Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States
eBook - ePub

Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States

Dovile Budryte

Share book
  1. 248 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States

Dovile Budryte

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Revisiting the process of political community building in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, this book analyzes the roles that international actors have played in these processes and assesses the unintended consequences of this involvement. The study differs from other works on ethnic minorities and nationalism in the former Soviet Union by exploring the use of minority rights discourse and the salience of historical memory. Case studies examine the transformation of nationalism in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - all former Soviet republics - which have experienced Soviet nationalities policy first-hand. Primarily intended for an academic audience and practitioners interested in promoting tolerance in multi-ethnic societies, the book's historical narrative will also appeal to readers with a general interest in the former Soviet Union and post-Communism.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the Post-Soviet Baltic States by Dovile Budryte in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Nationalism & Patriotism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351896207

Chapter 1
Post-Soviet Baltic Nationalisms in Theories and Case Studies

Post-Soviet expressions of nationalism in the Baltic states have been explored in numerous works, most of which focused on ethnic relations in Latvia and Estonia, while Lithuania received less attention. Latvia and Estonia became popular cases of ‘nationalizing states’ (Rogers Brubaker’s term) that initially denied citizenship to large segments of immigrants, most of whom were ethnic Russians. In the context of the expansion of the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Baltic states, especially Latvia and Estonia, were explored as young, inexperienced democracies eager to emulate the more experienced Western communities. To gain membership in the community of Western democracies, Latvia and Estonia liberalized their citizenship and language laws, which, presumably, lessened ethnic tensions and prevented ethnic conflict.
These observations raise several questions about post-Soviet studies of Baltic nationalisms:
  • Which theoretical approaches have been employed to study these phenomena?
  • Which common themes have been embraced by these theoretical approaches?
  • Which developments related to the re-assertion of nationhood during the post-Soviet period have received less scholarly attention?
My goals in this chapter are to answer these questions and then to identify those areas of the existing approaches to the study of post-Soviet Baltic nationalism that are in need of conceptual refinement and further empirical research. In this review I divide the previous theoretically sound literature on national identities and nationalism in the Baltic states during and after the disintegration of the USSR into three conceptually and thematically distinguishable areas:
  • Recent Studies in Early Baltic Nationalism
  • Theories Defining Nations and Nationalism
  • Case Studies of Post-Soviet Baltic Nations and Nationalisms
The scope of this review is limited to the developments in the area of nation building during the post-Soviet era, although several recently published works exploring early Baltic nationalism are mentioned. Most of the reviewed works use theories devised in the West; it is still difficult to reflect theoretically on the relatively recent past from within the Baltic states.

Recent Studies in Early Baltic Nationalism

There are numerous insightful works dealing with the development of the Baltic nations and nationalism in the Russian empire and during the Soviet era. These works are noteworthy because they address the question of the formation of the Baltic nations. Rein Taagepera’s (1993), Toivo Raun’s (1991), Andrejs Plakans’s (1996), and Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera’s (1993) studies of the Baltic nations, published in English, remain standard texts in the field. David J. Smith’s, Artis Pabriks’s, Aldis Purs’s, and Thomas Lane’s comprehensive guide on the Baltic states (2002) includes concise surveys of the rise of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national consciousness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Recently, several interesting studies that explore early Baltic nationalisms and relate these developments to broader debates in nationalism studies were published. For example, a recent article by Toivo Raun, ‘Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Estonian Nationalism Revisited’ (2003), provided a comprehensive review of research on early Estonian nationalism in the context of the major debates in nationalism studies. A major question in these debates has been that of the nature of nations and nationalism — i.e., whether nations are primordial or should be treated as constructs. By and large, Raun was critical of the modernist approach pioneered by Ernest Gellner, and argued that ‘Gellner’s key emphasis on the transforming impact of industrialization is not relevant for the Estonian case since the spread of national consciousness to a large extent preceded any decisive phase of economic modernization.1 Raun argued that early Estonian nationalism could best be understood from the theoretical perspectives developed by Miroslav Hroch and Anthony D. Smith.2
Although Raun viewed attempts to develop a precise chronology of nation formation as futile, since ‘essentially this process is unquantifiable process,’ he suggested that the mass mobilization of the Estonian population could be traced to 1905, when people even in the most remote villages participated in meetings and debates3. During that year, an All-Estonian Congress gathered in Tartu. It called for an end to russification and for territorial autonomy within one administrative district.4 According to Raun, the rise of literacy and the availability of materials written in the Estonian language contributed to the growth of ethnic awareness during the nineteenth century.
In ‘Early Lithuanian Nationalism: Sources of Its Legitimate Meanings in an Environment of Shifting Boundaries,’ Algis Valantiejus (2002) explored the rise of early Lithuanian nationalism. Unlike Raun, he had a more positive view of the applicability of Gellner’s theory. Although Lithuania was similar to Estonia during the early stages of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in that it did not show signs of industrialization, social mobility, and other institutions, Valantiejus argued that the then prevalent social expectations should be taken into account. He argued that what Gellner calls ‘the penetration of industrializing expectations’ (for example, a willingness to engage in trade, have children, and take on urban crafts) was present during the late nineteenth century and made people realize the ‘limitations of their previous conditions.’ The ‘modern sense’ of national belonging surfaced in relation both to strong ethnic ties and social changes.
Valantiejus embraced Miroslav Hroch’s approach to the study of nationalism, arguing that early Lithuanian nationalism was created by two forces: the ‘ethnic aspect of religion’ (i.e., ethnic Lithuanians who were Catholics and resisted Russian pressure to convert to Orthodoxy) that made ideas of ethnic nationalism attractive to Lithuanian peasants; and the secular liberal movement, led by the patriotic intelligentsia. Although Hroch’s macro-historical take on the development of nationalism in small states remains one of the more popular approaches among those who write about early Baltic nationalism, some scholars have explored Baltic identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by employing a micro-historical approach that focuses on individuals rather than on large, impersonal forces.
In a recent study of a family from Latvia by two scholars based in Australia (Perkins and Petrikeeff, 2001), the authors suggested that the mostly German bourgeoisie in Riga divided their loyalties between its ethnic identity and the Tsarist Russian state. For the father of the family, Peter Skerst, the desired ethnicity during the middle decades of the nineteenth century was German, but the issue of identification was much more complex for Skerst’s four sons. Because of their education in the Imperial Russian Lyceum and their exile as White Russians, Skerst’s two older sons adopted Russian identities. The two younger sons attended a German school in Riga and later enrolled in the German organized militia, and thus ‘became’ German. The main point made by the authors is that during the early twentieth century, when Baltic nationalist movements achieved historical significance (the three Baltic countries became independent after World War I), sometimes purely accidental circumstances played an important role in shaping ethnic identity.
The story of the Skerst family illustrates how problematic the concepts of national identity and nationalism have become. How can it be possible to explore nationalism as a movement of a people that embraces the same nationality when a close examination of a single Latvian family shows that its members chose different identities? Similar frustrations with the fluidity of the terms ‘nationalism,’ ‘nation,’ and ‘national identity’ have been expressed by those who have written about post-Soviet Baltic nationalism. To illustrate, Valery Tishkov, a former Russian nationalities Minister, argued that ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ might be useless terms since they are conceptually empty and their meanings are difficult to pin down.5
Despite the chameleon-like qualities of nations and nationalisms, issues related to these concepts (for example, citizenship, language and history education, multiculturalism, and integration of ethnic minorities) continue to trouble the Balts. Rather than being paralyzed by the apparently inadequate vocabulary of nationalism studies, researchers interested in post-Soviet Baltic identity issues have developed working definitions of nationalism. As I explain in the following section, these working definitions, drawn from the two leading theoretical approaches in nationalism studies, have come to be described as the ‘primordialist’ and ‘constructivist’ approaches.

Theories Defining Nations and Nationalisms

Many, including those who have done research on early Baltic nationalism, have used the terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in the way suggested by Anthony D. Smith, whose name has been associated with the so-called ‘primordialist’ school of thought. Smith’s followers tend to see national identity as ‘a fundamental empirical fact of social reality’ and emphasize the stability of ethnic and national communities.6 Smith (1996) defined the ‘ethnie’ (a feeling of kinship) as the core around which nations are built. According to Smith, ‘national sentiment is no construct. It has a real, tangible base. At its root is a feeling of kinship, of the extended family, that distinguishes the nation from every other kind of sentiment.7 Smith, like other primordialists, embraces a view of the nation as an enduring community of ‘history and culture, possessing a unified territory, economy, mass education system and common legal rights.8
Although Smith agreed that the majority of modern nations, as well as nationalisms, emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — i.e., ‘in the modern world inaugurated by the French and American revolutions’ — he argued that the existence of ethnic origin myths, mobilization of communities based on language, and similar phenomena suggest that modern nations have pre-modern ancestors. This is a major insight of the primordialist school of thought according to which if we want to understand the power of modern nations and nationalisms, we must trace these phenomena over long periods instead of associating them with one particular period.9
Within the primordialist paradigm, nationalism is understood as ‘an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation.’10 In other words, nationalism is a social movement, but it is also an instrument of transmission of the myths, traditions, language, and historical memory that constitute and help maintain the ‘feeling of oneness,’ or national identity. If we take the main tenets of the primordialist theory seriously, then nationalism, as well as nations, will never disappear, but will instead re-appear in the future. The main reason for their frequent appearances and intensity is the ability of modern nationalisms to build on the pre-existing memories, myths, and other aspects of the ethnic communities that form the basis of every nation.11 In short, to use a famous phrase coined by Ernest Gellner, nations as seen by Smith’s school of thought have a ‘navel’ or ethnie.
An alternative way of conceptualizing nationhood is to explore nations as the outcomes of modern social changes, as historically specific constructs, or communities without ‘navels.’ Celebrated works on nationhood such as Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and Karl Deutsch’s explorations of ‘communication communities’ are examples of such conceptualization. Nations are perceived as constructs of historical, industrial, and communicative developments (i.e., the invention of mass media, print, and the spread of ideas).12 The modernists (a.k.a. constructivists) see primordialist approaches as ‘expressions of nationalism itself,’ and not as tools to explore nationalism. Therefore, the primordialist approaches are seen as fundamentally flawed.13
According to Ernest Gellner, nationalism is ‘primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.’14 If this principle is violated, then nationalist sentiments can be aroused. Nationalist movements are motivated by sentiments of this kind. Nations (cultural units) and states (political units) are not universal, nor do they exist in all places at all times. Both nations and states are contingencies, and they are not the same contingency. In the words of Gellner, ‘nationalism holds that nations and...

Table of contents