Becoming banal: incentivizing and monopolizing the nation in post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

While new regimes often seek legitimation by forging banal ties between state and nation (or “banalization”), there have been few attempts to explain how nationalism becomes banal, to account for variations in the process across different types of regimes, or to establish clear criteria for identifying successes or failures in banalization. This article presents an original theoretical framework for understanding banalization as a social and political process involving attempts to either incentivize or monopolize national expression, depending on the type of political regime. Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted during 2014–2016, a case study of post-Soviet Russia fleshes out the process and outcomes of banalization across different kinds of regimes from the 1990s to the present. It further suggests the value of examining banalization as a regime process in accounting for the ways that the successes or failures of banalization influence their successors’ pursuit of legitimation.

KEYWORDS:

• Banal nationalism
• everyday nationalism
• legitimation
• authoritarianism
• hybrid regimes
• Russia

Acknowledgements

This manuscript benefited from feedback received at conferences and workshops for the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), the British International Studies Association (BISA), and the Program on New Approaches to Security in Eurasia (PONARS). The author is grateful to Jon Fox, Sam Greene, Eleanor Knott, Peter Rutland, Michael Skey, and David Stroup for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Any errors or omissions are the author’s sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A full comparison across democratic, hybrid, and autocratic regimes would go well beyond the confines of available space. Since most existing work on banal nationalism focuses on established democracies, this analysis concentrates on the more novel examination of banalization in non-democracies.

2 It is perhaps worth nothing that the terms “everyday ethnicity,” “everyday nationhood,” and “everyday nationalism” are not often distinguished in the literature, though they share the same core focus on social practices, repertoires, and performances that are constitutive of national identities.

3 Billig mentions in passing the notion of enhabituation as a means by which this process might occur but, to be fair, his chosen task was to challenge the assumption that Western democracies are somehow immune to nationalism. However, one might draw clues from the first wave of constructivist works that identify long-term historical processes of modernization and linguistic assimilation or vernacularization (Smith 2011)—either imposed in top-down fashion or market-driven—as crucial to spreading the notion of the nation as an imaginable and sovereign entity.

4 Both nationalizing and banalizing states share the notion that the state contains a core nation or nationality and that state action is needed to strengthen the nation. To these, nationalizing processes further claim ownership of the state by the core nation, complain that the core nation is weak or unhealthy, and argue for state action to address current or past injustices against the core nation.

5 The author is grateful to Ekaterina Semushkina and Valeriia Umanets for research assistance and to Prof. Oleg Lysenko and his team at Perm State Pedagogical University for conducting and transcribing the focus groups.

6 Patriotism was chosen as a focus rather than nationalism since the latter is understood by most Russians as referring to extremism or ethnic separatism.

7 For a fuller discussion of the interview data and patriotic categories of practice, see Goode 2016.

8 From 1991 to 1999, the nationalities ministry changed its name and leadership eight times.

9 Author’s interview, Perm’, 27 November 2015.

10 Author’s interview, Tiumen’, 6 August 2014.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Fulbright Association Research Fellowship [grant ID 48141501].