Download Чувство европейской идентичности

Galina Zvereva (Moscow)
The Sense of European Identity in the Russian History Text-books.
In today’s Russia, the correlation between “Russianness” and “Europeanness” in
the collective consciousness of Russian society is a vividly discussed topic, both in the
sphere of public politics and in the academic community.
In this paper I am going to discuss how the concept of “European identity” is
treated in Russia’s new history textbooks along with constructing a model (or models)
of national and state history.
History textbooks are a special kind of formulaic texts. They are the “meeting
points” of academic discourses and the discourses of power and public politics. The
elements of professional historical knowledge are blended there with the ideological
demands of the state and the expectations of the society.
Both for general and for professional education in history one of the powerful
organizing (constituting) factors is the idea (the “project”) of consolidating the state and
the society in Russia around a new conception of national (“fatherland’s”,
“Vaterländisch”) history. In new textbooks on Russia’s history the “Present” is being
constantly justified with the help of the constructs of collective cultural memory.
The purpose of this paper is to consider how and in what ways the basic
ideological concepts which are being built into the normative version of Russia’s
history are used for the reglamentation of the collective consciousness of Russia’s
society. An analysis of the textbooks gives us an opportunity to see the specific features
of the formation of collective identity concepts in today’s Russia.
The predominating model of Russia’s history in the latest history textbooks
remains the conception of an uninterrupted (continuous) national and state history. The
philosophical and theoretical basis of this model is new Russian historiosophy which is
characterised by a “geopolitical” and “civilisational” approach (i.e. this historiography
presents itself in terms of “geopolitics” and “civilizations”). The methodological
priorities in constructing such a model are essentialism and primordialism.
My approach in this paper is to use some elements of discourse analysis in order to
draw attention to the semantics of the basic words which constitute the cognitive matrix
of textbooks on Russian history.
The place of honour in history textbooks is occupied by the concepts “Russian
civilization”, “Russia’s specific way (road)”, “Russia’s originality (samobytnost’)”,
“Russian mentality”, “Russian identity”. The contents of such concepts, as a rule, is
construed as positive and as opposed to such critically treated concepts as “Western
(European) civilization”, “European way”, “European mentality” and “European
identity”.
The concepts which constitute the model of the national and state history in recent
textbooks reproduce the stereotypes and the shibboleths that hinder (block)
understanding the complexity of the issues of national, civic and socio-cultural
collective self-identification in today’s Russia. One of the most topical and the most
stereotyped basic words is the word (the notion) “nation”, construed in a primordialistic
and universalistic way and often equated to ethnicity. It is from the contents of this
notion that the concepts of “the Russian people”, “the Russian ethnos”, “the Russian
nation”, “the Russian mentality” are derived.
Textbooks in Russia go on reproducing the traditional perception of the
“individualistic European” as an undifferentiated Other, an Alien, alien to the
collectivist foundations of Russia’s society. The concepts (notions) of “European” and
“Russian” are often opposed to each other; this opposition is considered, as a rule,
retrospectively, in the context of the arguments (discussions) between the
“Westernisers” (Zapadniki) and the Slavophiles in the 19th century.
In most of the textbooks, the role of “European” factor in forming the
consciousness of the “Russian nation” looks ambivalent. The very idea of “European
identity” in most textbooks is interpreted as derivative from the monolithic
individualistic “Western mentality (consciousness)” of the time of globalization and
neoliberalism. The predominating elements of this “Western mentality” are alleged to
be rationalistic mechanicism, lack of spirituality, consumerism as well as the
standardization of thinking and ways of living. All these bad things are contrasted to the
spirituality, collectivism as well as to vivid and sensuous attitude to life which are
allegedly innate to the “Russian man”. These qualities, ascribed to “Russians”, are
presented as atemporal, not connected with historical time. But in the same textbooks
we can often find another idea: that the cultural values of the Russian people are closely
connected with the best pan-European (universal) values.
It is only to a very small degree that today’s textbooks on Russian history take into
account the latest interpretations of “European identity” in the context of globalization,
i.e. those interpretations which are being established in European public discourses in
connection with the discussions of the complex processes of the economical and
political integration of European society, on the one hand, and its social fragmentation,
on the other. It means that that the concept of “European identity” cannot be effectively
used for pedagogical purposes while analyzing the contents of mentality changes in the
society of today’s Russia. So we may state that in recent textbooks on history the
representation of the current consciousness of Russian society points to the absence of a
“perception of new European identity”, rather than to the presence of such perception.
It should be noted that this feature differentiate recent textbooks on Russian history
from those written in the 1990s. Then the “europeanness”, the European elements in
Russian cultural consciousness were represented much more conspicuously and
eloquently.