ロシアの非対称な連邦制

Russia’s federalism in the 1990s had two different characteristics: the legal equality of federal subjects and bilateralism. While the constitution, which was adopted in December 1993, regards all the federal subjects (regions) as “legally equal”, it also allowed the center and regions to sign bilateral treaties to transfer some of their powers to each other. These treaties forged the asymmetry of Russia’s federal system and undermined the central government’s capacity in the 1990s.<br> This paper aims at explaining the reason why such complex institutional settings were introduced in the constitution. Previous studies have argued that after the constitutional crisis in October 1993, President Yeltsin pursued the concentration of power on the center-regional axis by emphasizing the legal equality of all the federal subjects. At the same time, the concept of bilateralism was also brought in the federal system. In this manner, the constitution has different orientations in itself, but it remains unclear why such ambiguous institutional settings were made in Russia.<br> In the course of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia started drafting a new constitution. While Yeltsin intended to grant himself strong power in the constitution, he couldn’t get enough support from the parliament on this point. Thus, he tried to win over regional leaders to his side in order to gain support for his own constitutional draft. In June 1993, he convened the Constitutional Conference, where a lot of regional leaders took part and played a great role in working on a new draft.<br> Although the provisions of strong presidential power were approved in the Constitutional Conference, there were some disputes over the center-regional relations. One of them was whether the draft would include “the special status of republics” or “the legal equality of all the subjects.” Faced with such a state of confrontation, Yeltsin arranged a compromise between the two by both giving the republics “sovereign state” status and proposing that all the federal subjects should be “legally equal among themselves in relations with the Federal bodies of state power.”<br> Another issue was the relations between the central government and the Republic of Tatarstan. As Tatarstan started negotiating with Moscow over a bilateral agreement in the late Perestroika period, it refused to sign the Federal Treaty in March 1992 and kept on the negotiation. In the Constitutional Conference, Tatarstan demanded that such a peculiar position should be taken into consideration in the constitutional draft, and this demand was accepted. In July 1993, the Constitutional Conference adopted the draft, which acknowledged such bilateral treaties as one of the ways to determine the scopes of authority and powers between the center and the federal subjects.<br> This clause remained in the final draft, in spite of the fact that Yeltsin pursued the concentration of power after the crisis in October 1993. In this way, while he partly centralized the state structure at the last stage of making the constitution, he left the concept of bilateralism in the constitution. This bilateralism subverted the ability of the federal government, and exacerbated political and economic turmoil in the 1990s.<br>