the new russian nationalismmajority outgroup cohesiveness and therefore decreasing their
ingroup heterogeneity relative to the majority ethnic group. In
that case, we would expect the sense of identity threat among
Russia’s ethnic minorities to decline as the Russian territorial
domain expands. Minorities would then be less likely to oppose
expansionist majority group nationalism. This dynamic seems
plausible even regarding expansion into ethnic- Russian populated
territories, given debates in Russia as to whether, after nearly a
quarter century of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those ethnic
Russians who stayed in the former Soviet republics have retained
a sufficiently Russian identity to count as ‘full- fledged’ (polnot-
sennye) russkie (Karavaev 2008). Hypothetically, the same logic
would also reduce opposition among Russia’s ethnic minorities to
Russia’s territorial expansion into all of the former Soviet Union
- in which case, the symbolic value of common superordinate
minority identity relative to the existing ethnic Russian majority
identity would increase.
Conversely, the same constructivist/social identity logic of rela-
tive group heterogeneity could also be used to argue that Russia’s
ethnic minorities would oppose an expansion toward a USSR
2.0. This is because, under such a scenario, minority groups
would have to deal with new outgroups – other ethnic minorities - within a state. By extension, any inter- minority coalition or
alliance (that is, their superordinate group identity as minorities
versus the ethnic Russian majority) would be more heterogene-
ous and therefore more threatened by and hostile to the majority
group.
It may be tempting to conclude that these conflicting theo-
retical interpretations, on balance, mean that ethnic minorities
would support expansionist ethnic majority nationalism about as
much as ethnic majorities would themselves. Such a conclusion,
however, would be under- specified and therefore theoretically
infertile. The workings and effects of specific causal processes
would be conflated in an indeterminate fashion, and the knowl-
edge gaps would remain.
These theory controversies warrant new empirical probes and
tests to improve our understanding of nationalism and intergroup
relations in general. The present study takes this path with a