Owlbread, how do you reconcile your "civic nationalism" in Scotland (People living there should vote no matter where from, "ethnic Scots" anywhere not), with your position on Crimea (Tatars get right because their ancestors lived there a while ago, the Russians can go and sod themselves.)?
I've thought about this a lot recently and I'm not sure if I've got it right yet. I feel like I'm concentrating on ethnicity way too much.
The fact that there are Tatars scattered all over the world, either the children of the deported or even the very elderly deported themselves still alive today, unable to return to their homes, makes this a somewhat unusual situation, quite unlike the situation in Scotland. I know I have made arguments against the concept of Scots abroad being able to vote on independence on the grounds that they choose not to live in this country but that's the key; they have the choice. The Tatars do not. If they can actually afford to move back, they live in ghettos.
Under the current set up with the Russian majority Crimea will never be an independent state. Even though they are more Soviet than anything else the pro-Russians will never consider something like an independent Crimea. If Crimea is forced to allow the Tatars to return, that would not create an ethnically homogenous Tatar state. They would instead form a small majority with a very substantial Russian minority. I think the Russian minority in that situation would integrate more easily into an independent civic "Crimean" mindset than if they were a subject of the Russian federation. They already have that, hence all the waving of Crimean flags over the last few months - it just needs to be encouraged to develop into a sense of "national" as opposed to regional identity.
I would imagine that an independent Crimean Tatar state would speak Russian as a lingua franca anyway in the same way that Chechnya spoke Russian during its de facto independence, despite having next to no Russians in the country. Chechen Mujahideen would be praising Allah one minute then calling their friend a "molodyets" the next.
The Russians in Crimea have every right to live there, even if they are in many cases literally living in a Tatar's stolen house. They are Crimeans for better or worse, just as English people in Scotland are Scottish for better or worse. Their rights as a minority should be respected. You know, if a Russian in Crimea decided to call himself a Tatar and started speaking Tatar I would consider him to be a Tatar. This has nothing to do with blood, for me.
To put it simply, there are other forces at work here that make this situation more complicated than it should be, meaning my usual idea of Civic Nationalism doesn't really work. I think though it is the answer to the Ukrainian problem as a whole; you will notice that I have almost never called the Russophone Ukrainians "Russians". They are Ukrainians just like anyone else, they just speak a different language.
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Topic: UR's Post-USSR politics megathread (Read 304100 times)