Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs: Towards a New Framework

The article surveys Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia and how this affected the national identities and inter-ethnic relations among the three eastern Slavs. Western historiography of Russia largely utilised an imperialist and statist historiographical framework created within the Tsarist empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although this framework was imperialist it was gradually accepted as 'objective' by the Western scholarly community. Yet, this historiography was far from being 'objective'. After 1934 Soviet historiography also reverted to the majority of the tenets found in Tsarist historiography. Within Tsarist, Western and Soviet historiographies of 'Russia' eastern Slavic history was nationalised on behalf of the Russian nation which served to either ignore or deny a separate history and identity for Ukrainians and Belarusians. In the post-Soviet era all 15 Soviet successor states are undertaking nation and state building projects which utilise history and myths to inculcate new national identities. The continued utilisation of the Tsarist, Western and Soviet imperial and statist historiographical schema is no longer tenable and serves to undermine civic nation building in the Russian Federation. This article argues in favour of a new, non-imperial framework for histories of 'Russia' territorially based upon the Russian Federation and inclusive of all of its citizens.     

20世纪初俄国在西藏的阴谋

本文引用了丰富的档案和报刊资料,考述了20世纪初英国远征军入侵西藏前后而发生的种种诡秘事件,其中主要涉及两位俄属布里亚特蒙古人,一位是十三世达赖喇嘛的＂洗礼大师＂阿旺·德尔智,另一位是受雇于俄国外交部曾在俄国参谋部中亚探险与情报工作印度小组受过训的泽仁布,他们的神秘使命在于利用其民族和宗教外衣的掩护,达到如何影响达赖喇嘛与英国抗衡目的,从而使俄国能在西藏问题上保持或扩大自己的影响。     

Post‐Zionist orientalism? Orientalist discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian‐speaking intelligentsia in Israel

This article attempts to shed light on a special kind of Orientalist discourse that circulates in Russian‐Israeli literature and press. This discourse feeds on the cultural sources buried in the Russian‐Soviet imperialist discourse about ‘Russia’s Orient', which has been articulated by modern Russian literature, including prominent Russian‐Jewish authors, and corresponds to the racially grounded discursive practices currently widespread in post‐Soviet Russia with regard to natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The article investigates the ways of transferring Orientalist concepts from the (post‐)Soviet cultural experience to the Israeli one, identifying the Orientalist discourse's dual role in shaping the immigrants' self‐awareness on two levels, the local and the global. On the local level, the Russian‐Israeli intelligentsia deploys ‘Soviet‐made’ Orientalist interpretative tools to read and decipher the reality of a new country, by presenting it as a familiar reality. Identifying and labeling the local Orientals — the Palestinians on the one hand and the Mizrahi Jews on the other — by means of negative concepts borrowed from the Russian‐Soviet Orientalist repertoire, a Russian‐Israeli intellectual locates her/himself within the Eurocentric Ashkenazi component of Israeli society. On the global level, the extreme Islamophobic rhetoric of the Russian‐Israeli Orientalist discourse, according to which today Israel and Russia, as well as the West, all share a common Islamic ‘enemy’, enables a Russian‐Israeli intellectual on the one hand to reassert her/his cultural ties with her/his country of origin, and on the other to heighten the validity of her/his self‐image as part of Western culture.     

Orientalism and Russian speaking minority regions in Europe: representing Narva

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the concept of orientalism to propose a framework for understanding the relationship between international news media and individual representations of minority groups in Europe. Even though the case study focuses on Narva, Estonia, the model here provides a basis for comparing the identity formation practices, particularly of geographically separated Russian speaking minority groups in Europe. Narva’s large Russian speaking population and geographical proximity to Russia have been pinpointed as security concerns due to the convenient source of information and mass media sponsored by the Russian Federation causing a misrepresentation of Russian speaking minority groups in international media.     

Forging Ukrainian national identity through remembrance of World War II

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the collective remembrance of a specific historical event shapes the national identity that underpins a state’s foreign policy objectives. By drawing on multidisciplinary insights, the paper explains how political actors frame past events in order to promote a certain conceptualization of a national community. Taking Ukraine as a case study, the paper demonstrates how Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2014–2015 prompted Ukrainian policy-makers to re-define Ukraine’s relations with the EU and Russia by re-evaluating the experience of Ukrainians in WWII.     

Ambivalent Islam: the identity construction of Muslims under Portuguese colonial rule

This article wishes to contribute to the study of the historical processes that have been spotting Muslim populations as favourite targets for political analysis and governance. Focusing on the Portuguese archives, civil as well as military, the article tries to uncover the most conspicuous identity representations (mainly negative or ambivalent) that members of Portuguese colonial apparatus built around Muslim communities living in African colonies, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The paper shows how these culturally and politically constructed images were related to the more general strategies by which Portuguese imagined their own national identity, both as ‘European’ and as ‘coloniser’ or ‘imperial people’.

The basic assumption of this article is that policies enforced in a context of inter-ethnic and religious competition are better understood when linked to the identity strategies inherent to them. These are conceived as strategic constructions aimed at the preservation, protection and imaginary expansion of the subject, who looks for groups to be included in and out-groups to reject, exclude, aggress or eliminate. The author argues that most of the inter-ethnic relationships and conflicts, as well as the very experience of ethnicity, are born from this identity matrix.     

Skiing and divergent ethnic identities in the multiethnic Northern Norway

This article examines first whether the skiing as the Norwegian national sport was used by the state in its assimilation strategy towards the indigenous Sámi people. One would think that skiing's central role in building a Norwegian national identity would mean that it would have a vital place in government policy towards its indigenous population. Second, the article explores how skiing became integral in the creation of a modern Sámi identity from the 1970s. The article explores how the Sámi over the last 30 years have tried to incorporate skiing and sport in the ongoing revitalizing of a Sámi identity.     

Between Darius and Khomeini: exploring Iran's national identity problematique

Iran, since the advent of its nation-state building process, has struggled to define its national identity in a relevant and resonant way. This article, while acknowledging the multi-dimensional nature of Iran's national identity, focuses on its two most profound components: Nationalism and Islamism. It explores how the tensions between these two are at the heart of not only the problem of Iranian identity but also of Persian identity. Examining how these two bases of identity also rely on similarity as well as difference the article argues, through the use of the tool of a problematique, that a coherent Iranian national identity, inclusive of all including ethnic minorities, is not possible until the tensions between Nationalism and Islamism at the heart of Persian identity are resolved.     

Establishing roots at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport Garden: Landscapes of national identity

With the understanding that the planning of public space is a discursive practice, this article examines the cultural meanings encoded in the design of the grounds around Israel's main airport, Ben Gurion International. Using the example of Terminal 3, the article discusses how the State of Israel leverages landscaped space as an ideological tool in the struggle for control over symbolic expressions of national identity. The design decisions here are framed in the context of the all important Zionist trope of ‘redemption’, or land reclamation in the image of Zion. The airport's ‘Seven Species Garden’ is explained as part of a widespread mythology of an autochthonous people/land bond, deeply rooted in Jewish-Israeli consciousness, which draws upon the Bible for territorial legitimacy and national identity. Finally, the Orientalist bias betrayed in the airport grounds effectively bars entry of the county's largest minority to the ‘gateway’ of Israeli national space because such references are based on ethnicity.     

‘Our own Hurricane Katrina’: Aboriginal disadvantage and Australian national identity

Since Prime Minister Howard's declaration in 2007 that child sex abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities was Australia's ‘own Hurricane Katrina’, the trope of natural disaster has been a regular feature of print and television media coverage of Indigenous affairs in Australia. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is to separate what happens to Aboriginal people from the fabric of ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural and political life; to render it alien and unconnected to the relative privilege enjoyed by other Australians. This strategy also produces peculiar temporal effects by erecting a cordon sanitaire around Australian history and the national identity that it supports. Howard's comparison of Aboriginal disadvantage with Katrina, if read alongside his politicization of the teaching of Australian history, demonstrates an unwillingness to incorporate systemic injustice toward Indigenous people within the composition of that history. This article interrogates the relationships between the manifold understandings of Aboriginal disadvantage and attempts to commemorate its violent history, as these aspects of Australian life are both integrated and refused by national identity narratives. Specifically, the paper reinterprets the trope of natural disaster as a means of comprehending Indigenous disadvantage and Australian identity by drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history. Benjamin's understanding of activism as a constructive retrieval of the past will be developed to reconnect catastrophe to history, and to enable an exploration of responsibility for that history as an integral condition of contemporary Australian identity.     

‘The Machine that Creates Slovenians’: The Role of Slovenian Public Broadcasting in Re-affirming and Re-inventing the Slovenian National Identity

This article illustrates how Slovenian national public television came to serve as a central site of contention where fundamental issues of identity, politics and national culture were challenged, negotiated and defined. The Slovenian case offers an interesting laboratory for an analysis of the role of journalism in creating and asserting a particular version of national identity. This article explores how Slovenian television's elites (journalists, editors and officials) articulate the importance of public television as the ‘machine that creates Slovenians’. Based on an analysis of roughly twelve interviews with journalists of Slovenian national television, I argue that one of the most important cultural and political institutions in the creation, maintenance and reinforcement of Slovenian national identity was, and continues to be, national public television.     

Place,identity and football: Catalonia,Catalanisme and Football Club Barcelona, 1899–1975

A growing body of work considers sport and the social construction of identities. Drawing from that research, this article considers how football clubs are involved in the construction of national identities by making explicit the connections between sport, identity and place. The first part of the article examines the literature addressing sport and collective identification/representation and considers critical approaches that uncover the power relations that frame the sport/identity nexus. The second part of the article applies these ideas to a discussion of Football Club Barcelona's role in the social construction of Catalan nationalism and national identity from 1899 to 1975.     

Austrian Maps and Bulgarian Territorial Claims

This article concerns the attempt of the re-emerged Bulgarian state to re-define and re-conceptualise national identity in Sofia's visual and spatial representations. The idea to conceptualise and represent Bulgarian identity as homogeneous in the monumental St Nevsky's Cathedral was transformed through the simultaneous and synchronic emergence of monumental houses of worship of other ethnic and religious communities. The forging of Bulgarian identity, in anticipation of reunification, veered from official concepts towards pre-liberation democratic ideology. This countered the elite's vision and helped others assert difference as a component of Bulgarian-ness, thus introducing an alternative to the homogenising model.     

National Identity between Tradition and Reflexive Modernisation: The Contradictions of Central Asia

Central Asia, one of the most understudied areas in the world, is currently going through the upheavals of modernisation and nation formation. Arguing against the one-dimensional modernist conclusion that this process was arrested during the Soviet period, the article sets out to explore the complex weave of historical continuity and discontinuity in the formation of national identity in the new states. It argues against the notion that national identity involves the necessary dissolution of traditional ties. Moreover, the article substantially qualifies the contemporary theoretical trend to treat continuing elements of tradition as merely dead images of the past, given life by instrumental elites. Instead of nationality being posited as a one-dimensional form of identity, the article sets up an approach that emphasises the contradictory layering of identity.     

Looking forward into the past: Partido Nacionalista Vasco and the immigrant question in the Basque Country

ABSTRACT

This article examines the discursive and political response to immigrant-generated diversity by Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) in the Basque Country of Spain. A much-ballyhooed fact about PNV is that its founder, Sabino Arana, articulated a racist nationalist doctrine in the late nineteenth century. Alarm bells were raised in the early 2000s when the Basque Country became a destination for foreign immigrants arriving in Spain from Latin America and North Africa: do foreign immigrants pose a threat to Basque national identity? The PNV's answer to this question has been a clear ‘no’. Rather than distance itself from its past, however, party elites legitimate the inclusive and compassionate attitude towards foreign immigrants through selective discovery of the Basque national narrative. While sceptics of ideational variables are quick to suggest that nationalist elites manipulate the past to serve current purposes, this article suggests that such an interpretation does not do justice to the subtle ways in which symbols, myths, and images of the past have shaped the worldviews of PNV elites in the realm of immigration.     

National Identity Formation in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire: The Skerst Family in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The modern history of the Baltic provinces of the former Russian Empire has essentially been written from an ethnic/national perspective. It is basically the story of the formation of the Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and German 'communities', of their 'specific' national identities and eventually of nation states. With those who acquired a German identity, the focus has essentially been upon the landed nobility, the so-called 'Baltic Barons', the traditional elite that formed a minority even of the ethnically German population. The existence of other German groups has been recognised, such as the 'literary estate' (Literatenstand), which in the nineteenth century 'brought into Baltic higher culture, rationalist viewpoints and represented a potential threat to noble control of local politics.' However, such groups have received comparatively little attention from historians, especially among those publishing in English. Even then there is limited acknowledgement of their possessing distinctive cultural and other forms of self-identification. A recent study by a Canadian scholar of the Germans of Riga before 1914 tends to impose the values of the landed elite upon them. In works published in post-1945 (West) Germany by emigres from the region, there is an inclination to present a distinctive 'Baltic German' identity that is largely derived from the experience of the landed elite.     

Independence and identity ignored? New Zealand's reactions to the Statute of Westminster

This article concentrates on New Zealand's constitutional and cultural identity through the fascinating political meanderings between independence and dependence in political and constitutional matters that surrounded the ratification of the Statute of Westminster. New Zealand was the last of the Dominions to pass the Statute in 1947, sixteen years after it could have done in 1931 when most other Dominions did. New Zealand did not ratify this critical Act because it did not wish to appear ‘disloyal’ to Britain even though the ‘Mother Country’ had no problems with this happening. New Zealand's position mirrored the country's ambivalence between a separate national identity and interdependence moored with Britain and the Commonwealth. Though this may seem contradictory, these policies and positions accurately reflected what was perceived as New Zealand's interests. The politics and reactions of New Zealand towards the Statute of Westminster betrayed the reality that New Zealand's independence lay, in the government's mind of that era, in the country's dependence and deference to Britain whether London wanted it or not.     

Inventing Culture and Nation: Intellectuals and Early Latvian Nationalism

The article argues that Latvian nationalism started out as a doctrine of cultural egalitarianism. This was due to the crucial role played by the emerging native intelligentsia, which came from peasant backgrounds and received education in Russian universities during the 1840s and 1850s. Using historical accounts and intellectuals’ publications, it is shown that Latvian intelligentsia was influenced by the bourgeoning Russian and German nationalist ideas at the time, which it re-interpreted within traditional cultural context. To a large extent, these intellectuals created a national identity for themselves in order to claim an equal position among intellectual elites of other nations. These conclusions imply that it is necessary to study nationalisms as a part of not only social and economic, but also cultural, modernity.     

Cultivating an Australian Sentiment: John Christian Watson's Narrative of White Nationalism

Contemporary observers and historians have interpreted Australia's first Labor Prime Minister, John Christian Watson, as an ideal leader for Labor's early participation in nation-building following the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Little attention has been paid to the values Watson brought to Labor's participation in nation-building. Race, defence and the ‘cultivation of an Australian sentiment’ formed the recurring themes of Watson's national narrative. Compelled by a need to fix an identity from the peripheral territories of empire as a British subject and the leader of white Australians in a nation, as he claimed, that ‘we have made our own’, Watson's narrative provides insights into the anxieties of racialised white identity in the federation period—an identity tested by conflicting class and national loyalties.