Find Insurance Online

Dmitri Medvedev, President of the Russian “Federation,” fired Yuri Luzhkov in September, 2010, after the mayor of Moskow (legally a governor of a region) questioned the president’s fitness and thus rattling the tightly controlled government.The conflict had turned into a highly unusual spectacle because such defiance of the country’s leadership by a senior official rarely occurs in public. “It is difficult to imagine a situation under which a governor and a president of Russia, as the chief executive, can continue to work together when the president has lost confidence in the leader of a region,” Mr. Medvedev said. The state-controlled television channels, which rarely if ever voice criticism of party leaders, suddenly went after Mr. Luzhkov, signaling the Kremlin’s displeasure with him. They broadcast programs that questioned Mr. Luzhkov’s performance and suggested that he was responsible for corruption in Moscow.  To be sure, Luzhkov had endured sustained criticism for reigning like an autocrat, muzzling dissent and allowing blatant corruption to flourish. During his tenure, his wife, Yelena Baturina, obtained much of the construction business in Moscow, becoming one of the world’s richest women.However, it was criticism of Medvedev, rather than corruption, that costed Luzhkov his job.  We can conclude that the governors of Russia’s regions, which are equivalent to the states of the EU and US, are in no way free of the central government.  In federalism, the federal states are semi-sovereign.  The Russian Federation is thus not a federation; rather, it is a consolidated empire like China.  Because an empire is of such scale that it is inherently heterogeneous (diverse), consolidation has the drawback of not allowing for the diversity to express itself politically.  As the pressure builds, the seeds are laid for the eventual demise of the polity.  The EU is in much better shape in this respect, as its member states still have sufficient sovereignty to enact laws that reflect their particular conditions.  Lest it be said that the long tradition of the EU states’ governmental sovereignty is a sufficient buttress against consolidation, the delegates at the US’s Constitutional Convention relied on the citizens’ identification with their states against encroachment by the new general government of the federal system.  History and people’s political identification may seem solid to us, but what holds for us may one day be an afterthought. While we can learn from history, it does not have its own staying power; it is in this sense artificial—a creature of the mind.  One might counter that the history of centralized rule in Russia (and the USSR) played a role in the demise of Russian federalism.  I would counter that it is the present locus of power that decisive.  Consider, for example, the present power of the US Government as against the history of state power in the US wherein the federal government handled mostly foreign affairs.  That history could not stand up against the encroachments of centralized power.  I predict that the EU, should it endure, will suffer the same plight.  Russia is simply further along.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/europe/29moscow.html?_r=1&hp: