ABSTRACT

The cultural state commenced by fashioning political-territorial entities with rights of self-governance, ultimately conferring a legal status on individual carriers of culture, effectively enabling and shaping a mode of collective life in the first place. Commentators have long understood the ethno-territorial scheme and the catalogue of official nationalities as interdependent and mutually implicative, indeed mutually constitutive. Law determined the spatial and institutional dimensions of cultural polities; law fixed the social meaning of cultural identity. The USSR, far from being simply a housing or shell preserving earlier, imperial era, nationalist aspirations, was rather an incubator for national identities in the first place. Soviet nationalities policy and ethno-federal institutions constructed ethnic communities in specific ways towards specific ends. For post-colonial theorists of law, colonial states pioneered the use of law to create rigid hierarchies among colonial populations, deploying race and tribe as legal categories and statuses capable of elaborate differentiation to serve the purposes of colonial rule.