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The Power of National Identity
Assistant Professor Rawi E. Abdelal began his talk on Politics of Identity in the Post-Soviet World by showing a photograph of a monument located near Vilnius in Lithuania. The pyramidal object marks the point that Lithuanians say puts them in the exact center of Europe.
The Lithuanians are proud of this distinction, noted Abdelal, a scholar of international political economy and author of National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective, which won the 2002 Marshall Shulman Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He quoted from an interview with a member of the Lithuanian parliament who, eager to distance his country from its former association with Russia, steadfastly defined Europe as not Russia. Of course, reasoned Abdelal, if Europe does not extend all the way to the Ural Mountains, some eight hundred miles east of Moscow, then Lithuania cannot be the geographical center of Europe. But in the post-Soviet era, beliefs about national identity dont necessarily have to be true to be powerful.
Abdelal asserts that the remarkable variety of foreign economic policies among the fourteen former Soviet states and Russia is the result of each states unique sense of national identity and historical relationship with Russia. The countries distinctive approaches to monetary policy and trade relations have placed them roughly in three categories: countries that favor economic reintegration with Russia; countries seeking reorientation and closer integration with Europe; and ambivalent countries torn between Russia and the West.
At the time of the Soviet breakup, few in the international community would have predicted this outcome. Policymakers at institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund looked at the deeply institutionalized economic interdependence that existed among these states and assumed that continued close economic cooperation would be an obvious necessity. Similarly, many world leaders including President George H.W. Bush feared the nationalist tendencies that would emerge after the breakup would be uniformly detrimental to Western interests. Abdelals research draws instructive lessons from the fact that neither of these scenarios materialized and suggests that policymakers need to take a closer look at the role of national identity as a determining factor in economic behavior.
Deborah E. Blagg
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