7


Homeland nationalism in Weimar Germany and “Weimar Russia”

Rogers Brubaker


In interwar Europe, one of the most dangerous fault lines was that along which the domestic
nationalisms of ethnically heterogeneous nationalizing states collided with the transborder
nationalisms of neighboring “homeland” states, oriented to co-ethnics living as minorities in the
nationalizing states. The clash between the nationalizing nationalism of interwar Poland and the
homeland nationalisms of Germany and the Soviet Union,[1] between the nationalizing nationalism of
Czechoslovakia and the homeland nationalisms of Germany and Hungary, between the nationalizing
nationalism of Romania and the homeland nationalisms of Hungary and Bulgaria[2] – to name only a
few – generated both chronic tensions and acute crises, tensions and crises that were bound up with
the background to and the outbreak of the Second World War.[3]

Analogous collisions along the same fault line threaten the stability and security of the region
today. In some cases they have already led to war. As I argued in Chapter 3, the interplay between
the nationalizing nationalism of Croatia and the homeland nationalism of Serbia (along with the
minority nationalism of Croatia’s borderland Serbs) led to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Similarly,
the interplay between the nationalizing nationalism of Azerbaijan and the homeland nationalism of
Armenia (initially sparked by the minority nationalism of Karabakh Armenians) led to the war over
Nagorno-Karabakh. Many other collisions or potential collisions along this fault line, while they
have yet to generate large-scale violence, remain potentially destabilizing. The nationalizing
nationalisms of Romania and Slovakia have clashed with the homeland nationalism of Hungary.[4] The
nationalizing nationalisms of Serbia and Macedonia confront the incipient homeland nationalism of
Albania.[5] The nationalizing nationalism of Bulgaria faces the potential homeland nationalism of
neighboring Turkey.

The most important – and potentially the most dangerous – clash along this fault line today is
between the nationalizing nationalisms of Soviet successor states and the homeland nationalism of
Russia. The nationalizing policies and politics of Estonia and Latvia, especially their restrictive
citizenship policies toward their large Russian minorities, have met with harsh Russian
condemnations of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” and repeated assertions of Russia’s right to
protect Russians against allegedly massive human rights violations. Chronic tensions between
Ukraine and Russia over Russian-dominated Crimea flared up in 1994 when the Crimean Russian
leadership declared itself virtually independent of central Ukrainian authority and sought closer
ties to Russia.[6] Tensions between Kazakhstan and Russia, too, have increased over the hardening
nationalizing policies applied by the Kazakh regime in the Russian-dominated north.[7] And a
limited war broke out in trans-Dniestrian Moldova in summer 1992 between the initially strongly
nationalizing Moldovan state and the secessionist, Russian- and Ukrainian-led “Dniester Republic,”
backed by the Russian 14th army, acting with the tacit acquiescence, if not the active direction,
of MOSCOW.[8]

Having addressed nationalizing states in Chapter 4, I turn in this chapter to the transborder
nationalisms of external national homelands. Homeland nationalisms, too, have been neglected –
indeed to an even greater extent than nationalizing nationalisms – in the literature on nationalist
politics. One symptom of this is that there is no generally accepted analytical vocabulary for
discussing – or even for identifying – what I have called “homeland nationalism.” Particular
instances of this kind of nationalism have, of course, been studied. The most substantial
literature concerns interwar Germany. Even that literature – comprising only a few specialized
books and a handful of articles, almost exclusively in German – is minimal by comparison with the
huge literature on other aspects of German nationalism. Written overwhelmingly by historians,
moreover, that literature has been highly particularizing, oriented to the details of one
particular situation, indeed in most cases to one or another aspect of the interwar German concern
with ethnic Germans in neighboring states. Its key concepts – Deutschtumspolitik,
Volkstums-politik, Deutschtumsarbeit, Deutschtumspflege, all denoting an active concern with ethnic
“Germandom”(Deutschtum) – have been tied specifically to that historical situation; it has been
little concerned to develop wider theoretical or comparative perspectives.[9]

As for the generalizing literature on ethnicity and nationalism, while it has addressed irredentism
and external intervention in ethnic conflict, it has not focused sustained analytical attention on
external national homelands or homeland nationalism as such. Irredentism – a movement to
incorporate irredenta, that is, lands or peoples represented as “unredeemed” because stranded under
“alien” rule – is indeed an instance of homeland nationalism, but it represents an extreme limiting
case, not the field of homeland politics as a whole. And the problematic of “external intervention”
cuts across that of homeland politics. On the one hand, it casts a broader net, including
intervention by any external power, whether an external national homeland, another state, or a
transnational or international organization. On the other hand, “intervention” is usually conceived
narrowly as armed or at least coercive intervention, while the multifarious actions constitutive of
homeland politics involve the use or threat of force only as a limiting case.[10]

To address this undertheorized form of nationalism, this chapter, like its predecessor, adopts an
historical approach. The major part of the chapter is devoted to the analysis of one particular –
and particularly relevant – case of homeland nationalism: that of Weimar Germany. Weimar homeland
nationalism invites our attention not only for its intrinsic interest, and not only because its
themes and methods were appropriated by the Nazis, but also because of the striking similarities
between Germany after the First World War and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union –
similarities that have led some commentators to speak of “Weimar Russia.”[11] Accordingly, the
final section of the chapter addresses the emergent homeland nationalism of post-Soviet Russia,
comparing it with that of Weimar Germany.


Nationalizing and homeland nationalisms

Nationalizing and homeland nationalisms are diametrically opposed and directly conflicting:
nationalizing nationalisms (like that of interwar Poland) are directed “inward” by states toward
their own territories and citizenries, while homeland nationalisms (like that of interwar Germany)
are directed “outward” by neighboring states, across the boundaries of territory and citizenship,
toward members of “their own” ethnic nationality, that is toward persons who “belong” (or can be
claimed to belong) to the external national homeland by ethnonational affinity, although they
reside in and are (ordinarily) citizens of other states. Since these latter states are ordinarily
nationalizing states (or are at least so represented by the external homeland), homeland and
nationalizing nationalisms typically collide head-on.

Nationalizing states and external national homelands advance competing jurisdictional claims over
the same set of persons. These are persons who “belong,” or can be represented as belonging, to
both states – to the nationalizing state by citizenship, to the homeland by putative ethnocultural
nationality. The nationalizing state, appealing to norms of territorial integrity and sovereignty,
asserts that the status and welfare of its citizens, whatever their ethnocultural nationality, is a
strictly internal matter over which it alone has legitimate jurisdiction. The external national
homeland, rejecting this view, asserts that its rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis “its”
(transborder) nation cut across the boundaries of territory and citizenship, that it has the right,
even the obligation, to monitor, promote, and, if necessary, protect the interests of “its” ethnic
co-nationals even when they live in other states and possess other citizenships. Precariously
situated between these competing claims are the national minorities themselves – sharing
citizenship but not (ethnocultural) nationality with the nationalizing state, and sharing
nationality but not citizenship with the external national homeland.

 Yet despite their directly opposed orientations, homeland and nationalizing nationalisms share one
key similarity: both are oriented to a “nation” distinct from the citizenry of the state. In
nationalizing states, this nation is smaller than the citizenry; for external national homelands,
it is larger, extending beyond the citizenry – and beyond the territory of the state – to include
citizens and residents of other states.[12] Both nationalizing and homeland nationalisms therefore
reveal, although in differing ways, a deep tension inherent in the nation-state as a model of
political organization – a tension between the “conceived order” or “imagined community” of the
“nation”[13] and the territorially framed organizational reality of the state.

The dominant “Western” understandings of the nation-state, whether in their English, American, or
French variants, provide no analytical purchase on this tension, for in these traditions (important
differences among them notwithstanding) “nation” is seen as subsumed under, congruent with, and
framed by the state. (Even in the American tradition, with its weak sense of stateness, “nation” is
seen as congruent with if not as subsumed under the state.) Yet where “nation” is understood (in
however imprecise a fashion) not as a coincident but as an alternative reference, cross-cutting
rather than reinforcing the territorial and institutional frame of the state, the flattened,
“Western” conception of the nation-state, collapsing nation and state into fully congruent
categories, is inadequate. This is clearly the case in Central and Eastern Europe – the world
region in which “nation” is most strongly established as a cognitive and evaluative frame
independent of and incongruent with the frame of the territorial state.[14]


Weimar homeland nationalism

Origins

Although homeland nationalism in Germany emerged only in the last decades of the nineteenth century
and crystallized as a significant political force only after the First World War, the incongruence
and tension between the conceived order of the nation and the organizational reality of the state –
a central precondition for the emergence of homeland nationalism – has deep roots in German
history.[15] Its matrix was the distinctive economic, political, and cultural geography of Central
Europe. Two features of that geography are relevant here. First, western Germany lay in the heart
of Europe’s “city belt,” a legacy of the overland trade routes of the middle ages, extending from
Italy to the North Sea and the Baltic. In this zone, dubbed “polycephalic” by Stein Rokkan and
Derek Urwin, the density of cities, ecclesiastical principalities, and other small but autonomous
political jurisdictions created obstacles to the expansion and consolidation of centralized
territorial states – obstacles that were much weaker in the “monocephalic” zones to the west and
east of the city belt, where, in consequence, large centralized states emerged much earlier.[16]
The resultant long-standing fragmentation of political authority meant that ethnolinguistic and
political boundaries did not even come close to coinciding in Central Europe. A second distinctive
feature of Central European cultural geography has been the broad zone of ethnoculturally mixed
settlement patterns extending eastward from the area of consolidated German settlement – a legacy
of the large-scale eastward migration of German peasant settlers and colonists that occurred in
several great waves in the high middle ages and again in the early modern era. Together with the
fragmentation of political authority in western Germany, these extensive mixed zones in its eastern
border-lands prevented congruence between ethnolinguistic and political boundaries.

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, no cultural or political significance was attached
to the Volkssprache (the language of the Volk, or of everyday life, as opposed to the
Staatssprache, the language of public affairs). As a result, the lack of even remote congruence
between ethno-linguistic and political units had no particular importance.[17] This changed in the
late eighteenth century: the Volkssprache was celebrated most powerfully by Herder – as a matrix of
creativity and individuality, and a conception of nation as founded on language and linguistically
embedded culture took root among the flourishing German Bildungsbürgertum. From this time on, the
imagined community of the ethno-cultural nation was available as a point of orientation, focus of
value, source of identity, and locus of allegiance independent of – and potentially conflicting
with – the state. Thus was realized one key precondition for homeland nationalism.

Through the end of the eighteenth century, this new ethnolinguistic or ethnocultural understanding
of “nation” remained an apolitical, even antipolitical concept, while conceptions of statehood
remained uninformed by the national idea. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the
two frames of reference – ethnocultural nation and territorial state – came to stand in a relation
of dynamic tension to one another. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars – especially the
crushing and ignominious defeat of Prussia by the French at Jena in 1806 – made a tremendous
impression in Germany. That the state must seek to harness the energies of the nation, and the
nation to embody itself in a state, became the conventional “progressive” wisdom. How this melding
of nation and state might be accomplished was a central question of German political and
intellectual life for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

With the founding of the German Reich in 1870-1, representing the triumph of the
Prussian-kleindeutsch over the Austrian-grossdeutsch project for a German nation-state, there was
now, for the first time, a state claiming to embody the German nation. Yet the very
“incompleteness” of this incarnation – the fact that millions of Germans, above all the eight
million Austrian Germans, were excluded from the new state – created the possibility for homeland
nationalism.[18] Thus in the very act of becoming a nation-state – the long-sought state of and for
the ethno-cultural German nation, yet one that failed to incorporate substantial parts of that
nation – the new German Reich became at the same time not only a cardinal point of cultural and
political reference but also a potential external national homeland – patron, protector, and
possible “redeemer” – for the excluded co-nationals.

In the first decade of the Reich, and through most of the second as well, homeland nationalism
remained an unactivated potential. After the wars and territorial upheavals involved in the
Reichsgründung, Bismarck’s chief foreign policy priority was to reestablish and maintain a stable
European inter-state order so as to make possible the internal consolidation of the state; he
repeatedly assured other European powers that the Reich was territorially “saturated.” Consistently
statist rather than nationalist in orientation, moreover, Bismarck repudiated any suggestion that
the Reich had a special responsibility for or concern with ethnic Germans outside its frontiers.
Nor was there any significant body of opinion or organized constituency advocating such
homeland-nationalist claims during these decades.[19]

The position of Germans outside the Reich, however, was beginning to change. Long-privileged Baltic
Germans were increasingly threatened, from the late 1880s on, by Russification, Hungarian Germans
by Magyarization. More importantly, German dominance in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire
was increasingly contested by the growing Slav majority, in particular by vigorous Czech, Polish,
and Slovene national movements. In response to this challenge, a clamorous pan-German movement
arose among Austrian Germans in the 1880s. Seeking to restore German hegemony in the core Austrian
lands through their separation from the overwhelmingly Slav-inhabited outlying territories of
Galicia and Dalmatia, the pan-Germans looked to the Reich for support and, covertly, for eventual
incorporation of Austro-German lands.[20]

This increasingly beleaguered position of Germans outside the Reich evoked in response an organized
movement of support within the Reich. In this way homeland nationalist claims first found organized
expression in Germany. The pioneering organization in this respect was the German School
Association, which sought to sustain German schools outside the Reich so as to “preserve Germans
outside the Reich for Germandom.”[21] While this association (renamed Association for Germandom
Abroad in 1908) focused on cultural support for co-ethnics abroad, the more radical Pan-German
League, founded in the early 1890s, advanced political demands as well, presenting itself as a
“national opposition” and advocating the “national consolidation of the entire German Volkstum in
Central Europe, that is, the eventual establishment of Grossdeutschland.”[22] The League’s
president, Ernst Hasse, who was also a National Liberal deputy, often demanded in the Reichstag
that the Reich actively intervene to support hard-pressed Germans outside the Reich.[23] This
initial phase of homeland nationalism reached its peak of intensity in 1897, when violent
Austro-German protests against an ordinance establishing Czech alongside German as an official
administrative language in Bohemia and Moravia and requiring officials in those lands to know both
languages induced a strong protest movement in the Reich as well.[24] In this moment of high
enthusiasm for the Austro-German cause, a few influential diplomats and army figures even advocated
the incorporation of Austro-German lands into the Reich.[25]

The new homeland nationalism, however, remained politically weak, and proved unable to influence
Reich policy. On foreign policy grounds, Bismarck’s successors continued to adhere to his strict
noninterventionist stance vis-à-vis Volksdeutsche outside the Reich, and to exclude any
consideration of a possible Anschluss of Austro-German lands. Moreover, demands for intervention on
behalf of beleaguered Volksgenossen had no mass support and only fragmentary elite backing. This
reflected not the weakness of nationalism in Imperial Germany but the extent to which nationalist
sentiment was focused on and “contained” within the territorial and institutional frame of the
Reich. “The nation,” for nationalists, no longer necessarily meant the institutionally amorphous
Kulturnation but rather the Staatsnation constituted by the Reichsgründung and strengthened in the
succeeding decades by the powerfully integrative workings of state-wide institutions, economic
dynamism, and geo-political prestige. This “containment” was far from perfect; nationalism spilled
over not only into concern for Volksdeutsche outside the Reich but also, and more significantly,
into an imperialist Weltpolitik. On balance, however, the process of “concentration” of the concept
of nation (and of “Deutschland”) onto the territory and population of the Reich through the
integrative workings of a dynamic, prestigious, “successful” territorial state at a moment of high
geopolitical competition among states did much to weaken support for the transborder appeals of
homeland nationalists.[26]


The crystallization of homeland nationalism

This changed dramatically with the First World War and its aftermath. The fate of Germans outside
the state – previously a peripheral concern of scattered intellectuals, with no mass support and no
bearing on high politics – abruptly became a central preoccupation of nationally minded
intellectuals, a focus of vigorous and broad-based associational activity, and an object of
continuous and high-level state concern. Weimar Germany “crystallized,” in a way that Wilhelmine
Germany had not, as an external national homeland for its ethnic co-nationals in other states.[27]
This newly urgent transborder concern with “Germandom” – with what German authors have called
Deutschtumspolitik or Volkstumspolitik – crystallized in response to the drastic and intertwined
transformations experienced by the German state and by ethnic Germans living outside its borders in
the aftermath of the war. The state suffered not only military defeat, political revolution, and
loss of territory, but also – temporarily – loss of standing as a Great Power. The Weimar
Republic’s territorial boundaries were fixed by a treaty universally denounced, in Germany, as
unjust, illegitimate, and humiliating; its constitutional order was under attack from the beginning
by the revolutionary Left as well as by the radical Right. With the basic territorial and
institutional parameters of statehood thus deeply contested and lacking firm legitimacy, the Weimar
Republic proved unable to “embody” the nation or to “contain” nationalism, as the Kaiserreich had
done, within the territorial and institutional frame of the state. Because the state had lost much
of its binding, integrative power, nationalism was partially de-territorialized and
de-institutionalized. Nationhood, which had become firmly, though never exclusively, identified
with the prestigious and “successful” state in the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine eras, was now
detached from the devalued frame of the defeated state, and again identified primarily with the
state-transcending, institutionally amorphous ethnocultural nation or Volk.[28]

This völkisch reorientation of nationalism reflected not only the weakness and (in the eyes of many
nationalists) illegitimacy of the Weimar Republic but also the dramatically embattled position in
which ethnic Germans beyond German state frontiers found themselves after the war.[29] Germans
outside the Reich – neglecting overseas emigrants, who did not figure centrally in Volkstumspolitik
– had lived chiefly in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Their position, to be sure, had
been weakening in the last decades before the war; precisely this had occasioned the initial
formulations of homeland-nationalist demands in Wilhelmine Germany. It changed much more
drastically, however, with the collapse of the great multinational empires. This was particularly
true for the millions of Austro-Germans who were abruptly transformed from the Staatsvolk of a
Great Power into national minorities in nationalizing Czechoslovakia (roughly 3 million) and in
equally nationalist Italy (a quarter of a million). Nearly 2 million Germans from the Hungarian
half of the Habsburg Empire became national minorities in rump Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and
Czechoslovakia, as did the Baltic Germans in the new states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. An
even sharper and (given German military successes on the Eastern front) entirely unexpected
reversal in status was suffered by the million-plus Reich Germans in eastern and predominantly
Polish districts of Prussia who suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves beyond the reach of
German state authority in the incipient Polish state. All of these new (or newly reconfigured)
states understood themselves as nation-states, as the states of and for particular ethnocultural
nations; in all of them, Germans faced policies and practices of nationalization resembling in some
respects those analyzed in Chapter 4.

It is not enough, however, to focus on the result of this transformation – on the status of ethnic
Germans as new minorities in newly nationalizing states. What engaged the attention – and provoked
the indignation – of Weimar nationalists were the processes and especially the struggles through
which the transformation occurred. The reorganization of previously multinational political space
along ostensibly national lines in Central and Eastern Europe was a protracted process that spanned
several years.[30] It involved not only prolonged negotiations among the victorious Powers but also
armed struggles to create “facts on the ground.” In some cases the demarcation of boundaries was
delayed pending plebiscites; campaigns leading up to these again involved bitter and sometimes
violent struggles. While the defeated and disarmed German state was unable to playa major role in
this protracted shaping of the postwar settlement, non-state German groups such as the Freikorps
captured the imagination of nationalists with their armed struggles on behalf of beleaguered
Deutschtum in the Baltics, in the mixed German-Polish districts of Poznania and Upper Silesia, and
along the German-Slovene frontier in Carinthia.[31] These “heroic” struggles in the ethnic
borderlands helped divert nationalists’ attention from the “impotent” state to the vigorous,
autonomous Volk.

Even where the postwar settlement did not transform Germans into minorities, as in the creation of
the rump Austrian state, the process of political reconfiguration created fertile ground for
homeland nationalism in Germany. As the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire fractured along
national lines in the final stages of the war, Austro-Germans set their sights on union with
Germany. Before the war, such a union, although envisioned as an eventuality by some pan-Germans in
Austria and Germany, was not a serious possibility: as noted above, Bismarck and his successors
consistently repudiated any initiative tending in this direction, since it would have entailed the
disintegration of a Great Power that was Germany’s chief ally. But with the prewar state system
destroyed and the disintegration of the Empire inevitable, these obstacles to Anschluss with
Germany no longer existed. The principle of national self-determination, moreover, evoked by the
Empire’s secessionist nationalities and enshrined in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, seemed to
provide a powerful warrant for Anschluss. On November 12, 1918, the Austrian Provisional National
Assembly declared itself a Republic and part of the German Reich; this was endorsed by the Weimar
National Assembly.[32] Support for Anschluss in 1918-19 was nearly unanimous, across all party
lines, in German Austria and Germany.[33] Yet at the insistence of France, unwilling to create a
larger and more populous Germany, the victorious Powers prohibited the union. So while Austria
became a German state, the Allies’ refusal to allow union with Germany reinforced the conception –
basic to homeland nationalism – of Germans as a state-transcending Volk to whom the right of
national self-determination was denied at the same time that this right was trumpeted in principle
as the basis of the postwar settlement. One further factor nourishing Weimar homeland nationalism
was the flow of ethnic German resettlers to Germany.[34] From the territories ceded to Poland after
the war there was a mass migration of roughly two-thirds of the ethnic German population.[35]
Predominantly urban, and well-schooled in ethnonational struggle from the decades-long efforts
before the war to secure the ethnonationally mixed eastern districts of Prussia for “Germandom,”
these resettlers formed a ready-made constituency and reservoir of leadership for Weimar
Deutschtumspolitik. The flow of German resettlers from the Baltic states, the Sudetenland, and
other formerly Russian and Austro-Hungarian territories, although much smaller, also included many
who became actively involved in the “Germandom” cause. Through this latter migration, ethnonational
perspectives formed in the great multinational Romanov and Habsburg empires, often without any
special reference to Germany, were trans-posed to and internalized within Germany itself.


Civil society homeland nationalism

Weimar Deutschtumspolitik was not confined to the state. It embraced all those, within and outside
the state, who articulated, propagated, or tried to inculcate a concern with and sense of
responsibility for Deutschtum as a whole, and for German minorities in other states in particular.

Deutschtumspolitik in this broad sense flourished in Weimar civil society. Although some
associations and organizations concerned with ethnic Germans outside Germany had been established
before the war, scores of new ones sprung up in its aftermath. Many of these, to be sure, were
transitory groupings of little significance.[36] Still, Germandom-oriented associational activities
did involve considerably wider circles of participants than their prewar analogues. The Association
for Germandom Abroad, the only prewar association to retain a central place in Weimar
Volkstumspolitik, did so by transforming itself into a mass organization with 2 million members and
a strong base in the schools.[37] Another major Germandom organization, the German Protective
League for Border and Foreign Germandom, united in a loose federation over a hundred
Germandom-oriented associations, many émigré-based and focused on particular German minority
communities, others based abroad in the minority communities themselves.[38] A third organization,
the Organization of German Ethnonational Groups in Europe, linked German minority organizations
throughout Europe, and was active primarily in international fora, mainly the League of Nations and
the Congress of European Nationalities. Youth and church groups too were involved in
Germandom-oriented activities. Trips were arranged for youth groups to familiarize them with ethnic
German communities in other states.[39] Church-based associations – the Evangelical Gustav Adolf
Association and the Reich Association of Catholic Germans Abroad – provided substantial material as
well as moral support for German co-confessionals abroad.[40]

In the associational sphere, then, concern with Germandom across state frontiers was much more
vibrant and broad-based than it had been before the war. Public interest in co-nationals abroad was
both expressed in and reinforced by what Martin Broszat has described as a “flood of belletristic,
polemical-political and half-scientific literature” concerned with Germandom abroad as well as an
abundance of newsletters and periodicals on the subject.[41] At its more academic pole, this
literature shaded over into Ostforschung, research on “the East,” which received a major impetus
during and after the war, and much of which focused on the territories ceded to Poland and on other
areas of ethnic German settlement in Ostmitteleuropa.[42] At its more reportorial pole, it shaded
over into “ordinary” journalism, which also (especially the more nationalist oppositional papers)
devoted considerable attention to the tribulations of Germans in other states.

The boundary between civil society and the state, in the domain of Deutschtumspolitik, was anything
but sharp. In 1919-20, the government, prohibited from acting itself, worked through nominally
private associations to check the Polish uprising in Poznania in early 1919 and to organize voters
in the plebiscite districts in West and East Prussia in 1920.[43] Throughout the Weimar period, the
government channeled money to the Auslandsdeutsche through ostensibly private but in fact
state-controlled intermediary organizations; it also provided funding for the major Weimar
Germandom-oriented associations, trying in return, with little success, to promote their
coordination and consolidation.[44] Close connections between leading figures in the associations
and state agencies concerned with Auslandsdeutsche further eroded the boundary.[45] Yet despite the
blurring of this boundary, Germandom-oriented activities in civil society constituted a distinct
domain of Deutschtumspolitik. These activities created a dense web of relations linking leaders of
the various minority German communities with one another and with Germans in the Reich and Austria.
And they contributed to the formation of Weimar public opinion, sustaining public interest in and
concern with the fate of minority Germans, and supporting the understanding of the German nation as
a state-transcending ethnocultural unity.

Discourse and activities in this domain tended to be Volk- rather than state-oriented. To be sure,
many – probably the overwhelming majority – of those involved in Weimar Germandom-oriented
activities, like the Weimar citizenry as a whole, hoped for eventual border revisions that would
bring Austria and key portions of territories ceded to Poland into the Reich. Some envisioned a
more far-reaching territorial reorganization of Central Europe that would unite all contiguously
settled Germans, including the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, in a single state. Yet whatever
their hopes for territorial revision, these did not directly govern their activities in the sphere
of Deutschtumspolitik. Border revision was a distant dream, not a concrete goal toward which one
could work with any hope of achieving it. From a Volk-oriented perspective, moreover, the urgent
imperative was not to change state frontiers but to diminish their significance, to strengthen the
Volk as a self-subsistent, autonomous entity,[46] and to strengthen public awareness of and
interest in this state-transcending Volk. There were, to be sure, ambiguities and outright
contradictions involved in this stance, in this concern to “organize the organic Volk,” to deploy
the financial means of the state to increase the autonomy of the Volk.[47] But an underlying
völkisch orientation did distinguish the homeland nationalism of Weimar civil society from that of
the Weimar state.


Official Weimar homeland nationalism

Before the First World War, as I indicated above, the German state had carefully refrained from
making commitments to or claims on behalf of ethnic Germans outside the Reich, limiting itself to
noncommittal expressions of sympathy for its ethnocultural kin. This changed sharply after the war.
The state became continuously implicated in Deutschtumspolitik.

The core of official Deutschtumspolitik involved covert financial support for Germans outside the
Reich. Funding was channeled through intermediary organizations that were nominally private but in
fact financed and controlled by the government; this arrangement permitted the government to avoid
public debate and accountability in this domain and thereby to shield this support from the
scrutiny both of the minority-harboring states and of the Allies.[48] Through these backdoor
channels the Reich provided substantial support for German schools, newspapers, churches,
charitable organizations, and social and cultural activities. It provided credit for beleaguered
German farming and business interests and sought to help preserve German land ownership.[49] Using
its funding as leverage, moreover, the government sought – albeit with little success – to promote
the consolidation of the numerous German organizations abroad and, failing that, to monitor,
coordinate and control their activities (again in a discreet, behind-the-scenes manner). The
Foreign Affairs Ministry in particular attempted this task of coordination and control, in order to
prevent embarrassing incidents or activities (such as openly irredentist activities) that could
interfere with Reich foreign policy, to resolve disputes among and promote the unity of minority
German organizations, and to promote activities consistent with Reich foreign policy aims.

Rhetorical invocations of the plight of transborder Germans were often highly generalized,
referring to Grenz- and Auslandsdeutschtum as a whole.[50] This generalized rhetoric, however,
masked differentiated policies. This is best illustrated by the differing Weimar policies towards
transborder Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia.[51] The situation of Germans in these states – by
any reckoning the two most important communities of Germans outside the Reich – was in certain
respects quite similar. In both states, Germans were large and (for the most part) territorially
concentrated communities.[52] In both states, Germans were borderland minorities, inhabiting
regions contiguous to the Reich (and thereby of much greater and more immediate concern to the
Reich than, say, the distant Russian Germans). In both states, finally, Germans had been
unexpectedly and unwillingly transformed from the Staatsvolk of a Great Power into what they
perceived as second-class citizens of third-class states.

 Yet there were also three key differences between Germans in Poland and in Czechoslovakia. First,
the borderland Germans of Poland had been citizens of Germany until 1919; some retained their Reich
citizenship even after the war. The Sudeten Germans of the Bohemian and Moravian borderlands, by
contrast, had been citizens of Austro-Hungary, and had never in modern times been united with the
Reich-Germans in a single state. Second, there was a mass exodus of Germans from the newly Polish
territories to Germany immediately after the war, and continuing into the 1920s, while there was no
comparable large-scale migration of Sudeten Germans to the Reich (or to Austria, for that
matter).[53] Third, the Weimar regime had territorial claims against Poland – indeed revision of
the Polish border was a fundamental axiom of Weimar foreign policy – but not against
Czechoslovakia. These differences were interdependent: all reflected the fact that the borderland
territories inhabited by Germans in Poland had long belonged to Germany, while those inhabited by
Germans in Czechoslovakia had long been part of a separate state. The Reich and Germans in western
Poland were united by longstanding political as well as ethnocultural ties, by ties of common
statehood and common citizenship, not merely (as was the case for the relation between the Reich
and the Germans of Czechoslovakia) by the ties of common language and culture.

Reflecting these basic differences, Weimar policies and practices concerning co-nationals in Poland
and Czechoslovakia differed substantially. Outrage over the territorial settlement in the east,
empathy for the large numbers of ethnic Germans – and Reich citizens – who had suddenly come under
Polish rule, and apprehensions concerning their large-scale migration to Germany together meant
that initial government attention was concentrated almost exclusively on Germans in Poland,
specifically on those in the ceded territories. Indeed, far more attention and resources continued
throughout the Weimar era to be focused on co-nationals in western Poland than on those elsewhere
in the “new abroad.”[54] Moreover, attention and resources were concentrated on an immediate and
concrete aim in the Polish case: to stop or at least limit the reflux of Germans into the Reich and
thereby to secure the continued existence of the German minority in the western borderlands of the
new Polish state. To this end, the Reich limited payments of compensation for re settlers (since
such payments only encouraged further resettlement) and developed instead a system of “anticipatory
compensation” or “preventive refugee assistance” for Germans still in Poland, involving cash
payments to the unemployed, loans to German enterprises, and supplementary cash support for needy
German pensioners.[55]

This immediate aim of stopping the influx into Germany, in turn, was inseparably linked to
longer-term revisionist aims: as leading Foreign Ministry officials frankly acknowledged in
internal documents, it was necessary to preserve a substantial German presence in the ceded
territories in order to be able to make ethnodemographically plausible revisionist claims on those
territories in the future.[56] Substantial Reich outlays for agricultural credits from 1924 on,
intended to preserve German landownership in the ceded territories, were also seen as buttressing
future revisionist claims. It would be one-sided, to be sure, to see Weimar support for Germans in
Poland solely in terms of Germany’s revisionist aspirations.[57] The ties of common citizenship,
only recently and (from the German point of view) arbitrarily ruptured, could be seen to require
such support, irrespective of possibilities for territorial revision, while limiting the reflux of
minority Germans to the Reich was justified by economic as well as ethnopolitical
considerations.[58] Moreover, the government discouraged openly irredentist activities by minority
organizations; it aimed to preserve the possibility of revision in the long term, not directly to
foster an irredentist stance on the part of the minority.[59] Finally, while revisionist hopes
focused on parts of the ceded territories (on the “Corridor” that cut off East Prussia from the
rest of German territory and on Upper Silesia, not on Poznania), aid was generally distributed to
Germans throughout the ceded territories, indeed in many cases to Germans throughout Poland.[60]
Yet even when these and other factors are taken into consideration, it remains indisputable that
definite revisionist commitments substantially shaped Weimar Deutschtumspolitik vis-à-vis Poland.

The same cannot be said for Weimar Deutschtumspolitik vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia.[61] In
organizational form, to be sure, support for Sudeten Germans looked very much like support for the
Germans of western Poland: money was channeled through intermediary organizations that were
nominally private but in fact closely controlled by the Reich government. In the cultural and
caritative domain, moreover, the pattern of support was similar, although funding was at a
considerably lower level than in Poland. Schools were here too the top priority, but newspapers,
charitable organizations, cultural associations, and various social and cultural programs and
activities were also supported. Weimar support for Sudeten Germans, however, lacked the urgency,
the immediate practical objectives, and the clear long-run strategic significance of support for
the Germans of western Poland. There was no threat – from harshly nationalizing policies or heavy
outmigration – to the very existence of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, nor was there any
commitment to incorporating Sudeten German lands in the Reich.[62] The Weimar government encouraged
Sudeten Germans to address their grievances by working within the new state, as loyal Czechoslovak
citizens.[63] Although Sudeten Germans figured centrally in the unfolding of the Munich crisis and
in Hitler’s dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state, they did not – in marked contrast to the
Germans of western Poland – figure centrally in Weimar foreign policy. The Reich did not object to
the postwar incorporation of Sudeten German lands into Czechoslovakia, but sought rather to
establish good relations with the new state from the outset.[64] And while the status of the
Sudeten Germans was an irritant in German-Czechoslovak relations, those relations – again in marked
contrast to the chronically hostile relations between Germany and Poland – remained at least
“correct” throughout the Weimar era.

 Yet the contrast between Weimar Deutschtumspolitik towards Poland and towards Czechoslovakia,
although substantial, should not be overdrawn. Weimar support for the Sudeten Germans was not
purely cultural, not innocent of political design. Although it had no claims on Czechoslovak
territory, the Reich nonetheless refused to guarantee the German-Czechoslovak frontier; it
preferred to leave the Sudeten German question – even its territorial aspect – formally open, so as
to be able to extract maximum diplomatic leverage, in pursuit of other foreign policy aims, from
its acknowledged status as external national homeland for the Sudeten Germans.[65] Covert
government subsidies for radically nationalist Sudeten émigré associations in the Reich, whose
radical demands could then be cited, in diplomatic discussions, as evidence of the pressure of
public opinion on the government, also suggest the Weimar regime’s interest in exploiting the
Sudeten German issue as a diplomatic bargaining chip.[66] At the same time, the Reich hoped to work
through the Sudeten Germans to influence Czechoslovak foreign policy in a manner favorable to
Germany, above all to promote the interpenetration of the Czechoslovak and German economies as part
of a broader, if never precisely defined, aspiration for German economic hegemony in East Central
Europe and the Balkans.[67]

In view of this substantial program of covert state support for co-nationals abroad, and the vigor
of civil society homeland nationalism, it is surprising that public articulation of homeland
nationalist themes by state and government officials remained rather muted and limited. At certain
political conjunctures, to be sure, official homeland nationalist rhetoric did become more salient.
Thus, for example, Gustav Stresemann, Weimar foreign minister from late 1923 through his death in
1929, used homeland nationalist idioms to counter the nationalist Right’s vehement attacks on his
rapprochement with the Western powers in the 1925 Locarno agreements and his proposal to join the
League of Nations. Rapprochement with the West, Stresemann argued to his domestic nationalist
opponents, would “open up new possibilities” for German revisionism in the East, while League
membership would enable Germany more effectively to defend the League-guaranteed rights of its
co-nationals,[68] the violation of which had been emphasized above all by the nationalist Right. By
comparison with post-Soviet Russia, however, official public pronouncements on the obligation to
aid co-ethnics in other states were neither particularly frequent nor particularly salient in
Weimar Germany (a point I return to, and seek to explain, in the final section of this chapter).

In an internal memorandum of 1925, Stresemann made the case for a more energetic and visible
official public engagement on behalf of German minorities. After emphasizing the “extraordinarily
endangered situation” of German minorities and the “inestimable political, cultural, and economic
importance to the Reich” of preserving these communities and their German spirit [Gesinnung],
Stresemann argued that this end could best be realized by working to influence world public
opinion.

“ Machtpolitisch” means – for example, coercive diplomacy or military intervention – were
foreclosed by the present European balance of power; and financial help – limited in any event –
could help minorities exercise rights, but not compensate for their lack of rights. Thus the “only
way open to the German Reich of truly helping its co-nationals [Volksgenossen] living under the
sovereignty of a foreign state” was to “interest world opinion so strongly in the fate of oppressed
German minorities that the majority peoples will be compelled through inter-national pressure to
grant them their vital [lebendsnotwendige] cultural freedoms” – above all the freedom to establish
schools in which children study “not only in the German language, but in the German spirit
[Gesinnung].” Stresemann conceded that League of Nations supervision of the legal rights granted
minorities in the peace treaties had been very weak in practice, indeed “almost illusory.” But more
important than the working of the League provisions themselves was their importance as a “means of
influencing world public opinion.” Already, minorities’ numerous complaints to the League of
Nations had “made the minority problem a question of international interest. . . and a liberal
[grosszügig] solution of this problem in Europe is seen as a precondition of any lasting peace.”
Germany should therefore seek to “further strengthen this existing trend of world public opinion.”
In particular, it should seek to “persuade world public opinion that. . . cultural autonomy is a
natural right of every minority.” This, after all, was simply “a particular case of the principle –
already long recognized by the world in theory – of the self-determination of peoples, and the
realization of this principle need not require changes in territorial borders. . . The wish to
avoid further violent convulsions in Europe is today. . . so strong, that an idea that promises to
reduce the explosiveness of the European situation is bound sooner or later to win over the opinion
of the world.”[69]

This grand vision remained conspicuously unrealized. Stresemann did give minority protection a
somewhat higher profile within the League of Nations; but he did not undertake the wide-ranging
campaign envisaged in the 1925 memorandum, and a rather modest German proposal to reform League
minority protection procedures was quietly buried. Auslandsdeutsche and Weimar nationalists, whose
hopes for a forceful German Minderheitenpolitik had been aroused by Stresemann’s earlier rhetoric,
were disappointed.[70] There were several reasons for Stresemann’s caution in pressing this agenda
in the League. The granting of full cultural autonomy to minorities within Germany – conceived by
Stresemann as a key precondition for this campaign – was blocked by Prussian opposition.[71]
Moreover, considerable international skepticism regarding German sponsorship of minority protection
– in particular the all-too-transparent connection between this sponsorship and Germany’s
revisionist aspirations – diminished the political attractiveness of such a campaign. Finally,
Stresemann was reluctant to expend scarce political capital by pushing too aggressively in the
League for minority protection at the expense of other, more immediately pressing foreign policy
goals – above all a reduction in German reparations payments and the withdrawal of Allied
occupation troops from the Rhineland – to which Stresemann was committed, and for which he required
the support of the Western powers.[72]

After Stresemann’s death, Germany did adopt a more aggressive stance in the League in the sphere of
Minderheitenpolitik, reflecting the generally more confrontational character of foreign policy in
Weimar’s last years.[73] But this did not occur in the manner foreseen by Stresemann in the 1925
memorandum. Rather than occupy the moral high ground as an advocate of universal minority rights,
Germany became embroiled in acrimonious confrontations with Poland over the status of Germans in
Poland, indeed precisely in those areas of Poland – the Corridor and Upper Silesia – that were the
focus of German revisionist aspirations. Through this and other developments, Germany became
increasingly isolated in, and disenchanted with, the League.[74] The League system of minority
protection – which never functioned to the satisfaction of minorities, host states, or external
national homelands in any event – was on the verge of breaking down. And it did break down soon
thereafter: the would-be “defender of minorities” became their greatest persecutor with the Nazi
seizure of power; Germany withdrew from the League in October 1933; and Poland renounced its
Minority Treaty a year later.


The legacy of Weimar homeland nationalism

Weimar homeland nationalism was a complex – and far from coherent – web of political stances,
cultural idioms, organizational networks, and transborder social relations.[75] As a political
phenomenon, homeland nationalism involved a set of “moves” in both domestic and international
political arenas. In the domestic arena, these moves were intertwined with patty competition; in
the interstate arena, they were bound up with – and generally subordinate to – Germany’s efforts to
recover sovereignty, revise the Treaty of Versailles, and reestablish its position as a Great Power
and regional hegemon. Because of this intertwining, Weimar homeland nationalism cannot be
understood solely in terms of its own “internal” logic, cannot be analyzed as an “autonomous”
domain of politics. Homeland nationalist stances were often deployed instrumentally, in a more or
less consciously calculated fashion, as a means to other ends. At the limit, this could involve a
cynical exploitation of homeland nationalist rhetoric for purposes indifferent, indeed hostile, to
the specific interests of transborder Germans. In general, however, the resonance and
taken-for-granted legitimacy of homeland nationalist discourse in Weimar Germany meant that
homeland nationalist stance-taking could be objectively strategic and at the same time subjectively
“sincere.”

As a cultural phenomenon, Weimar homeland nationalism involved the articulation, propagation, and
appropriation of a set of idioms of identification with, and responsibility for, transborder
Germans. These idioms represented transborder Germans as full members of the German national
community, of the German Volk. In this discourse, “nation” and “Volk” were detached from the frame
of the state and implicitly or explicitly redefined in ethnocultural terms. In its more elaborate
forms, this expansive outward redefinition of the nation to include transborder Germans was one key
component of the broader völkisch movement that flourished in Weimar Germany. (The other – more
familiar and more fateful – component of völkisch thought and discourse was of course the
restrictive inward redefinition of the nation to exclude Jews.)[76] This discourse of
identification with and responsibility for co-nationals abroad was articulated and propagated by
journalists, publicists, scholars in Ostforschung institutes, émigrés from transborder German
communities, and activists in Germandom-oriented associations and organizations – categories that
were often closely overlapping. It was appropriated and used by politicians and state officials as
well, but generally in fragmentary fashion and without the anti-statist implications of
consistently Volk-oriented discourse.

As an organizational phenomenon, Weimar homeland nationalism involved a network of state agencies,
formally private but more or less state-controlled organizations, and voluntary associations.[77]
This net-work provided a rich variety of organized sites for the development and promotion of
interest in, expertise about, and activity on behalf of ethnic Germans beyond the frontiers of the
Reich. The leading personnel in these organizations and associations were well connected with one
another, partly through overlapping memberships and interlocking directorates, partly through joint
participation in a variety of meetings touching on the affairs of Auslandsdeutsche. Together, they
constituted an organized “public,” a structured, differentiated space of communication, discussion,
and debate.

As a social-relational phenomenon, finally, Weimar homeland nationalism involved the organized
cultivation and maintenance of a dense network of cross-border relations and the organized
provision of a steady cross-border flow of resources. These relations and resource flows – funded,
for the most part, by a few state agencies but organized in decentralized fashion through the
network of organizations and associations described above – not only linked Auslandsdeutsche to
Weimar Germany but, perhaps more importantly, contributed to detaching them from the states in
which they lived. This restructuring of social networks and relations was most important in the
case of the Sudeten Germans. The networks and relations of Germans in the western borderlands of
Poland had long been framed by the Prussian and German states; in their case, Weimar homeland
nationalism aimed at sustaining or reconstituting social relations that had been disrupted by the
change in borders, not at reorienting those relations in a new direction. The networks and
relations of Sudeten Germans, by contrast, had been framed by the Habsburg state but were
substantially restructured after its collapse. In part, of course, this involved the reframing of
networks and relations by the new – and administratively comparatively strong – Czechoslovak state;
but it involved at the same time – and in tension with this statist reframing – a reorientation of
external ties (ties outside Bohemia and Moravia) away from German Austria and toward the German
Reich, reflecting the fact that it was unambiguously Weimar Germany, not the rump Austrian state,
that had assumed the multifaceted role of external national homeland for Sudeten Germans. The
strengthening of Sudeten German ties with Germany, in turn, encouraged the Sudeten German elite to
look to Germany for solutions to their problems rather than seek a durable modus vivendi within the
Czechoslovak state.[78]

The vicissitudes of homeland nationalism after the Nazi seizure of power lie beyond the scope of
this chapter. It is worth noting in passing, however, that the Nazis appropriated the political,
cultural, organizational, and social-relational legacy of Weimar homeland nationalism:


the calculated deployment of homeland nationalist stances in domestic and international arenas; the
völkisch idioms of identification with and responsibility for transborder Germans; the network of
official, semi-official, and unofficial agencies, organizations, and associations concerned with
co-nationals abroad; and the web of cross-border ties and resource flows. In this sense, one can
speak of continuity between Weimar and Nazi homeland nationalism.[79] And there was in fact no
abrupt break in the early years of the new regime. Indeed, homeland nationalist themes at first
receded from public view as the regime focused on internal consolidation, pursued an initially
cautious line in foreign policy, and discouraged the press from focusing on the problems of the
German minority in Poland in the wake of the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934.[80]


Yet the Weimar legacy was radically transformed in the context of the aggressive Nazi foreign
policy of the late 1930s (and again in the context of imperialist war and German occupation in the
East). The cautious diplomatic use of homeland nationalist themes in Weimar gave way to the
blustering fulminations of Hitler in the months preceding the Munich agreement. The völkisch
discourse of identification with and responsibility for transborder Germans was redefined by the
Nazi commitment to establishing a grossdeutsches Reich incorporating, minimally, the entire area of
consolidated German settlement. The sprawling network of Weimar Germandom-oriented associations was
subordinated to the state and party apparatus, and the “traditionalist” homeland nationalist
leaders, committed to the integrity and autonomy of German minority communities, were displaced by
others who did not scruple to subordinate transborder minorities to the imperatives of Reich
foreign policy.[81] The web of cross-border ties, finally, permitted Hitler to use the Sudeten
Germans, in 1938, as a fifth column in his plan to destroy the Czechoslovak state.[82]


Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia: homeland nationalisms compared

Like Weimar Germany, post-Soviet Russia offers fertile soil for homeland nationalism. Just as the
collapse of the Wilhelmine, Habsburg, and Romanov empires stranded millions of Germans, so the
disintegration of the Soviet Union stranded millions of Russians – indeed a far larger number, some
25 million in all[83] – as minorities in an array of successor states. Like the German minorities,
the new Russian minorities have been portrayed as threatened by the nationalizing policies and
practices of the successor states. Like their interwar counterparts, these states were established
as the states of and for particular ethnocultural nations, and have been committed, in varying ways
and varying degrees, to diminishing the accumulated economic advantage, cultural influence, and
political power the minorities had enjoyed as members of the formerly dominant nations, and to
promoting instead the specific interests of the state-”owning” nations. Like Weimar Germany,
post-Soviet Russia has suffered a “humiliating” loss not only of territory but of its status as a
Great Power, creating an opening for political entrepreneurs with a variety of remedial,
compensatory, or restorationist political agendas. As in Weimar Germany, so in post-Soviet Russia
bitter stories about separation from beleaguered or endangered ethnic kin have been central to
public narratives of humiliation and loss, while commitments to protect those kin have been central
to remedial, compensatory, and restorationist projects.

There are many further parallels between Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia that bear at least
indirectly on homeland nationalism, including deep economic crisis, new and fragile democratic
regimes, and geopolitical and economic preponderance vis-à-vis the respective “new” and “near”
abroads in which their minorities were concentrated.[84] But rather than pursue these similarities,
I want to explore in this final section three differences in the forms – and formative contexts –
of homeland nationalism in the two settings. The first concerns the greater visibility of official
Russian homeland nationalism, the second the weakness of civil society homeland nationalism in
Russia, and the third the ambiguity of the population targeted by Russian homeland nationalism.
This is necessarily a limited and highly selective discussion; a full analysis of Russian homeland
nationalism would require, minimally, a chapter of its own. Official Weimar homeland nationalism
transpired primarily behind the scenes. Our knowledge of its aims and modalities comes mainly from
administrative archives, not from the records of public speech. The homeland nationalism of Weimar
civil society – the discourse and activities of Germandom associations, Ostforschung institutes,
the press and publicistic sphere – was public and visible, but that of the state was largely
covert. State and government officials did invoke the obligation of Germany to help ethnic Germans
in other states, but such pronouncements were comparatively infrequent, and the theme was not
particularly salient in official discourse. Stresemann had envisioned a major public campaign on
this issue, using the League of Nations as a platform, but it never occurred. Once Germany joined
the League, it proved surprisingly reticent on the issue.

Russia, by contrast, has been anything but reticent; its official homeland nationalism has been
conspicuously visible.[85] Public pronouncements on the right, and the obligation, to protect
Russians in the near abroad have become a staple of official Russian discourse, figuring
prominently in almost all accounts of Russian foreign policy priorities. High state and government
officials – up to and including President Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Kozyrev – have issued a
steady stream of pronouncements on the issue. These have varied in tone and substance with the
audience to which they have been addressed and the domestic and international contexts in which
they have been formulated, and it would be a mistake to read too much significance into any
particular pronouncement. In general, however, a hardening of position and toughening of rhetoric
on transborder Russians can be observed, mirroring the emergence of a generally tougher Russian
stance vis-à-vis the near abroad, and reflecting the intensifying political challenge from the
nationalist Right.[86] Illustrative of this shift was Kozyrev’s widely reported assertion in April
1995 that armed force might be needed in certain cases to protect the rights of compatriots.[87]

This demonstrative stance-taking by officials has been complemented by an official codification of
the “fundamental guidelines” of Russian policy vis-à-vis “compatriots” in the near abroad.[88]
Drafted on presidential initiative, and formally approved by the government on August 31, 1994,
this document is worth dwelling on for a moment. Compared with other pronouncements of state and
government officials on the issue, the document is quite moderate in tone and substance, repeatedly
stressing conformity with international law and norms and commitment to realizing its aims through
bilateral agreements with the successor states. Yet it forthrightly outlines a series of
thirty-nine governmental measures in support of compatriots abroad, grouping them under four
headings as “political-legal and informational,” “diplomatic,” “economic,” and “social and
cultural.”

“Political-legal and informational” measures include establishing Russian-language radio and
television programming in the near abroad and ensuring its unimpeded functioning; working together
with the Russian (russkii) and Slavic communities in the successor states, and providing
information enabling the Russian Federation media to “report objectively” on the near abroad,
“paying special attention to the situation of compatriots and the protection of their rights.”
Diplomatic measures include raising the issue of the rights of compatriots in international fora,
especially the United Nations and the Organization (formerly Conference) for Security and
Cooperation in Europe; concluding agreements on citizenship (read: dual citizenship) with the
countries of the near abroad; and working through Russian and world public opinion to pressure near
abroad governments to modify their domestic legislation. Economic measures include cultivating ties
between enterprises in Russia and enterprises employing compatriots in the near abroad; directly
purchasing such enterprises (partly in exchange for cancellation of debts owed to Russia);
establishing cross-border joint enterprises specifically aimed at aiding compatriots; and
threatening a variety of economic sanctions including the curtailment of trade and a change in the
customs regime in the case of “gross violations of the rights of compatriots.” Social and cultural
measures, finally, include providing “technical, informational, and financial help” to the
Russian-language press in the near abroad; supporting a variety of Russian (russkil) cultural
institutions and activities; founding Russian (rossiiskii) universities, institutes, faculties, and
gymnasia in the near abroad; admitting compatriots to secondary and higher educational institutions
in Russia; and providing textbooks and training teachers for Russian-language education in the near
abroad.

Although the Weimar government in fact adopted a number of similar measures, it did not and – given
the then prevailing strength of norms of nonintervention – could not admit to maintaining direct
contacts with transborder ethnic Germans, funding their organizations, supporting (and thereby
controlling) their economic life, or supporting the German-language press and German-language
educational institutions in its “new abroad.” The Russian government’s forthright acknowledgment of
these measures, together with the salience and frequency of official pronouncements on this issue,
reflects two key differences in the international context of homeland nationalism between the
interwar period and the present. The first difference is normative and institutional. The principle
of territorial sovereignty was far more robust in the interwar period than it is today. The League
of Nations Minority Treaties imposed certain obligations on the post-World War I successor states;
but these were bitterly resented and denounced as unacceptable intrusions in internal affairs, less
because of their content (the provisions of the Minority Treaties were actually rather weak) than
because of the then unacceptable symbolism of violated sovereignty.[89] This sort of denunciatory
language, to be sure, still circulates today, but it has an antiquated flavor. By comparison with
the interwar period, the exclusive claims of the nation-state to internal sovereignty have weakened
through the growth of a complex web of cross-border jurisdictions in various policy domains, while
transborder concern about the rights of minorities – like transborder concern for human rights –
has acquired new levels of institutionalized international legitimacy.[90]

The second salient difference is geopolitical. Russian military, political, and economic
preponderance vis-à-vis the Soviet successor states is much greater than that of Weimar Germany
vis-à-vis East Central Europe. This certainly holds for the initial decade of Weimar, and one could
argue that it holds even for me first few years of the Nazi regime. A convincing argument has been
made, to be sure, that Germany’s long-term geopolitical position in Europe had actually improved as
a result of the territorial settlement following World War I,[91] while no one would make a
parallel claim about post-Soviet Russia. In the short and medium term, however, Weimar Germany was
in a much weaker position vis-à-vis its “new abroad” than is post-Soviet Russia today. Defeated and
disarmed, it was (temporarily) militarily weaker even than Poland and Czechoslovakia; its freedom
of action in foreign policy – even with respect to its structurally weak eastern neighbors – was
reduced to a minimum. Russia, by contrast, enjoys vastly greater freedom of action, and far greater
power, vis-à-vis its near abroad. This unambiguous and unchallenged regional geopolitical and
economic preponderance enables Russia to adopt an assertive stance on Russian minorities abroad,
while at the same time the normative erosion of strong claims to sovereignty and the new
international legitimacy of transborder concerns with minorities enable it to frame its tough talk
in the idioms of human and minority rights.

This suggests a further contextual difference between Weimar and contemporary Russian homeland
nationalism. Weimar foreign policy was consistently focused on revising the Treaty of Versailles
and this revisionism always included a commitment to eventual, albeit (at least under Stresemann)
peaceful changes in territorial borders. Russia, on the other hand, although – or perhaps precisely
because – it is overwhelmingly dominant geopolitically, is not necessarily committed to territorial
revision. The present borders of the Russian Federation are universally seen as arbitrary, as
lacking any historical sanction or normative dignity; yet they are not universally regarded as in
urgent need of revision. Territorial revision is indeed pushed by certain political entrepreneurs,
who claim to find intolerable the existence of Ukraine or Belarus as a separate state or the fact
that 6 million Russians live under Kazakh rule. But it lacks the axiomatic, fundamental,
unquestioned status it possessed in Weimar Germany.[92] There is a rough elite consensus on the
need to restore Russia’s status as a world or at least continental Power; but there is no consensus
that this necessarily requires border adjustments, let alone the wholesale reincorporation of the
newly independent states. This has nothing to do with the “moderation” of the Russian leadership,
or with the initial “Atlanticist,” pro-Western orientation of Russian foreign policy (which did not
last long in any event). It has to do with a secular decline in the “material” significance of
territory – with the partial “de-territorialization” and “economization” of power, at least in the
more economically “advanced” world regions – and at the same time, in seeming opposition to this,
with the institutional reification and “sacralization” of existing territorial frontiers in
international discourse and international organizations.[93] The former makes border changes less
necessary; the latter makes them more difficult. By comparison with the interwar period, borders
have become more “inviolable,” but they have also become more insignificant. This dual development
makes territorial revisionism a costly, “inefficient,” and, it could be argued, ultimately
unnecessary way to augment state power, even for many of those whose agendas are commonly labeled
“neo-imperialist.”[94]

The public rhetoric of homeland nationalism was well suited to Russian moves to consolidate a
position of hegemony without territorial incorporation in the near abroad. Homeland nationalism, by
definition, cuts across territorial boundaries; it asserts a form of nonterritorial jurisdiction
over citizens of another state. It can therefore help establish and legitimize extraterritorial
influence and control, as Russia has sought to do in the near abroad. The fit between homeland
nationalist idioms and Weimar foreign policy priorities was less close. Homeland nationalist
rhetoric was generalized, referring to all transborder Germans. Yet, as argued above, Weimar
foreign policy vis-à-vis the two neighboring states with the largest German communities – Poland
and Czechoslovakia – was sharply distinct, governed in the former case by deep antagonism and
fundamental territorial claims, in the latter by “correct” relations and an effort to increase
German economic influence in Mitteleuropa. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the more
limited international legitimacy of transborder concern with minority rights in the interwar
period, homeland nationalist idioms were less well suited to the public articulation and
justification of Weimar foreign policy.

If the official homeland nationalism of post-Soviet Russia has been more public and visible than
that of Weimar Germany, civil society homeland nationalism has been much less visible in the
Russian case. Reportage and commentary on Russians outside Russia has figured prominently in the
Russian press, and there is an emergent counterpart to Weimar Ostforschung in various research
institutes conducting research on the near abroad. Given the degree of state control over the
broadcast media, however, as well as state support for – and sometimes direct commissioning of –
research, these belong only partially and ambiguously to the sphere of civil society. Oppositional
political parties and factions, as well as individual political entrepreneurs, have made ample use
of homeland nationalist rhetoric to castigate the government for failing to take bolder measures in
defense of Russians in the near abroad;[95] but they too can scarcely be conceptualized as part of
civil society, since their homeland nationalism, although defined in opposition to government
policy and practice, arises directly from the struggle for political power. The core of civil
society homeland nationalism in Weimar Germany – the dense and vigorous network of associations
concerned with co-ethnics abroad – has no counterpart in post-Soviet Russia. This reflects of
course the general weakness of civil society in Soviet successor states. In Weimar Germany,
moreover, civil society homeland nationalism could build, ideologically and organizationally, on an
established prewar tradition of concern for Germandom abroad. Needless to say, there was no
comparable tradition of concern for Russians outside Russia in the Soviet era.

The population targeted by Weimar homeland nationalism was relatively clearly defined. In practice,
to be sure, it was not always evident precisely who belonged to this population, especially in
regions (such as Upper Silesia or parts of East Prussia) of fluid ethnocultural identity. In
principle, however, everyone agreed that German claims as external national homeland concerned the
Grenz- und Auslandsdeutsche of Central and Eastern Europe, and that these borderland and foreign
Germans were defined by their ethnocultural nationality.

In Russia, by contrast, there is no agreement even in principle about the circle of persons
addressed by Russian homeland claims.[96] Five terms have been widely used to identify the relevant
population. Most clearly paralleling Weimar homeland nationalism are claims to protect russkie,
that is Russians by ethnocultural nationality. The second term, rossiiane, also ordinarily
translated as “Russians,” construes Russianness not with reference to ethnocultural nationality –
or rather not with reference to Russian ethnocultural nationality – but with reference to Rossiia,
that is, to the Russian state, or to Russia understood in a territorial sense. This formulation, in
turn, can be interpreted in a subjective-political sense, in terms of identification with the
Russian state or with Russia as rodina (homeland, native land, mother country), or, more commonly,
in an objective-ethnocultural sense, in terms of membership of one of the many ethnocultural groups
considered indigenous to Russia. This latter meaning is sometimes designated by the expression
etnicheskie rossiiane, seemingly oxymoronic in its juxtaposition of the adjective “ethnic” and a
derivative of the expressly nonethnic noun Rossia. In practice, rossiiane serves more as a
“politically correct” substitute for russkie, one that acknowledges the multinational population of
Russia, than as an alternative way of construing the population for whom Russia is a homeland.[97]

The third widely used term is russkoiazychnye, or Russian-speakers. Although almost all Soviet
citizens spoke Russian to some extent, russkoiazychnye does not designate Russian-speakers in this
purely linguistic sense. It points rather to two analytically distinct categories of persons (in
addition to Russians by ethnocultural nationality) who might identify with Russians in the
non-Russian successor states and with Russia as an external national homeland. The first category
includes people living for long periods outside “their own” national state and tending to identify
with and assimilate to the Russians in that state (especially Ukrainians and Belarusians but also
members of other dispersed national groups such as Armenians and Jews).[98] The second category
includes people who live in “their own” national state (“their own” in the sense that it
corresponds to their official Soviet-era passport nationality or their self-identified
ethnocultural nationality) but whose primary language (and sometimes even mother tongue) is Russian
and who consequently may identify politically with Russians in that state and coalesce with them in
resisting programs of linguistic nationalization.[99]

The fourth term, sootechestvenniki, means compatriots, that is people who share a common fatherland
(otechestvo). In the post-Soviet context, however, this original, clearly political meaning has
been overlaid by a mélange of criteria based on some combination of descent, ethnicity, past
citizenship, and spiritual-cultural orientation. Thus sootechestvenniki have been defined by one
expert as “former subjects of the Russian Empire or citizens of the USSR and their direct
descendants, not presently possessing Russian citizenship but belonging to one of the ethnic groups
of Russia and considering themselves spiritually and culturally-ethnically tied to Russia.”[100]
This incongruous blend of legal, ethnographic, and identitarian notions has become the term of
choice in official documents.

The final term is grazhdane (citizens). The protection of one’s own citizens residing in other
states, it would seem, is completely distinct from homeland nationalism, the defining feature of
which is the claim to protect non-citizen co-nationals. Yet the distinction is not so clear-cut in
the post-Soviet context. Grazhdane is often used (in political speech if not in official documents)
metaphorically, as a rough synonym of sootechestvenniki;[101] it is also used, again
metaphorically, in connection with the claim that Russia has responsibility for all former Soviet
citizens. Moreover, Russia has sought to convert co-nationals into fellow citizens.[102] It has
sought to conclude agreements on dual citizenship with other successor states.[103] More recently,
Russian officials have suggested that, even in the absence of such agreements, Russia might accord
citizenship on application to individual petitioners from the near abroad, even to those who
possess the citizenship of another successor state.[104] Doing so on a large scale would strengthen
Russia’s jurisdictional claims in the near abroad, and provide a convenient pretext for
intervention.[105]

The shifting and ambiguous vocabulary of homeland claims enables Russia to play in multiple
registers, and to advance multiple and only partly overlapping jurisdictional claims in the near
abroad. Through a kind of division of semantic labor, russkie provides cultural resonance and
emotional power (and is therefore most useful in the context of domestic political competition),
while rossiiane, russkoiazychnye, and sootechestvenniki (terms entirely foreign to everyday speech,
and lacking – with the partial exception of the last – any kind of cultural resonance and emotional
power) designate a broader target population and can therefore be used in international contexts
and in official documents to expand Russia’s jurisdictional claims in the near abroad (and to
represent those claims as transcending a narrow ethnic interest in protecting ethnic Russians). An
expansive politics of citizenship, finally, enables Russia to combine the traditional (and from the
point of view of international law more legitimate) rhetoric of protecting citizens in other states
with homeland nationalist claims to protect noncitizen co-nationals. This opportunistic use of
multiple idioms is further evinced in the somewhat incongruous marriage of a vocabulary of human
rights to that of homeland nationalism, as in the frequent claim that Russia must protect the human
rights of (ethnic) Russians in the near abroad.


Conclusion

 Weimar homeland nationalism, I suggested above, was a complex web of political stances, cultural
idioms, organizational networks, and transborder social relations. Russian homeland nationalism can
also be regarded in this way. As a political phenomenon, homeland nationalism has been more
salient, in both domestic and interstate contexts, in post-Soviet Russia than in Weimar Germany.
Pronouncements on homeland nationalist themes have been more central to both governmental and
oppositional political discourse, and to domestic political competition, than was the case in
Weimar Germany. Like Weimar homeland nationalism, Russian homeland nationalism is doubly
“intertwined” – with domestic political competition on the one hand, and with efforts to
consolidate Russian hegemony in the near abroad on the other. In both domestic and interstate
contents, homeland nationalist stances have been deployed instrumentally, as a calculated means to
other ends. But again as in Weimar, this instrumental exploitation of homeland nationalist stances
has occurred – and has indeed only been possible – against the background of taken-for-granted
shared understandings concerning the plight of Russians in the near abroad and the obligation of
the Russian state to do something on their behalf.

The dual embeddedness of homeland nationalism, as a political phenomenon, in wider domestic and
interstate political contexts, means that it lacks its own autonomous logic and dynamic. As a
political phenomenon, homeland nationalism is a set of moves, a set of stances, a family of related
discursive claims – but the “game” in which these moves are activated, in which they payoff, or
fail to payoff, is not the game of homeland politics, but the wider domestic and interstate
“games.” The “value” or appropriateness of a homeland stance or move depends on the state of the
game at a particular moment – on the rules of the game and the resources possessed by competing
players.[106] In general, the greater international legitimacy and institutionalization of
cross-border concern with minorities makes homeland nationalist “moves” more appropriate and more
useful than they were in the interwar period. The domestic political arena in post-Soviet Russia
also induces homeland nationalist moves, if only because there are so few politically profitable
competing idioms today. Given the background of the widely shared, taken-for-granted sense that
something ought to be done for successor state Russians,[107] homeland nationalist idioms have been
adopted in the competition for domestic political power almost by default, faute de mieux.

As a cultural idiom, Russian homeland nationalism has been much more uncertain, ambiguous, and
fluctuating than its Weimar counterpart. Weimar homeland nationalist discourse could build on the
grossdeutsch tradition of the mid-nineteenth century and on the tradition of concern for Germans in
the Habsburg and Romanov territories that developed in the late Bismarckian and Wilhelmine eras.
Because of the lack of a comparable tradition in Russia, homeland nationalist discourse has had to
be assembled by “bricolage” from various available and legitimate cultural “scraps.” Lacking
indigenous roots, it has had to be cobbled together from a variety of discursive traditions: from
“classical” homeland nationalism, from the legal rhetoric of diplomatic protection of citizens in
other states, from human rights discourse, from the vocabulary of Great Power politics. As a
result, the discourse has been multivocal and opportunistic, playing, as argued above, on multiple
registers, and lacking consistency. The ambiguous and partly incongruous vocabulary for identifying
the targets of homeland nationalist claims is but one indicator of this.

As an organizational phenomenon, Russian homeland nationalism lacks the strong associational base
in civil society that characterized Weimar homeland nationalism; the network of organizations
concerned with Russians in the near abroad is therefore much more state-centered. As a
social-relational phenomenon, finally, Russian homeland nationalism, like its Weimar counterpart,
involves the cultivation and maintenance of cross-border relations and the provision of a flow of
cross-border resources. The process of organizing resource flows and reconstituting networks and
relations disrupted by the breakup of the Soviet Union is still incipient; and too little is known
at present to make substantive claims about it. In the long run, however, the political disposition
of Russian and Russophone minorities in the successor states – in particular, the degree to which
and manner in which they look to Russia for solutions to their problems, rather than work them out
within the frame of the successor states – will be significantly shaped by these relations and
resource flows, and on the degrees and forms of integration with Russia (and of detachment from
successor state contexts) that they generate.



In: Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 107-147.
________________________________

[1] Since large Belarusian and Ukrainian populations were included in the interwar Polish state,
the Soviet Union – having established nominally sovereign Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet
Republics, granted them considerable cultural autonomy during the 1920s, and even encouraged them
to embark on “nationalizing” programs – could represent itself (with a certain plausibility during
the 1920s) as the external national homeland for co-nationals in the eastern borderlands of Poland.

[2] Like Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria lost substantial territories and large numbers of
co-nationals in the post-World War I settlement. More than 3 million Hungarians were stranded as
minorities mainly in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, while Bulgarian nationalists,
identifying the much-disputed nationality of all Slav inhabitants of Macedonia as Bulgarian,
claimed that the post-war settlement had left a third of all Bulgarians in other states. Concern to
recover lost territory and redeem ethnic kin dominated Hungarian and Bulgarian politics in the
interwar era and led both states into wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. On interwar Hungary, see
C. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and its Consequences, 1919-1937
(London: Oxford University Press, 1937); and Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two
World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), chapter 4. On Bulgaria, see ibid.,
chapter 7, esp. pp. 325-6; and Myron Weiner, “The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of
International Relations and Political Development,” World Politics 23, no. 1 (1970), esp. 671. On
the nationalizing nationalism of interwar Romania, see Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in
Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995).

[3] On conflicting national claims in interwar East Central Europe, see the splendidly concise
overview in Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars, pp. 3-14. On national
tensions and the background to World War II, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World
War (New York: Atheneum, 1961), especially chapter 8 on the Sudeten crisis. For an account of the
complex relation between Nazi Germany, Sudeten German organizations, and the Czechoslovak state in
the making of the Sudeten crisis and the Munich agreement, see Ronald Smelser, The Sudeten Problem,
1933-1938 (Folkestone, UK: Dawson, 1975).

[4] Nationalizing nationalisms may be found in established as well as new states. On the
nationalizing practices of post-Ceauşescu Romania, see Vilmos Táncos, “Kettös hatalmi szerkezet a
Székelyföldön” (“The Dual Structure of Power in the Szekler Lands”), manuscript (1994). On the
background to contemporary Hungarian homeland nationalism, see László Neményi, “The Dynamics of
Homeland Politics: The Hungarian Case,” paper presented at conference on “National Minorities,
Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,” Bellagio Study and
Conference Center, Italy, August 1994.

[5] Serbia exemplifies both homeland and nationalizing nationalisms; see n. 12 below.

[6] It should be noted, however, that while Russian nationalists have asserted that Crimea belongs
to Russia, and have contested the validity of its 1954 transfer from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian
SSR, the Russian government has not, as of this writing, encouraged Crimean Russian separatism.

[7] Ian Bremmer, “Nazarbaev and the North: State-Building and Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 4 (1994).

[8] See Paul Kolstoe and Andrei Edemsky, “The Dniester Conflict: Between Irredentism and
Separatism,” Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. 6 (1993); Jeff Chinn and Steven D. Roper, “Ethnic
Mobilization and Reactive Nationalism: The Case of Moldova,” unpublished manuscript (1994).

[9] Volkstum theorist Max Hildebert Boehm’s sketch of “co-nationalism” – that is nationalism
directed towards ethnic co-nationals living in other states – is an exception; but Boehm’s
discussion, to my knowledge, has not been taken up elsewhere in the literature. See Max Hildebert
Boehm, Das eigenständige Volk (Göttingen. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1932), pp. 177ff.

[10] On irredentism, see Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), chapter 6, and Naomi Chazan, ed., Irredentism and International Politics
(Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner and Adamantine Press, 1991). From the burgeoning literature on
external intervention in ethnic conflict –  and, more generally, on the international dimensions of
ethnic conflict – see for example Weiner, “The Macedonian Syndrome”; Astri Suhrke and Lela Gardner
Noble, eds., Ethnic Conflict in International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1977); Joseph
Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981),
chapter 6; Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modern Diasporas in International Politics (London and Sydney:
Croom Helm, 1986); Alexis Heraclides, “Secessionist Minorities and External Involvement,”
International Organization 44, no. 3 (1990); Paul Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International
Relations (Aldershot, UK and New York: Dartmouth Publishing Company and New York University Press,
1991); Robert Cooper and Mats Berdal, “Outside Intervention in Ethnic Conflicts,” in Michael Brown,
ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). In
this literature, Paul Smith’s brief discussion of the relation between ethnic groups and their
“external motherlands” perhaps comes closest to articulating the specific phenomenon of homeland
nationalism that I address in this chapter; see Ethnic Groups in International Relations, p. 8.

[11] In the US, Stephen Sestanovich was an early exponent of this concept. See for example Bill
Keller, “Gorbachev’s Grand Plan,” The New York Times, December 5, 1988. For a critical discussion
of the Weimar analogy, see Jack Snyder, “Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State,”
Survival 35, no. 1 (1993), 6.


[12] Concretely, to be sure, nationalizing and homeland nationalisms may be found together in the
same state. This happens when the “core nation” cuts across the state’s citizenry such that a
substantial fraction of the citizenry does not belong to the core nation, while a substantial
fraction of the core nation are not citizens. Serbia is a nationalizing state vis-à-vis Albanians
in Kosovo and an external national homeland vis-à-vis Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Romania is a nationalizing state vis-à-vis Hungarians, a homeland vis-à-vis Romanians in Moldova.
Russia today is a homeland for diaspora Russians, but also (potentially) a nationalizing state
vis-à-vis non-Russian minorities in Russia. Interwar Germany was of course not only an external
national homeland for transborder Germans, but a murderously nationalizing state vis-à-vis Jews.

[13] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991); on the nation as conceived order, see M. Rainer Lepsius, “The Nation
and Nationalism in Germany,” Social Research 52 (1985).

[14] On cross-cutting conceptions of nationhood in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, see chapter
2, pp. 32-40, 45-6.

[15] I have explored this tension in a different context in Citizenship and Nationhood in France
and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), Introduction and chapter 6.

[16] Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity: Politics of West European
Peripheries (London: Sage, 1983), pp. 7-12, 16-17, 35-9.

[17] This lack of correspondence between linguistically embedded culture and polity, of course, was
characteristic not only of Germany, but of most of the world before the age of nationalism. Its
utterly unproblematic quality has been emphasized most vigorously by Ernest Gellner in Nations and
Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). For a contrasting view, see Anthony Smith,
The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

[18] On the Bismarckian Reich as an “incomplete” (unvollendet) nation-state, see Werner Conze,
“Nationsbildung durch Trennung,” in Otto Pflanze, ed., Innenpolitische Probleme des Bismarckreiches
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1983).

[19] See Theodor Schieder, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat (Cologne and
Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1961), pp. 22ff., 42-3; Hans Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das
Reich (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), Part I.

[20] Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg
Monarchy, 1848-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), vol. I, pp. 97ff; Schieder, Das
Deutsche Kaiserreich als Nationalstaat, p. 50. Not only pan-Germans but other Habsburg Germans,
disappointed by the Monarchy’s concessions to non-German nationalities, gradually began to reorient
themselves to the Reich. For the case of the Sudeten Germans, see Rudolf Jaworski, Vorposten oder
Minderheit? Der sudetendeutsche Volkstumskampf in den Beziehungen zwischen der Weimarer Republik
und der ČSR (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977), pp. 34-5.

[21] Quoted in Otto Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland 1770-1990 (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1993), p. 191.

[22] Quoted in ibid., p. 192.

[23] Schieder, Das deutsche Kaiserreich als Nationalstaat, p. 52.

[24] A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), pp. 181ff.;
Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1974), p. 441. More generally, organizational ties between Reich Germans and
Austro-Germans in trans-border associations facilitated the development of a homeland-nationalist
response in the Reich to the Austro-German predicament. See Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in
Deutschland, p. 189.

[25] Schieder, Das deutsche Kaiserreich als Nationalstaat, p. 44.

[26] Ibid. esp. pp. 40-3, 52, 168-9, n. 75; Jürgen Kocka, “Probleme der politischen Integration der
Deutschen, 1867 bis 1945,” in Otto Busch and James Sheehan, eds., Die Rolle der Nation in der
deutschen Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1985).

[27] For an account of the multiple functional “crystallizations” of the state – each the center of
its own “power network,” each involving a different set of institutions, tasks, and constituencies
– see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 75ff.

[28] Martin Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der Nationalsozialismus,” Deutsche Rundschau 84,
no. 1 (1958), 59-60.

[29] The war itself had radically transformed the position of dispersed ethnic German communities
in the western parts of the Russian Empire, that is, in the Baltic provinces and Russian Poland.
Their fate was connected with the wider German community both by German occupation of these
territories and by the tendency of Russia – fighting not only Germany but “German” Austria-Hungary
as well – to define Germans, not only Germany, as the enemy. See Werner Conze, Die Deutsche Nation
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963), p. 104; Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland,
p. 218.

[30] Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval, and State Formation in Eastern
Europe, 1914-1923,” in Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyi, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in
Historical Perspective, 2nd edn (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of
Alberta, 1990).

[31] Broszat notes that new national legends that arose after the First World War concern not the
core state but ethnic Germans in the borderlands and beyond (“Die völkische Ideologie und der
Nationalsozialismus,” 60). See also Max Hildebert Boehm, “Die Reorganisation der Deutschtumsarbeit
nach dem ersten Weltkrieg,” Ostdeutsche Wissenschaft: Jahrbuch des ostdeutschen Kulturrates 5
(1959), 12-13.

[32] Conze, Die Deutsche Nation, p. 109.

[33] Indeed it has been argued that German democrats were even more strongly committed to Anschluss
than conservatives, partly because they hoped the inclusion of Austria would counter Prussian
predominance in the Reich. See Stanley Suval, The Anschluss Question in the Weimar Era (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 23-4; Michael Laffan, “Weimar and
Versailles: German Foreign Policy, 1919-1933,” in Laffan, ed., The Burden of German History 1919-45
(London: Methuen, 1988), p. 84.

[34] Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland, p. 266; Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und
der Nationalsozialismus,” 61.

[35] Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (Lexington:
Kentucky University Press, 1993), chapter 2.

[36] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 151.

[37] Boehm, “Reorganisation,” 19; Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland, p. 267.

[38] Bastiaan Schot, Nation oder Staat? Deutschland und der Minderheitenschutz (Marburg/ Lahn: J.
G. Herder-Institut, 1988), pp. 106ff.

[39] Conze, Die Deutsche Nation, p. 113; Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, p. 73.

[40] Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, pp. 71ff.; Karl-Heinz Grundmann, Deutschtumspolitik zur
Zeit der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie am Beispiel der deutsch-baltischen Minderheit in Estland
und Lettland (Hanover-Döhren: Harro v. Hirschheydt, 1977), p.124.

[41] Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der Nationalsozialismus,” 61

[42] Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Grundmann, Deutschtumspolitik, pp. 125ff.

[43] Schot, Nation oder Staat?, pp. 87-8, 111.

[44] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 150ff. In some instances, government subsidies for
Ostforschung institutes clearly compromised the integrity of research; see Martin Broszat,
Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 231.

[45] Schot, Nation oder Staat?, pp. 93, 99, 109.

[46] The most sophisticated theoretical exposition of this aim can be found in Boehm’s Das
eigenständige Volk.

[47] Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der Nationalsozialismus,” 63.

[48] On the most important of these nominally private institutions, the Deutsche Stiftung, see
especially Norbert Krekler, Revisionsanspruch und geheime Ostpolitik der Weimarer Republik
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1973), pp. 16ff.; Schot, Nation oder Staat?, pp. 132-3.

[49] Krekler, Revisionsanspruch, pp. 65ff.

[50] Interwar German public discussion made a standard distinction between the Grenzdeutsche,
compactly settled in areas adjoining the Reich and part of the contiguously settled German
population of Central Europe, and Auslandsdeutsche proper, who lived in German enclaves or were
dispersed amidst non-German populations.

[51] See Rudolf Jaworski, “The German Minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Interwar
Period,” in Smith, ed., Ethnic Groups in International Relations; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, “Die
deutschen Minderheiten in Polen und in der Tschechoslowakei in den dreissiger Jahren,” Aus Politik
und Zeitgeschichte, 31 (1986); and Manfred Alexander, “Der Politik der Weimarer Republik gegenüber
den deutschen Minderheiten in Ostmitteleuropa, 1918-1926,” Annali dell’Instituto Storico
Italo-Germanico in Trento, vol. IV (Bologna: Mulino, 1978).

[52] German concentration was, however, much greater in Czechoslovakia. Germans comprised nearly a
quarter of the total population of the state, and were an absolute majority in 4,000 Gemeinden
(Jacobmeyer, “Die deutschen Minderheiten,” p. 21). In Poland, although there were local German
majorities before World War I in some areas ceded after the war to Poland, the great wave of
emigration from these regions left “not a single Landkreis or significant town in the area ceded to
Poland which still had a German majority” (Richard Blanke, “The German Minority in Inter-war Poland
and German Foreign Policy,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990], 93).

[53] See Chapter 6 for a discussion of post-World War I migrations of ethnic unmixing involving
Germans and other formerly dominant nationalities.

[54] Helmut Pieper, Die Minderheitenfrage und das deutsche Reich 1919-1933/34 (Hamburg: Institut
für Internationale Angelegenheiten der Universität Hamburg, 1974), p. 58; Jaworski, “German
Minorities,” 179.

[55] Krekler, Revisionsanspruch, pp. 48-59.

[56] Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik, p. 228.

[57] On this point I follow Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, esp. pp. 159ff.

[58] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 161; Krekler, Revisionsanspruch, p. 63.

[59] See the 1922 Foreign Ministry circular that is quoted in Krekler, Revisionsanspruch, p.44.

[60] Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 161.

[61] Jaworski, “German Minorities,” 179-80.

[62] It is true that the Reich refused to guarantee Czechoslovak as well as Polish borders, and
some have seen this as an indicator of latent revisionism vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia. But certainly
there were no focused, specific revisionist commitments vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia, while such
specific revisionist commitments vis-à-vis Poland are abundantly documented.

[63] Jaworski, “German Minorities,” p. 180. See also F. Gregory Campbell, Confrontation in Central
Europe: Weimar Germany and Czechoslovakia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 162.

[64] Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1985), pp. 57, 113; Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, pp. 137-8.

[65] Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, pp. 138-9.

[66] Ibid., p.141.

[67] See Stresemann’s Denkschrift of 1925, reprinted in Schot, Nation oder Staat?, p. 215; Krüger,
Aussenpolitik, p. 113; Campbell, Confrontation, pp. 77, 266-7; Jaworski, Vorposten oder
Minderheit?, pp. 187-8; Wolfgang Michalka, “Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1920-1933,” in Karl Dietrich
Bracher, Manfred Funke, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds., Die Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste,
1987), p. 318; Johann Wolfgang Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche 1918-1938 (Munich: Nymphenburger,
1967), pp.221-2.

[68] Annelise Thimme, “Gustav Stresemann: Legende und Wirklichkeit,” Historische Zeitschrift 181
(1956), 315-16; Carole Fink, “Stresemann’s Minority Policies, 1924-29,” Journal of Contemporary
History 14 (1979), 405ff.; Fink, “Defender of Minorities: Germany in the League of Nations,
1926-1933,” Central European History 4 (1972), 336ff.

[69] Stresemann’s Denkschrift is printed in full in Schot, Nation oder Staat?, pp. 286-92.

[70] Martin Broszat, “Aussen- und innenpolitische Aspekte der Preussisch-Deutschen
Minderheitenpolitik in der Åra Stresemann,” in Kurt Klexen and Wolfgang Mommsen, eds., Politische
Ideologien und nationalstaatliche Ordnung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1968), p. 442; Fink,
“Stresemann’s Minority Policies,” 408ff.; Fink, “Defender of Minorities,” 339-40; for more detail,
Carole Fink, “The Weimar Republic as the Defender of Minorities, 1919-1933,” Ph.D. Dissertation,
Yale University, 1968, passim.

[71] The best analysis of the interrelation between Germany’s internal minority policy and its
external concern for the rights of Germans abroad remains Broszat,” Aussen- und innenpolitische
Aspekte.” While the Foreign Ministry, from 1925 on, pushed for a generous Reich-wide policy of full
cultural autonomy for minorities, the proposal foundered on the resistance of state governments –
and particularly Prussia, where most minorities were located. In 1928, finally, limited concessions
were made regarding minority schooling in Prussia, and Stresemann indeed pushed the minority agenda
more vigorously after this time. But this fell far short of the initial demands for full cultural
autonomy, which would enable Germany (while avoiding a simple politics of reciprocity and using
instead the language of “natural rights”) to demand similarly broad cultural autonomy for its own
minorities in other states.

[72] Stresemann’s one dramatically confrontational League intervention in the sphere of minority
protection – a passionate, table-pounding reply to Polish Foreign Minister Zaleski, who had
denounced the numerous petitions to the League by the Deutscher Volksbund, the major German
minority organization in Upper Silesia, as “bordering on treason” – seems to have been a calculated
gesture aimed at placating domestic nationalist critics, dismayed at his lack of energetic action
on behalf of German minorities (Fink, “Stresemann’s Minority Policies,” 411; Blanke, Orphans of
Versailles, pp. 132-3).

[73] Fink, “Defender,” 352ff.; Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, p. 135.

[74] Fink, “Defender,” 354ff.

[75] Political, cultural, organizational, and social-relational aspects of Weimar homeland
nationalism were, of course, closely intertwined. I distinguish them here not in order to suggest
that these were sharply distinct spheres or forms of homeland nationalism, but rather in order to
highlight the complex, multifaceted nature of that nationalism.

[76] On the duality of völkisch thought, see Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der
Nationalsozialismus.”

[77] For the official and semi-official organizations, the best sources are Krekler,
Revisionsanspruch, and Schot, Nation oder Staat? For voluntary associations, see especially
Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?

[78] Jaworski, “Die Sudetendeutsche als Minderheit,” 35. For a richly detailed account of this
reorientation of social relations, see Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, pp. 70ff. Throughout
the Weimar period, there was a struggle among Sudeten Germans between “activists,” who favored
working within the Czechoslovak state, and who participated in coalition governments from 1926
through 1938, and “negativists,” who rejected all political engagement in the new state. As
Jaworski has shown, however, the activists were in a weak position, partly because of the strong
elite disposition to look for support to Weimar Germany. Strikingly, even the activist political
leaders sought approval from high officials in Berlin for their decision to enter the Czechoslovak
coalition government (Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, esp. pp. 179ff.; Campbell,
Confrontation in Central Europe, p. 168).

[79] On the theme of continuity, see Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit?, p. 166.

[80] On the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and its consequences for the German minority in
Poland, see Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, pp. 183-206.

[81] Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Nationalsozialistische Aussenpolitik 1933-1938 (Frankfurt am Main and
Berlin: Alfred Metzner, 1968), pp. 160ff. On “traditionalist” Germandom leaders, see Smelser, The
Sudeten Problem, pp. 14ff., esp. pp. 17-18. The struggle between traditionalists and radical
statists is a major theme of Smelser’s book.

[82] For a sophisticated account of the process through which Sudeten Germans, under the leadership
of Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront, became available as a compliant tool of Hitler’s
foreign policy, an account emphasizing struggles among Sudeten German factions and among different
homeland-nationalist organizations in the Reich, see Smelser, The Sudeten Problem. Smelser’s
account begins in 1933; for the background in Weimar, emphasizing the economic, political, and
psychological dependence of Sudeten German elites on Germany, see Jaworski, Vorposten oder
Minderheit?

[83] How many “Russians” were stranded as minorities in Soviet successor states depends, of course,
on how “Russian” is defined. The standard figure of 25 million reflects the number of persons
living in Soviet republics other than Russia identifying their “nationality” as Russian at the time
of the last Soviet census in 1989. Below, I discuss ambiguities in the definition of the “target”
of Russian homeland politics.

[84] The expression “new abroad” in interwar Germany, like “near abroad” in post-Soviet Russia,
suggested a sphere of influence, a zone that was not quite fully “foreign.” Similarly, the
prevailing interwar distinction between Grenzdeutsche or Grenzlanddeutsche (borderland Germans) and
Auslandsdeutsche (foreign Germans) implied that the former, compactly settled in areas adjoining
the Reich, were not truly foreign despite being residents and citizens of other states.

[85] I do not mean to suggest that there is not also a crucial covert dimension to Russian homeland
nationalism. No doubt there is. My intention here is simply to highlight the public and visible
dimension of official Russian homeland nationalism – a dimension largely lacking from official
Weimar homeland nationalism.

[86] A useful review of the evolution of official Russian policy vis-à-vis Russians in the
successor states is given by Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London: Hurst,
1995), chapter 10.

[87] Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 19, 1995; Rossiiskie vesti, April 19, 1995; Izvestiia, April 20,
1995.

[88] Osnovnye napravleniia gosudarstvennoi politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii v otnoshenii
sootechestvennikov, prozhivaiushchikh za rubezhom (Utverzhdeny postanovleniem Pravitel’stva
Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 31 Avgusta 1994, No. 1064) [Fundamental Guidelines of the State Policy of
the Russian Federation Concerning Compatriots Living Abroad (Ratified by Resolution of the
Government of the Russian Federation of August 31, 1994, No. 1064)].

[89] Contributing to the resentment was the fact that the minority protection obligations were not
universal, but were imposed only on the new (or newly enlarged) states.

[90] On international institutionalized legitimacy in the context of an emergent “world polity,”
see John W. Meyer, “The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State,” in George M. Thomas,
John W. Meyer, Francisco 0. Ramirez, and John Boli, Institutional Structure: Constituting State,
Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1987). On the institutionalized
international legitimacy of human rights discourse, see Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship:
Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

[91] The core of the argument is that the new stares of East Central Europe, lacking substantial
protection from the Western powers, and likely to be forced eventually (given the inevitably
growing strength of Germany and the Soviet Union) to choose between Berlin and Moscow, were (given
their fundamental anti-Soviet disposition) structurally inclined to align themselves with Germany.
See Andreas Hillgruber, “‘Revisioniusmus’ – Kontinuität und Wandel in der Aussenpolitik der
Weimarer Republic,” Historische Zeitschrift 237 (1983), 600ff.

[92] One reason for this is that territorial revision was clearly focused, in Weimar Germany, on
the Polish Corridor, Danzig, and Upper Silesia; although maximal positions varied, these were
universal minimum demands. In the Russian case, revisionism is not clearly focused. The present
boundaries of the Russian Federation are indeed felt to be arbitrary, but there is no consensual
sense of what – or more precisely where – a minimally “adequate” Russia would be.

[93] On the declining significance of territory, see Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading
State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

[94] Drawing on Michael Doyle’s definition of empire, Ronald Suny argues against conflating an
“imperial project” proper, involving the establishment (or reestablishment) of full sovereignty by
a center over a distinct and subordinate periphery, with “Great Power hegemony,” involving a
relation of domination between separate states, and suggests that the latter is more likely in the
case of post-Soviet Russia. See his “Ambiguous Categories: States, Empires and Nations,”
Post-Soviet Affairs 11, no. 2 (1995), 193-4.

[95] The stances of Russian political parties on the issue of Russians in the near abroad are
reviewed by Kolstoe, Russians, pp. 276ff.

[96] See Kolstoe, Russians, pp. 260ff.; Mark Beissinger, “The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire,”
Post-Soviet Affairs 11, no. 2 (1995), 169-70.

[97] As of 1989, the largest groups of rossiiane (other than ethnic Russians) outside Russia were
Tatars, Jews (considered to be rossiiane under the Soviet nationality regime because they had, in
principle, “their own” national territory within the RSFSR, although fewer than 5% of the
inhabitants of this remote patch of land on the Chinese border identified their nationality as
Jewish in 1989), Lezgins, Ossetians, Bashkir, Mordvinians, Chuvash, and Chechens (calculated from
Gosudarstvennyi komitet SSSR po statistike, Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia SSSR, pp. 5-11). In so
far as members of these national groups, outside “their own” ethnonational territories, have tended
to assimilate to Russians, they could indeed plausibly be construed as part of the population
Russia could claim to protect. In this case, however, Russia would be claiming to protect them in
their quality as “Russian-speakers,” not in their national quality as Tatars, Jews, etc. On the
avoidance of the term russkie, see Kolstoe, Russians, pp. 260-1.

[98] David Laitin has suggested that Russian-speakers in this sense, together with the ethnic
Russians in non-Russian successor states, may be in the course of forming a new “Russian-speaking”
nationality, distinct from the Russian nationality. See “Identity in Formation: The
Russian-Speaking Nationality in the Post-Soviet Diaspora,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the American Political Science Association, 1994.

[99] Dominique Arel has suggested that this latter category may be particularly significant in
Ukraine. See “Language and Group Boundaries in the Two Ukraines,” paper presented at conference on
“National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,”
Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy, August 1994.

[100] This definition was formulated by a working group headed by Professor Igor Blishchenko,
Director of the Independent Institute of International Law, as reported in “Rossiia vnov’ prinimaet
sootechestvennikov iz zarubezh’ia,” Izvestiia, September 8, 1992. I am grateful to Pål Kolstø for
calling this to my attention. Similar definitions were given to me in interviews with officials of
the Russian Ministry of Nationalities and Regional Policy in June 1994 and July 1995. The Izvestiia
article refers to “relatives in direct ascending line’: rather than to descendants, but it is clear
from the context and from other documents (including an article by Blishchenko himself) that this
is simply a reportorial error. See for example I. P. Blishchenko, A. Kh. Abasidze, and E. V.
Martynenko, “Problemy gosudarstvennoi politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii v otnoshenii
sootechestvennikov,” Gosudarstvo i pravo 2 (1994), 10, which offers a similar definition but omits
the reference to membership in one of the ethnic groups of Russia.

[101] Kolstoe, Russians, p. 261.

[102] Beissinger, “The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire,” 171.

[103] An agreement has been signed with Turkmenistan, and similar ones are being negotiated with
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Belarus. See “Na chto setuet seto,” Rossiiskie vesti, July 6, 1995.

[104] The legal basis for such a practice was established in 1993, when a key provision of the
original 1991 Russian citizenship law, barring the acquisition of Russian citizenship by persons
possessing other citizenships except where dual citizenship was permitted by international
agreement, was repealed.

[105] From the standpoint of international law, Russia’s claim to protect its citizens in the near
abroad, if they also held the citizenship of the state in which they were residing, would be
problematic at best. Traditionally, the protection of citizens abroad, known in the legal
literature as diplomatic protection, has been permitted when the person in question was a citizen
only of the state claiming to protect him or her, and not also of the state in which he or she was
residing. In recent decades, however, the incidence of dual (and multiple) citizenship has
increased sharply, and in a variety of situations courts have had to determine which of two or more
formal citizenships should be treated as a person’s “effective” citizenship, reflecting the more
“real” and substantial ties between a person and a state. Partly as a result of the development of
this notion of “effective” citizenship, the traditional bar on the diplomatic protection of dual
citizens (when one of the citizenships is that of the state in which the person to be protected is
residing) has been eroded; states’ claims to protect such persons, although controversial, have
received some measure of international judicial approval in cases where the “effective” citizenship
of the person in question (ordinarily reflecting habitual residence as well as a preponderance of
social, economic, political, and cultural ties) is that of the state claiming to protect him or
her. Note, however, that this is a relatively narrow exception; it would provide no legal warrant,
for example, for a Russian claim to protect a person holding both Russian and Kazakhstani
citizenship and residing habitually in Kazakhstan. Since the vast majority of Russians in the near
abroad are long-term residents of the states in which they live, it is hard to see how their
“effective” citizenship could be construed as that of the Russian Federation. The proliferation of
dual citizenship among Russians of the near abroad, therefore, would not (from the standpoint of
international law) provide Russia with a blanket legal justification for intervention in the near
abroad, although it would undoubtedly strengthen the domestic political rationale for such
intervention. On diplomatic protection and dual citizenship, see Loïc Darras, “La double
nationalité,” Thesis in Law, Paris, 1986, pp. 631ff.

[106] For an extended discussion of rules and resources as constitutive of “structure,” critically
engaging and reformulating Giddens’ notion of the “duality of structure” and Bourdieu’s notion of
habitus, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure – Duality, Agency, and Transformation,”
American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992).

[107] This shared understanding, to be sure, is itself shaped and sustained by the media and is
therefore, in part, a product as well as a condition of homeland nationalism.