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Understanding Nationalism in the Graveyard of Empire: The Ukraine Case and Historiography of Nationalism (II) – Histories Divided and Entwined

In Ukraine, recent elections in the disputed separatist republics of the eastern regions and national elections which have indicated a decisively pro-western turn in the country’s politics, have deepened internal divisions within the country. Comment on Ukrainian affairs has consistently emphasized the importance of regional factors and an ‘east-west’ divide in the country’s history and politics. Yet it is also possible to overstate the centrality of a simple geographical line formed by the Dnieper River. More recent scholarship has emphasized not only the geographical divide but its relation to more complex regional patterns to Ukrainian history, and how Ukrainian national identity has been understood and formed not only in conflict with but in more complex relation to its historical ‘others’ – most notably, in both historical and contemporary contexts, Russia.

The studies considered in this part of the series all focus on how this process has taken shape, dealing specifically, inter alia, with concepts of ‘romantic nationalism’ in Ukraine, the development of Ukrainian national(ist) historiography in relation to the country’s geographical situation, and the role of certain historical ‘myths and memories’ in the history of Ukrainian nationalism(s). This part of our series on Ukraine will contribute further to research on the country, some of which will appear in next year’s special edition of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism on Ukraine (15.1).

Serhiy Bilenky has emphasised the historical rather than geographical significance of this ‘east-west’ divide in his work Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (2012). He points to the role of competing conceptions of national belonging in shaping Ukraine’s history, and how this as much as the political and geographical factors has worked against the development of an overarching Ukrainian identity that can overcome regional challenges. What complicated the history of nationalism in Ukraine was not only that ‘for most natives of Ukraine engaged in the discourse about Ukraine, the Ukrainian imagined community (with or without a national state) was compatible with Russianness’, but also an idea of Ukraine ‘helped both Russians and Poles not only to arrive at their most authentic national histories and folk traditions but also to strengthen their national identities.’ (Bilenky 2012: 89, 306)

Perceptions of Ukraine as a ‘borderland’ between ‘west’ and ‘east’ have influenced comment on the 2014 conflict (source: FT.com)

Similarly, in From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Nation Through Cultural Mythology, 1865-1870 (2010), Olga Maiorova points out that ‘Russian and Ukrainian national identities competed for the same ancestors, heartlands, and historical events.’ Any analysis which tries to strictly separate the (conjoined) development of Ukrainian and Russian nationalism merely restates, therefore, the assumptions of these nationalisms. In Maiorova’s analysis, the development of a Ukrainian historical narrative which emphasised antagonism with and separation from Russia and that of a Russian narrative which emphasised the timeless commonality of Ukrainians within a greater Slavic community could and did spring from the same sources.

In a more in-depth analysis of a single important historical ‘myth’, specifically the ‘Cossack mythology’ and its importance to both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms, Serhii Plokhy notes that it was certain terrains in the south and east of Ukraine that became crucially important to both Russian and Ukrainian senses of nationhood –regions in which the present crisis is concentrated. Highlighting the utility of this ‘myth’ for different groups, Plokhy points out that it was as important for nineteenth-century Russian liberals as it was for Ukrainian intellectuals. (2012: 3-4) On the other hand, ‘by focusing on the heroic deeds of the Cossacks’, the ‘myth’ of the Cossacks ‘provided the emerging Ukrainian nation with a story of its origins…as an ethnic group’ (2012: 7) centred in eastern and southern regions of present-day Ukraine, a story which provided both a distinct point of origins for the Ukrainian nation different from and potentially in conflict with its ‘Russian’ heritage.

In a more recent volume, authors such as Georgiy Kasianov, Roman Szporluk and Andreas Kappeler have noted the continuing importance of a more general ‘east’-‘west’ divide in the historiography, which has quite often been conceived of in ‘civilisational’ terms, even when not explicitly as an integral part of the Ukrainian nationalist historical narrative. This form of argument has ‘ethnicized’ Ukrainian national identity as much as any of its ‘rivals’, and divided Ukrainian understandings of the country’s history into what may be ‘mutually exclusive and irreconcilable’ regional narratives. (Kasianov 2009: 19, Kappeler 2009: 56, Szporluk 2009: 273)

Much commentary has focused on linguistic divisions within Ukraine. However this is just one of a number of factors in the ‘east’-‘west’ divide. (source: guardian.com)

These analyses focus largely on the ‘ideological’ aspect of nationalism and the role of ‘and narratives of the past in delineating conceptions of national belonging. In emphasising the different uses to which certain narratives could be put, and the alternative sources of belonging that seem to have been available for Ukrainians (such as that of a Russian-oriented identity), they reject, largely, the notion of any single Ukrainian sense of national belonging. On the other hand, and equally importantly, they find that the same applies to ‘non-Ukrainian’ ideas of national belonging in the country, and agree that some of the most important cultural constituents of modern Ukrainian national identity – such as the ‘Cossack myth’ and the idea of Ukraine as a ‘bridge’ between ‘east’ and ‘west’ – have long pre-dated the age of nationalism.

There is a lengthy continuity of consensus in historical scholarship on Ukraine from different viewpoints ranging from political and social history to newer comparative and transnational methods on the importance of the ‘east’-‘west’ divide and regional divisions in Ukraine. These studies in particular, however, tend to employ a constructivist reading of nationalism(s), which, in simple terms, is interested primarily in the importance of competing conceptions of national identity within a given context and the varying conditions under which they arise and develop; and the practices by which nationalists ‘create’ nations and nationalisms through highly selective, or ‘instrumentalist’ usage of given ‘myths and memories’ or ‘objective’ ethno-cultural ties, rather than attributing any permanence or simple causal power to these factors.

The next part of this special series on historiographical understandings of nationalism in Ukraine will consider further and more closely the role of regional differences and particularities in Ukrainian history.

References

Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (2012)

Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther (eds.), A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography (2009)

Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Nation Through Cultural Mythology, 1865-1870 (2010)

Serhii Plokhy, The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (2012)

‘Ukraine elections highlight nation’s split between east and west’, The Washington Post, 25/10/2014

‘West condemns rebel elections in eastern Ukraine’, The Telegraph, 31/10/14

Article Spotlights

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Read on for Article Spotlights from the SEN Archives focusing on nationalism-related issues raised in SEN News Bites over the last several weeks.

Alexander Shvarts’s piece considers Soviet Jewish diaspora identity in Canada:

Alexander Shvarts, Soviet Jews in Toronto: Ethnic Self-Identity and Issues of Integration, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 38-55.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a Jewish ethnic group, suchas the Soviet Jews in Toronto, that contains both strong ethnic and some religious components will be more likely to assimilate into Canadian society or retain their ethnic identity. The paper is based on interviews with a group of thirteen Russian Jews who emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union.

Emma Haddad’s essay deals with how the refugee’s outsider status interacts with the boundary-forming function of the modern nation-state.

Emma Haddad, The Refugee: Forging National Identities, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 23-38.

Refugees are the side-effect of the creation of separate nation-states, moreover of nation-states that have failed to enforce a system of substantive sovereignty that would ensure the protection of all their citizens. Refugees are therefore anomalies in the system of nation-states and challenge the assumption that all individuals belong to a territory. The refugee’s identity is forged precisely by his or her lack of belonging, his or her status as an ‘outsider’.

Ramón Máiz’s piece considers how the particularly structuring of multi-national states as well as specific party organization features can benefit secessionist or separatist groups.

Ramón Máiz, Making Opportunities: Contemporary Evolution of Galician Nationalism in Spain (1982–2001), Volume 3, Issue 2, 2003, pp. 20-34.

This article shows that the fact that the Bloque Nacionalista Galego went from being a marginal force to the second largest regional party in the Galician autonomous parliament was due both to the favourable political opportunity structure of the new institutional setting of the Spanish state of autonomies and also to its outstanding capacity for a multilevel organization, charismatic leadership and effective mobilisation repertories, together with the moderation of its initially radical nationalist discourse. Particularly, a successful strategy of frame realignment allowed it to connect with the overlapping and dual Galician-Spanish identity of most Galician voters.

Article Spotlights compiled by Shane Nagle.

Understanding Nationalism in the Graveyard of Empire: The Ukraine Case and Historiography of Nationalism (I)

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Introduction

In February of this year we witnessed the beginning of the 2014 Crimean Crisis. For decades this region, home to an ethnically Russian majority, as well as eastern Ukraine more widely, has been oriented more towards Russia than (western) Ukraine. Political instability in Ukraine centred in Kiev and a decision by the President Viktor Yanukovych to reverse moves for closer ties with the European Union in favour of deepening those with Russia, led to Yanukovych fleeing the capital after an outbreak of violence between security forces and protesters there. This was followed by disturbances in the Crimean region, during which armed pro-Russian and Russian state forces began to take over the region. Following this, the Crimean Parliament called for a referendum on the region’s constitutional status. Subsequently, based on the referendum’s outcome, the Crimean Parliament decided on secession from Ukraine in order to join the Russian Federation. Moscow agreed, and on March 18^th the Russian government and the separatist Crimean government signed a treaty to that effect. The annexation – the first of its kind anywhere in Europe since 1945 – was internationally condemned as illegal and illegitimate, and the region remains in dispute. Since then, an armed conflict has been in occurrence between Ukrainian troops and separatist militias, as well as with Russian forces inside Ukraine. Spreading out from Crimea, a general conflict has arisen in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian state and other breakaway ‘republics’ (including in the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast areas, both part of the larger Donbass region) that have oriented themselves towards Russia. In August, in a conference in Yalta (where, perhaps significantly the map of post-war Europe was decided by the Allied powers during the Second World War between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin), Russian President Vladimir Putin affirmed that under no circumstances would the annexation of Crimea be reversed. Unrecognized elections that have just taken place in Donetsk and Luhansk (where there are now around 15,000 Russian troops) may, as argued by Ukraine scholar Taras Kuzio, establish ‘a de facto new border with Ukraine.’

Orthodox monks pray next to armed servicemen near Russian army vehicles outside a Ukrainian border guard post in the Crimean town of Balaclava on 1 March 2014

Seventy years ago, in his seminal study The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of its Origins and Background (1944), the historian Hans Kohn distinguished between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ forms of nationalism. Since then, despite its shortcomings, this distinction, and its re-workings in forms such as the ‘civic’-‘ethnic’ dichotomy remains highly influential in its different forms, being a kind of ‘theoretical common sense’ in nationalism studies.

For Kohn, while ‘Western’ forms of nationalism were based fundamentally on ideas of citizenship as opposed to ethnic belonging, ‘Eastern’ forms of nationalism were based on a collectivist and illiberal conception of ethnic descent and commonality. Again, this seems to match with the nature of the Crimean conflict: ethnic Russians have rejected established state boundaries in favour of far more ‘meaningful’ commonalities with the Russian Federation based on common culture and historical memories.

While Kohn did not believe that his distinction matched exactly with European geography, it has not been uncommon for central and eastern Europe, for most of its history a region contested by rival empires, to be seen as a borderland in which different forms of nationalism have come into conflict, often violent.

In the Crimean conflict we can see, arguably, Kohn’s conflict played out in literal terms, in an antagonism between ‘west’ and ‘east’ in Ukraine. This is, after all, a ‘common sense’ interpretation of the conflict, insofar as it matches the ‘common sense’ distinction of civic and ethnic nationalisms among many scholars of nationalism (as noted by Rogers Brubaker in his essay on civic and ethnic nationalism in his 2004 book Ethnicity Without Groups).

Yet how useful are these ‘common sense’ notions to understanding the conflict? Does the political and media narrative hold weight in terms of what scholars have come to understand about nationalist fissures in Ukraine, a ‘graveyard’ of three empires?

The situation in eastern Ukraine is emblematic of a number of problems central to the study of nationalism: the relationship between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conceptions of nation and nationalism, the shaping and contesting of nation-state borders, the presence of disputed regions and ‘non-national’ regional affiliations, the relations between ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora’ nationalisms, as well as differing and conflicting narratives of ‘national(ist)’ historical memory, to name only a few (the Kiev ‘uprising’ of November 2013-February 2014 has been described as both a ‘Cossack Rebellion’, and a ‘neo-Nazi coup’).

Ukraine: Language and political divisions (Source: Reuters)

With more than half a year having passed since the beginning of the conflict that remains ongoing, and has now claimed over 4,000 lives since April, and may yet escalate further with the order for the deployment of more Ukrainian troops to the disputed eastern regions, SEN Online will provide a brief and accessible survey of some recent important English-language scholarship on the history of nationalism in Ukraine and the Ukrainian-Russian borderland, and seek to examine its relevance for how contemporary affairs in Ukraine may be analysed and understood. This will complement a more extensive analysis of the conflict in Ukraine that will appear in a special issue of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism next year (15.1, April 2015).

The theoretical study of nationalism came relatively late to the analysis of the nations of the Soviet Union, with sustained archival research unencumbered by political constraints by both Soviet and international scholars not really being possible until the post-1991 period. As such, events such as those that have taken place in the Ukraine in the past several months, less than twenty-five years since the end of the Soviet Union, provide an opportune moment to reflect on how recent historical scholarship on nationalism has come to understand the problem of nationalism in one of the classic ‘graveyards’ of empire and post-imperial ‘borderlands’.

The first part of the survey will consider how historians have observed the west-east divide in Ukrainian history, and its significance for Ukraine and nationalisms in the country.

NB: Images sourced from Reuters

References

‘Ukraine Crisis: Russia vows troops will stay’, BBC News, 2/3/14

‘Ukraine Crisis: Russia isolated in UN vote’, BBC News, 15/3/14

‘Crimean Parliament formally applies to join Russia’, BBC News, 17/3/14

‘Crimea Crisis’ Russian President Putin’s speech annotated’, BBC News, 19/3/14

‘Putin to decide next moves in standoff with West over Ukraine’, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 11, 150, 14/8/14

Russia annexes Donbass but loses Ukraine’, Financial Times, 4/11/14

‘Ukraine crisis: Poroshenko orders troops to key cities’, BBC News, 4/11/14

‘Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by Andrew Wilson – review’, The Guardian, 5/11/14

Books

Rogers Brubaker, Ethncity Without Groups (London, Harvard University Press, 2004)

Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of its Origins and Background (New York, Macmillan, 1945)

Article Spotlights

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Today’s Article Spotlights consider the role of regional identities and centre-periphery relations in relation to contemporary nationalism, as well as the conceptual challenges facing scholars of nationalism as its meanings are necessarily being redefined. These Spotlights will introduce further writing from SEN Online that will take stock of the recent Scottish independence referendum result and its implications.

Anthony Smith’s essay from 2008 surveys the state of scholarship on nationalism and its likely future directions.

Anthony D. Smith, The Shifting Landscapes of ‘Nationalism’, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 317-330.

The field of study that comprises nations and nationalism is often seen as riven by a conflict between ‘modernists’ and their opponents. In fact, the field is far more fragmented than such a characterisation suggests. From the very first normative critical essays 150 years ago, it has been composed of shifting landscapes in which different approaches and perspectives overlap and cross-cut each other like intersecting monologues. While there was a short period of engagement in the 1980s, a ‘classic debate’ between modernists, perennialists and ethno-symbolists who embraced a macro-analytic framework and a causal-historical methodology, the familiar landscape has radically shifted to reveal a series of deconstructionist strategies and techniques; and while rational choice theories, among others, continue to embrace causal-historical analysis, there has been a rejection in many quarters of both macro-analytic narratives and causal-historical analysis. The new anti-essentialist strategies include feminist critiques, the study of everyday nationhood, the hybridisation of national identities, and debates about the ‘ethics of nationalism’ which echo earlier critiques. Above all, there is a new concern with the application of globalising trends to nations and nationalism, and especially with the role of nations without states, and the impact of supranationalism, large-scale migration and ‘religious nationalisms’.

Kees Terlouw’s essay considers the relationship between contemporary regional identities and globalization, with a comparative focus on the Netherlands and Germany.

Kees Terlouw, Rescaling Regional Identities: Communicating Thick and Thin Regional Identities, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2009, pp. 452-464.

Novel forms of regional identities emerge in response to global competitive pressures and challenges to the nation-state. Regions have to react and position their identity in relation to the rescaling of statehood. Especially, the growing autonomy of regional administrations makes support from local stakeholders more important. Communicating a specific regional identity is one of the instruments regional administrations use for mobilising support. However, at the same time old, traditional regional identities become more fluid. Regional identity traditionally focuses on shared past and specific social and cultural characteristics. Especially globalisation and individualisation undermine this traditional thick regional identity. Regional administrations have to adjust their communicated regional identity. By communicating the image of a future oriented region that can face the challenges of global competition, they increasingly use a thin regional identity. This paper analyses different case studies from the Netherlands and Germany.

Alberto Spektorowski’s essay considers the role that regionalism has played in the discourse of contemporary right-wing and extremist nationalism in Europe.

Alberto Spektorowski, Ethnoregionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of the European Third Way, Volume 7, Issue 3, 2007, pp. 45-63.

While the idea of a Europe of its peoples, or a post-nation-state ‘regionalist Europe’ is largely applauded by liberal, radical democratic, and post-colonial theorists, who welcome this development as an antidote to narrow nationalism, ideologues of the New Right had adopted this idea to their exclusionist political design. Based on what can be defined as ‘multiculturalism of the Right’, the New Right proposes a new European nationalist resurrection based upon the idea of the reemergence of multiple European organic identities that would set a cultural barrier against immigrant communities. In order to elaborate this plan the New Right makes use of the intellectual contribution of old anti-liberal integralist sources at the fringes of fascism. The latter set the path for a European ‘third way’ in the 1930s and the New Right attempts to reestablish this trend in a post-modern Europe. This article does not claim that Europe of the peoples is an anti-liberal project, but asks to heed ‘unexpected’ political uses of the idea.

Finally, this piece from Diego Muro and Alejandro Quiroga considers the nation-building process in modern Spain from a centre-periphery perspective. This essay will prove especially interesting to those thinking about the implications of the rise of Scottish nationalism for regional nationalist and secessionist movements in Spain, such as that of Catalonia.

Diego Muro and Alejandro Quiroga, Building the Spanish Nation: The Centre-Periphery Dialectic, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2004, pp. 18-37.

This paper provides an historical overview of Spain’s nation-building process from the nineteenth century to the present time. Using Stein Rokkan’s centre-periphery paradigm, the paper argues that a pervasive feature in contemporary Spanish history is the dialectical relationship between the Spanish nation and the peripheral nations of Catalonia and the Basque Country. From this perspective, the Spanish nation-building process is understood as one of the main triggering events for the emergence of peripheral nationalisms at the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, tensions between the core and the periphery help to explain why Spain has a quasi-federal institutional structure. Recent interest in ‘constitutional patriotism’ for example, can only be understood in relation to Catalan and Basque initiatives to reform their autonomy status.

Article Spotlights compiled by Dr Shane Nagle.

Article Spotlights

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Read on for Article Spotlights from the SEN Archives focusing on recent SEN News Bites. Here we focus on diaspora nationalism and processes of ‘othering’ in response to immigration.

Giorgio Shani’s article deals with diaspora Sikh nationalism, and the degree to which the concept of a territorial Sikh homeland is a diasporic ‘invention’.

Giorgio Shani, The Territorialization of Identity: Sikh Nationalism in the Diaspora, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2002, pp. 11-19.

This article seeks to examine Sikh nationalism in the diaspora. It will be argued that Sikh diaspora nationalism is concerned with instilling a sense of the global unity of all Sikhs through an involvement in the politics of the homeland. This is achieved through the articulation of a Sikh nationalist discourse disseminated through the internet for consumption by the diaspora.

Professor John Hutchinson’s essay focuses on the Irish community in London between the turn of the twentieth century and the achievement of Irish independence.

John Hutchinson, Diaspora Dilemmas and Shifting Allegiances: The Irish in London between Nationalism, Catholicism and Labourism (1900–22), Volume 10, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 107-125.

Focused on the London Irish, this article discusses the diasporic dilemmas of Irish Catholics in England who oscillated between four claims to loyalty in the early twentieth century. Liberals and later the labour movement sought to mobilise them for radical political and socialist goals; the Catholic Church to support religious education against secularist threats; a homeland nationalism to advance the prospects of Irish parliamentary autonomy; and a diasporic nationalism to defend their ethnic interests in England. These pressures peaked during the First World War and the Irish War of Independence. The overall effect of this nationalist mobilisation may have been to advance their integration into English social and political institutions.

Adrienne Kochman’s piece deals with the role of Ukrainian museums in producing a ‘culturally authentic history of Ukraine’, focusing in particular on the United States.

Adrienne Kochman, The Role of Ukrainian Museums in the United States Diaspora in Nationalising Ukrainian Identity, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2008, pp. 207-229.

Ukrainian museums in the United States diaspora have attempted to construct a culturally authentic history outside Ukraine itself where, for the better part of the twentieth century, Ukrainian artistic endeavors were defined within a russified Soviet framework. Established largely by third wave post-World War II Ukrainian immigrants interested in seeing an independent Ukraine, these museums have been a symbolic testament to democratic self-definition. A separate Ukraine pavilion at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago of 1933 set an earlier precedent in its representation of Ukraine as an autonomous nation. This affirmed later permanent museums which collected indigenous Ukrainian folk art and artifacts as well as modern art – created by native Ukrainians and those of the diaspora – in opposition to the official Soviet Socialist Realist canon. Ukrainian independence in 1991 and increased national awareness after 2004 elections realigned these museums’ mission from a cultural refuge to active participants in the new nation-building process.

Article Spotlights compiled by Dr Shane Nagle.