Political Change And The Risk Secession Of States

The research question in this paper is the secession risk of multinational countries during its democratization. I will focus on the political change of socialist states including the USSR and the central-eastern European socialist states, in order to evaluate the risk of disintegration of multinational states.The analysis of this paper is based on three facts. First, some states had broken up when they changed from one-party political system to multi-parties democracy since the 1980s. That brought nothing but some tragedy. For example, the new independent countries out of soviet union have suffered economic depression as well as ethnic conflicts. In Yugoslavia, civil war broke out, which resulted in millions of victims. Second, China as a multinational country has a similar nationality problem. The integrity of our country is threaterned by the RadicalSeparatist movements in Xinjiang and Tibet. So one of our research aimsis trying to get the knowledge about separatist movements,in order to solve it. Third, in a more broad view, separatist movements is a worldwide phenomenon which is difficult to handle with. Many states,Whatever rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, have been suffering secession. This is a long list:Sri Lanka, Canada,UK,Nigeria,India and so on. So the research has a lot of significants.Review of the recent literature on secession illuminates the ways in which my research is different from past approaches. The previous researchers neglected the risk secession assess, instead of focusing on cases study, which failed to find a general rule. My research method is based on the concept of Concentrated multinational states applied by Shandong University Wang Jianmin.The concept of concentrated multinational states is very useful to estimate the risksecession of countries.In this paper I have examinedthress different consequents of democratization in nine states:Poland, Hungary, Albania, German Democratic Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union. The first result is that communist party was overthrown whilecountriesdidn’tbreak up during democratization.These countries are types of uninational countries like Poland, Hungary, Albania.Still there are some differences between them. East German has united with west German. The second type is anti-Concentrated multinational countries like Romania, Bulgaria. When political change happened,there are some soft ethnical conflicts.Minorities would make peace with the rulers.The third type of countries is Concentrated multinational states likeCzechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,Soviet Union.They are the main objects of mystudying. When political change happened, the separatism movements had come up. These states had one common concequences:secession. And also civil war broke out in Yugoslavia.According to the model analysis of concentrated multinational states,we can explain the different results and determine the risk of splitting of the Soviet socialist countries in the process of political transition.Firstly,the national structure is the prerequisite, which plays a decisive role in national unity or division.In mufti-national state, to identify whether the country will be divided or not in democratization,our prime consideration is that whether it is a concentrated multinational state.The Basic features of concentrated multinational states include unique national culture,high degree of settlement, and the lage number of the population. However,it does not mean that the concentrated multinational states will deserve to split. Whether the state will collapse or not, it depends on the multiple factors. Such as the ethnic hatred in history, the combination of the nation, the economic disparity and economic ties, the country’s control power and so on.There are constants and variables in the factors. The national structure of the concentrated multinational states,the country’s control power are the constants,while the other factors are variables.And the various factors play a different role across nations.And The validity of this model has been verified in the Soviet Eastern socialist countries.