In Belarus, national solidarity, not nationalism, leads the day

Photo: Siarhey Dostan

But this would be a mistake. Nationalism is no more a driving force of the protests in Belarus than any other ideology. Instead, what is driving them is something which other countries could actually learn from: national solidarity. Decades of economic stagnation, electoral fraud, and human rights abuses – as well as Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s failure to properly handle the coronavirus pandemic – have politicised Belarusians and empowered them as emerging civic actors. And this, in turn, has catalysed them into forming a broad-based movement that transcends the divisions of the country’s old nationalist opposition.

A new opposition

All of this contrasts strikingly with earlier efforts to rally around a Belarusian national identity, which focused on more exclusive ethno-linguistic criteria. During most of the Soviet period, Belarus was one of the most “de-nationalised” and Russified countries in the USSR. But in 1988 a group of Belarusian intellectuals and political figures, headed by the archaeologist Zianon Pazniak, created a nationalist organisation called the Belarusian Popular Front in Vilnius, Lithuania. The resulting BPF Party called for the revival of Belarusian culture and language, and was historically one of the major players of Belarus’s early pro-democracy movement.

After first being elected in 1994, Lukashenka, Belarus’s current president, replaced crucial national symbols such as Belarus’s historical white-red-white flag with ones which were reminiscent of the Soviet era. He also made Russian Belarus’s second official language, moved the newly independent state back into Russia’s orbit and began to roll back support for the Belarusian language in many of the country’s institutions. Lukashenka had various reasons for implementing these policies, but they were all effectively anti-nationalist.

Because of the country’s troubled past and complex demography, national identity in Belarus is a complicated issue. But Lukashenka’s appeal to Belarus’s Soviet past also proved more politically popular than the BPF’s anti-Russian vision. When the former began to move the country towards authoritarianism in the mid-1990s, Pazniak and other BPF leaders went into exile, fearing arrest. Belarus seemed set to become a dictatorial state-nation, not a democratic nation-state.

Subsequent years saw the BPF put on the backburner, Volha Biziukova, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, told me. Since the early 2000s, nationalist parties like the BPF – which split into a more radical and a more moderate wing after Pazniak’s exile – have remained marginal. With the rest of the opposition fragmented, Lukashenka has accordingly ceased to see it as a threat.

National consciousness is now finally back on the rise. Yet, the current protests have virtually no ethno-cultural orientation. Already over two months long and hundreds of thousands strong, the protests have instead focused on removing Lukashenka, now 26 years in power, from the presidency. 

While it is possible to find nationalist themes in the protests, Biziukova said, it is the “relative weakness” of ethnonationalism that makes them truly remarkable. Unlike the 2014 revolution in neighbouring Ukraine, this “new opposition” is intended to be non-ideological. The individual political programmes of past candidates have been set aside for another day, when a free and fair election can truly take place. In the run-up to the election, established opposition groups in Belarus remained weak and divided. Now, many are even more marginalised. Unlike in the past – such as in 2010 – these groups have not played an important role in organising protests. Instead of vertical, centralised leadership, there has been a surge of diffuse horizontal ties within Belarusian society, as the political analyst Artyom Shraibman explained to me. And as the protests continue, Belarusian society is becoming “much less atomised” and “much more connected”, creating a “true, authentic, grassroots civil society”.

Division can wait

To be sure, it remains unclear whether Belarus’s different parties, activists and opposition groups can remain united in spite of their differences, butsceptics of the national solidarity movement may underestimate just how much progress it has already made. After the government prevented leading presidential hopefuls like Viktar Babaryka, Valeriy Tsepkala, and Siarhei Tsikhanouski from registering as candidates in June, Tsikhanouski’s wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, joined forces with Babaryka’s campaign manager, Maria Kalesnikava, and Tsepkala’s wife, Veronika Tsepkala, to form one united campaign. The unifying rhetoric of the United Headquarters was a central element of their appeal, allowing them to mobilise unprecedented numbers of people in advance of the election.

When I spoke by phone with Veronika Tsepkala two months ago, she added that Tsikhanouskaya’s team had come together around two central principles. First of all, they all agreed that if Tsikhanouskaya won the election, she would only serve as an “interim” president. Second, they resolved to call for the release of all current political prisoners, including those who had served as candidates in past electoral cycles. “Sviatlana’s main objective was to announce a new presidential campaign in six months,” Tsepkala explained. “Then the people of Belarus would decide which political programme they wanted the most.”

Additionally, Belarusians themselves have changed, as Kalesnikava told me in a telephone interview two months ago (she is now being detained by the Belarusian authorities). “It is the first time in our history, perhaps in the last hundred years, that we feel ourselves to be a union – as one strong and free nation.”

If the success of the protests is any indication, she may be right. To date, the protests do not seem to be limited by any discernible divides. They have not been restricted to urban areas, where most of Belarus’s population resides, but neither do they only involve the young, the upwardly-mobile, or the university-educated. In fact, the centrality of women and striking workers in the protests is quite unusual for the post-Soviet world. And although there have been some expressions of discontent from the left, this has not visibly weakened the protests, either.

Additionally, the national solidarity movement is both transnational and trans-generational. Since early August, the Belarusian diaspora have been engaging with stakeholders, raising and donating funds, and even mass-translating news from Belarus for journalists, as Veronika Laputska, a Polish-Belarusian sociologist at the German Marshall Fund, explained to me. Since the protests in Belarus began, Laputska has also been participating in various solidarity marches in East-Central Europe, and recently met with Tsikhanouskaya and Veronika Tsepkala in Warsaw.

Importantly, this has all helped to sustain the protests. Although the situation in Belarus now increasingly favours the government, Tsepkala at least believed that the protests could last much longer thanks to these efforts. When asked about how long workers could afford to remain on strike, she told me that other Belarusians in the diaspora would try to support them.

Long live Belarus!

If new elections were organised, the old anti-Russian nationalism of the BPF could possibly make a return. However, experts agree that this would only happen if little green men end up in the country, trying to save Lukashenka. Nationalist politicians would also need to be careful not to be perceived as exclusionary or extreme. As the philosopher Olga Shparaga recently argued, most Belarusians seem to prefer a vision of a new Belarus founded upon social inclusion and democratic fairness.

The protests in Belarus therefore show a rejection of both the neo-Soviet tutelage of Lukashenka and the nationalism which characterised his early opponents. In this way, they have not only seemingly bucked a trend which has persistently dogged Eastern Europe, but also one which is increasingly worrisome to the world as a whole. By creating a form of national solidarity without nationalism, Belarusians have shown the continuing power of civic conceptions of national identity, at a time when ethnic chauvinism seems ascendant across the globe.

What unites the protestors is not a devotion to the purity or glory of their “people”; rather, it is their common attachment to ideals of popular sovereignty and fundamental rights shared by all citizens. Like the Monday demonstrations in East Germany, or the current protests in Lebanon and Iraq, what is now happening in Belarus is very much a legacy of the French Revolution, which placed the figure of the oppressed citizen at the heart of the struggle against tyranny. It could not be farther from the nationalism of leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or India’s Narendra Modi.

Aside from this, the protests in Belarus show that it is possible to build a powerful political movement based on these precepts. And this too is relevant: just earlier this month, a political commentator in the United States, where democracy was more under threat than ever before, called for the same. For this reason, Kalesnikava believes that others can draw inspiration from Belarusians. “The Belarusian people are powerful when they are together,” she told me. “I think it’s a good example for everyone else who needs changes.”

Christian Gibbons is an American freelance writer based in Boston. He has a Master’s degree in Nationalism Studies from Central European University and writes on European politics, international affairs and human rights.

belarus, Belarusian opposition, identity, national identity, protests