Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 28 – Participants at
a roundtable organized by the Liberal Mission Foundation called to discuss two
new volumes by ethnic specialist Emil Pain suggest that three kinds of national
identity – ethnic, state-centric and civic – are in conflcict in Russia and
that the outcome of that competition will determine the country’s future.
What makes this significant is that
most of the debate about the definition of a new Russian nation has assumed a contest
only between ethnic and civic, with state-centric definitions, themselves very
different than and add odds with both, typically conflated with one or the
other.
Former economics minister Yevgeny
Yasin, who chaired the meeting, noted that “according to the Levada Center, the
most important sign of a civic nation, a sense of civic subjectiveness … has fallen
since the 1990s, raising the question: “Is the development of a civic nation in
Russia possible in such conditions?” (liberal.ru/articles/7226).
Emil Pain, a professor at the Higher
School of Economics, gave the main talk. He argued that “under current
political conditions, the participation of people of liberal views in any political
institutions serves no purpose … but to take part in theoretical discussions is
useful.” As for himself, he has avoided political activities since 2012.
The main thesis of the new book, Nation and Democracy, of which he is the
co-author, is that “a civic nation, that is, a civic society which has taken
control of the state and redirected it for its own interests will become in the
future the basic condition for the resolution not only of inter-ethnic problems
but also for the development of democracy in Russia.”
Russia moved in that direction in
the early 1990s and with the 1993 constitution was on its way to becoming a
nation state, Pain said; but “the national project has been deformed in the
2000s when the authorities began to destroy” the baases of local government and
treaty agreements between Moscow and the republics and regions.
“It is important to stress,” Pain
said, “that this regress was in no way connected with any characteristics of Russians
as the ethnic majority of the country. Those very same Russians, including thoe
born in the USSR, showed their capacity for civic activity and for mastering liberal-democratic
norms in countries where those norms were not suppressed by the powers.”
Unfortunately, he continued, “certain
scholars – Abdulatipov, Mikhailov, and Tishkov – assert that civic
self-consciousness in Russia is growing.” They do so by misinterpreting research
conducted by the Institute of Sociology which shows that ever more residents of
Russia are inclined to identify with state institutions rather than nations.
But “in reality, this is an
imprecise interpretation of the results of the sociological research: it
incorrectly interprets identification with the state as a synonym of civic
identity.” The two are not the
same. Russian liberals are linked with
national identity and nationalism but do not focus first and foremost on the
state but on the community and its rights and powers.
Such links and identifications can
best grow not from the top down but from the bottom up and in places like major
cities, where “civic ideas have always been formed. From classical times, the words ‘politics’
and ‘poliss,’ ‘citizenship’ and ‘urbanity’ have common roots. The same thing is
true now.”
A second speaker, political analyst
Kirill Rogov, argued that the current confusion about nations and national
identities began with the Maidan in Ukraine. “We saw in the Maidan a certain
combination of elements of a a pro-European choice, ethnic nationalism and
civic nationalism.” But not everyone saw it the same way.
“The West,” Rogov said, “viewed the
Maidan as a manifestation of civic nationalism, but Russian propaganda
presented it as a manifestation of ethnic nationalism” and promoted a certain vision
of state national identity and nationalism at home to counter the possibility
of such a development within Russia.
Beyond question, he continued, “this
collision was prefigured by the events in Russia” a few years earlier “which
also demonstrated the possibility” of a coalition emerging that would include both
liberals and nationalists. And the state offered “’imperial nationalism’” as a
substitute for that.
“The term ‘imperial nationalism,’”
Rogov said, “is not entirely correct. More properly this is state nationalism
because it is the specific nationalism of a continental empire in which
imperialism has ot an expansionist coloration but on the contrary, it realizes
itself in the idea of preserving the perimeter” of the country.
A third speaker, Aleksey Kara-Murza
of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy said that he agrees with Pain that “the
nation is the most important instrument of a liberal politics. He is right that
liberal culture constructed on the primacy of the free creative personality is
formed in the struggle with two opponents – autocratic despotism … and
unlimited cosmopolitanism.”
There is a strong tradition in
Russian liberalism of fighting with the former but a much less developed one
involving struggle with the latter, Kara-Murza said. But it does exist and should be expanded
upon. It goes back to Petr Struve who in the early years of the 20th
century said his primary task was “’to marry’ nationalism and liberalism.”
He was chairman of the pan-emigration
congress of 1926 in Paris where he declared his goal to be the formation of a
Russian civic nation in exile, one opposed to the Soviet empire. That idea took
shape in Vasily Aksyonov’s novel, The
Island of Crimea, where in Muscovy, they live in an imperial fashion “but
in ‘our Crimea, we live by national and liberal values.”
Struve argued that true patriotism is
liberalism, something many today do not understand because the regime has “privatized”
patriotism: “Who is not with us, is against us. Who is not with us is not a
Russian. [And] who is not with us is against Russia. The liberals are again and
that means they must be rejected.”
Lev Gudkov, the director of the
Levada Center, was the fourth speaker.
He began by noting that Pain had drawn parallels between the outcome of
the Iranian revolution of 1979 and “the authoritarian-traditionalist turn of the
last decade in Russia,” parallels which are not simply superficial but reflect common
characteristics of countries trying to catch up with the West.
These involve not cultural
distinctions and details, Gudkov said, but rather “the inertia of underlying institutions”
which define how elites and those who support them feel: “mass resentment,
complexes of national incompleteness, the pursuit of compensatory gratification,
the defensive isolationism” and so on.
Most Russian liberals, he continued,
are put off by and do not want to have anything to do with nationalism in
general or Russian nationalism in particular given the history of the latter
both before the revolution and in Soviet times when it was associated with some
of the most reactionary and offensive notions.
Of course, there were exceptions
among the ruralist writers and people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gudkov
conceded. But they have become less influential as the current Russian regime
has revived some of the more extreme forms of Russian nationalism under the control
of the state.
For most liberals, Russian nationalism is
understood as “Russian conservative or imperial nationalism” rather than with
the foundations that could lead to the development of democratic values. And yet, “the entire end of the 19th
and the beginning of the 20th century show that the development of
democracy always rested on the idea of national representation.”
According to Gudkov, “any successful
democracy one way or another operates or includes in itself the idea of a
nation as a civic or collective … consolidation for the defense of the ideals
of national culture, national economy, security, territorial integrity or on the
contrary expansion.”
In this way, “the nation and
democracy or the idea of liberalism have something in common – the representation
of the whole. But it appeals to ‘unity in diversity,’ considering the national
community as an organic collection of autonomous formations, groups, social divisions
and so on.”
Gudkov said that “in various
republics of the former USSR it had a different nature [than in Russia]: it was
emancipatory and a conservative national movement at the same time. All of them
included within themselves the potential of anti-imperial consolidation, including
an anti-Russian movement as well as the potential or idea of representation of diversity.”
In Russia today, he continued, “we
are dealing with conscious efforts of the authorities to restore great power
imperial nationalism which destroys any potential for autonomy, group
consolidation or the idea of representation.” But that effort has not destroyed
the interest of many Russians in a different form of nationalism, one combined
with liberalism.
Focus groups say, he said, that they
would like to see “a certain ‘liberal conservatism’ or ‘liberal nationalism,’
without the extremes of political correctness or multi-culturalism” and even
believe that such a nationalism could serve as ‘a positive collective identity’”
in the Russian Federation.
Such people recognize that an empire
is “incompatible with the idea of civic or national and social representation,”
that it leads to “the sterilization” of society and the destruction of “inter-group
ties,” “a sharp simplification of history and ideas about society,” including
about ideas involving representation.
Viktor Sheynis of IMEMO was the
fifth speaker. He argued that “the main link
connecting liberalism and democracy is not the nation but civil society.” Russia was moving in that direction between
1906 and 1917, but it failed to achieve its goals because society was
insufficiently developed to support democracy.
Ethnicity or the nation may help or
hinder the development of civic society but it is not the same thing, according
to the economist. In the post-Soviet
world, he suggested, the hopes that the development of the nation will lead to
democracy are weak because of the strength of imperial and anti-imperial values
and because of the time needed to overcome both.
A sixth speaker, Vasily Bank, noted
that “unfortunately, national problems and conflicts with us in the country
have as it were gone underground. In fact, no one is working on them,
especially the executive power. The corresponding structures that had been
involved are being disbanded,” making the situation worse.
If this doesn’t change, he
suggested, “the problem will go out of control and we will face another
Chechnya.”
Gudkov then made an intervention
before Pain made his concluding remarks.
Gudkov said he wanted to illustrate his ideas about “compensatory
imperial nationalism” by pointing out that after the annexation of Crimea, “xenophobia
fell sharply. Very sharply.” But not because aggression fell but because it was
redirected at a different target.
Further, he suggested, “today we
have a very homogenized and common mass consciousness. Young people are the
most pro-Putin group” and simultaneously the most anti-Western at an
ideological level and the most pro-Western in terms of consumerism and mass
culture.
In summing up the discussion, Pain
said that Russians have forgotten that the term “nation” was originally applied
not to an ethnic group but to the idea of “popular sovereignty.” For nearly a century after the French
revolution, Russians did understand that. Only after 100 years did an ethnic
understanding of the nation become predominant.
Pain said he does not think it will
take another century to return to the original idea in Russia. What is a civic nation? “It is civil society
which controls the state.” It isn’t imperial but supports “a
national-federative political milieu.” At the same time, “no one will give this
voluntarily.” It must be sought and fought for.
“In Russia between 2010 and 2014, a
new anti-imperial nationalism arose. Then, for the first time, nationalists
among whom were those who went to the Bolotnaya square and called themselves
national democrats proclaimed as the main idea of nationalism – the state for the
nation and not the nation for the state.”
But with the annexation of Crimea, “a
large segment of Russian nationalists returned to the ranks of imperial
nationalism,” Pain continued. It lost its way as it integrated with government
officials and thus was “almost completely replaced by state nationalism. The
state defined the rules the game in the sphere of nationalism as well.”
But civic or liberal nationalists
are coming back, Pain said. “They are
already here, in the ranks of those who support Aleksey Navalny and who despite
the xenophobic ideas at the start of his movement now march “under slogan of a
profoundly civic nationalism.” That at
least gives some basis for optimism about the future.
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