Inventing Majorities E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 575

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The recent history of post-Soviet societies is heavily shaped by the successor nations’ efforts to geopolitically re-identify themselves and to reify certain majorities in them. As a result of these fascinating processes, various new ideologies have appeared. Some are specific to the post-Soviet space while others are comparable to ideational processes in other parts of the world. In this collected volume, an international group of contributors delves deeper into recent theoretical constructions of various post-Soviet majorities, the ideologies that justify them, and some respectively formulated policy prescriptions. The first part analyzes post-Soviet state-builders’ fixation on certain constructed majorities as well as on these imagined communities’ symbolic self-identifications, in- or outward othering, and national languages. The second part deals specifically with post-Soviet ideas of sovereigntism and the way they define majorities as well as imply changes in internal and external policies and legal systems. These processes are analyzed in comparison to similar phenomena in Western societies. The book’s contributors include (in the order of their appearance): Natalia Kudriavtseva, Petra Colmorgen, Nadiia Koval, Ivan Gomza, Augusto Dala Costa, Roman Horbyk, Yana Prymachenko, Yuliya Yurchuk, Oleksandr Fisun, Nataliya Vinnykova, Ruslan Zaporozhchenko, Mikhail Minakov, Gulnara Shaikhutdinova, and Yurii Mielkov.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Ideological Creativity Introduction to Post-Soviet Ideologies

I Self, Otherness, and Ideology

1 Reconfiguring Identities within the Cityscape Ideologies of Ukraine’s Decommunization Renaming

2 The Friends So Far, the Foes So Near? Ambiguities of Georgia’s Othering

3 The Splendid School Assembled Studying and Practicing International Relations in Independent Ukraine

4 Toponymy and the Issues of Memory and Identity on the Post-soviet Tbilisi Cityscape

5 Mediatization of History Introducing the Concept and Key Cases from Eastern Europe

II Post-Soviet Sovereigntism in Comparative Perspective

6 The Rise of Precarious States A Shadow Side of Sovereignity Loss

7 Sovereigntism as a Vocation and Profession Imperial Roots, Current State, Possible Prospects

8 Sovereignty as a Contested Concept The Cases of Trumpism and Putinism

9 Implementing International Human Rights Law Recent Sovereigntist and Nationalist Trends

10 The Evolution of Sovereignty From Nation State to Human Person

On the Authors

Ideological CreativityIntroduction to Post-Soviet Ideologies

Mikhail Minakov

The Ontological Foundations of Human Creativity

Human being is an existence with a capacity for creative self-realization in the world. “To be” means to participate in the world’s continual change, to re-interpret it and to launch new beginnings within it. Each human presence in the world is limited by the time span of individual existence, from birth to death. Yet human presence transcends these limits due to the intersubjectivity of individual existence and to the interobjectivity of the material change resulting from humans’ creative presence in the world. As human beings we are born into the world created before us (by human and non-human existences), and we leave it with our addition to it. Human beings are a part of the many forces participating in a creative interplay of the world’s creation and re-creation.

This philosophical proposition also translates into the ontology of politics. Politics is one of several spheres in which human creative existence—individual and collective—is dominant. To study politics and its many phenomena means to add to the understanding of what human being/s is/are in his/her/their individual-collective ontological interwovenness of (co)presence.

Authority and subjection, conflict and agreement, freedom and serfdom, justice and crime, citizenship and statelessness, individual and common good—these and many other political phenomena stem from our transpersonal copresence. In this copresence humans are doomed to communicate, to reach for conclusions and to implement them together. Such communication is a rich process, one that allows human individuals to convey their conditions: formulated as equality or inequality, an active or passive position, a central or marginal role, acceptance or resistance vis-à-vis the results of yet another communicative act. And each act is an act of creation, a decision that alters a human’s behavior and the material conditions of their life, their social reality.

Imagery is an important part of social reality. Human imagination is a complex cognitive act which unites various other human cognitive faculties in reaching out toward stable cognitive posits—ideas, conclusions, beliefs—that translate into action and change of reality. Basically, by creating imagery and causing a change in reality, the human imagination can be understood as one of human creativity’s key elements.

Creativity and Imagination

The imagination is an object of study from many perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, sociology and political science.

In philosophy, imagination is interpreted as a cognitive operation with a thing or situation, whereby all rational categories are applied to the possible object of sensation that is not given at the time (Plato 1989; Aristotle 1964; Vico 1956; Kant 2013; Heidegger 1997; Ricoeur 1994; Cocking 2005; Bottici 2014). For over two thousand years, imagination was considered a faculty joining fantasy (Plato, Aristotle) and productivity (Kant), and enabling an understanding of other humans and/or being itself (Heidegger, Ricoeur). A concise resume to this line of philosophical argumentation was offered by Paul Ricoeur, who famously defined the imagination as a cognitive act that can simultaneously be used:

to think of things, which are not present in the current perception, but which can exist,

to create in the mind images of things that do not and cannot exist, and

to bring about images representing things, persons, and/or ideas. (Ricoeur 1994: 120ff)

Which means that imagination unites aspects of fantasy, virtuality and possibility in cognition.

Another cognitive aspect of imagination is problem-solving. The pragmatists have interpreted the imagination as a key human faculty for managing situations of uncertainty by merging work with the past (memory), work with the future (fantasy), and work with the current situation (intelligence). In doing so, imagination creates a list of possible solutions (Dewey 1998: 32, 87ff, 189ff; Rorty 1998: 167ff).

However, the imagination has other, non-cognitive dimensions that are critical for understanding individual and collective human life. Those dimensions actually include emotional, social, political, cultural and other aspects. From the existential point of view, human life consists of many acts, which also involve projections and existential acts of fulfilling the projected, allowing the projected to be (Husserl 1980; Heidegger 1996, 1997; Sartre 2001). Here the imagination plays the huge role of making these acts meaningful, possible, and creative.

Philosophers also see imagination as a critical human faculty for constructing social reality and selves in correlation with collective identities. This social dimension of imagination is equally studied in social phenomenology (Berger & Luckman 1956; Schutz & Luckman 1960), philosophical critique (Castoriadis 1987, 1997a, 1997b; Marcuse 1991; Fadieiev 2021), and political philosophy (Taylor 1989, 2004; Honnet 1995). The common ground here is the understanding of imagination as the main source of meaning in social life, providing human individuals and collectives with a framework for the interpretation and practical change of reality.

Contemporary psychology tests many ideas discussed by philosophers. However, psychology’s major focus has been on the imagination’s ability to connect ideal and material spheres in human feeling and action. From this point of view, imagination is a higher psychological function, aiming to “build things acting as if they were abstractions, and build abstractions acting as if they were real things,” and thus to transcend the dichotomy of ideal and material (Tateo 2015a: 146, 2015b: 4ff).

The synthetic and productive force of imagination also transcends the individual–collective dichotomy. For example, in her empirical psychology studies, Jacqueline Adams found that “the imagination permeates our decision-making, routinely enters our thoughts, is a domain in which individuals immerse themselves regularly, and, in the form of collective imaginings, can inspire social change” (Adams 2004: 277). This and many other studies (Newman 1993; Pileggi et al. 2000; Kane et al. 2007; Zittoun and Cerchia 2013; Oklopcic 2018) show that imagination is a central function of mind, which constantly brings the individual psyche out of a now-reality into some other “space,” and this “space” is of a transpersonal or intersubjective nature (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010; Schooler et al. 2011; Mooneyham and Schooler 2013; Smallwood 2013). These “mind travels” seem to be another way of describing the imagination’s power to offer alternative situations as problem-solving or adaptational practices.

Psychologists also show the imagination’s rootedness in collective human presence. For example, Adams (2004) concludes from her studies of decision-making in cross-cultural families:

Finally, class and nationality may be among the shapers of the imagination. Of those in the middle class, dreams might be different from those of the working class… Many people from the same nation have shared imaginings, or collective fantasies, and different cultures have different imaginative traditions or themes. The shared imaginings can be about other people… (Adams 2004: 294–5)

These social and political roots link contemporary psychology and political sciences with respect to their interest in imagination.

Political science studies imagination as an important aspect of human participation in political life. One example can be a vision of the past, present and future shared by a political community or society. In a recent study of political imagination, researchers found that the “process of imagination extends not only to how we anticipate the development of our personal lives, but also how we envision the future of our social groups, be they micro-groups such as families, or macro-groups such as nations or even the fate of humanity itself” (De Saint-Laurent et al. 2018: 4). Imagination turns individuals into participants and co-authors of transpersonal, imaginary—and thus, socially real and affectively perceived—worlds.

Special attention is paid to the political creativity that merges the “unreal” projections (fantasies) with “real” political consequences through an interplay of present, future and past. Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie (2018) studied several cases in which the political imagination of the future was applied for the same situation as our study: the quest to remedy collective traumas. In their study they show that:

Imagination [of collective future] involves a three-step sequence. First, there is a trigger—usually, disruptions of some kind questioning a person’s involvement in a current conduct that initiate the person’s uncoupling from the proximal sphere of experience... Second, the burgeoning loop of imagination utilizes resources—drawn from a wide range of semiotic and material elements previously internalized by the person along the life course, or present in the immediate environment, through the presence of others, the affordances of the setting, or the power of guidance of complex artefacts… Third, the sequence ends with a return—when the person loops out of imagining, and recouples with her proximal circumstances, a few seconds or hours older. (Zittoun & Gillespie 2018: 17)

Such processes took place when dissidents, or the politicians who brought down the Berlin Wall, or started Perestroika in USSR, imagined a free post-communist world (ibid., 19–20).

The use of time in political imagination preconditions the understanding of common good, of who belongs to the groups deemed to be legitimate participants, and of the rules of political actions. In these terms, the imagination of the past, in terms of collective memories, is one of the constant factors predefining political action. For example, Constance de Saint-Laurent (2018) analyzed the political imagination of the past in terms of “collective memories.” Her studies show three main models of the political use of the past (collective memory, history):

history as a “frame of reference, determining the main actors and the roles they should play in the future”; history as “a source of experiences and examples” of what is “likely, possible, or desirable”; and history as “generalizable experience from which global representations of the world can be built, which in turn, inform the imagination of collective futures” (de Saint-Laurent 2018: 64).

So imagination of the past represents a faculty of specific conservative creativity that deals with phenomena from academic historical imagination to radical nostalgia with political consequences.

The political imagination of the future is vested in the understanding of purposes, of possible and impossible plans, of virtual problems and disasters. The radical imagination deals with utopian visions. The functionality of such imagination aims at “keeping us from becoming complacent with the present” (McBride 10), at looking for “new beginnings” (Arendt 1963: 12ff) in spheres of equality, justice and common good.

Ideological Creativity

Keeping the above ontological, theoretical, and empirical arguments in mind, it is important to stress that political ideologies are specific phenomena rooted in human creativity. The imagery that forms, makes sense, and motivates human individuals to participate in political communication and action reveals ideology as a creative force that cannot be separated from humanness itself. This creativity stems from the specificity of the human presence in the world. It is simultaneously a cognitive and practical act in which human life—individual and collective—vests itself. And this ideological creativity makes human participation in politics ontologically, cognitively, and psychologically meaningful.

Creativity and imagination go hand in hand with political processes, power distribution, wealth of choice, and political inclusivity. By continuing Hanna Arendt’s intuition in looking at politics as a sphere of human self-realization and creativity (Arendt 1960, 1963), Vlad Glaveanu, a researcher of political imagination, offered a widely accepted definition:

Creativity is best understood as a form of action in and on the world, performed in relation to others, and leading to the continuous renewal of culture… Creativity and imagination designate the human capacity to generate meaningful novelty in thought and in action. Both processes express our agency and help us expand our range of mental and cultural resources (e.g., ideas, schemas, images, objects, norms, and so on). (Glaveanu 2018: 84–85)

Thus, the political study of imagination proves certain philosophical intuitions, which in turn have inspired political scholars in recognizing creativity as the foundation of political action.

This creativity can manifest itself in the production of ideological positions and beliefs. George Kateb has famously defined this connection as imagery of two kinds: seeing-non-existent and not-seeing-existent, which can also be another definition of ideology (Kateb 2002: 485ff). Kateb, and later Oklopcic, also link political imagination with specific political emotionality. Both researchers prove that different ideologies lead to emotions of different force and kind: ethnonationalism and antiliberal ideologies provoke stronger emotional reactions and more active political imagination than the liberal ideologies (ibid. 500; Oklopcic 2018: 8ff). Thus political imagination, by provoking emotions, leads to collective actions. However, the more rational ideologies have weaker motivations for collective solidarity than less rational ones.

Ideological creativity’s conceptualization is based on four elements. First, by merging cognitive, aesthetic and emotional acts with behavioral consequences, imagination has its own ideological materiality. Second, this materiality is connected with human creativity as a faculty to begin anew, to use the past for projecting the future, and to solve present problems by elaborating past experience (personal and collective) and a fantasy of the future. Third, imagination transcends ideal and material, as well as individual and collective, and preconditions political actions in changing the current state of affairs. And finally, the production of imaginary meanings leads to collective/political, materially manifested results. Altogether, ideological creativity can be seen as the existential and functional unity of three aspects of social imagination:

real aspect: imagination is embodied in the social reality, and it participates in its reproduction; intersubjective aspect: imagination refers to the experience of individuals and groups simultaneously; ideal aspect: imagination focuses on alternatives to the state of affairs, offers a utopia or nostalgia as possible solutions.

Ideological creativity as a concept manifests the ability of human existence to cast projections into nothing and fill this nothing with its own presence, thus bringing the project into being. At this level, there is no rationalized division of human existence into categories of individual, collective or humankind; all these divisions are actually the result of ideological creativity, not its foundations.

Ideological creativity as a concept refers to cognitive operations with real and not-yet-real things, processes, ideas, and persons. These operations work with images and imageries, as practice, cognitively projecting a spatio-temporal real and unreal toward specific ends. The ends of these ideological cognitive processes unite aspects of fantasy, virtuality, and possibility, making possible a change of reality through human action.

Ideological creativity as a concept refers to social practice based on the merger of the collective past (collective memory), collective future (social fantasy), and work on the current situation (transpersonal intelligence). Due to social imagination, ideological creativity translates into the construction of social reality and political selves in correlation with collective identities. This concept reveals Aristotle’s definition of politics (as communication about the highest common good) as a complex interpersonal process in which there is simultaneously:

exchange with politically important information; decision-making where real needs and possible solutions meet each other in the conflict and agreement of imageries; distribution, confirmation, and/or change of power position of persons and groups participating in the communication and support of imageries; implementation of and/or resistance to the decisions; (re)production of the political community as living collective of involved political subjects.

Ideological creativity, by merging projections with real political consequences, is the source of meaning in political life that provides human individuals and groups with a framework for the interpretation and practical change of social reality. It is a human faculty allowing us to engage with the world and re-create it toward certain common ends. As such it opens a space for authority and subjection, conflict and agreement, freedom and serfdom, justice and crime, citizenship and statelessness, individual and common good.

Post-Soviet Ideological Creativity

The combination of a future-oriented critique of reality, a problem-solving approach, and the planning of a future state of affairs on one side, with history, memory and nostalgia on the other side, establishes the limits of the ideological imagination in specific historical, cultural, and geographic situations. One such situation is connected with the experience of people living in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Soviet and post-Soviet epochs differentiate and interconnect in many ways, and one of them is the ideological specificity of these epochs. Svetlana Boym has meaningfully expressed the Soviet and post-Soviet ideological continuity in the following way:

The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. (Boym 2001: 11)

However, utopia and nostalgia are both grounded in real, current problems, and offer common solutions. Thus, ideological creativity always deals with current groups, communities and other types of collectivities that affectively and existentially involve individuals in a life that transcends their own personalities through politics or social action.

In our past study of the post-Soviet ideologies, Alexander Etkind and I (Etkind & Minakov 2020) described the politically driven reimagination of the future and past of the newly established societies. The unpredictable future was wide open and seen as a source of danger. Yet the past, as it was reinvented in the times of Perestroika, was full of threatening imagery as well. For this reason:

The new societies of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia faced tectonic transformations, which led to a flourishing of different phenomena related to ideology. But the social structure adapted slowly. The new social reality had to normalize political competition, multiparty systems, private property, the significance of money, the coexistence of consumerist lifestyle and totalitarian traditions, and the contradictions between democratic politics and oligarchic economies, between atheism and religious renaissance, and so on. Events throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries inspired new ideological frameworks, which allowed individuals, institutions and social groups to accept and interpret the new political and socioeconomic reality in a way that was eclectic, relativistic or—the most popular ideological term of the epoch—post-modern. Though philosophical genealogies of the post-modern and post-Soviet conditions were vastly different— if not opposite—these concepts often merged or conflated in their popular usage. (Etkind & Minakov 2020: 9–10)

In this current collection of research, scholars indicate and analyze specific cases of post-Soviet ideological creativity.

Aims and Structure of This Book

One of the major results of the post-Soviet ideological creativity has been the creation of majorities. In various national contexts the quest for a majority took place over several years (Azerbaijan, the Baltic countries, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan) or several decades (Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine). When the ideological and demographic construction of the majority is finished, power elites have an opportunity to legitimize their rule through elections. In cases like the Baltic countries, these elections have a democratic character (though it may not save them from an illiberal turn). In cases like Russia or Kazakhstan, these elections lose their democratic meaning but remain as a provider of legitimacy to the ruling group that “defends the people” (that is, the majority). The ideological construction of majorities was crucial for establishing a government-controlled political order after the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

This book consists of ten research papers dedicated to the ideological construction of new majorities, which have both universal meaning and post-Soviet specificity. Each paper, after a double blind peer-review process, was previously published in the Ideology and Politics Journal issues of 2019-2021. Later, these chapters were additionally reviewed and updated by their authors for this publication.

Our book’s chapters are divided into two parts. The first part studies how the new post-Soviet majorities create their own symbolic reality, give names to the significant topoi of their collective space, regulate the knowledge of the past in collective time, and prescribe major features that differentiate and link collective selves and others. The intensive instrumental (mis)use of the images of the self and the other has been based on a set of intertwined cultural, ethnic, gender, social and religious stereotypes born in the 18th and 19th centuries, and redefined by the post-Soviet national revivals, civil and world wars, as well as ethnic and religious conflicts aiming to reestablish “historical justice.” The construction of the self and the other in their own country facilitates re-energized identity politics, sometimes in its most extreme forms.

The first part opens with a chapter on the decommunization of place names in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih. Natalia Kudriavtseva explores attitudes towards the ongoing renaming among an expert community of researchers from different fields. The working group, organized by the researchers with the aim of developing their own toponymic suggestions to be then publicly discussed, stands here as a separate aspect of the symbolic changes. Employing the sociolinguistic concept of language ideology, the author transforms it from a belief about language into a belief about place name in order to analyze the working group, naming motives and toponymic choices. In a similar way to the ideology which links ethnic identity to language, the toponymic ideologies of the renaming group members are governed by the view that the toponym is an expression of national identity, where a specific historical interpretation functions as a structural piece. The processes structuring these ideologies—iconization, fractal recursivity and erasure—necessarily lead to a selective commemoration of events and historical figures, which are defined by their belonging to the place. As foreseen by the national agenda, “decommunizational” renaming in this local context is also perceived as a reconstruction of identity.

In the second chapter, Petra Colmorgen analyzes the case of Georgia building its post-Soviet national self through the othering of its two most powerful neighbors. Russia and Turkey are constructed to be the other in relation to Westernness and Orthodoxy, two key Georgian identity markers. But perceptions of us versus them are not always led by exclusively negative perceptions, nor are they directed only outwards. On the one hand, Georgia’s othering of Russia and Turkey remains incomplete, because the neighbors also represent characteristics close to aspects of the Georgian majority’s self. On the other hand, a “spillover effect” of othering takes place within the Georgian state border in Adjara as well as in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, since the Georgian identity parameters of Orthodoxy and Westernness are challenged in those territories. Analyzing these complex links, the author discusses how Russia and Turkey can contain elements of identification with and differentiation from Georgianness simultaneously. Furthermore, Colmorgen explores how othering is transmitted to objects within the internationally recognized Georgian territory, when, for example, Adjara, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, are perceived to be insufficiently Orthodox or Western. The author explains how such complex othering patterns in Georgia might be found in conflicts within the Georgian self. Discussing how Georgia’s identity is formed between the extreme poles of Westernness and Orthodoxy, questions of how much Westernness is tolerable for Georgian Orthodoxy and to what degree Orthodoxy can be part of a Westernized Georgian society are not only key to understanding the current Georgian self, but to contextualizing relations to Russia, Turkey, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adjara respectively.

In the next chapter, Nadiia Koval and Ivan Gomza analyze the development of Ukrainian IR (International Relations) sociology and its theoretical and ideological limitations. In particular, the authors look at the degree of Ukrainian scholars’ integration in the global IR community, their favorite theories and methods, and their lack of influence on policymakers. Based on the TRIP-2017 survey data analysis, the authors discovered that, due to Soviet tradition and partial Westernization, Ukrainian IR scholars tend to espouse realism and constructivism as their preferred IR paradigms; they prefer to use descriptive methods, and their area studies focus is primarily on the CEE region and Western Europe. Their policy and political influence are minimal, and their involvement with the global community of IR scholars is limited. On the whole, Ukrainian IR scholars enjoy little prestige domestically and cannot effectively prevent the “double peripheralization” of Ukrainian IR studies.

Augusto Dala Costa narrates a massive renaming in Tbilisi, which took place from 1988 to 2007. The author emphasizes that the toponymic changes in Georgia’s capital reflect the political transformations of the time and accord with the post-Soviet national discourse of Georgia. Drawing upon the data previously not translated from the Georgian language, Costa detects the points where the national discourse meets Tbilisi’s local history and highlights a selective nature of commemoration of early independence. Replacing ninety percent of Soviet personal names with the same number of place names memorializing Georgian historical figures, the authorities performed a “Georgianization” of the capital, incorporating not only cultural but also religious and ethnic elements into its cityscape. Deprived of local peculiar traits, the toponymic portrait of Tbilisi depicts the whole of Georgia as a homogeneous monoethnic nation whose unity is secured by the commemoration of national historical events and figures, which its capital readily illustrates. This national discourse characterizes the Menshevik nature of the First Republic, the local minorities of the Armenians and Azeris, and even the shared Transcaucasian history erased from the post-Soviet Tbilisi cityscape. Reconfigured in such a way, the symbolic landscape of Georgia’s capital reflects the politics of the then Georgian leaders—Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Mikheil Saakashvili—and brings about “the democratic expression of power from the Georgian nation,” while also cultivating its self-perception as it shapes Georgian national identity defined by the political agenda of the time.

Finally, a chapter authored by Roman Horbyk, Yana Prymachenko and Yuliya Yurchuk analyzes the mediatization of the sphere of public history, which has become a mainstream trend in Central and Eastern Europe. To some extent, this was provoked by the policies of the Russian government, which actively used historical arguments to justify aggressive foreign policy. Based on the theory of mediatization and collective memory studies, the authors consider relevant processes throughout the region and then consider the case of Likbez, a public initiative of Ukrainian historians aimed at refuting historical myths both in and around Ukraine. The authors highlight the general trend of the government losing its exclusive role in interpreting and representing the historical past. They also note that the use of media technologies affects the status of professional historians. On the one hand, it leads to a blurring of professional standards; on the other hand, it promotes giving the “meaning-producers” direct access to the target audience, where they enter into competition with other actors, including the political class and government bureaucracy.

The second part of this book is dedicated to sovereigntism and the comparison of its manifestations in post-Soviet and Western societies. The international order has recently entered a period in which national elites and popular movements have risen up against universalism and advocated for the supremacy of their government and individual state’s interests—a phenomenon referred to as sovereigntism. If in earlier years, the global order was challenged mainly by radical left and right groups that had little impact on the norms and principles of the global agenda, the primary challenge to universal norms of justice and human rights today comes from the ruling groups of some of the world’s largest powers and economies.

The chapters of this part focus on a number of questions stemming from the ideological divide between universalism and sovereigntism. How did sovereigntists become so influential on the national and international stage? Can international peace and human rights norms survive in a world-system of national exceptionalism? What are the potential implications of continuing down the current path of divisions between universalism and sovereigntism?

In their opening chapter,Oleksandr Fisun and Nataliya Vinnykovalook at the controversy over universalism and sovereigntism as part of a wider theoretical debate over the fate of state sovereignty and democracy. The authors argue that sovereignty is going through a period of de-etatization: real policymaking is now being done in network formats, where the role of non-state stakeholders causes the state to lose its sovereign monopoly on decision-making and undermines state legitimacy. They also show how post-Soviet—Ukrainian—ideological creativity became influential for understanding contemporary politics in more distant countries.

Ruslan Zaporozhchenko continues the discussion by stating that in times of globalism, sovereigntism consolidates the instruments and practices of populism, particularism, nationalism, or separatism, in varying combinations, to deconstruct the existing sovereign system of power nationally and internationally. Such a deconstruction may catalyze protest movements, revolutions, civil wars, or mass rallies, which in turn may lead to a further (re)production of divisions within the political systems and regional orders.

In the following chapter, I offer an analysis of the concept of sovereignty as promoted by contemporary sovereigntists. I argue that although the sovereigntist ideology varies from country to country, it is consolidated around a specific interpretation of the concept of sovereignty. Taking as examples Trumpism and Putinism, the sovereigntist ideologies in an old democracy and a new post-Soviet autocracy, I show that sovereigntists define sovereignty as the supremacy of the people as an imagined majority, a perspective that denies the sovereignty of the human person and the legitimacy of cosmopolitan norms of justice.

Gulnara Shaikhutdinova examines how international human rights law is experiencing a sovereigntist and nationalist turn in domestic legal systems, adducing the legal systems of the EU, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Russia as examples. The author argues that the sovereigntist trend in implementing international human rights law leads to the fragmentation of contemporary international law and the emergence of multiple legal values and practices that contradict each other and the international legal order.

In the concluding chapter, Yurii Mielkov contends that universal norms take precedence over a particularist ethos and provides a framework for any moral particularity that could serve to achieve more peaceful and just universal goals for the world. Using arguments from post-Soviet experience, the author argues that moral particularism can only lead to a world of closed societies, with little space in the national and international public sphere.

On the whole, the selected research provides our readers with many specific cases of post-Soviet majority construction, with their attendant insights, as well as a general account of ideological creativity.

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ISelf, Otherness, and Ideology

1 Reconfiguring Identities within the CityscapeIdeologies of Ukraine’s Decommunization Renaming1

Natalia Kudriavtseva

Recent research into the symbolic transformation of urban spaces in post-communist countries have analyzed the political significance of place names as vehicles of commemoration (Azaryahu 1997; Light 2004; Gil 2005; Palonen 2008; David 2013). This focus, partially intersecting with the linguistic landscape perspective (see e.g. Berezkina 2016; Pipitone 2019), allows us to go beyond thedescriptive approaches to place-naming traditionally taken in sociolinguistics, and to adopt a critical standpoint on place names as means of re-constructing history. In landscape approaches, this view has been known as “place-making”—understood as “a way of constructing the past […] and, in the process, personal and social identities” where place names are by all means involved in this “place” production (Basso 1996, cited in Pipitone 2019: 16–17; see also Azaryahu 2011: 32). In the field of cultural geography (see e.g. Berg & Vuolteenaho 2009), where the influence of linguistic theory has been recognized (Bucher et al. 2013: 25), place names, in their commemorative capacity, are considered to make up a “city-text” which reproduces a particular version of history and contributes to shaping a local and national sense of belonging (Azaryahu 2009).

Studies of urban toponymy, as a reflection of social memory and of renaming as a promotion of the ruling elite’s ideology in the context of Central and Eastern Europe (Stipersky et al. 2011; Bucher et al. 2013), point out an iconic link between street names and official versions of history, which works as a structural component of the group identity authorities try to design. These studies draw on Duncan Light’s notion of “iconographic landscapes”, assuggested in his research of renaming in post-socialist Bucharest (Light 2004). Light argues that iconographic landscapes arising as a consequence of renaming in post-socialist states are necessarily in accord with the ideals of new regimes, and that the examination of these toponymic changes can offer important insights into the ways in which these states are redefining their national identities and national pasts (Light 2004: 154). Light also notes that in this post-socialist identity-building, there are two processes that complement each other: that of commemorating certain historical facts and that of forgetting others (Light 2004: 156). Therefore, the city-text which results is doomed to highlight certain things and erase others as “the gesture of street naming constitutes an attempt to constitute and represent imagined communities” (Palonen 2008: 220). In this respect, the differentiation between city-related, regional, national, and international “identity levels” (Stipersky et al. 2011: 186) seems to be an effective methodological tool, as it allows usto check the intensity of each of these levels in a particular cityscape, as well as to examine whether the processes of commemorating and forgetting the past unfold similarly at different identity levels.

In Ukraine, as in other countries of Eastern Europe, the rejection of communist past has been accompanied by the search for a new consolidating element that all Ukrainians might possibly share. Decommunization—which intensified after the Euromaidan Revolution, includingtwo laws on the censure of the communist and Nazi regimes and on the commemoration of strugglers for Ukraine’s independence (Law 2015a; Law 2015b)—triggered a large-scale toponymic renaming targeting primarily the south-east of Ukraine. In these regions, unlike in Western Ukraine, where a massive renaming alreadyoccurred as early as 1991, the bulk of toponymy2 was still of the Soviet origin; thus,the decommunization process has been most evident there. Though the renaming strategy pursued by authorities in this part of the country was to maximally avoid commemoration, as explained by the need to deideologize and depoliticize urban place names, it is possible to identify three memorialized historical strata in the officially sanctioned toponymy seen by the local authorities as readily accepted by all. These are the Kievan Rus and Cossack epochs, the 20th century national liberation movements, and certain military events and figures of the Soviet period (Gnatiuk 2018: 128; see also Gomaniuk 2017; Pavlenko 2018). Among the commemorative names, which were not directly related to either the military sphere or politics, the most drew on pre-Soviet era heritage, specifically the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires (Gnatiuk 2018: 129). Overall, these trends in the toponymic renaming, as brought about by the 2015 decommunization,coincide with those exhibited by other post-socialist countries, specificallyin their appeal to the pre-socialist era as an object of commemoration, a decrease of political and military place names, and an increase in local toponymy (Gnatiuk 2018: 134).

Reviewing officially endorsed renamings, however, it is possible to detect only officially expressed or imposed identities articulated by political elites. Those are not necessarily similar to the identities embraced by actual communities who inhabit cities and towns (Stipersky et al. 2011: 184). Maoz Azaryahu has stressed the necessity to refine our understanding of renaming by examining “the operation of naming commissions as municipal agencies that ‘author’ the landscape-as-text,” and thus explore the relation between the “input” (i.e. names offered for commemoration) and the “output” (i.e. the actual names approved by the officials) (Azaryahu 2011: 29–30). It is only in the case of looking into these suggestions on renaming (i.e. in the case of input) that place names can be seen as “mirrors” of those identities that people tend to manifest. So far, such cases have rarely been subject to academic scrutiny, andeven when studied, those surveyed were namely capital cities (see e.g. Azaryahu 1997). Similarly rewarding appears to be an exploration of renaming suggestions in provincial cities and towns, both in terms of additional empirical data (Azaryahu 2011: 29), and the specifics of the input that is analyzed.

It is such a study of toponymic suggestions that I describe in this chapter. The case is Ukraine’s south-eastern provincial city of Kryvyi Rih. I set out to establish whether the suggested place names are in any way different from those authorized by the local officials. Do the authors of the suggestions and the authorities work on a similar range of objects which should be renamed under the law? Do the suggested toponyms relate to the same historical periods as those identified as common for the south-east of the country? How do any historical strata, expressed in the suggested toponymy, come to be realized at different identity levels? And which of these levels—local, regional, or national—is preferred?

I will not only review the full list of toponyms offered by a naming commission, but also survey the attitudes of its members towards the decommunization renaming as such. Froma methodological point of view, I will thus follow a socio-onomastic approach, which allows fora discussion of the members’ naming motives behind their choices, as well as their perceptions of the various roles that toponyms play. My main objective is to reveal what can be called the commission members’ ideologies of place names, or their toponymic ideologies, asexpressed in their associations, evaluations, and practices, connected to place names. In line with the abovementioned critical toponymy studies, where the focus moves from a mere description of toponymy to the processes involved in naming places and creating names, I aim to show the kind of processes that structure these toponymic ideologies and motivate the concrete choices that the commission members make.

Theoretical Framework

In this study, I will not refer to “ideologies” in the sense often used in studies of socialist and post-socialist renaming, where it means an official state ideology legitimized in the symbols of urban space (e.g. Light, Nicolae & Suditu 2002; Gnatiuk 2018). Here, I draw on the sociolinguistic concept of language ideologies,broadly defined as “beliefs and feelings about language” (Field & Kroskrity 2009: 4). The notion of an ideology as a belief about something might readily lend itself to critical linguistic research on toponymy, as it can be extrapolated to denote people’s attitudes to place names and their beliefs of the influence that place names have. Research on attitudes towards toponyms, including the issue of renaming, has been conducted in the field of cultural geography (see Kostanski 2009) as well as in the field of sociolinguistics (see Berezkina 2016). The concept of language ideologies was first used within the context of attitudes towards American indigenous place names (see Pipitone 2019). AsI will show here, this framework can also be usefully extended to the discussions of decommunization renaming in Ukraine.

Defined as “the cultural (or subcultural) systems of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989: 255), language ideologies are otherwise described as accustomed cultural stereotypes about language in general, particular languages, linguistic structure,or language use. On a large scale, these ideologies always concern more than just language, since they “envision and enact links of language to group and personal identity” (Woolard & Schieffelin 1994: 56).

The associations between languages and identities are formed through the three semiotic processes,identified by Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal (2000) as iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. Iconization means that certain linguistic features are perceived as iconic representations of particular groups of people—as if “a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence” (Irvine & Gal 2000: 37). The notion of fractal recursivity, reminiscent of geometric fractals, suggests that intergroup oppositions between linguistic varieties or groups are projected onto intragroup relations, or vice versa: “[…] the myriad oppositions that can create identity may be reproduced repeatedly, either within each side of a dichotomy or outside of it” (p. 38). The process of erasure renders certain phenomena invisible, since language ideology is “a totalizing vision, elements that do not fit its interpretive structure […] must be either ignored or transformed” (p. 38). For example, Aneta Pavlenko (2011: 49) uses this scheme to illustrate associations between languages and identities in Latvian and Ukrainian postcolonial narratives:

In the process of fractal recursivity, a political opposition between Russia and the new nation-states is projected inward, onto the relationship between Russian speakers and the titulars and between Russian and the titular language. In the process of iconization, Latvian and Ukrainian are symbolically linked to morally superior ethnic and national identities and a European or Western identity, and Russian to an inferior ‘colonizer’ identity. Its linguistic features, such as swearwords, become an iconic representation of the moral inferiority of its speakers. And because linguistic ideology is a totalizing vision, elements that do not fit its interpretive structure, such as variation within both groups, are rendered invisible through the process of erasure.

Since a toponym is, in the first place, a linguistic form (and therefore a sign), the three processes that construct language ideologies can also be seen as structuring the ideologies of place names. These processes can be employed in the analysis of associations between identities and place names. Under this framework, the use of a certain place name can be considered as symbolizing and indexing a particular identity, as this place name refers to a specific historical vision iconically represented by certain figures and events. Applied to the previous research on post-socialist renaming, this scheme explains the link that brings about “iconographic landscapes,” where commemorating and forgetting are grounded by the processes of iconization and erasure.

Methodology

Toponymic Classification

In this study, I have adhered to the methodology used in previous works on urbanonymy,seen as reflecting identity in some central and regional European cities (Stipersky et al. 2011; Bucher et al. 2013) and thirty-six of the largest cities in Ukraine (Gnatiuk 2018). This included the quantification and classification of toponyms according to themes and scales, or identity levels. In order to enable comparisons of the “input” names with the “output” names approved by the officials, I used the following thematic classification, based on (Stipersky et al. 2011 and Gnatiuk 2018). First, I distinguished between (I) restored historic toponyms, and (II) non-historic, or newly given, place names. Then, I classified the non-historic names into (1) commemorative, (2) topographic, (3) poetic, (4) denoting crafts and trades, and (5) others. Of these five groups, only topographic and commemorative names were further subdivided into classes. Topographicnames were classified intogeographic (various geographic designations, such as rivers, towns, mountains, etc.),localities (vicinity to some significant locality, such as a hospital, railway station, etc.), and appearance (physical nature of a street, such as wide, narrow, etc.). Commemorative names, including personal and collective names, were grouped into names referring to political and military spheres, and into other names.

The political and military group of the commemorative names was additionally categorized according to historical periods, such as those identified by Oleksiy Gnatiuk (2018: 124): Kievan Rus; Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Cossack State between the middle of the 17th and 18th centuries; Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; the Ukrainian Struggle for Independence 1917–1921; the Soviet Union; the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and related liberation movements; Independent Ukraine (including the Euromaidan Revolution and the Donbass military conflict). The group of other names includes commemorative names related to spheres other than war and politics, such as science, culture, religion, industry or business. These names were also specifically arranged into historical categories of pre-Soviet, “Soviet-persecuted” and “Soviet-favored” (i.e. people having no obvious problems with the Soviet regime), ex-Soviet,and post-Soviet people.

In terms of scales, which is another criterion used in the classification, all commemorative names were related to the kind of historical context that a certain figure is perceived to represent—local, regional, national—which, in its turn, symbolizes a particular dimension (or level) of identity. Thus, names of persons commemorated for their contribution or relation to the city’s history are thought to be local-specific. Names of persons having somehow influenced a wider region where the city is located belong to the regional level. Names of persons who have historical significance for the whole of Ukraine are seen as embodying the national identity dimension.

Socio-onomastic Attitudinal Survey

To allow a deeper insight into the ideologies embraced by the authors of the toponymic suggestions that I examine, I have surveyed their attitudes towards renaming, as well as place names themselves, to find out more about the reasons for toponymic preferences and the associations relatedto them. I used both a questionnaire and in-depth interviews for this study, as outlinedin previous research (Kostanski 2009; Berezkina 2016).

Besides traditional questions of age, gender, and nationality, the questionnaire was comprised ofthree parts, includingthirteen different questions. Two of these parts included multiple-choice questions, and the other part contained two open-ended questions. The three questions in the first part identified beliefs about the nature and significant characteristics of the toponym, as well as the kinds of toponyms to which the respondents paid most of their attention. The second part listed eight different place names in the city which had to be renamed under the decommunization legislation, and asked the respondent to choose the most suitable variant for the renaming. The final part with the open-ended questions askedabout the respondents’ opinion on the officially approved list of renamed toponyms in Kryvyi Rih, and also about their ideas of why / whether this renaming is altogether important.

As for the interviews, I followed a conversational-style interview—also known as the “open” semi-structured interview question routine (Kostanski 2009: 113). It is a method of open-ended questions, which allows the interviewer to build uponnew information gleanedin the process of an interview, as it arises. While the list of questions asked was therefore not identical for each participant,basic themes were eventually covered by all of them. These themes concerned the interviewees’ associations with the city, their reflections on the work of the naming commission, as well as their perceptions of the functions of place names and of the impact of the decommunization renaming as a whole. As such, my methodological approach has been fundamentally qualitative in nature, with occasional uses of quantitative methods, the latter applied in the toponymic classification part.

Data and Analysis

The city of Kryvyi Rih lies on the junction of the Inhulets and Saksahan rivers in the south-western part of theDnipropetrovsk region, a central-eastern region of Ukraine. The region borders the Donetsk region in the east and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions tothe south. Kryvyi Rih is its second largest city, itself being located close to the central Kyrovohrad region and to the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv. Founded in 1775 by Zaporizhzhia Cossacks as a post station, Kryvyi Rih firstevolved into a town and then a city, largelydue to the extraction of rich iron ore deposits. The discovery of Ukraine’s largest iron ore field was made by Ukrainian-German archaeologist and landowner Oleksandr Pol in 1866. This kicked off the first mine and a railway connection in Kryvyi Rih, bringing the city into the industrial conglomerate of Prydniprov’ia and Donbas.

In 1918, this industrial cohesion was even seen as sufficient grounds for creating a separate Soviet quasi-state—the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic, which existed for hardly a month before it was joined with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, where it became completely dissolved as an independent territory by 1919. The city’s iron ore potential was most exploitedduring the Soviet period, which brought its push for heavy industry. This included the construction of Ukraine’s biggest mining and smelting complex “Kryvorizhstal” (1931). During World War II, Kryvyi Rih was occupied by German troops for almost three years (1941–1944), and the city’s industrial equipment was either evacuated to Russia or blown up. The post-war period, however, saw even greater industrial expansion, as well as housing and infrastructure growth. Today Kryvyi Rih is one of the country’s largest industrial centers—home to more than 600,000 people.

The naming commission—whose particular toponymic suggestions and ideologies I have examined—was independently organized in one of the city-based universities in Kryvyi Rih. It involved eight members, including the rector of the university (Korotaiev 2017: 136). This commission was not affiliated with an official municipal agency, but was rather a citizens’ grassroots initiative (working group). However, it was their activity that triggered a massive public discussion and encouraged the city officials to attend to decommunization renaming foreseen by the law. The city council and mayor were supposed to facilitate and administer the process from the very beginning, but they did not end up making any decisions regarding the renaming of city places within the specified time of nine months. The working group, however, did prepare renaming suggestions and initiated their own discussion long before the decision was to be made on the subject by the regional self-government. Two representatives of the working group were then invited to work on a special naming commission created at this official level, where the final decision on the renaming process in the city of Kryvyi Rih was to be made and endorsed.

I have concentrated my research on seven of the nine members who made up the core of the group and also authored the list of toponyms submitted to the officials. Of the seven scholars, there were two historians, two geographers, two Ukrainian language experts,and one scholar specializing in philosophy and logic. It is important to note that in the group’s work on toponymic suggestions, it was on their own that they identified objects thathad to be renamed under the decommunization legislation. As a result, they actually ended up with even more decommunized place names than was originally recommended by the Ukrainian Institute for National Memory (Viatrovych et al. 2015). Out of the 239 streets, squares, parks, ponds, city districts,and metro stations that the working group saw as bearing communism-related labels, 231 objects were recommendednew names, and 8 streets were suggested to reorganize. The group’s mostintensive work on the renaming suggestions took place in January 2016; of course, much historical and geographic research precededthese January discussions.

Toponymic Classification

The list of toponymic suggestions, which I have classified according to the abovementioned themes and identity levels, was given to me by the university rector. Table 1 shows quantities in the designated categories of commemorative names, such as vulytsia Kostia Hordiienka (Kost Hordiienko Street), park Mershavtseva (Mershavtsev Park), andvulytsia Ukrainskykh voiniv (Ukrainian Warriors Street); topographic names, such as vulytsia Umanska (Uman Street), vulytsia Hoverlivska (Hoverla Street), andvulytsia Staroinhuletska (Old Inhulets Street); denominations of crafts and trades, such as vulytsia Hirnykiv (Miners Street) or vulytsia Kobzarska (Kobzar Street); poetic names, such as vulytsia Chervneva (June Street) andmaidan Svobody (Freedom Square); restored historic names, such as vulytsia Tserkovna (Church Street) or vulytsia Poshtova (Post Street); and other names, which include at least one habitual name of popular origin—maidan 95 kvartal (95th Kvartal Square) and one name homonymous with the previous toponym park Pravdy (Truth Park), which was formerly known as the park named after the communist newspaper Pravda (Truth).

The table also indicates the numbers of commemorative names with reference to the identity scales (local, regional, and national), and with respect to particular historical periods. One of the main problems that arose during this classification was deciding which of the identified historical periodsshould this or that figure be assigned to. For example, Volodymyr Byzov and Pavlo Shevchenko, both former rectors of two of the city’s universities, were suggested to be commemorated in the names of the streets wherethe universities are located. They served as rectors and contributed to the development of their respective universities during both the Soviet andpost-Soviet times. Another instance is Eduard Fuks, a geologist and photographer known to have been the most qualified explorer of iron ore deposits in Kryvyi Rihduring both the pre-Soviet and early Soviet period. He was later persecuted by the Sovietsand died of aself-imposed hunger strike in 1938. Further, such collective names as “Ukrainian warriors” and “Heroes of Ukraine” might have associations with various historical periods.

Table 1. Classification of toponyms suggested for places in the city of Kryvyi Rih (quantities in dubious categories marked by means of ±)

Category

Group

Subgroup

COMMEMORATIVE NAMES (83)

persons (77):

local (62) regional (4)

national (11)

political and military (15):

local (9):

Cossack State (3)

1917-1921 (1)

Russian Empire (1)

Soviet Union (2)

Independent Ukraine (2)

regional (2):

Cossack State (2)

national (4):

1917-1921 (2)

Soviet Union (persecuted) (2)

other (62):

local (53):

pre-Soviet (17±1)

Soviet-persecuted (6±1)

Soviet (23±4)

post-Soviet (2±4)

regional (2):

pre-Soviet (2)

national (7):

pre-Soviet (2)

Soviet-persecuted (4)

ex-Soviet (1)

collective names (6):

local (1) national (5)

political and military (5):

local (1) Soviet

national (4)

Independent Ukraine (1)

all times (3)

other(1):

national (1)

Independent Ukraine

TOPOGRAPHIC NAMES (105)

geographic names (72)

localities (32)

appearance (1)

CRAFTS & TRADES (14)

POETIC (4)

RESTORED HISTORIC (23)

OTHER (2)

TOTAL(231)

Out of these 231 suggested place names, there were 122 toponyms accepted by the regional authorities, and which were approved bytheir order, issued in May 2016 (Order 2016). Ninety of the recommended names were used on the same objects, while thirty-two names were used to rename streets, squares, and parks, other than those suggested by the working group. Besides, seventeen of the accepted 122 toponyms were taken in a slightly different form. For example, vulytsia Osvity (Education Street) was adapted as vulytsia Osvitianska (Educational Street), and vulytsia Rybalok (Fishermen Street) as vulytsia Rybalska (Fishing Street).

In terms of the designated categories, the most frequently used category was that of topographic names, followed bycommemorative toponymy. These two types of toponymy also prevailed through the officially endorsed process of renaming, except that the biggest group was instead commemorative names (see Gnatiuk 2018: 125).3 The most pronounced historical context “named” in the subgroup of political and military commemorative toponymy was the Cossack period (17th–18th centuries), in both the input and output. Such historical periods as Kievan Rus and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth werealtogether absent from the renaming recommendations, though they figuredin the list of place names officially approved. Among other commemorative toponyms (e.g. science, culture, religion, industry, and business) preference among the recommendations was given to the so called “Soviet-favored” personalities, this category closely followed in preference by names of other representatives of the pre-Soviet time. In the approved list, however, the order was just the opposite: pre-Soviet commemorative names ranked first, while Soviet names came in second.

As for the identity dimensions, there were no discrepancies between the input, suggested by the working group, and the output toponymy, produced by the officials. Local history is expressed most vividly in both the renaming suggestions of the commission and in the list of officially authorized place names. When juxtaposed with the identified historical contexts, the identity levels in these toponymic suggestions exhibit an interesting pattern: while the most frequent appeared to be Soviet-related toponymy, including names of non-persecuted political and military figures from the Soviet Union, and “Soviet-favored” personalities, representing other spheres of life, these were only found in the local identity dimension, which means that the commemorated people have significance exclusively at the local level in the city of Kryvyi Rih. At the regional and national levels of identity, there are either names of Soviet-persecuted persons, or names of those who do not have any relation to the Soviet Union as such.