The war of laws in the Soviet Union: Politics as competing sovereignty claims

When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated perestroika, few anticipated the depth and scope of reform, nor the consequences, intended and especially unintended, that would result. When Gorbachev opened for revision the rules of communist rule, he initiated a dynamic process of political transformation that would ultimately lead to the demise of the Soviet Union. Once the authoritative restrictions on political participation were loosened, political actors emerged in the republics and within the Soviet elite who challenged communist power. The War of Laws was a manifestation of that challenge and was focused on the legal issue of sovereignty, that is, who ruled whom? The War of Laws was two dimensional: between the republics, especially the Baltics, and central Soviet law making authorities; and among the factions that emerged within Soviet legislative and executive institutions. Although there was much violence in the last years of the USSR, the War of Laws was largely non-violent, yet as a conflict over power and political control, it was a determining factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The demise of the Soviet Union presents a tremendous challenge to scholars. How can we understand and explain the dissolution of what was believed to be one of the most stable political regimes in modern times? Although the sovietology literature provides rich descriptions of the salient features of Soviet politics, it fails to provide an adequate explanatory framework because it does not address what is known as the "agent-structure problem." Do people act as purposeful agents, making their own history, or do social structures determine history? I develop a constructivist theory of politics which answers the agent-structure question by proposing that agents and social structures are co-constituted in a process whereby social structures are continually produced, reproduced, and transformed by human actions and human action is continually constrained and enabled by social structures. I suggest that the War of Laws was an explicit manifestation of this process as participants sought to transform the political structures of the Soviet regime in a dynamic competition over sovereignty.