民族の「自決」とは何か

【ユダヤ人「ブンド」の問いをめぐって】

抄録

This article examines articles on the national questions written by the leading figures of The General Jewish Workers’ Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. My aim is to clarify the meaning and nature of the Bund’s demands that were presented in the polemics it had with Vladimir Lenin and his supporters.

Firstly, it points out that the Bundists’ argument for the right of Russian Jews to develop its own language and culture is not to be seen as a sign of the Bund’s deviation from an “international” class movement toward “bourgeois nationalism” or “separatism,” as Lenin criticized. Vladimir Medem, a Bundist, argued that the liberation of language and culture was the Yiddish speaking Jewish workers’ social liberation.

This article, secondly, shows that the point of the polemics between the Bund and the Russian Social Democrats over the national question was how to interpret and define “self-determination” of all nationalities which was in the program of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Referring to Karl Kautsky’s articles, Vladimir Kossovsky, an another theorist of the Bund, argued that this idea reflected within itself the notion of nation in Western Europe that was associated with state, and was not applicable in Eastern Europe, where each ethnic group did not have territorial borders and national movements did not always carried the demand for their own state. The Bund’s national program, national cultural autonomy, that was formulated under the influence of Karl Renner’s theory, was an alternative to the idea of “self-determination” that Lenin formulated as the right of all nationality “to secede and form a separate state”.