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“Forward to David the Builder!” Georgia's (re)turn to language-centered nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Christofer Berglund Open the ORCID record for Christofer Berglund [Opens in a new window]
Christofer Berglund*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
*
∗Email: christofer.berglund@statsvet.uu.se
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Abstract

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n = 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.

Keywords

Georgianationalismminoritieslanguagematched-guise experiment
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 2016 , pp. 522 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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