Rico Isaacs, Jonathan Wheatley, Sarah Whitmore. Europe-Asia Studies. Volume 73, Issue 8, 2021.
In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities.
The notion of culture war was brought to prominence in the work of James Davison Hunter (1991, p. 42), who, in writing of contemporary cultural conflict in America of the 1980s, defined that decade’s social hostilities as being ‘rooted in different systems of moral understanding’. The 1980s marked a shift whereby the old cultural dividing lines between Protestants and Catholics and the economic class alignments of the New Deal era had been replaced by a division based upon what Hunter observed as the fundamental cherished assumptions by which we order our lives and the moral authority upon which such ordering is premised (Hunter 1991, p. 42). The dividing social cleavage Hunter identified in American politics cuts across old lines of conflict and instead hinges on two polarising impulses: a traditional conservative orthodoxy and a liberal progressivism (Hunter 1991). These competing social cleavages draw upon distinct sources of moral authority: whereas orthodoxy looks to a transcendental authority, unchanging and consistent with time and offering a programme for moral purity and goodness, for progressivism moral authority resides in a spirit of subjectivism and rationalism and an understanding of modernity as a dynamic process of change (Hunter 1991, p. 44). In 1980s American society these polarising impulses featured in public debates over issues such as abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, values in public education and multiculturalism among many others. This division of competing visions of the moral ordering of society, and these clashes over fundamental social issues, remain deeply entrenched in American society, culminating in the deep disunion of the four years of the Trump presidency.
The polarising debates regarding morality and identity have long since ceased to be a solely US phenomenon and have gone ‘global’, illustrating their complex ‘transnational’ nature (Kline 2004; McCrudden 2015). The liberal surge of globalisation in the 1990s led not to universalism, but rather engendered contention, often between foreign and local agents, with one group proselytising the other in terms of the perceived acceptable moral and normative boundaries for religious, social and political conduct (Hackett 2008, p. 1). Both US conservative faith-based and liberal human rights advocacy NGOs sought to export and promote their convictions abroad, often facing off ‘against each other politically across the globe’ (McCrudden 2015, p. 435). For example, US evangelists are argued to have played a key role in seeking to restrict the rights of the LGBTQI community in Africa (Kaoma 2009), and especially in the case of the 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda which generated a strong response from global and local LGBT human-rights advocates (Wahab 2016). While the ‘exporting’ of the US culture wars has been ongoing since the 1990s, local actors in many different countries also became locked into value-laden tensions pitting those holding on to some notion of ‘tradition’ against those seeking ‘progress’ (Gathii 2006). For instance, in Australia during 2016–2017, the Safe Schools controversy opened up battle lines between those seeking to create safe and inclusive spaces in schools for LGBTQI students and those from right-wing Christian groups who viewed the initiative as imposing gender fluidity and the proliferation of ‘cultural Marxism’ in the education system (Busbridge et al. 2020, p. 733). Meanwhile, gender has also been the centrepiece of a culture war in contemporary Latin America, where mobilised conservative coalitions have antagonised feminist and LGBTQI activists (Biroli 2020). Here we could draw upon any number of examples of culture wars from across the world; what is significant is that in the last three or four decades culture wars as a phenomenon rooted in moral, social and normative divides, polarising communities, have moved beyond the US to attain global reach.
And so, as it is with other regions of the world, culture wars are now an ever-present fixture in the public and policy discourse in the post-Soviet and wider post-communist space. Like the post-secular conflicts which appeared in the US, the appearance of culture wars in the post-Soviet and post-communist space has also been driven by conservatives seeking to restore tradition, faith and family to the national spirit in response to the perceived erosion of those values by liberal progressives advocating gender and in particular LGBTQI rights. In Poland, for example, clerical leaders in the Catholic Church in comradeship with right-wing commentators and parties have campaigned vigorously against what they perceive as a genderist ideology which is promoting same-sex marriages and reproductive rights, consequently undermining ‘traditional’ family values in the country (Graff 2014; Żuk & Żuk 2020). Such anti-genderist movements have also been observed in Slovenia (Kuhar & Panjik 2020), Croatia (in relation to the marriage referendum of 2013) (Juroš et al. 2020) and in Hungary (albeit existing mostly at the discursive rather than mobilised level) (Kováts & Pető 2017). Conflicts between so-called ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’ can be seen in any number of ongoing policy debates in the region, including—but not limited to—Hungarian higher education (Versek 2018), same-sex marriage in Slovakia (Roháč 2014), LGTBQI rights in Poland (Harper 2016) and Soviet heritage in Lithuania (Baločkaitė 2015). It is Russia, however, which presents us with one of the most striking examples of an ongoing culture war in the post-Soviet space. Putin’s instrumentalisation of culture wars for purposes of regime legitimation in declining economic conditions has seen the consolidation of regime–Church relations, the engendering of a moral panic regarding the politics of gender and ‘gayropa’, and the introduction of anti-gay propaganda laws (Wilkinson 2013; Sharafutdinova 2014; Smyth & Soboleva 2014; Robinson 2017; Foxall 2019).
The above illustrates that in the post-Soviet space there are equivalent battle lines to those in the US and the West when it comes to the ‘cultural’ dimension of political conflict within both political elites and broader society. As in the West, countries in the post-Soviet space have also experienced de-industrialisation, the erosion of the public sector, the accumulation of wealth by a small financial elite and, more recently, increased migration flows (Morris 2016). Indeed, the upheavals bought about by globalisation are even more far-reaching in the post-Soviet and post-communist space than in the West given that post-Soviet societies and economies were more or less insulated from the outside world during the Soviet period. And it is not only economic globalisation that is making its mark; the globalisation of media (through social media and global television channels) as well as new opportunities for foreign travel have exposed post-Soviet societies to cultural norms from beyond their borders.
These processes have created social divisions between elites and ordinary people, the urban and the rural, the well-educated and the less-well educated, and the religious and the secular in much of the post-Soviet space. These divisions can be observed in policies and debates related to the role of traditional religious values, sexuality, biopolitics, race and gender in post-Soviet societies, as the above literature has highlighted.
While previous research has focused on particular cases or specific issues such as the emergence of Pussy Riot (Sharafutdinova 2014; Smyth & Soboleva 2014), anti-homopropaganda laws (Wilkinson 2014), gender (Hankivsky & Salnykova 2012), body politics (Bernstein 2013) and globalisation (Blum 2007), a systematic focus on the fissures underlying culture wars has been largely absent from scholarship on the post-Soviet region. Given the intensity and frequency of such normative battles across the region, it is surprising that there has been no attempt to understand culture wars in the post-Soviet space as a comparative phenomenon in their own right. This is what we tentatively seek to do in this special issue, by focusing attention on different forms of culture wars that have appeared in the region. The contributions in this special issue explore the nature and dynamics of culture wars from the vantage point of different cases (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Latvia) and from different methodological standpoints, while also at the same time critically engaging with the idea of a culture war and its relationship to globalisation. The overall aim of the special issue is therefore to unpack how the concept of culture war can be used analytically to comprehend tensions and conflict over competing interpretations of the moral ordering of the post-Soviet public space.
The contributions in this special issue draw on a series of themes which deepen and more importantly complicate our understanding of culture wars in the post-Soviet space, but also more generally too. These are: the multifaceted and complex nature of culture wars which cut across binary understandings of the phenomenon; the religious dimension to such cultural conflicts; the multiple causal explanations for culture wars and the varied levels of agency and agents involved; the perceptibly dominant role of Russia in the region’s ideological and cultural conflicts; and finally, the under-conceptualisation of culture wars. In what follows, we touch upon each of these themes and outline how the essays in this issue make a contribution to them.
While the statement that culture wars are complex might seem obvious from the outset, the notion of culture wars is often, both in scholarly and more mainstream discourse, framed in binary terms. As Rico Isaacs and Liga Rudzite note in their essay on the culture war in Latvia over the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, the notion of a culture war is typically constructed in terms of a binary value-based dichotomy, whether it is the sacred–secular as framed by James Davison Hunter, the liberal–illiberal (Furedi 2017), the somewhere–anywhere (Goodhart 2017) or the traditionalist–progressive (Uzlaner 2020). As Isaacs and Rudzite argue in their essay, culture wars are ultimately more complex, fluid and dynamic than these elegant dichotomies suggest; underlying these perceptible binary divides are multiple dimensions, agents and institutions who are ultimately caught up in a power struggle over resources and influence. Likewise, Tatiana Zhurzhenko’s essay on restrictions on Russian mass culture in post-Maidan Ukraine highlights how culture wars are not straightforwardly transposed from the US to the rest of the world, but rather demonstrate a varied regional nature and have their own specificity and history. As Zhurzhenko notes, European culture wars are less driven by the religious–secular divide, and are rooted instead in reactions to globalisation, mass migration and multiculturalism. This is something Jonathan Wheatley finds in his essay on Georgia and Jasmin Dall’Agnola in a contribution that looks comparatively across the post-Soviet states.
Irrespective of the history and particularity of post-Soviet culture wars, the phenomenon retains an important religious dimension, as is the case in other parts of the globe. Religious actors and institutions underpinned by a religious moral system are key interlocutors of the conflict. For example, Putin’s rapprochement with the Orthodox Church in the last decade has seen a retrenchment of state–church relations providing the Russian regime with a new voting coalition (Smyth & Soboleva 2014). At the same time, it has given the Church greater scope to influence policy through its discourse of ‘traditional morality’, which has become a significant component of Russia’s culture wars, shaping attitudes and policies towards body politics (such as abortion and sexuality), while stressing the importance of ‘traditional family values’ to Russian society and culture (Agadjanian 2017). In other cases, we see the same collusion between politicians and religious authorities. In Latvia, right-wing conservative parties have been heavily influenced by leading figures in the Catholic Church in their policy towards ratifying the Istanbul Convention. In Georgia, the Georgian Orthodox Church has become increasingly emboldened since the 1990s, spurning any reformist tendencies and adopting a more strident traditionalist discourse helping shape the politics of emerging socially conservative movements and ongoing public debates on LGBTQI rights and even immigration. Therefore, it is often religious morality which is driving or central to culture wars in the post-Soviet space, demonstrating the challenge such faith-based moral orders pose to the secular liberal order associated with globalisation. The importance of religious moralisation and its challenge to globalisation is something which emerges both explicitly and implicitly throughout the contributions in this special issue.
One of the ongoing debates within broader populism studies and the literature on culture wars specifically is the extent to which such cultural conflicts are an elite-led phenomenon or instead driven by changing norms and values within broader society. Hunter’s original work in the US suggested that cultural polarisation is initially driven by political elites but then extends to wider society (Hunter 1991, p. 43). This is challenged by other scholars who have argued that the US culture wars remain an elite phenomenon played out on the airwaves of broadcast media by journalists and political activists (Wolfe 1999; Fiorina et al. 2010). Recent developments in populism studies continue to reflect this explanatory divide. On the one hand Norris and Inglehart (2019, p. 14) argue that populist movements materialise in response to a ‘silent revolution in cultural values’ which emerge from below as a consequence of long-term structural changes. This produces a socially conservative backlash from mass society to feelings of cultural and ideational loss (Hawkins et al. 2017, p. 343). On the other hand, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter argue that rather than being a generational shift, socially conservative populism is a ‘more or less conscious manipulation of the concept of “the people” to push reactionary ideas in the service of power’ (Mondon & Winter 2020, p. 17). The contributions in this special issue reflect the gamut of these perspectives, illustrating the methodological pluralism running throughout the essays in this issue. Jasmin Dall’Agnola uses a multilevel approach relying on survey data to explore the attitudes of post-Soviet citizens towards globalisation, revealing how the values held by ordinary people are shaping culture wars in the region. Likewise, Jonathan Wheatley uses public opinion data to reveal how cultural attitudes are shaping voting preferences whereby cultural issues such as LGBTQI rights, the role of the Orthodox Church and immigration are establishing a political divide between the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation. At the same time, Isaacs and Rudzite stress how the debate over ratification of the Istanbul Convention functioned as a source of political expediency for politicians, Church leaders and other cultural elites. Similarly, Matthew Frear’s essay on Belarus illustrates how homophobic discourses are being used by state authorities and other actors for their own interests. Jeremy Morris and Masha Garibyan go one step further; adopting an ethnographic approach, they find that the Russian public are not simply a pliable and persuadable mass whose attitudes are easily swayed by official discourse, but rather possess their own agency and instead display a tendency to re-appropriate socially conservative official discourse to express their own feelings about the Russian state. In sum, the contribution serves to further complicate our understanding of the roots of culture wars, their purpose and how they are used and adapted by—and even take on new meanings for—the different types of actors involved.
The above illustrates a further contribution of this special issue—which is to show that culture wars are not just an elite-led phenomenon. Instead, the analyses featured in the collected essays illustrate that culture wars can feature multiple agents: not just political elites (both national and local), but also civic organisations, the media, church leaders, journalists, academics and ordinary citizens. For example, as Matthew Frear shows in the case of Belarus, it is not just Lukashenka regime elites who have sought to instrumentalise a homophobic discourse for political gain but also opposition elites. Furthermore, Rico Isaacs and Liga Rudzite illustrate the panoply of actors involved in Latvia’s culture war regarding the Istanbul Convention, including Church authority figures, academics, civic ‘family’ groups, politicians, journalists and NGOs; Tatiana Zhurzhenko, meanwhile, highlights the role of cultural actors, such as rock singers Andrey Makarevich and Yuriy Shevchuk, among others, who got involved in Ukraine’s culture war with Russia. And, as noted above, Jeremy Morris and Masha Garibyan’s ethnographic research highlights the quotidian nature of culture wars—in other words, how ordinary people also have agency in the midst of these ideological tensions.
External actors also play a considerable role in culture wars. In the case of post-Soviet culture wars, Russian actors and organisations have undoubtedly played a dominant role. As the contributions from Isaacs and Rudzite and Frear highlight, there is a considerable influence of the Russian media space in Latvia and Belarus respectively, a phenomenon observed by other scholars as an important factor shaping the development of broader civic and ethnic identities amongst Russian-speaking populations (Vihalemm et al. 2019). But the same Russian-led discourse which permeates and influences anti-gender and social conservative discourses pertaining to tradition and family values in Latvia, Belarus and other post-Soviet states, is equally challenged in others. As Zhurzhenko and Wheatley note in their essays on Ukraine and Georgia respectively, the position of Russian media and other agencies as dominant cultural actors capable of shaping ideological debates within these countries is explicitly challenged. As Zhurzhenko details in her essay, in the post-Maidan context, Ukrainian officials undertook a Kulturkampf aimed at limiting the hegemony of Russian culture in the country. While Russia is not the only influential external actor which is shaping the normative politics of morality in the post-Soviet space, as the Holy See is also a prominent actor (Byrnes 2017), Russian activist groups, television and social media are playing a dominant role in shaping the morality politics of Russian-speaking populations in neighbouring countries and regions.
The final broad theme in this special issue concerns how, across the gamut of scholarship on culture wars, there is a tendency for under-conceptualisation. Aside from Hunter’s original sociological conceptualisation, the term is often just applied as a label that is used to discuss some form of cultural divide. Its popular use in mainstream media discourse across the globe has not aided its analytical utility. No doubt the extent to which the term can be applied across a variety of cultural conflicts in different social and political fields only serves to undermine its clarity and the extent to which it is a meaningful concept. On the one hand, we could just accept the term culture wars as a broad label that we apply to simplify and reduce complex sociological conflicts and relationships and thus not seek to develop a clearer and potentially operationalisable concept for culture wars. On the other hand, not to do so would diminish the opportunity to advance our comparative understanding of these types of cultural and ideological divisions.
In contributing to these broad themes above—complexity, the religious dimension, multiple causal explanations, varied levels of agency, the dominant role of Russia and the under-conceptualisation of the concept of culture wars—the six essays in this special issue attempt to deepen and complicate our understanding of culture wars in the post-Soviet space, and tentatively beyond, by drawing on a range of cases and methodological approaches.
The contributions to the special issue
The first two essays in this special issue seek to develop a clearer conceptual understanding of culture wars in the post-Soviet space. Rico Isaacs and Liga Rudzite in their essay work deductively from the case of Latvia’s struggle to ratify the Istanbul Convention to draw out four constituent components of a culture war which could be operationalised in other contexts. These four elements are: a discourse of moralisation as a feature of culture wars; an important role for external agency in blaming the precipitation of culture wars; the instrumentalisation of culture wars for political expediency; and that culture wars are less about culture and rather a manifestation of ongoing power struggles among a complex of different actors at different levels (both elite and non-elite) over the instruction or restriction of rights, resources and values. Using thematic analysis, and coding techniques drawn from Grounded Theory, Rico Isaacs and Liga Rudzite analyse elite and public discourse pertaining to Latvia’s struggle to ratify the Istanbul Convention based around these four elements of what constitutes a culture war. The analysis finds that the Latvian parliament’s struggle to ratify the Convention can be ultimately understood as a power struggle in which various political, religious and family-based interest groups are aiming to restore a self-perceived equilibrium within Latvian society in response to the perceived loss of male power, prestige and highly contestable notions of ‘traditional’ Latvian family values. The essay eschews simple dichotomies, recognising instead the fluid, dynamic and complex nature of Latvia’s culture war, and using Björn Kraus’ (2014) constructive theory of power to detail how different sides within the debate are seeking to instruct or restrict the rights, resources and values of others.
The second essay in this collection by Tatiana Zhurzhenko also seeks to further our conceptual understanding of culture wars in the post-Soviet space. In her essay, Zhurzhenko integrates James Davison Hunter’s sociological conceptualisation of culture wars alongside the nineteenth-century concept of Kulturkampf to account for both bottom-up and top-down perspectives on the Ukrainian authorities’ post-Maidan restriction of Russian culture. As Zhurzhenko details in her analysis of ongoing public debate and discourse, in the context of a post-colonial syndrome in which some sections of Ukrainian society resented the dominance of Russian culture and language in the country, culture became weaponised in the aftermath of the 2014 events in Maidan and the role of Russian culture and the legitimation of its presence in Ukraine became the object of a new Kulturkampf. In analysing the discourse around the restriction of Russian culture in Ukraine, Zhurzhenko also demonstrates the complex nature of culture wars, teasing out the different arguments for and against the increasing curtailment of Russian culture and, therefore, demonstrating the non-binary nature of culture wars. Zhurzhenko’s analysis unpacks a series of measures which limited the import of Russian books and printed products, restricted Russian films and television products, and placed bans on Russian artists touring the country. These policies, Zhurzhenko argues, can be understood as a form of Kulturkampf, a policy aimed at limiting the hegemony of the Russian culture which then led to the polarising of Ukrainian society into supporters and critics of this policy. Zhurzhenko’s essay demonstrates the diversity of culture wars, showing that in the post-Soviet space they are not limited to questions of tradition, gender and perceived ‘traditional family values’, as in the case of Latvia and the Istanbul Convention, but can instead focus on the securitisation of national identity including the perception that national culture requires protecting from some external malignant force.
Matthew Frear’s essay on homophobic discourse in Belarus challenges the simple interpretation that culture wars in the post-Soviet space are a straightforward replication or direct exportation of the culture war occurring in Russia over sexual minorities. Frear’s analysis illustrates the particularity of the Belarusian context, as the discourse of political homophobia is present not just in the rhetoric and actions of politicians that support the Lukashenka regime, but also in those of the political opposition. The essay undertakes a discourse analysis of various independent Belarusian online news portals, official websites of government bodies and political organisations. The analysis finds that the use of homophobic rhetoric and the promotion of the idea of traditional, natural, family values is neither endemic nor uniform across the Belarussian government and political class, but rather is instrumentalised at certain flash points when it is considered politically expedient to use. While to some extent Frear finds that the political opposition instrumentalises political homophobia in the same way as the government, there is also a section of the opposition that has sustained, for two decades, a consistent homophobic discourse in defence of religious values, heterosexual marriage and the importance of having children. Through an examination of the case of Belarus, the essay highlights the elite-led nature of culture wars, their instrumentalisation for political expediency and the extent to which a focus on polarised binaries underestimates the heterogeneity within each opposing camp in the conflict.
Jeremy Morris and Masha Garibyan’s essay, adopting an ethnographic approach to culture wars in the Russian case, rejects the idea of a recent ‘conservative turn’ in Russia, arguing instead that such a normative shift is largely isolated to elite discourse. Rather, through a series of deep intimate ethnographic encounters, Morris and Garibyan find that while their participants identify to some extent with elite-led discourse regarding homophobic culture war type tropes such as ‘gayropa’ there is also considerable digression from the ‘script’ of elite-led public opinion formation. Through their interviews with participants, Morris and Garibyan identify how homophobia and traditional attitudes to the family in Russia speak more to the ambivalence in people’s evaluation of their own state and its capacity to inculcate, nourish, favour or punish social behaviours. The essay therefore makes an important contribution in terms of re-introducing the agency of ordinary citizens into debates about culture wars, allowing us to move away from seeing the broader populace as some pliable mass whose views are easily shaped by ongoing elite discourses.
The final two essays in this special issue move from the particular to the general, with a focus on larger-scale quantitative methodological approaches. Jonathan Wheatley’s essay examines how a cultural dimension is now structuring political competition and voting preferences in Georgia. Using data generated by a Voting Advice Application (VAA), Wheatley finds that there is an ideology-based politics in Georgia which is premised on competing interpretations of culture and identity. The data reveal that the division between religious traditionalists and social conservatives on the one hand, and a younger, liberal and progressive constituency on the other is rooted in a social structure comprising the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation, with the former adopting a position of ‘cultural integration’ and the latter of ‘cultural demarcation’. The analysis also reveals that the main ideological divides that split the Georgian population are, in part at least, reflected in voter choice, and there are indications that party competition structuring is also emerging along these new cultural dividing lines between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation.
Jasmin Dall’Agnola’s essay, which completes this special issue, uses an even wider lens to study the phenomenon of culture wars in the post-Soviet space. Developing Wheatley’s focus on the polarisation of the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation, Dall’Agnola uses data from the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey to examine the effects of globalisation on post-Soviet citizens’ identification with their nation. Contributing to findings elsewhere in this issue which observe culture wars in the post-Soviet space as complex and infused with particularity, Dall’Agnola finds that while globalisation does impact on citizens’ feelings of national identity, it also departs partially from the conventional understanding of the relationship between globalisation and national identity in the West. The analysis in Dall’Agnola’s essay demonstrates that a post-Soviet person’s embrace or rejection of national identity is not predetermined by educational background, a factor largely perceived to determine the polarisation of cultural politics in the West. At the same time, the findings show some congruence with culture war patterns in the West, with there being: a class divide with working-class respondents more likely to embrace strong feelings of national identity; a generational divide with younger citizens more likely to embrace global citizenship; and a geographical divide with urban citizens less likely to be patriotic and willing to fight for their country. Thus, Dall’Agnola’s essay provides a telescopic overview of culture wars in the post-Soviet space, via the lens of citizens’ normative attitudes towards national identity and globalisation, highlighting both the specificity of the phenomenon in this region and its compatibility with culture wars in other parts of the world.