The goal of this paper is to reveal a few trends in the interaction between religious, national, and ethnic identities as applied to the understanding of current developments in the South Caucasus. It starts with the dominant paradigms in scholarship of identities that has undergone deep evolution towards post-modern washing-out of old solid concepts, such as ethnos, nations, and religion. It turns next to those objective and subjective developments in the emerging new societies of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which seem to contradict the fashionable academic episteme by recreating robust and powerful concepts of ethnos, nation, and religion. Finally, it will suggest a more complex interpretation that would mitigate the above contradiction between dominant academic scholarship and the societal processes.
Keywords: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, ethnos, nation-state, religion, ethnonationalism, primordialism, constructivism, Soviet legacy.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the main current trends in the correlated dynamics of religious, national and ethnic identities, to the extent and in how they can be applied to the understanding of modern processes in the South Caucasus. Although here we are all first-
The article was written in the framework of the research project "Religion and Society in the Caucasus: Forms of interaction and modern Dynamics" (2016, RANEPA Public Communications Analysis Laboratory).
Aghajanyan A. Etnos, natsiya i religiya: nauchnye paradigmy i real'nost ' Yuzhnogo Kavkaza [Ethnos, Nation and Religion: scientific paradigms and reality of the South Caucasus]. 2016. N2. pp. 331-356.
Agadjanian, Alexander (2016) "Ethnos, Nation, and Religion: Scholarly Paradigms and the Societal Processes in the South Caucasus", Gosudarstuo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii г za rubezhom 34(2): 331-356.
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go is interested in the Caucasian theme, parallels with other regions of the world are inevitable. The trends in question are truly global. Everywhere and everywhere, as a result of the profound social transformations of the turn of the 21st century, identities were in the process of reformatting.
From the very beginning, I would like to distinguish between three aspects or levels of analysis: (a) objective social changes (in our case, in the Caucasus region) - the totality of empirical reality available to us; (b) subjective construction, awareness, transformation of mass identities as a response to this reality; (c) academic, scientific understanding of the two previous phenomena. It goes without saying that these three analytical focuses are interrelated and overlap so strongly that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. For example, we can easily show how closely scientific and popular (mass) perceptions of ethnic or religious identities depend on each other, and how both can directly influence real, "objective" changes in society; and, conversely, scientific concepts and mass stereotypes, in turn, can profoundly influence the perception of ethnic or religious identities. depend on these same "objective" changes. It can be assumed, however, that these three levels are not the same, and that for analytical purposes such a distinction is permissible and useful.
We will follow these three aspects, but in reverse order. We will begin with the last of these three levels - with those academic approaches to the problem of identity that have undergone tremendous changes due to the transformation of Western epistemology - changes towards a mostly "postmodern" erosion of old firm concepts, including such as ethnicity, nation and religion. Then we will turn to the subjective and objective changes in societies that are in the process of formation, in particular, the societies of the South Caucasus. These relatively recent changes seem to contradict the new, fashionable academic epistemes and sometimes decisively, directly refute them: we are facing an obvious revival and affirmation - or at least this is what it looks like - of reliable and powerful concepts-realities - of ethnic groups, nations and religions. And after that, at the very end of the analysis, we are waiting for another unexpected turn.: We will try to show that, after all, social and global changes call into question the apparent triumph of these revived concepts, and that the new academic epistemes may not be entirely unfounded.
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De-essentializing Old Communities: Global trends and academic fashion
If we try to formulate in one word one dominant trend in the last decades in the academic understanding of all three concepts - nation, ethnicity, religion-then this word will be de-essentialization. This trend began with a postmodern and poststructuralist "suspicion" of once-unshakable academic conventions. These suspicions, skepticism, and deconstruction of old concepts were the result of a whole series of political and cultural developments in the West, as well as corresponding shifts in academic thinking; this broad topic is far beyond the scope of this article, and I will not touch it. The fact is that the old concepts of ethnicity, nation (or nation-state) and religion have lost the more or less clear content that they had in the framework of the classical discourse of the Western Modern era.
De-essentialization has affected all three concepts. The concept of "ethnos"has lost its original connotations, primarily related to blood and kinship ties; ethnoses have been viewed more in a constructivist spirit, and their main characteristics have become mobility, the presence of a fluid, partial or multiple identity; some pioneering works that formulate this new perception of ethnos have been followed by many others. 2 The nation (nation-state), as the main political "container" of modernity, was reinterpreted in the same spirit - as a largely imaginary, constructed, invented and even historically temporary reality, now under the pressure of a new "global state" - with mass migrations, transnational economic, political and cultural flows, integrative political processes, etc. This means that they have a more "soft" concept of national citizenship and a less pronounced sense of national patriotism.3 Finally,
2. Barth, F. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.; Appadurai, A. (1990)" Disjunction and Difference in Global Cultural Economy", Theory, Culture and Society 7: 295-310. See, in particular, the latter's characteristic notion of ethnoscape.
3. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso; Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell; Hobsbawm, E. Nations and Nationalism Since
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religion - the third concept that we are interested in here - was" deconstructed " in a similar way as a relatively new phenomenon with modern genealogy, and by no means a centuries-old, essentially unchanging tradition; and thus religion was reinterpreted as a more flexible, applied," portable " source of identity; an increasingly less collective phenomenon and more and more individual; less public and more and more "privatized", more and more "detached from the roots", removed from a certain cultural background and more and more de-confessionalized - detached from a certain institutional and ethno-national context.4
We can rightly assume that the trend described above was the most noticeable and dynamic, quantitatively dominant and finally fashionable. This dominance, this fashion, has radically changed some of the normative priorities, both inside and outside the academy; it has influenced the assessment of all the phenomena described and the very language of their description. "Ethnocentrism" and "nationalism" have obviously acquired negative connotations and are usually seen as dangerous tools of possible manipulation, or at least as a state of mass self-deception fraught with conflicts. In a sense, this negative vision of large organic collective solidarities has weakened and made less relevant the classical opposition of "ethnic" and "civil" nationalism, which is still very much the same as in the past.-
1780: Programme, Myth, Reality; Brubaker, R. (2004) "In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism", Citizenship Studies 8(2): 115-127. Ulrich Beck very accurately called the nation-state a conceptual "container" invented by social scientists and losing its meaning with the rise of globalization. Beck, U. (1997) Was Ist Globalizierung. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. The same W. Beck and D. Levy tried to "overcome the fixation on territory in the social sciences, shifting attention to the temporal dimension" of history and shifting the focus of analysis to the space "between the essentialist concept of nationalism and the universalist concept of cosmopolitanism": Beck, U., Levy, D. (2013) "Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-Imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society", Theory, Culture and Society 30(2): 3-31. For a postmodern view of "nation" as a pure construct, see Walker, R. (2001)" Postmodernism", in A. Motyl (ed.) Encyclopedia of Nationalism. (Volume I). New York: Academic Press (online access).
4. Asad, T. (1993) The Genealogy of Religion. Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. John Hopkins University Press; Beyer, P. (1994) Religion and Globalization. London: Sage; Smith, J.Z. (1998) "Religion, Religions, Religious", in M. Taylor (ed.) Critical Terms of Religious Studies, pp. 269-284. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press; Bastian, J. -P., Champion, F., Rousselet, K. (eds) (2001) La Globalisation du Religieux. Paris, L'Harmattan; Masuzava, T. (2005) The Invention of World Religions: or, How the European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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the fact that now, with the postulated decrease in the importance of the nation as such, any type of nationalism, be it civil or ethnic, or even patriotism, is losing its relevance - after all, all these forms of stable identity look outdated, as they contradict the main trends towards transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.
"Ethnos" and" ethnicity", however, have acquired a more positive content within the framework of a liberal (multi -) culturalist perspective; they have become associated with the protection of minority rights.5 But in this case, the "ethnic identity" or "nationality" of the minorities was clearly opposed to any ethnocentric claims of the ethnic majority, which presupposes classical nationalism aimed at creating a national state. There were still strong arguments in support of nation-states as such, such as the very convincing arguments of J. R. R. Tolkien. Rawls 6, who proclaimed the nation state to be "a natural, stable, and convenient unit of the international order"; but for Rawls, the nation-state is, of course, an ideal liberal community based on individual human rights and civic ties, a far cry from classical collectivist nationalism. Nevertheless, Rawls also received a sharp rebuke from "cosmopolitan" critics for what they considered to be homogeneous "peoples"
As for our last concept - religion-the situation here has been rather complicated in recent decades. Religion, as a kind of continuation of the ethno-national or, conversely, as a nation-forming phenomenon, was definitely deconstructed and refuted; any essential connection with national roots of any kind was questioned. Increasingly, in the academic imagination, religion has become associated with vibrant transethnic and transnational energies, such as charismatic Pentecostalism and global Islamism - religious movements that are the most dynamic in the world.-
5. Tamir, Y. (1993) Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Kymlicka, W. (2001) Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7. См. интересное обсуждение в: Miscevic, N. (2010) "Nationalism", in E. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition) [http://plato.Stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/nationalism, accessed on 1.03.2016].
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interesting, and most noticeable 8. At the same time, a new approach - more precisely, what can be called "post-secular sensitivity" - began to take shape in the academic research of religions, according to which a de-essentialized, de-confessional, detached from its "roots" religion turned into a kind of dispersed, cosmopolitan (universal?)religion. "spirituality" is a kind of optional but effective complement to individual or group identity, which fits perfectly into the framework of a pluralistic, egalitarian culture that presupposes complete freedom of religion (or non-religion).9
A new explosion of eternal identities as a challenge to academic studies
All the scientific paradigms described above, as well as the semi-hidden normative preferences that influenced them in one way or another, have been severely undermined by events in non-Western societies in recent decades. Of course, numerous examples of transnationalism and the loosening of old boundaries of identity remain plentiful; however, at the same time, a real explosion occurred in the opposite direction. Since the 1980s, ethnicities, nations, and religions have been deeply intertwined and have become the ferment and basis of political and cultural revival in many societies. We can recall outbreaks of ethnic conflicts in Rwanda, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka; a sharp increase in religious nationalism in Iran, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Israel, etc. In fact, even in Europe, despite the democratic
8. The literature on Pentecostalism and charismatic movements is vast; see, for example, S. Coleman's analysis of "A global charismatic meta-culture that transcends both Territorial and denominational boundaries and shows remarkable similarities in different parts of the world": Coleman, S. (2000) The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity, pp. 425-4.. 66-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; see also in the same vein: Martin, D. (2001) Pentecostalism: the World Their Parish. Wiley-Blackwell. Regarding Islamism, see Olivier Roy's eloquently titled book: Roy, O. (2009) Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways. Columbia University Press.
9. For the concept of "postsecularity", see Gorski, Ph., Kim, D., Torpey, J., VanAntwerpen, J. (eds) (2012) The Postsecular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society. NYU Press.
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Finally, examples of tensions along the boundaries of old identities have increased 10.
"Academic globalism" was particularly hard hit after the collapse of the communist bloc, especially after the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. For the newly independent territories that emerged from the ruins of these empires, nation-state building was a priority project that brought together political elites and mobilized broad segments of the population. These new nation-states were conceived from the very beginning, ideally in "classical" modern categories, as the main core of the entire socio-cultural order based on unambiguous principles: undisputed territories and borders, one citizenship, one language, one set of symbols, one historical memory and one sovereign government.
This ideal was sometimes indeed similar to the classic type of civil or political nation, and it was declaratively (and sometimes sincerely) accepted by the new ruling elites. Nevertheless, an unavoidable problem immediately arose in these new states, which sharply distanced them from the ideal type of nation-state: they were always based on ethnocentrism (ethno-nationalism). National identities here were clearly defined through the exclusion of "others", and these" others " were alien ethnic groups. The Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, or Kazakh nationalism of the 1990s and 2000s was clearly ethnically labeled-with all the differences in all these particular cases. In general, nation (in the modern sense) and ethnic identity were strongly linked in all these countries, and this combination became the central political narrative. This situation was the exact opposite of the previously proclaimed global trend towards the" dissolution " of traditional collectives, towards the growth of transnational mixing and cosmopolitanism. It looked as if the massive explosion of ethno-nationalism that occurred after liberalization in post-communist countries confirmed what it seems to have always been, is, and will always be: ethnic, national, and religious consciousness has never disappeared and will not disappear; they have been preserved, not changed. -
10. It can be said that the revival of nationalism in Western Europe already in the 2010s, around disputes about the limits of European integration and the consequences of migration, partly fits into this trend.
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despite all the expectations and exaggerated rhetoric of globalization supported by new scientific theories 11.
This "anti-global", revived emphasis on strong ethno-national solidarity can be easily illustrated by the history of all the South Caucasian peoples. First, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, the construction of a classical modern state was undoubtedly the central discourse, which framed both the power struggle between elites within each country and relations between countries. Second, ethnic identity was fundamental and understood in essentialist terms. For example, "Armenian" has become a central element of identity, with an emphasis on ancient roots and an autochthonous presence in the country12. Similarly, the central narrative was the Turkic identity of Azerbaijanis, which, according to the generally accepted narrative of historical memory in the country, absorbed the autochthonous ethnic substratum13. The Karabakh war between the two countries in the early 1990s showed that ethnic confrontation was undoubtedly the decisive factor in the territorial conflict, accompanied by ethnic cleansing-the mass displacement of Armenians from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis from Armenia and Karabakh 14. In Azerbaijan, ethnocentrism has also made the status of other minorities more vulnerable, although not in the form of open conflict, as in the case of Armenians. Similar processes and similar conflicts took place in post-Soviet Georgia, where the Abkhazian and Ossetian ethnic revival was quite consistent with the deeply ethnocentric, "Kartvelian" orientation of the new Georgian state.
11.For the concept of ethnonationalism in connection with the collapse of the Soviet Union, see Connor, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding. Princeton University Press.
12. See Levon Abrahamian's arguments on the" root-oriented"," pseudo-historical " model of national identity characteristic of Armenians: Abrahamian, L. (2007) Armenian Identity in a Changing World, pp. 10-12. Mazda Press.
13. Yunusov A. Azerbaijan at the beginning of the XXI century: conflicts and potential threats. Baku: Adiloglu Publ., 2007.
14. Nona Shahnazaryan perfectly showed how war revives archaic models of relations and excludes any individual nonconformity where ethnic solidarity prevails: Shahnazaryan, N. (2010) "National Ideologies, Survival Strategies and Symbolic Contexts of Karabakh War", in N. Tsitsishvili (ed.) Cultural Paradigms and Political Change in the Caucasus, pp. 197-217. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.
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The difference between the civil and ethnic modes of "nation" was not, however, completely leveled. These two modes sometimes diverged, but sometimes merged together. All three countries strongly recalled the experience of their "first" republics, which existed in 1918-1920 / 21 in the short interval between the Russian Revolution and Sovietization; in all three cases, the legacy of these republics was partly interpreted as an attempt to embody "civilization and democracy", in contrast to both imperial regimes - pre-revolutionary Russian and subsequent Soviet. This was the original anti-Soviet and anti-Russian rhetoric of independent governments in all three countries, with the declared desire to reproduce the "European" model of a civil nation. However, ethnically colored historical memory becomes part of independent post-Soviet history from the very beginning; ethnic identity quickly begins to completely dominate, suppressing the rhetoric of a" civil nation"; hence, the idea of ethnic purity and, as a result, the practice of ethnic cleansing. Another motive that has become an important part of state - building is the motive of sacrifice and reciprocal hostility: the memory of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire; the memory of the suffering of Georgians in the Ottoman and Russian Empires; the memory of the recent military casualties in Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and, as a result, the suffering of hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Let us repeat that the idea of a civil nation has not completely disappeared; it has been periodically revived, though without much success, by small liberal opposition groups in Azerbaijan; very cautiously, by alternative political groups in Armenia; and finally, this idea of a civil nation became a powerful legitimization tool during the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and Georgia. the subsequent "pro-European" reforms. Nevertheless, the ethnocentric discourse remained unquestionably dominant, and the interests of the" nation " were interpreted in ethnic categories, both among political elites and in the mass consciousness.
Another central pillar of nation-building from the point of view of classical nationalism is the State itself. It was necessary to justify the continuity, to find examples of independent statehood in the past-a legacy that would prove the viability of the old ethnic group in the new situation of independence. Soviet experience of state educational institutions-
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donation has, of course, had a significant impact on the countries of the South Caucasus (we will talk about this later). However, the Soviet legacy was mostly thought of in postcolonial terms, and therefore viewed as ideologically ineffective, and ethnonational memory sought to find more effective models of power and glory; hence the interest in history, with a particular focus on military exploits and strong power. The reference points for Armenians were relatively short moments of truth, such as the state of Tigran II the Great (1st century BC), the kingdom of Bagratids (X-XI centuries) and the Kingdom of Cilicia (XII-XIV centuries). In Georgia, such points of support were the semi-mythical ancient kingdom of Colchis and the" golden age " of the Bagrationi dynasty (XI-XIII centuries AD). In Azerbaijan, the ethno-national culture has a relatively recent history, but the national memory includes claims to the heritage of the ancient states of Atropatene and Caucasian Albania, as well as a reminder of the Turkic origin of the Safavid and Qajar peoples dynasties in Persia (XVI-XX centuries).
Finally, let us turn to religion, which from the very beginning has proved to be a powerful symbolic resource in our region. On the one hand, a certain crisis of secularism, or at least some of the processes that made secularism "vulnerable", was, as we said above, a global trend, and this made religion an attractive resource for social and cultural construction - something that did not seem very plausible from the height of classical secular Modernity. At the same time, despite the dominant interest in transnational religious movements in the world, in the post-socialist region, the resurgent religion clearly did not seek to be "transnational", acquiring strictly ethnic forms and taking on the function of an additional support for the ethno-national myth and legitimization of the national state. The importance they attach to" eternal genealogies "and" natural roots. " 15Moreover, religion, which has been under pressure for most of the twentieth century, has accumulated a strong energy precisely because of this fact. Anyway, the religion was
15. Hervieu-Leger, D. (2000) Religion as a Chain of Memory, pp. 157-162. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
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It is also interpreted in essentialist terms as the original and most profound component of identity.
In some cases, religion in general appeared as a key, system-forming factor in the invention of new nations - for example, in the case of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (Muslim) nationalisms, where ethnic differences themselves were not enough to construct borders of identity. In most other cases, religion was secondary to ethnic or national identity. In cases such as Poland, Lithuania, Russia, or Romania, where there is an indisputably dominant Christian denomination, Catholicism or Orthodoxy has become a de facto central element in the legitimization of new nation states, even if this role has not been fully established de jure. Within the new Russian state, Tatar, Bashkir, Chechen, Avar, and other ethnomythologies and ethnopolitics used Islam as such an additional binding element of identity; Islam was a common reference point, albeit in varying degrees and forms, in those post-Soviet states where it was the dominant religion.
This revived (in fact, newly constructed) religious ethno-nationalism was also clearly manifested in the South Caucasus, where a widespread, almost consensual big narrative of endemic, inherited religiosity - Georgian Orthodoxy, Armenian Apostolic Christianity, and Azerbaijani Islam-was formed. This large narrative of "eternal" religious identity became part of official political discourses, was integrated into the normative preferences of local scientific communities, and became the dominant trend in popular popular culture.
In Armenia and Georgia, this understanding of the respective Christian churches was enshrined in the constitutions and in special legislation. The Armenian Constitution of 2005, while establishing the principles of religious freedom, pluralism, and separation of church and State, nevertheless recognizes the special status of the national church (Article 8.1), and several other legal documents confirm this status.16 In Georgia, with-
16. Tchilingirian, H. (2007) "In Search of Relevance: Church and Religion in Armenia After Independence", in B. Balci, R. Motika (eds) Religions et Politique Dans le Caucase Post-Sovietique, pp. 277-311. Paris: Maisonneuvre & Cousin; Sarkissian, A. (2008) "Religion in Post-Soviet Armenia: Pluralism and Identity Formation in Transition", Religion,
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According to the 1995 Constitution, the norm of religious pluralism is also combined with the recognition of traditional Orthodox hegemony, which was further confirmed in the Concordat between Church and State of 2002 (article 9.1). Both churches were presented as the most ancient Christian churches (which received the status of state churches at the beginning of the IV century), which, consequently, were continuously carriers of an" eternal " ethnic identity, including during long periods without statehood, when this identity was under threat. Both churches emphasized their specific features. The Armenian (non-Chalcedonian) tradition has retained its own literary and liturgical style. The Georgian Church, although it belongs to world Orthodoxy, has always (except for the hundred-year period of subordination to the Russian Church) enjoyed institutional autonomy, a special style and identity; under strong internal traditionalist pressure, the Georgian Church withdrew from the ecumenical movement in 1997. The peak of the religious upsurge in Armenia was the official celebrations on the occasion of the 1700th anniversary of the Baptism in 200117. In Georgia, the religious revival reached a higher intensity, and it can be assumed that, unlike in Armenia, it was a mass movement "from below" 18.
State and Society 36 (2): 163-180. For the most complete description of the religious aspect of the national ideology of post-Soviet Armenia, see Siekierski, K. (2010)" Religious and National Identities in Post-Soviet Armenia", in I. Borowik, M. Zawila (eds) Religions and Identities in Transition, pp. 149-162. Krakow: Nomos; Siekierski, K. (2014) '"One Nation, One Faith, One Church': the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Ethno-Religion in Post-Soviet Armenia", in A. Agadjanian (ed.) Armenian Christianity Today: Identity Politics, Popular Practices and Social Functions, pp. 9-34. Farnham: Ashgate.
17. An interesting feature of Armenia was the activity of non-Christian, "neo-Pagan" nativism, see Antonyan, Yu., Siekierski, K. (2013) "A Neopagan Movement in Armenia: The Children of Ara", in K. Aitamurto, S. Simpson (eds) Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, pp. 266-82. Durham: Acumen. This movement (numerically small) and its accompanying mood (spread much more widely) offered an alternative to the Christian national narrative; at the same time, Armenian pre-Christian antiquities could also complement this narrative, as if lengthening the unchanging ethno-national history.
18. Serrano, S. (2010) "From Culture to Cult: Museum Collections and Religion in Contemporary Georgian National Discourse", in N. Tsutsishvili (ed.) Cultural Paradigms and Political Change in the Caucasus, pp. 275-292. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing; Serrano, S. (2010) "De-secularizing national space in Georgia", Identity Studies 2 [http://identitystudies.iliauni.edu.ge/wp-content/uploads/10-41-1-PB.pdf, accessed on 1.03.2016].
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If we talk about Azerbaijan, it is absolutely certain that, even despite the constant official secular rhetoric, Islam is firmly linked to the ethnic Turkic and national Azerbaijani identity here after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, in comparison with the Christian traditions of Armenia and Georgia, Azerbaijani Islam has not become an obvious resource for ethnic and national consolidation. There were several reasons for this. One of the reasons, as mentioned above, was that the tradition of national integration in Azerbaijan was still less deep, and the mass awareness of ethnic identity among the scattered Turkic population was not clearly expressed, at least until the end of the XIX century. Therefore, there were no conditions for the formation of a special sub-tradition of " local Islam". The formation of national identity at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a purely secular project. Another reason may be the tension between Turkic and Shiite identities, which also made religious affiliation less pronounced. In addition, the differences in the institutional structure of Islam and Christianity led to the fact that the degree of confessionalization in Islam, where there is no "national religious institution", was much lower. Another new factor hindering the nationalization of Islam was the rise of radical Islamism as a transnational force, which made Islam less "applicable" to nation-building projects. Islam is not mentioned in Azerbaijani constitutional or legislative documents as a"national religion". Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the notion of Islam as a key element of Azerbaijani identity is indisputable and is used in various ways by political and cultural actors.19
The rise of religious ethno-nationalism in an era of global confusion and the "relativity theory" of group differences came as a surprise and challenge to mainstream academic predictions and fashionable theories. However, if you think about it, the very fact of such an explosion of "primordial", "primordial" feelings corresponded to the logic of globalization: that was the downside of ten-
19. Svetokhovsky T. Islam and national identity: the case of Azerbaijan / / Religion and politics in the Caucasus / Ed. by A. Iskandaryan. Yerevan: Institute of the Caucasus, 2004. pp. 8-30; Yunusov A. Azerbaijan at the beginning of the XXI century: conflicts and potential threats.
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access to transnational flows and mixes. As R. Friedland vividly and clearly expressed it, at a time when cultures and capitals are becoming phenomena "without borders", "religious nationalism is a return to the text, to the immutability of signs, an attempt to fit a nation into a cosmic context"; religion helps non-Western states "create a discursive space in which they can freely live." breathe"20. According to this logic - let's call it anti - global, restoring roots-religion gives ethno-nationalism an uplifting force and the highest possible legitimacy in its quest to consolidate economic resources (primarily territory) and returns a sense of cultural resilience. Religion provides ethnic groups and nations with an essentialist scenario, a special language, a convincing "cosmic" reference, and ready material for individual and collective subjectivity. This reborn subjectivity resolutely rejects the global, cosmopolitan, eclectic, and relativistic subjectivity that has been so much written about in the scientific literature and that has seemingly triumphantly spread throughout the world.
Explanatory box: the ambiguity of the Soviet legacy
The ambiguous Soviet legacy was perhaps the main and immediate cause of the explosion of religious and ethno-national identities in the South Caucasus. The Soviet Union was, on the one hand, a unitary project based on the idea of a single Soviet citizenship, authoritarian supranational sovereignty, and a single official socialist culture. Ethnic particularism and nationalism were considered contrary to communist ideology. On the other hand, as the researchers point out, the Soviet regime was not consistent in this area and ultimately failed to achieve its unitary goals.21 Instead, in clear contradiction
20. Friedland, R. (1999) "When Gods Walks in History. The Institutional Politics of Religious Nationalism", International Sociology 14(3): 301-319.
21. Brubaker, R. "In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism", p. 50; Suny, R. (2001) "The Empire Strikes Out! Imperial Russia, "National" Identity, and Theories of Empire", in R. Suny, T. Martin (eds) A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, pp. 23-66. New York.
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with the ideology of communist internationalism and, in fact, the declared "universality" of revolutionary change, the Soviet regime retained a unique emphasis on multinational and cultural diversity. In fact, the regime reformatted the public space of old Russia by inventing a visible network of ethno-national borders. The Soviet Union turned out to be an "affirmative action empire" - an "empire of positive discrimination" 22-an empire that actually contributed, albeit selectively, to the establishment of ethnic features, the formation of national elites, and the essentialization of the very concept of nationality, which is firmly connected with language, territory, and blood kinship.
The Soviet Union was a two-story empire: officially, the" lower floor "of ethnonational entities was subordinate to the" upper floor " of the Union. On the" ground floor", special, partially hidden, but in fact, as Rogers Brubaker beautifully showed, 23 detailed institutionalized alternative identities were gradually formed, on the basis of which nationalism and deaf hostility were developed, directed both against the Center and against other peripheral nationalities. These hidden forces led to the explosion when the Union began to fall apart, and were, in fact, the main reason for its final collapse. While the early 1990s were the time of the end of the cold war and the euphoria of hopes for global integration (which is partly reflected in scientific works), the post-Soviet independent states brought with them, on the contrary, now unrestricted, free emotions of ethnocentric, often aggressive collective subjectivity.
As in other new post-Soviet countries, in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, individual identities were already perceived in a ready - made form, from the Soviet era, but they were then repeatedly strengthened and sharpened due to open competition between national elites for resources-not only economic and territorial, but also symbolic: hence the fact that it is possible to create a new identity in the future. call them "memory wars" ; in cases of conflicts in Abha-
22. Martin, T. (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalisms in the Soviet Union (1923-1939). Cornell University Press.
23. Brubaker, R. "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: an Institutionalist Account".
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In Georgia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the "wars of memory"were closely intertwined with real wars. 24
The rise of the religious mode of nationalism in this region, as part of a broader global trend, was also mediated by the Soviet experience. The pre-revolutionary Russian Empire was largely organized along confessional lines; the Soviet Empire, on the contrary, was rebuilt, as we have just seen, in ethnic and national categories, as religion was suppressed as a symbolic competitor to communist ideology. Nevertheless, religion has become a kind of" hidden narrative "tied to the much more" open " narrative of nationality. Religion was subordinated to national identity: at the end of the Soviet Union, starting in the 1960s, religion was a politically controlled ghetto, but at the same time a culturally recognized "ethnographic museum", an ethnic "antiquities shop". But it was precisely because its 'spiritual' content was curtailed and suppressed that it regained its previously hidden energy quite quickly. This was especially evident in Georgia, where, for certain reasons, the revived national heritage was clearly expressed in religious terms, which led to the sacralization, even in the late Soviet years, of secular nationalism of the XIX - early XX centuries.25 In Armenia, the Church has always been and remains the bearer of historical heritage, and Catholicos Vazgen I (1955-1994) was a major national figure, just like Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia Ilia II (since 1977). In Azerbaijan, the Muslim layer of mass consciousness and the hidden social networks associated with it played a similar role in Soviet Azerbaijan, although, as we have already said, there was not and could not be such a concentration of religious power as in the case of organized national churches in two Christian countries.
24. We borrow the term "wars of memory" from Viktor Shnirelman: Shnirelman V. Wars of Memory: Myths, identity and Politics in Transcaucasia. Moscow: Akademkniga, 2003. Shnirelman's book explores various" presentist " interpretations of history by Caucasian scholars. Many local scientific and non-scientific books, articles and Internet blogs are filled with such "memory wars" involving representatives of the main (titular) nations and minorities.
25. Zedania, G. (2011) "The Rise of Religious Nationalism in Georgia", Identity Studies (3): 120-128.
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Nevertheless, the Soviet legacy was complex and ambiguous. On the one hand, it dramatically increased the importance of religious symbols and language, and this was immediately apparent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But this same legacy left deep gaps and gaps in the sum of religious knowledge and practices, and the result was a shallow," discharged "religiosity, and "religion" as a whole became a pliable object of improvisation and reconstruction. In addition, the Soviet legacy left behind a strong tradition of everyday secularism that persisted even after independence. Therefore, religious ethno-nationalism, which looked so bright and prominent, had serious internal limitations, which were, in fact, the result of the same Soviet experience that brought it to life.
Indeed, the content of everyday religiosity, despite all the differences between the three South Caucasian countries and the regional diversity, was generally relatively fragmented and unstable, which was reflected in the low intensity of religious practices, low level of religious knowledge, and other indicators. As in other post-Soviet countries, the grand narrative of a "national" religion is being challenged by some of the secular and reformist elites formed during the Soviet era. Another constraint on religious nationalism was the model of secularism and separation of religion from the state, which was everywhere a continuation of the Soviet model. From a practical point of view, secularism could serve to maintain a balance in a relatively pluralistic confessional context, especially in Georgia. In addition, the pragmatic position of the post-Soviet ruling elites was to find a balance between instrumentalizing religion as part of national symbols and neutralizing religion as a convenient resource for political opposition. This was especially evident in the case of Islam, with its tendency to politicize, and in this sense it is worth highlighting the case of Azerbaijan,where the ruling regime largely preserved the Soviet political tradition, while Islam, changing under the influence of strong external centers of Islamism, turned into a channel of opposition sentiment. 26
26. Cornell, S. (2006) The Politization of Islam in Azerbaijan. Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, John Hopkins University.
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The Soviet legacy of state secularism, the "looseness" of mass, background religiosity, and widespread prejudice against any political involvement of religion were not the only reasons that limited religious ethno-nationalism. Another factor was the Western model of secularism, firmly embedded in international law, within which the newly independent states were more or less bound and had to conform. Secularism was part of the modern ideal of the nation-state, and therefore this model came into conflict with the temptation to "return" religion as a distinctive marker and legitimizing resource. Georgia, which was the site of the strongest religious revival, is also, paradoxically, the most striking example when the strict model of secularism was consciously introduced during the rule of Mikhail Saakashvili in 2003-2012, and in this case it was not about the inertia of the Soviet legacy, but about a new conscious policy. However, this new policy for the region was not fully implemented and could not fully resist the unbending growth of the"national religion".
So, in general, we should keep in mind that the Soviet heritage was certainly a central factor in shaping the current understanding of ethnos, nation and religion in the region. The Soviet canonical ideology, partially "dissolved" in the habitat of elites and other social groups, carried the Russian imperial polyethnic tradition, as well as modern ideas of supra-ethnic nationalism and secularism. But at the same time, the same Soviet legacy led to an explosion of ethnic and religious particularism. Of these two opposing vectors, the particularism vector clearly dominated after (and as a result of)the collapse of the officially declared supranational project, such as the Union. And yet - another example of the ambiguity of the problem - the Soviet Union as a whole was itself a bulwark of self-sufficient particularism, the ideology of hostile "camps", and its collapse caused euphoria about the new supranational ("global") ideology, which was the source of the West at the time of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the neoliberal "The Washington Consensus."
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Further discussion: Can the explosion of primordial identities be reconciled with the effects of globalization?
In his classic work "Nations and Nationalism since 1870," Eric Hobsbawm writes about the decline of nationalism at the end of the twentieth century in the wake of the trend towards global interconnections. But in the same place, in the sixth chapter of the second edition of his book, in 1992, he admits that "it would be really absurd to deny that the collapse of the Soviet Union... it marks a profound and possibly long-term historical change, the consequences of which are, at the time of writing, still quite unclear"; and he goes on to add that the attempt to "conclude this book with any reflections on the decline of nationalism as a vector of historical change might seem... willful blindness"27.
Hobsbawm's comment reflects some confusion. The post-Soviet reality seemed to have overturned all dominant approaches to ethnicity, national statehood, and religion. This "harsh and visible" reality, of course, has influenced academic debates, reviving approaches that, on the contrary, have emphasized the ancient roots of modern nations. 28 Such conclusions were, in some ways, an echo of the old, Herder - and Hegel-derived, influential German philosophical tradition, conceptualizing Volksnation, endowed with Volksgeist; and at the same time - the French intellectual tradition of the collective mentalite or caractere national. The emphasis that religion played a crucial role in the formation of old, "pre-modern" nations was also quite convincing.29
The idea of the antiquity of natural collectives and their sacred origin obviously contradicted the constructivist view.
27. Hobsbawm, E. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, p. 163.
28. Armstrong, J. (1982) Nations Before Nationalism. Chapel Hill; Beaune, C. (1985) Naissance de la Nation France. Paris: Gallimard; Smith, A. (1988) The Ethnic Origin of Nations. London: Wiley-Blackwell; Smith, A. (2004) The Antiquity of Nations. London: Polity.
29. A. Hastings believes that Christianity (but not other religions) was the main source of modern nationalism: Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationality. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge University Press.
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a view of the modern nation and the thesis of the decline of nations as such - both ethnic and civil - in a postmodern global mix. We can agree that the conclusions drawn from the experience of post-Soviet states have revealed the fragility of existing academic stereotypes. However, in fact, regardless of the stereotypical opposition of primordialism and constructivism, nationalism and transnationalism, as obvious speculative extremes, the situation seems more complex. Let's try to understand this.
First, the post-Soviet experience has indeed led to the revival of the idea of ethno-religious continuity of ancient peoples, and our Caucasian examples, apparently, should be taken seriously, as examples of deep cultural memory, examples of the creation of historical collective subjectivity. At the same time, there is a lot of evidence that the narratives of these old, pre-modern ethnonations are largely selectively constructed using very arbitrary interpretations on the part of the ruling and intellectual elites. "Cultural memory" does not distinguish between history and myth; it projects the current needs and ideas of today onto the past; it works as a " hot " memory, reproducing strong old symbols for the needs of modern identity.30 By the way, this mechanism of memory construction at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in fact, does not differ from similar processes in the past, when historiographers and politicians of medieval "pre-modern peoples" invented collective identities in primordial, essentialist terms. In the Caucasus, the "hot memory" of Armenian or Georgian medieval authors is an obvious example of such constructivism. 31 The formation of cultural memory is a constant, continuous process, but the very (re -) production of this chain of memory, a certain tradition of this mechanism,
30. Assman, J. (2011) Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press
31. See Mikhail Dmitriev's interesting discussion of the emergence of a discourse on ethnic differentiation in medieval Europe in connection with the processes of state formation, social consolidation, and legitimation of power - all of which Dmitriev associates with Sinnproduktion, the work of "creating meanings". Dmitriev M. V. Problematics of the research project "Confessiones et nations". Confessional traditions and protonational discourses in the history of Europe // Religious and ethnic traditions in the formation of national identities in Europe / Ed.by M. V. Dmitriev. Moscow, Indrik Publ., 2008, pp. 15-42.
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By itself, it proves the existence of longue-duree collective entities. Thus, we seem to avoid the rigid dichotomy of primordialism and constructivism.
Secondly, the post-Soviet experience has defined the idea of an independent nation as a modern phenomenon, as a project related to modernization. The newly independent states were "conceived" not only in terms of tradition, but also in terms of renewal and progress. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union provided the states of the South Caucasus with the first experience of modernization, however contradictory it may be. In the wake of strong initial postcolonial self-determination in the 1990s, these countries opened up to borrowing economic, political, and cultural technologies coming from the West. The idea of "transition" ("transit") The transition to a Western legal, economic, and political structure led to a partial acceptance of the classical modern "nation"model. This process of nation-state building was a complex life factory, where new norms were assimilated and "imported" institutions were reproduced. Nevertheless, it was also a process of interpretation and construction, in two senses: first, it was the construction of an idealnational modernity (selective import of those elements that were interpreted as "modern"); and secondly, this idealized modernity was still inseparable from essentialist, ethnocentric, and ethno-religious ideas. We cannot deny that there was a real process of nation-building in the Caucasus, which created a certain "modern potential". However, once again, this process has always been a tangle of civil and ethnic, secular and religious interpretations.
Third, the post-Soviet essentialization of the national, although at first glance directly contradicts integrative and globalizing trends, does not exclude the process of blurring and mixing national identities. First of all, we must not forget the common imperial heritage (Russian and Soviet) of these nations. We have seen how ambivalent this legacy was. No matter how discredited and rejected the imperial experience was by postcolonial critics, it was an inertial delineation of a common semantic space. After several centuries of cohabitation of the Caucasian peoples in this space, the current reality in all three countries is a "palimpsest of social identities".-
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This imperial experience was already the first introduction to strong supralocal integrative impulses. 32 The" New Eurasian Paradigm "proposed by Marco van Hagen emphasizes the need for a comparative and interactive history of the entire vast region and challenges the normative framework of a European nation-state with well-defined borders; instead, attention should focus more on the "New Eurasian Paradigm". borderlands and diasporas that began to form within empires and were the prototypes of the new diasporas of the "global era" 33.
Indeed, in post-imperial times, starting in the 1990s, the old imperial "palimpsest" became even more complex, with new layers created by global energies added to it; new examples of borderlands replaced the old ones; new diasporas were added to the old ones. All three independent countries of the South Caucasus have been exposed to powerful integrating forces generated by neoliberal economies, market interdependence, increasing migration, global flows of legal and cultural patterns, and various political integration projects. In these circumstances, despite the trends of ethnic consolidation and even ethnic cleansing that we have described above, any nationalist solipsism and narcissism could hardly be viable. This does not mean that an emphasis on a centuries - old ethno-national identity is impossible-we see that such ideas flourish; however, they are intertwined with integrative trends and global mixing. A new concept of a nation is being formed (you can refer to it with the risky term "postmodern nation"), which is based on a combination of constructed" uniqueness " with freedom of movement beyond territorial and semantic borders. For example, in the modern diasporas of Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, or Abkhazians, we can find both strong ethnocentric instincts and a well-developed transnational experience. They can get development and so on-
32. Editors of the volume "New Imperial History of the Post-Soviet Space" write about the revaluation of the Russian and Soviet imperial experience / Ed. by I. Gerasimov et al. Kazan: Center for Studies of Nationalism and Empire, 2004, especially in the introduction "In search of a new Imperial History", pp. 7-29. From this text, we borrow the term "palimpsest of social identities".
33. Hagen, van M. (2004) "Empires, Borderlands and Diasporas. Eurasia as Anti-Paradigm for the Post-Soviet Era", The American Historical Review 109(2): 445-468.
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It can also be defined as ethnic and religious solidarity, and religious indifference, or even transethnic religiosity based on individual choice. On the other hand, internal nationalist discourses themselves depend on transnational information flows, such as the influence of Iranian or Arab Islamism or even the Turkish wave of de-secularization on religious functions in Azerbaijan; or the influence of Western Armenians and the Cilician Catholicosate on religious nationalism in Armenia.
Thus, although the idea and practice of strong ethnonation and ethno-religion are put forward by political elites as the only identity strategy, they are only one of a wide range of options open within the global world order. In essence, ethnocentric exclusivity and the construction of rigid borders are a natural reaction against past imperial violence and new global conflagrations; but this reaction does not negate the inevitability of these conflagrations themselves. The new hardline nationalism, with its ethnic and/ or religious underpinnings, opposes individualism and cosmopolitanism, but it cannot stop their spread. In this sense, the academic paradigm of de-construction, de-essentialization, with which we began this article, in spite of everything, does not lose its adequacy and explanatory power (unless it turns into ideological wishful thinking).
The circle of our reasoning is complete: studies of global confusions do not contradict the search for fixed borders - ethnic, national or religious, because the obsession with constructing rigid collective subjects and borders is both a reaction to the growing global interaction, and, in fact, part of it.
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