The Construction of a National People

Official histories of the Soviet period tended to project the contemporary national and ethnic categories onto the past, so as to tell the story of the Mongol or Khalkh ‘peoples’ through time (e.g., Gongor 1978). However, more recent scholarship (e.g., Atwood 1994, Bulag 1998, Kaplonski 1998, Munkh- Erdene 2006, Elverskog 2006) has challenged these historical representations. These approaches suggest that national identity, as it is understood today, is a relatively recent development in Mongolia, although authors differ in their understanding of politically significant identities in the Qing and pre-Qing periods. Kaplonski argues that ‘[a]lthough its origins can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century, national identity on a broader scale became important only with the establishment of the socialist regime in the 1920s. […] It was, therefore […] largely the socialist government itself that was responsible for creating and propagating an identity based on the concept of ‘nation’ in Mongolia’ (1998: 35).

In the Qing period (1691-1911), Mongolia was ruled by an aristocracy – the descendants of Chinggis Khan's lineage who held the title taiji. Mongolia was divided into about a hundred petty principalities termed khoshuu, conventionally translated as ‘banner’ in English, each governed by a taiji who held the title of zasag (ruler). In this era it is difficult to identify a clear sense of Mongol ethnic identity that is distinct from the tracing of noble or elite ancestry (Munkh-Erdene 2006, Atwood 1994, Elverskog 2006).

Mongol commoners did not share common descent with the nobility, nor could they do so even in theory since descent from royal ancestors was the basis of aristocratic status. When, in a later era, Mongolian nationalists cast back through historical records for records of a common ethnic origin for all Mongols, they found accounts of ruling lineages. Historically, the ‘lineage of the Mongols,’ then, was primarily a reference to the aristocracy. As Atwood (2004: 507) puts it ‘[Chinggis Khan’s] descendants, the Taiji class, were the only full members of the Mongolian community.’

But in the twentieth century this aristocratic political discourse was transformed by new ideologies. Mongolian independence movements began to construct a new discourse of popular nationalism in which the shared descent of the Chinggisid lineage was used as the template for the concept of the Mongolian nationality.