Russian electoral politics and the search for national identity.

• Author: Ishiyama, John T.
• Position: Special Issue: Argument & Identity

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formally dissolved in December 1991, the Russian Federation became the most prominent of the new nations that emerged. The rebirth of the entity generally known as Russia brought with it the need to create and institutionalize democratic practices after centuries of authoritarian rule, as well as the opportunity to effect market reforms from the remains of a controlled economy. That, in turn, set in motion the rhetorical exigency of engendering in the citizenry a new identification, a new nationalism as citizens of something now called the Russian Federation. Changes such as these necessarily entail questions of public argumentation, debate and rhetoric: democratic forms of governance, for example, may be understood as the institutionalization of a public forum to resolve conflict. Such governments are characterized by open deliberation of choices for future action-the use of rhetorical and dialectical processes-rather than by coercion or the threat of violence.

Similarly, efforts to create or re-create definitions of national identity and individual identification with the national polity are clearly the undertakings of rhetoric and argumentation. In the case of the Russian Federation, of course, traditions of public deliberation about national self-definition and choices of future actions never had been firmly established, even prior to 1917, and they were non-existent from 1917 through at least 1989. Thus, political argumentation in the Russian Federation from 1991 forward offers the scholar a case study by which to investigate the processes of democratization, the creation of institutionalized dialectics, and the rhetorical search for national identity.

The present study represents a further step in a continuing examination of political reform in the Russian Federation. Specifically, it examines political argumentation advanced by various parties and candidates in Russian elections held to date (Williams, Young, Ishiyama, & Launer, 1997 and Young, Launer, Likhachova, Williams, & Ishiyama, 1997). In this essay, we sketch our theoretical orientation to the rhetorical construction of national identity and examine the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections as well as the 1996 presidential campaign. It is our contention that the results of these elections say more about the search for a Russian national identity in the wake of dramatic change than they do about the electoral process itself.

RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY

Our approach to national identity is informed by Kenneth Burke, who sets forth a theory of "identification" as a fundamental rhetorical process that constructs one's psychological "identity" and, ultimately, one's sense of "self" (1937, 1950, 1951). Drawing upon the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), Burke argues that personal identity is neither purely individual nor purely socialized but rather a murky amalgam of the two. Identity is constituted and reconstituted through a dialectical relationship between external manifestations ("me") and a core sense of self ("I") (1937, p. 139). Through common identifications, which is to say through rhetoric, individuals may coalesce collectively, may commingle in a symbiotic sharing of the same substance, a partial sharing of the ontological ground for the being of both the individual and the collective, although this ontology, too, is an ever-shifting dialectic.

National identity may be understood as a special case of collective identification. "[W]hen considered close up, the identity of the 'self' or 'person' becomes part of a collective texture involving language, property, family, reputation, social roles, and so on-elements not reducible to the individual" (Burke, 1937, p. 139). It is through rhetoric and argument that identity is constituted and reconstituted in the ambiguous nexus between the individuated and the collective, between division and unification. Burke (1950) writes,

Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence. (p. 22)

Then, there would be no need for rhetoric. "But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric" (p. 25). Collective identity, as a merger of individual identifies, proclaims unity and sameness, yet as a rhetorical construct it is never seamless; it always contains within itself the dialectical invitation to division.

A person may say, for example, "I am Russian," thereby proclaiming a national identity and announcing a particular "me." To the extent that an individual understands 'Russian' to mean "a citizen of the Russian Federation," there is identification created, a sharing of essence between the entailments and implications of citizenship and self. Such an identification does not reduce identity to a single dimension: "Russian" may still mean an ethnic categorization, an inheritor of Slavic traditions, defender of the motherland, vodka drinker, etc. To the extent that disparate individuals share an identification, such as "citizen of the Russian Federation" or "ethnic Russian," those common "me's" which Burke (1937) terms "corporate we's" constitute the psychological grounds for collective allegiance and for the construction of common motives.

Identification implies both an "otherness" through the differences of dialectic and a "oneness" through the psychological incorporation of common terms. A sharing of sameness that sublimates difference without eradicating it constitutes "consubstantiality" (Burke, 1950, p. 20-23).

At the level of national identity, there must be a core of what McGee (1980) has termed shared "ideographs" of a common political culture, the terminological and potentially imagistic building blocks of collective political allegiance; even though divergent and opposing political movements may arise within a political culture, each tends to identity itself with and through these shared ideographs, albeit with potentially radically divergent interpretations. It is at this level that consubstantiality emerges to bind together dialectically distinct ideological movements within a functional sense of "national identity."

Ritter and Andrews (1978), in their study of American Revolutionary rhetoric, illustrate the processes through which public argument transforms national identity: in order to create an "American unity," they argue, Revolutionary rhetors recognized the need for the creation of a new American ethos distinct from the synchronically existent national identity in which "the colonists saw themselves as Englishmen." Indeed, the rhetorical construction of this new American national character "provided a new anchor for Americans seeking an identity distinct from their British cousins" (p. 6).

Today, Russian rhetors face a similar, although not entirely parallel, challenge. Whereas the effort by American rhetors to establish a new identity was aided by geographic separation from Britain, thereby providing the ability to construct an identity in opposition to the mother country, Russian rhetors are faced with a more recondite situation. The challenge for Russia is to create a new identity within the physical space and tattered traditions of the past. In order to become a viable political force, the nascent ethos of a new Russian identity must be activated at the individual level before it can be actuated at the national level. The ideographs of a new, albeit incipient, political ideology must become configured in a coherent form that appeals to the individual citizens of Russia, coalescing them as a consubstantial collectivity, "calling them forth [as] a people" (McGee, 1975). Through this process of rhetoric and argumentation, the audience is reconstituted (Hammerback, 1994): at the personal level, individual identity and sense of self are transformed; at the group level, allegiance and cohesiveness are solidified; and at the national level, identity is reconstituted.

This transcendent level of consubstantiality - which constitutes a sense of national identity - must be pluralistic, encompassing differences. Other examinations of post-Soviet Russian national identity have studied how Russian leaders have worked to reconstitute "Russian" in relation to other nationalities or states (Chafetz, 1996). Our interest is somewhat different: we examine how discourse constitutes or reconstitutes the audience as a people through the transformation of individuals into citizens identifying with the principles and values of a pluralistic nation-state (Burke, 1935).

The Russian quest for national identity is crucial to the democratization process. As James Billington (1996) notes, despite the fact that the Russian Federation has "already adopted many of the forms of democracy and much of the substance of a market economy, this new Russia is nevertheless haunted by a 'vacuum of belief'" (n.p.). Absent a self-defining core of beliefs, the Russian Federation will never attain political stability and would thereby remain a constant threat both to itself and the rest of the world. Billington continues, "Peaceful integration into the Western world may never be secured until Russia is at peace with a more affirmative sense of itself" (n.p.). Given these stakes, it is critically important to trace what Billington calls the "outlines . . . [of] a new, more positive concept of a distinctive Russian identity" which is now emerging and which may give rise to a "healthy Russian nationalism compatible with, and conducive to, democracy" (n.p.).

Any configuration of national identity that is consonant with the rhetorical needs of democracy must emphasize the political actor as agent. In this context, one might expect...