The contours of civic and ethnic national identification in Ukraine

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Notes

Research for this article was supported by a Shklar Fellowship at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York, Macmillan, 1946).

Ibid., p. 329.

Mark R. Beissinger, ‘State Building in the Shadow of an Empire-State: The Soviet Legacy in Post-Soviet Politics’, in Karen Dawisha & Bruce Parrot (eds), The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 166–167.

Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 105.

George Scho¨pflin, ‘Nationalism and Ethnic Minorities in Post-Communist Europe’, in Richard Caplan & John Feffer (eds), Europe's New Nationalism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 153.

For evaluation of the first proposition see Stephen Shulman, ‘Challenging the “Civic”/”Ethnic” and “West”/”East” Dichotomies in the Study of Nationalism’, Comparative Political Studies, 35, 5, 2002, pp. 554–585.

Stephen Shulman, ‘Sources of Civic and Ethnic Nationalism in Ukraine’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18, 4, 2002, pp. 1–30.

The following discussion is based on Shulman, ‘Sources of Civic and Ethnic Nationalism in Ukraine’.

Graham Smith et al., Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 122.

Ibid., p. 127.

For more discussion of elite perceptions of cultural similarity and distance between Ukraine, Russia and Europe, see Stephen Shulman, ‘The Cultural Foundations of Ukrainian National Identity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 6, November 1999, pp. 1011–1036.

The following discussion is based on Stephen Shulman, ‘Competing versus Complementary Identities: Ukrainian–Russian Relations and the Loyalties of Russians in Ukraine’, Nationalities Papers, 26, 4, 1998, pp. 615–632.

For details of the theoretical link between foreign orientation and national identity see Stephen Shulman, ‘The Internal–External Nexus in the Formation of Ukrainian National Identity: The Case for Slavic Integration’, in Taras Kuzio & Paul D'Anieri (eds), Dilemmas of State-led Nation-building in Ukraine (Westport, CT, Praeger, 2002), pp. 103–129.

The oblasti surveyed were Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Poltava, Rivne, Transcarpathia and Vynnytsya.

Respondents indicated their ethnicity as Ukrainian, Russian, both Ukrainian and Russian or other. Language use was ascertained by asking which language they used most at home: Ukrainian, Russian, both Ukrainian and Russian equally or other. Finally, five regions were identified in the sample: West (Rivne, Lviv and Transcarpathia), Centre (Kyiv oblast, Vynnytsya and Poltava); South-East (Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa), Kyiv City and Crimea.

As discussed earlier, the results of the questions on whether being an ethnic Ukrainian or an Orthodox believer is important to being a real member of the Ukrainian nation are inconclusive. Only a minority of respondents believes these traits are important, and thus we cannot say that the Ethnic Ukrainian identity (for the first question) or Eastern Slavic identity (for the second) is supported. At the same time, we cannot say that these results favour the opposite identity in each case.