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Essay on Nationalism & Ethnic Identity In Central Asia
Nationalism & Ethnic identity in Central Asia: A Background
Walker Connor defines a "nation" as:
A human grouping whose members share an intuitive sense of kind or sameness, predicated upon a myth of common descent. It therefore refers to such people as the Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians. It does not refer to any collection of people who are conscious of their multiethnic background (for example, the Czechoslovak people, the Soviet people, or the American people) (Connor, 1984, p. 14)
As is recognized, the final collapse of the Soviet Union similar to its national republics in 1991 took Soviet specialists largely by surprise. Before Gorbachev's launching of perestroika, few intellectuals claimed that strife among Soviet nationalities might pose a serious threat to the regime-and even those who did tended to concentrate on issues such as the increasing population growth of Central Asians relative to Slavs, the potential threat of Islam to Marxism-Leninism, and the possibility of war on the territory of the USSR (d'Encausse, 1979; Bennigsen and Broxup, 1983; Amalrik, 1970).
After 1987, when Gorbachev's active encouragement of glasnost' had led to the formation of "national fronts" in a whole series of Soviet republics, the problem of nationalities naturally began to receive much more explicit scholarly attention in the West (Hajda and Beissinger, 1990). However right up until 1991, the majority of analysts of Soviet affairs that include the most supposedly experienced ones remained quite unconvinced of arguments that the "Soviet empire" would actually break up along national lines, instead emphasizing the economic and institutional barriers facing would-be proponents of full republican independence (Motyl, p.99-128); (Hough, p.639-672); Laitin, p.139-177).
Ordeshook argued given the absence of any national integrative institutions that might weld local interests more tightly to the center, Russian federalism faces a rocky and uncertain future....
