Diana Kudaibergenova's comprehensive analysis of nation-building processes in independent Latvia and Kazakhstan is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between power and identity in Eurasia. The study focuses on Latvia, a western and democratic state, and Kazakhstan, an eastern and authoritarian state. The central question posed in Toward Nationalizing Regimes is: how did elites operating in vastly different political regimes build their respective post-Soviet state, and construct their respective titular nation and the largest national minority—ethnic Russians?
Kudaibergenova's analysis is based on extensive ethnographic research conducted in Russian, Kazakh, and Latvian. In addition to approximately two hundred elite interviews, she relied on political ethnography, content analysis of major newspapers in both countries, and archival research in the Prague office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The main argument arising from this impressive field research, which we unfortunately see less and less of, is that elite composition within each regime via election and robust coalition building in Latvia or via elite selection and closed coalition building in Kazakhstan generated differences in political development and in the treatment of Russians.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan emerged as independent sovereign states with large ethnic Russian minority communities. Elites adopted a different approach to Russians: those in Latvia adopted a restrictive approach that prioritizes the Latvian nation and its members, while those in Kazakhstan adopted an accommodating approach that prioritizes loyalty to Nursultan Nazarbaev, economic development, and interethnic stability. Yet both regimes, Kudaibergenova argues, are nationalizing. The aim of a nationalizing regime, which is also a power field, is “to impose hegemony over the national imagination, to provide a stable yet very limited framework for understanding and identifying with the given nation. It is also a stable discursive field that is controlled by the ruling elites within these nationalizing regimes” (73).
One of Kudaibergenova's contributions to our understanding of nationalism is her explanation of how nationalizing states work. Building on Rogers Brubaker's work, which conceptualizes nationalizing states as managed by elites who implement formal policies and permit informal practices that privilege members of the core nation, Kudaibergenova reminds us that his triadic nexus does not specify who is nationalizing, or how and when nationalizing occurs. Kudaibergenova asserts that elites, rather than states, are the key actors in nationalization processes and that a crucial factor in understanding these processes is the dominant public discourse about nationhood. In Latvia, which is an electoral democracy governed by a closed ideological paradigm that preserves the Latvian nation, elites who challenge or diverge from this view fail politically. In Kazakhstan, which is not an electoral democracy, elites who challenge or diverge from the personalistic reign of Nazarbaev fail politically. Kudaibergenova finds this to be the case even after Nazarbaev's voluntary resignation.
I found Kudaibergenova's analysis of Harmony and Lad most interesting. These case studies demonstrate how regime type influences the extent to which ethnic Russians in Latvia and Kazakhstan are excluded from the political arena. When I was in Latvia researching the Russian minority question years ago, Harmony represented Russians; that was its objective. Kudaibergenova shows that Harmony's political objectives had to shift in order to win seats in parliament: “Harmony needed to shift its ideological program toward a more Latvianized and thus dominant discourse” in order to be accepted (113). Elites in Kazakhstan were not only less nationalizing than elites in Latvia but also more pluralistic in their attitudes towards ethnicity. Kudaibergenova argues that elites in Kazakhstan were not as aggressive about protecting the rights of the core nation and were thus able to adopt “compartmentalized ideology,” or a “reshuffling the content of nationalist and state building rhetoric” on an as-needed basis (104). Lad, a public organization rather than a political party, was not under the same pressure as Harmony to influence formal policies affecting Russians because they, for the most part, accommodated ethnic Russians. When I was in Kazakhstan researching the Russian minority question years ago, Lad represented ethnic Russians within the confines of Nazarbaev's dictates. In other words, it worked with rather than against the political establishment.
A discussion of the literature on nation building in the Baltics and Central Asia would have strengthened Kudaibergenova's analysis because it would have clarified in stark terms her original contributions to existing scholarship. Nevertheless, Toward Nationalizing Regimes is a must read for anyone interested in the relationship between elite competition and nation building in Eurasia. It is also a model for future scholarship based on field research.
