Modern Nation with Deep Ethnic Roots: Georgian Identity Over the Longue Durée

Abstract

The article aims to represent the history of Georgian national identity.

The author shares the opinion that nations are modern constructs, but some of which have deep ethnic roots. On the basis of premodern cultural premises, the elite of the group creates a national narrative, i.e. the idea of ​​a nation around which members of a given ethnic community consolidate and through the process of cultural mobilization, ethnic identity turns into national.

The picture I have represented is as follows: the presence of a Georgian ethnic community can already be seen in the 15th-14th centuries. BC. in western Georgia. This community was politically represented by the ancient Colchian kingdom. Assyrian and Urartian sources of the 12th and 8th cc BC also give very important information about the "Colchian period" of Georgian ethnicity. In the 4th-3rd cc BC, the political center of the Georgian ethnic community moved to eastern Georgia, when the Kingdom of Kartli was founded by King Pharnavaz. As a result of Pharnavaz's reforms, the process of the formation of Georgian ethnicity became irreversible.

In the 11th-12th centuries, the development of Georgian identity reached such a level that one can speak of the formation of a pre-modern Georgian nation. Political fragmentation in subsequent centuries did not entail the destruction of Georgian identity: the population of different Georgian political units was still bound by the consciousness of a common origin, common culture and bonds of solidarity.

In the 17th-18th centuries the impulses of modernization from Europe reach Georgia and establish an imprint on the development of Georgian identity. In the first half and in the middle of the 19th century, the ideology of Georgian nationalism emerged, and in the second half of the 19th century, as a result of a general ethno-cultural mobilization, a modern Georgian nation was formed. At the end of the second decade of the 20th century, Georgian identity takes on a political shell: Georgians manage to create a state of the modern type, the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

The role of this state is enormous in the final crystallization of the Georgian national identity, despite the fact that it was soon destroyed as a result of the intervention by Soviet Russia. In the Soviet empire, Georgian identity almost completely lost the civic characteristics that it acquired during the period of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The situation changed significantly after the 2003 Rose Revolution. Georgian national identity is gradually becoming inclusive again. The development of Georgian national identity continues today.