In Identities in Formation, David Laitin analyzes processes of identity formation among the Russian-speaking populations of the recently formed nations of Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin rejects the dichotomy found within the literature on identity between ‘primordialist’ (emphasizing the fixity of identities) and ‘constructivist’ (emphasizing the fluid, instrumental dimension of identity formation) conceptions of identity, arguing that a Janus-faced conception of culture is needed to capture both features of identity (p. 20). In times of change and uncertainty – such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and formation of new states – the constructivist nature of identities will be particularly important. Laitin’s main theoretical claim is that the decisions Russian-speakers in the near abroad are making about their identities – Are they Russians? Are they (e.g.) Latvians? Should they learn Latvian? Should their children? – can be analyzed through a rational choice tipping model.
The basic premise of the tipping model in Laitin’s usage is that the decision of Russian-speakers about whether to learn the titular language of their countries (which Laitin uses as a proxy for cultural assimilation) is made by weighing the potential gains of assimilation against the potential costs of assimilation, and that the payoffs of assimilation increase as more and more people adopt the titular language. Laitin argues that three primary mechanisms influence the strategic calculations concerning linguistic assimilation performed by Russian-speaking populations. First is the possibility that learning the titular language will have economic returns for the Russian-speakers in each country. Second is the extent to which in-group status is positively or negatively impacted by adopting the titular language. Third is the extent to which those Russian-speakers who do linguistically assimilate will be fully accepted by the dominant out-group with which they interact – that is, the titular population of the states in which they live.
Laitin emphasizes the fact that the four countries in his sample do not start the tipping game at the same place. The historical legacies of Russian rule have left profoundly different linguistic landscapes in each country. For instance, while one third of Russians in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian in 1989, less than one percent of Russians in Kazakhstan spoke Kazakh (p. 252). Laitin looks to the nature of elite incorporation of each country into pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia to explain these divergences. In Ukraine, treated as a ‘most-favored lord’, elites had strong incentives to adopt Russian as a means of upward mobility. In Estonia and Latvia, incorporated as ‘integralist republics’, the titular language remained dominant, yielding lower incentives for titulars to speak Russian. In Kazakhstan, incorporated as a ‘colonial republic’, there were incentives for elites to learn Russian to reap the benefits of being political mediators. These historical patterns lead Laitin to predict that Russian-speakers are most likely to assimilate in Estonia and Latvia, least likely to assimilate in Kazakhstan, with Ukraine so divided that it is difficult to predict which language will win out. Laitin also attempts to establish the ways in which Russian-speakers in the near abroad are identifying themselves, arguing that the conglomerate identity as the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) may form the basis for a broader nationalist movement among Russian-speakers abroad.
Commentary and Critique
There are many things to appreciate in Laitin’s book. First and foremost is the extraordinary effort that went into data collection, which drew on a plethora of methodological approaches: large-scale surveys, rich ethnographies, linguistic experiments, historical analysis, and content analysis of different media sources. Second is Laitin’s commitment to identifying the micro-foundations for broader macro-processes. As a whole, the book is remarkably ambitious and thorough.
Laitin is by and large convincing that decisions made by Russian-speakers about whether to invest in learning their titular language are influenced by the incentive structures with which actors are faced. Clearly many of the characters in the book based their decisions about linguistic assimilation on instrumental calculations. But if the basic premise of analyzing linguistic assimilation with the use of choice models seems plausible, I think that Laitin’s reliance on rational choice tends to underemphasize the role of power in structuring the decisions of Russian-speakers. In focusing on actors’ considerations of economic returns, in-group status, and out-group status, Laitin overlooks the extent to which the state can employ coercive measures to impose high costs on those who do not assimilate to the desired language. This tension is evident when Laitin discusses the colonial model of incorporation in Kazakhstan, which predicts that a few Kazakhs would have incentives to learn Russian to serve as political leaders. But this explanation does not account for the fact that nearly all Kazakhs eventually learned Russian.
A related gap in Laitin’s model is his treatment of state policies concerning citizenship rights enacted in each country in the first years of independence. In Laitin’s initial vignette of the Grigor’yev family in Estonia, he attributes the obsessive efforts of Liuba to learn Estonian to her deep fear that her family could be separated if they could not all meet the Estonian government’s stringent demands upon Russian-speakers for receiving citizenship (p. 5). Because Russians living in Estonia were not automatically granted Estonian citizenship, deportation to Russia – a place many Russian families in Estonia had never lived – was a looming threat in the first years of Estonian independence. In this story, the harsh citizenship policies enacted by Estonia served as a powerful incentive for Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or contend with the uncertainty of living without citizenship.
Yet the citizenship policies that seem like such a strong motivator of behavior receive barely any attention in Laitin’s empirical analysis of the likelihood to assimilate. Contrary to Laitin’s model of choice, in Latvia and Estonia, where citizenship laws are the toughest (p. 253), the state has largely pre-empted choice by imposing severe costs upon Russian-speakers who refuse to assimilate to the titular language. To the extent that Laitin includes such state policies in his models of the tipping game, he considers them as supplementary factors in out-group status. The more restrictive the citizenship policies, the greater the stigma Russian-speakers will receive from the titular population for learning the titular language, and the lower the likelihood that Russian-speakers will learn the titular language (p. 256). But this assessment works in opposition to the commonsense notion (as well as Liuba Grigor’yev’s interpretation) that exclusive citizenship laws provided a powerful incentive to learn the titular language. Giving more attention to the role of power (especially state power) in influencing decisions about assimilation would help Laitin make more sense of the fact that many of his respondents insisted that they really did not have much choice at all.
In addition, Laitin sometimes stretches his rationalist explanation of assimilation decisions beyond its plausible limits. For instance, Laitin predicts that as compliance with titular language laws approaches 100%, some individuals will have incentives to remain monolinguistic Russian speakers in order to emerge as ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize the Russian-speaking community (p. 29, p. 249). This interpretation suggests that those who refuse to learn the titular language do so because they expect the future payoff of becoming a future leader and ‘cultural hero’ after the language cascade has happened. It seems more likely that those who remain monolingual Russian-speakers due so out of habit, personal conviction, pride, stubbornness, or old age. It is possible that such holdouts would be heralded as ‘cultural heroes’ for their actions, but I doubt their decisions would be motivated by such a far-sighted desire, as Laitin seems to think.
A more general point to draw out from the limitations of a rational choice approach to cultural identities is that it would be helpful to delineate the scope conditions under which such an approach is valid. Laitin gives off the impression that he is justifying the application of choice models to the study of culture more generally, without acknowledging the specificities of his usage, such as the fact that the state has a big role in structuring incentives, the uniqueness of language versus other cultural elements, etc.
There are also some aspects of Laitin’s rational choice account which he does not fully develop. In setting up the tipping game as a collective action problem (p. 27) in which cultural entrepreneurs play an important role, Laitin seems primed for a discussion of leadership along the lines of Calvert. But Laitin never really delivers on this promise in his empirical analyses. In order to get at this dynamic, I think Laitin would need to examine a different unit of analysis. For the most part, Laitin focuses on the level of the individual, looking at survey responses and conducting interviews with select individuals to draw generalizations about entire countries. What might be interesting to study further would be to examine the connection between political and social movements, the role of leaders, and processes of assimilation.
Another drawback of the book is that Laitin’s deductive approach seems to color many of the interpretations of his data. Laitin starts with a strong theoretical statement of the relevance for tipping models to studies of identities. Later on, it becomes clear that many of the theoretical predictions he held were not borne out by the data. For instance, in introducing the tipping game, Laitin outlines ‘competitive assimilation’ as one of the primary mechanisms driving decision-making among Russian-speakers (p. 28). However, Laitin later acknowledges that this factor seemed to play little role at all in the calculations of actors (p. 123). Laitin similarly acknowledges the lack of support for his theories about the differences between nationalism in Russian and nationalism among Russian-speakers in the near abroad (p. 319). Laitin on the whole seems to offer pretty honest admissions of the limitations of his data, but one wonders what story he would have been able to tell if he let the data speak for themselves without bringing his strong theoretical ambitions to the table. What results in the book is more or less a test of Laitin’s predictions, rather than an attempt to account for the observed outcomes. Like Fransozi, Laitin draws on a wide range of methodological tools, but his work clearly lacks the theoretical agnosticism present in Fransozi’s book.
Perhaps related to his deductive approach is Laitin’s propensity to make big predictions about future trends that seem to be based more on a desire to be provocative than on a close analysis of the data. One of Laitin’s main claims is that the concept of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) has emerged as the dominant mode of identification for the ethnic Russians living in Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin even goes so far as to suggest that this emerging identity might serve as the basis for a nationalist project, in which the Russian-speaking populations of different countries would join together to assert their common interests. Laitin acknowledges one problem with this argument – that the prevalence of the term russkoiazychnoe naselenie has actually dropped off quite steeply in the mid-1990s in favor of lumping the minority populations together as ‘Russians’. However, an additional impediment to a nationalist project built around identification with the Russian-speaking population is the fact that the usage of the phrase is quite different across different countries. In Ukraine, the term has many uses, not one of which distinguishes Russian-speakers who are ethnic Russians from the rest of the Ukrainian population. The different identity cleavages in different societies call into question the extent to which Russian-speakers will be able to mobilize around a coherent identity.
