The Rise and Fall of Ethnoterritorial Federalism: A Comparison of the Soviet Union (Russia), China,and India

The early Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and independent India inherited vast territories and multi-ethnic populations from the preceding empires. Their maintenance was a political and administrative challenge. The Soviet Union devised an archetype of ethnoterritorial federalism, in which nationality groups were granted their own administrative territories and subnational governments. The PRC and India imitated this system selectively, aware of its dangerous centrifugal tendency. The collapse of the Soviet Union discredited ethnoterritorial federalism, but none of the three countries has since devised a new system of multinational integration to replace it.