Barrignton. Nationalism

After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States
Lowell W. Barrington, Editor

http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=126246
The University of Michigan Press
11. Nationalism, Nation Making, &

the Postcolonial States
of Asia, Africa, & Eurasia
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
I have benefited enormously from Lowell Barrington’s clarifying

essays on ethnicity and nationalism. His distinction insisting on territorial-
ity for the nation but not for ethnicity is very useful. At the same time, in
our many discussions, I have argued that his de‹nition of the nation
remains, for my money, too objectivist. So I have amended the de‹nitions
he offers in his introductory chapter as a prelude to my own discussion of
nationalism after independence. My additions are in brackets. “What
makes nations different from other groups,” writes Barrington, “is that
they are collectives [who feel they are] united by shared cultural features
(such as language, myths, and values) and the belief in the right to territorial
self-determination. Put another way, they are groups of people [who believe
they are] linked by unifying cultural characteristics and the desire to con-
trol a territory that is thought of as the group’s rightful homeland.”
My amendments here are meant to emphasize the unease I have about
too concrete a notion of “cultural features” or “cultural characteristics.”
Having heard all my life about the importance of preserving ethnic culture
and remaining unsure about what that entailed, I subscribe to a notion of
culture as a “a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is
continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation.”1
In this chapter, nation is employed to mean a group of people who imag-
ines themselves to be a political community distinct from the rest of
mankind, deserving self-determination, which usually entails self-rule,
control of their own territory (the “homeland”), and perhaps a state of
279
AFTER INDEPENDENCE 280
their own. Nations, therefore, have to be made; they are not simply given by
God, nature, history, or ethnic origins. And they can only exist in their full
modern form when a discursive environment has been established in which
cultural communities, however de‹ned, are understood to have legitimate
claims to political recognition, autonomy, independence, statehood, and
control of a piece of geography.
Although arguably there were precocious instances of culture endowing
power to leaders, such a discursive universe did not exist persistently and
hegemonically anywhere in the world before the late eighteenth century. By
the twentieth century, nations were the name of the game in politics, and
the days of empires, dynastic realms, or class-derived polities were num-
bered. Even as they continued in various forms to coexist with nation-
states, empires and non-nation-states spoke the language of the nation,
dressed in national costume, and, joined by late-arriving theocratic chal-
lengers, defended the people in the form of the nation against rival forms of
modernity and transnational predators.
Finding the “Radical Middle” in Ideas about the Nation
As several authors in this volume mention, our usual understanding of

nations and nationalism is based on irreconcilable opposites, binarisms, or
dichotomies. There is the good nationalism of the West, often referred to as
civic, and the bad nationalism elsewhere, referred to as ethnic. There is the
dichotomy between theories of nationalism that consider the nation to be
ancient and primordial, natural and organic, and those—now hege-
monic—that consider nations to be modern and constructed. Some see the
nation as spontaneous, popular, and folkloric, while others talk about it as
something created from the top down, elite generated, and manipulated by
those in power. To those who see nationalism as inevitable, permanent, and
relatively unchanging are counterposed those who see it as situational and
constantly shifting.
Here, I propose a radical middle position. For me the nation is (1) mod-
ern and constructed but built on prior associations, communities, and
identities, which in turn were constructed, though at a different time and in
a different way. Ethnicity itself, for all the primordialism that accompanies
its spokespersons, is like every other human category or group, a social
construction—though one with deep roots and considerable longevity—
and it evolves and changes over time, is contested by its members and out-
281 Conclusion
siders, and requires effort by actors to maintain some coherence or make

changes.
The nation is (2) certainly in›uenced, shaped, often driven, even created
by elites, but on the basis of themes, traditions, and symbols that resonate
in the population. “Experience,” as understood and explained, is the con-
text for the creation of the nation. “History” is doubly implicated: what is
remembered as having happened, and what historians, journalists, and
politicians select and promote as collective or of‹cial memory.
The nation is (3) more often both civic and ethnic than either one exclu-
sively. As Barrington mentions, these forms of nationalisms are useful, per-
haps, as ideal types but seldom exist in isolation from one another. They
overlap and blend into each other. For one thing, civic requires a stable
community, which in some sense is a culture, though the markers of it may
be different from those more easily recognized as ethnic.
The nation is (4) both situational and constantly shifting. At the same
time, it is much more persistent and indelible than many constructivists
would have it. If nations are successful and maintain themselves, imagined
communities are soon institutionalized communities.
The Postindependence Nationalisms of the Cases Covered in This Volume
As the chapters in this volume show, in many cases these various nation-
alisms operate simultaneously and in combination with one another. One
might see the Yugoslav-Bosnian con›ict as a clash between a nationalizing
state nationalism (of Yugoslavia/Serbia) and a state-seeking nationalism
(of the Bosnians), as well as the result of imperialist nationalisms (of Croa-
tia and Serbia), not to mention the diasporic nationalism of Bosnian Serbs
and Bosnian Croats. In Africa, Asia, and Eurasia, such a mixing of nation-
alism variants has been common.
There is one additional, and important, feature that the countries dis-
cussed in detail in this volume share. Although treated separately in the
book, the “postcolonial” and “postcommunist” cases (especially in the
cases of the Eurasian states of the former Soviet Union) are, in my view, all
postcolonial states. While scholars continue to debate whether the USSR
was an empire and, if it was, what kind of empire, the justi‹cation of dom-
inance from a metropolitan center in the Soviet case was not that different
from the imperial rationalizations of the great European powers. Where
race distinguished between the superior and the inferior and thereby served
to legitimize white rule over native peoples in Africa and Asia, an ostensibly
egalitarian ideology in the Soviet Union made distinctions between supe-
rior and inferior classes, levels of development, and degrees of proletarian-
ization and peasant backwardness that supported Moscow’s dominion
over peoples who required a helping hand. The Soviet system, like the great
European empires, formalized boundaries, de‹ned ethnicities and nation-
alities, and in its educational projects provided the basic elements to future
nation-building.
The Postcolonial Cases of Malaysia, Rwanda, and Somalia
Diane Mauzy’s chapter on Malaya stimulates an interesting question: why

does nationalism seek independence? In a variety of nationalisms, certainly
in those of imperial Russia and the late Soviet Union, there was a steady rise
in political assertions—from cultural rights to autonomy to sovereignty to
independence. There should be no mystery here. In the best-run empires,
at least in their own vision, the greater good of the whole state, its interests
and security, took precedence over any particular ethnicity or nation’s
interests. In actuality, this often meant the good of a particular dynasty or
ruler, or the interest of a dominant, ruling nation. With nationalism came
the conviction not only that sovereignty and the right to rule reside in the
people constituted as the nation but that the people know best and can best
realize their own interest.
Despite all the advantages that accrue with empire—such as greater
security in the international arena and larger markets—nationalists make
compelling arguments that as representatives of the nation they best re›ect
the mentalities and aspirations of the people. It may be that such rhetoric is
self-serving and legitimizes a new national elite in power, rather than the
now-delegitimized imperial rulers, but at least the leaders of the nation
must be approved in some form by the people. Nation-states need not be
truly democratic, but they are in some sense the expression of populism.
Given the logic of the discourse of the nation, it is extremely dif‹cult to
stop the slide from cultural or linguistic demands to greater political par-
ticipation and eventual self-rule and independence. The coincidence of
nationalist rhetoric with the more mundane personal and political interests
of leaders makes the drive to independence almost irresistible if the right
thresholds and opportunities arise.
Yet for all the power of rhetoric and the logic of the discourse, national
communities must also have the capacity to know themselves and act in
283 Conclusion
their own name. Here the various communication theories of the nation
are particularly suggestive in giving us a prehistory of the nation.2 The
communities that could imagine themselves as nations were only in part
the creatures of patriotic scholars and poets; they were also compelled by
soldiers and government leaders to live under single sovereigns in given
state boundaries. They were prodded by teachers and linguistic reformers,
commercially minded printers and journalists, to learn a language that
could be reproduced on paper and understood widely. And, ‹nally, they
were brought together physically in unanticipated ways by the growth of
towns; the building of roads, railroads, and telegraphs; and the expansion
of markets and new industries. The rise of nations and nationalism has a
social as well as a discursive history, and the two must be told together.
A principal political problem in the twentieth century, and now in the
twenty-‹rst, is how to ‹t nation and state together, how to make the cul-
tural community and the territorial political unit congruent. In Rwanda, as
John Clark convincingly demonstrates, there was no “national”
identi‹cation that bound Hutu and Tutsi together in a single Banyarwanda
nation. Rather, two exclusivist, antagonistic nationalisms—Rawandan
Tutsi and Rawandan Hutu—faced each other in a bloody contest for state
power. The very formation of these “national” identities in colonial times
had been part of a Belgian project of segregation and dominance of Tutsi
minority over Hutu majority. Class and cultural distinctions, along with
the ambitions of politicians, fed into perpetuating mutually exclusive iden-
tities. Without the imperial power to mediate, state power in the hands of
one group created anxiety and insecurity, indeed the threat of annihilation,
in the other. Once a small group of militants determined on a murderous
course of extermination of its enemies and found an opportunity (with the
death of President Habyarimana), difference, antagonism, and con›ict
degenerated into genocide.
The Somalian case presents a fascinating contrast with Rwanda. Peter
Schraeder’s chapter underscores how dif‹cult nation making is even in a
country marked by ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogeneity, where
elites elaborated a pan-Somalian nationalism to bind Somalians in various
countries—Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, British Somaliland, and Italian
Somaliland—together in an inclusive Somalian ethnonational state. That
ambitious irredentist project foundered when confronted by the resistance
of Ethiopia, backed by the Soviets and Cubans, and the deep structure of
clan loyalties and politics within Somalia. Here ethnic solidarity was over-
whelmed by regionalism and clan allegiances, and identi‹cation with a

Somali nation proved less powerful than other loyalties. The unrecognized
secession of the northern Somaliland Republic, the independence of Dji-
bouti, and the collapse of Somalia into clan warfare seem to argue that this
is a case less of a nation in search of a state than a nationalism in search of
a nation.
What does Somalia tell us about constructivist versus primordialist and
instrumentalist theories about identity? Primordialism assumes that iden-
tities are ‹xed, constant, and closely bound to “natural” ties like family and
bloodlines. Schraeder argues that the enduring affective ties of all Somalis
led them “regardless of clan groupings—[to] recognize their common
identity and belonging to some overarching Somali ethnic group.” He
identi‹es this pan-Somali identity, rather than the clan identity, as primor-
dialist. Yet a constructivist would emphasize the ways in which
identi‹cations are mutable and multiple and how even the most “natural”
of identities, like gender, tribe, or clan, are embedded in cultural under-
standings. The pan-Somali identi‹cation competes with the seemingly
most primordial local or clan identity but is unable, except in some elite
formulations, to become more salient than the allegiance to clan. Instru-
mentalism derives from constructivism and locates the construction in
elites’ strategic calculations about their own interests. In Somalia the con-
structed nationalism of the elites, despite authoritarian and quite brutal
impositions by governments, failed to take hold and overwhelm the more
local and clan loyalties. Rather than being an argument for primordialism,
the Somali story is an invitation to investigate precisely how clan
identi‹cations occur and are maintained, reinforced, and, perhaps, in some
cases, overcome. The very process of clan identi‹cation itself may be an
instrumentalist imposition by men with guns. Rupert Emerson’s percep-
tive reading of Africa as a continent “rich in nationalisms but poor in
nations” may be supplemented with the observation that Somalia is a
country rich in ambitious politicians but poor in effective nation-builders.
Malaya/Malaysia is an interesting example of how an ethnic nationalism
might evolve into a more civic nationalism. The transition to independence
was founded on a “bargain” that gave ethnic Malays dominance in the state
but with speci‹c rights for non-ethnic Malays. When that dominance was
challenged, the very shape of the state was changed (the expulsion in 1965
of Singapore) and the democratic system suspended (after the 1969 elec-
tions). But with the growing demographic and economic weight of ethnic
285 Conclusion
Malays, with the Malay language solidly secured, and with the sense of
threat to Malayness diminished, the more civic sense of Bangsa Malaysia,
though fragile and contested, gained ground. The inimical Other was no
longer the local non-Malay but the globalizing West. Mauzy’s story illus-
trates the malleability of nationalism, within limits, and the strategic uses to
which skilled leaders can employ alternatively primordial notions of iden-
tity and top-down constructions of civic identity.
The Postcolonial Cases of Eurasia
Taras Kuzio’s provocative chapter expands the de‹nition of civic national-

ism to include what a number of scholars would call varieties of ethnic
nationalism. By juggling categories, however, he forces analysts to think
more carefully about how to distinguish—or whether it is worth distin-
guishing—between these two ideal types. He argues that the preindepen-
dence ethnic nationalism was marginalized after the achievement of state-
hood and that in Ukraine today there is simply a competition between
varieties of civic nationalism. Ukrainian nationalism today is a pragmatic,
even necessary, response to the large number of ethnic Russians and Rus-
sophone “Ukrainians” in the country. Ukrainian civic nationalists defend
the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and its territorial integrity; its
idea of belonging to the nation, re›ected in its discourse and laws about cit-
izenship, is inclusive. Ethnic nationalists, on the other hand, can be found
among the Eastern Slavic and Russophilic parties who favor the merger of
Ukraine with Russia or other Eastern Slavic peoples, and among Ukraini-
ans who propose a pan-Ukrainian expansion to match state borders with
ethnographic ones.
Kuzio buttresses his positive evaluation of Ukraine’s civic nationalism
by showing that most of the political parties in Ukraine favor the govern-
ment’s program of gradual Ukrainization while preserving polyethnic
rights. A number of scholars, like Arel and Laitin, however, have taken a
different tack and propose that the nationalizing policy of the Ukrainian
state, promoting Ukrainian language, education, and culture, contradicts
the stated civic ends of Ukraine’s nationality policies.3 Kuzio does not
examine, at least in this chapter, the baleful effects of Ukrainization on Rus-
sians and Russophones. Instead, he introduces a normative argument that
this is a program of af‹rmative action “for righting some of the wrongs
committed against the Ukrainian language and culture during tsarist and
Soviet rule.” By stretching some of the conventional uses of civic national-

ism, as well as some other terms, he opens up a hornets’ nest of de‹nitions.
If, one may ask, the defense of a multinational state or empire by Russians
in the past can be labeled (as Kuzio does) imperialist rather than national-
ist, why should Ukrainian leaders not be considered imperialists for hold-
ing together a multinational state, pushing through a policy of (moderate)
cultural homogenization, and favoring one ethnic nation over another?
Ukraine gives us an excellent example of the dilemma of the modern
nation-state in formation. Just as early modern dynastic states carried out
projects of cultural and administrative homogenization that eventually
allowed them to be considered nations, so postcolonial states of the late
twentieth century may ‹nd themselves acting like little empires, promoting
the ruling nation, discriminating against minorities, or even, if the oppor-
tunity arises, expanding into neighboring territories to make the ethnic and
state boundaries conform. Happily for the post-Soviet space, Ukraine and
most of the other newly independent states have generally been satis‹ed
with their Soviet borders, and pragmatic former Communists, now trans-
formed into leaders of the nation, have been more interested in stability
and material well-being (often for themselves and their cronies) than in
grand irredentist adventures. Indeed, several of the most destabilizing cases
in the post-Soviet world occurred where nationalists, rather than Commu-
nists, came to power (for example, Georgia and Armenia).
Lithuania is another country where the Communist Party contributed
to ethnic peace. A republic in which a mass nationalist movement (Sa̧jūdis)
threatened the very foundations of the Soviet state, Lithuania was the ‹rst
union republic to declare itself independent of the Soviet Union. The
Communists under Algirdas Brazauskas, who had already in the years of
perestroika withdrawn from the all–Soviet Union party, won the ‹rst
postindependence election, in part through the support of the non-
Lithuanian minorities. A kind of tacit pact existed between the Commu-
nists and the nationalists, as the Communists adopted a more nationalist
stance. Given the demographic hegemony in the country of the ethnic
Lithuanians, there was little to be feared from adopting the “zero option”
and granting citizenship to all who lived in the country. Terry Clark notes
the problems with ethnic Poles in particular, but the picture drawn is one
of relative tolerance and lack of tension in a setting where civic nationalism
in the law coexists quite easily with ethnic nationalism among the domi-
nant population. The very myth of the nation shared by Lithuanians—as
287 Conclusion
innocent sufferers with little to gain from outsiders—serves to consolidate

Lithuanians within their own ethnic community and leave non-Lithuani-
ans to make their own way.
One might have expected the Armenian story to have paralleled that of
Lithuania. The most ethnically homogeneous of Soviet union republics,
Armenia had no signi‹cant problems with internal minorities (though the
160,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled once the Karabakh con›ict erupted).
The Communist Party attempted, after some hesitation, to collaborate with
the Armenian National Movement but was overwhelmed by the mass sup-
port for the claims to Karabakh and, later, the turn toward independence.
Yet instead of developing a civic nationalism, Armenians articulated a pri-
mordialist ethnonationalism with irredentist claims to “Armenian lands”
in neighboring countries. The country was well served, however, by a prag-
matic moderate leadership under Levon Ter-Petrosian (1990–98), who
curtailed the more excessive demands of militant nationalists until he fell
from power after proposing a compromise solution to the Karabakh prob-
lem. Razmik Panossian argues that the original nationalism of the early
independence period gave way to a “postnationalist politics” steadily from
1994 to 1995. Instead of politicians and ordinary people uni‹ed in seeking
common national goals, intraelite rivalries over power and wealth at the
top and the mundane problems of survival at the bottom divided the coun-
try and turned people toward political apathy, despair about their future,
and emigration to Russia and Los Angeles.
Panossian’s concept of postnationalist politics is both revealing and
problematic. Clearly, something was different in Armenia (and Lithuania,
for that matter) in the ways in which political issues mobilized the popula-
tion in the years just before and after independence. With sights set on
founding a new state, or winning a war, the country could temporarily put
aside quotidian dif‹culties of light and heat, food and water. But with the
achievements of independence and victory also came consolidation of a
new political and social order that fell far short of the anticipated democra-
tic polity and prosperous market economy.
Yet one wonders whether, as Panossian claims, politics really became
“postnationalist” in Armenia. Politics became “normal” or “ordinary,” yes,
but as Panossian points out, political events and policies continued to be
framed in the language of a particular nationalism. Karabakh remained the
most salient political issue: it precipitated the fall of a government, it pre-
vented the opening of borders and freer regional trade and development,
and it aligned a powerful neighbor, Turkey, with Armenia’s local enemy.

And it was nationalism, in a militant incarnation, that limited the country’s
options. A discourse in which language about exclusion from the nation,
betrayal of national interests, and dehumanization of opponents became
normal made compromise and collaboration both among Armenians and
in international bargaining almost impossible. Rhetorical violence can turn
quickly into physical violence not only in marriages but in domestic poli-
tics, and on October 27, 1999, two of the three leading politicians in Arme-
nia were assassinated by extreme nationalists who saw themselves as
defenders of Armenia against the “bloodsuckers” of the nation.
As instrumentalist, strategic, and calculated as the use of nationalist lan-
guage may be at times by elites, it is extremely important that theorists and
analysts of nationalism take seriously two propositions: (1) that national-
ists are very often “sincere” and passionate about their cause and (2) that
the receptivity in populations of nationalist appeals depends as much (or
even more) on emotions as it does on rational calculation. In his chapter on
Georgia, Stephen Jones emphasizes how the overwhelming support among
ethnic Georgians for Zviad Gamsakhurdia in 1990–91 was predicated on a
widely felt sense of anxiety—the threat of Georgia’s disintegration, fear of
Russian military power, perceived neglect of Georgian interests by the
Soviet state, and a deep sense of victimization in their own country. The
demonstrations by Abkhazians and Ossetians, the killings by Soviet troops
of Georgians on April 9, 1989, and a more generalized and long-experi-
enced feeling that Georgians were losing their demographic hold on their
own republic all fed into a toxic emotional commitment to a radically
exclusivist Georgian nationalism. Enemies were everywhere; Georgians had
to stand alone, united, against their internal foes. Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric
belittling the one-third of the population that was not ethnically Georgian
created a sense of threat among the non-Georgians, who sought protection
from Russia, thus con‹rming the Georgian notion of betrayal of and dan-
ger to the nation.
Jones shows that Eduard Shevardnadze’s arrival initiated a move from a
self-destructive ethnonationalism toward a more tolerant and inclusive
idea of the Georgian state. While not fully civic, since it preserved a privi-
leged place for ethnic Georgians, the evolving ideology of Shevardnadze’s
government at least made pragmatic gestures toward greater respect for
non-Georgians and even opened a discussion on federalism. The citizen-
289 Conclusion
ship law of March 1993, like that of Lithuania, recognized all residents
regardless of ethnicity or language pro‹ciency as citizens. While militants
can still be heard, and minorities still experience discrimination, Georgians
are less hyperbolic in their rhetoric than they were at the beginning of the
1990s. Postnationalism would be too strong a characterization of the situa-
tion in Georgia (as I believe it is in Armenia as well), but the atmosphere is
certainly postchauvinist.4
Reconsidering Types of Nationalism & Their Transformations
Nationalism is an even more dif‹cult phenomenon to de‹ne than the

nation, a word as contested as any you are likely to ‹nd in social science.
Nationalism is used to mean everything from loving folk culture and motifs
in opera to state patriotism or racist imperialism. Although I believe that
too many disparate phenomena have been labeled nationalism, I think it
valuable to think of nationalism as an ideology or political movement that
pursues (and here I borrow and revise Barrington’s words) “through argu-
ment or other activity . . . a set of rights and privileges for the self-de‹ned mem-
bers of the nation . . . [which may include] territorial autonomy or indepen-
dence.” Here I have left the door open to cultural nationalism, which in
several cases, for example, the Estonians in the nineteenth century, pre-
ceded and for a long time seemed to be an adequate substitute for a politi-
cal territorial nationalism. In other words, there are historical instances
when nationalism exists even before and in the absence of the nation itself.
Taking into account the speci‹cs of nationalism after independence in
the cases discussed in this volume, I would like to review and expand upon
Barrington’s ‹ve variants of nationalism. The authors of the chapters in
this volume have provided us with examples of the ‹ve variants, but they
have also demonstrated the importance of considering the development of
nationalism prior to independence and the way in which this development
shapes the causes, trajectories, goals, and effects of nationalism after inde-
pendence. At least two forms of nationalism exist before the full formation
of independent nation-states.
State-seeking nationalisms involve movements or parties that accept or
assume the reality of the nation and work to realize it in a polity. They can
be in some contexts the same as anti-imperial, anticolonial nationalisms.
Such nationalisms presuppose some shared features—such as language,
earlier historic polities identi‹ed with a people, an ethnonym, or belief in a

common origin—that are then employed by nationalists to justify political
claims. Ethnic (or civic) identity-creating nationalisms involve the activities
of scholars, patriots, and politicians to construct a knowledge of the
“nation”—to select its past, to invent its traditions, and “to recover” its
folklore—all in service to an idea of continuity with a long, even ancient,
past. This priority of primordiality and antiquity gives, in the global dis-
course of the nation, legitimacy to the claim to territory and statehood, or
at least autonomy, and protection of cultural or linguistic rights. Ethnic (or
civic) identity-creating nationalisms may exist prior to the actual existence
of the nation.
Out of these two types of nationalism, and the often-revolutionary
efforts of nationalists, come modern national states. With their arrival, as
Barrington has detailed, a number of other speci‹c forms of nationalism
may appear, which we can broadly place into two categories related to the
two forms of preindependence nationalism mentioned in the preceding.
The ‹rst set of these variants focuses on the boundaries and sovereignty of
the state. The sovereignty-protecting variant of nationalism justi‹es discrim-
ination against minorities pursuing secession or irredentism. A subset of
this nationalism is “mobilizing nationalism,” an effort to tap national or
patriotic themes to move the population to undertake great efforts
(defense, industrialization, etc.). Mobilizing nationalism is the nationalism
that concerns Posen in his well-known article about the mass army.5 The
other variant focused on state boundaries is an imperialist “hypernational-
ism.” This external-territory-claiming nationalism is the aggressive assertion
of a state’s or nation’s superiority over others or other territories and will-
ingness to use force to achieve subjugation of others.
The second set of nationalism variants ›ows from the identity-creating
variant of preindependence nationalism. Civic nation-building nationalism
is related to state patriotism. It involves developing loyalty and
identi‹cation with a polity based on civic principles that supercede (or at
least are not reducible to) ethnicity and religion, race, or other cultural,
biological, or ideological differences. The ethnic nation-protecting variant of
nationalism, on the other hand, involves the effort by the majority or dom-
inant or titular ethnicity to consolidate and broaden its in›uence, culture,
language, and power within a state that it seeks to establish as an ethnically
national state. Co-national-protecting nationalism (Brubaker’s “homeland”
nationalism) occurs when states look beyond their own borders for mem-
291 Conclusion
bership in the nation, seeking to represent or include members of its

“nation” who live in another state.
Related to this last variant is a form of nationalism that Barrington does
not address: diasporic nationalism. Nationalisms seeking to connect co-
nationals need not develop only within an existing territory considered to
be the “national homeland.” Fragments of the nation outside the homeland
boundaries may seek unity with or protection from the homeland state.
This disconnected minority, or “diaspora,” while not necessarily being dis-
loyal to its state of residence, maintains its primary attachment to the
national homeland. Some diaspora communities, geographically far from
their homeland, like Armenians in America, may be involved in ethnic
identity-creating nationalism prior to independence as well as efforts to
protect the nation and its territory after independence.
The ‹nal amendment I will add to Barrington’s discussion of postin-
dependence variants of nationalism is a brief comment on their ›uidity.
As the authors in this volume have highlighted, it is not only likely that
two or more of these variants will exist in the same case at the same time.
It is also likely that the postindependence nationalism will progress from
one form to another. Again, several sequential combinations or “paths”
are possible.
I will highlight one such path here that is particularly relevant to the
postcommunist states, where ethnic understandings of the nation prior to
independence were popular. Some governments continued this emphasis
after independence, adopting policies to protect the ethnic nation. Estonia
and Latvia are the most conspicuous examples on the territory of the for-
mer Soviet Union but not the only ones by any means. In these two Baltic
states, ethnically driven policies regarding citizenship, language use, and
education in the early and mid-1990s began to give way in the late 1990s
and early years of the twenty-‹rst century. Efforts at “integrating” the
minority populations from 2000 to 2005 hint that ideas of a more civic
national identity—though still centered around knowledge of the titular
group language—may be taking hold. This evolution from ethnic “nation-
protecting” to civic “nation-building” has been encouraged by European
international organizations. But it is also consistent with a decreasing per-
ception among Estonians and Latvians that the minorities in their coun-
tries pose a threat to their national cultures and to the states they now con-
trol.6 Such decreases in perceived threat over time are not unusual
following the establishment of independence.
Conclusion
Two questions have been posed throughout this volume: Why after the
nation has achieved statehood is there still nationalism? And what does it
do? As Barrington puts it in his introduction, “If the national membership
boundaries are well-established and accepted . . . and correspond to the
borders of the new state, . . . nationalism after independence would be
dif‹cult to sustain.” But these are conditions that do not prevail in most of
the countries under review in this book, nor should we expect them in
postcolonial cases.
While they are immensely important moments of transition, indepen-
dence and sovereignty are only way stations in the history of the nation.
Nations are never fully made. Like other humanly conceived communities,
they are always in process. As some nation-states in this volume are enter-
ing the international community of states and taking on new attributes of
sovereignty, other, older states are cautiously negotiating away aspects of
their sovereignty, surrendering what had earlier been so dif‹cult to win to
supranational entities like the European Union. Particularly in newer
states, nationalism continues to function as a mobilizer of loyalty to the
contested authority of the national state, the de‹ner of boundaries and
rules of inclusion and exclusion.
The very content of what a particular nation is, what it ought to mean to
its citizens, can never be taken for granted or permanently ‹xed. Thus,
returning to my “radical middle” propositions about the nation, national
identity is more rigid than most constructivists acknowledge, but at the
same time the nation must be constantly reinscribed in the consciousness
of its members. As I write elsewhere:
Like other discourses, talk about and everyday embodiments of the

nation both constitute the felt presence of the national and hide the frac-
tures, divisions, and relations of power within the nation. But, then, that
is why intellectuals and politicians, military bands and postage stamps,
have so much work to do. Ultimately more fragile than it would admit,
the nation must constantly be reproduced in thousands of ways until it
becomes as ordinary and quotidian as the water in which ‹sh swim.
Ultimately, ordinary people must join in that daily plebiscite of which
Ernest Renan spoke, or what at times seemed so evident and permanent
can give way to more tangible concerns.7
293 Conclusion
This effort at constant reproduction highlights the other elements of my

“radical middle” position. Postindependence nations are modern and con-
structed, but the reconstruction is built on existing foundations; the
remodeling project is the task of elites, but it is a task that requires them to
employ themes, traditions, and symbols that resonate more broadly. Elites
must take account of what has gone before, what is thought to be primor-
dial, even as they attempt to lead the nation in a more civic direction.
In the post-Soviet nation-states, identi‹cation with ethnicity (natsion-
al’nost’ in Russian) has remained very strong; in many cases much stronger
than with the state in which people ‹nd themselves living. Citizenship
might be granted by law or earned by learning the language of the titular
nationality, but that legal identity often competes at a disadvantage with a
deep, primordial sense of ethnic belonging. The chapters in this volume
point out that many post-Soviet states have incorporated civic nationalist
approaches in the early years of independence. As Ian Bremmer argues in
his chapter, much of this has to do with pressure from the outside (from
Russia and/or Europe). But the leaders of these states have also, for both
strategic and emotional reasons, returned at times to the “existing founda-
tion”—the ethnic symbols familiar to the masses and the ethnic lines of
“us” and “them”—and promoted the primordialism that marked Soviet
thinking on nationality.8
This balancing act that the “radical middle” approach seeks to capture is
the task that postindependence elites faced (and continue to face). The
comparisons between states generated in the British, French, and Italian
empires and those formalized and developed in the Soviet Union (which
increasingly in the literature is treated as an empire) present us with a range
of postcolonial situations. The intentions and methods of different empires
led to different outcomes. Divide and rule strategies, promoting one eth-
nicity over another, privileging a ruling metropolitan nation over periph-
eral peoples—all within a powerful racialized discourse of development—
had powerful but different effects on the colonized peoples.
Yet there are also important similarities. In all of these cases a great
“dialectic of empire” made it necessary for the peoples of the peripheries
ultimately to take their liberation in their own hands. Empires justi‹ed
themselves by proclaiming their civilizing mission (or the building of a
higher form of human existence, capitalism, or socialism). But every step
they took toward successfully building a more mobile, better-educated,
more modern society undermined their very reason for maintaining their
dominance. Who needs European sahibs if native peoples have become

educated and “civilized” enough to run their own affairs? Who needs Com-
munist Party bosses from the center if the peoples of the non-Russian
republics (and Russia itself!) have acquired the skills and consciousness to
represent and govern themselves? The empire, by its very achievements
(dostizheniia, a favorite Soviet word), provides the shovels with which its
subjects dig its grave.
Nationalism remains a slippery term, dif‹cult to de‹ne and to measure.
In its place many analysts have concentrated instead on national identity or
identi‹cation and sought to elucidate the intensity or salience of ethnic and
civic identities.9 Identity, for all its changeability, forces us to look at where
understandings of self, group, and place have come from. The chapters in
this book demonstrate that postindependence states do not start from
scratch with new national identities.
I have chosen to have the post-Soviet cases studied in this volume share
the “postcolonial” label with Malaysia, Rwanda, and Somalia to highlight
how elites must build their sense of nation, their nationalism, on the iden-
tities that have come from the (colonial) experience prior to independence.
As fresh a start as independence must seem to those actually experiencing
it, the specter of past generations weighs heavily on the new states. Analysts,
as many in this volume have shown, can only begin to explore the present
and future of postindependence nationalism with a serious look back into
the past. The past takes its revenge . . . if we choose to ignore it.
NOTES
My thanks also to Lowell Barrington as well as Henry E. Brady for suggestions on
how to improve this chapter.
1. William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn:
New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn
Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 52.
2. See, for example, Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An
Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (New York: Wiley, 1953); Ernest Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Benedict Ander-
son, Imagined Communities: Re›ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983).
3. David L. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the
Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Dominique Arel, “Language
Policies in Independent Ukraine: Towards One or Two State Languages?” Nationalities
Papers 23, no. 3 (1995): 597–622.
4. The Georgian political analyst Ghia Nodia once suggested to me that the pro-
gressive moderation of nationalism among Georgians is the result of their defeat in the
295 Conclusion
wars of the ‹rst years of independence, and I speculated that the intense (and often
intolerant) commitment to ethnonationalism, particularly among the Armenian intel-
ligentsia, may be related to the Armenian victory in the wars with Azerbaijan.
5. Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” International
Security 18, no. 2 (autumn 1993): 80–124.
6. For more on this topic, see Lowell Barrington, “Integration Policies in Estonia
and Latvia: Can They Serve as Models for Other Multiethnic States?” (paper presented
at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York, April
2003).
7. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New
Nations,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 4 (December 2001): 871.
8. For a discussion of post-Soviet thinking on nationality in Armenia and Ka-
zakhstan, see ibid., 862–96.
9. See, for example, Laitin, Identity in Formation; the discussion of this book and
others by Lowell Barrington, “Russian-Speakers in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan:
‘Nationality,’ ‘Population,’ or Neither?” Post-Soviet Affairs 27, no. 2 (April–June 2001):
129–58, and comments by Laitin and Barrington, 159–66; as well as the very suggestive
papers forthcoming by Henry E. Brady and Cynthia S. Kaplan, “Categorically Wrong?
Nominal versus Graded Measures of Ethnic Identity,” Studies in Comparative Interna-
tional Development 35, no. 3 (fall 2000): 56–91; “Ethnicity and Context: Mass Mobiliza-
tion during Transitions” (unpublished); and “Frames, Groups, and Events in Estonia”
(unpublished).

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After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States

Lowell W. Barrington, Editor

11. Nationalism, Nation Making, &

I have benefited enormously from Lowell Barrington’s clarifying

Finding the “Radical Middle” in Ideas about the Nation

As several authors in this volume mention, our usual understanding of

siders, and requires effort by actors to maintain some coherence or make

The Postindependence Nationalisms of the Cases Covered in This Volume

The Postcolonial Cases of Malaysia, Rwanda, and Somalia

Diane Mauzy’s chapter on Malaya stimulates an interesting question: why

whelmed by regionalism and clan allegiances, and identi‹cation with a

The Postcolonial Cases of Eurasia

Taras Kuzio’s provocative chapter expands the de‹nition of civic national-

Soviet rule.” By stretching some of the conventional uses of civic national-

innocent sufferers with little to gain from outsiders—serves to consolidate

and it aligned a powerful neighbor, Turkey, with Armenia’s local enemy.

Reconsidering Types of Nationalism & Their Transformations

Nationalism is an even more dif‹cult phenomenon to de‹ne than the

earlier historic polities identi‹ed with a people, an ethnonym, or belief in a

bership in the nation, seeking to represent or include members of its

Like other discourses, talk about and everyday embodiments of the

This effort at constant reproduction highlights the other elements of my

dominance. Who needs European sahibs if native peoples have become

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