Patriots, Pensioners and Ordinary Mongolians: Deregulation and Conspiracy in Mongolia

ABSTRACT

This article links the heavily deregulated Mongolian post-socialist economy with the emergence of highly patriotic-nationalist movements and narratives of conspiracy and suspicion. It is argued that an extreme alienability of value in the new Mongolian market economy goes hand-in-hand with a nationalist and xenophobic perception of the extreme inalienability of Mongolian values and the Mongolian nation state. This creates a prevalent ‘moral economy’ in which values are radically uncertain, while at the same time fervently protected, and where the extremes of uncertainty/suspicion and certainty, liberal flows and nationalist cuts, co-exist. In this Mongolian moral economy, the middle-ground has thus been marginalised, leaving little room for moderate voices, ambiguity and alternative ‘tempered’ responses, and the jump from one certainty to the next is often as short and hasty as the leap from radical certainty to radical uncertainty and full-blown, all-embracing and endless suspicion.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy
• patriotism
• nationalism
• market economy
• postsocialism
• Mongolia

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Mikkel Bille, Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen, Esther Fihl, Regnar Kristensen, Andreas Bandak and anonymous reviewers for having read and commented on previous versions of this manuscript. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for funding my post doc project on Uncertain business: An anthropological study of exchange, protection and insurance in Mongolia’s new trading culture and the Danish Council for Strategic Research for funding the research project on Alternative Spaces. This article is a result of research carried out as part of both projects.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 While the term ‘moral economy’ does draw on a long-lasting anthropological tradition of seeing economy and morality as inseparable (cf. Thompson 1971; Scott 1976; Mauss 1990 [1950]; Ferguson 2006; Browne 2009), I do not intend to refer to moralities born from particular conditions of production with this term (see e.g. Scott 1976) or to the fact that the economy is morally embedded in pre-existing Mongolian cultural traditions. Rather, the term moral economy is used in a looser sense to refer to the insight that economic agency is profoundly inseparable from, and constantly ascribed to, agencies that are always up for critical moral evaluation. As such, I do not use ‘moral economy’ in order to oppose it to a supposedly ‘regular’ economy, as some users of the term, according to Carrier (2018), tend to do.

2 See Buyandelger 2013 in particular for a discussion of the uncertainties involved in the neoliberal deregulation and their relationship to shamanism.

3 This argument is, logically speaking, similar to Boltanski’s insight that the presentation of reality as ‘robust’ and ‘predictable’ goes hand in hand with ‘fragility’ and ‘anxiety’ (Boltanski 2014: 15).

4 While it is true that similar distinctions between public and private were operative in pre-socialist times (see Sneath 2002: 93–94), it is reasonable to assume that they were radicalised and came to be heavily structured around an ideological distinction between state socialism and market capitalism during the socialist period.

5 By focusing on ‘understandings’, I do not intend to imply that such perceptions and discourses are false, nor that straightforwardly illicit transactions or conspiracies are not taking place.

6 I should add that while such conspiracies might have transpired with more force in the post-socialist period, they seem to reach back to at least the socialist period. Kaplonski (2004: 77) writes, for example, that a rumour had it that the Russian wife of Tsedenbal, the leader of socialist Mongolia from 1952 to 1984, was a Russian spy. Likewise, gossip and rumour are known to be important features of Mongolian life in general (see Højer 2004, 2019).

7 It should be stressed that while some of these groupings were self-proclaimed Nazis (natsistuud) and usually adored Hitler, ‘Nazism’ or extremism, in the Mongolian context, as in other Asian contexts, is not necessarily identical to or coextensive with Nazism in a European context (Billé 2015: 47). The fact that Nazi paraphernalia could be used as a ‘marketing ploy’ (Billé 2015) in a bar in Ulaanbaatar, a bar that was unrelated to any political movements, would indicate that while Nazism caused less moral outrage in Mongolia than in Europe, it was also the object of some fascination.

8 Apparently, a similar admiration of Hitler and Nazism is to be found among some Uyghurs in Western China (see Rudelson 1997: 72–75) and in other Asian contexts also (Billé 2015: 47).

9 Bulag writes ‘the “821” group’ (1998: 238) but other writers refer to it as the 281 association (Süglegmaa 2009: 142; Sanders 2010: 196).

10 In addition, due to the Soviet Union’s conflict with China, a Mongolian anti-Chinese patriotism – or controlled nationalism – may have been supported by the Soviet Union (Bulag 1998: 229).

11 Bulag cites Milivojevic:

In 1969, when Mongolia’s embassy in Beijing was attacked by a mob of Red Guards, Tsedenbal [the Mongolian president] freely confessed – to an American journalist – that he hated the Han Chinese more than did the Russians. Such racial hatred was fully reciprocated by the Chinese, who unleashed a Great Han campaign against the Mongols of IMAR [Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region] during the Cultural Revolution. (Milivojevic 1991: 109, cited in Bulag 1998: 15)

12 I have only come across Bulag’s mentioning of the ‘821’ group, widely considered a neo-Fascist group and later to become the Independence Party (1998: 238–241), and, after drafting the first versions of this manuscript, Billé’s elaborate work on Mongolian nationalism and Sinophobia (Billé 2010, 2015).

13 Oushakine’s study of post-Soviet Altai (2009) has partly inspired my reading of the Mongolian case. There are great differences, though, between the two ethnographic contexts. First, socialism and nation are much harder to separate in Russia than in Mongolia, where socialism was imported. Accordingly, the longing for the socialist past may seem – or have seemed – less prominent in Mongolia. Secondly, the Mongolian identity seems to be less based on common sufferings. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, Mongolians tend to avoid the articulation of suffering and misfortune (Højer 2004).

14 See Billé’s book on Sinophobia for further discussion of these highly gendered aspects of Mongolian identity (2015).

15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jJNNttOKZFY, accessed on 27 October 2015.

16 See Billé for further discussion of the role played my music, in particular hip-hop, in shaping Mongolian identity (2015: 33–36, 48, 58–59).

17 Actually, when Bulag describes the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party’s strategy in the early years of transition, it looks strikingly similar to some of the views of later Nazi movements: ‘Their logic was this, put simply: return to the original “Mongol Idea” (Mongol Uhaan) and religion, thus become Buddhist and “Mongol”; fight against anything foreign, from people to ideas, thus against democracy and economic change’ (Bulag 1998: 238).

18 The chief of the Criminal Police Department, however, subsequently met with representatives of the movements to make it clear that ‘such attempt to violate an individual’s rights or property would be severely dealt with’ (Batmonkh 2007).

19 This, again, may also make the Mongolian case more comparable to other postsocialist cases than Billé tends to admit (2015: 1).

20 Billé likewise focuses on a Mongolian anxiety with upholding a visible distinction between Mongolians and foreigners, but he mainly focuses on a Mongolian concern with an invisible Chinese penetration of the Mongolian biological, social and political body (Billé 2015).

21 Once again, there are strong parallels with the discourse of deception in the post-Soviet world of Barnaul (Oushakine 2009: 15–78).

22 This fundamental anxiety is similar to the observation made by Billé that the Chinese enemy is ‘imagined to be everywhere and potentially in everyone’ (Billé 2015: 4).

23 A number of people from these movements never answered my calls, and the first person I met was cautious but then agreed to meet up in front of the Sports Palace in Ulaanbaatar and – then – to move on to a nearby restaurant to give an interview. When meeting one of the leaders of Dayaar Mongol, I was picked up on the street in a big white jeep. Two people in full army uniforms, and behaving with the discipline of soldiers, were sitting on the front seat. The back seat was occupied by the leader himself and his friend or helper, one dressed in black and both with a swastika on a chain around their necks. Slightly hostile, the leader immediately tried to find out who I was. He asked me a number of questions and I assured him that he only had to say what he wanted to say during the interview. I was met with an aggressive ‘minii erh’, ‘my right’, meaning that of course he was the one deciding. His right to take full control of the interview – which he did (my recorder was checked and I was refused to record) – but also the right of the Mongolian nation, stayed central throughout the interview, as did his suspicion of outsiders and foreigners.

24 This is similar to the widespread but often implicit (anthropological) assumption that money and market economy are bad (Parry & Bloch 1989; Gell 1992: 142; Maurer 2006: 19).

25 This logic of radical oppositions can be observed in other postsocialist contexts also, such as when simple state regulation in Bulgaria is seen as ’totalitarian’ and ’totalitarianism’ considered the only way to regulate private enterprises (Ghodsee 2011: 186–187).

26 I have elsewhere made a similar argument concerning the lack of a ‘mid-range’ in temporal orientations (Højer 2018).