The assumption that foreign policy reflects a paramount national interest in survival remains dominant in international relations (IR) theorising. Even as other conventional wisdoms attract critiques, most scholars take it for granted that states seek survival, focusing debates not on why states prioritise different foreign policy objectives but on why they employ different strategies in pursuit of this primary objective. Ontological security studies has notably drawn attention to identity-related insecurities, but its foundational works see those insecurities as manifesting alongside states’ interest in physical security rather than interrogating the latter’s ideational foundations. Building on more recent works in that subfield, this article argues that ontological security scholars should reconceptualise state survival to account for variations not just beyond but also within that concept and, by doing so, develop theories capable of explaining a broader range of state behaviour. In short, IR theories should pay attention to the varied meanings of survival itself, not just the means states use to pursue it.
Traditional conceptualisations of the state (and thus its survival) reflect a legal definition of sovereign statehood that has become relatively stable in the modern international system: encompassing a permanent population, a defined territory, government institutions, and political autonomy over both domestic and international affairs.Footnote 1 However, leaders and publics may understand and value these factors in different ways, as processes of national identity formation produce meaningfully different conceptions of survival and threats to it. When circumstances generate contrasting incentives requiring policymakers to prioritise one aspect over another, those different conceptions of survival should be expected to generate distinct patterns of behaviour. As a result, the survival motive does not mean the same thing to all states at all times. Put another way, states’ physical bodies and physical survival – as IR scholars frequently discuss these concepts – are chiefly ideational.
This article contributes to the existing literature in several ways. By exploring understudied variations within state survival, it problematises an assumption that is central to many IR theories and widely endorsed even within critical scholarship, encouraging new avenues of research concerning core principles of statehood and drivers of foreign policy. This intervention has broad implications within IR but contributes most directly to the ontological security literature. Recent studies in that subfield have begun interrogating the ideational nature of physical aspects of statehood rather than dichotomising the survival of the ‘body’ and survival of the ‘self’, and this article brings that scholarship as well as work on national identity narratives (which remain underutilised in IR theories) into dialogue with more traditional perspectives on security studies. Finally, it ploughs new empirical terrain via thick descriptive case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan, two understudied countries within IR. These case studies demonstrate how their distinct historical processes of national narration generated radically different interpretations of survival and, hence, distinct threat perceptions and security choices during the late 1980s and early 1990s, even as the two countries faced many similar structural constraints amid the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The first section that follows surveys the prevalence of states’ survival interest as a foundational assumption in IR theory. The second section develops my argument that processes of national narrative construction can drive publics and policymakers to understand their survival differently, with direct consequences for their threat perception and security behaviour. The third section explores relevant ontological security scholarship and critiques the now-common distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘ontological’ security, arguing that even the physical security of complex social constructs like states is ideational. The fourth section develops my theoretical argument in greater detail, considering varied interpretations of each core element of statehood and policy-making trade-offs among them. The next six sections illustrate these arguments through case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan. After describing my case selection and methodology, I explore the context of each country’s national mobilisation, investigate how their leaders conceived national survival during the late 1980s, and examine their policy responses to three critical events: the New Union Treaty, the Union-Wide Referendum, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The final section concludes by summarising my findings and suggesting avenues for future research.
The omnipresent assumption
The assumption of a state survival interest has been virtually omnipresent in IR theory since early in the field’s history, yet there has been far less engagement with the socially constructed nature of this interest (and thus the potential for variations in its meaning across time and context). Martin Wight declared that ‘international theory is the theory of survival’, distinguishing it from political theory and law, which he described as concerned with ‘the theory of the good life’.Footnote 2 Hans Morgenthau asserted that ‘the foreign policies of all nations must necessarily refer to their survival as their minimum requirement’.Footnote 3 John Herz similarly posited that seeking survival before other things is a natural inclination of men and societies,Footnote 4 while Kenneth Waltz claimed that the anarchic international system forces states to, above all, ‘seek their own preservation’.Footnote 5 Subsequent realist theorising made this survival assumption its cornerstone, conceptualising it as an exogenous national interest and as the principal determinant of state behaviour.Footnote 6
This perspective remains prevalent across various schools of thought in international relations today. Many neoliberals and institutionalists assume that ‘survival is the primary goal of all states’,Footnote 7 and neoclassical realists and proponents of rational theory approaches follow suit.Footnote 8 As Robert Powell observed, there is no disagreement between neorealism and neoliberalism on this matter: ‘Indeed, it would seem bizarre not to assume that units prefer survival over extinction’.Footnote 9 English School founder Hedley Bull agreed on the importance of a survival interest,Footnote 10 and constructivist Alexander Wendt affirmed that ‘there is no dispute that states want to survive; this much is trivially true’.Footnote 11
The consensus that modern states prioritise a shared understanding of survival reflects systemic perspectives that downplay intrastate variations. Even as interest in identities grew across other social sciences in the 1960s, prominent IR theories shifted towards economic models and rationality, envisioning a world of fixed, coherent, pre-determined entities.Footnote 12 IR held the potential to evolve differently, as founding figures like E. H. Carr and Arnold Wolfers paid significant attention to historical contingencies and ideational factors.Footnote 13 However, subsequent IR theories largely downplayed historicism and unit-level variations, and neorealism’s predominance by the 1980s signalled the victory of this ‘sterile’ form, to use Carr’s terminology.Footnote 14 A field concerned with relationships among nation-states came to neglect the ‘nation’ part of this dual concept while theorising ‘states’ as analogous units with uniform interests and limited behavioural variations.
The constructivist turn and growth of critical approaches challenged many conventional assumptions in IR, opening avenues for insightful research on ideas, identities, norms, and relational theorising.Footnote 15 Amid discerning debates over the nature of the international system, levels of analysis, actors’ rationality, and the role of ideas and emotions in political behaviour, however, states’ survival motive attracted the least scrutiny. The state continues to be routinely anthropomorphised, its survival widely understood as an inherent manifestation of the state’s ‘physical body’, and thus state survival continues to be conceptualised as a common motivation shared across states instead of exploring variations in their interpretations of it. Even the nature of human bodies has long been subject to incorrect assumptions, and extrapolating those assumptions to complex social constructs like states can be even more misleading.
National narratives and survival interests
Despite near-consensus on the importance of nationalism from classical realists to critical theorists, IR theories often treat it as a relatively uniform social glue that helps constitute the state, rarely interrogating how the construction of nationalism itself can vary and produce distinct understandings of national existence and survival. As Lapid and Kratochwil aptly summarise, ‘It is indeed strange but hardly overstated that, in an age of nationalism, international relations and most other social disciplines seem to have converged on little else but the sustained exclusion of the national problematic from their respective research agendas, relegating it to a fringe phenomenon’.Footnote 16 IR scholars frequently use the term ‘state’ as a complete replacement for both ‘nation’ and ‘nation-state’, treating populations as a simple checklist item among qualifications for statehood, masking the social foundations of their shared histories and identities, and reinforcing the illusion of analogous units. I argue that centring nation-states’ societal aspects, collective narratives, and formation processes can help us critically interrogate IR’s foundational assumption of state survival interest and unmask the wide variations of its interpretation across time and contexts.
Scholars have long argued that social actors are constituted through narratives that give meaning to their existence in the world.Footnote 17 Benedict Anderson seminally argued that nation-states are ‘imagined political communities’ sustained through autobiographical stories, exploring how innovations including industrialisation, the printed press, and social mobility facilitated modern forms of nationalism by enabling those stories to spread and take root.Footnote 18 Accordingly, nation-states are simultaneously malleable – socially constructed or ‘imagined’ – yet relatively stable since they are embedded in emotionally linked and bounded ‘political communities’. In such conceptualisations, states are not unitary political actors but complex socio-political entities (nation-states) that define the terms of their own existence through complex processes featuring interactions among many domestic and external factors.Footnote 19
These processes of national narration produce discursive and conceptual lenses that lead even the core aspects of sovereign statehood to assume varied meanings and importance. To be sure, many states historically cultivated nationalism by emulating others, and many were externally conditioned to adopt foreign-derived conceptions of modern sovereignty with relatively little room left to ‘imagine’.Footnote 20 Yet the wide temporal, spatial, and cultural differences across their national formations nevertheless left substantial room for variations.Footnote 21 Moreover, because prevailing national narratives – including about ‘physical’ dimensions of statehood – are products of constant discursive contestation, there are substantial possibilities for the rearticulation and redefinition of a collective national self.
Ontological security scholars’ long-standing attention to national narratives makes them well positioned to investigate such constitutive questions. Drawing primarily on Giddens, they have frequently emphasised national autobiographical narratives as a primary source of ontological security for individuals and societies.Footnote 22 Indeed, the subfield has been described as exploring ‘how and why actors in world politics reflexively construct their selves through narratives and routinized behaviors in relation to other actors, and how this then affects and can explain political outcomes’.Footnote 23 That said, most works in this subfield have focused less on the precarity of nation-states and dimensions of statehood and more on the social identities of states in the international arena, reflecting the system-level theorising that remains common within IR even among constructivist approaches.Footnote 24
As collective entities maintained through shared discourse, all aspects of statehood – even those commonly conceived as ‘physical’ – gain meaning through complex processes of narration. For instance, Felix Berenskoetter has explored national narratives from a phenomenological angle, highlighting the importance of experienced and envisioned spaces and showing how these narratives give meaning to political communities’ spatio-temporal aspects, often in ways that diverge from the ideal-typical Westphalian state.Footnote 25 Research on nationalism and memory studies has long explored the importance of material environments (e.g., territories, landscapes, sites, monuments, buildings) for anchoring collective identities.Footnote 26 The ‘material turn’ in ontological security studies further examines the psychosocial dynamics through which physical environments acquire varied meanings and significance for individuals, societies, or nation-states.Footnote 27 Individuals often develop strong emotional connections with familiar environments, incorporating them into their self-narratives to provide a sense of ontological security.Footnote 28 When incorporated into national identity narratives, such natural environments, historic sites, and monuments become ontic spaces, carrying meanings well beyond their material importance determined by shared experiences and emotional connections to them.Footnote 29
As this discussion suggests, even the territoriality of a state – long considered a purely ‘material’ factor in IR – does not have a priori or universal meaning. Instead, its meaning is acquired through collective experiences and discursive interpretations; while often stable, it is never complete and always subject to potential reinterpretation. Recent developments in ontological security scholarship, such as incorporating insights from psychoanalysis and philosophy (e.g., Lacan, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger), position it particularly well to build on these insights by more broadly examining the precarious subjectivity of nation-states and variations in their understandings of survival. Despite these strengths, however, ontological security studies has largely been built on the distinction between physical and ontological security – a crucial step in the subfield’s origin, yet one that I argue now holds it back. In the following section, I develop this critique as well as elaborate on why the subfield is well positioned to explore the complexities of state survival and consequent variations in state behaviour.
Ontological security and survival
Ontological security scholarship has pushed IR to consider how identities can exacerbate interstate conflict or generate cooperation, yet to date it has stopped short of fully problematising the social construction of state survival. Building on psychology and sociology with the insight that social actors strive to maintain a relatively stable sense of self to orient themselves in time and space,Footnote 30 the subfield’s core insight is that identity-related concerns often trump the conventionally understood pursuit of physical security.Footnote 31 Its founding scholars based the subfield on the proposition that there are two distinct types of security – ‘of the body’ and ‘of the self’ – exploring when and how the latter supersedes the former.Footnote 32 This separation between the physical and ontological proved effective for challenging conventional materialist understandings of international security, demonstrating that ontological security can at times override physical security among state motives, but it also had the side-effect of stifling inquiry into the ideational properties of ‘physical’ survival itself.
A state’s interest in survival entails a fundamental existential question, principally ontological. As Anthony Giddens writes, ‘Consciousness of finitude, which human beings develop with increasing cognitive mastery of temporal categories, is associated with anxieties of an utterly fundamental sort’.Footnote 33 Death-related concerns are even more fundamentally ideational at the collective level than for individuals, with wide variations in how groups define themselves and, therefore, what survival means to them. Due to the abstract nature of statehood, a stable sense of collective self is neither given nor uniform – as discussed below, states vary widely in their perspectives on core aspects like political autonomy, governing institutions, and even components like borders and population. If states strive to maintain a stable sense of self – as ontological security scholarship claims – yet each understands its collective ‘self’ somewhat differently from others, then interrogating those variations in collective understanding should be a central project for IR scholars interested in state survival and its implications.
Some recent research has begun moving in this direction, critiquing the artificial separation of ontological and physical securities, noting how state identities relate to material spaces and natural environments, observing the prominence of physical aspects within identity narratives, and emphasising the mutual constitution of bodies and selves.Footnote 34 Critics have pointed out that the separation of body and mind is absent from foundational texts, and that Giddens and R. D. Laing emphasised the unity of body and mind as essential for a secure sense of self.Footnote 35 Yet there has also been a tendency to replace the physical–ontological dichotomy with distinctions between a state’s ‘self’ and ‘identity’ or its ‘embodied self’ and ‘social identity’,Footnote 36 recalling Wendt’s ‘personal/corporate’ and ‘social’ identities, where ‘corporate’ references states’ intrinsic qualities and thus creates a state with a stable ‘body’, ‘common core’, or ‘platform for other identities’.Footnote 37 In contrast, I argue that, since states are social constructs all the way down, shaped by both domestic and international factors, such dichotomies are ultimately inadequate for understanding states’ precarious ontology and variations in their survival interests.
The ‘body’ metaphor’s ubiquitous application to states is not surprising. Its historical roots extend back to political systems featuring a single supreme leader, and it resonates with the field’s prevailing unitary-actor perspectives. Still, the widespread use of words like ‘body’ and ‘physical’ when referencing aspects of statehood creates an illusion of stability and uniformity that discourages further scrutiny. This is exemplified by Wendt’s proposition that ‘the state is pre-social relative to other states in the same way that the human body is pre-social’ – implying that scholars can safely examine the social identities of pre-given states at the international level while leaving the matter of state construction unexplored.Footnote 38 To his credit, Wendt has subsequently acknowledged that this statement is incorrect.Footnote 39 Extensive research shows that human bodies are not essential, pre-social, or stable, and extrapolating such ideas to states is thus particularly problematic.Footnote 40 In Pierre Bourdieu’s words, anthropomorphising a state ‘is a very dangerous fiction, which prevents us from properly understanding the state … a theological entity, that is, an entity that exists by way of belief’.Footnote 41
IR scholars, including within ontological security studies, have offered various justifications for treating states as unitary actors for theoretical purposes, in either a literal or ‘as if’ manner.Footnote 42 While this may be preferable under some circumstances, it comes with the trade-off of omitting the possibility of variably constructed survival motives from consideration. For an assumption that has become foundational across the field, I argue that this is too great a cost. If states are socially constructed all the way down, then their ‘bodies’ and hence their ‘physical’ survival interests are also abstract and malleable.
There have always been prominent (if not mainstream) critical voices in IR who have recognised historical variety within states, judged uniform frameworks ‘unreliable as primary referents’,Footnote 43 and emphasised states’ malleable nature as ‘intrinsically contested’ social constructs in ‘permanent need of reproduction’ and ‘always in the process of becoming’.Footnote 44 Many have noted that the ‘national interest’ offers no specific guidance for state behaviour.Footnote 45 For instance, Jutta Weldes developed a promising re-conceptualisation of ‘the national interest’, showing how policymakers’ Cold War narratives ‘fleshed out the skeletal, abstract conception of the national interest in survival and power posited by realists by providing a rather more detailed picture of who was to be protected, from what threat, and by what means’.Footnote 46 Such discerning critiques effectively demonstrated that national interests are largely ideational and vary in their contents, yet even these scholars often found value in basing their insights atop a presumedly fundamental state survival interest. Expanding upon these works, the next section argues that states’ survival interest is itself socially constructed, incentivising far more varied behaviour than a uniform survival motive would predict.
Interpretations of national survival
If states themselves (not just their social identities) are discursively constructed and maintained through national narratives, then it follows that their perspectives on survival are socially constructed as well, and we should expect those perspectives to vary in ways capable of provoking significant differences in their threat perceptions and foreign policy behaviour. As discussed above, even theoretical approaches that emphasise the role of ideas have often overlooked this problem by accepting an interest in physical survival, distinguishing it from ideational aspects of statehood, and investigating the latter. Yet constructing any nation-state requires dramatically abstracting from the individual level to the collective, constituting the state’s physical existence – and hence its survival – as ideational. Accordingly, I begin from the premise that there is no clear separation between states’ physical and ideational aspects (treating them as complex social constructs all the way down). This raises critical questions regarding how they are produced and reproduced, how their leaders and publics come to define their shared national existence, and how their collective narratives frame the meaning and importance of the core components of sovereign statehood.
As a first step towards opening the door for further research on these complex questions, I distinguish among four potential interpretations of survival that prioritise each of the conventional core aspects of modern statehood: population, territory, government, and autonomy. Of course, this leaves substantial room for further variations, including varied prioritisations among the three remaining aspects beyond whichever receives top billing, and future research might add additional aspects as well. A nation-state that conceives its survival primarily in terms of its population would prioritise the well-being of individual citizens over other factors when contemplating policy trade-offs. One that conceives its survival primarily in terms of its government would prioritise its leaders’ ability to maintain their authority via domestic political institutions. Conceiving survival in terms of territory implies prioritising the maintenance of existing borders, emphasising control of particularly meaningful or strategic territories. In contrast, conceiving survival in terms of autonomy implies prioritising the ability to conduct domestic and foreign policy independent from outside influence.Footnote 47
Even as IR scholars routinely lump these four aspects together within the assumption of a uniform survival interest,Footnote 48 we can easily recognise circumstances in which they are at odds with one another, policy options that carry trade-offs among them, and contradictory incentives for policy-making. For example, a state that prioritises political autonomy may risk war rather than submitting to foreign demands even if doing so would mean sacrificing population and risking its territorial integrity, while one that prioritises the well-being of its population may prefer ceding some autonomy to appease a threatening power. Without any a priori reason to assume that states prioritise among these four aspects uniformly, IR theories are hard-pressed to explain a wide range of real-world variations. Statehood is not a dichotomous variable – political entities meet its criteria to varying degreesFootnote 49 – yet modern practices of sovereign recognition create an illusion of clarity that belies its inconsistent and contested nature.Footnote 50 Theories that do not allow for variations in the meanings nations assign to those criteria are unable to explain significant variations in the construction of their national interests and the drivers of their foreign policy behaviour.
Even population and borders – often regarded as material rather than political dimensions of statehood – exhibit considerable variability in their content and significance. Many IR theories assume that governments prioritise the well-being of their populations, but history offers numerous examples of that priority varying over time, under different leaders, and towards different domestic groups. Indeed, Feminist IR scholars have long argued that state policies often generate insecurities for significant portions of their populations.Footnote 51 Nation-states are not merely the sum of individuals living in a designated territory; their legitimacy hinges on internal contestation regarding who truly represents the nation. This often leads to ‘othering’ and discrimination towards domestic minorities, but it can also enable rearticulations and reconstructions of more inclusive collective identities.Footnote 52 The United States offers a clear example through its tumultuous history of demographic change, expanding individual rights and liberties, and narrative contestation between visions of an exclusionary Anglo-Saxon Christian nation and a more inclusive nation of immigrants.Footnote 53
Territorial integrity is also socially constructed. National narratives often assign varying importance to specific territories. Conceptions of a ‘heartland’, ‘holy land’, or ‘promised land’ – such as Karelia for Finland or Jerusalem for Israel – influence how states safeguard those territories and react to territorial loss.Footnote 54 Some have willingly ceded portions of their territory, while others have fought hard for lands with little material value. Collective ideas about where a state begins and ends do not always align with recognised borders or effective government control, as in Serbia and Georgia. Imperial imaginaries can also shape understandings of territoriality, as when Vladimir Putin told a schoolboy who described Russia’s borders, ‘Russia’s borders do not end anywhere’.Footnote 55 The early United States similarly defied the notion of ‘fixed’ territorial borders, espousing an ever-expanding settler-colonial frontier.Footnote 56 The ‘closing’ of that frontier stabilised US borders yet sparked an identity crisis by disrupting that prevailing self-image.Footnote 57
States are also expected to safeguard their governing institutions, yet these too are often mutable in practice. Observers routinely treat the state in question as enduring even after fundamental regime changes, and some policymakers prioritise stability while others promote domestic change or even revolution. Such variations indicate not uniform status-quo motives but rather contingent and varied goals regarding states’ own governing institutions. Public majorities may even welcome external interventions to reform those institutions, further challenging assumptions of states as unitary actors harbouring a uniform survival interest. For instance, Georgia’s 2024–2025 pro-democracy protests supported economic sanctions against its political leaders, hoping to reverse their authoritarian turn.Footnote 58 The internal complexity and contingent histories of nation-states imply varying patterns of domestic contestation regarding their own political institutions and hence varying levels of attachment to those institutions within conceptions of national survival.
Finally, states are widely expected to cherish their political autonomy, yet in practice they are often willing to relinquish it. While some have borne great costs and risks to assert their autonomy, others have accepted subordinate relationships with a powerful benefactor in exchange for security or economic gain.Footnote 59 At times, this subordination can reach extreme levels, as in Belarus’s subordination to Russia.Footnote 60 Many polities have exercised contested intermediary forms of sovereignty; for example, Canada’s political separation from the United Kingdom took more than a century.Footnote 61 Such variations are evident not only across states but also within a single state over time. France joined NATO in 1949 but withdrew from its integrated military command in 1966 (eventually rejoining it in 2009), while the United Kingdom left the European Union (EU) in 2020 after forty-seven years. Notwithstanding Brexit, the EU’s endurance and expansion strongly undercuts the assumption that all states uniformly prioritise autonomy, as its member states forfeit significant decision-making authority in both domestic and international affairs.Footnote 62 In Katzenstein’s words, ‘pooling state sovereignty calls into question the very foundation of a realist perspective, where states, locked into a struggle for survival in an anarchic world, seek to defend their existence to the end’.Footnote 63 Critically, as demonstrated in the case studies below, forfeiting autonomy can carry different meanings depending on whether national narratives portray the recipient as a reliable ally or an enduring threat.
Recognising that the meaning and value of these core components of statehood can and do vary – both across states and within a state over time – should provoke critical reflection on what IR theories gain and lose by assuming a uniform survival motive. In other words, national narratives not only shape the construction of national interests (as scholars have previously demonstrated) but also help us understand how state survival itself is socially constructed. Crucially, this is a different argument from the notion that states may employ diverse methods to secure their survival: not just the means but also the meaning of survival varies. The next section illustrates how differential processes of national identity formation generate divergent conceptions of survival and foreign policy behaviour through comparative case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Case selection and methodology
I use comparative thick descriptive case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan to illustrate the central argument of this study: that nations construct varied understandings of survival, leading to different behavioural choices, rather than adhering to a uniform state-survival interest. During the late 1980s and 1990s, prevailing national narratives in these two countries framed survival in distinct ways, generating contrasting threat perceptions and security policies.
These cases are particularly well suited for this analysis because both were part of the centralised Soviet Union for a prolonged period, during which they faced significant uncertainties. The behaviour of both countries contradicts the traditional logic of a uniform survival assumption, moreover, which would predict that Kazakhstan – relatively rich with natural resources and possessing nuclear weapons – should have been more likely to consider balancing against Russia, while the militarily weaker and economically more vulnerable Georgia should have seen no alternative but to bandwagon. Their decisions to violate these predictions become understandable when we apply the theoretical perspective developed above, rooted in the social construction of survival. For Georgia, which prioritised autonomy from Moscow in its construction of national survival, bandwagonning would have directly undermined that survival. Accordingly, its leaders eliminated that approach from their menu of policy options and insisted on balancing. Kazakhstan, understanding its national survival more in terms of individual well-being rather than collective autonomy, prioritised bandwagonning not as a desperate choice but as a preferred strategy.
I employ the thick description case study methodology, which utilises an in-depth account of the actions and intentions of relevant actors as well as a detailed account of the socio-cultural context to deepen our understanding of events.Footnote 64 Although the primary timeframe of the study includes the late 1980s and early 1990s, I develop the rich context of each case by surveying each country’s processes of nation-state formation during the preceding centuries, establishing a basis for contrasting predictions regarding their understandings of survival when realising their political independence amid the Soviet Union’s collapse. I proceed to explore how each country approached three foundational decisions: reacting to Soviet President Mikheil Gorbachev’s proposal for a New Union Treaty, the Union-Wide Referendum, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Throughout these case studies, I rely on primary sources – including official statements and transcripts of parliamentary debates, many obtained via archival research and translated from the Georgian and Russian languages – to examine how leaders vocalised the core motivations behind their decisions, using secondary sources to provide additional context. Investigating Georgian and Kazakh national narrative formation and policy choices throughout their transitions to political independence – including while still nominally under Soviet rule – reflects a deliberate and important element of case selection. Limiting scrutiny to these countries’ post-1991 periods of formal independence – as state-centric theoretical perspectives would insist – would have projected the assumption that they represented analogous state-units backward onto the historical record, missing the divergent roots of their national narratives and the formative moments during which their interpretations of survival were constructed. In contrast, focusing on Georgian and Kazakh leaders’ decisions during this transition period shows how differently they navigated the trade-offs among their governments’ domestic authority, territorial integrity, populations’ well-being, and capacity to enter autonomous relations with other states. In short, this approach treats the strength and contents of national narratives as a subject for empirical inquiry, rather than assuming that policymakers uniformly value all aspects of modern statehood.
As these case studies show, Georgia developed a long-standing national narrative featuring Russia as the central threat, defined its survival primarily in terms of political autonomy, rejected bandwagonning as an unacceptable sacrifice of that autonomy, and prioritised balancing against Russia throughout its transition to renewed independence despite stark power asymmetry and risk of retaliation. Kazakhstan, meanwhile, focused on individual well-being and deprioritised autonomy, framing Russia as a partner and choosing bandwagonning as a desirable option rather than a desperate last resort.
National mobilisation in Georgia and Kazakhstan
Georgia’s prevailing national narrative highlights connectedness with its ancient past, pride in its centuries-old literary and religious traditions, and historic dynasties including a Golden Age during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It also emphasises autonomy – lending a religious-mythological flavour to Georgians’ ability to endure a turbulent history of honourable fighting against stronger invaders, reinforced by nationalist leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia lecturing about ‘Georgia’s Spiritual Mission’ and destiny to be resurrected like Lazarus.Footnote 65 Its formation as a modern nation-state occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after initial contacts with the Russian Empire marked by treachery. In 1801, Russia overthrew Georgia’s royal dynasty and annexed its territories in violation of a 1783 treaty, prompting decades of uprisings against the occupation.Footnote 66 While some Georgian nobles joined the empire’s elite, the early nineteenth century also gave rise to patriotic romanticism and longing for Georgia’s lost kingdom. From the mid-1850s, a new generation of Georgian intellectuals began the mass dissemination of national narratives through books and newspapers written in the Georgian language, escaping tsarist censorship.Footnote 67 Socio-political developments, including the abolition of serfdom and spread of the printed press, facilitated interpersonal connections and national identification beyond localised lived experiences. After the Russian Empire’s demise, the founders of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918–1921) consciously defined their nation in contrast to Russia and emulated democratic Europe.Footnote 68 Despite its brevity, this foundational period saw high levels of public participation in socio-political life, cementing the value of political autonomy within Georgia’s national self-understanding.
In February 1921, Bolshevik Russia forcibly annexed independent Georgia.Footnote 69 The next seventy years of Soviet rule were not uniform; some cultural expressions were tolerated even as nationalist ambitions were suppressed. In Ronald Suny’s words, ‘Without gaining the full attributes of political sovereignty, Georgians nevertheless remained a cohesive and conscious nationality in possession of its own territory and prepared, should the opportunity arise, to improve its social, material, and cultural life’.Footnote 70 A new national movement began brewing during Gorbachev’s Perestroika period, culminating on 9 April 1989, when Soviet troops attacked a large-scale pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi, killing and injuring peaceful demonstrators and further inciting anti-Soviet sentiment.Footnote 71 These tragic and emotional events set the stage for Georgia’s renewed political independence, uniting its people through collective trauma and against a clear enemy.
Kazakhstan, in contrast, was occupied by the Russian Empire more gradually between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries; it absorbed the Small and Middle Hordes relatively peacefully before conquering the Great Horde.Footnote 72 Although nomadic culture is currently used to strengthen narratives of Kazakhstan’s uniqueness, most individuals identified with their narrow clans rather than any broader national identity,Footnote 73 and its relatively fluid notions of habitation and territoriality contrasted with European experiences of nation-building.Footnote 74 Kazakhstan’s vast size and low urbanisation hindered its scattered peoples’ ability to form a shared national identity,Footnote 75 and the tsarist government’s 1889 Resettlement Act further stifled nation-building by dramatically altering its demography and causing economic decline.Footnote 76
During the early twentieth century, Kazakh intellectuals of different backgrounds formulated national narratives through growing numbers of books and newspapers, but their efforts lacked mass character or associated political activity.Footnote 77 Between 1905 and 1916, the Alash movement attempted to transform oral myths of their people’s origins into a more stable written narrative suitable for modern nation-building.Footnote 78 After the Russian Revolution, a political movement led by Alikhan Bukeikhanov established a provisional government called the Alash Autonomy – a brief but significant historical moment for Kazakhstan – but external pressures, internal dissent, and economic hardship prevented more effective and widely shared nation-building.Footnote 79
Subsequent nationalist writers worked to recreate a Kazakh national mythology (especially during the 1950s and 1960s), constructing historical continuity by reimagining pre-colonial, pre-Russian Kazakh nationhood, but alternative Soviet narratives constantly undermined them.Footnote 80 In 1986, Gorbachev’s decision to dismiss a Kazakh leader and appoint Russian Gennady Kolbin to head Kazakhstan’s Communist Party sparked student protests in Alma-Ata, which some have described as revealing cracks in the Soviet system. While significant, these protests remained reactive – failing to generate further protests or ambitious political demands. In short, Kazakhstan did not experience the widespread national mobilisation for political independence that swept Georgia and some other Soviet republics during the late 1980s.Footnote 81
Constructing survival: Political autonomy vs. individual well-being
National narratives are contextual and relational, defined largely in terms of the nation’s relationships with ‘significant others’. Amid the Soviet Union’s collapse, Georgia’s leaders and public interpreted their national survival as prioritising collective political autonomy – first and foremost, autonomy from Russia. This anti-Russian and pro-European perspective notably invoked Georgia’s first republic (1918–1921), which had defined its independence and identity in contrast to Bolshevik Russia and consciously emulated democratic Europe. As its chairman, Noe Zhordania, declared in 1920, ‘Our present and our future path is strongly, directly intertwined with the West, and no power can terminate this connection’.Footnote 82 Georgia’s leaders during the late 1980s and early 1990s reinvigorated this framing of opposition to Russia and ‘belonging to Europe and Christian civilization’.Footnote 83
Georgia’s prioritisation of political autonomy was apparent during the Soviet Union’s first multi-party elections (1990), electing a nationalist Supreme Council that would formulate independent domestic and foreign policies and pursue full independence. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a leader of the liberation movement, became chairman of the Supreme Council of Georgia on 28 October 1990, and subsequently the country’s first president in 1991. Mirroring majorities in its parliament and society, he prioritised autonomy as paramount to Georgia’s survival. When a journalist asked what the president’s defining characteristics should be before the May 1991 elections, then-candidate Gamsakhurdia responded, ‘The president of Georgia must have the power and ability to achieve and protect the country’s real independence, adopting a firm and uncompromising stance against the so-called center (Russia)’.Footnote 84 Soon afterwards, the overtly anti-Russian and anti-communist Gamsakhurdia was elected president with 86 per cent of the votes, even as Georgia remained formally under Soviet rule.
Kazakhstan was far better positioned to seek independence than weaker republics like Georgia. Its rich natural resources offered economic benefits from independence, and it had also inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union.Footnote 85 Nevertheless, Kazakhstan displayed a strong unionist position, becoming the last republic to declare independence.Footnote 86 Having undergone relatively mild national mobilisation, Kazakhstan’s people and leaders devalued autonomy compared to Georgia’s. Instead, they interpreted survival largely at the level of individual well-being, exhibited a lesser us-versus-them mentality toward Russia, and chose bandwagonning not out of desperation but as a preferred strategy. Whereas leaders in Georgia and some other republics viewed the Soviet Union as an imperial aggressor and celebrated its dissolution, Kazakhstan’s leader Nazarbayev actively tried to preserve the union. He continued lamenting its collapse even years later, criticising Gorbachev’s failure and detailing his own personal efforts to maintain integrated economic and security institutions: ‘I was doing everything possible to find common approaches acceptable to all the leaders pulling the cart in different directions’.Footnote 87
The New Union Treaty
Gorbachev proposed the New Union Treaty in 1990, hoping to salvage the Soviet Union amid growing calls for autonomy among its constituent republics.Footnote 88 Georgia spurned the proposal as an insult to its declared goal of independence.Footnote 89 Its leaders’ discussions surrounding the New Union Treaty demonstrated their ironclad resolve to reject any proposal from Moscow as untrustworthy and incompatible with Georgia’s political autonomy. Far from seeing it as a Soviet domestic political matter, they consciously approached this decision as a foreign policy issue. Nodar Natadze, the chairman of the political group Popular Front and a member of the Supreme Council, affirmed that it was their responsibility to reject any union ‘unequivocally’ because all new parties had been elected on a platform championing Georgia’s independence, which was ‘incompatible’ with subservience to Moscow.Footnote 90 At every step of this discussion, the imperative of national duty was recalled and often met by applause.Footnote 91 Their formal rejection letter, addressed to Gorbachev, made inescapably clear that Georgia would refuse any union implying even minimal vertical subordination.Footnote 92
Kazakhstan’s leaders did not welcome the opportunity to realise their own political autonomy. On the contrary, their dedication to preserving the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and early 1990s was unmatched. As the separatist republics gained momentum, Nazarbayev, no less than Gorbachev himself, ‘became preoccupied with the search for a formula to keep the union together, which became even more important to him than defending Kazakhstan’s interests against Moscow’.Footnote 93 He appealed to Kazakhstan’s electorate to support the New Union Treaty:
The Kazakh people, and all the people of the republic do not conceive of themselves outside our united Fatherland, the preservation of which answers both the political and economic interests of multinational Kazakhstan. The collapse of the Union would inevitably bring with it the complete collapse of the economy of the republic, the sharp exacerbation of the standards of living of millions of people, would throw us all back whole decades, and would do irreparable harm to cooperation with countries of the world community. We do not have another path available.Footnote 94
Whereas Georgian leaders rejected any union as incompatible with their country’s autonomy, Nazarbayev pleaded with his people to support the New Union Treaty by linking it to their individual well-being – ‘the standards of living of millions of people’. Georgia’s leaders and public also valued their well-being, of course, but they nevertheless prioritised political autonomy. Moreover, the enthusiasm in Nazarbayev’s appeal – calling the Soviet Union a ‘common home’ and claiming that solutions were ‘only possible together’ – extended well beyond the logic typically attributed to a survival-minded state, which many IR theories would expect to bandwagon with a stronger neighbour only when necessary.
The contrast between Georgian and Kazakh perspectives on Moscow is telling: to Georgia, it was the adversary; to Kazakhstan, a ‘united Fatherland’. Such narratives are always contested, and each saw internal divisions, yet these expressions were representative of the prevailing national moods in their respective societies. If made in the Georgian context, statements like Nazarbayev’s would have been labelled traitorous for suggesting cooperation with the enemy. Despite major divisions within its anti-communist movement, Georgia’s public had voted out the communists in October 1990, and even Georgian communists responded to public pressure by adopting nationalist positions and advocating for independence.Footnote 95
The Union-Wide Referendum
Gorbachev responded to the opposition from Georgia and some other republics by proposing a union-wide referendum, hoping to rally popular support for the New Union Treaty.Footnote 96 It was the first time that the Soviet Union held a direct referendum, asking its citizens whether they supported preserving the union as a ‘renewed federation of equal sovereign republics’.Footnote 97 This referendum was an informative event demonstrating how the Soviet republics envisioned their future relationships with Moscow.Footnote 98 While some interpreted it as a positive effect of Perestroika, Georgian leaders saw the referendum as yet another attempt to stifle their political autonomy.Footnote 99 They not only rejected it; they also held an alternate referendum on Georgia’s full independence.
During Supreme Council discussions, Gamsakhurdia insisted that a referendum on maintaining the Soviet Union could not be held because there had never been a referendum on joining it during the 1921 conquest. He considered Georgia’s 1918 ‘declaration of independence still legally valid’, though given its infringement for seventy years he thought a new referendum was important ‘to demonstrate to the world society that the Georgian nation wants independence’.Footnote 100 Natadze concurred that Gorbachev’s referendum ‘should be totally boycotted’, noting that Georgia was ‘essentially under two life-or-death threats’ from Moscow: one of them was the physical risk of ‘slaughter’ and the other ‘legal, if we willingly agree to stay in the Soviet Union’.Footnote 101 Throughout these discussions, Georgia’s leaders clearly defined political autonomy from Russia as the central national priority, equating any union with Russia to national death. Acknowledging the risk of punishment, they nevertheless deemed it worthwhile to achieve Georgia’s independence – prioritising that collective goal over their individual well-being.
One member expressed concern that the public might ‘perceive Georgia’s independence … as the stomach’s sacrifices to the soul’, and that ‘economic pocket situation’ could affect voters’ ‘political choice’. However, this scepticism was drowned by others who argued that Georgians favoured their nationalist souls over materialist stomachs, emphasising ‘the national self-awareness and the instinct in Georgian people to save their nation’.Footnote 102 As in the response to the New Union Treaty, this discussion explicitly confronted the trade-off between collective autonomy and individual well-being; once again, the former emerged victorious. Georgia’s referendum, held on 31 March 1991, produced over 90 per cent turnout, with over 99 per cent voting in favour of independence.Footnote 103 On 9 April (the two-year anniversary of the Soviet army’s crackdown on Georgia’s protests), the Supreme Council passed the Act of Restoration of State Independence of Georgia.Footnote 104 In an hour-long speech preceding its official reading, Gamsakhurdia framed independence from the Soviet Union as a restoration of the pre-Soviet sovereignty that had been lost in 1921. He described the First Georgian Democratic Republic (1918–1921) as an indispensable experience of modern Georgian statehood and identified Russia as its past and present enemy.Footnote 105 This narrative was formalised in the official act of restoration of independence, which bonded Georgia’s regained independence to its historic past.
Meanwhile, Kazakhstan proceeded enthusiastically with Gorbachev’s referendum. Both its turnout and public support for preserving the Soviet Union were among the highest across all republics: roughly 88 per cent and 95 per cent respectively.Footnote 106 Kazakh leaders held a televised meeting beforehand, with various political parties issuing a joint statement urging the public to vote ‘yes’. While some republics’ leaders criticised the Soviet Union as a rudimentary colonial creation, Kazakhstan’s leaders emphasised the importance of maintaining it, describing the referendum as a vital measure for ‘the preservation of our common home’.Footnote 107 Nazarbayev’s language emphasising kinship and trust went well beyond strategic cooperation, reflecting a construction of national survival distinct from Georgia’s.
Some scholars have highlighted a plausible alternative explanation for this outcome: Kazakhstan’s large ethnic Russian population (37 per cent), which played important roles in both its domestic and foreign affairs during the late 1980s. However, the overwhelmingly high turnout and referendum result show that the lion’s share of Kazakhstan’s citizens shared the unionist position, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, large ethnic Russian populations in other republics like Latvia and Estonia demonstrated far more pro-independence positions, so Kazakhstan’s policies during this period cannot simply be explained by its ethnic composition.Footnote 108
The Commonwealth of Independent States
Once Gorbachev’s efforts to preserve the Soviet Union had failed, leaders of the newly sovereign Russian Federation replaced the unrealised New Union Treaty with a new international organisation: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Kazakhstan quickly became an ardent supporter of the CIS, hosting its founding ceremony in Alma-Ata on 21 December 1991.Footnote 109 In Martha Olcott’s words, ‘The urge to integrate was almost instinctive for Kazakhstan’s leaders and citizens alike, regardless of their ethnic origin … Some in Kazakhstan would even have given up independence if a stable union with Russia would have resulted.’Footnote 110 Nazarbayev continued advocating deeper integration, proposing the Eurasian Union as an enhanced version of the CIS.Footnote 111 That proposal entailed a common market, common security, a common foreign policy, and even integrated cultural and educational spheres among member states – compromises of political autonomy that Georgia’s leaders saw as direct threats to their national survival.Footnote 112
Many scholars have sought to explain Kazakhstan’s unwavering support for preserving the Soviet Union and its sustained cooperation with Russia by turning to concerns over its economy and security against domestic instability and external threats.Footnote 113 Yet such concerns were not unique to Kazakhstan: the other thirteen newly independent states had even more to lose by leaving the union and antagonising Russia, yet many nevertheless did so (or else advocated much lighter versions of cooperation). The social construction of survival offers a more compelling theoretical mechanism to account for these variations than the assumption of a uniform survival motive. Kazakh leaders in the early 1990s had no need to hide from the public that they were compromising their country’s political autonomy while promising higher living standards. In defence of economic union within the CIS and staying in the rouble zone (which enabled Russia to dictate Kazakhstan’s economic policy), Nazarbayev told Kazakhstan’s parliament in 1993, ‘We must now waive part of our sovereignty’ or else face ‘financial collapse’.Footnote 114 This is a crucial point that underscores the social construction of survival: all post-Soviet states faced dire economic and security situations, yet nevertheless they valued core aspects of statehood in contrasting ways.
Economically weak Georgia – as interdependent with the Soviet economy as any republic – had much more to lose by cutting ties with Russia than oil-rich Kazakhstan, which was better positioned to handle or even benefit from independence.Footnote 115 Yet while eleven of the fifteen post-Soviet states joined the CIS on 21 December 1991, Georgia (along with the three Baltic states) initially refused. Instead, its leaders appealed to Western powers for support. As early as November 1990, they told the Paris Summit of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) that Georgia’s recent democratic elections were evidence that ‘Georgia has chosen the way that will bring it back to the family of European people’.Footnote 116 Georgia’s leaders hoped that the CSCE and other Western institutions would consider ‘the justified aspirations of the people of the formerly independent states to rebuild their statehoods’.Footnote 117 Georgia officially applied to the United Nations in June 1991 (prior to the Soviet Union’s formal dissolution), expressing readiness to ratify important conventions of international law.Footnote 118 Gamsakhurdia and other Georgian leaders also envisioned possibly joining NATO, though they received no official signs that the country would ever be considered for membership.Footnote 119
Georgia’s leaders were well aware that their US and European counterparts were reluctant to provide even timely recognition of their independence, not to mention any security guarantees, making their prioritisation of political autonomy all the more noteworthy. Moscow had recently demonstrated its readiness to inflict both economic blockades and military crackdowns,Footnote 120 and Georgians expressed frustration that Western leaders did not see the Soviet Union as an empire as they did – a ‘barbarian anachronism’ stifling Georgia’s self-determination.Footnote 121 Georgia would eventually join the CIS in 1993 under the leadership of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who succeeded Gamsakhurdia after a coup in January 1992, but it would again withdraw from the CIS under his successor, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Georgia’s pro-European and anti-Russian foreign policy represents a substantial puzzle for conventional IR theories. Facing severe external material obstacles, the main drivers of Georgia’s actions were chiefly ideational. Given its economic and military disadvantages and lack of external allies, its leaders had every reason to consider balancing against Russia a futile endeavour, yet Georgia was one of the first Soviet republics to declare independence. Its leaders explicitly defined their nation’s survival in terms of political autonomy and interpreted Russia as its principal threat, fuelling a steadfast unwillingness to compromise that autonomy and a readiness to accept risks. As these case studies demonstrate, two nations faced with similarly precarious situations amid the breakup of the Soviet Union nevertheless interpreted their national survival – and hence, the foreign policy demands of the moment – very differently.
Conclusion
This article problematises a ubiquitous assumption in IR theory: a uniform survival interest as the foremost determinant of state behaviour. This assumption is widely accepted across different schools of thought; even ontological security scholars rarely challenge it directly, instead examining how other interests can override the survival interest under certain circumstances. This general assumption obscures theoretically significant variations in how national leaders and publics understand their collective survival, and addressing these blind spots can produce more nuanced understandings of international behaviour. Case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan illustrate how different conceptualisations of survival can lead to contrasting foreign policy choices even in the face of similar material constraints.
International relations is long overdue for a critical re-examination of the concept of survival. Scholars often fail to clarify what they mean by that term, and those who do routinely assume that survival combines several distinct interests without clearly prioritising among them. This is a problem because the various interests that are lumped together under the general umbrella of survival frequently incentivise different types of state behaviour. Any conceptualisation that does not acknowledge these tensions will inevitably find it challenging to explain real-world foreign policies. There is no compelling reason why we should necessarily expect all states to similarly value their territorial integrity, political autonomy, government, and population, nor to identically prioritise those interests when circumstances force trade-offs among them. On the contrary, further research into the social construction of survival can help us understand why states prioritise those interests very differently.
This study has opened the door to future research by developing a theoretical critique of the widespread assumption of a uniform state survival motive, rooted in recent scholarship on ontological security and nationalism. Future research in this area can further explore state survival interests by incorporating insights from area studies, as well as other growing bodies of scholarship such as memory studies and critical geography.Footnote 122 Its exploration of the divergent prioritisations of political autonomy vs. individual well-being in Georgia and Kazakhstan suggests the promise of similar investigations into diverging conceptualisations of survival in other states at their moments of independence and beyond. As collective units, states are social constructs, and the processes through which they are formed and reformed can produce varied self-narratives. These two illustrations do not exhaust potential conceptions of survival, with territory and government offering two ready alternatives based on conventional definitions of statehood, and other variations likely as well. Future research should investigate the varying prioritisation of these often-competing aspects of statehood.
Another avenue for further research would examine variations in understandings of survival within the same nation-state over time, exploring the circumstances under which conceptions of national existence and survival can change. Their socially constructed nature implies that national identity narratives can persist in relatively stable forms, producing relatively consistent patterns of behaviour, yet also hold the potential for change. Despite some variations across administrations, Georgia’s central foreign policy goal remained maintaining its political autonomy from Russia for at least three decades after independence, and public approval for Georgia’s aspiration to join the EU and NATO remained consistently high.Footnote 123 This steadiness was particularly noteworthy considering the enduring threat of Russian retaliation and the absence of Western security guarantees, starkly illustrated by the 2008 war. Kazakhstan’s pro-unionism and pro-Russian foreign policy also remained stable throughout that period, as evidenced by its continued membership in Russia-led economic and security organisations and by public support for Russian leadership, with over 80 per cent viewing Russia as a friendly and trustworthy country.Footnote 124
Still, this does not mean that Georgia’s or Kazakhstan’s dominant national identity narratives or foreign policy priorities are immutable. While some transformations occur slowly, others can be accelerated by intrastate or interstate shocks: witness the rapid transformation of Ukraine’s national identity and foreign policy orientation between 2013 and 2023. Indeed, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent shock waves across the region, sparking a particularly vivid crisis in Georgia, where the government abandoned its long-standing anti-Russian foreign policy and sparked unprecedented public mobilisation and civil resistance.Footnote 125 While the current Georgian crisis is beyond the scope of this paper, it illustrates both the possibility and the difficulty of redefining deeply rooted understandings of national survival. Exploring such transformations offers fascinating research opportunities, further underscoring how problematising the social construction of survival can help scholars better explain both continuity and change in state behaviour.
Acknowledgements
For insightful feedback on earlier versions of this project, I would like to thank Stephen Jones, Catarina Kinnvall, Daniel Maliniak, Rebecca Mitchell, Jennifer Mitzen, Brent Steele, Daniel Morey, Emily Beaulieu Buchcus, Karen Patrone, Clayton Thyne, and Richard Maass. I would also like to thank the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, panel attendees at the 2022 ASEEES and ISA conventions, as well as the EJIS editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
Eteri Tsintsadze-Maass is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hampton University, where she teaches international relations and comparative politics courses. Her research focuses on international security and the psychosocial underpinnings of political behaviour. Her publications explore ontological security, national identity narratives, terrorist radicalisation, small state security, social movements, and the politics of post-Soviet states.
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