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Abstract
The demographic composition of Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union presented a dilemma to the new Kazakhstani government: Should it advance a Kazakh identity as paramount, possibly alienating the large non-Kazakh population? Or should it advocate for a non-ethnicized national identity? How would those decisions be made in light of global norms of liberal multiculturalism? And, critically, would citizens respond to new frames of identity? This paper provides an empirical look at supraethnic identity-building in Kazakhstan – that is, at the development of a national identity that individuals place above or alongside their ethnic identification. We closely examine the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan to describe how Kazakhstani policies intersect with theories of nationalism and nation-building. We then use ordered probit models to analyze data from a 2014 survey to examine how citizens of Kazakhstan associate with a “Kazakhstani” supraethnic identity. Our findings suggest that despite the Assembly of People’s rhetoric, there are still significant barriers to citizen-level adoption of a supraethnic identity in Kazakhstan, particularly regarding language. However, many individuals do claim an association with Kazakhstani identity, especially those individuals who strongly value citizenship in the abstract.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to panelists and audiences at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, the 20th Annual ASN World Convention, and colleagues and students at Nazarbayev University, Astana, for helpful comments and suggestions. At Indiana University, Bloomington, thanks are due to Dr. William Fierman, Dr. Gardner Bovingdon, Dr. Jack Bielasiak, Dr. William Scheuerman, and Dr. Edward Lazzerini.
Notes
1. See Bremmer Citation1994; Fierman Citation2000, and Bohr Citation1998 (following Amrekulov and Masanov Citation1994) for extended discussion.
2. Mentions of “the assembly” or “the Assembly of the People” refers to the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan.
3. See Schatz Citation2009 for extended discussion.
4. Kazakhstan’s regime falls short of meeting most procedural requirements for democracy and is consistently evaluated by most outside measures as authoritarian and low in political freedom (Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers Citation2014; Freedom House Citation2015). Since democratic regimes are broadly recognized as the only legitimate regime at the international level, and because close ties with foreign partners is necessary to attract investment and sustain economic development, the Kazakhstani state has made symbolic efforts toward a façade of democratic accountability.
5. Authors’ translation from Russian.
6. Neither ethnicity nor nationality is consistently reported for the members of the assembly serving as members of the Mazhilis. Therefore, the characterizations of ethnic background and/or language knowledge were made for each member based on publicly available personal information available at zakon.kz. Criteria included language listed as primary, membership in ethno-national cultural organizations, etc.
7. Map from Google Maps (“Kazakhstan” Citation2015) with authors’ modifications.
8. Shymkent also has a sizeable Uzbek population.
9. See www.opinions.kz for background information on the research institute.
10. Kish (Citation1965) offers a method for selecting one individual from each household to be selected. Although there is a selection bias that can be corrected by weighting each response, the difference between weighted estimate and biased estimate in prior studies has been shown to be negligible (Kish, 400), so this study uses the unweighted estimates.
11. Due to data limitations, we were unable to directly assess respondents’ knowledge of or engagement with the assembly. Instead, we rely on the proxy of political engagement that measured respondents’ knowledge of and engagement with politics in general; we assume that this political engagement encompasses many Kazakhstani political organizations, including the assembly.
12. As the dependent variable is not evenly distributed across the response categories, we also ran a robustness check using a logit model. Under this specification, the dependent variable is whether or not the respondent felt strong Kazakhstani affiliation. These results are included in ; we found that the regression coefficients had consistent signs across the two models.