Formation of Ukrainian identity and national state formation in the modern era of the XIX century

Abstract

The article examines the dynamics and features of the revival of Ukrainian national traditions, mainly languages and their institutionalization, which are accompanied by the formation of an intellectual national-patriotic elite, whose representatives were examples of moral behavior and political leadership in the struggle for national liberation. It is noted that having formed relatively separately in the four main parts of the Ukrainian lands (Dnieper, Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia), the Ukrainian scientific, cultural, educational and political elite began to unite efforts in organizing joint Ukrainian national revival institutions and actively participated in political life. It is argued that Ukrainian nation-genesis does not represent in political history a perfectly uniform movement towards progress. Perhaps this is the contradiction that causes either the decline of national life and the restriction of political freedoms of the masses, or the rapid rise of national and patriotic feelings and the mass awakening of national identity and the struggle for political freedoms. The middle of the XIX century, which became a period of national revival for the peoples of Europe, has been studied. This was preceded by important socio-political events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular the bourgeois-democratic revolutions, which largely implemented the ideas of freedom, equality, and justice. It is outlined that the bourgeois-democratic revolutions and the national liberation struggle of the European peoples gave prospects for the Ukrainian nation to be reborn and developed. However, the Ukrainian lands were part of the imperial states with different levels of development of political culture, law, public morality, education and more. Thus, the Austrian monarchy of “enlightened absolutism” and the Russian monarchical despotism treated the Ukrainian people differently. Political events of the late XIX – early XX centuries. analyzed through the prism of the then dominant imperial spirit and the rise of the national consciousness of the peoples who were colonized by the imperial states. This means that Ukrainian national genesis and its institutionalized political freedoms are understood only in the closest connection with the imperial spirit of the European geopolitical space and national liberation movements. It is proved that the concept of political freedom for the peoples whose territories were seized by the imperial states, arose as a scientific philosophical and political thought in the first half of the XVIII century. and already in the works of J. Locke, J. Vico, N. R. J. Turgot, J. N. Condorcet and I. Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and many other thinkers, it acquired a general civilizational worldview significance.