Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Terry”13 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 result of ethnonational reidentification or assimilation over time (Silver 1986). According to this measure, the least nationally conscious communities are the small groups of people of the Siberian north and also a number of Finnic groups such as the Karelians and Mordvinians, whose members were undergoing a pro cess of reidentification toward Russians during much of the Soviet period. It is also true that members who live outside their home republics are more likely to acculturate and assimilate through an intergenera- tional process of reidentification (Kaiser 1988, 1994). Although ethnic reidentificaftion is a useful general indicator of national consciousness, this measure does have limits because it does not indicate the strength of national consciousness among the population that considered itself to be part of the nation (that is, those who did not reidentify). Another way of assessing national consciousness is study the behavior of individuals and to determine to what degree each member of the nation behaves in a way that is consonant with nationalism. Nationalism here is defined as both an ideology and a political strategy. In Nationalism and the State (1982, 3), John Breuilly states that the political doctrine of national- ism has three essential tenets: ~ “There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.” ~ “The interests and values of the nation take priority over all other interests and values.” - “The nation must be as independent as possible. I0 This usually requires at least the attainment of polit- ical sovereignty.” . National consciousness as discussed above is addressed in Breuilly’s first tenet. Beyond this, the pri- macy of national identity and the political objective that this inspires (that is, the attainment of indepen- dence) are of crucial importance in understanding nationalism as a political and geographic action pro- gram. Applying this to the former USSR, it is rela- tively obvious at this point that ethnoregional differences exist in the degree to which nationalism has become an activated strategy. The Baltic nations have clearly been most nationalistic; close to the entire membership tumed out for independence ral- lies-—indicating a high degree of national conscious- ness-—and they were least willing to compromise on the question of political independence. The least nationalistic of the titular groups in the fonner Union republics are in Central Asia. For example, Tajikistan has erupted into civil war; the conflict is, at least in part, intranational and interethnic, indicating a low level of national consciousness and the continued pri- macy of subnational, localized ethnic identities. The degree of national solidarity is lowest in Central Asia, and the nationalized elites have had the most difficulty calling their groups to action. As a final point regarding this factor, it is important to note that there is a lack of correspondence between the degree of national consciousness and the level of interethnic violence. For example, the Tajik civil war has resulted in much greater loss of life and disloca- tion than has the constitutional nationalism pursued by Estonians and Latvians. Strength of Attachment to Place of Residence A sense of homeland rises with national conscious- ness (Kaiser 1991, 1994). As an etlmonational com- munity becomes more nationalistic, this sense of homeland becomes politicized and is converted into territorial nationalism? Nationalism is an explicitly geographic ideology and strategy, a political action program to make the borders of state and homeland congruent (Williams 1989; Gettner 1983). Nationality policies in the USSR facilitated the devel- opment of a politicized sense of homeland. First, the federal structure helped give definite shape, size, and borders to homelands that for the masses of most groups were only vaguely perceived in the 1920s (see figure 7). 3 From a nationalist perspective, the ancestral homeland is the only place where the nation can survive and prosper in the future. If nationalists view the nation as a primordial organism, they also typically view it as an organism that can thrive only when rooted in the soil of the ancestral homeland. Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.