Ideology and National Identity in Post-communist Foreign Policy

Rick Fawn, Rick Fawn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135757908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comparative analysis of the foreign policies of eight post-communist states which considers the extent to which official communist ideology has been replaced by nationalism and establishes how these states express their national identities through foreign policy.

Ideology and National Identity in Post-Communist Foreign Policies

RICK FAWN

The French Revolution gave rise to the phenomena of ideology and of nationalism that are being played out two centuries later after the end of communism in Europe. Much as the direct, immediate impact of the French Revolution continued past 1789 into the 1790s and thereafter, so too did those of 1989 Eastern Europe extend into the 1990s and beyond. The Soviet Union disintegrated, the East German state disappeared through fusion and the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav federations collapsed, one through a peaceful but non-participatory elite negotiation, the other through leadership-sponsored inter-ethnic violence. The state ideology of Marxism-Leninism was pronounced defunct throughout the post-communist space; Western neo-liberal economic advisers were invited in to replace the role of party ideologues, and international financial organizations tied assistance to policy transformations. In all states, whether they were entirely new political constructs or building on previous polities, a process of both state-and nation-building began.

This collection is concerned with countries drawn from the geographical expanse of post-communist Europe plus parts of the Soviet interior: Russia, Moldova, Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In each case national identity and perceptions of relative location and belonging in Europe and the world had to be identified and confirmed or created. Foreign policy provided a crucial aspect of this process; the practicalities of political alignments meant, at a minimum, access to foreign economic assistance, trade and investment that could contribute to the construction of new state edifices and the appeasement or satisfaction of socio-economic expectations. Potential participation in security partnerships, and in fewer cases full membership of alliances, not only gave access to some technology but also signalled geopolitical reorientations.

The inputs of foreign policy can be numerous, even in states with highly centralized decision-making and policy implementation. These can include, for example, the distribution of natural resources, the need for foreign investment, or the impact of the interests and relative power of neighbours. But two are strikingly important for the 27 European and former Soviet post-communist states that encompass one-fifth of the world’s surface: the reorientation from the all-encompassing ideology of Marxism-Leninism that purported to understand the past and prescribe the future, and the birth or re-ignition of the collective identities of nationhood.

The ideology of communism is the single most important denominator of this broad geographic area. As many of the country-studies demonstrate, these peoples conceptualized their geopolitical belonging differently from one another prior to the imposition of communism. These papers are concerned with the extent to which an ideology can be found still to exist in post-communist foreign policies and, second, what else might have supplanted the officially central role held until only a few years ago by Marxism-Leninism. The extent to which the construction of a national identity governs foreign policy and the extent to which foreign policy is used to express within and outside the country this new or renewed national identity becomes the central issued pursued.¹ While often lacking in causal explanation, a frequent assertion is that communist ideology has been replaced by nationalism. This is because, to take one example of such thinking, nationalism often provides ‘a critical source of social cohesion for states in the midst of profound transformation’ .²

Ideology, nationalism and national identity are phenomena and social-scientific concepts that carry two centuries of experience and controversy. These studies explore particular contours of several post-communist foreign policies. This introduction considers some of the debates and definitions relating to them.

Ideology, Marxism-Leninism and Communist Foreign Policies

Elusive and misappropriated, ideology is at a minimum a troublesome concept. It exists as a philosopher’s conception, a practitioner’s device and an analyst’s tool, and in each of these forms it assumes innumerable guises. While what precisely can be said to constitute ‘ideology’ was and remains contestable, the adaptation of Marxism to state practice as Marxism-Leninism was a modest favour to the study of ideology: an ideology was expressly defined in practice, if with subsequent contradictions in the face of historical changes, and was made explicit to the running of the communist system by its masters.

Consequently understanding that ideology became the departure point and often remained the focus in the study of every facet of communist life: from youth to women to agriculture to science and the arts, and of course in politics and the economy. Official ideology established rules and procedures for the totality of human existence. It affected, even shaped, every aspect of life and has been studied accordingly.³ This is not to say that ‘pure’ Marxism-Leninism was actually applied, of course; the Soviet theory in practice has been called ‘ad hoc Marxism-Leninism [which] obscured the original Marxism-Leninism and recast it as a series of five-year plans’.⁴ That the ideology itself might have been reshaped shows its importance as the starting-point and the justification for everything. Ideology was interpreted, reinterpreted and applied by Soviet leaders; those assigned that task, formally called ‘ideologists’ (in Russian, ideologi), occupied senior positions in the political hierarchy. This was equally true in Soviet pronouncements on foreign policy and world affairs and, in return, in the preponderance of Western analysis. It is therefore a significant psychological and analytical change for those living in and studying the former Soviet bloc that socialism was abandoned as its official state ideology.

The centrality of Marxist-Leninist theory to Soviet affairs made one ideology conspicuous in practice but did not render the general definition of ideology clearer. Instead, various definitions, even in volumes specifically dealing with that issue, have been offered. It was defined by some Western observers practically as ‘the body of doctrine which the Communist Party teaches all Soviet citizens’.⁵ This literal definition is challenged by others who contend that ‘the official ideology of the Soviet state is not an ideology at all. It is a set of empty phrases, endlessly repeated, but believed by no one.’⁶

Even practical assessments of the role of Soviet ideology were confounded by the divergence in the practitioners’ apparent fidelity to their beliefs and the analysts’ different views. In the extreme case of Stalinism, David Joravsky notes, The Stalinists did so many things in such extravagantly brutal and wasteful ways that outside observers came to think of them as mad ideologists whose minds were unhinged by a dream of total power and utopia. The Stalinists regarded themselves as supremely practical people, who subordinated theoretical considerations to practical necessities.’⁷

Ideology needs to be placed on a continuum of expression of political thought. With ideology at one extreme end, it serves, as it was defined in a multi-dimensional study of ideology, as ‘a set of systematic theoretical principles projecting and justifying a socio-political order’.⁸ Ideology was identified for that study as providing a sy stematic interpretation of the past and a programme or unfolding of the future. Ideology can be distinguished from other thinking as a set of core values that are untouchable and not debatable.⁹ The question for the present set of country studies is the extent to which this description is true for the thinking and values that guide post-communist foreign policy and what, if anything, has replaced an explicit ideology such as Marxism-Leninism. Each state has adopted new policies; some have even proclaimed ‘missions’. The suffix ‘-ism’ that flags thinking as an ideology has crept into some post-communist foreign-policy parlance, particularly with ‘Eurasianism’. But even when a term appears with the familiar ‘-ism’ suffix of an ideology, it need not have much content or be synonymous across the region, and Eurasianism denotes different substance in the cases of Russia and Kazakhstan.

Close to ideology, but by no means identical with it, is political culture. It has been argued that a switch occurred in Sovietology in the 1960s away from the detection and analysis of pure ‘ideology’ in the Soviet polity to political culture, even if those making this distinction still argued for the retention of the focus on ideology.¹⁰ For some, when ‘ideology’ is referred to not in the ‘highly charged’ terms of the Cold War, but used objectively, it becomes ‘synonymous with political culture’.¹¹ Several of the case studies find that ideology cannot describe their country’s foreign policy, but political culture instead is the term argued for and adopted here for the study of Georgia. Political culture may be more broadly based among a population than ideology, and indeed is often taken to have a collective psychological dimension.¹² In the cases of Estonia, Poland and the Czech Republic— perhaps the three most Western-or European-oriented countries examined here—ideology is used to describe elite views and values that are not necessarily shared with the wider population.

Both ideology and political culture can be said to generate action programmes. These give active expression to goals; but while these may stem from ideology, they can also exist in their own right as expressions of aims. Without the broad philosophical understanding of the past that an ideology purports to have, an action programme on its own can be said to offer more long-term goals. Short-term objectives, even if the thinking behind them comes indirectly from a leadership’s broader thinking and world-view, should be seen as separate from ideology, political cu...