by Peter Emerson
Introduction
There are numerous electoral systems in the world, quite a few decision-making voting systems, and several forms of governance. The first vary enormously. The usual forms of the latter two, however, do not; decision-making is usually taken by majority vote, occasionally in autocracies and theocracies, but nearly always in democracies; while elected parliaments are invariably ruled by a majority – a majority party or coalition. Politics therefore is adversarial, for majority voting allows the voter only to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’, and even in plural societies like Belgium, consociational voting ensures that decision-making remains dichotomous. Governance may sometimes involve all-party power-sharing, as in Switzerland and Bosnia, but here too reliance is placed on binary decision-making; a form of rule based on preferential decision-making has yet to be practised.
Likewise, when self-determination is exercised, binary voting is the norm. It implies that a minority may secede if a majority of that minority so decides… but that act of secession might produce another minority: when Ireland opted out of the UK, NI opted out of opting out, and remained in the UK. So too in the Caucasus, when Georgia left the USSR, Abkhazia and South Ossetia tried to leave Georgia; it was the same again in Yugoslavia, with Bosnia, and then Republika Srpska; and now too again with the USSR: Ukraine, Donetsk and Krasnoarmiisk.
Fearful that such referendums could lead to the break-up of the Russian Federation, and mindful that their Balkan ally, Serbia, opposed any referendum in Kosovo (as they spell it), Russia used to call the practice of holding these plebiscites ‘matryoshka nationalism’ after their famous dolls: every majority contains a minority, next a smaller one, and maybe too a miniscule one. Little wonder that when the first ethnic clashes in the USSR occurred, in 1988 in Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus, a headline in Moscow read “This is our Northern Ireland,” {Вот наш Ольстер (Vot nash Olster).}
As noted, binary vote decision-making is ubiquitous. In October 1991, at a cross-party conference in Belfast, one of the guests was a native of Sarajevo, Mr Petar Radji-Histić: a war was already raging in Croatia, despite or rather because of their two referendums; so we opposed any binary referendum in Bosnia which was, after all, 40:30:20 Moslem:Orthodox:Catholic – so there was no majority anyway! Alas, via the Badinter Commission, the EU (EC) insisted that Bosnia hold such a poll, and on the day of the vote, the barricades went up in Sarajevo. Looking back, “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum,” (Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo’s famous newspaper, 7.2.1999). The same quotation now applies to Ukraine.
‘Democratisation’
In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, western advisers advocated ‘majoritarianism’, {even though the Russian word for ‘majoritarianism’ is ‘большевизм’ (bolshevism)}. Not least because of all this advice, Moscow’s new polity consisted of the French two-round electoral system, the ubiquitous binary vote in parliamentary decision-making, and a form of governance based on majority rule. The problems were only beginning…
… most especially with self-determination. Nevertheless, despite the 1989 violence in Baku and Tbilisi, the west continued to support Gorbachev, but not after the 1991 fatalities in Lithuania. The West now changed its mind and backed the populist, Boris Yeltsin; it was a huge mistake. The latter supported the break-up of the USSR (because he wanted power) but opposed any ‘matryoshka nationalism’ for the break-up of the Russian Federation: (not unlike another Boris), of principles he had none. There followed the wars in Chechnya and, in 1999, the emergence of Vladimir Putin. And because Yugoslavia was considered to be similar to the USSR, western support for the nationalist Serb, Slobodan Milošević, was transferred to another extremist, the Croat Franjo Tudjman, and this second western U-turn exacerbated the wars in the Balkans.
But back to the newly independent and now majoritarian Ukraine. In 1991, in a referendum on independence, every oblast (region), including Crimea, voted in favour. Using the same very divisive two-round electoral system, presidential elections in 2004 led to a final between the two Viktors, Yanukovich and Yushchenko. Thus the one country of mainly Slav Christians divided into two ‘halves’: the largely pro-Russian, Russian-speaking Orthodox to the South and East, as opposed to the mainly pro-EU, Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic or Uniate others. Yushchenko won, albeit by a whisker and his right to majority rule was supported by the EC/(EU).
The Caucasus was still rumbling. In 2004 in Georgia, the more diplomatic Eduard Shevardnadze lost the election in Tbilisi in what was called the Rose Revolution, but the ‘changing of the guard’ was only the result of the ballot. Then, however, the new, more pacifist premier, Zurab Zhvania, was murdered… maybe on the orders of the new President Mikhail Saakashvili, or so many Georgians think, and power was now the monopoly of the latter.
Moscow itself now did a huge U-turn: despite Kosovo, Russia chose to support (matryoshka) referendums – some of them anyway – backing South Ossetia to opt out of Georgia… whereupon, of course, a Georgian enclave called Akhalgori (Eredvi) – like Northern Ireland – tried to opt out of opting out: more matryoshki, and yet more violence! Saakashvili waited for Putin to go to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics… and then invaded. Putin responded in the only way he knows how, and the result was war.
Two years later in Ukraine, the other Viktor, the pro-Russian Yanukovich – as noted, he had lost the 2004 contest – won the 2010 election, again by a whisker, the pro-western bloc having divided into Yushchenko versus Julia Timoshenko. (*1) There followed the protests in Maidan which, in February 2014, turned horribly violent. The EU then performed its own U-turn: democracy, apparently, was no longer majority rule, it was now power-sharing! A delegation rushed over to Kiev… and arrived on the very day that Yanukovich ran into exile.
Putin doesn’t like losing. So in March, he ran a second referendum in Crimea. As mentioned above, Crimea had already voted to be in Ukraine; but now, supposedly, it changed its mind. (The Belfast Agreement caters for a similar vacillation, every seven years or so.) (*2) In May came referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk… and the word Scotland, Шотландия (Shotlandiya) – (2014, of course, was also the year of Scotland’s referendum) – was used by Russian separatists in Luhansk, to ‘justify’ the unjustifiable.
Thus, just as the UK doll had splintered into Ireland and then Northern Ireland, so too the Ukrainian matryoshka broke into the small and infinitesimal: part of Ukraine tried to opt out and become an independent Donetsk, supposedly; whereupon the Dobropillia and Krasnoarmiisk region (*3) tried to opt out of opting out and to opt back into Ukraine, in another referendum! Nearly three million people voted, and 69.1% chose Ukraine.
This particular vote Putin chose to ignore. (Just as many westerners had ignored the first referendum in Kosova, in 1991. Another instance was when Croatia voted to leave Yugoslavia, the Krajina (*4) voted to leave Croatia – as in South Ossetia, this was another pair of mutually exclusive referendums!)
Next, in 2022, Putin changed his mind: he now wanted Donetsk to be, not independent (of Ukraine), but something quite different, to be incorporated (into Russia). And apparently, by some strange coincidence, in yet another (bloody) referendum, a majority of the people of Donetsk had, it is said, done the same.
Lessons
At worst, then, the majority vote is (and always was) a means by which the powerful can manipulate those with less power: at worst, both in parliament and/or in a referendum, it can be false flag, a provocation to violence. Accordingly, if only for the sake of Ukraine, those in Scotland (*5) and Ireland who might wish to change their own constitutional status should campaign for multi-option or better still preferential ballots. (How else can a W-I-S-E option, such as a Wales-Ireland-Scotland-England federation, get onto the ballot paper?)
There is another reason. If it is seen that the 2014 and then 2022 binary referendums in Donetsk etc. do in fact succeed, it will encourage others elsewhere who are already rattling their sabres and ballot boxes, like the current and former presidents, Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska and Anatoly Bibilov in South Ossetia, respectively; a poll in either could easily lead to yet more violence and war. What’s more, tensions in Kosova (to use the Albanian spelling) are yet again on the rise.
Meanwhile, the biggest lesson for the two governments here in these islands (and elsewhere) is as follows: both the House of Commons and Dáil Éireann should practice that which they preach: governance in both – indeed, governance in every democracy – should be based on broad coalitions, governments of national unity, forms of power-sharing based on preferential decision-making. If only for the sake of Ukraine.
Furthermore, as I first wrote in Fortnight in 2005, Ukraine itself should adopt a form of power-sharing.
Postscript
To every violent horror, there is always a pacifist response. Putin has ‘declared war’ (or special military operation) and thus, apparently, he now has the ‘right’ to kill. Those countries opposed to such violence should ‘declare peace’, so to say that until Russia withdraws from Ukraine and ceases all acts of violence therein, they will ignore all the norms of peaceful coexistence and diplomacy, and that their personnel in Russia – ambassadors and so forth – shall be at liberty to join the anti-war protests in Pushkin Square and elsewhere, for as long as such protests remain non-violent.
In addition, any (old) persons of influence outside Russia – the Pope, a retired Archbishop of Canterbury, an Imam and a Rabbi, along with a former US president perhaps, a British former prime minister, an ex-film star, whosoever – could endeavour to undertake a Gandhian protest of some sort, either in Moscow, or if that’s not possible in Minsk, or maybe just on the Belarus border: a silent vigil, a protest, a fast. It might be a policy which achieves nothing yet risks the lives of those involved; in contrast, other policies have put the lives of Ukrainians at risk.
–
Peter Emerson
Director, the de Borda Institute
A Russian-speaker; an OSCE election observer, six times in Ukraine, twice in Georgia and once in Russia; a member of the EU Monitoring Mission in Mtskheta for South Ossetia, 2008-9, and author of The Punters’ Guide to Democracy, (Springer, Heidelberg).
Footnotes:
(*1) Her bloc’s acronym was spelt B (for block), YU (for Julia), T (for Timoshenko), so to spell BYUT (‘short’ for beauty).
(*2) A procedure best called a ‘never-end-’em’.
(*3) It included seven cities such as Mariupol, and altogether its population was about four times the size of the Northern Ireland krajina (see footnote 4).
(*4) Three areas of Croatia which had long since been populated by Serbs as a bulwark against the Ottomans. The word ‘krajina’ shares the same etymology as ‘Ukraine’ – borderland.
(*5) The SNP used to be in favour of multi-option referendums, in 1992 advocating the alternative vote AV, (STV without PR). A little later on, the Scottish GP supported the preferential-points system of voting, the modified Borda count MBC. Now that these two parties are in power, however, (now that they can choose the referendum question), their support for the more inclusive methodology has waned, as has their desire to talk about it.