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THE NATIONAL IDEA AND
NATIONAL IDEOLOGY IN THE SUSTAINABILITY OF ETHNOCULTURAL IDENTITY
Kenan ALLAHVERDIEV
Ph.D. (Philos.), Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Azerbaijan Tourism and Management University (Baku, Azerbaijan)
ABSTRACT
T
he author investigates the correlative ties between the categories "national idea" and "national ideology" and their
impact on the ethnocultural identity of peoples in the context of the contradictory processes at the current stage of globalization.
KEYWORDS: national idea, national ideology, ethnocultural identity, globalization.
Introduction
This analysis focuses on revealing the correlative ties in the national idea-national ideology-ethnocultural identity triad and how they interact with each other.
My interest was stirred by the events that have been unfolding and are still unfolding in Ukraine. Some people interpret them as the inevitable revival of what is called the "Russian World" (essentially the idea of the ethnocivilizational "mission" of the Slavic-Russian proto-ethnicity, or future super-ethnicity, the choice depending on the political bias), others defend the idea of "Ukrainianism" (that is, national-civil ideology), while others still advocate the notorious "European choice" (as a unique cross-ethnocultural identity).
Even this simple and extremely condensed enumeration of the components of the political, cultural, and ethnic aspects of the Ukrainian tragedy points to the possibility that other and highly varied configurations might appear today or in the near future.
No reasonable or self-respecting expert today is ready to forecast which of the possible alternatives will be realized in the form of Hegel's "reasonable reality," "traded" in the course of the Great Game on the Grand Chessboard, or sacrificed and forgotten.
One thing is clear, however, in the globalized and contradictory world these three aspects of ethnopolitical and cultural life are intertwined to the extent that, metaphorically speaking, they can only be articulated as a choir, and not as individual arias.
My approach to the national idea-ideology-identity triad can be replenished with the following three simple, yet coherent questions: Are the concepts "national idea" and "national ideology" tools
or stages of nation-building? Is ethnocultural identity the choice of history or of politicians? and What will become the "sacral offering" to globalization: the national idea, ideology, or identity?
Are the Concepts "National Idea" and "National Ideology" Tools or Stages of Nation-Building?
At one time, Russian scholar and academician Nikita Moiseev wrote about the role of the national idea in social life: "No nation is likely to survive, let alone preserve its culture, without a clear understanding of its national idea or a certain vision of its prospects. This makes society and the people vulnerable."1 This is very true, however the range of definitions of the national idea is extremely wide, and becomes even wider keeping in mind that most ethnicities (nations) rigidly correlate the concept and philosophy of the national idea with the past and present political and economic format, geopolitical context, etc.
To clarify my point I will rely on a specific example of the national idea in one country—the idea of "Azerbaijan-ism." It is based on three dominants:
■ The national development strategy. According to the official viewpoint, the national idea as the basic element for modernizing Azerbaijani society will serve as an important component of the new political culture that is taking shape in Azerbaijan.
■ The geopolitical development strategy. Few people involved in the internal discussion of the idea of so-called Greater Azerbaijan associate it with the idea of Azerbaijan-ism. It seems that concentrating on this and other virtual ideas (phobias) adds vehemence to ethnic and state relations in the region and pushes the possible development vectors of the national idea into the Procrustean bed of radical nationalism.
■ The national security strategy. Some members of the political-expert community offer a different interpretation and look at the essence of the national idea through the prism of national security and the need to preserve it. Political scientist Rizvan Guseynov has put the alternative ideas into a nutshell: "We still lack the main thing. I have in mind a national idea that would arm the state and be realized across the country as a clear-cut program. I think that the struggle for the occupied Azeri lands should become the strongest unifying stimulus for our people."2
I think that such a wide range of interpretations of the national idea is very acceptable for a country that has just moved away from the ethnization of politics to statist ethnicity. I can say more: what is frequently said about the national idea as a phenomenon limited to the post-Soviet developing countries poorly correlates with historical reality, even though those who say this argue that in developed democratic states, no one is losing sleep over whether they have a national idea or not.
This is hard to accept, since essentially all nations have well-known and popular clichés that express their national idea in a few words. Take for instance, America's recognition of Divine Prov-
1 N.N. Moiseev, "Rossia na pereputie," Sotsialno-gumanitarnye znaniia, No. 4, 1999, pp. 173-174.
2 R. Guseynov, "Azerbaidzhanu neobkhodima obshchenatsionalnaia idea," available at [http://www.nedelya.az/articlen. php?catno=0100014#1], 17 October, 2008.
idence expressed in "God bless America" and the contemporary idée fixe of American supremacy; Russia's notion that it is the last bulwark of the Orthodox world ("Moscow is the Third Rome and there will never be a Fourth") and its striving to the neo-imperialist "Eurasian Projects;" the Jews' claim that they are "God's chosen people" and Israel's absorption policy; and China's ideas ranging from the Middle Celestial Kingdom to "concentration on itself' as the strategic aim of the twenty-first century.
The recent history of the European peoples and the European Union as their main achievement tells us how they, having discarded the obsolete idea of the "white man's burden," started talking about multiculturalism, a new idée fixe, and a magic wand expected to resolve the problems that are still piling up.
This means that the national idea is a concise form of what people think about their past, their cultural mission in the world, etc.
The question of national ideology, its meaning, and its correlation with the national idea looks even more complicated when discussed in the media and quasi-scholarly publications.
There can be no national ideology where there is no national idea and, therefore, there will be no concept of national policy. Hence ethnic, confessional, and other clashes between the titular nation and national minorities in polyethnic states and an impaired nationalities policy.3 Those who write about this also warn their readers against confusing the concepts of national idea and national ideology, saying that they are not one and the same thing. The national idea can be described as a strategy, while ideology is a tactical tool used to implement the strategy. Ideology is the methods and means used to popularize the national idea; it is a vehicle of the national idea.4 Historian Eldar Ismailov was of more or less the same opinion: "National ideology is a wider aspect of the problem that not only covers purely ideological issues, but also economics, politics, ethics, and aesthetics, in short, the human environment. The national idea, on the other hand, concentrates on one problem, i.e. recognition of the Azeris as a separate and very individual phenomenon, very special people that occupy their own niche in an ethnically highly diverse world."5
So far, however, the expert community has not arrived at a consolidated opinion. Philosopher Amrali Ismailov, for example, has concluded that there is no national ideology, and cannot be one. He calls it nonsense, an absurdity and self-deception, and says that there can only be a national idea.6 Other authors are even more radical; they insist that formulating a national idea and national ideology terminologically, building a special policy on this, and imposing it on society smack of totalitarianism.7
The above suggests at least two theoretical constructs. According to the "realistic" construct, spiritual-political components—national idea and national ideology—are two logical results of the course of history, socioeconomic history in particular. Since I have already written about this in detail above, I will only point here to two possible interpretations. Either the components of national existence appear stage-by-stage in keeping with a certain order—first the national idea (and national unity) and then national ideology (and stronger unity)—or they emerge concurrently as two halves of a single whole—strategy and tactics—to use political parlance.
3 R. Guseynzade, "Azerbaidzhanstvo—odna iz form patriotizma," available at [http://ethnoglobus.az/index.php/vse-novosti/item/478], 8 January, 2015.
4 R. Mekhtiev, "Sovremenny Azerbaidzhan kak voploshchenie natsionalnoy ideii," available at [http://1news.az/ analytics/20110519053419632.html], 19 May, 2011.
5 Bakinski rabochi, 18 June, 2011.
6 A. Ismailov, "Ne natsionalnaia ideologia, a natsionalnaia ideia," available at [www.1news.az], 30 September, 2009.
7 Z. Guliev, "Opasnye igry v natsionalnuiu ideiu," available at [http://minval.az/author/219/#sthash.dJGtO4wf.dpuf], 29 April, 2013.
According to another theoretical construct very popular in Western classical ethnopolitical writings based on instrumentalist and constructivist paradigms, national ideas are a prior to the nation. Ernest Gellner's famous "nationalism produced nations, not the other way around"8 offers a succinct description of the above, and further "nations are the artifacts of man's convictions and loyalties and solidarities."9 Different authors identify different dominants in the formation of nationalism and nations, such as the undisguised voluntarism of Urs Alternatt10; the vague political program of Eric Hobsbawm11; the intellectual elites of Miroslav Hroch,12 etc.
The very principle of the primacy of the national idea as a form-shaping feature of a certain "imagined entity" over all the other components that build the nation has been and still is criticized. According to prominent British scholar Anthony Smith, nations do not appear out of nowhere; "some historians," he goes on to say, "have perhaps given ideology too much attention and explanatory weight; they overlook or bypass the importance of processes of nation-formation, which are independent of the activities of nationalist ideologists".13 It is not surprising that Karl Deutsch, a prominent German political scientist, arrived, if not at Marxist, at least at materialist conclusions (through his study of communication systems) that nations resulted from the industrial revolution.14
I feel much closer to Anthony Smith, who writes about the "ethnic roots of nationalism," by which he means that ethnicity is fertile soil for nationalist ideology and that, however, nationalism develops under the pressure of other factors.15
By way of summing up, I can say that there are two main approaches—ethnic and ethnocul-tural—to the factors that determine the emergence of a national "idea-ideology." They are not mutually contradictory, rather they are mutually complimentary. To emerge, a national idea needs the prototype of a nation, an ethnic community that gradually shapes a national idea out of its ethnocul-tural identity, common language and culture in particular.
I believe that national ideology as a synthesis of national-ethnic ideas helps the nation (ethnicity) to understand its social and ethnic commonness as a single organism and its entire set of rational-axiological and emotional characteristics. National ideology as a result of systematization and generalization of national interests by the political elite serves as the foundation for the nation's self-determination in the social, political, and spiritual spheres. Despite the fact that national ideology contains and preserves its genetic basis, genetically hued basic ideas, postulates, and values, there are several possible vectors of transformation:
—the ethnic component is treated as an absolute in national ideology, either in the form of nationalism, or so-called macro-nationalism, the positive and negative aspects of which are covered in classical works by Louis Leo Snyder Global Mini-Nationalisms: Autonomy or
8 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2006, p. xxi.
9 Ibid., p. 7.
10 U. Altermatt, Das Fanal von Sarajevo. Ethnonationalismus in Europa, Verlag Neue Züricher Zeitung, Zürich, 1996.
11 "Nationalism is a political programme, and in historic terms, a fairly recent one. It holds that groups defined as 'nations' have the right to, and therefore ought to, form territorial states of the kind that have become standard since the French Revolution" (E.J. Hobsbawm, "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today," in: Mapping the Nation, ed. by Gopal Balakrishnan, Verso Books, 2012, pp. 256).
12 M. Hroch, "From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation: The Nation-building Process in Europe," in: Mapping the Nation, pp. 78-97.
13 See: A. Smith, "Nationalism and the Historians," in: Mapping the Nation, p. 175.
14 K.W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, Cambridge, Mass., 1953.
15 A. Smith, Theories of Nationalism, London, 1971; idem., Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1979; idem., The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World, Cambridge, 1981; idem., The Ethnic Origin of Nation, Oxford, 1986; idem., National Identity, London, 1991.
Independence16 and Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-Movements.11 The latter discusses the Turkic dilemma: Pan-Ottomanism, Pan-Turkism, and Pan-Turanism.18
—the sociopolitical component prevails in national ideology when individual national-ethnic ideas are integrated to form the political ideology of a single state, that is, when national ideology becomes state ideology and a tool of sorts used by a polyethnic nation to realize its interests.
In any configuration, the national idea and national ideology are bound by ethnicity, no matter how it is interpreted—either as man's inborn qualities, behavioral stereotypes, and common environment of symbols, or using other definitions. What is important is its ability to regulate individual social behavior and promote psychological stability, definition, and socialization of the values inherent in the given ethnic environment.
Recognized as the cornerstone of the "national idea-national ideology" tandem, ethnicity reveals the mobilizing mechanism used to achieve certain aims. This creates a string of determinants of ethnonational qualities that develop along a spiral and are present in any given nation: "ethnicity-ethnocultural identity-ethnosocial requirements and interests-national idea-national ideology-the nation-state as a developed ethnosocial organism."
This reveals another extremely important aspect—the dependence of temporal descriptions of the emerging national idea and national ideology on a specific matrix of their substantive basis. These two components belong to different periods and stages of the nation's development as a entity of the historical process. More likely than not, the national idea is a "slogan-dream" of sorts rooted in the people's (ethnicity's) ethnocultural identity. Its outlines are vague, but the trend is clear: the ethnicity is developing into a nation. National ideology, on the other hand, is the mobilizing vector of the nation (which has taken or is taking shape) moving toward a fully-fledged ethnosocial mechanism, which means that the nation is blending with the state. The content of these phenomena will be differentiated by different history states prevailing at different stages of nation-building.
Is Ethnocultural Identity the Choice of History or of Politicians?
Ethnicity as a set of certain objective descriptions of the interaction of a social group with the environment demonstrates a certain degree of definiteness (a definite territory and ethnonym, two tangible realities), while the national idea and national ideology represent two different stages of the development of this quality. It is much harder to reveal the nature of a nation's ethnocultural identity in order to establish whether it is primordial or chosen by the ethnic group under the pressure of a very specific combination of internal and external factors; this means that the choice is historically determined.
In the most general form, ethnocultural identification can be defined as individual correlation with a sociocultural group (in our case ethnicity/nation) through imitation or enforced or free and deliberate choice.
16 L.L. Snyder, Global Mini-Nationalisms: Autonomy or Independence (Contributions in Political Science), Westport, Connecticut; Greenwood Press, London, England, First Edition, 1982.
11 L. Snyder, Macro-Nationalisms. A History of the Pan-Movements, Westport, Connecticut; Greenwood Press, London, England, 1984.
18 Ibid., pp. 114-128.
This fairly generalized description of the phenomenon of ethnocultural identification contains a deep-seated contradiction among its components: while the processes of ethnoformation and, hence, ethnic identity are evolutionary (that is, a change in any of its components does not change ethnic self-awareness), the processes of cultural self-determination can be relegated to the ethnotransforma-tional type. Here the changes are more dynamic and may replace, relatively quickly, the primary cultural archetype. This explains why many authors describe the problem of identity as a major challenge of our time on a par with globalization.19
This is primarily caused by the realization that globalization, while bringing down interstate and international walls, invigorates self-defense mechanisms among the globalized nations and the search for a refuge of sorts. Anthony Giddens offered an impressive description: "As the influence of tradition and custom shrink on a world-wide level, the very basis of our self-identity—our sense of self— changes. In more traditional situations, a sense of self is sustained largely through the stability of the social positions of individuals in the community. Where tradition lapses, and lifestyle choice prevails, the self isn't exempt. Self-identity has to be created and re-created on a more active basis than before."20
The range of perceptions of ethnocultural identity is fairly wide, therefore I will keep here to the most frequently used:
(1) normal—when a nation's image is perceived as positive and the need for identity is determined by personality types and situations;
(2) ethnocentric—an uncritical perception of one's own ethnicity as advantageous accompanied by certain elements of ethno-isolationism;
(3) ethnodominant—when belonging to a certain ethnicity is perceived as the highest value;
(4) ethnic fanaticism—an extreme form of ethnic identity coming close to self-sacrifice;
(5) ethnic indifference—when ethnic identity does not matter;
(6) ethnonihilism—a form of cosmopolitanism;
(7) ambivalent ethnicity—normally observed in mixed ethnic environments.21
It is not my task to dwell on historical examples of types of ethnocultural identity; however, I will point out that it stems from the "we-them" opposition and the desire of all peoples to find an answer to the question "who are we?"
Discussions—scholarly, quasi-scholarly, public, and political—began on the very first day of Azerbaijan's independence in an attempt to arrive at an answer to this question. The wide range of responses can be summed up as follows:
(1) we are designated as a Turkic people and "the national idea of Azerbaijan cannot be formulated unless we restore the time-tested self-name 'Turks' of the titular nation."22
(2) we are Azerbaijanis and "in the conditions of global transformation, it is highly important to preserve our national image, traditions, language, history, and the sociocultural background of the Azerbaijani people."
19 E.H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, W.W. Norton, 1994; S. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Free Press, 2005; M.A. Mikhailova, "Etnokulturnaia identichnost v usloviakh kulturnoy globalizatsii," available at [http://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/etnokulturnaya-identichnost-v-usloviyah-kulturnoy-globalizatsii].
20 A. Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives, Free Press, 2005, p. 42.
21 A.P. Sadokhin, Etnologia, Gardariki, Moscow, 2002, pp. 134-135.
22 F. Alekperli, "Natsionalnaia ideologia Azerbaidzhana," Zerkalo, 8 August, 2009.
Some authors try to oppose these two theses, while others attempt to lump them together into one. Nizami Jafarov, for example, proceeds from the thesis that Turkism rests on the ideology of Azerbaijan-ism.23
These discussions are useless from the academic and all other points of view. Indeed, in the final analysis, both the most widespread models of ethnosociocultural identity—ethnocentric (uncritical preference for one ethnicity and self-identification with it) and ethnodominant (one ethnicity among many others is preferred) offer no advantages when it comes to the modernization and renovation of society.
It is much more important to concentrate on the quest for innovational content of national development that would allow us to avoid social and cultural degradation and even marginalization of the country's population, as well as help it to find its place in the global world. "Azerbaijan-ism is an outcrop of national state-building, rather than ethnonational, awareness. It unites ethnic Azeris, Lezghians, Talyshes, Kurds, Russians, Avars, Jews, Tatars, etc. This is confirmed by the fact that national self-awareness—Azerbaijan-ism, statism, and a global approach to state problems prevail in the regions where national minorities live in compact groups."24
Ethnocultural and religious tolerance is one of the main components of this vector of the self-identity of any nation. There is any number of international documents related to tolerance as a factor of security and stability in the world,25 the main and the most inclusive among them being the Declaration of the Principles of Tolerance adopted by UNESCO in 1995 that says: "Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human."26
Much has been written about tolerance, but until recently the issue was never taken beyond its religious or religious-political aspects.
Russian academic Musi Gajimirzaev has pointed out the following in this respect: "Ethnoconfes-sional tolerance as a factor that ensures peace and security reflects the nature of the relations and sociopolitical activity of the political entities, including social, ethnic and confessional groups and individuals as tolerant and based on mutual understanding and harmony, which strongly affects the degree to which the individual, society, the state, and its regions are protected against external and internal threats."21
Here is an even more important question: What place does ethnoconfessionality hold in the ethnopolitical processes in the states of the Caucasus? The above paradigm points to four most important points:
(1) Ethnonational development in most of the titular and small ethnicities living in the Caucasus is still going on, while ethnoconfessionality, by its very nature, pushes aside ethnotrib-alism and sub-ethnic clans and accelerates ethnic consolidation.
(2) Because of their polyethnicity, all Caucasian states (monoethnic Armenia being the only exception) have been confronted with the task of moving the "coexistence" of the earlier relatively independent smaller ethnicities into a new format of ethnosocial unity, viz. a
23 N. Jafarov, "Na osnove ideologii Azerbaidzhanstva stoit tiurkizm," available at [http://ethnoglobus.com/index. php?l=ru&m=news&id=222].
24 G. Inanj, "Azerbaidzhanstvo ne etnicheskoe, a natsionalnoe soznanie," available at [http://www.1news.az/ authors/84/20091002032211102.html], 21 September, 2009.
25 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, 25 November, 1981, available at [http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/36/a36r055.htm]; Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, 18 December, 1992, available at [http://www.un.org/docu-ments/ga/res/41/a41r13 5 .htm].
26 [http://www.unesco.org/webworld/peace_library/UNESCO/HRIGHTS/124-129.HTM].
21 M.M. Gajimirzaev, Etnokonfessionlnaia tolerantnost kak faktor obespechenia mira i bezopasnosti na Severnom Kavkaze, Author's synopsis of the Ph.D. thesis, Stavropol, 2003, p. 9.
united people within each particular state with their ethnocultural diversity intact. This far from simple process (ethnic fusion in the parlance of ethnologists) largely depends on the degree to which the forms of ethnoconfessionality are developed.
(3) Late in the twentieth century, when the Soviet Union was falling apart, it was ethnoconfessionality that provided the moral-political and social-psychological justifications of the national states.
(4) Most of the polyethnic transition states, including those in the Caucasus, accepted ethnoconfessionality as a pragmatic ideological and political foundation of all types of constructs of the national idea, national ideology, and national ideal (the idea of Russia-ism or Azerbaijan-ism). The following question is of fundamental importance: if the development of ethnicities (nations) boils down to movement toward a certain ideal (aim or program ideology) to what extent is this social ideal "national," or to what extent is the national ideal "social?" Ethnoconfessionality as a universal accumulator of the historically developing ethnic, social and spiritual experience of people can serve as the measuring rod.
This explains why the development of independent Azeri statehood was closely related to the traditions of tolerance. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, put this in a nutshell: "...many countries hold forth about their tolerance; this is an excellent political gimmick, yet genuine tolerance remains outside the reach of many. Your country is an exception: little is said about tolerance, yet it is a national feature of your people... Tolerance in Azerbaijan is an inexhaustible category."28
I have deliberately concentrated on tolerance as one of the components of ethnocultural identity: its presence, absence, or low level predetermines in many respects the predominance of one of the types of identities enumerated above.
It should be said that they, or even wider versions of the important aspects of ethnocultural identity, do not answer the question: is ethnocultural identity the choice of history or of politicians?
I have the following to say in this respect:
(1) During ethnogenesis, practically all peoples relied and rely today on ethnic (national) self-awareness of a local group fixed at the ethnopsychological level as "we-them" to acquire ethnocultural identity. It is at this stage (despite possible and very different interpretations of this process) that a certain cultural-linguistic entity of the given local group emerges, the group itself tends to isolation within certain territorial limits.
(2) The ethnicity's specific geohistorical environment and the geopolitical balance of power in the world and the region play a certain role in the process.
What Will Become the "Sacral Offering"
to Globalization: The National Idea, Ideology, or Identity?
Here are two very pessimistic forecasts of the future of the ethnocultural world on our planet.
The influential American newspaper The Wall Street Journal wrote that, according to scholars, "by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to
28 "Baku—odin iz nemnogikh gorodov, gde ia svobodno mogu khodit v kipe," Nedelia, 22 August, 2008.
today's 6,000." This will happen for objective reasons: in the globalized world bigger groups affect smaller groups, who in time will start using their languages and borrowing their cultures.29
And the second forecast: in fifty years, the U.N. might consist of 400 to 500 states (twice as many as today). This means that the process of nation- and national state-building is still going on and that we have not yet reached the highest point, let alone the final stage. Those who wrote about the end of national states in the post-Soviet era were wrong.30
These scientifically substantiated assertions are causing a lot of concern among ordinary people, members of specific nations (ethnicities), and citizens of specific states. They cannot but ask themselves: What will happen to us? What will happen to the identity of my grandchildren and great grandchildren in 100 years? In what state will we live? What should we sacrifice today for the vague boons of some global civilization?
At first glance, the two trends are logically incompatible or even contradictory. Indeed, on the one hand, there is mounting ethnocultural unification, while on the other, there is dynamic fragmentation of the present political and economic map of the world. In fact, this is a dialectical contradiction rather than logical incompatibility and it is rooted in the nature of the current stage of globalization.
It should be said that globalization, as movement toward closer worldwide interconnection on the basis of communicative closeness, blending of national economies into the world economy, and the emergence of new international forms of infrastructure, makes mutually exclusive development trends unavoidable. The 18th World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Quebec (Canada) in August 2000 discussed the correlation between globalization and Westernization and modernization, the contradictory correlation between globalization and national sovereignty and national interests, the contradictions between identity and globalization and between the mounting national self-awareness of smaller ethnicities in the absence of adequate representative (nationalstate) organizations in the countries where they live and in the world, the contradictions between national-ethnic relations and consciousness in the age of globalism and between globalization and migration, and the mounting threat of nationalism and separatism amid global development.31
In the time that has elapsed since the 18th World Congress, the following contradictions have come to the fore:
■ The threats and challenges (international terror and crime, drug trafficking, slave trade, etc.) created by globalization have become more prominent in scope and repercussions and incompatible with its advantages;
■ The relations between the national and quasi-states and between ethnicities and supra-national integration structures remain fairly vague.
■ Globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor regions of the world: the rich countries are growing richer, while the poor countries are becoming poorer. This speaks volumes about the elite nature of globalization.
It also adds veracity to the warnings: instead of a "new world order," humanity might find itself amid "new world disorder."32 Ernest Gellner, in turn, wrote: "Nationalism is not a zero-sum game, it is a minus-sum game, because the majority of cultures-participants is bound to lose: there are simply too many cultures, as it were potential state-definers, for the amount of space available on this earth
29 J.H. McWhorter, "What the World Will Speak in 2115," 2 January, 2015, The Wall Street Journal, available at [http:// www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-world-will-speak-in-2115-1420234648?tesla=y&mod=e2fb].
30 See: R.G. Abdulatipov, Etnopolitologia, St. Petersburg, 2004, p. 245.
31 Iu.V. Irkhin, "XVIII Vsemirny kongress Mezhdunarodnoy assotsiatsii politicheskoy nauki o problemakh globalizatsii,"
VestnikRossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov, Politologia Series, No. 3, 2001, pp. 36-44.
32 H. Veltmeyer, New Perspectives on Globalization and Antiglobalization (The International Political Economy of New Regionalisms Series), Hants, Aldershot, UK; Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 2008
for viable states. So most of the cultures are bound to go to the wall and fail to attain their fulfillment, that is, the marriage of the culturally defined nation with its own state, which is what nationalist theory anticipates and ardently desires."33
This means that globalization is a geohistorical process that spreads far and wide to cover all aspects of social life and all regions albeit with different intensity, its impulses and development vectors depending on the regions' "qualitative" state.
This suggests that the twenty-first century will unfold amid two opposing, yet gradually strengthening global trends:
Disunity, which has been widely developed during ethnic consolidation and ethnopolitical mobilization, on the one hand, and the unificatory trend in the form of ethnic integration and the quest for new forms of global community, on the other.
These trends perfectly fit the seemingly contradictory opinions about future trends, which suppress ethnic and linguistic diversity, on the one hand, and increase the number of states on the planet, on the other.
These two trends may be brought together in the following way. As the first step in the desired direction, the "interested" external players "wake up" local ethnic groups and the parade of their "national ideas" stirs up the centrifugal intentions of individual ethnicities and territories. Under certain conditions, this stage may lead to political, territorial, administrative, etc. delimitation with the state to which they belong. The imperatives of globalization, however, make the next stage inevitable: the territories that have just detached themselves from their former states to become quasi-states will seek integration with big regional or even macro-regional associations. It goes without saying that these structures, which look supra-national and rely on specific ethnocultural dominants, will gradually weaken the sovereignties and change the values, traditions, language, and mentalities, in short the spiritual sphere, of their "new members."
This is a universal, but not a uni-lineal process: it depends, to a great extent, on the ethnodemo-graphic indices of each specific ethnicity: its numerical strength, the level of ethnic distances, sustain-ability of the ethnocultural code, etc. Some of the large nations might profit from the globalization trends described above and might consolidate their position in the integrating historical space: China in the APR, Germany in Central Europe, etc.
Conclusion
The above demonstrates that the three interrelated factors—the national idea, national ideology, and the identity problem—are especially important.
It seems that the ethnonational ideas and ethnonational ideologies based on the archaic matrix of ethnicity and fulfilling its instrumental (mobilizing) and motivational functions in the post-Soviet states have already exhausted themselves. Today, national-state ideology is a tool for realizing the national ideal and achieving economic and political aims, as well as a criterion of their correspondence to real and long-term national (ethnosocial) interests. I am talking about efficient states with clearly formulated long-term interests; all others are best described by Seneca's famous saying: "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable."
33 E. Gellner, op. cit., p. 121.
