Between State and Nation Building: The Debate about ‘Ethnicity’ in Georgian Citizens’ ID Cards

Reisner, Oliver

doi:10.1017/9789048511624.009

Exploring the Caucasus in the 21st Century 2010

DOI: 10.1017/9789048511624.009

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Between State and Nation Building: The Debate about ‘Ethnicity’ in Georgian Citizens’ ID Cards

Oliver Reisner¹

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2016

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

Berglund

2016

Natl. pap.

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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.

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

Berglund

2016

Natl. pap.

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Language hierarchies in Georgia: an experimental approach

Driscoll¹,

Berglund

Blauvelt

2016

CASU

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How do Georgian citizens of different nationalities evaluate people when they speak in different languages? This article presents the results of three sets of “matched-guise” experiments, a method long used by sociolinguists to evaluate attitudes to different language varieties and their speakers. The results are revealing of the language hierarchies that prevail in Tbilisi and in the southern border regions of Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli (where Georgia’s Armenian and Azerbaijani populations are concentrated). Our results suggest that social rewards for linguistic assimilation from one national group to another are very low in both rural and urban parts of Georgia. These findings show that with linguistic assimilation unrewarded, contemporary language hierarchies leave room for Russian to be sustained as a bridge language between communities. The results also show that native speakers of English are afforded higher social status than native speakers of Russian in Tbilisi.

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Between State and Nation Building: The Debate about ‘Ethnicity’ in Georgian Citizens’ ID Cards

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Language hierarchies in Georgia: an experimental approach

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