Paper

Presented to the International Society for Sociology of Religion, Twenty-third Congress, Quebec City, 26–30 June 1995.

Abstract

Despite a large literature in Occidental behavioural science, prior to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, on the “Islamic factor” in Soviet Central Asia, and even more vocal anticipations during a brief period thereafter, issues linked to religion have not played a terribly significant role in the development of any of any of the Central Asian countries since their independence. This paper reviews that literature and ascertains the reasons for those erroneous expectations. The answer seems to be that Occidental behavioural science, in its relative ignorance concerning the geographic area in question, seized upon religion as the sole observable background variable of cultural difference, and uncritically projected a “fundamentalist” expectation upon it. The religious identity ascribed by Western social scientists to the peoples of that region appears in retrospect as a surrogate, and a poor one, for nationality. It was not until the early 1990s that Occidental behavioural science began again, after a lapse of 30 years, to take nationalism seriously.

The paper also re-examines the myth of political “modernization”, which is not the deus ex machina as believed in the 1960s, the last time behavioural scientists seriously considered the phenomenon of nationalism. Political “modernization” is only an occasional result of mobilization and economic development which latter in turn depends to a greater degree that previously suspected, on cultural receptivity to a “work ethic”. This is, in fact, why the most notable in the scientific literature in this field today couples the terms “democracy and the market” as the joint and inseparable goal of what is no longer “modernization” but “transition”. (This literature was born from studies in the late 1970s on southern Europe later extended in the early 1980s to include Latin American, and subsequently extended further to Central and Eastern Europe after the democratic revolutions of 1989. The language is now applied to the countries of Central Asia as well, by international organizations as well as by social scientists.)

Moreover, if we cease to neglect demographic and geographic realities in post-Soviet Central Asia, such as nationality mixes in various republics and their geographic dispersion which inhibits the regularization of social communication, it becomes evident why religion, despite its significance as a secondary and international cultural identity, has played so small a role in the course of developments and why political “modernization” is chimerical if not a phantom category itself.

Publication

Robert M. Cutler, “De-authoritarization in Uzbekistan?: Analysis and Prospects,” in Irina Morozova (ed.), Towards Social Stability and Democratic Governance in Central Eurasia: Challenges to Regional Security (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2005), pp. 120–141.