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Article Spotlights – May/June Round-Up

This edition of Article Spotlights, reflecting on a number of stories that appeared in News Bites in May and June, brings articles from the SEN Archives focusing on the possibilities of a European collective identity, nationalism in Greece, nationalist ceremony in China, and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.

George Yiangou’s paper asks the question: ‘is a common European identity really a distinct possibility?’

George Yiangou, Analysing the Prospects of Forging an Overarching European Collective Identity, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 37-49.

This article reviews the prospect of forging an pan-European identity through the consideration of the rival approaches of Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith. It also cites Switzerland as an example of a successful multicultural state and investigates the extent to which the Swiss experience can be compared with the emergence of a European identity.

Dimitrios Gkintidis’s essay examines the role of nationalist display in the elaboration of a narrative of ‘Powerful Greece’, and its relation to the dilemmas faced by Greek nationalism since the economic breakdown of the country that began in 2010.

Dimitrios Gkintidis, Towards a Powerful Nation: Neoliberalism and Greek Nationalism in Thrace at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Volume 14, Issue 3, 2014, pp. 452-472.

This article retraces the permutations of Greek nationalism from the early 1990s up to the late 2000s using the example of the World Thracian Congresses – localized public events of ostentatious nationalist display that were organized from the early 1990s in the Greek border region of Thrace. New discourses on a ‘Powerful Greece’ and flexible geopolitics reflect the particular ways in which Greek nationalism and neoliberalism were configured among local and national elites. By understanding the ways in which aspirations of national grandeur, rationality, and accountability have been constructed for the last twenty years, we can begin to develop a deeper insight into the dilemmas of Greek nationalism during the economic crisis of the early 2010s.

Erika Kuever’s article deals with the 60th Anniversary National Day Parade in China, and its significance as a form of ‘visual poetry’.

Erika Kuever, Performance, Spectacle, and Visual Poetry in the Sixtieth Anniversary National Day Parade in the People’s Republic of China, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 6-18.

The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 2009 was marked with a massive parade in the heart of Beijing viewed on hundreds of millions of television screens across the nation. English-language media coverage focused primarily on what it saw as the event’s explicit message: the Communist Party’s celebration of the nation’s military might and continued economic growth, and its origins in a coherent and uniquely Chinese ideology. Such coverage largely reflected international fears of China and thus misread the parade’s import and impact on its domestic audience. I argue that the National Day events are better understood as a form of visual poetry that relied on performance to emotionally conflate party, nation, and state. Both the speeches of party leaders and the scripted remarks of state media commentators relied on language and ideas that the Chinese public has heard numerous times. The visual elements of the parade, in contrast, were unprecedented in both scale and spectacle. Hundreds of thousands took part in displays of collective harmony, unified patriotic sentiment, and ethnic unity. The distinctive style and rhythm of the parade depicted a vision of nationhood without the ethnic fractures, labour unrest, and massive inequalities that constitute the greatest threat to the power of the party-state as it embarks on its seventh decade of continuous rule.

Mykola Riabchuk’s piece argues that the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict demonstrates that the most important cleavage in Ukrainian politics and society is between ‘European’ and ‘East Slavonic’ narratives of Ukrainian identity.

Mykola Riabchuk, ‘Two Ukraines’ Reconsidered: The End of Ukrainian Ambivalence?, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2015, pp. 138-156.

The 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war, euphemistically called the ‘Ukraine crisis’, has largely confirmed, on certain accounts, a dramatic split of the country and people’s loyalties between the proverbial ‘East’ and ‘West’, between the ‘Eurasian’ and ‘European’ ways of development epitomized by Russia and the European Union. By other accounts, however, it has proved that the Ukrainian nation is much more united than many experts and policymakers expected, and that the public support for the Russian invasion, beyond the occupied regions of Donbas and Crimea, is close to nil. This article does not deny that Ukraine is divided in many respects but argues that the main – and indeed the only important – divide is not between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones, or the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. The main fault line is ideological – between two different types of Ukrainian identity: non/anti-Soviet and post/neo-Soviet, ‘European’ and ‘East Slavonic’. All other factors, such as ethnicity, language, region, income, education, or age, correlate to a different degree with the main one. However divisive those factors might be, the external threat to the nation makes them largely irrelevant, bringing instead to the fore the crucial issue of values epitomized in two different types of Ukrainian identity.

Finally, Anne Koumandaraki’s essay focuses on the role of state policies in defining Greek national identity.

Anne Koumandaraki, The Evolution of Greek National Identity, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 39-53.

This paper is an attempt to bring together different and – at times – conflicting arguments on Greek national identity. More specifically, it focuses on the contribution of the Greek state to the process of national homogenisation in the country. The main argument is the process, which lasted almost half the twentieth century, was promoted by specific governmental policies which defined in a vigorous way the borders of the Greek nation. The argument follows Ernest Gellner’s (1983) argument that nationalism is a modernizing force emerging out of the dissolution traditional communities and individuals’ attempts to find new marks of social reference.

Article Spotlights compiled by Dr Shane Nagle

Sen News Bites: 24 February – 2 March 2015

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The Sun Herald (02/03/2015) examines Xi’s warning against ‘Western values’ in the context of the struggle to affect public attitudes, the threat of Chinese cultural supremacy in Hong Kong, and mainland China’s role on the world stage.

Aljazeera (02/03/2015) looks at the possible future evolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict and its implications for the region.

Open Democracy (26/02/2015) examines four possible options for configuring the future of the UK constitution and considers their implications for parliamentary sovereignty.

TheGuardian(01/03/2015) reports on the complex search for identity through internet and virtual communities of the ‘new Jihadists’, and examines the consequences of their social alienation.

Financial Times (02/03/2015) reports on recent Russian events, emphasizing Putin’s involvement in creating a climate of nationalist paranoia, drawing on claims of a stronger Western containment of Russia.

News compiled by Sabella Festa Campanile

If you would like to write a response to any of these news stories, please email us at sen@lse.ac.uk

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

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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

SEN News Bites: 3-9 November 2014

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Radio Free Europe (04/11/2014) reports the key points of a recent speech made by the President of Kyrgyzstan in which he warned that radical Islam and societal Islamization pose a constant threat to Kyrgyz national identity.

The New York Times (05/11/2014) features an opinion piece reflecting on contemporary Russian ‘official’ nationalism on the occasion of the celebration of Unity Day in Moscow.

The Diplomat (07/11/2014) reports the results of a recent survey of public opinion in China indicating overwhelming support of all of the country’s territorial disputes.

The Voice of America (08/11/2014) features a piece on the politics of nostalgia and belonging in East Germany in anticipation of the Berlin Wall anniversary.

Eleven Myanmar (08/11/2014) reports on the progress made this week by the peace negotiators in southeastern Myanmar on the way to an all-inclusive and transformative national dialogue.

International Business Times (09/11/2014) features a piece on Catalan nationalism in the context of the independence vote this week.

BBC News (09/11/2014) features a piece exploring the fears of the people of northern Kazakhstan in relation to their Russian neighbours in the context of the Ukrainian crisis.

News compiled by Anastasia Voronkova

If you would like to write a response to any of these news stories, please email us at sen@lse.ac.uk.