9
assumed to have a particular set of discursive practices (Hopf, 2002:6). When this
dynamic is applied to national identities, the other can be constituted by either internal
actor – such as the Chechens have been constructed in the post-Soviet period – or by
traditional foreign entities.
1
Yet, as Hopf (2002:1-38) illustrates, the “other” need not
necessarily be represented by another individual nor does the relationship have to be
intrinsically conflictual. The other may be actualized by an object, an image or an idea.
Furthermore, the available repository of potential demarcators which separate “we” from
“them” may include “name, physical prototype, sartorial style, dietary practice, rites,
religious observation, language, administrative partition, economic niche…[and]
stereotypical representations diffused in the popular consciousness” (Young, 1992:74).
The dichotomy between the self and the “other” is, I posit, a fundamental variable in
explaining contemporary Russian national identity and ascertaining the dynamics of the
state’s “identity crisis” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The suggestion that identities are both recent and elite driven is a belief, which is
congruent with the modernist and post-modern schools of ethnic and nationalist literature
positing that the political phenomenon now known as “nationalist” or “ethno-nationalist”
was unknown prior to the French Revolution. Instrumentalists argue that the creations of
identities are recent constructs and artifacts of elites bent on preserving order which tap
the emotions of the masses and provide them with social and psychological security (A.
Smith, 1998:125). This school rejects primordialist explanations for the origins and
existence of differing ethnicities and nationalist groups. For their part, primordial
theories view ethnicity as genetic in that an individual is born with certain organic
1
It is important to note that “the political consequences of an identity may depend even more centrally on
its political content and meaning…. [because] the meaning of an identity, especially political…affects its
political impact” (Huddy, 2003:528).
Convention