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What Does It Mean to Be a Kin Majority? Analyzing Romanian Identity in Moldova and Russian Identity in Crimea from Below

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What Does It Mean to Be a Kin Majority? Analyzing Romanian Identity in Moldova and Russian Identity in Crimea from Below Eleanor Knott What does it mean to be a kin majority? Analyzing Romanian identity in Moldova and Russian identity in Crimea from below Article (Published version) (Refereed) Original citation: Knott, Eleanor (2015) What does it mean to be a kin majority? Analyzing Romanian identity in Moldova and Russian identity in Crimea from below. Social Science Quarterly, 96 (3). pp. 830- 859. ISSN 0038-4941 DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12193 Reuse of this item is permitted through licensing under the Creative Commons: © 2015 John Wiley and Sons CC BY 4.0 This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63888/ Available in LSE Research Online: Online: November 2015 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. What Does it Mean to Be a Kin Majority? Analyzing Romanian Identity in Moldova and Russian Identity in Crimea from Below∗ Eleanor Knott, London School of Economics and Political Science Objective. This article investigates what kin identification means from a bottom-up perspective in two kin majority cases: Moldova and Crimea. Methods. The article is based on 50 fieldwork interviews conducted in both Moldova and Crimea with everyday social actors (2012–2013). Results. Ethnic homogeneity for kin majorities is more fractured that previously considered. Respondents identified more in terms of assemblages of ethnic, cultural, political, linguistic, and territorial identities than in mutually exclusive census categories. Conclusions. To understand fully the relations between kin majorities, their kin-state and home-state and the impact of growing kin engagement policies, like dual citizenship, it is necessary to analyze the complexities of the lived experience of kin identification for members of kin majorities and how this relates to kin-state identification and affiliation. Understanding these complexities helps to have a more nuanced understanding of the role of ethnicity in post-Communist societies, in terms of kin-state and intrastate relations. Introducing the Kin Majority Problem In post-Communist states there has been an emergence of new and renewed cross-border ties where kin-states reach out to those they claim as co-ethnic (kin communities). In the 1990s, kin-state relations were considered as increasing the likelihood of conflict, yet kin- states’ territorial claims failed to materialize. Instead kin-states moved toward institutional engagement with external kin communities by facilitating their acquisition of citizenship and quasi-citizenship. Despite the proliferation of these policies, little research engages with the kin community by exploring how they identify and the lived experience of kin-state policies. Similarly, there has been a focus only on kin minorities and little consideration of the phenomenon of kin majorities, defined in this article as a community claimed as co-ethnic by a kin-state, which form a majority in the state or substate unit in which they reside. This article examines and compares two post-Communist/Soviet examples of kin majorities in Moldova and Crimea. This phenomenon of kin-states and kin ∗Direct all correspondence to Eleanor Knott, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK [email protected] grateful to the ESRC for the funding to complete the doctoral research and fieldwork. She is also grateful for the comments of her supervisor, Denisa Kostovicova, and to Gerard Toal, Jon Fox, the participants of the Association for the Study of Nationalities 2014 World Convention, and the Graduate Network Conference at Sciences Po in 2014 for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. [The copyright line for this article was changed on November 14 after original online publication.] This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 96, Number 3, September 2015 C 2015 John Wiley and Sons. Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of the Southwestern Social Science Association. DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12193 What Does it Mean to Be a Kin Majority? 831 communities/majorities policies is not unique to post-Communist identity politics since there are many examples beyond post-Communist space (e.g., South Korea, India). How- ever, the concentration of these policies in post-Communist Europe and Eurasia, in a zone of intense state-building and nation-building, and across spaces of free (E.U./Schengen zone) and restricted movement (Toth,´ 2006; Zaiotti, 2007), makes these comparisons of kin-states and co-ethnic majorities a relevant and important endeavor from a conceptual, empirical, and policy perspective. Empirically, this is important because existing kin relations research on the cases of Crimea and Moldova is sparse and based on top-down assumptions. For example, Eyal and Smith (1996:223) state that there “can be no doubt” that Moldovans “can only be considered Romanians.” Similarly in Crimea, few studies have researched everyday identity politics in the region in its own right, treating Crimea as an ethnic outlier within Ukraine (Fournier, 2002; Wilson, 2002). Using “everyday nationalism” and political ethnographic approaches, this article explores the meaning of kin identification in these two kin majority cases, Moldova and Crimea, by exploring from a bottom-up perspective how individuals identify themselves relative to their home-state and kin-state.1 The article therefore provides a crucial insight that questions these top-down assumptions at a time preceding the heightened geopoliticized nature of post-Soviet space, since Crimea’s annexation by Russia and the ensuing separatist conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk. The article finds that there are many different ways of identifying with the kin-state that blur mutually exclusive census categories, such as Romanian/Moldovan and Russian/Ukrainian boundaries. This article demonstrates that kin majorities are an important phenomenon to research because when viewed from below, they appear far more fractured than their majority status would indicate. From Kin Minorities from Above to Kin Majorities from Below External states, such as kin states, have an important role in affecting domestic outcomes such as “group cohesion and political mobilization” because external states can provide key “material, political and moral support” tipping the balance of domestic politics (Gurr, 1993:128). External states are therefore key actors both in civil wars (Gurr, 1993), and in the creation of de facto states, when a “patron” state offers external support in the absence of external legitimacy (Kolstø, 2006:723). What makes kin-state research specific are the bonds of co-ethnicity that kin-states use to claim as basis of their right to engage with kin communities,2 that is, kin-states toward kin communities irrespective of how kin community actors identify (e.g., Bulgaria toward Macedonia or Romania toward Moldova). These claims have obscured understanding of kin community identification from an actor- centered perspective, leading to homogenized understandings of the kin community as if it uniformly identifies co-ethnically and with kin-state, and have ignored the phenomenon of kin majorities. This article argues that it is necessary to combine approaches to kin-state relations that argue that nationalism is a relational and interactive politics between different actors (Brubaker, 1996) with bottom-up everyday approaches to identification that shift 1Fieldwork was conducted in 2012 and 2013 in Crimea and therefore this is predominantly a study of Crimea before Yanukovich left office and pro-Russian groups in Crimea seized power. 2This article also makes a conceptual distinction between kin-states that make claims toward kin commu- nities arising from border shift (e.g., Romania toward Moldova, Russia toward Crimea) and the larger field of diaspora states, which make and try to retain claims with co-ethnic communities residing outside of the kin-state following emigration (e.g., Jewish, Chinese, and Indian diasporas). 832 Social Science Quarterly TABLE 1 Previous Approaches to Kin-State Relations Perspective Critique Antagonistic: Originally Triadic nexus → antagonism Absence of conflict Brubaker (1996) and between states potential Does not account for kin-state developed by Fearon and source of conflict introduction of policies Laitin (2003), van Houten Top-down institutional approach (1998), Smith (2002), also Kin minority focus Caspersen (2008) Fuzzy: Fowler (2004), Batt Kin-state policies cause fuzzy Assumes kin-state policies (2002) relations between states in unproblematic the nexus Top-down institutional approach Not conflictual because Kin minority focus states willing to share sovereignty over shared citizenry understandings of relational kin-state politics away from top-down state-level analysis to unpack the agency, and forms of identification, of the kin community, in particular for the phenomenon of kin majorities. To conceptualize these relational dynamics of nationalism, Brubaker developed a theory of a “triadic configuration” of a kin minority, an “external national homeland” state (kin- state), and a “nationalizing”
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