Territorializing national identity in post-socialist Mongolia: purity, authenticity, and Chinggis Khaan

Abstract

This article examines the geographies of new identification and belonging in post-Soviet Mongolia and identifies an increasingly nationalist trend over the past two decades. It explains how Mongolian society has constructed, contested, and renegotiated its national identity with the disappearance of the overarching communist ideology that had dictated the political landscape of the country for nearly seven decades. Conceptually, “national identity” is treated as a social construct, produced and mediated to reflect shifting power arrangements and ideological commitment of the state. Mongolia’s case is no exception. Mongolia’s post-socialist identity has been narrated and enacted by various social and political actors, each expressing an “ideal” representation of the nation. It is a continuous process of boundary-making and of narrating identification and differences within those discursive frontiers. Theoretically, the article juxtaposes a traditional approach in understanding nationalism with a critical treatment of nation and national identity. Using Anthony Smith’s ethnosymbols as the cursory reading of the expressions of national identity in Mongolia, it arrives at the conclusion that Mongolia’s identity-building project is neither organic, nor confined to a predictable set of markers that are inherent in Smith’s approach. Following Pierre Bourdieu, it rather regards these markers as tools of the state that are used to create categories in making and unmaking groups. The article concludes that constructing national identity is a complex process of negotiating and renegotiating “ideal” versions of Mongolia, a process by which power arrangements are constantly and dialectically articulated and muted.

Keywords:

• Mongolia
• nationalism
• national identity
• post-Soviet
• post-socialist transition
• territory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While we understand that the terms Soviet and post-Soviet are ontologically ambiguous designations, we use the terms precisely because they capture ideologically rooted periods that are very distinct before and after the Soviet collapse.

2. Chinggis Khaan’s name is spelled differently depending on the language in which it was written and on conventions of transliteration. Among the most common are Chinggis, Genghis, Genghiz, or Jengiz. In English, Chinggis Khaan’s name is most commonly spelled as Genghis Khan, deriving from Persian and Arabic transliteration; however, the old Mongol spelling of his name transliterates as Chinggis Khaan, which is how it is written and pronounced in Mongolia today and is thus used as such in this article.

3. In the post-Soviet era, other religious sectors began to grow, but none has enjoyed the official endorsement by the state as has Buddhism.

4. Enkhbayar has served as the prime minister (2000–2004), the speaker of the parliament (2004–2005), and the president of Mongolia (2005–2009), making him the only politician to have held all top three political positions in Mongolia. He remained an influential political figure until his imprisonment in 2012. While he has since been released, his leverage on the political stage is yet to be seen.