政治制度の再考と非対称型自治

制度的紛争解決論比較

抄録

Since the end of the Cold War, most people have recognized that ethnic conflicts occur frequently in many parts of the globe, such as Aceh, Bougainville, Karen, Kurd, Mindanao, North Ireland, South Sudan, the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Most of these conflicts do not seek to seize the state's power, but rather are assaults against the central ruling authority by a region that seeks territorial autonomy and sovereignty (self-determination) through secession. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan defined such center-region conflicts as a “stateness problem.”
These problems often have been dealt with through an integrational or consociational approach. Over the past decade, however, they seem to have been solved by the introduction of “federacy” or “asymmetrical autonomy,” which, despite their conventional achievements in Europe, had not for many years until recently appealed to many scholars as a solution to ethnic conflicts. Such indifference among scholars derived from their misunderstanding of asymmetrical autonomy, including how it functions and in what situations it brings states integration or secession. By discussing these questions, this article attempts to provide scholars with a “new” perspective on useful institutions for resolving conflicts.
Asymmetrical autonomy is a system that provides one or more of a state's units with more distinctive autonomy than others. This feature can, on one hand, help mitigate national minorities' feelings of discrimination and anger; but on the other hand, also can exacerbate the strife between the center and the region if centrifugal forces are already strong. The latter is the typical concern of scholars who are skeptical of asymmetrical autonomy, and they often overlook the benefits of the former. In order to elucidate asymmetrical autonomy's benefits, this article sheds light on the conditions under which it will be allowed and clarifies that it at least won't be harmful if a reciprocal channel is established between leaders of the center and the region, commitment problems are mostly solved, and universal human rights are guaranteed in the asymmetrically autonomous region.
Asymmetrical autonomy not only mitigates, but also institutionally “entrenches,” the stateness problem. Recent asymmetrically autonomous arrangements include temporary external conditionality of self-determination, while the polity can be democratic. This arrangement contradicts Rustow's insistence that democracy should not be established before people decide which political community they belong to, and that of Linz and Stepan, who argued that a stateness problem might exist when a significant proportion of a population does not accept the boundaries of the territorial state as a legitimate political unit.
Facing this contradiction, and reviewing the discussion above, we might need to reconsider the idea of asymmetrical autonomy as both a solution to ethnic conflict and a system to alter the framework of the relationships between democracy, nations, and states.