Professional paper
The Images of Minorities in Nationalist Mythologies in Post-Socialist Georgia and Serbia
Sergey Sibirtsev
orcid.org/0000-0002-9351-2683
; Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
This paper presents the findings of research on the causes of exclusionary nationalist myths. During the research, two cases are analyzed – Georgia and Serbia during the collapse of the USSR and the SFRY respectively. In the course of the dissolution of the old states, old identities waned and the newly emerged states faced the problem of creating new identities. These heated up nationalist discourse both in Georgia and Serbia, thus begetting a number of exclusionary myths about their minorities. However, Georgian nationalism developed hostile myths about the Abkhaz and the South Ossetian minorities and nothing like that about the Ajar minority. Similarly, Serbian nationalism created exclusionary myths about the Albanian minority in Kosovo, while it was relatively accommodative towards the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina. In my paper, I argue that these differences in the trajectory of the development of nationalist discourse are determined by the ‘national identity markers’ (descent, language, culture, religion, and citizenship) on the basis of which the majority is constructed. In particular, if the content of a dominant identity marker of the majority conflicts with the content of the respective identity marker of the minority, the majority does not perceive that minority as ‘us,’ part of the same nation but rather as ‘them,’ the ‘other.’ This is reflected in the nationalist political discourse.
Keywords
nationalism; nationalist discourse; nationalist myths; minorities; national identity markers; Georgia; Serbia
Hrčak ID:
77471
URI
Publication date:
8.2.2012.
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