Nation-Building and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial States of Asia and Africa

The nation is a type of supra-ethnic community. Members of a nation are characterized by an awareness of their own unity (i.e., the presence of a common national identity), acquired through belonging to a single civil society (the form of social organization of a nation); a system of moral, social, and political values that is uniform in its basic features, reflected in national culture and national mythology; a special form of political organization - nation state. Colonial states were created not as national, but as territorial, i.e., uniting citizens according to the formal and random feature of their residence within the borders of a single colony, which later turned into, in most cases, multicultural and multiethnic postcolonial states. The national policy of postcolonial states from the moment of their emergence and often to this day has been and is built on the opposition of the “progressive” “nation” to the “archaic” “ethnic group”, “tribe” and the desire to suppress, in fact, destroy the ethnic self-consciousness of citizens, putting in its place a supra-ethnic - national one. However, ethnocultural diversity is not an insurmountable obstacle to the formation of nations. On the contrary, it can be a favorable factor in this process. Ethnicity is not opposed to national identity, if it does not develop into ethno-centrism - the ideology of the superiority of one ethnic community over others, in some parts of the postcolonial world closely related to tribalism. The “incompleteness” of nations in many postcolonial countries is manifested not in the ineradicability of ethnic consciousness in their citizens, but in the insufficient formation of the supra-ethnic - national - level of consciousness. The real obstacles to its formation are not ethnicity. One real obstacle is tribalism, understood not as the very fact of the existence of indigenous political institutions with bearers of power, but as a potential, and in many cases actual, voluntary or involuntary provocation by them of the rise of the local (tribal) layer of identity above national in people’s consciousness. Another obstacle is, where it exists, a totalitarian state that destroys civil society. The rejection of the opposition of “ethnic group” and “nation” and the transition from the policy of suppressing ethnicity to the policy of consciously preserving polyethnicity and simultaneously strengthening the supra-ethnic - national - layer of citizens’ consciousness can become the path to successful nation-building in postcolonial countries. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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