Narodnost Is Not an Ethnosociological Category
If “narod” is a crucial ethnosociological category, then the concept of “narodnost’” derived from it (in the sense of a “minor” or “small narod”) has no special significance. For ethnosociology it is not important whether a narod is quantitatively large or small: in any case, it is always bigger and more complex both qualitatively and quantitatively than the ethnos. The ethnos is a koineme; the narod (laos) is derived from it. And it does not matter whether we are talking specifically about a big or small narod. The narod is an ethnosociological status. From the point of view of ethnosociology, narodnost is an empty term. It can have a certain contextual meaning, strictly one of two: either people mean by it “ethnos,” or indeed the “narod” (in the ethnosociological sense), but small in its quantitative composition or having lost some of its qualitative characteristics (statehood, religiosity, civilizational identity). But in the case of its having lost its qualitative characteristics a “narod” or its fragments (parts) can be transformed anew into an “ethnos,” since the processes of complication and simplification of social systems is in principle reversible. Thus, strictly speaking, in the majority of cases when the word narodnost is used, it should be replaced with the more concrete, substantial and unambiguous term “ethnos.” If in some specific cases it is necessary to indicate the small quantitative parameters of the narod, then we can use the sociological formula proposed by Augustin Cochin, “little narod.”
The Nation: The Second Derivation from the Ethnos
Another concept with many interpretations which provokes heated disputes is that of the “nation.” Here the spread of definitions is so great that the topic demands a separate analysis.33 For now, we will give a schematic description of the content of this concept.
As the first derivative of the ethnos, the narod produces a state and/or religion, and/or civilization. In the case that the ethnos creates a state, we are dealing with a specific type of society, in which political structures, institutions, forms, and codes are clearly traced. This is a feature of all states.
A certain type of state, namely the modern European state, produces a historically specific model of political arrangement, based on fundamentals and principles different qualitatively from all other states. It is customary to call these radically new type of states and the societies corresponding to them “national states” or “nation-states” (État-nation in French). A society presenting itself as the content of a “national state” is a nation.
“Nation” is a strictly political concept, inseparably connected with the state; what is more, with a concrete state, the current-day European bourgeois state of Modernity.
In ethnosociology, “nation” is one of the most fundamental concepts. It is interpreted as the second derivation from the ethnos. The nation is a society qualitatively even more complex and differentiated than the narod.
Just as the ethnos was the matrix for the narod (laos), so too is the narod a matrix for the nation. But there is an obvious dialectical moment here. The narod, manifesting itself in history, displaces the ethnos, carrying it off into the sphere of implication, into the lowest floor or the basement, hiding it behind its façade.
There is the exact same dialectical moment in the nation, too. The nation, manifesting itself in the political history of Modernity (since in other epochs we do not find traces of the nation in such an understanding), replaces the narod, carrying it off into the sphere of implication, shifting it to a lower floor (this time to the second floor, since the first is occupied by the ethnos), and sealing it off with its façade.
On a superficial level, when there is a narod, there is no ethnos; when there is a nation, there is no narod. But if we look deeper, then under the narod we discover the ethnos (koineme) and under the nation, the narod (as the first derivative from the ethnos).
If there were two models of identity in the narod, the ethnic (collective, popular) and individual (minimal, elite), then in the nation only one becomes the norm, the individual identity, which is spread out over all the members of the nation. In the narod, the individuals were the “heroes” of the aristocracy. In the nation, the individuals are “merchants,” i.e., the third estate, and normatively everyone.34
Individual identification lies at the basis of the nation and is expressed in a concrete legal attribute, citizenship. The citizen of a given state is an element of the nation. This form of identity is legal, political, and strictly fixed.
At first glance, it appears to supplant and abolish other forms of identity, the ethnos and the narod. From a legal point of view, this is certainly the case; neither the ethnos, the narod, estate-hood, profession, nor place of residence count as legal categories in classical nations, nor do any of them figure in any official documents or legal codes. But on a deeper level the factors of ethnicity and belonging to a narod as a historical whole, including its structure of stratification, is preserved and makes itself known in certain circumstances.
In a nation, the city (politicized) population, to which the Greek term δήμος (démos) corresponds most of all, predominates. The “demos” in contrast to the ethnos and the “laos” signified in Greek history the “population,” the residents of the “city limits” without a clear ethnic or estate identity. For this reason, Aristotle considered democracy a negative model of political arrangement, in contrast to the “polity.” In both democracy and the polity, according to Aristotle, we are dealing with a government of the majority (as opposed to aristocracy, monarchy, tyranny, and oligarchy). But the polity is a quality, socially competent, organic majority (which we can correlate with the narod), and democracy is the rule of the “city limits” where all live indiscriminately, i.e., the rule of the poor majority.
The nation consists of citizens, the totality of whom are the population (demos).
Thus, we can illustrate the diversity of identities of different types of societies as follows:
Figure 5. Identity in various types of societies.
The Nation and Reversibility
In the relationship between the ethnos and the narod we see reversibility: from the ethnos (more precisely, from ethnoses) a narod is formed, which disintegrates anew into ethnoses. Does the principle of reversibility also apply to the nation?
Here everything becomes more complicated. The nation, in contrast to the ethnos, is not an organic community, and, in contrast to the narod, not a historical community, i.e., one that depends on the realization of a project, advanced by a heroic elite (in the sociological sense). The nation is conceived as a purely rational and contractual phenomenon, and in the very idea of a contract is contained the possibility of its dissolution and the conclusion of another. Thus, theoretically, the nation, in disintegrating, begets new nations, on the basis of new agreements with other groups of participants. But in practice the matter is somewhat different. The disintegration of national governments, for instance Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which were formed as nations almost a hundred years ago on the fragments of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, while formally introducing a new contract, gives way in practice to new nations based on a return either to an ethnic koineme or to the narod that had historically created a government formed as a nation.
Czechoslovakia was divided peacefully and by agreement into two national governments, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but at the basis of such a division there lay an ethnic and ethno-confessional principle. The Czechs are mainly Protestant; the Slovaks, mainly Catholic. Religion is a sociological marker of the narod, and the separation of two so closely related Slavic cultures, the Czech and the Slovak, with a very similar, if not identical language, indicates the exposure of a purely ethnic source, the koineme.
In the former Yugoslavia, the narod was formed around the Serbian ethnos, which had tried to consolidate the other ethnic and cultural groups of Yugoslavia. The Serbs were an ethnos with the ambitions of a narod, but one formed as a nation. When the vertical of fed
eral power weakened in Yugoslavia, ethnoses in the various republics — Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Bosnians, Albanians and Montenegrins — started to undermine the national state. The Serbs, considering themselves a narod and Yugoslavia their state, opposed this desperately. This ended tragically: almost all the ethnic regions separated and formed new national governments, and the Serbs were thrust back from the identity of a narod to the identity of an ethnos. The majority of these processes were accompanied by massacres, battles, and the interference of external nation-states: the countries of NATO and Russia.
Here we see that superficially the Yugoslav nation reconsidered its contract for the creation of new national combinations. And from a legal point of view that is what happened. In practice, however, in this tragic and bloody process there occurred first:
• The partial rehabilitation of ethnoses (except for the Serbian), i.e., the reverse disintegration of the nation into ethnoses (return to koinemes).
• The accelerated (artificial) transformation of ethnoses into nations, bypassing the stage of the narod, since the entire process was determined by the legal European context of Modernity, in which the norm of the establishment of a society only along the lines of the nation-state principle is acknowledged.
Thus, from an ethnosociological position we can discern reversibility also in the case of the disintegration of the nation.
Nationality Is Not an Ethnosociological Category
Even more than with narodnost, a problem arises with the concept of “nationality.” This is complicated by the fact that the term nationality received a specific semantic burden only in the Russian-speaking context (scientific and legal), while in other European languages the meaning of this term is unambiguous and does not evoke any confusion: nationality (the French nationalité, the German Nationalität) signifies belonging to some national state, i.e., “citizenship.” This is a legal category and it is registered in documents.
In Soviet history in connection with a series of circumstances, which we shall consider in detail in the corresponding chapter, the concept of nationality acquired a completely different meaning and started to signify “belonging to an ethnos.” Thus, a significant confusion of two sociological concepts, separated by a great distance, occurred: between the ethnos (koineme) and nation (the “second derivative” of the ethnos, a political and artificial construction).
In ethnosociology as a strict discipline such use of the term nationality is ruled out to an even greater degree than use of the term narodnost. The sole meaning that should be ascribed to this term is the generally accepted European use, indicating only and strictly “citizenship” and nothing else.
Nationality in our case is citizenship in the Russian Federation, existence as a Russian citizen. But “Tartar,” “Great Russian,” “Chechen” or “Yakut” — this is ethnicity, ethnic belonging. In the exact same way, any citizen of France, both an ethnic Frenchman and a naturalized African or Arab, have one and the same “nationality”: they are all “Frenchman according to nationality” (leur nationalité c’est la nationalité française). They are ethnically, religiously, phenotypically, and visually distinct, but this distinction is neither juridical nor legal; it is not associated with the nation. Even the most ordinary observers can take note of it, but only ethnosociology can correctly interpret, describe, and classify it (as we said in the previous chapter).
So as to avoid confusion, we will not use the term “nationality” in the course of ethnosociology.
Civil Society as an Ethnosociological Concept
Let us move on to the topic of civil society. This is another derivative, this time from the nation. It is based, on one hand, on the same principle on which the nation is built, on the principle of individual citizenship, but in contrast to the nation, it denies the fixity of the structure of agglomeration, i.e., the historical justification (on the contemporary level) of the state as a political (although also a constructed and mechanical) whole.
Taken by itself, in isolation from the nation, civil society is a sociological abstract, representing citizens’ project of existence without a national state, i.e., content without form. This society is thought of as based exclusively on individual identity, opposite all forms of collective identity — ethnic, narodni, class, religious, and even national.
The theory of civil society was created by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in the spirit of pacifism and anthropological optimism. Kant thought that people will eventually realize that it is unreasonable to fight among themselves, defending the nation-state, and that it is much more advantageous and profitable to cooperate.35 At that point, civil society, based on reason and morality, comes to be. Kant’s ideas lie at the basis of the main orientation of the liberal and bourgeois democratic politico-social tradition.
Civil society is thus thought of from the beginning as passing beyond the limits of national governments and is opposed to them as forms of organization subject to gradual abolishment. The form of agglomeration of national identity must give way to an exclusively individual identity. And only then will we have a society of individuals, in which no forms of collective identity remain.
In a certain sense, “civil society” is an abstraction, since empirically we do not know a contemporary society which exists outside of statehood and is post-national. Nevertheless, behind this concept stands a completely understandable system of thought, which continues the main vector of sociological transformations that have occurred with society in Modernity and draws a theoretical horizon to which, following such a path, we must arrive sooner or later. This path is thought of as a departure from collective identity and individual heroic identity (in an estate society) in the direction of a purely individualistic identity and is announced as the meaning of history and the direction of progress.
For Western culture and Western society such a path of thought is altogether natural and justified. For this reason, in Ethnosociology one can perfectly well use the category “civil society.”
Civil society as a concept is the third derivative of the ethnos. In a certain sense, civil society is the complete antithesis of the ethnos, since all relations, structural symmetries, values and forms of identification between them are inverted. Civil society is a sociological model which presupposes the absence of the ethnos, even in a deep, unconscious dimension.
The Reversibility of Civil Society
This raises the question: is civil society reversible? We cannot answer this question unambiguously, since the process of the creation of civil society is not complete, and we have no precedents on which to rely. The sole thing that we can do in this regard is trace the reversibility of preceding societies, studied from the point of view of Ethnosociology. In the narod the ethnos remains even after the collapse of the former and is rediscovered anew after the disintegration of those forms that the narod historically produces. The disintegration of the nation shows that in national states, too, the ethnic factor and the narodni factor are not abolished and can again become very important social forms of identification. Thus, reversibility is found in practice in all phenomenologically observable forms. The “first” and “second derivatives” from the ethnos are again “traced back to the argument,” to put it in terms of the differential calculus. On this basis, we can suggest that reversibility is one of the laws of ethnosociology and is applicable to all types of society, both those that are known historically (we can convince ourselves of this at a glance) and those future ones that need only to be realized.
Hence, we can say cautiously that a civil society, when (and if) it will be built, most likely also has the prospect to transition backward to less complex ethnosociology models, such as the nation, narod, and ethnos.
Global Society as the Apotheosis of Civil Society
If we place the concept of civil society in a concrete historical context, we will see that this society cannot but be global, super-national, and post-state in character. That is, civil society proposes that
ultimately it necessarily becomes global. Thus, we can consider global society as the highest form of civil society, as its most optimal and concrete realization.
In its formation, global society has the following stages:
1. It begins with the strengthening of individual identity inside the framework of national states. This is called “democratization” and “social modernization.” Collective identity with the nation and, correspondingly, with the state gradually cedes its place to a strictly individual identity. Civil society gains strength. Democratic national states become more and more democratic and less and less national.
2. Then, after reaching a high level of democratization and modernization of the nation-state, several of them merge into one super-national formation, which transforms into the basis of a post-national, democratic super-state, which we see realized in practice in today’s European Union.
3. The second stage lasts until finally all societies and states reach the highest level of democratization and unite into a single world state (Global State) with a single world government. The citizens of this planetary state, this “Cosmopolis,” will be citizens of the entire world, and the very status of a citizen will be entirely equated with the status of man. This ideology has received the name of “the rights of man.” It implies precisely the concept of global citizenship or the global society.
From a sociological point of view, we should pay attention to the main point of the concept of global society (and civil society as well): this society disclaims all forms of collective identity — ethnic, historical, civilizational, cultural, class, national, etc.
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