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We live in an era of profound uncertainty with many dimensions and layers. The principles of the world order require re-examination and reconfiguration. Europe, with its ideals of freedom and democracy, is seeking ways to preserve its significant role in shaping humanity’s future.

What is happening in our region — the war, the confrontation with authoritarianism and imperialism, the striving for national liberation — is part of this complex global context.

At the local level, the Belarusian pro-democratic community is undergoing a process of national self-determination, the urgency of which emerged after 2020 and, to an even more radical degree, after 2022. This process requires constant reflection because, on the one hand, it is marked by internal polemics, and on the other, it determines the ability of the Belarusian pro-democratic community to act in a coordinated manner in the interests of Belarus.

The current situation regarding national self-determination in the Belarusian pro-democratic community is characterised by a certain controversy. This can be traced by analysing how different actors understand and interpret the key concepts through which this self-determination takes place. In the lexicon of the democratic forces, at least three such concepts can be identified: national identity, decolonisation, and geopolitical choice. There are marked differences among representatives of different political and social groups regarding each of them.

1. National Identity

Based on texts and speeches (videos, podcasts) available in the public sphere, two prevailing approaches to the question of national identity can be identified.

The first approach, in its rhetoric, resembles the position of ethnic nationalism. It is partially represented in some documents of the leading political institutions of the democratic forces. In addition, it is promoted by a number of well-known Belarusian cultural figures and civic activists. At the same time, many Belarusian intellectuals and cultural figures (including Belarusian-speaking ones) adhere to a different approach. It differs from the first in its less dogmatic attitude toward historical myths and nation-building narratives, as well as a more flexible view of the language question.

This divergence cannot be called polarisation, because the representatives of each approach do not form a homogeneous group with a fixed position uniformly shared by all. However, the tendency toward controversy is nonetheless clear.

For now, it does not appear to be producing any serious destructive effects within the pro-democratic community. However, depending on how events unfold, the controversy over the understanding of national identity could develop into an ideological conflict.Here, one may recall the situation at the beginning of the 21st century, when researchers identified two main versions of national identity in Belarus — the official (neo-Soviet) and the opposition («Adradzhenne«, or national revival) version — which constituted opposing ideological poles. At the same time, there existed a «third way», whose representatives — Akudovich, Abushenko, Babkou — saw the Belarusian situation as more complex and irreducible to either of those ideological frameworks.

What emerges, then, is a notable restructuring within today’s pro-democratic community. As what might be called the «official» discourse of the democratic forces begins to crystallise as a discourse of ethnic nationalism, what previously appeared in that constellation as the «third way» is now articulated as the «opposition».

2. Decolonisation

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, there has been a rapid development of the discourse on decolonisation in Ukraine, Belarus, and other countries in the region. The concept and practices of decolonisation are now widely represented across various spheres of the Belarusian pro-democratic community — political, academic, activist, and artistic.

The demand for the concept of «decolonisation» stems from a sharp awareness of the need to counter the imperial (colonial) ambitions of the Russian authorities aimed at the political and cultural subjugation of Belarus. Many «decolonisation» initiatives seek to restore the political and epistemic agency of Belarusians and to advance a distinctly Belarusian — rather than Russocentric — vision of historical heritage and cultural distinctiveness. In other words, the spread of the decolonisation discourse rests on entirely legitimate grounds and reflects a genuine existential threat to the Belarusian nation from Putin’s Russia — both in terms of state sovereignty and in terms of an «imagined» cultural-historical community.

The controversy surrounding the concept of decolonisation lies in the debatable appropriateness of its application to Belarus. The uncritical transfer of the postcolonial and decolonial lens — which in its classical form was developed for countries of the «Global South» — to Belarus as a former post-Soviet country appears not only problematic from an academic standpoint, but also counterproductive in practical terms. Among the reasons that complicate any straightforward transfer, foremost is the fact that Belarusians were active participants in and beneficiaries of Soviet modernisation (industrialisation, urbanisation, and scientific and technological development).

If the decolonisation discourse indiscriminately conflates several empires — the pre-revolutionary Russian, the Soviet, and the contemporary Russian — it will inevitably encounter internal resistance from the older generation of Belarusians and will resist the characterisation of themselves as «colonised» in that era — at least, not «colonised» in the same sense in which, for example, Indians were colonised by the British.

3. Geopolitical Choice

Against the backdrop of the Lukashenka regime’s Russia-centric geopolitics, pro-democratic Belarusians are advancing two distinct positions: a position of neutrality (in its more radical version, «Finlandisation») and a «European choice« position, which opens up the prospect of Belarus’s future integration into the European Union. The latter was formulated by the leading political institutions of the democratic forces following Russia’s full-scale military aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Proponents of both positions emphasise security questions — the security of Belarus in the context of the international agenda for the strategic rethinking of the European security system as a whole.

In this context, it is important to note that the question of including Belarus in the European security system has good prospects only if Belarusians are also perceived by other European nations in a (geo)cultural sense as a nation belonging to the «common European space». Today, unfortunately, one can observe a certain divergence between geopolitical and geocultural perspectives in the perception of Belarus: pragmatic approaches driven by regional security imperatives have not yet been matched by meaningful shifts in the cultural re-evaluation of Belarus across European societies. The understanding of Belarus continues to be filtered through the prism of imperial — Soviet and Russian — historical narratives. From this perspective, the discourse of neutrality, as well as the tradition of framing Belarusian culture as a borderland culture («between Russia and the West«), do not contribute to a reassessment of Belarus’s place in Europe. In a broader historical perspective, they correlate with the cultural demi-orientalisation of Eastern Europe — that is, the perception of Eastern Europe as an «other Europe», distinct in civilisational terms from «authentic», Western Europe. This understanding of Eastern Europe is an ideological construct that emerged during the Enlightenment and has been interpreted differently depending on the geopolitical context (e.g., during the Cold War, after the collapse of the USSR).

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has prompted a paradigmatic revision of Europeans’ mental maps. Today’s discussion of European security issues is intrinsically linked to the reconceptualisation of Europe as a geopolitical and geocultural space. A reassessment of the concept of Eastern Europe, together with a repositioning of Belarus within the European space, are integral components of this process.

Summary

The controversies over national self-determination in the Belarusian pro-democratic community outlined above are a natural phenomenon of political life.

Political life is not only — and not even primarily — a struggle for power.

Politics begins with the articulation of ideas and goals capable of uniting people and creating a foundation for collective action. Accordingly, political struggle is a struggle of ideologies and political programmes. As long as representatives of the democratic forces do not have the opportunity to participate in civilised competition for power in Belarus, conditions of exile still leaves room for formulating and publicly debating various political programmes. In other words, the existence of controversies is not a cause for alarm. The real cause for concern would be if the democratic forces were to lack the tools and the will to engage with them constructively.