SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Ilya Gerasimov uses the case of the 1998 Russian financial crisis to introduce the modern sociological model of the nation-state’s systemic demise. Known in Russian primarily as “the default” – a shorthand for “sovereign debt default” – the 1998 financial crisis was first and foremost a crisis of trust in the government and its economic policy. Economics experts have traced the roots of the default all the way to 1991 and the origins of the sovereign Russian Federation. Gerasimov suggests that the 1998 crisis was the first stage in the Russian national project’s fundamental default on its promise to build a “normal” democratic state, so that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was only the culmination of that systemic failure. From the very beginning, the problem was not the project’s Russianness but its normative “normalness.”
Gerasimov refers to current sociological literatures that expose the crisis of the modern nation-state due to the failure of nation to mobilize and control the country’s population in the same way that was common in the mid-twentieth century. These conclusions – reached by scholars studying developed western societies over the past two to three decades – reveal that the postnational condition is already a reality undermining the legitimacy and hence efficiency of the modern state. Gerasimov argues that this diagnosis is even more true of post-Soviet societies that discarded many of the existing Soviet-style modern state institutions after 1991, while being unable to replace them with new statehood institutions because, in the 1990s, globalization and the triumph of human rights had set the scene for the postnational condition. This condition does not mean that national solidarity became void, only that it lost its monopoly and ability to forge mutual trust and hence social cohesion on the scale of the entire society. In modern societies, national mobilization involves only a fraction of the population and grows increasingly aggressive and reactionary in response to the majority’s indifference. According to Gerasimov, Putin’s regime has tried different scenarios of national mobilization as a sine qua non for the functional state – one no longer vulnerable to defaulting on its promise to investors and citizens. The last resort of any national mobilization is literal mobilization for war, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was prompted by domestic concerns over a failing state that was not backed by a mobilized nation. The spectacular failure of the long-planned aggression testifies to the failure of Russian statehood and nationhood – which should serve as a warning to any modern society. Based on his analysis, Gerasimov elaborates the principles of a possible postnational state and offers several examples of its institutional configuration.