Echo of 1989? Protest imaginaries and identity dilemmas in Belarus

Abstract

The revolution of 2020 in Belarus has often been described as a new 1989 and there is no doubt that the emancipatory appeal of the Belarusian protests is similar to the one that sustained the 1989 revolutions. But will building the democratic system – the major aspiration of the Belarusian protesters – follow the scripts of liberalisation and Westernisation in evidence in other Eastern and Central European countries? Will self-determination in post-Lukashenko Belarus follow a scenario modelled on the patterns adopted by other Eastern European and post-Soviet states, where ethnocentric national identities and the memory of victims of communism became distinctive markers of Eastern European post-communism? Examining the symbolic dimension of the protest repertoire the article demonstrates how the protests rearranged the system of historical and cultural references that shaped the foundation of the Belarusian collective memory and identity discourses since 1994. It reveals how a broad variety of actors engaged in contention activated a process of re-signification of the cultural and political symbols and ideas and led to the formation of a blended socio-cultural imaginary, which integrates previously disconnected and competing projects and ideologies.