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Nationalities Papers

471

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nach Petersburg von Kioto nach Tokio. Wege und Ziele von Modernisierung im Petrinischen Russland und in Meiji-Japan is again openly comparative of these two empires and is thus able to say much more about modernization than studies that focus on one example in isolation. Beyond these, there are a couple of valiant but rather weak attempts at imperial comparatives with a nod to the Festschrifts honoree. Yes, there are TWO articles comparing Russia to Switzerland. To be fair, Michael Khodarkovskys piece focuses on the North Caucasus, but beyond establishing that they are both landlocked and mountainous, theres just not much to say. Again, courageous, and perhaps tonguein-cheek, but such an article ultimately points most egregiously to the problems of a Festschrift. One of the strongest contributions, and perhaps best-labeled sub-imperial, is Rudiger Ritters Das Imperium entlasst seine Kinder. Identitatsbildung durch Geschichte in Belarus, Polen und Litauen nach 1989, which fascinatingly traces the post-imperial, neo-national history writing of these three new republics. Unsurprisingly, Belarus lacks the pre-history of the others and has had the hardest time nding a Belarusian essence. A similar theme arises in a few of the several essays that have Ukraine as the focus, such as Frank Sysyns The Persistence of the Little Rossian Fatherland in the Russian Empire: The Evidence from The History of Rus or of the Little Rossia, which traces the transformation of this text into a fundamental building block of nineteenth century Ukrainian nationalism. Despite my rather harsh opening to this review, I hope the preceding two paragraphs have indicated that this collection does have something for almost everyone interested in Russian imperial history, and more widely, those looking for good examples of imperial comparative history. Beyond what I have mentioned, there are a few articles that could be argued to be at least somewhat comparative in avor, but there are at least eight that do not even pretend to conform to the instructions the editors surely provided. Andreas Kappeler is a great historian and he should be very honored that so many people put so much time and effort into this volume honoring him. But my duty as a book reviewer is to the larger public, and I cannot recommend the purchase of this volume to anyone. Robert L. Nelson University of Windsor rnelson@uwindsor.ca # 2011, Robert L. Nelson Globalization and nationalism. The cases of Georgia and the Basque country, by Natalie Sabanadze, Budapest & New York: Central European University Press, 2010, viii + 218 pp., US$ 40.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-9639776531 This book, based on an Oxford Ph.D. thesis, begins with the seeming paradox that expanded globalization has not led to the demise of nationalism, but rather appears to have encouraged its resurgence as a disintegrative and protectionist backlash against the integrative and universalizing tendencies of globalization (p. 34). Author Natalie Sabanadze, a Senior Adviser to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, proposes the counter-hypothesis that globalization and nationalism are not contradictory but complementary processes, in that forces of nationalism tend to develop pragmatic relationship [sic] with globalization that serves political and security interests of a national community (p. 4). Of particular interest to Sabanadze are instances of government-led nationalism (p. 54). This can lead to the marginalization of extremist nationalist

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Book Reviews

movements by governments which promote openness to the global community while co-opting nationalist symbols or rhetoric, as in Saakashvilis Georgia, or on the other hand the incorporation of populist nationalists into the ruling coalition, as appears to be happening in Russia (p. 54). As laboratories for exploring the relation of nationalism to globalization, Sabanadze has chosen her homeland of Georgia, representing the new nation-states that emerged from the break-up of the USSR, and the Spanish Basque country, as a sub-state European region where nationalism is both active and institutionalized. Of these two cases, I feel more qualied to discuss the former (although I did note some remarkable parallels between the different manifestations of nationalism in the Basque Country and Quebec, where I have lived for the past 20 years). She traces Georgian nationalism back to movements for cultural, linguistic and political rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Georgia was part of the Russian Empire. She characterizes these movements as Herderian, inclusive and self-critical (pp. 68 76). The rather light colors in which she depicts Georgian nationalism up to the Red Army invasion of 1921 serves to heighten the contrast with her dark portrayal of the initial phase of post-Soviet nationalism, dubbed national fundamentalism and associated principally with Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the dissident who became post-Soviet Georgias rst president (pp. 89 98). Sabanadze places the blame on Soviet Georgian intellectuals, who, with the overt or covert support of the leadership, fostered the primordialized and self-congratulatory concepts of national identity which informed much of the exclusionary nationalist rhetoric of the late 1980s and early 1990s (pp. 81 88). This account rings true, but should be extended to include Tsarist-period scholars who contributed to the modernist linguistic and ethnological concepts of ethnicity which replaced earlier notions of Georgian identity rooted primarily in religious afliation. After a period of national apathy under the presidency of Shevardnadze, nationalism reemerged in the new century in the form of competing movements, an anti-Western and anti-globalist strain (favorite targets of which include the Soros Foundation and newly-introduced Protestant sects); and a pro-Western, Europeoriented nationalism encouraged by the government, especially after Saakashvilis rise to power. (An interesting feature of these competing nationalisms, not developed by Sabanadze, is that both make reference to Georgian Orthodox identity. The anti-globalists oppose Orthodox morality to unhealthy trends, practices and cultural products imported from the West, often accompanied by an orientation toward the fellow-Orthodox Russians, whereas Saakashvili promotes Orthodox symbols as a sign of Georgias attachment to Christian Europe). Rather little is said in this book about Georgias ethnic minorities. The lesson learned from the South Ossetian war of August 2008, which must have occurred just as the manuscript was about to go to the printers, is that globalization is no protection from power politics (p. 111). The only extended discussion of Abkhazia is mostly about the politics of cultural preservation (p. 178). The cases of South Ossetia and Abkhazia could have been used to exemplify a longstanding scheme of transnational interaction and alliancemaking against which current relations between nationalism and globalization could be assessed. The engagement of the Abkhaz leadership with Moscow for leverage against Tbilisi, even as Georgians seek support from the West against Moscow, conforms to a conguration of crossing alliances that has a long history (as any student of the Caucasus knows well). Modern manifestations of crossing alliances, including several cases mentioned in Globalization and Nationalism, typically oppose a pro-Western or genuinely globalist orientation to one based on perceived solidarity of religion (Islam, for example), ethnicity (Russian support for co-ethnic minorities in the Baltic states, p. 177), or marginalization

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Nationalities Papers

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(the Basque party Herri Batasuna as the voice of those who have no voice in Europe, p. 159). My overall impression of this book is positive. The comparative approach has been underused in studies of the political history of the Caucasus. Sabanadze lays the groundwork and deconstructs some of the key concepts for future work in this direction. Her case study of Georgian nationalism draws on Georgian-language sources, including some hardto-nd periodicals, which are inaccessible to many foreign commentators. The book is attractively bound and printed, but the syntactic and lexical infelicities cropping up here and there in the text indicate that the manuscript should have been looked over one last time by a proofreader. Kevin Tuite Universite de Montreal/Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena tuitekj@anthro.umontreal.ca # 2011, Kevin Tuite Language policy and language situation in Ukraine. Analysis and recommendations, ed. by Juliane Besters-Dilger, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2009, 396 pp., US$81.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-3631583890 The language situation in post-Soviet Ukraine remains among the most misunderstood, misconstrued, and muddled aspects in the recent scholarship of that country. The reasons for this state of affairs include an often uncritical reproduction of both Soviet and Western stereotypical (western Ukraine vs. eastern; Catholic west vs Orthodox rest of the nation, Ukrainian and Russian as mutually comprehensible languages, etc.) views by researchers, difculty in collecting statistically reliable data in a situation of postimperial trauma when potential informants give pollsters what they think the latter want to hear, interpretation of data outside its historical, cultural, and socio-psychological context, and a continued lack of sufcient command of the language by non-Ukrainian researchers. Many western scholars still think that knowledge of Russian is sufcient for them to do research, interview informants and pass conclusions. The book under review is a collection of nine essays by Ukrainian and Western scholars focusing on the language situation in Ukraine both in its internal dimension and viewed in terms of international practices limited to Western democracies and precedents where its contributors deem them applicable to or comparable with the case of Ukraine. The language situation in that country is discussed on a general national scale as well as in a number of more specic domains: regional (Odesa), sociolinguistic (surzhyk), and socio-political (education, mass media, government administration and courts). The analytical tools are drawn from ve disciplines represented by the books contributors: political science, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology and jurisprudence. Chronologically the book is limited to the years immediately following the Orange Revolution of 2004. The declared goal of the book is to discuss language situation in all the mentioned aspects and articulate a set of policy recommendations for Ukraine. Even though Ukrainian policy-makers are apparently targeted as the primary audience of this collective monograph, it is an even more valuable resource for scholars of postmodern Ukraine as well as of other countries in a postcolonial transition, not because of the dismissive treatment of science by politicians in Ukraine but primarily for a wealth of very interesting material it offers in its descriptive part.

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