Inventing Majorities: Ideological Creativity in Post-Soviet Societies

by Mykhail Minakov (Editor)

Overview

The recent history of post-Soviet societies is heavily shaped by the successor nations’ efforts to geopolitically re-identify themselves and to reify certain majorities in them. As a result of these fascinating processes, various new ideologies have appeared. Some are specific to the post-Soviet space while others are comparable to ideational processes in other parts of the world.

In this collected volume, an international group of contributors delves deeper into recent theoretical constructions of various post-Soviet majorities, the ideologies that justify them, and some respectively formulated policy prescriptions.

The first part analyzes post-Soviet state-builders’ fixation on certain constructed majorities as well as on these imagined communities’ symbolic self-identifications, in- or outward othering, and national languages. The second part deals specifically with post-Soviet ideas of sovereigntism and the way they define majorities as well as imply changes in internal and external policies and legal systems. These processes are analyzed in comparison to similar phenomena in Western societies.

The book’s contributors include (in the order of their appearance): Natalia Kudriavtseva, Petra Colmorgen, Nadiia Koval, Ivan Gomza, Augusto Dala Costa, Roman Horbyk, Yana Prymachenko, Yuliya Yurchuk, Oleksandr Fisun, Nataliya Vinnykova, Ruslan Zaporozhchenko, Mikhail Minakov, Gulnara Shaikhutdinova, and Yurii Mielkov.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838216416
Publisher:	ibidem Press
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Series:	Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr. Mikhail Minakov is Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington DC, as well as editor of the Kennan Institute’s blog Ukraine Focus. He is also editor of the Kyiv-based Ideology and Politics Journal and philosophy website Koine. Among Minakov’s recent books are From “The Ukraine” to Ukraine (co-edited with Matthew Rojansky, ibidem 2021), Post-Soviet Secessionism (co-edited with Daria Isachenko and Gwendolyn Sasse, ibidem 2021), A History of Experience (in Ukrainian, Laurus 2019), Development and Dystopia (ibidem 2018), Photosophy (in Ukrainian, Laurus 2017), and Demodernization (co-edited with Yakov Rabkin, ibidem 2018; in Italian, Ledizioni 2021). His over 90 articles have appeared in, among other journals, Russian Politics and Law, Russian Social Science Review, Southeastern Europe, Transit, Studi slavistici, Mondo economico, Porownania, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, Sententiae, Krytyka, Agora, Ukraina moderna, and Filosofska dumka.

Table of Contents

Ideological Creativity. Introduction to Post-Soviet Ideologies Mikhail Minakov 7

I Self, Otherness, and Ideology

1 Reconfiguring Identities within the Cityscape: Ideologies of Ukraine's Decommunization Renaming Natalia Kudriavtseva 27

2 The Friends So Far, the Foes So Near? Ambiguities of Georgia's Othering Petra Colmorgen 55

3 The Splendid School Assembled: Studying and Practicing International Relations in Independent Ukraine Nadiia Koval Ivan Gomza 85

4 Toponymy and the Issues of Memory and Identity on the Post-soviet Tbilisi Cityscape Augusto Dala Costa 141

5 Mediatization of History: Introducing the Concept and Key Cases from Eastern Europe Roman Horbyk Yana Prymachenko Yuliya Yurchuk 177

II Post-Soviet Sovereigntism in Comparative Perspective

6 The Rise of Precarious States: A Shadow Side of Sovereignity Loss Oleksandr Fisun Naialiya Vinnykova 205

7 Sovereigntism as a Vocation and Profession: Imperial Roots, Current State, Possible Prospects Ruslan Zaporozhchenko 231

8 Sovereignty as a Contested Concept: The Cases of Trumpism and Putinism Mikhail Minakov 281

9 Implementing International Human Rights Law: Recent Sovereigntist and Nationalist Trends Gulnara Shaikhutdinova 321

10 The Evolution of Sovereignty; From Nation State to Human Person Yurii Mielkov 343

On the Authors 363

Index 369

Editorial Reviews

Democratic politics creates changing majorities. Nation states comes with the promise of permanent majorities. The game of majorities is at the center of this original and important book focused on the study of political imagination in the post-soviet space.

Ivan Krastev

This volume offers multiple perspectives on the process of (re-)imagining post-Soviet identities. Framed by the original concept of ‘ideological creativity’, several case studies explore how majorities define the ‘self’ and ‘the other’, how identities are shaped by particular spaces, and how claims to sovereignty remain contested. A thoughtful contribution to ongoing debates.

Gwendolyn Sasse

In this volume Mikhail Minakov has carefully selected a unique group of experts to assemble a path-breaking and challenging volume. The volume focuses on perhaps the most critical and most neglected question in the field today—the invention and construction of “majorities” in post-Soviet space. The brilliance of the volume is in this: instead of viewing majorities as solely reductions, as impositions from outside powers, Minakov and the collection’s authors underscore that majorities, for good and ill, are the consequence of political imaginaries by active, self-fashioning political agents. Thus, the authors present the post-Soviet space as a place of articulated and rearticulated ideologies, and of self and group conceptions, symbolic developments of worldview and of collective space.

Christopher Donohue

Combining philosophy, sociology, political science, and public history, this volume focuses on the powers of imagination in the mastery of everyday life—individual, national, and global. Consisting of ten research papers, the collection documents the panorama of broad East-European “ideological creativity”, which is manifested in construction of new sovereign majorities. Combining universal meanings with post-Soviet specificities, these stories present the current debates about state sovereignty and ideological sovereigntism in the wider contexts of post-transition, demodernization, and deglobalization. Sophisticated and complex, these analyses will inspire generations of researchers who will be puzzled by the mysteries of our time.

Alexander Etkind

The three decades of political turmoil in the post-Soviet states, hollowed by their fleeting and fleeing elites while still presumed to be transitioning towards something more civilized, does not mean only a lasting crisis. In the countries with the once formidable intelligentsia like Ukraine and Georgia, the same disorderly conditions can sometimes foster intellectual creativity of the highest world mark. Read this book and marvel at the potent phrases such as: Legitimacy now belongs to the global Maidan which exists outside the modern state.

Georgi Derluguian