Official discourse of nation-building in the post-Soviet space: the cases of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus

Abstract

The article analyzes the official discourse of nation-building in three post-Soviet states – Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. The process of “nationalization” of new states is not completed, and the analysis of authority discourse enables to evaluate how national elites, after gaining independence, choose the vector of nation-building and form a nationalist discourse. The purpose of the article is to identify common and specific features in the official discourse of nation-building. The hypothesis is that there is a common discursive base that links the trajectories of this process, as well as a specificity determined by the peculiarities of post-Soviet nation-building in each country. The study had for empirical basis the official messages of the presidents of the states and doctrinal documents in the field of national policy. Six nation-building discourses were identified, four of which – the civic, polyethnic, civilizational and sovereignty discourses – are common, ethnic discourse is present in Kazakhstan and Belarus, neo-imperial discourse – in Russia. The major coincidences are present in civic, polyethnic discourses and the discourse of sovereignty, and this makes it possible to record the presence of a common discursive base, although semantic articulations differ in each state. The most significant differences are observed within the civilizational discourse; in each state, civilizational orientations are determined by attempts to construct an image of its unique history and culture. Ethnic discourses in Kazakhstan and Belarus are not semantically identical, although they are built around the main theme for ethnonationalism – the theme of language. In Kazakhstan, this topic is highly politicized; in Belarus, it is part of a cultural policy, due to which the issue of “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” populations has been moved deeply to the periphery of the socio-political process. The main feature of Russian discourse is in this study the explicit neo-imperial discourse, which, on the one hand, emphasizes the state-imperial character of the Russian people, and on the other, strengthens the discourse of sovereignty.