Abstract
Nationalism is dominating global headlines again, perhaps nowhere more so than in the post-socialist states of Eastern Europe, and its resurgence as a social force demands explanation and analysis. Veljko Vujačić, until recently Associate Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College, now Provost at the European University in St Petersburg, addresses this demand in his new book that aims to explain why the dissolution of two apparently similar states – Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union – resulted in such different outcomes. Simultaneously, Vujačić aims to make a general contribution to the historical sociology of nationalism and to remedy what he perceives as a materialist bias within the field by offering a Weberian corrective. Overall, the book is clearly written, engaging, and thought-provoking, although as the post-Crimea postscript clearly reveals, the interplay between symbolic and material factors should be studied with a great deal of care.
The book’s main thesis is that the divergence in the symbolic construction of nationhood by Russian and Serbian cultural elites constituted the decisive difference between the mode of disintegration of the Soviet and Yugoslav states (pp. 3–5). Given the patrimonial character of the Imperial Russian-cum-Soviet state, members of the intelligentsia and other cultural producers increasingly experienced a cleft between state and society going back to the 17th-century notion ‘Holy Rus’ and the rise of autocracy under the early Romanovs. As political elites attempted to first Westernize, and later, Sovietize, society from above, cultural elites broke with official ideology and called out to the populace to revitalize itself as a community by revolting against this ‘Dual State’, even at the cost of abandoning conquered territories. Thus, in 1991 (and 1917), no strong nationalist constituency arose to keep the empire together. On the other hand, Yugoslavia – another socialist federation built on the Leninist principle of maintaining state coherence by constraining the dominant ethnic group and granting smaller groups their own territorial units and the right of self-determination – perished in a bloody civil war because Serb cultural elites identified the Yugoslav state as their own. This transpired because of the preexistence of Yugoslavia as a popularly created (and relatively egalitarian) state before the victory of Tito’s communists in 1945, but as also because the dominant narrative of Serbian nationhood centered on the heroic struggle for independence against insurmountable odds, whether in 1389 against the Ottomans, Habsburgs in 1914, or Nazis in 1941. Thus, the conversion of Serb communists to nationalism in the 1980s and their defense of Yugoslav territorial integrity and ethnic Serbs outside Serbia by force of arms stemmed from a widely shared perception that Yugoslavia was built on specifically Serb sacrifices in the two World Wars.
Vujačić first tests his hypothesis against realist, institutionalist, and voluntarist explanations for the opposed Soviet and Yugoslav outcomes. All these approaches, which Vujačić regards as parts of the materialist mainstream, are found lacking on account of their blackboxing of nationalist ideology simply as an epiphenomenon of power politics, demographics, institutional strength, or actions of particular leaders. He argues, in this case convincingly, that a lack of concern for the fate of Russian minorities outside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and, conversely, fervent anxiety regarding Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia are impossible to understand in terms of a cost–benefit analysis of the likelihood of armed (including nuclear) conflict, the compactness or dispersion of ethnic settlement, degree of centralization of federal structures (much stronger in the Soviet case), or decisions of Yeltsin or Milosevic. Although he allows these factors some situational weight, Vujačić insists that from a longue dureé perspective, historical memories such as the common sense of victimization by Stalin shared by all ethnic groups in the USSR or the recollection of interethnic conflict during the Second World War in Yugoslavia must be understood as motivating factors in their own right (p. 5).
The bulk of the book (Chapters 3–5) is dedicated to constructing ideal types of Serb and Russian national ethics. Here, Vujačić employs John Armstrong’s conception of mythomoteurs – constitutive myths that effectively respond to collective emotional needs and thereby promote the formation of core of group identity (p. 65). Both sets of mythomoteurs – the Russian ‘Dual State’ and the Serb heroic struggle against superior foes – successfully addressed the ressentiment of both sets of cultural elites of their backwardness relative to Western European counterparts, as well as their desire to belong to a larger community which understands them and accepts their leadership as producers of cultural values. Vujačić is particularly insightful when illustrating how communists who generally dismissed nations as ideological atavisms destined to wither away clearly recognized the reality of dominant mythomoteurs and formulated policies to substitute for them. He interprets the brutality of the collectivization campaign as triggered by the imperative to destroy traditional Russia and replace it with a new, progressive Soviet-Russian patriotism. In the Yugoslav case, he attributes the victory of the communist Partisans not only to their opposition to the virulent ethnonationalism of the Croat Ustasha and Serb Chetniks but also to their symbolic incorporation of the Serb symbolism of struggling against the odds into their campaign to rid the country of Nazi occupation.
Overall, Vujačić’s appeal to take politico-cultural factors seriously as ‘necessary causal antecedents’ (p. 5) and sources of criteria for rational action (pp. 44–46) surely resonates in an age when macrosociology is increasingly dominated by ‘big data’ which nevertheless fails to impress scholars and policymakers who must anticipate and respond to status struggles in Ukrainian, Middle Eastern, and other conflicts. In a Weberian non-positivist vein, he carefully qualifies his claims in order to avoid falling into a reductionist idealism (p. 5), explicitly stresses the multicausal character of his approach, balances cultural and contextual factors, and offers only provisional conclusions about the impact of the former on political outcomes (p. 298). His historical overview of the making of the two mythomoteurs and incorporating perspectives from publicists, poets, parliamentarians, revolutionaries, partisans, and dissidents of various political stripes is generally even-handed, allowing each of them to speak to the predicament of their countries at their respective times and avoiding egregious moralizing toward figures he obviously disagrees with.
Still, it is difficult to entirely shake the sense that Vujačić’s analysis does tend to fall into culturalist reductionism. First, his analysis evinces a disturbing tendency to identify genuinely affective action solely with particular types of nationalism. Given his tendency to differentiate tangible national mythologies from ‘abstract Marxist theories’ (p. 72), one might wonder why, in two states where such mythologies were particularly pronounced, communism triumphed at distinct points in the last century. It is well and good to point to compromises with nationalism, the unintended consequences of communist nationality policy that suppressed dominant nations in both countries, and the self-defeating character of repressive policies, but in fairness, we must recognize these as contextual factors relative to communist myth – as important a global cultural force in the 20th century as the symbolic system of European-style nationalism was in the 19th. Perspectives that attribute the relatively peaceful retreat from the Cold War and acquiescence to Soviet dissolution to Gorbachev’s true faith in Marxist principles (advanced by Kotkin, 2001) remain unaddressed in this monograph.
A similar point may be made with respect to statist ideology – the ‘official’ nationalism which Vujačić dismisses as barren and artificial (pp. 19, 206, 294). The notion that states and empires, no less than nations, are genuine historical collectives capable of generating genuine social and cultural movements has been proposed by a number of recent theorists (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Karatani 2013) who also shed light on the transformation of Marxism into an imperial Russian-Soviet ideology. The failure of Soviet-Russian patriotism to preserve the empire in the wake of perestroika may be partially attributable to Stalinist repression, Gorbachev’s ‘true belief’, poor economic performance after 1970, or the consequent delegitimization of communism by another imperial ideology (neoliberalism), but its defeat makes it no more artificial than the failure of the Whites’ ‘Russia, One and Indivisible’ in the Civil War made nationalism a bourgeois anachronism destined for the dustbin.
The salience of state and imperial ideologies is very much on display in the short postscript which addresses the Ukraine crisis. Vujačić deserves credit for addressing the issue, as he recognizes that it raises serious questions regarding his thesis that the contrasting Russian and Serb national myths serve as primary causes for the divergent post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav trajectories (p. 299), but, ultimately, his answer – that things have changed since 1991 (p. 301) – is hardly satisfactory because this change also requires explanation. When Vujačić examines the reasons for this change, it turns out that the main trigger of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the existence of separate Russian and Ukrainian states and the fact that elites within these states felt the imperative to develop distinct ideologies. In other words, institutional developments drove a transformation of political ideologies and political outcomes. Moreover, the main symbolic representation of this divergence was the transmutation of official Soviet-Russian patriotism, centered on the iconography of Stalinism and the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War into the mythomoteur on the Russian side and, conversely, its rejection and the concomitant development of anti-Soviet wartime ideology of Bandera into the mythomoteur on the Ukrainian side. Thus, the contemporary Russian state, still a patrimonial ‘dual state’ by many accounts (see, for example, Sakwa, 2013), effectively mobilized an official Soviet-era nationalism that strongly resonates with the Russian population (as high approval rates for Putin a year and a half after the annexation of Crimea seem to suggest). In truth, a fundamentally similar postscript could have been written circa 2008, when the Serbian elite (in response to defeat in war and confrontation with an expanding imperial power and ideology in the form of the European Union (EU)) made a decision act like the Russian elite in 1991, tacitly accept the independence of Kosovo, and begin preparations for the eventual accession to the EU. In conclusion, then, these ironies of recent history, as well as the present book, should make us think long and hard about the future shape of symbolic communities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and about the interplay of symbolic and material factors in historical social science.