Conceptualising the Reconstruction of Identities in the Postcommunist Countries

Abstract

In this article I propose to explore the meanings, mechanisms and issues at stake in the reconstitution of identities which can now be seen taking place in the countries of the post-communist space. We shall consider this space not as a thing in itself, but in terms of its old and new interactions with the countries of western Europe, in order to understand the phenomena of reconstructed identities in general, in the context of their relationship to the period of globalisation in which we now find ourselves.The notion of space is complementary to the historical perspective of the analysis proposed here, which conceptualises the interaction between spatial groups (nations, states, 'natural groups') and social groups (classes) in terms of paradigms. It also has the advantage of postulating the existence of a 'substratum' capable of accepting different forms of identity. The emphasis is on the current reconstruction of identities, religions and politics in the global space as it relates the economic and social identities of particular contexts.We shall consider what remains in place, as well as those aspects which are reconstructed ; we shall look at the interaction or possible interference between the various cultural and political traces in each society; these traces, both old and not so old, become superimposed, combining in a peculiar alchemy. Beneath the surface, between what was there before and what has now been reconstructed, is a process we can identify in terms of the prefixes 'de', 'dis' or 'un': de-construction, dis-integration, the un-writing of the reference points built up under communism, which had itself disintegrated and reconstructed what was there before.All attention is on the social movements of the contemporary period, which are carrying out this process of the progressive deconstruction of the paradigms of the centralised nation state in both East and West. What required reconstruction after 1989 can be termed re-individualisation, re-privatisation or re-capitalisation; in other words a re-harmonisation with the social mechanisms in operation throughout the non-communist space.In some cases, we are witnessing a form of restoration of not the communist, but the pre-communist period (restoration of private property, of democratic institutions if there were any, or of conceptions of the nation inherited from that past). In other cases the restoration is more of a symbolic reformulation to re-root the society in a longer-term historical continuity.The idea of the re-construction of identity thus supposes both that there has already been a de-construction of identities in relation to the reference points current in the communist space -constructed within the national / class paradigm -and the temptation to replace it with a pre-construction that evades historical temporality (the ethnic group) as opposed to a matrice that is open to a new political future. This is usually for reasons