Various efforts to assess the effects of autonomy arrangements on the prospects of achieving
stability and democracy in ethnically heterogeneous societies have received a lot of attention
in the literature. i
The Gagauzian autonomy illustrates some of the key challenges of
elaborating and implementing autonomy provisions in the context of fledging democratic
institutions and a weak system of rule of law. Although the Gagauz autonomy is often
considered as a rare case of successful conflict transformation in post-Soviet space, the actual
implementation of autonomy provisions has been a highly contested issue. The terms of the
autonomy deal – the framework of rules and provisions that central authorities and Gagauz
elites agreed upon in 1994 – have not elicited political actors’ compliance with the letter of
the law to the extent that the legal literature on autonomy usually assumes.
This chapter provides an analysis of terms and reasons for the Gagauz autonomy agreement.
Its main focus, however, is on explaining how the process of autonomy implementation led to
the establishment of an autonomy regime whose functioning is far from the model autonomy
arrangement envisioned in the founding documents of the Gagauz autonomy. It examines
strategies employed by the central government and autonomy authorities in autonomy
implementation struggles and discusses outcomes produced by the interaction of these
strategies. The paper also shows how the analysis of autonomy implementation practices
increases our leverage in explaining successes in securing stability and democracy without
falling into the trap of attributing these outcomes of ultimate interest simply to the fact of the
formal introduction of an autonomy arrangement.
The proposed account pays close attention to the context in which political struggle over
implementation of autonomy provisions takes place. Characteristics of the domestic political
and legal environment affect the structure of choices available to political actors and shape
their strategies. Key characteristics of domestic environment for the purposes of this paper 2
include the autonomy region’s economic vulnerability, the prevalence of neo-patrimonial
political practices and the weakness of the rule of law tradition in Moldova. Two latter
characteristics set apart the Gagauz case and many other autonomies in the developing world
from the cases of territorial autonomies found in the context of developed Western
democracies. While the latter cases provide much normative inspiration for writing on
autonomy, it is the utility of autonomy principles for the former cases that are of central
concern for the literature mentioned above. ii
The chapter starts with a review of the context and legal provisions of the 1994 agreement on
the establishment of Gagauz autonomy. It then turns to discussing how this agreement on the
autonomy arrangement was translated into a set of specific norms and practices. These norms
and practices, which dramatically limited the scope of autonomy that many believe the 1994
settlement envisioned, are presented as a product of asymmetric power bargaining between
political actors operating in the weak rule of law environment. Finally, the paper examines
how this process of defining and narrowing the actual scope of autonomy affected the
behaviour of autonomy elites and their commitment to pursuing the course of the region’s
democratization and maintaining non-conflictual relations with the center.