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Thirty Years of Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2023

Peter Rutland Open the ORCID record for Peter Rutland [Opens in a new window]
Peter Rutland*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
*
Email: prutland@wesleyan.edu
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Abstract

This introduction to the special issue looks back at 30 years of nation-building in the post-Soviet states. Initial hopes that national self-determination would reinforce democratization proved misplaced. While that synergy worked well in the Baltic states, elsewhere authoritarian leaders embraced nationalism, while democracies like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine lost control of parts of their territory to secessionist movements backed by Russia. Each of the post-Soviet states promoted a national language (except for Belarus) and forged a new historical narrative for their “imagined community,” but in most cases they remained multi-ethnic and multi-lingual communities. In recognition of this persisting ethnic diversity, nation-building was accompanied by policies of ethnicity management. The international economic environment was rapidly changing due to globalization, posing new challenges for nation-builders. The gender dimension is important to the new national identities being forged in the post-Soviet space: the categories of race and class, less so. The article concludes with a review of the salient features of each of the newly-independent states.

Keywords

Post-SovietNation-buildingNationalism
Type
Introduction
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 51 , Issue 1: Special Issue on Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet States , January 2023 , pp. 14 - 32
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Nationalities

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