Two Strains of Nationalism – Isolationists and Integrationists – have Long Competed in Tatarstan, Nasibullov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – Nationalists are too often thought of as a single stream, Kamil Nasibullov says; but in fact, as the history of the Tatars has shown, there are two competing strains of nationalism, those who seek to defend their nation by isolating it from others and those who believe they can best advance its interests by integrating with larger surrounding groups.

            Many of the former may dismiss advocates of the latter as no not nationalists at all, the psychologist who works at the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences says. But in fact they represent a different strategy that reflects the particular situation of the Tatars (milliard.tatar/news/ot-volzskoi-bulgarii-do-sovremennoi-respubliki-xronika-borby-izolyacionistov-i-integracionistov-v-tatarskoi-istorii-2044).

            For most of the last millennium, Nasibullov says, Tatars have lived mixed together with other nations and have quite frequently lived under the power of states centered on other nationalities. Consequently, an integrationist strategy can be justified if it allows the Tatars to benefit rather than simply die out when a state of their own is an impossibility.

            He traces a history in which sometimes the isolationists have had the upper hand and at others the integrationists have; and argues that the Volga region in which the Tatars are centered is a kind of “Grand chessboard of the Tatars (in the spirit of Brzezinsky) on which the key stages of the formation of the ethnos unfolded.”

            This competition continues to have a geographic dimension as well with the isolationists centered in the wooded areas of the foothills of the Urals and the open steppe and forest steppe zone of the south and west the integrationist stronghold. Kazan truly is “the center of the Tatar world” but it is now “disputed territory,” where the Tatars contest over this civilizational choice.