Territorial Autonomy as a Tool of Minority Accommodation in the Post‐Soviet Space: The Cases of Ukraine and Moldova

Abstract

The article examines how territorial autonomy arrangements provide for the accommodation of ethnic diversity in the framework of unconsolidated democracies or ‘hybrid’ regimes. The paper focuses on Ukraine and Moldova whose politics and techniques of government combine Soviet legacies with knowledge and values transferred from ‘old’ democracies. The article rests on institutional analysis and involves the study of institutional settings in the domains of instrumental and symbolic policies. The examined autonomy arrangements to a large extent follow the patterns inherited from the Soviet past such as non‐articulation of the autonomies’ ethnic underpinning, ‘fuzzy legality’, the prevalence of informal institutions and their symbiosis with the formal ones, and systemic discrepancies between symbolic and instrumental policies. The author argues that such a system can be functional and compatible with democratic governance.