The subject of this paper is a historical analysis of the Belarusian nation-building process with some emphasis put on the role played by language as a marker for delimitation and as a national symbol used for political mobilisation. The purpose of this analysis is to seek explanations for the weakness of the Belarusian national identity today by referring to the modern theories on nationalism.

Nation-building can be studied with the help of various theoretical approaches of which the currently dominating are the so-called constructionist/instrumentalist approach (Anderson 1983, Gellner 1983, Hobsbawm 1990) and the postmodernist one that treats nationalism as a discourse (Brubaker 1996). However, all these approaches do not satisfactorily explain people's intense emotional engagement in national questions. Therefore we could see in the 1990s the emergence of the theories trying to add an important socio-psychological dimension to the analysis of nationalism. One of these is William Bloom's identification theory (see Bloom