Role of Nationalism in the Disintegration of the Soviet Union: Employing a Constructivist Approach

Abstract

It is pertinent to understand why and how did the Soviet Union come into existence, what did it achieve and what not, was it or was it not an empire, how did it collapse and did it really collapse after all, should we regard the demise of the Soviet Union as end of the bipolar world and, why? The Soviet Union (especially its collapse) continues to baffle international relations theorists particularly the ones associated with the realist and neo-realist school of thoughts as they badly failed not only to predict the disintegration of the Soviet Union but their prediction that very soon other actors in the international arena such as Japan and Germany will surface as powerful counter-weights to the US and the world will thus turn into a multipolar world. This has not happened yet since 1991. On the other hand, the major or core ethnic group of the former Soviet Union, the Russians, continue to challenge US hegemony in space, waters, air and on earth. Thus I wonder how exactly and if the so called Soviet collapse has really happened. Therefore, I am applying the recently developed (middle to late 1980s) constructivist school of thought (both the social and IR constructivism) to the Soviet collapse to figure out if it has really collapsed in terms of its political ends and ventures.