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 Language and Belarusian Nation-Building in the Light of Modern Theories on Nationalism
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa The subject of this paper is a historical analysis of the Belarusian nation-building process with some emphasis put on the role played by language as a marker for delimitation and as a national symbol used for political mobilisation. The purpose of this analysis is to seek explanations for the weakness of the Belarusian national identity today by referring to the modern theories on nationalism.
Nation-building can be studied with the help of various theoretical approaches of which the currently dominating are the so-called constructionist/instrumentalist approach (Anderson 1983, Gellner 1983, Hobsbawm 1990) and the postmodernist one that treats nationalism as a discourse (Brubaker 1996). However, all these approaches do not satisfactorily explain people´s intense emotional engagement in national questions. Therefore we could see in the 1990s the emergence of the theories trying to add an important socio-psychological dimension to the analysis of nationalism. One of these is William Bloom´s identification theory (see Bloom 1990) that I decided to use in the following analysis of the nation-building in Belarus.
Bloom claims that every individual possesses an inherent drive to seek, enhance and protect identity. In modern times national identification has become the one most frequently sought. When a group identifies with the same national idea, i.e. internalises the same national identity, they will tend to act together to protect and enhance the shared identity. This will to act on the behalf of the shared national identity is called by Bloom ”national identity dynamic”. The identification theory postulates at least three preconditions which have to be simultaneously fulfilled in order for a group´s national identification to succeed and generate the ”national identity dynamic”. Firstly, a situation must occur in which the existing identity of the individuals in the group is judged unsatisfactory by at least part of its members. Secondly, a strong leading élite must emerge from within the group, it has to communicate to the group a sense of the identity crisis and offer as a solution a national ideology, which will serve as a springboard for the emancipation of the group. Thirdly, those symbolic resources that the élite uses in the construction of the national identity (for delimiting and integrating the community) must be connected to the experience of the group. The symbols must be perceived as appropriate, i.e. representative of a system of attitudes and behaviour which in the life of the group give a feeling of psychological security.
How were these preconditions fulfilled in the case of Belarusians?
Up to the 19th century it was not possible to speak of a Belarusian national identity. Until this time the term Belarusian had a sub-ethnic, primarily geographical, meaning. On the other hand, during the pre-modern era the people on the Belarusian territory had a sense of an ethnic identity as a part of the community of so called ”ruskije”, which comprised ancestors to modern Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians. The most important markers of this identity were the Orthodox religion, a sense of shared origin in the old Rus´ (the Kiev realm), a collective name ”ruskije” (from ”Rus”) and a shared written language: Church Slavonic. However, the politically active part of the ”ruskije” in Belarus, the gentry, exposed a dual identity. In an ethnic sense they identified as ”rusikije” (in latin ”Rutheni”) and in a political sense as Lithuanians or later most frequently as Poles (natio Polonica) since they belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian state.
The roots of modern Belarusian nationalism can be found first in the identity crisis which the Ruthenian gentry experienced after the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Following the defeats of the Polish uprisings against Russian rule (1830 and 1863), and the ensuing Russian campaigns against Polish culture, part of the Ruthenian gentry started to view their Polishness as a burden. Some (especially those stripped of their title and privileges) converted to the Orthodox faith, (Vakar, 1956, p.74) while others, under the influence of Romanticism and the ”demonstration effect” of the new ethno-nationalist ideologies of neighbouring peoples, chose to formulate their own Belarusian national ideology.
The end of the 19th century saw the beginning of small-scale political nationalist agitation. At first, the national élite consisted mainly of Catholics (frequently former Greek Catholics, forced to abandon their faith by Russian authorities). They had a strong sense of their separate identity vis-a-vis the Russians. Later a small group of Orthodox Belarusians joined the movement, having rejected Russian state-nationalism as undemocratic and turning to Belarusian nationalism, which appeared emancipating by contrast (Radzik 1995). Thus, at the turn of the century, there emerged in Belarus an intelligentsia élite who attempted to communicate to the masses ideas about their economic and political deprivation, and the need to oppose this by means of a national ideology. However, this nationally aware élite was very weak. It was small, divided and without social prestige. Moreover, the communication of this élite with the masses, that according to Karl Deutch (1953) is so important for the spread of national ideas, was hampered. The communication was hampered both institutionally – due to the prohibition by the Tsarist regime of publications in Belarusian and dissemination of Belarusian national propaganda - and structurally – due to the illiteracy and isolation of the peasants caused by the late modernisation of the Belarusian territory (Guthier 1977, cf. Gellner 1983). Another researcher on the nationalism questions, Miroslaw Hroch (1985) has shown that in the situation of late modernisation the Churches can play an important role in the “nationalisation” of the masses. However, in contrast to many Eastern European ethno-nations, described by Hroch, the Churches in Belarus did not function as a communication channel between this population and the Belarusian national élite. Instead, the Orthodox priests used their authority to promote Russian national identity, while Catholic priests usually supported the Polish one (Radzik 1991).
As a result of these factors the diffusion of the national ideology was very difficult and it first achieved a modicum of success during and after the First World War, when the world of the Belarusian peasants was shattered by political and social transformations, including the partition of Belarusian territory between Poland and the Soviet Union (Pawluczuk 1972). During the 1920s the Belarusian peasant population became literate. For the first time, they gained access to Belarusian national high culture, with its own standardised Belarusian language (Bieder 1991, p.408, Wexler 1974, p.227-250). This happened first and foremost in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, during the so called “korenizatsja” period that in the case of Belarusia meant "Belarusification" combined with the spread of the Communist ideals. However, these favourable conditions for the Belarusian peasants´ identification with the Belarusian nation lasted only for about a decade. The Belarusians´ progress towards a modern nation was interrupted as early as the 1930s, when Stalin started a campaign against so-called ”bourgeoisie nationalism”. The spelling reform from 1933 was conceived as a method to bring the Belarusian language near the Russian and reflected the Russsifying tendencies in the society (Wexler 1974, p.270-275, McMillin 1980). During Stalin´s purges the greater part of the Belarusian national élite was liquidated. The few national activists who survived felt compelled to collaborate with the Germans during the Second World War (Turonek, 1993). Accused of supporting the Nazis, they were compromised and the Bealrusian national ideology together with them. After the Second World War, when the Belarusians went through modernisation on a mass scale, they found themselves without a national élite capable of conveying national symbols and mobilising around them. The second precondition needed according to Bloom (1990) for the successful identification of a population with the nation was thus not fulfilled in Belarus.
There is also reason to doubt whether the third precondition for the national identification - the use of the "appropriate" (in Bloom´s terms) symbols - was fulfilled during the Belarusian nation-building process.
When a cultural and political élite constructs a national identity, it chooses identity markers, symbols, etc. Under the influence of the "demonstration effect" of other East European nationalisms, the Belarusian national movement chose language as a national symbol. A symbol can be effective when it concerns a people´s experience of their situation. However, the Belarussion language was never really perceived of as a sharply delimiting marker between Belarusians and the neighbouring people. The Belarusians lived in an area where continuum of Slavic dialects was spoken. In such territories, it is hard to draw distinctions between different languages. For many years, the Belarusian peasants had considered that they did not speak a particular language but merely used some variety of Russian or Polish (see Wasilewski 1925, Rieger 1995). In order to be used as a national marker and symbol, Belarusian needed to be standardised, codified and differentiated from Russian and Polish. It is a very difficult task to establish a new literary language in a territory where two other closely related literary languages already fulfil a range of functions. The Belarusian élite, small and divided between Catholics and Orthodox (for example on the issue of the alphabet), was hardly capable of promoting literary Belarusian. During the whole of the modern era until now, with only a short break of one decade - the Belarusification of the 1920s - Belarusian developed in the shadow of either Polish or Russian. The use of Belarusian was almost always functionally limited. It had the lowest possible social status. For generation after generation, Belarusians internalised a negative idea of their mother tongue as an underdeveloped language, which stood between them and the modern world, a dialect associated with villages (Pičeta 1991). Under such circumstances, Belarusian could not be perceived of as a confidence-boosting security-creating symbol of the kind that, according to Bloom´s theory, is necessary in order to facilitate the identification with one´s own group. Consequently, the third precondition described by Bloom as necessary for the creation of ”national identity dynamic” has not been fulfilled in Belarusian case. The linguistc-ethnic construction of nation undertaken by the Belarusian élite has never been accomplished and the Belarusian national identity has remained weak.
In the 20th century the Belarusians were formally granted the status of a separate nation with, as its external symbol, their own Soviet Republic. At the same time, however, the central authorities did everything in their power to hinder the development of Belarusian nationalism and they were not interested to develop a viable national Belarusian high culture with which all the inhabitants of the republic could identify. Instead, identification with the Soviet state was promoted (the identity of ”sovjetskij čelovek”) and Belarusians were exposed to the intensive influence of Russian high culture (Bankowski-Zullich 1995, p.321), which was conceived to be a bearer of Soviet identity. The result of this process is that Belarusian high culture today is weak. It is called national on the level of discourse, but on the level of practice it functions among the majority of Belarusians as a kind of regional culture or ethnic at best (Proharava 1993, Sajevič 1993). Generally, Belarusian society today is culturally and linguistically bivalent (with Russian and Belarusian) or sometimes even polyvalent. Cultural valence means that they not only are competent in more than one culture, but actually can identify emotionally with more than one culture (Kloskowska 1993, p.11). The Belarusians are carriers of two (sometimes even more) cultures, a situation not unusual for so-called ”transitional borderland”, from which Belarus grew (Törnquit-Plewa 1998). There is, however, an imbalance in the Belarusian-Russian cultural bivalence (Gustavsson 1995, p.54). A small part of the intelligentsia are the carriers of the Belarusian national high culture and also the Russian high culture, while the people are carriers of the Russian high culture and the Belarusian folk culture. Accordingly, only the small national élite views Belarusian culture and language as a national heritage which must be cultivated and transmitted, while large masses of the people consider everything Belarusian in terms of local culture, and do not politicise it. Until the fall of the Soviet Union this ethnic and regional Belorusian identity could exist together with political identification with the Soviet state. However, in 1991 the situation changed radically. With the emergence of an independent Belarus and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the double Soviet-Belarusian identification lost its validity and many Belarusians experienced confusion (Proharova 1993, p.149-154). One could even speak in Bloom´s terms about an ”identity crisis” among Belarusians.
The Belarusian declaration of independence in 1991 was not the result of the people´s determined battle, but a consequence of political circumstances favourable to the Belarusian national idea. Nevertheless, the small nationally conscious élite gathered around BNF (Belarusian National Front) wanted to use the birth of the independent Belarusian state for a national mass mobilisation, and give the new state a national character. They hoped to reformulate the Belarusian identity and give it new political shape. With this goal in mind, the national élite returned to their ancestors’ strategy of constructing the Belarusian nation as an ethno-linguistic community. Between 1991 and 1995 the Belarusian élite made a tremendous effort to make language the symbol of Belarusian national identity. Under their pressure the parliament of 1991 gave Belarusian a privileged status as the state language. The regulations spoke of a ten-year period for gradual change from Russian to Belarusian in schools and other state institutions. The national élite wanted to carry through an intensive Belarusification. They pressed for quick change to Belarusian in schools and the media (for statistics describing changes see Lyc 1996, Gustavsson 1995). They suggested a language reform in order to purify Belarusian of Russian influences. However, a large part of Belarusians was critical towards this language planning and towards the Belarusification policy in general (Radkevic 1996, Miklasevski 1995). Many Belarusians (including teachers required to teach in Belarusian) had considerable difficulties using the Belarusian literary language. Therefore they preferred to use Russian in official contexts while speaking ”trašanka” (a mixture of Belarusian and Russian) in private. However, the most important reason for the critique must be seen in the fact that people living in Belarus do not experience the connection between language and national identity. About 20% of the people who call themselves ethnic Belorusians declared at that time that Russian was their mother tongue (Eberhardt 1995). But even they who declared Belarusian to be their mother tongue were in practise bilingual or multilingual. The situation in Belarus demonstrates clearly that the concept of ”mother tongue” (like the concept of ”nation”) is not natural and self-evident, but fluid and context-related. Members of national and ethnic minorities in Belarus (about 22% of the inhabitants) are mostly linguistically Russified. The Polish minority (about 417.000 people) constitutes the exception, but they do not declare Polish to be their mother tongue, only Belarusian. In the Polesie region there is also a regional group claiming that their mother tongue is their dialect, which they call Polesian and try to codify it (Duličenko 1995). Under these circumstances the Belarusian language could not function as a base for Belarusian national identity and an appropriate symbol for political mobilisation. This became clear in the referendum of 1995, initiated by the Belarusian president Lukasenka. In the referendum 83,3% of the Belarusians voted to grant Russian a status equal to that of Belarusian. In this way they gave a political expression to their de facto cultural bivalence and bilingualism (Törnquist-Plewa 1997, p-93-94)
The referendum results shows that the ethno-linguistic concept of a Belarusian nation is anacronistic and not viable. Using this symbol the Belarusian elité failed to reformulate the Soviet-Belorussian identity into a national Belarusian identity. The political initiative went to pro-Russian, anti-democratic president Lukasenka, who offered during the 1990-s another solution to the Belarusian identity crisis: the return to Russian as a second state language and political union with Russia. This identity project (i.e. double citizenship) is in fact a remade version of the Soviet-Belorussian identity. At the same time it is in line with the older Belarusian tradition of double and complementary political identifications. This may contribute to its attraction. However, the struggle for the formation and reformulation of Belarusian identity is not yet finished. National identities in Belarus are still fluid and negotiable. The failure of linguistic Belarusification and the signed, but not carried out, agreement to create a union of Russia and Belarus should not be interpreted as the death warrant of Belarusian national identity. The small Belarusian national élite still have a chance to gain support from people if they can show a better solution to the Belarusian identity crisis than Lukasenka does. In order to mobilise the masses politically around the Belarusian national idea, its ideologists must find a symbol which can fulfil a delimiting and cohesive function in Belarusian society. Such a symbol in the Belarusian context should not exclude (as the Belarusian language did) but instead allow multiculturalism, bilingualism and even binational identification. An important symbolic resource for many nation-builders in the world has always been a state. The Belarusians managed to get their own state and it could serve as a symbol for mass identification if it were perceived as protector and cultural and material benefactor. This means that the Belarusian national élite should use the state as a national symbol. However in order to do it they have to fight for democratic reforms in the country and create a political programme to convince Belarusians that they gain from safeguarding the state’s independence. They should also promote the kind of ”national narrative” which binds Belarus more to Europe than to Russia. It goes without saying that the European institutions’ support for a democratic Belarusian national project is crucial for its success. However, the way to such development in Belarus is still long.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, professor of East and Central European Studies at Lund University in Sweden. In her research she focuses on the role of language, history and myths in identity formation and nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe. Her publication list includes The Wheel of Polish Fortune. Myths in Polsih Collective Consciousness During the First Years of Solidarity” (1992) and
Vitryssland. Språk och nationalism i ett kulturellt gränsland (”Belarus. Language and nationalism in the Borderland”). The last one is the first scientific monograph on Belarus written in Swedish
STRESZCZENIE
Artykuł zawiera próbę analizy białoruskiego procesu narodowotwórczego, Szczegolną uwagę poświęca autorka roli języka jako wyznacznika tożsamosci i narodowego symbolu. Celem analizy jest poszukiwanie przyczyn słabości dzisiejszej tożsamości narodowej Białorusinów w oparciu o kilka współczesnych teorii o tworzeniu narodów. Autorka odwołuje się do teorii konstrukcjonistów Deutcha, Gellnera i Hrocha, ale bazuje głównie swoją argumentację na socjopsychologicznej teorii identyfikacji Blooma ( z 1990 roku). Według Blooma proces narodowotwórczy może zakończyć sie sukcesem tzn, internalizacją określonej narodowej tożsamości na skalę masową i gotowością jej obrony , jeżeli zostaną spełnione co najmniej trzy warunki: Po pierwsze musi powstać sytuacja w której dotychczasowa identyfikacja grupowa nie zadawala przynajmniej części grupy. Po drugie, z tejże grupy musi wyłonić się silna elita, która sformułuje ideę nowej tożsamości i będzie w stanie komunikować tą ideę pozostalym członkom grupy. Po trzecie, elita konstruując ideę narodową wybierze takie symbole i wyznaczniki tożsamości, które będą współgrać z doświaczeniami grupy i zaspakajać jej psychiczne potrzeby – dawać poczucie bezpieczeństwa, dumy itp.
Historia tworzenia się nowoczesnego narodu białoruskiego pokazuje, że pierwszy warunek Blooma – kryzys dotychczasowej tożsamoćci i potrzeba stworzenia nowej – został spełniony pod koniec XIX wieku. Wielostopniowa tożsamośc rusińsko-polsko-litewska na terytorium Białorusi utraciła siłę atrakcji i została zastąpiona przez integralne idee narodowe polskie, rosyjskie, litewskie i białoruskie. Natomiast jeśli chodzi o dwa pozostałe warunki, opisane przez Blooma, autorka artykułu argumentuje, że nie zostały one spełnione na Białorusi. Elita białoruska była niemalże przez cały okres nowoczesnej białoruskiej historii słaba, podzielona i co jakiś czas niszczona. Jej komunikacja z masami uniemożliwiona była strukturalnie (późny proces modernizacyjny, brak narodowego koscioła) i instytucjonalnie (rusyfikacja). Szczególnej krytyce poddaje autorka fakt, że elita białoruska uczynila język białoruski podstawowym symbolem narodowym. Symbol ten nie spełniał w kontekście białoruskim (wielojęzyczność o charakterze genetycznym) wymogów określonych w teorii Blomma. Tę samą strategię (kampanię białorusyfikacji) wybrała białoruska elita narodowa po upadku Związku Radzieckiego, co zakończyło się jej klęską polityczną w połowie lat 1990-tych. Autorka artykułu postuluje konieczność szukania przez elitę białoruską nowych symboli narodowych i sugeruje, że suwerenne państwo białoruskie mogłoby się stać takim
symbolem.
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