Ukrainian-Russian Conflict, Rooted in Clash of Their Contrasting National Projects, May Spread to Central Asia, Kazakh Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 24 – Gulnar Dadabayeva, a Kazakh specialist on nation building, says that the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine and future conflicts between Russia and most of the countries of Central Asia have their roots in the fundamental differences between the national projects of these countries.

            Ukrainians and most Central Asians, upon achieving independence in 1991, embarked upon a program of nation building much like that of countries in Eastern Europe, she says. They sought to build a nation united by a common sense of identity based on culture, history or language (caa-network.org/archives/23828/o-nacziestroitelstve-intervyu-s-gulnaroj-dadabaevoj).

            The Russian Federation briefly tried to do the same thing, but that didn’t work out, Dadabayeva says, “because Russia is a multinational state;” and as a result, “in the second half of the 1990s, [Russia and its leaders] returned to the old imperial idea,” one that was not limited to the space within its borders but inevitably included former Russian and Soviet possessions.

            She insists that she is not using the word “imperial” in any negative sense because “the imperial means of administration is a means of administering various parts of an empire.” In a country as diverse as Russia is, one simply can’t administer Chechnya the same way one does the Yamalo-Nenets district or Tatarstan the way one does Kaliningrad.

            Those like Russians who adopt this perspective see territorial unity of the nation as primary and thus for them, “it is completely not understandable why Ukrainians should insist that everyone must speak Ukrainian, why Ukrainian culture must be cultivated, and why all on its territory must become part of that culture.”

            Given these different views, it is very difficult to say whether the Russians and the Ukrainians can ever find a common language, Dudabayeva says.

            A similar clash is arising in Central Asia, all of whose countries are now following Ukraine in what might be called the Eastern European direction. Initially, she concedes, Kazakhstan was an outlier because its titular nationality was not as dominant as those elsewhere. It first sought to have a territorial nation but now is promoting an ethnic one.

            And because that is so, the possibility that Russia and the Central Asian countries will clash much as Russia and Ukraine now are can’t be excluded, Dudabayeva concludes. Instead, the underlying differences in the understanding of what nationhood should consist of make that more likely than not.