Credibility Explanations for the Success of Ethnoautonomy Arrangements

Are autonomous arrangements that have ethnically distinct minority populations (hereinafter referred to as ethnoautonomy) better off dividing and sharing powers with a central government, or would it be better for them to sever their ties and become fully independent? The past two decades have produced a useful debate regarding this question. Pro-ethnoautonomy scholars emphasize the virtues of autonomy arrangements that have distinct minority populations. They stress their economic advantages, and their meaningful levels of self-determination. On the other hand, still other anti-ethnoautonomy scholars reject the virtues of autonomy. They assert that ethnoautonomy is associated with poverty and violence. They also argue that autonomy can be unfairly exploited by one side or another given inevitable power differentials. This chapter seeks to explain why the pro and anti-ethnoautonomy literatures provide such starkly different assessments. The argument here will be that these distinct views can be explained by the presence (or absence) of constitutional entrenchment credibility mechanisms (which are capabilities that make allocated powers very difficult to change and take away). Even as anti-ethnoautonomy scholars assert their skepticism, they include within their assessment weak autonomy polities that have weak or nonexistent credibility guarantees; the powers of such polities can be taken away by executive fiat or the simple majority decision of a core state or central government legislature. As this chapter will demonstrate, the problems that such scholars observe do not come from autonomy itself. Instead, they emanate from the weakness of the credibility guarantees of the polities that they include within their assessment. By contrast to anti-ethnoautonomy scholars, scholars that accept the virtues of ethnoautonomy tend to exclude such weak autonomy cases and instead assess polities with meaningful constitutional entrenchment.