Nationality and citizenship: Education in Russia (and

Finland)

Nelli Piattoeva

University of Tampere, Finland

Contents

• Nationality and citizenship

• The imperial legacy of Russia and debates on the nature of Russian citizenship

• Russian citizenship education policy texts

Nation-state

• “The assumption that political norms apply within nation-states, conceived as single integrated “societies”, is so pervasive that many theorists don’t even see the need to make it explicit” (Kymlicka and Straehle 1999).

• Nation-states are “the product of careful nation-building policies, adopted by the state in order to diffuse and strengthen a sense of nationhood” (ibid),

• a sense that the state represents and encompasses a cohesive nation.

• This leads to the common assumption that the political jurisdiction (state) corresponds to the cultural grouping (nation)

Nation and state

• Confusion of the terms state and nation (Connor 1994)

• State: something objective and tangible (Connor 1994); polity with fixed boundaries, sovereignty over its territory, monopoly over legitimate violence within the state’s territory, and a bureaucratic and military apparatus (Suny 1995, 197)

• Nation: something intangible and belongs to the realm of feeling and intuition (Connor 1994); the imagined community of Benedict Anderson

“The imagined community” of Benedict Anderson

• imagined because members of the community will never meet all other members, but their minds provide them with an image of a community

• imagined as limited because even the largest nations have finite, stable or elastic, borders beyond which lie other nations

• imagined as sovereign: dream to be free; the measure of freedom is a sovereign state

• imagined as communities: regardless of inequality and even exploitation, the nation is conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship

Nation-state

• Thus nation-state is just one form of polity• The hegemony of this ideological model

(Castles 2005, 690). • Genuine societies are only those where

social, cultural and political dimensions coincide (McCrone and Kiely 2000, 23).

• Thus new states strive to build a nation, whereas older states continue their nationalising policies.

• On the international arena, nations are given a natural right to form a state

Nationality and citizenship• The merger between state and nation has lead to

the synonymous usage of nationality and citizenship

• Before the 18th century, citizenship and nationality could be scarcely related because they were linked to different socio-political entities (Heater 2004, 88)

• The confluence of the terms happened with the advent of the doctrine of nationalism: – citizen’s rights and duties were available for those sharing

the cultural bond, speaking the national language and possessing a sense of loyalty to the nation-state.

* spread of democracy coincided with the spread of (state)nationalism

Nationality and citizenship

• Derek Heater: the “equation of nationality and citizenship has been the keystone in the construction of political stability in new states” (1990, 185).

• Affiliating nation with the political concept of citizenship meant that modern citizenship had to incorporate not only rights and duties but also a sense of tradition, community, and identity (Heater 2002, p. 99)

The link between nationality and citizenship in the globalising world

(Delanty 2000)• The process of globalisation leads to the

decoupling of the nation_state.• Globalisation: 1) changes within states, 2)

changes in people’s identification with the nation-state (Sassen 2002)

• Globalisation leads to “tension between nationality and citizenship within the nation state … nationalism prior to the early twentieth century was primarily a nationalism of state patriotism … [which] created culturally homogenous populations”. New nationalism is nationalism “from below, nationalism of differentiation instead of homogenisation”.

A short summary

• The doctrine of nationhood legitimises state power

• Nationalism brings nation and state and consequently citizenship and nationality together, requires continuous nation-building to maintain the order

• Globalisation: decouples nation and state and thus nationality and citizenship

• Is there solid evidence to back up Delanty’s arguments?

Russia’s socio-political context• Russia is simultaneously experiencing state and

nation building processes• imperial legacy: nationality and citizenship

institutionalised as divergent concepts• Soviet Russia and contemporary Russia are

ethnofederal states• sub-state (and deeply ethnic) nationality as the

basic institutional block (Brubaker 1994)• nevertheless ethnic Russians associated strongly

with the USSR• competing conceptions of the Russian nationhood

(civic, linguistic and unionist with a Slavic bias)• difficulties to reconcile the state with a nation

Citizenship education policy texts

• Emphasis on the national school• education should be ethnic in form and

content• education should satisfy people’s

demands for national revival, guarantee knowledge of ethnic traditions and command of the native language

• the ethnic element was complemented by emphasis on the universal human values

• arguments included: state integrity, good interethnic relations and fears of state disintegration

• From the mid 1990s worries about and suspicion toward the effect of the ethnic content

• growing emphasis on citizenship and patriotic education

• Priority of the national Russian identity• The national identity is developed on the

basis of state patriotism, which implies love and devotion to the state

• state patriotism and the primacy of the national identity are expected to consolidate the country and improve interethnic relations

What is patriotism?

• Patriotism means “love for the Motherland, loyalty to one’s Fatherland, a determination to serve its interests, as well as a readiness to protect the Fatherland up to the point of self-sacrifice” (The concept of patriotic up-bringing 2003).

Concluding remarks

• growing efforts to re-conceptualise nationality and citizenship as equal, as opposed to distinct

• policies to detouch nationality from its ethnic conception (state patriotism, Soviet legacy)

• interplay of imperial past and nation-state building, but the discussion should also be extended to the supra-national level

What about Finland?

• In Finland and other Nordic states the connection between nationality and citizenship is very strong

• attempts to ”de-nationalise Finnishness”, to decouple the ethnos from demos

Points for discussion

• Every researcher is generally an expert of his/her country and its history, thanks to research knowledge and otherwise. That is why researchers inevitably have a different relationship to their native country as opposed to other areas (Pakkasvirta & Saukkonen 2005, 21). - Discuss this quote.

• How do you perceive the connection between nationality and citizenship in your own country? – How is it manifested in the educational sphere?– Have you observed any recent changes in the direction

proposed by Delanty or in the opposite one?

Points for discussion

• Considering that the system of education has traditionally socialised for national loyalty, how to reconcile this task with that of building a European or global citizenship?

• Think in the context of your own country as well as in the context of Russia with its particular socio-cultural situation.

References (in addition to those indicated in the paper)

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Connor, W. (1994) Ethnonationalism. The quest for understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Kymlicka, W., and Straehle, C. Cosmopolitanism, Nation-states, and Minority Nationalism: A Critical Review of Recent Literature.” European Journal of Philosophy, 1999, vol. 7, no. 1.Suny, Ronald Grigor (1995) Ambiguous categories, states, empires and nations. Post-Soviet Affairs 11(2), 185-196.

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