1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

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result of ethnonational reidentification or assimilation has become an activated strategy. The Baltic nations
over time (Silver 1986). According to this measure, have clearly been most nationalistic; close to the
the least nationally conscious communities are the entire membership turned out for independence ral-
small groups of people of the Siberian north and also a lies-indicating a high degree of national conscious-
number of Finnic groups such as the Karelians and ness-and they were least willing to compromise on
Mordvinians, whose members were undergoing a pro- the question of political independence. The least
cess of reidentification toward Russians during much nationalistic of the titular groups in the former Union
of the Soviet period. It is also true that members who republics are in Central Asia. For example, Tajikistan
live outside their home republics are more likely to has erupted into civil war; the conflict is, at least in
acculturate and assimilate through an intergenera- part, intranational and interethnic, indicating a low
tional process of reidentification (Kaiser 1988, 1994). level of national consciousness and the continued pri-
Although ethnic reidentification is a useful general macy of subnational, localized ethnic identities. The
indicator of national consciousness, this measure does degree of national solidarity is lowest in Central Asia,
have limits because it does not indicate the strength of and the nationalized elites have had the most difficulty
national consciousness amohg the population that calling their groups to action.
considered itself to be part of the nation (that is, those
who did not reidentify). As a final point regarding this factor, it is important to
note that there is a lack of correspondence between the
Another way of assessing national consciousness is to degree of national consciousness and the level of
study the behavior of indiviiluals and to determine to interethnic violence. For example, the Tajik civil war
what degree each member of the nation behaves in a has resulted in much greater loss of life and disloca-
way that is consonant with nationalism. Nationalism ion than has the constitutional nationalism pursued by
here is defined as both an ideology and a political Estonians and Latvians.
strategy. In Nationalismand the State (1982, 3), John
Breuilly states that the political doctrine of national- Strength of Attachment to Place of Residence
ism has three essential tenets: A sense of homeland rises with national conscious-
ness (Kaiser 1991, 1994). As an ethnonational com-
- "There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar munity becomes more nationalistic, this sense of
character." homeland becomes politicized and is converted into
territorial nationalism. 3 Nationalism is an explicitly
e "The interests and values of the nation take priority geographic ideology and strategy, a political action
over all other interests and values." program to make the borders of state and homeland
congruent (Williams 1989; Gettner 1983).
- "The nation must be as independent as possible.
This usually requires at least the attainment of polit- Nationality policies in the USSR facilitated the devel-
ical sovereignty." opment of a politicized sense of homeland. First, the
federal structure helped give definite shape, size, and
National consciousness as discussed above is borders to homelands that for the masses of most
addressed in Breuilly's first tenet. Beyond this, the pri- groups were only vaguely perceived in the 1920s (see
macy of national identity and the political objective figure 7).
that this inspires (that is, the attainment of indepen-
dence) are of crucial importance in understanding 7 From a nationalist perspective, the ancestral homeland is the only
nationalism as a political and geographic action pro- place where the nation can survive and prosper in the future. If
gram. Applying this to the former USSR, it is rela- nationalists view the nation as a primordial organism, they also
typically view it as an organism that can thrive only when rooted in
ively obvious at this point that ethnoregional the soil of the ancestral homeland.
differences exist in the degree to which nationalism
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