Citizenship, Territoriality, and Post-Soviet Nationhood The Politics
This book seeks to understand the politics of nationalism in the buffer zone between Russia and the West: Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova, as well as Russia itself. It problematizes the official ways of defining the nation, and thus citizenship, in the l
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Citizenship, Territoriality, and Post-Soviet Nationhood “This fine book captures a moment in the identity negotiations of three lesser known communities of the former Soviet space: Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. Among other things, it shows the resilience of identity in the old developed cultures vis-a-vis its mutability in the recent artificially-created ones. It also underscores the error of regarding the development of identities in post-Soviet nations as a function of a natural inclination for liberal democracy. Full of fascinating data, the book should be of interest to every student of PSS.” —Liah Greenfeld, Professor, Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology, Boston University, USA “This book represents an invaluable contribution to present-day scholarship in a number of respects. It provides extensive information on the contemporary situation in three ex-Soviet border states, where Western governments have thus far not been able to compete effectively with Russia for influence because of the Russians’ far greater knowledge of the area. As an expression of the pre-modernist school of nationalism studies, this book also explains clearly and in detail the historical background which led to and still influences the situation in these countries, as a corrective to modernist studies which have left their readers bewildered when history reared its head. From a theoretical perspective, this study draws a crucial distinction between civil nationalism, based on liberal-democratic values, and territorial nationalism, based on birth in the territory which a state occupies, showing that conflation of civic and territorial nationalism has been the product of a naive assumption, based upon a particular interpretation of the Euro-American experience and resulting in systemic misunderstanding of the political situations in other areas of the world, that they are both manifestations of the same political impulse, when in fact, territorial nationalism can be motivated by factors which are not liberal-democratic at all. The book also gives comparative insight into the motivations which governments have for adopting one or another policy regarding dual citizenship, a topic which will inevitably be addressed in broader circles as more and more people around the world avail themselves of this option.” —John Myhill, Full Professor, English Department, University of Haifa, Israel
“Maxim Tabachnik has revolutionized the study of citizenship and nationalism in general by reformulating the ‘ethnic’ (bad) ‘civic’ (good) distinction into one between ‘ethnic’ and ‘territorial.’ He has demonstrated convincingly, using the example of the post-Soviet states, that an ethnic/territorial distinction is much better able to account for differences in the outlooks and policies of these and other states than the traditional paradigm. The book also provides a fascinating study of the development of citizenship thinking throughout the ages. In short, this is a book from which both regional specialists of the post-Soviet space and student
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