From Social Democratic Projects of the Balkan and Soviet Confederations to the Practice of Jewish Cultural and National Autonomy in Ukraine

Abstract

This study is connected with the study of not only the specific sof the national question as such and, accordingly, with the practice of resolving it at th elevelofinter national social democracyat the beginning of the 20thcentury, but also with the study of the national question as part of a more than relevant issue of international conflictology today, the resolution of which can fundamentally affect the develop ment of the entire modern civilization. The situation that is developing in the modern world, namely – the constant growth of political, economic, social and ethnic tension, – all this leads to the search for a more elastic model of intrastate resource management and interstate political regulation.The cyclicity in the dynamics of world development, fixed by historical science, shows that human civilization constantly encounters such bursts of political activity.The reaction to such an aggravation at the border of the 19th – 20thcenturies was the search for alternative models of the state structure, which international social democracy tried to use in solving such a painful issue as a national one.

In this study, three models of state design were analyzed, two of which (the Balkan and the Soviet project) met the criteria for inter-subject confederal design, while the third (Ukrainian) project can rather be described as intra-subject or autonomist.Moreover, in this context, the autonomist project turned out to be the most attractive for solving urgent national problems, like the Macedonian issue in the Balkans and the Jewish one in the late Russian Empire and the early USSR.So, in both cases, the problem of Jewish self-identification played a key role, pointing to the prospects for the Jewish population of Soluni of Macedonian autonomy and the possibility of an independent political organization of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews in the context of the autonomist strategy of the August Bloc as a whole and the General Jewish Workers Union, in particular.However, despite the general attractiveness of the Balkan and Soviet projects, the prospect of their implementation initially raised more questions than answers.While the same platform of Jewish cultural and national autonomy, implemented in the conditions of the political practice of the UNR, for some time gave the Jewish population of Ukraine the illusion of political significance and the prospect of political self-organization.The First World War, the collapse of world empires that followed it, the severe limitation of the national policy of the Bolshevik Party – all this did not allow the already rather amorphous confederalist forms of potential state formations to be realized.Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the design of a confederal state model, taking into account the autonomist tasks of national subjects, has become a unique experience in the search for national identity in the conditions of modern state-forming politics, in other words, an attempt to correlate the national and the state in the world geopolitics of the first quarter of the 20th century.