6. National identity

National identity is the person's identity and sense of belonging to one state or to one nation, a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status.

National identity is not inborn trait; various studies have shown that a person's national identity is a direct result of the presence of elements from the "common points" in people's daily lives: national symbols, language, national colors, the nation's history, national consciousness, blood ties, culture, music, cuisine, radio, television, etc.

The national identity of most citizens of one state or one nation tends to strengthen when the country or the nation is threatened militarily. The sense of belonging to the nation is essential as an external threat becomes more clear. An example of this is the development of Taiwanese identity versus Chinese identity, which strengthened after the Republic of China became known internationally as "Taiwan" after losing its UN Seat and particularly starting in the late 1990s when it became clear that "China" (PR China) threatened Taiwan militarily. Although the official country name is "Republic of China" and its residents have been taught that their country is "China" and self-references in the educational system, textbooks, and school public announcements refer to students as "we Chinese..." in the 1980s and 1990s, growing numbers of adults in the 2000s started identifying themselves as "Taiwanese" in the face of hostile Chinese stance and military threat in the 2000s and the Pan-Green Coalition's promotion of Taiwanese identity.

There are cases where national identity collides with a person's civil identity. For example, many Israeli Arabs associate themselves or are associated with the Arab or Palestinian nationality, while at the same time they are citizens of the state of Israel, which is in conflict with the Palestinians and with many Arab countries. The Taiwanese also face a conflict of national identity with civil identity, in which residents are issued national identification cards and passports under the country name "Republic of China", when certain portion of them do not feel good about viewing their country as "China". This is also a reason why the Democratic Progressive Party advocates formal "Taiwan Independence" and renaming the country "Republic of Taiwan".

Also, there are cases in which the national identity of a particular group is oppressed by the government in the country where the group lives. A notable example was in Spain under the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1947) who abolished the official statute and recognition for the Basque, Galician, and Catalan languages for the first time in the history of Spain and returned to Spanish as the only official language of the State and education, although millions of the country's citizens spoke other languages.

The positive expression of one's national identity is Patriotism, and the negative is Chauvinism.

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The appearance, extent, and character of nationalism in European society has attracted much debate among historians and sociologists. Although there is little consensus regarding the forces responsible for its manifestation, most specialists on nationalism believe it to be an essentially modern phenomenon, appearing in the late eighteenth century in Europe and North America.

Three theorists stand out in the genealogical debate over nationalism. Eric J. Hobsbawm defined nationalism as the popular realization of political rights in a sovereign state. A populace linked itself to a limited national territory and was embodied through a centralized government, an event Hobsbawm believed first occurred during the French Revolution. If nationalism was a modern invention, so were nations: the nation-state was the result, rather than the origin, of nationalist discourse. Ernest Gellner adopted an economically reductionist approach, deeming nationalism a necessary function of industrialization. Because industry required skilled labor, a common vernacular, and high rates of literacy, he argued, the need developed for a national "high culture," promoted by a state-run educational system. Simultaneously, the old agrarian order faded away and societal anonymity replaced provincial distinctness, facilitating the creation of a homogenous national culture. Like Hobsbawm, Gellner sought to dispel teleological notions of the nation as eternal; nationalism was a modern invention, created in response to the needs of a new economic system, even if it represented itself as a natural, historical phenomenon.

The theory of the nation as invention was taken further by Benedict Anderson, who saw nationalism as a process of "imagining communities." The decline of universal religious paradigms and the rise in print capitalism allowed for this cultural construction to flourish in the eighteenth century. The mass consumption of newspapers and novels enforced a common vernacular, linked a populace to urban centers, and encouraged common participation in a shared (imagined) culture. Anderson implied that the Reformation and the printing press did more to encourage nationalism than did the advent of industrialization. Despite their differences, all three of these prominent theoreticians identified nationalism, and by association the nation-state, as a phenomenon of the last few centuries.

If nationalism is a modern novelty, then what came before? Certainly the terms nation, patrie, and Vaterland were used before the modern period. What did they mean? Faced with this question, modernists distinguish between nationalism as political ideology and nationalism as cultural identity. Most postulate that the former occurs only in modern society, starting with the French Revolution, while the latter had early modern antecedents. The early modern variant is usually referred to as "national identity" or "proto-nationalism," and it implies an awareness by the populace, at least in part, of a common national culture not yet manifest as a motivating political ideology. Cultural bonds could be found in common language, religion, and custom as well as in the common social condition of being dynastic subjects. Citing these bonds, some historians see modern nationalism making an appearance as early as the sixteenth century.

Conversely, the historian Eugen Weber has argued that if the modern definition requires that nationalism be popular in scope, then nationalism did not permeate the French countryside until the late nineteenth century, when public schools and railroad access exposed the rural population to cosmopolitan cultural norms and formalized instruction in the French language. These latter two interpretations call into question the importance of the French Revolution in the development of modern nationalism.

Time, then, is not the most useful tool for categorizing nationalism or national identity. Nationalism appears irregularly and is dependent on a variety of historical factors or "accidents" that escape structural categorization. And one cannot simply label national identity as embryonic nationalism: not all national identities function within nations, and not all nations have "proto-national" origins. Moreover, national identity should not be seen as something that replaces local attachments. Identities were conterminous, and awareness of national belonging was appended to local and provincial identities. The historian Peter Sahlins has described early modern identity as a series of "counter-identities," in which local communities defined themselves through a multitude of attachments: village, county, province, nation—all of which were distinguishable from the "other," that is, the foreigner.

Throughout the early modern period, the character and intensity of national identity varied widely from place to place. Spain is an excellent example of the potential ambivalence of early modern identity. Spanish subjects generally did not think of themselves as Spanish, but rather as Castilian, Valencian, or Catalan; the formation of a Spanish identity was further hindered by the presence of multiple kingdoms in Spain and the unwillingness of the Habsburg monarchs to promote their association with the Spanish state, particularly in their Castilian exclusivity. Identity was further complicated by the Jewish and Moorish populations on the peninsula, which added a racial character to Spanish identity construction. Nonetheless, Catholic beliefs were widely shared among the inhabitants of Spain.

In Italy, certain Renaissance writers encouraged national awareness through an appeal to an ancient Roman homeland and by evoking civic pride in the cultural accomplishments of the Renaissance. Certainly some contemporary writers idealized Italy: Francesco Guicciardini's revealingly titled Storia d'Italia (History of Italy, written 1536–1540) describes the decline of independent Italian states during the early sixteenth century. The Italian Wars resulted in Spanish occupation of much of the peninsula, and local elites became Spanish clients. Additionally, the papal resurgence during the Counter-Reformation discouraged national consciousness, as the papacy claimed a universal jurisdiction that transcended national limits. Italy remained a geographical expression rather than a nation, and national identity only resonated in elite literary circles. The situation in Germany—conceived of as the homeland of the ancient Germanic tribes, the descendants of whom shared a common ethnicity (as members of a single Volk)—was similar. Germany was a patchwork of small principalities under the nominal authority of the Holy Roman Empire, but the empire was divided between Protestant and Catholic communities; it was not exclusively Germanic; and it lacked a strong central government. German identity was not political or territorial; rather, it was a cultural affinity consisting of linguistic, ethnic, and historical associations.

State centralization played an essential role in the development of national identity in France. The vicissitudes of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) imbued the French monarchy with a national character that, though threatened during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), was reinforced over the course of the seventeenth century. The crown was a powerful unifying factor in French society, and belonging to the French nation meant allegiance to the French king. Royal patronage of art, literature, and historical writing promoted French culture, and the international acceptance of the French language and Parisian styles as the epitome of civilization at least among European elites, contributed to the sense of its distinctiveness and superiority. The monarchical association with the patrie faded only during the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment discourses posited the French people, rather than the king, as the legitimate repository of national sovereignty.

Before nationalism became central to French revolutionary discourses, the Netherlands and Great Britain—two relatively isolated North Atlantic Protestant states—seem to have developed strong national identities, the Dutch in the seventeenth century and the British in the eighteenth. They may thus meet the key criterion set out by modern definitions of nationalism—a widely held political ideology that identifies the nation-state as a distinct and sovereign representation of a particular people and as the embodiment or defender of its culture. In the cases of both the Dutch and the British, national identity was deeply entwined with religion, economic wealth, and political revolt. Protestantism was essential to the creation of both nationalisms. Protestant theologians' insistence on widespread vernacular literacy, combined with the rise of print capitalism, facilitated the creation of a national religious community. Urbanization and a rising middle class gave common people a vested interest in the political order, and as the historian Linda Colley has shown, patriotism and profit went hand in hand. Daniel Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman (1726) provides an excellent example of this growing national identity, as it explicitly links the social benefits of international trade to national pride in being English. Military crises—particularly the struggles against a Catholic "other"—augmented Britons' burgeoning national sentiment by juxtaposing religious and national sovereignty against the fear of foreign invasion.

Significantly, both the Dutch and the British endured severe political crises that resulted in the demise of monarchical regimes. The resulting insecurities over political legitimacy necessitated justifications for revolt, and contemporary writers constructed a new kind of legitimacy based on a pseudo-historical national ethos. Dutch and British writers used classical allegories as reflections of contemporary political conflicts and as means of constructing essentialized notions of national uniqueness. Seventeenth-century coins, medals, and pamphlets associated the new Dutch Republic with the Batavians, ancient barbarians who fought Julius Caesar or, more often, with the Israelites. The Dutch saw themselves as a chosen people threatened by subjugation, and they deployed such images to distinguish themselves from surrounding peoples and states. In the British case, even if the English, Scots, and Welsh had individual claims of separate identity, they all knew that they were fundamentally different from the Catholic French. Protestantism for them became synonymous with "Britishness," hence the litany of characteristics the British believed themselves to exemplify: freedom, prosperity, and rationality, contrasted forcefully against the perceived superstition and impoverishment of the oppressed French.

The concept of national identity is complex, and its intensity, character, and origins vary with time and place. Some areas of Europe were completely ambivalent to national sentiment, while populations elsewhere could be considered exceedingly patriotic. Different classes and orders could display varying degrees of national identification, and there could be differences between urban and rural populations as well. While the development of national identity remains a difficult historical problem, several general conclusions may be offered. Although most early modern European societies did not develop national identities to the same degree as the British and the Dutch, they did readily contrast themselves with their neighbors. In the early modern mind, "nation" might primarily mean place of birth, yet it also carried cultural weight: one's nation connoted perhaps ethnicity, perhaps language, but almost certainly religion. Religious homogeneity played a vital role in the construction of national identity, not just for the cases cited above, but also for the Scandinavian states and for Russia and much of Eastern Europe. One can state with fair certainty that most people saw themselves as part of a wider community, one that was occasionally national in scope, and that religion, language, and local political structures played prominent roles in determining that identity.

The Russian People and National Identity

9 august 2008

Valery Tishkov

© "Russia in Global Affairs". № 3, July - September 2008

Valery Tishkov, a Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also a Member of the Public Council of the Russian Federation.

Mechanisms for affirming national identity as a foundation of Russia’s statehood have long been the source of much controversy among Russian policymakers and experts, while debates on this issue are superficial and overly emotional. Juggling with such fundamental notions as ‘people’ and ‘nation’ involves serious risks for society and the state. In the Russian political vocabulary, the word ‘nationalism’ is attributed a negative meaning. Meanwhile, nationalism played a key role in the formation of modern states and largely remains a major political ideology of the modern age.

In Russia, these debates have contributed to the development of three main characterizations of Russian society and the state:

First, Russia is a multination state, which makes it totally different from other countries;

Second, Russia is a state of ethnic Russians (Russkii) with a host of other ethnic minorities whose members can either identify themselves as Russians or acknowledge that the ethnic Russian majority rightfully enjoys the state-building status;

Third, Russia (Rossiya) is a national state featuring a multi-ethnic “Rossiyan” nation (Rossiyane) underpinned by the Russian language and culture, and embracing members of other ethnic communities (usually defined as peoples, nationalities, ethnic groups or nations).

The Russian authorities, including the current and former presidents, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, have embraced this final characterization, which advances the notion of the Rossiyan people as a historical entity or civic nation. While it has its opponents, particularly among champions of ethnic nationalism who have proclaimed “a failure of the construction of a civic nation,” this interpretation of Russia’s current identity has been accepted and supported by a large number of intellectuals and policymakers as the only feasible option for Russia. Indeed, the formula is in line with the state (civic) national identity that has been adopted and proven successful in other major multi-ethnic countries around the world.

GLOBAL CONTEXT

Throughout the world, public policy discourses have come to embrace the perception of nations as territorial and political entities featuring complex – although integrated – social and cultural systems. No matter how ethnically or religiously heterogeneous some countries might be, they invariably define themselves as ‘nations’ and consider their states ‘national’ or ‘nation states.’ ‘People’ and ‘nation’ are synonyms here, and it is these two categories that impart primordial legitimacy to a modern state.

The perception of a united people/nation is a key factor in ensuring stability and accord in society, and is as strong a guarantee of the state’s strength as the Constitution, the Army and the guarded borders. The ideology of a ‘civic nation’ embraces the following attributes: the ethos of a responsible citizen; a unified education system; a commonly shared vision of the country’s past – both good and bad; a calendar and symbols; feelings of attachment to the country; loyalty to the state; and the upholding of national interests. All these factors form what is called ‘state (civic) nationalism.’

Civic nationalism exists in contrast to the ideology of ethnic nationalism, which embodies exclusively one or another ethnic community, often either a majority or minority of the given country’s population. That community considers only its immediate members, rather than all fellow countrymen, to be part of the nation, and, in instances of ethnic nationalism, seeks its own statehood or some form of preferential status. Clearly, there are important disparities between the two types of nationalism, especially given that ethnic nationalism stems from an ideology of exclusion and a rejection of diversity, while civic nationalism is based on an ideology of solidarity and readily integrated plurality.

Extreme nationalism among ethnic minorities presents a risk to the state – and to civic nationalism – particularly if they seek to secede from the country through the use of force. Admittedly, ethnic nationalism on behalf of a dominant group can likewise carry some serious risks. If such a community attempts to claim exclusive ownership of the state, it in turn risks engendering opponents of this state among the various subordinated ethnic communities.

For example, in India, Hindu nationalism on behalf of the Hindi-speaking majority sparked a string of domestic civil-war-like confrontations. Therefore, the Indian authorities now want to bolster the notion of an Indian nation that can encompass the country’s multitude of ethnic, religious and racial communities, both large and small. Since the times of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, local elites and the state have been working to shore up civic Indian nationalism as a counterweight to Hindu nationalism or any other nationalism on behalf of ethnic or religious minorities. Thanks to a focused endeavor to sustain that ideology, India continues to enjoy its national integrity.

In China too, the dominant ethnic group (Han) and the concept of the Chinese nation (Minzu) largely correspond in terms of demography and core culture. Nonetheless, the Han have been unable to promote themselves as the dominant state-making ethnic nation due to the 55 other non-Han ethnic groups (or nationalities) that exist in China, which account for over 100 million people. Han chauvinism, criticized since the times of Mao Zedong, poses a threat to Chinese statehood for the very reason that it risks provoking discontent and separatism by non-Han communities, leading to the eventual disintegration of China. The concept of a civic Chinese nation made up of all the country’s citizens was developed a few decades ago, and it appears to be working well toward establishing and sustaining a unified Chinese national identity.

These two national identities, both civic and ethnic, similarly coexist in many other countries (Spain, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Canada, etc.), including Russia. Understandably, such nations feature a complex ethnic, religious and racial mix of communities, yet the dominant culture, language and religion nearly always provide the national cultural framework: English for the British nation, Castilian for the Spanish, Han for the Chinese, and Russian for the Rossiyan nation.

Therefore, while there are certain unique features of Russia’s nation-building ideology and its practice of using the ‘nation’ category, modern-day Russia is generally not exceptional in terms of its construction as a nation.

NATIONALISM IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA

A state is considered legitimate if its population views itself as a united nation loyal to its state. In Russia, this is the Russian (Rossiyan) people (Rossiyane). This notion emerged in the times of Emperor Peter the Great and scientist and writer Mikhail Lomonosov and was further developed by outstanding public figures, starting from Nikolai Karamzin.

Russia developed a notion of Russian (Rossiyan) or “pan-Russian” (Pyotr Struve) nation at the same time (in the 18th and 19th centuries) as Europe and America formed the idea of modern nations based on civic nationalism. The words ‘Russkii’ and ‘Rossiyan’ were largely synonyms. The word ‘Russkii’ referred more to local customs and culture, while the word ‘Rossiyan’ referred to the whole nation.

For example, according to Karamzin, being a Rossiyan primarily amounted to having the capacity to feel a profound bond with the homeland (not the Tsar alone) and the desire to be a “perfect citizen.” This understanding of the notion of Rossiyan-ness was built on the basis of Russian culture and Orthodox Christianity (as well as on Catholic cultures in western Russia and Islamic ones in the Volga region). It imposed itself as the dominant school of thought, marginalizing the potential for ethnic nationalism not only in the country’s center, but also across its far-flung provinces (except for Poland and Finland).

Following on from this notion of a civic Rossiyan national identity, manifested in its various liberal-imperial and federalist forms, Struve quite rightly concluded that “Russia is a nation state” and that “while seeking to expand its core geographically, Russia has turned into a state featuring both national unity and multi-ethnic diversity.”

However, in Russia there were also supporters of an ethnographic Great Russian (Velikoruss) identity, according to whom the territory and the dominant culture of the empire was the sole preserve of the ethnic Russian majority. In fact, the long-standing endeavor to re-conceptualize the empire as a nation state of the Rossiyan “multi-peopled nation” (as defined by Ivan Ilyin) had still not been fully completed by 1917. While this was understandable given the enormity of the task in such a geographically vast and ethnically diverse country, it was primarily the result of a narrow-minded and ideologically disoriented ruling autocracy and political elite. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that, since pre-revolutionary Russia was an empire, it therefore was not a nation state.

Pre-revolutionary Russia already invoked, in the minds of its many different countrymen, a clear understanding of national territory, national economy and national interests. Furthermore, there existed a relatively large and both ethnically and religiously diverse stratum of educated professionals and civil servants who perceived themselves as members of the single Rossiyan people and regarded Russia as their homeland. It was not accidental that during the revolution and the Civil War opponents of Bolsheviks were united by the slogan of “defending a single and indivisible Russia.” The perception of pre-revolutionary Russia as a “patchwork empire” and a “prison of peoples” was invented in Soviet times due to the revolutionary rejection of the past. Recent studies of nationalism suggest that pre-1917 Russia, far from being a historical anomaly, was in fact some form of emerging nation state, with its national core being built around the Russian language and culture.

REVIEWING THE SOVIET ERA

Under the Soviet regime, the nation-building project placed greater emphasis on recognizing the rights and separate identities of Russia’s ethnic groups. Ethno-territorial autonomies acquired “ethnic statehood” in the form of Union and autonomous republics. Finally, ethnic communities and regional/religious/tribal identities were engineered into “socialist nations.”

Starting in 1926, Soviet population censuses featured a mandatory nationality question that forced all citizens to identify with the ethnic background of one parent. The country’s population was thus broken down into “nations” and “nationalities” (ethnic groups), whose overall number depended on counting procedures and political-ideological guidelines. The content of the notion ‘Russkii’ changed and began to denote only former “Great Russians,” while the latter term disappeared first from public usage and then from people’s self-consciousness. People living in “Little Russia” (now known as Ukraine) began to call themselves Ukrainians; Belarusians remained Belarusians; but both groups ceased to consider themselves Russians at the same time.

Nonetheless, the Soviet model – while entrenching new ethnic and cultural divisions – also sought to provide a unifying ideology that would bind all the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics together. In this way, through narratives of internationalism and friendship among peoples, bolstered and enforced by iron-rule authoritarianism, the Soviet Union fostered an ideology of Soviet patriotism. In fact, while such a reality was never admitted or acknowledged by the leadership, the Soviet people actually constituted a civic nation, with the Soviet Union being a kind of nation state. While its specific ideological framework was unique, the Soviet Union was in many ways no different than other large and ethnically heterogeneous states that have been and are known as nation states, such as the United Kingdom, Spain, China, India, Indonesia, the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and others.

The granting of statehood to ethnic territories was one of the factors in the Soviet Union’s breakup in the name of “national” – that is, ethnic – self-determination. After the breakup, the Soviet nation as a community was declared to be a chimera, and the Soviet Union was the “last empire.” However, despite the radical upheaval of the 1917 revolution and the watershed shift that took place, a series of studies have convincingly argued that the Soviet Union was an extension – in terms of its civic project – of the pre-revolutionary Russian state. At the same time, the word ‘Rossiya’ disappeared from the country’s name, as did the notions ‘Rossiyan people’ and ‘Rossiyans’ from the language.

The Soviet modernization and cultural policy, for all their distortions, helped small cultures to survive and develop, while common historical trials and accomplishments contributed to the consolidation of a civic nation in terms of entrenching similar social, cultural and behavioral patterns among the Soviet peoples.

A NEW RUSSIAN PROJECT

Due to the inertia of political and legal thinking, the Russian Constitution continues to feature the concept of multi-nationality, but this would be best substituted by the concept of a ‘multi-peopled nation.’ It is necessary to consistently affirm the notions ‘nation’ and ‘national’ in the official civic sense, without rejecting the established practice of using these notions in an ethno-cultural capacity. The coexistence of two different meanings for such a politically and emotionally loaded notion as ‘nation’ is possible within the framework of one country. At the same time, the primacy of the civic national identity is indisputable for its citizens, however hard ethnic nationalists may dispute this fact. The political leadership must explain that these two forms of identity are not mutually exclusive and that the notions ‘Rossiyan people,’ ‘Rossiyan nation’ and ‘Rossiyans’ do not deny the existence of ethnic Russian identity, Ossetian identity, Tatar identity, or that of any other people living in the country.

The overall effort to sustain and develop the languages and cultures of the peoples of Russia should proceed hand in hand with acknowledging the Rossiyan nation and Rossiyan identity as a fundamental characteristic of its citizens. This innovation is long overdue and is already recognized at the level of common sense and practiced in everyday life. Public opinion polls and everyday practices of Russian citizens show that their civic and state affiliation and the recognition of their Rossiyan-ness is more important to them than their ethnic affiliation.

Some current proposals are unfeasible to affirm in Russia the notion of not a ‘Rossiyan’ but a ‘Russian’ nation and to reanimate the pre-revolutionary notion of “Russians” as all those who consider themselves to be so. Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Russia will never agree to be called Russians again, while Tatars or Chechens have never identified themselves as Russians. Yet, all these and other ethnic groups in this country view themselves as Rossiyans. The prestige of Russian-ness and the status of Russians can and must be enhanced not by rejecting Rossiyan-ness but by affirming the double (Russian and Rossiyan) identity; by improving living conditions in regions largely populated by ethnic Russians; and finally, by promoting their social and political representation in the Russian state.

Modern states have come to acknowledge multiple and non-exclusive identities at the community and individual level. This weakens ethno-cultural borderlines within co-citizenship and promotes national consolidation. In addition, it more adequately reflects the self-consciousness of people born of mixed marriages. In Russia, where one-third of its people come from mixed couples, there still persists the practice of mandatory registration of a single ethnic affiliation. This practice results in personal violence and in heated debates about ethnic affiliation. In order to promote national consolidation and better reflect the ethno-religious diversity of Russia’s citizens, the forthcoming population census should allow for the registration of multiple ethnic affiliations.

In the light of the new doctrine, there should be no strict limitations on the use of the word ‘nation.’ At the same time, the state should refer to national priorities and strategic national interests as “national policy,” while the policy of sustaining and managing the country’s ethno-cultural diversity should be termed as ethnic or ethno-cultural policy.

Today, all states in the world consider themselves nation states, and Russia has no grounds to be an exception. A ubiquitous effort is underway across the globe to establish the concept of a nation as free from racial, ethnic or religious dimensions. A nation is forged as the result of a sustained effort on the part of any given country’s political and intellectual elites, articulating and disseminating their self-perception as a unified nation with a common set of values, symbols and aspirations, rather than striving to achieve ethno-cultural uniformity.

Such general views exist in countries with a more disunited population than that of Russia, whereas Russia features a real community of Rossiyan nationals (Rossiyane) sharing a single set of historical and social values, patriotism, culture and language. However, a large part of the Russian elite seek to deny this community, so there is an urgent need to change the situation. National identity can be developed through a host of tools and strategies, with the primary objectives being to assure civic equity, pursue education and awareness programs, cultivate the state language, develop the symbols and calendar, and sustain cultural and mass-media activities. Following the completion of crucial political and economic reforms, Russia now needs to review its ideological and doctrinal documents underpinning the ongoing effort to achieve civic solidarity and national identity.

This material was prepared for a discussion at the symposium “Foresight: Russia in the 21st Century,” organized by the international forum of Deutsche Bank, the Alfred Herrhausen Society, in partnership with the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and Policy Network, a British think tank.

So what exactly is racialism or racial chauvinism? There are seven main “ingredients” for someone to qualify as a racialist or racial chauvinist and they are:

> taking an arrogant, bigoted or superior attitude against another race; > making racial slurs or degrading or insulting remarks against another race; > attacking or calling for the denial of the basic rights of another race; > holding an illogical distrust of another race; > preaching forced assimilation over other cultures rather than voluntary integration; > falsely blaming other race/s for the problems of his/her ethnic community; and > falsely portraying other race/s as a threat to his/her ethnic community.