Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics

8. LESSONS FROM RUSSIA

8 LESSONS FROM RUSSIA A Critical View of the Relationship between Ethnic Elite Claims and Mass Interests It is by now conventional wisdom in social science that ethnic identity is a contingent , socially constructed phenomenon rather than a primordial one. As the hegemony of primordialist explanations of ethnic mobilization fades, rational choice-based as well as other approaches to the formation of ethnicity and its politicization have appeared. However, while recognizing the constructedness of ethnicity, many of these accounts retain essentialist assumptions concerning the preferences of ethnic groups. In an essentialist understanding of ethnic politics, ethnic group members have fixed, uniform preferences that support a nationalist program. These preferences, furthermore, are conflicting and opposing across ethnic groups. Thus there is a direct line from individual identity to preference formation to nationalist political behavior. This approach, however, tends to underestimate the role of politics in determining people’s preferences and to overpredict the incidence of ethnic conflict. It also obscures the thorniest questions of all: why people decide to organize along ethnic lines and how ethnicity is mobilized in support of particular political goals. Perhaps most critically, essentialist understandings of ethnic politics prevent us from recognizing the possibility that mobilization in support of nationalism is not necessarily a permanent or even an enduring outcome. According to the framework presented in this book, people’s preferences in favor of nationalist programs do not inhere in individuals with ethnic affiliations as easily and as automatically as many observers assume. People who share ethnic affiliations, in other words, should not be conceptualized as interest groups or coherent political actors. Even when the ethnic group with which an individual is 206 CHAPTER 8 207 affiliated occupies a particular economic position vis-à-vis other social groups or people in other regions, and even when an ethnic entrepreneur emerges to represent their putative ethnic group, people with those identities do not necessarily respond. A person who maintains an ethnic identity, even a strongly felt one, does not reflexively throw his or her support behind nationalism. Instead, people ’s preferences in support of nationalism result from the particular meanings that develop among a population in response to proximate experiences, events, and conditions. In other words, the process of political mobilization itself transforms the meaning of ethnicity among a given population into a community defined by a belief that it must control its own state. The sense of nationhood that motivates mobilization, however, may be a fleeting phenomenon. People with ethnic affiliations often abandon the shared sense of nationhood that places primacy on the political control of an independent state. When this happens, nationalist mobilization comes to an end. Processes in Russia’s republics during the transition from Soviet rule suggest one way in which this may occur. Vigorous systemic political and economic change in the late Soviet era structured the kinds of experiences people were undergoing in local republican economies. However, the meaning of these experiences and their relationship to politics were not self-evident. Nationalist political entrepreneurs emerged who imbued these experiences and local economic conditions with particular meanings. They communicated particular messages that associated economic conditions with ethnic identity and the political future of the ethnic group. They attempted to construct an ethnic nation—a group that felt dignity could only be achieved if the nation were able to control its own state. By examining variation in popular support for nationalism in Russia’s republics , I have found that the messages put forward by politicians that helped to generate a sense of nationhood among titular populations were those that linked group subordination and victimhood to an aspect of people’s present experiences . Though these experiences may vary across contexts, in Russia they involved concerns central to people’s lives: professional achievement and social mobility, the same issues that occupied people in the Soviet Union. Individuals in the republics faced a situation of rising competition for education and jobs that had been brought about by economic development and by the Soviet state’s affirmative action policies for titular nationalities. Large numbers of people were seeking educations, jobs, and social status in the modern industrial economy as well as in other high-status, white-collar positions. Macroeconomic contraction in the late 1980s exacerbated this competition. However, these economic conditions by themselves did not polarize republican populations along ethnic lines. It took ethnic political entrepreneurs to invest local conditions with ethnic and 208 CONSTRUCTING GRIEVANCE political meaning...