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Understanding Nationalism in the Graveyard of Empire (III): Beneath the Eagle’s Wings

The last part of this series on the historiography of nationalism in Ukraine, ‘Histories Divided and Entwined’, looked at the significance of regionally-differentiated understandings of Ukrainian history. Scholars have emphasised that particular regions in Ukraine have been pivotal for the development of other national ideas in addition to only the Ukrainian, the most significant contemporary example being the attachment felt by Russians towards Crimea, where the Ukrainian-Russian conflict of 2014 began. In recent televised remarks, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev reiterated that “When we speak about Crimea … we realize that it is our history, our destiny and our pain too”. Lev Golinkin, writing in the new York Times has recently noted that the vast majority of the 450,000 Ukrainians who have fled the country since April have gone to Russia. Nicolai Petro of the University of Rhode Island has summed up the conflict as ‘a war over Ukrainian identity’: ‘For the westernmost regions (Galicia), being Ukrainian means suppressing Russian culture so that Ukrainian culture can thrive in its stead. Here, creating a Ukraine that is antithetical to Russia is commonly referred to as making a “civilizational choice” in favor of Europe. For the eight Russophone regions of eastern and southern Ukraine (which I call the Other Ukraine), being Ukrainian means being a distinct nation that is still very close to Russia. These Ukrainians do not wish to join Russia, but neither do they wish to be forced to forsake Russian culture in order to be considered loyal Ukrainians.’

In short, no analysis of nationalism in Ukraine, historical or otherwise, can begin without exploring not only the political role of Russia in Ukrainian affairs, but the role occupied by Ukraine in the Russian nationalist historical imagination.

The dispute over the meaning of the name ‘Ukraine’ itself encapsulates the contested relationship between the country and Russia. It was towards the mid-nineteenth century that ‘Ukrainian’ began to gain currency as an ethno-cultural as opposed to merely geographical identifier, a shift in meaning opposed by the imperial authorities, for whom the country was known as ‘Little Russia’.

As Theodore Weeks notes in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013), ‘The Russian [imperial] government never considered Belorussians and Ukrainians to make up separate nations, rather they were seen as branches of the Russian people speaking dialects of the Russian language.’ The early decades of Soviet rule in Ukraine resulted in limited recognition of Ukrainian ‘separateness’ as a result of the policy of indigenization, which in turn caused discontent among those Russians in Ukraine who saw themselves as victims of ‘reverse discrimination’. Weeks concludes that over a period of roughly 150 years until the present day a Russian fear of national separatism ‘has played a constant – if not primary – role in Russian politics.’

Andrew Wilson, in The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2009) also argued that an inability to ‘engage seriously with the reality of Ukraine’s separate existence’ has conditioned Russian political and academic perspectives on Ukraine since 1991. Ukraine, according to this thinking, ‘is an artificial buffer state with no prospect of long-term coherence.’ (Wilson 2009: 300) Ukrainians, by contrast, demonstrate a more varied view of Russia, ranging from ‘rabid Russophobia in western Ukraine to equally Ukrainophobic Russian nationalism in Crimea. (Wilson 2009: 308)

Important recent historiography has demonstrated that Ukraine has played a dual role in ‘the Russian mind’, as a historical point of origin for ‘Slavdom’ and therefore the Russian nation, and also a place from where Russian unity – an often tenuous concept in the country’s history – was threatened. Faith Hillis, in Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (2013), finds that ‘Russia first encountered the challenge of modern nationalism in its western frontier.’ (Hillis 2013: 3) As Geoffrey Hosking noted in his work Russia and the Russians (2012 edn.): ‘Russia has usually been a multi-ethnic empire without a dominant nation’ which has with respect to Russia ‘rendered the distinction between internal and foreign affairs much less well-defined than in most polities.’ (Hosking 2012: 4) Ukraine was the locus for one of the most important foundational events for the Russian national(ist) historical narrative, the Russian Polish War of the 17th century. The Russian imperial state, apparently unable to forge a genuinely unifying idea of Russianness for its Russian subjects (Hosking 2012: 344), was presented with the alternative of defining itself as an empire of the Slavic people. The challenge of Ukrainian nationalism that defined itself against Russia posed a threat to this mode of Russian self-identification, and in a circular process that is familiar to students of other national conflicts, Russian attempts to suppress nascent Ukrainian ‘separateness’ only gave impetus to its development. (Hillis 2013: 16) Hillis has argued that the role of Ukrainian disillusionment with Russia, as opposed to straightforward ‘Russophobia’, should not be underestimated by the historian: ‘Many of the first [nineteenth-century] intellectuals to imagine a separate Ukrainian nation were in fact alumni of the Little Russian lobby.’ (Hillis 2013: 16)

Ilya Prizel, in National Identity and Foreign Policy (1998) has argued that ‘Russia’s history has been marked by a powerful and overbearing state but a weak, and even uncertain, national identity’, and that Ukraine’s history has been burdened by both these problems. (Prizel 1998: 2) The notion of a ‘Russian civilisation’ that takes precedence over established borders (as opposed to one of a Russian national identity that is bounded within the country’s historic borders) is, Prizel argues, an enduring idea with an old vintage in Russian history, and has continued to shape Moscow’s policy on its neighbours. But what made Ukraine so significant in this respect was that ‘the incorporation of Ukraine…fused Russia’s national identity within an imperial identity.’ (Prizel 1998: 157) Ukraine, in this light, becomes a matter of existential importance for Russianness, not just an object of power politics.

What these studies have in common and bring to light is the dual and at times conflicting role played by Ukraine in the development of Russian national identity not only in providing it with an important point of origin (such as the idea or myth of Kievan Rus’) but in offering an unsettling challenge to the very idea of Russianness. Seen in this light, it is less unsurprising that Prime Minister Medvedev should refer to Russian ownership of Crimea not only as ‘our destiny’ but also as ‘our pain’.

References

Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (2013)

Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians (2012 edn.)

Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (1998)

Theodore Weeks, ‘Separatist Nationalism in the Romanov and Soviet Empires’, in John Breuilly (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013

Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2009)

Nicolai N. Petro, ‘The Real War in Ukraine: The Battle over Ukrainian Identity’, The National Interest, 4/12/14

Lev Golinkin, ‘Driving Ukrainians Into Putin’s Arms’, New York Times, 8/10/12

‘Dmitry Medvedev, Russian PM, says Crimea is “our destiny”‘, CBC News, 10/12/14

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

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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

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)

Scotland Votes, Secessionists Watch

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While the UK is engulfed in politics within the confines of the isle, the wider nationalist community are searching for a precedent for their own secessionist struggles. Catalan and Basque organisations have been campaigning with the Scots—as have the Flemish, Sardinians and Venetians. Catalonians have shown a particular interest in the Scottish referendum—now more strongly than ever before—and pushing towards a similar vote for themselves. About a year ago, Professor Daniele Conversi, Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, spoke to us about the relationships between the different movements.

Straight from the streets of the Basque country, I had a chance to snap some of those who have shown support. And as we watch the events unfold tomorrow, it’s worth remembering that they indicate more than the fate of just one state.

You can follow the unfolding events on Google’s specially created site or track them across the collection of sites we collated early last year.

Scottish flag & Basque support Catalan and Basque

The Scottish independence campaign and Contemporary Scottish Nationalism: Lessons from across the Irish Sea? – Part 3

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Colin Kidd, the Scottish intellectual historian, has argued persuasively that the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century – commonly seen as a direct and praiseworthy outcome of the Union – did much to subvert uncomplicated patriotic readings of Scottish history. Instead it served more as the basis of an Anglo-Scots unionist historiography (which finds its contemporary resonance in the discourse of David Cameron and other members of the unionist campaign), and helping in this way to frustrate the development of the kind of historicist and cultural nationalism that became so widely accepted and influential in later nineteenth century Ireland. (Kidd 2003) Although historical rhetoric does have its place in contemporary Scottish nationalism of the ‘Yes’ campaign (contributing to both the nationalist narrative and the idea of the ‘social union’ that will survive any break-up of the constitutional union), it bears none of the centrality and forcefulness of its nineteenth and early twentieth century Irish counterpart. The rhetoric of ‘social union’ employed by the SNP is perhaps another manifestation of this. (Scotland’s Future, 29, 214)

The idea of a ‘social union’ between an independent Scotland and ‘the rest of the UK’ has become a key part of Alex Salmond’s policy and rhetoric.

Still, if independence does happen, the closest parallel, and only precedent, that results in the history of these islands, particularly with respect to the constitutional mechanics of making independence of reality (for example in areas such as the role of the Crown in Scottish government, defence arrangements, Scottish financial obligations and so forth), would be one from across the Irish Sea – the Irish Free State, the ‘semi-sovereign’ entity that resulted from the Irish War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The kind of friendly and reasonable, consensus-based ‘nationalism’ that wishes to preserve existing social and cultural ties while establishing political autonomy, lying at the heart of the ‘Yes’ campaign, also owes much to the ideas that made possible and are expressed in the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’. How Scottish independence would affect affairs in Northern Ireland is a whole other knotty area for speculation. If only for these reasons, those with an eye on Scotland this year ought to keep an eye on Ireland’s past as well, and if necessary dust off their Irish history books.

Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity: 1689-1830 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland (Edinburgh, The Scottish Government, 2013)