Informal Nationalism After Communism: The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist Identities by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, Central Asia, Europe, Eastern, Modern, 20th Century, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism
ISBN: 9781838603830
Google: E2aXwwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 46157053
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Why Prosume Foreign Policy?

Isaacs and Polese (2016) note that the psychological aspect of nationalism is significant, because one needs to create a bond of attachment to an abstract idea. Thus, it is important to look behind the nationhood manifestations and explore the psychological underpinnings of nationalism. Or as Edensor (2002) puts it, there is a ‘fundamental emotional subjectivity which grounds identity in shared, unreflexive feelings’ that needs to be explored from a political psychology point of view. While Jennifer Mitzen (2006) and other proponents of the concept of ontological security1 (Kinnvall 2004; Rumelili 2015; Subotić 2015) advocate a move from an individual to a state level, this chapter proposes applying the ontological security concept to the level it originated in – individuals. Striving for ontological security and identifying ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been a driving force in post-Soviet society (Gudkov 2005; Amirov 2015). Moreover, it is easier to converge on a positive self-identity, than a negative one. Consequently, it is much easier psychologically to revert back to Soviet-era perceptions of great power identity associated with successful foreign policy.

Positive national identity in Russia is inextricably linked to assertive foreign policy, such as openly defying the US, pushing against NATO in Eastern Europe and Central Asia or expanding the ‘sphere of influence’ (Laruelle and Gabowitsch 2008; Laruelle 2014; Tsygankov 2016). Moreover, foreign policy practices and discourse in Russia are a product that the population is supposed to consume (Trenin 2015) – hence the ‘consuming foreign policy’ in the title of this chapter. But how to study the everyday consumption of great power identity in foreign policy? In this case, the literature on everyday nationalism provides a very useful framework for analysis. Fox and Miller-Idriss suggest studying everyday nationhood in four ways:

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