Second draft for group 2
Construction of Belarus Nationalism
As we have problems with our research questions we needed to change some aspects of our first project. So, in the beginning we wanted to focus on the people's interpretation of the history. We wanted to learn how nationalists use the history of their region in order to create nationalistic feeling. The starting point was that different history between Eastern and Western parts of Belarus resulted in two different expressions of nationalism but as we found difficult to explain the direct relation between history and nationalism we changed the starting point.
Therefore, our statement is that Belarus has two different parts, both of them differs from each other in a certain way. Both of the parts were under influence of other countries. Eastern part is consider "more Russian", as in the past it belonged most of the time to The Soviet Union. In western part there has been clashing influences of Poland, Germany and Russia.
We choose as a representative examples two cities: Lida and Polatsk. They are approximately the same size and quite homogeneous demographically. Polatsk (eastern part) is a interesting case as it is considered as a beginning of Belarus state. It dates back to the roughly 800 and there are many old historical and cultural sites and monuments. Lida (western part) dates back to more less 1100. It is a more industrial city than Polatsk.
We have found names and addresses of nationalistic organizations in both cities. There are much fewer organizations in Polatsk than in Lida. On whole, in Eastern Belarus there is much weaker national identity, and a whole structure of nationalistic organizations. In Western there are many more organizations, the nationalistic movement is more active.
The general question of our project is:
What are the elements of the history, economy and demography which helps to grow and expand nationalism in both parts? We want to observe the two expressions of nationalism and try to discover, to understand, its link with the history, economy, demography. Why in Eastern Belarus nationalistic movement is weaker and in Western is stronger. What are the reason for that? Why is there such a difference in the perspective of national movement? We would like to find out, if it is because of the history, or of the economy or demography, or there are other reasons?
We would like to see how the nationalistic organizations works in Lida in Polatsk, are there similarities and differences between the manner of their functioning and existing. Who are they (what kind of people; occupation, sex, age etc, what are the main celebrations for them, how they celabrate it, what are the reasons for joining, establishing nationalistic organization, what they do to attract other people if they do at all in order to join organization. Are they feel save, do they have problems with police, is it easy to organize their meeting, how often do they meet, what they do. What language they use usually in their conversation in every day live, between the members of the organization etc. What are their aims?
We have the same problem with this research questions here, we think that we can't observe, the reasons of the strength and weakness of the nationalistic movements in two parts of Belarus, we don't know how to- So we need to change the projects but we are not exactly sure how to do it and which path we should follow. We are aware of that we should make other questions and not to try pose the questions why.