One of the starkest clashes in the scholarship of ethnicity pits experts who explain separatism as the natural expression of national consciousness (be it primordial or constructed) against theorists who deny that ethnicity plays any significant causal role. This chapter begins our empirical discussion of separatism by arguing against both of these approaches (termed here ethnicity-as-epiphenomenal theory and the National Consciousness version of ethnicity-as-conflictual theory) and starting to build the empirical argument for the relational theory.

We begin by considering the puzzling contrast between Ukraine and Uzbekistan, back when they were component parts of the USSR. If National Consciousness theories of separatism are to escape the tautology of considering separatism a defining feature of national consciousness, the crucial causal element of national consciousness is a sense of national distinctiveness vis-à-vis the dominant ethnic group in the union. Prior to the Gorbachev era, leading experts frequently argued that Uzbeks and other Central Asians were highly conscious of national distinctions separating them from the dominant Russians and that the degree of national consciousness of Ukraine's population was lower than that of the Uzbeks due to the large part of its culture and history that it shared with Russia. They thus frequently expected Uzbekistan, not Ukraine, to pose the greatest challenge to Soviet unity. Yet it was Ukraine, not Uzbekistan, that willfully sought secession and dealt the death blow to the USSR. Thus, more recent National Consciousness accounts posit that national identification was actually weak in unionist Central Asia and strong in secessionist Ukraine, raising serious questions of circular reasoning.