Nationalism, Identity and the Belarusian State

Abstract

Nationalism and the formation of nation-states in Europe are usually treated in the context of the evolution and political mobilisation of ‘national consciousness’.¹ This collective, national identity may be considered to derive from recognition of a primordial, ‘natural’ phenomenon (that is, the ‘nation’); it may be treated as both a resuit of and an actor in the interplay of socio-economic and political forces; or it may be reduced to what Anthony Smith describes as ‘a communion of imagery’, whose basis is a ‘text’ made up of images and cultural constructs.² However, while the existence of different ‘levels’ of national consciousness is accepted, with the exception of analyses proceeding from this final conception (which Smith labels as ‘post-modernist’) the phenomenon of national consciousness itself tends to be taken as undifferentiated and unproblematic, and this has certainly been the case with studies of the former Soviet Union.