National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics [antikvár]

1 Introduction The national cultural autonomy model revisited Ephraim Nimni The model for national cultural autonomy ('NCA') discussed in this volume is rarely mentioned in the West nowadays, even if it is debated and seriously considered in post-communist states and in a diluted and perhaps distorted form has been recently implemented in post-communist Russia (Bowring below). The original model, which is explained in Karl Renner's article State and Nation, first published in 1899 and published in English for the first time in this volume, represents an ingenious, daring and, some say, a complex and counter-intuitive model (Forman 1998:108) for managing persistent and obstinate national and ethnic conflicts within a single democratic state framework. The model has something important to say to many contemporary multinational and multi-ethnic societies governed in accordance with the canons of the nation state model but which show a glaring discrepancy between this model and their multinational and multiethnic composition. When first discussed, around the turn of the twentieth century within the Social Democratic Party of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, the model was designed to manage ethno-national conflicts and prevent secession by offering national and ethnic minorities constitutionally guaranteed collective rights, wide cultural autonomy and non-territorial self-determination. A century later, and following the John Stuart Mill (1862/1976: 361) dictum that 'free institutions are next to impossible in a country made of different nationalities' it is still widely accepted that sovereign states have to be nation states in order to legitimately represent their citizens. This deceptive assumption engendered states which are nation states only in name, an anomaly that motivates not only the tendency of many liberal democracies to be linguicidal, but countless internal wars and acts of ethnic cleansing when a nation in one such state wishes to live up to Mill's unfortunate assertion. As the twenty-first century commences, there is a conspicuous discrepancy between the cultural and political borders of most nation states, in an international system that has 191 nation states represented in the United Nations, all of whom together contain 3,000 to 5,000 nations and 575 potential nation states (Ryan 1997: 162). The majority of armed conflicts.