State ideology and the legitimation of authoritarianism: The case of post-Soviet Uzbekistan 1

Abstract

This article analyses the rhetorical legitimation strategy of post-Soviet Uzbekistan under Islam Karimov as an authoritarian state. I show that the most important mode of legitimation in this case is neither the consequentialist appeal to stability, order or welfare, nor a direct appeal to guardianship, i.e., special knowledge. Rather, Karimov and his court intellectuals seek to advance a conception of 'ideology' as the comprehensive pre-political consensus of the political community. Their concept of 'ideology' is used to advance a political logic whereby the nature of the political community, the purpose of the state, the unifying political telos and the present regime are fused into a single entity. This ontological fusion is presented as a hegemonic reality and occurs at the pre-political level, resulting in the vanishingly small space left over for politics that characterizes authoritarian systems. I then suggest that such analysis of the hegemonic strategy of authoritarian regimes, and above all the teleological conception of politics it advances, is a superior approach to authoritarian legitimation than the search for explicit 'consequentualist' versus 'principled' arguments.

Networked Authoritarianism and Social Media in Azerbaijan

“…We argue that both the “donkey bloggers” and the online activism conducted by Hajiyev, Salavan, and Babayev threatened the government not only by its content, but also by virtue of its very existence. It represented a “conceivable ideological alternative” (March, 2003, p. 210) which threatened to mobilize mass opinion on a geographically ambiguous medium: a tactic doubly threatening to authoritarian legitimation. The administration cast the bloggers and social media activists as villains in a new national narrative that sent a harsh message about citizenship and Internet use.…”

“…After the Soviet Union collapsed, the presidents of the newly independent states cultivated nationalist ideologies that proclaimed their countries' primordial roots and teleological progressions toward independence. March (2003) argues that this form of post‐Soviet authoritarian legitimation is rooted in “a consistent rejection of the existence of conceivable ideological alternatives to the substantive orientation of the regime” (p. 210). The desire for political uniformity is echoed in the patronage networks of post‐Soviet leaders, particularly in the Aliyev dynasty of Azerbaijan (Guliyev, 2012).…”

How authoritarian rulers seek to legitimize repression: framing mass killings in Egypt and Uzbekistan

“…12 To describe how legitimating messages in authoritarian regimes work more generally, March posits that [t]he main strategy is to define the entire state in relation to common goals, to define the goals and aspirations as virtually constitutive of the nation as such, and to equate the regime with the proper articulation and realization of those goals through the state apparatus. 13 A variety of goals or values in line with more general patterns of legitimation can be invoked to justify repression. Since personalist rule with demobilizing strategies has existed for a while in many authoritarian regimes, we expect justifications to revolve around stability.…”

Political society and civil society in Uzbekistan—never the twain shall meet?

“…As Andrew March suggests, the range of issues legitimately open to contestation (and as such the space for a formal political society) is narrowed by 'an exclusive identification between the political community, the state, the goal and the regime, using the latent and natural legitimacy of the first three to secure the legitimacy of the latter'. 15 However, excluding political contestation from within formal institutions does not mean that competition does not exist. It is just that the site of this contestation shifts from formal institutions to informal and more opaque social processes, something illustrated well in a number of contributions to this issue.…”