NATIONS AND

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J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY
AS
NATIONALISM A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 25 (1), 2019, 85–89.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12486

Communicative integration in nation-

states and empires
VERA TOLZ
School of Arts Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
Manchester, UK

On the whole, I have been swept away by this ambitious book. With great skill,
this book uses multi-disciplinary methodologies to analyse a vast amount of
qualitative and quantitative data and addresses the hugely important question
of why some nations come together while others fall apart. My comments are re-
lated to Chapter 4 which focuses on Russia (my area of expertise) and China.
This chapter advances the argument that communicative integration is one of
the main factors that tends to influence the prospects of national political inte-
gration and, therefore, a country’s territorial unity and social stability.
Wimmer argues convincingly that, if members of a polity can speak a shared
language, a communicative space across ethno-cultural divides will be
established; consequently, cross-regional political networks are more likely to
emerge, and nation-building at the pan-state level is more likely to succeed.
The presented evidence advances a further argument that not only
monoglossia but also monographia can have positive nation-building conse-
quences. My issue is not with the arguments but with the selection of cases
to support them. The question I raise is whether an imperial formation, whose
elites do not pursue nation-building at the level of the entire state, is an appro-
priate example to investigate the relationship between communicative and na-
tional political integration. My approach is that of a historian who analyses
developments and events in relation to the specific political, social and cultural
context within which they occur.

What kind of polities are we comparing?

The choice of China to substantiate the above arguments makes sense. Since
the early twentieth century, China has been defined and imagined by its elites
as a nation-state. The Han community was the overwhelming majority in the
population, most of whom spoke languages and dialects belonging to the same
Sino-Tibetan linguistic group. In this demographic context, pursuing nation-

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
86 Vera Tolz

building policies across the entire state would be a logical choice. In contrast,
the selection of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union as one of the cases is prob-
lematic. The two instances of state disintegration – in 1917 and 1991 – are
discussed on what appear to be wrong premises.
In contrast to the case of China, in the Romanov Empire, ethnic Russians
constituted less than half of the population. Their proportion rose to just over
half in the Soviet period (58 per cent in 1939). Half of the population thus
belonged to different ethnicities; many of them spoke non-Slavic languages
of different linguistic groups. Under these circumstances, even when ideas of
nationalism began influencing the Russian imperial elites in the nineteenth cen-
tury, the tsarist government never aimed to turn this hugely diverse multi-eth-
nic empire into a nation-state. Most understood that such an undertaking
would be utopian (Miller 2004). In fact, in the late tsarist period, the Russian
imperial administration tended to emulate British policies in India or French in
North Africa in Russia’s imperial borderlands of the Caucasus and Central
Asia (Jersild 2002; Morrison 2008).
Neither did the Soviet government attempt to turn the USSR into a nation-
state. In the aftermath of the disintegration of land-based empires in the con-
text of the First World War, the Bolshevik leadership, when recreating the
state on the territory of the defunct tsarist empire, saw little choice but to di-
vide the Soviet Union into ‘republics’. These republics were envisaged, in the-
ory, as national homelands of different ethnic groups and nationalities. The
fear of being accused of imperial domination inevitably constrained Soviet
leaders from pursuing pan-state integration policies through cultural
Russification.
The Soviet Union was imagined as a supra-national entity, a federation of
free nations which, according to the Soviet constitution, had the right of self-
determination, including independence. This was made abundantly clear fol-
lowing Gorbachev’s liberalising reforms, which made it possible for the elites
in the Union republics to act on this constitutional right that, hitherto, had
been only theoretical. At the level of political rhetoric, Soviet citizens’ identifi-
cation with the entire state was, of course, encouraged. However, at the level of
institutional structures and actual policies, surprisingly little was done to
achieve a Soviet identity. Khrushchev’s project of creating ‘a single Soviet peo-
ple’ (as a unified national community), which is mentioned by Wimmer, was
abandoned because of opposition from leaders of the Union republics’
(Rakowska-Harmstone 1992: 529–30). Instead, state policies facilitated na-
tional identification at the sub-state level (of the Soviet republics). This unusual
process of sub-state nation-building is well theorised by Brubaker (1994).
While Soviet republics acted as ‘the incubator of new nations’ (e.g. Uzbek or
Azerbaijani among the peoples who did not think in national terms in the
pre-Soviet period, the Soviet leadership maintained inequitable and largely im-
perial relationships between the centre and the ethnic peripheries (Suny 1993:
87 and 112–3). In sum, by comparing China and ‘Russia’, Wimmer compares
a nation-state-in-making and an imperial formation of a specific kind.

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Communicative integration in nation-states and empires 87

Inevitably, in my view, the comparison between Russia and China becomes a

misleading one.
It seems to me that the choice of the Russian case has been influenced by
popular understandings of what ‘Russia’ historically was. This popular under-
standing, until recently, influenced scholarship too. Calling the Russian and
Soviet states, whose population was explicitly multi-ethnic, as uniformly ‘Rus-
sians’, as is the case in Wimmer’s book (Wimmer 2018: 113), is an example of
unfortunate usage prevalent in Western popular discourses. Typically, for im-
perial formations, neither under the tsars nor under the Soviets were the state’s
minorities (except Ukrainians and Belarusians in the tsarist period) officially
called Russians or popularly perceived as such. Recently, the imperial and co-
lonial nature of not just tsarist Russia’s but also the Soviet Union’s policies
have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. This literature largely re-
mains unacknowledged in the book (see, e.g. Sahadeo 2010 and Khalid 2007).

Whose linguistic practices are analysed?

It appears that in relation to China, the book tends to focus on the elites,
whereas in relation to Russia, the approach is muddled. At times when
discussing Russia, Wimmer evokes evidence which relates to the entire minor-
ity population in the context of discussing elites. This is, for example, the case
in the discussion of Russia’s Tatar population in the late imperial period
(Wimmer 2018: 154–5). The narrative of the relevant section is about the Tatar
elites, whereas the cited evidence from Robert Geraci’s book about the Rus-
sians and Tatars in the Volga region not knowing each other’s languages, re-
fers explicitly to the largely illiterate peasant population of the region
(Geraci 2001: 37). In fact, by the late imperial period, most of the educated
Volga Tatar elites were fluent in Russian, and their program to reform Islam,
referred to by Wimmer, was strongly influenced by their reading of publica-
tions in the Russian language. The same applies to leaders of other minority
groups in the Russian empire on the eve of the 1917 revolution and state disin-
tegration in the context of the First World War. In turn, in the Soviet period,
while Russian language proficiency among ordinary citizens continued to vary
across the republics of the Soviet Union up until its disintegration in 1991, the
elites working in the state and party administration had to be completely fluent
in Russian. This fact is largely unacknowledged in the book.

Questions arising

The levels of linguistic assimilation or the spread of monographia in the con-

text of ‘Russia’ fail to explain the patterns of state disintegration in 1917–
1918 and 1991. Why, contrary to what Wimmer implies, does Tatarstan, the
national homeland of the Volga Tatars, remain part of the Russian Federation

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
88 Vera Tolz

to the present day? Why, if monographia can have similar integrative conse-
quences as monoglossia, did Stalin’s decision in the 1930s to make most minor-
ities use Cyrillic script fail to prevent the eventual state disintegration? In fact,
the choices made by the leaders of Union republics in 1990–1991 in relation to
the issue of independence were not directly related to the levels of Russifica-
tion. Why, in 1991, did the political elites in the Soviet republics of Central
Asia, with the lowest levels of Russian language proficiency among ordinary
Soviet citizens, prefer Central Asia to remain part of the same state as Russia?
Conversely, why did Belarus become an independent state in 1991, with almost
universal proficiency in the Russian language and lack of knowledge of the Be-
larusian language among 40 per cent of the republic’s population?
I would suggest that, when analysing the disintegration of an imperial for-
mation, we need to consider factors other than those which we prioritise when
assessing the success or failure of political integration in a nation-state-in-mak-
ing. Within an imperial formation, an imperial centre deliberately maintains
different relationships with different regions. The nature of the relationship
makes a particularly significant impact on the outcomes when an imperial state
starts to disintegrate. The Central Asian republics had a specific economic re-
lationship with Moscow that made their elites, and ordinary citizens,
favourably disposed to continuing a union with Russia (Fowkes 1997: 178–
9). The Tatar republic had a different status within the USSR from that of
Belarus, which led to their different statuses post-1991. Ukraine, whose refer-
endum on independence became the last nail in the USSR’s coffin, was not a
unified entity, as Wimmer depicts it. Ukraine was more a conglomerate of re-
gions with different historical relationships to Russia. The region of Western
Ukraine, from where the leaders of Ukraine’s pro-independence movement
came, became part of the Russia-dominated state only in 1939. This region,
having been part of the Habsburg Empire and then Poland, had a very differ-
ent political history from Russia and from that of other parts of Ukraine. Ro-
man Szporluk (2000: xxiv) argues, plausibly, that by annexing Western
Ukraine Stalin made a major strategic error, planting the seeds of the Soviet
Union’s eventual imperial disintegration.
Finally, the inappropriateness of using the Soviet-style ethnic federation to
assess the extent to which communicative integration is a factor in successful
nation-building is obvious from the history of the two other ‘federations’ of
this kind: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. With the collapse of the communist
regimes, both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell apart despite far-reaching
communicative integration.
Despite these critical comments about this particular case study choice and
the questions arising from this choice, Wimmer’s book remains a very rich re-
source. Inevitably, it will invigorate debates around the issues surrounding na-
tional political integration, suggesting further factors for our consideration.
These debates include, as this short intervention argues, the relationship be-
tween specific nation-building projects and imperial frameworks within which
they are pursued.

© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019
Communicative integration in nation-states and empires 89

References

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© The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019