Hala – APSA 2005
Nationalism as defined here is not individuals’ beliefs, nor a collective cultural
disposition. I follow Breuilly and treat nationalism as politics, political interaction
organized around putatively national boundaries (Breuilly 1993). Mark Beissinger’s
work on nationalist mobilization in the post-Soviet states adopts the contentious event
analysis framework pioneered by Charles Tilly in From Mobilization to Revolution
(1978). It stands out from most scholarship on postcommunist nationalism for its
eventful perspective. Rather than follow convention and treat the break-up of the USSR
as if it were inevitable, he explains the process by which it came to seem inevitable.
Cataloguing nationalist protest events situated in time, he systemically demonstrates the
construction of the post-Soviet nations from 1987 – 1991.
While protest event analysis like Beissinger’s limits the analytic focus to
contentious public gatherings by challengers from outside the polity, I take Koopmans'
and Statham’s approach (1999) and broaden the political field under examination. In the
“political claims analysis” framework, exemplified by the Koopmans et al. MERCI
(Mobilization on Ethnic Relations, Citizenship and Immigration) project, the unit of
analysis is public claim-making events, which can range from official declarations,
parliamentary proceedings, party platforms, legal actions, research publications, all
manner of public statements, as well as protest events. Thus it encompasses claims from
the “bottom-up” and “top-down.” Besides expanding the political field to include
authorities and other members of the polity, political claims analysis also has the
advantage of rigor that most conventional discourse analysis lacks. It captures the
historically-grounded qualitative elements of discourse but features the formalism that
adds reliability and also makes comparative analysis more feasible, especially analysis at
the macro-level.
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Convention