Specifics of National Identity Construction in the Post-Soviet States of the Caspian Sea: Problems and Prospects

Annotation

The article considers the cultural and educational policy of the Caspian countries, which shapes both the national identity of individual states and the macro-identity of the Caspian region as a whole. Therefore, the author considers two aspects: the policy of constructing national identities directly in each of the Caspian countries and attempts to form a unified socio-cultural space of the Caspian macro-region. The aim of the article is to identify the factors of the specificity of constructing national identity through the use of the scale of images “Friend - Other - Foe - Enemy” in the cultural and educational space. Both internal (heterogeneity and mosaic) and external (multi-vector foreign policy) factors are taken into account. Under the influence of these factors, the cultural and educational policy is built, where the dominance of the ethnic component of identity becomes a determining factor. Like all post-Soviet countries, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan use similar mechanisms to create new forms of memory politics - mythologising the past, reassessing shared history with Russia as a victim of trauma and forecasting future possibilities on the basis of their own heroic past. All these processes are aimed at creating a new national identity (meta-identity) that connects different ethnicities and confessions under the aegis of the titular ethnicity. The article analyses cultural and educational policy through the prism of comparative analysis of national history and local history courses and textbooks for general education and higher education institutions. The article is a continuation of a series of studies on the problem of constructing national identity in the post-Soviet space of the Caspian region.

Keywords

• national identity
• cultural policy
• mythologisation
• Caspian macro-region
• ethnic self-identification
• security
• cultural heritage
• memory-forgetting
• cultural dialogue
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Acknowledgments

the study was carried out by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation No. 22-18-00301 “The process of constructing new identities in the Caspian macroregion in the context of societal security”.

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