s plan is to hold a referendum asking all Illinoians to vote on whether to remove Cook County from the state.  There is no legal precedent for such a referendum, which their backers fantasize would be binding even if all of Cook County opposed it.  In fact, this all sounds highly unconstitutional—as well as downright tacky.

Now, if Cook County did secede, it would have a name problem.  The “State of Cook” sounds awful.  They would probably (let’s imagine for a moment that this could even happen) go with “the State of Chicago,” a one-county state, which would itself be unprecedented.  The postal abbreviation CH is available (as opposed to a State of Cook’s problem with CO already being taken by Colorado), so there’s no problem there.

A State of Chicago coterminous with the current Cook County would be the second smallest state, only slightly larger than Rhode Island (which has a whopping five counties, incidentally), and it would be by quite a long shot the smallest state west of the Appalachians.  But it would rank 22nd in population, just behind Minnesota.  African-Americans would have a larger share of the population (24.8%, as opposed to 15% in Illinois currently) than in any other state outside the Deep South—though that would change if the District of Columbia ever achieved statehood.

Plus, the State of Chicago would have an automatic and obvious state song: “Sweet Home Chicago,” the uptempo blues composed by Robert Johnson, the itinerant Mississippian guitarist and singer who never visited the city but dreamed of doing so.  It is already the Windy City’s unofficial anthem.

Chicago also has its own flag already, which many major American cities still do not.  Illinois’s flag is one of the many state flags which merely feature the state seal lazily placed on a white or blue background, resulting in a design that is headache-inducingly busy while not being at all memorable:

Chicago’s flag, on the other hand, is a dandy.  Vexillologically speaking, they would come out far better in this deal.

It will never happen.  But it does remind us that we are in need of a word for the converse of separatism—the agenda of ejecting a state or other political entity from a union.  I welcome readers’ suggestions.

And, once we come up with the word, someone in Brussels had better figure out how to translate it into Greek, Italian, and Portuguese.

(Galician and Sicilian too.)

(Postscript: see the blog of Michael J. Trinklein, author of Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It (2010), for a discussion of the Chicago-statehood movement of the 1920s, in which Chicagoans themselves wanted to secede, griping that they had a disproportionately low influence on Illinois’s legislature.  Trinklein’s book points out that “the tension between upstate and downstate Illinois was intended by the folks who drew the original boundaries.  If the inhabitants of the southern half had been part of some other state (such as Kentucky or Missouri), they likely would have sided with the South in the Civil War.  So the boundaries were drawn (by northerners) to attach southern Illinois to a northern port” (p. 29).  (Anyone who enjoys my blog, should also check out Trinklein’s, as well as his informative book.))

Transnistria’s Limbo to Continue Indefinitely

It’s being reported now in the Washington Post that talks will continue on November 30th, in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the status of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, or Transnistria for short, the sliver of the Republic of Moldova where non-Moldovans, mostly Russians, form a majority and are at times openly nostalgic for the Soviet Union.  The talks will be under the auspices of the Russian Federation, the European Union, the United States, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Russia’s relationship to Transnistria has always been odd.  It “supports” the Transnistrians but does not recognize their state.  The only states that recognize Transnistria are two other mostly-unrecognized states, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  (Transnistria also recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh, which has not returned the favor; that must sting.)  Russia’s withholding of recognition of Transnistria may seem odd, considering that Russia went to war in 2008 to carve those two not-terribly-viable puppet states, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, out of what nearly the whole rest of the world regards as the sovereign territory of the Republic of Georgia.  Doubly so since Russia’s rationale for supporting Abkhazian and Ossetian separatists involves fears that Ukraine will join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and thus further encircle poor Russia.  But wouldn’t a fully recognized pro-Moscow regime in Transnistria turn the tables and encircle Ukraine, compromising and slowing NATO’s strategic extension toward the Steppes of Asia?  Well, yes, but Russia seems to be making a calculation here.  They knew, in 2008, that the West would never come to the defense of Georgia, because it borders Russia itself, and because the Caucasus is close to volatile areas like Turkey, Kurdistan, Iran, and Iraq; it’s just too close to the powderkeg (see map below).  Transnistria, on the other hand, is enough out of the way—landlocked and wedged between Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine—that an Abkhaz-and-Ossete-style recognition by Moscow might just spark a NATO and Russian proxy war that Russia would lose.  (One can imagine Romania, which joined NATO in 2004, rising to defend the territory of mostly-Romanian-speaking Moldova, requiring NATO to take a stronger position than it would otherwise be inclined to do.)

So Russia is for the moment content to use the Transnistria issue behind the scenes simply to unnerve Ukraine and NATO.  But they are not remotely interested in pushing the issue toward a resolution.

Nor is the Ukrainian government interested in pushing the issue terribly much.  At current levels of stability, Ukrainian admission to NATO will happen eventually, and until then Ukraine is too large and well armed for the Russians to mess with it the way they messed with Georgia.  So Ukraine is in no hurry to dismantle the Transnistrian state.  However, Ukraine is even less eager to prevent Transnistria from moving even one inch closer to legitimacy.  The last thing Ukrainians want is for parts of Ukraine that have a Russian ethnic majority to feel inspired and empowered.  These include Crimea, which has an active Russophilic separatist movement mainly because of its distinct history and the fact that it was not even part of Ukraine until Stalin transferred it from the Russian S.S.R. to the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1954.  But they also include vast swaths of eastern Ukraine (some of which have been parts of Russia at various points in history).

As you can see, the slightest bit of progress for Transnistrians could embolden Transnistrians to stoke ethnic-Russian separatism in Ukraine’s nearby Bessarabia region, which includes the important Black Sea port Odessa—a city where even the bare majority of ethnic Ukrainians mostly speak Russian.  The distribution of Russian and Ukrainian speakers and ethnic-self-identifiers in Ukraine also maps quite neatly onto how Ukrainian elections tend to divide the country.  If it looked like the Transnistria project was moving forward, Ukrainians would worry that their country might start to rip apart—even if Russia officially stayed out of the fight, as it would.  And then Ukraine would never be let into NATO.

Nor is it probably accidental that these upcoming talks will be held in Vilnius.  Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian maps of distributions of Russian-speakers look similar to Ukraine’s.  And, while the three Baltic states are in NATO and their Russian minorities are rather chastened (and generally realize, though they rarely admit it, that they’re living in countries with more freedom and stability than Russia offers), no one in the West wants a suddenly restive population of Russians within NATO’s borders.

So, while it’s, I suppose, in general fine that all sides are talking to make sure Transnistria remains stable, don’t expect any changes to the status quo one way or the other.  Everyone wants the status of Transnistria, for the moment, to stay just as it is.