Content area
Full text
Abstract
The countries of the former Soviet Union inherited a unique system for managing the needs of ethnic minorities. The question is how these countries utilize Soviet constructs to develop policies suitable for their distinct political contexts. Kazakhstan's leaders have chosen to fashion a multiethnic civic nation and established the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan to oversee the work of creating a uniform national identity. This paper discusses major theories pertaining to civic nation-building, highlights the Soviet approach to building a civic nation, and describes how the ideology, form, and activities of the Assembly contribute to civic nation-building in Kazakhstan. Finally, it describes the author's own ethnographic research demonstrating how people react to Kazakhstan's civic nation-building efforts. The paper argues that Kazakhstan's attempts to create a civic national identity are failing because it has not yet provided a consolidating national discourse as strong as socialism was during the Soviet period.
Keywords: Kazakhstan, ethnicity, civic nation-building, korenizatsiia, Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan, Soviet minorities' policies, identity.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
Introduction
As former republics of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian countries have inherited extremely diverse multiethnic populations produced through large-scale forced and voluntary migration. Their Soviet history has instilled their citizens and leaders with a unique way of thinking about ethnic nations, which the communist authorities largely constructed and proliferated from the 1920s until the Union disbanded in 1991. Since independence, Kazakhstan's and other Central Asian countries' approaches to nation-building reflect these Soviet constructs, but they have also offered new perceptions and strategies to the concept of the nation.
Kazakhstan is highly multiethnic. According to official statistics, 59.2 per cent of the population is Kazakh, 29.6 per cent is Russian, and 10.2 per cent comprises Germans, Tatars, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and Uyghurs. The remaining 1 per cent includes members of over 140 other nationalities.1 Rather than constructing a state-sponsored national identity based exclusively on ethnic Kazakh culture to assimilate the large non-Kazakh portion of the population, the leaders of Kazakhstan have opted for a multiethnic civic nation aiming to enfranchise all of its citizens completely, regardless of their cultural identities. This nation-building approach encourages the state's ethnic minorities to preserve and revitalize their own ethnic cultures and languages while it simultaneously characterizes...