ქართული ნაციონალიზმის წარმოშობა

Abstract

Social theorists distinguish two principal types of nations: nations being direct products of modernization processes and nations emerged as results of nationalisms. The Georgian nation belongs to the later type. Accordingly, representation of the history of Georgian nationalism is a key task of Georgian historiography. The Soviet historians treating nationalism as a false bourgeois ideology placed it beyond the academic interests. It is why during the long period (until very recently) the phenomenon of Georgian nationalism was neglected issue. Hence today the study of the problem lacks necessary insights. The goal of the present investigation is to fill up (of course, only partially) the existed gap and provide up-to-date discourse on the history of Georgian nationalism. In particular, we attempt to provide alternative view on the time of Georgian nationalism’s emergence: we argue that the early nineteenth century was a date of Georgian nationalism’s origin instead of generally accepted late nineteenth century. We define principle sources and stages of development of Georgian nationalism. The research shows that the matrix of Georgian nationalism despite of its west European sources was not always well-matched with paradigmatic models. We share opinion according to which nationalism is linked with the Enlightenment project and assert that conceptualization of the notion of “people “may serve as a main indicator of nationalist ideology arising. With this assertion in mind we analyze the empirical data, namely, the anti-Russian uprisings of Georgian peasantry and nobility in the first two decades of the nineteenth century and also conspiracy of Georgian nobility of 1832. We treat these movements as nationalist ones considering them as original facts in the history of Georgian nationalism. We think that these movements were expressions of Georgian premature political nationalism, which in the late nineteenth century had been transformed into mature cultural nationalism. In this regard we compare the paradigms of interrelations between political and cultural nationalisms proposed by M. Hroch on the one hand, and J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith, on the other hand. The obtained material makes us to suppose that Georgian case study can be used for elaboration of these theoretical patterns.