Model Minorities and Fifth Columns in Service of Nation-Building

• In Event: The Politics of Identities

Abstract

Does the presence of two or more transborder minorities alter the logic of nation-building and affect minority securitization? When are ethnic nation-states likely to frame one transborder minority as threatening but not the other? This article goes beyond the triadic nexus framework commonly applied to minorities caught between their home- and kin-states, proposing a complex relational lens for analyzing nation-building in multiethnic states. Titular political elites dealing with several minorities assign them to contradictory frames to manage the challenging reality of ethnic demography and regional security. By framing one minority as a "model minority" – trustworthy and law-abiding – and another as a "fifth column" – threatening and disruptive – they accomplish two aims: (1) maintain the dominant status of the titular nation by discrediting minority claims for institutional changes, and (2) legitimize the differential treatment of minorities. Ethnic minorities' responses to these frames vary from relative acquiescence to violent conflict. I explore why the initially excluded Poles in Lithuania have been recently accommodated, why the marginalized Uzbeks in the Kyrgyz Republic became targets of repression, and why the relatively accommodated Russian speakers, former colonizers in both states, became framed as a security threat in Lithuania but not in the Kyrgyz Republic after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding how strategic framing advances nation-building offers generalizable insights on (de)securitization of ethnicity.

Author

• Olga Talal, Queen's University