Pre-Revolutionary Identities in Central Asia

Abstract

The following two chapters examine the contention that a nation-building process has occurred in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Turkmenistan during the Soviet period. Several specialists on the area have emphasised the national delimitation of the region and an accompanying nation-building process that is said to have occurred; one contemporary example of this interpretation states that ‘one of the most successful and obvious legacies of Soviet domination of Muslim Central Asia is the territorial and political fragmentation of the area which has radically, perhaps even permanently, altered the geopolitical complexion of Turkestan [Central Asia] … new language based ‘nationalisms’ were invented, bestowed, and promoted through competition for access to strategic resources among nationalities at all levels of social articulation’.¹ However, to what extent this process of nation-building has succeeded is contested between these scholars, some have argued that the Central Asian republics in which ‘national consciousness was nonexistent or merely in an embryonic state have reached the stage of modern nationhood; ill-defined tribal or ethnic ‘sub-national’ consciousness has disappeared; supranational pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic consciousness … may have survived in the minds of a few but it is barely discernible on the surface’.² Others have taken a more cautious approach, arguing that ‘even at present, these objectives remain unachieved; and these processes, incomplete’.³