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Excerpt
East European Constitutional Review
A Quarterly Published by New York University Law School and Central European University
Volume 11 Numbers 1/2 Winter/Spring 2002
[full text available at: http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/vol11num1_2/special/glinski.html]
Russia and Its Muslims: The Politics of Identity at the International-Domestic Frontier
Dmitri Glinski

Preliminary conclusions

Russia's Muslim community has a higher capacity to act cohesively when provoked by circumstances than almost all other comparable segments and units of Russian society. It has shown its distinctive political position in the country by the consistency of its voting patterns and by considerable solidarity in its response to the post-9/11 developments. The reverse side of the coin is that the community presents the handiest target for those searching about for an image of the enemy inside the country (strikingly similar to the role often played by Jews in prerevolutionary and, to an extent, Soviet Russia). And in this context, paradoxically, the Muslim community is even weaker-in the sense of being more vulnerable to repression-than the rest of society, given the highly asymmetrical relationship between the Kremlin and everybody else. Which means that passive support or mere acquiescence on the part of Russian society in general is enough for a hard-line government to marginalize politically disloyal Muslims and their leaders, especially in light of their current isolation from international-in other words, mostly Western-public opinion.

Both sides understand this fairly well, which explains the consistently low profile of Muslim organizations and leaders with regard to all political issues and debates that are not vitally important to them. It also helps to account for the lack of sustained campaigning against the Chechnya war; most Russian Muslims (and other Russians as well) have accepted that, given the abyss of alienation that separates government from society and incapacitates government initiatives, some purported "internal" enemy is a must if the authorities are to show themselves as "strong" and "effective" in the exercise of their power. And once this was understood, the Chechens were quietly delivered to Moscow hard-liners on the shaky assumption that everybody else will be spared from the worst, at least for the foreseeable future.

It is equally clear, however, that this solution is very costly for Russian society as a whole, in moral and material terms, and that over the long run it cannot be sustained. Yury Lotman, Russia's leading structuralist thinker, once described it as a "culture of explosion." This image fits Russia in political terms as well, with its proclivity to release deeply hidden or suppressed social forces and grievances. Russian Muslims, positioned as they are in the country's strategically vulnerable and pivotal territories, if systematically excluded from government, the social elite, and from decision-making processes, may eventually become a destructive force in one such future explosion. A constructive alternative would be to foster, by means of constitutional and legal reforms, democratic channels of political representation and social mobility for Russia's Muslims. They should also be given their legitimate voice in Russia's debate over its national identity and foreign policy orientation. The Western public's attention to and support for this development would help to forestall Russia's transformation into a zone of engineered conflict between Islam and the West. That the West could be inadvertently drawn into such a conflict by self-styled agents of a top-down Westernization, acting on the West's behalf but in their own interests, is a dangerous prospect, and one that suggests the need for greater attention to these issues both within Russia and beyond.