Nationality in Ukraine: Some Rules of Engagement

Abstract

Although the fall of empires gives rise to states, it need not create nations. The collapse of the Soviet Union 10 years ago did not instantly transform citizens of its successor states into members of nations. As in other postimperial settings, in post-Soviet Ukraine the modern nation is built, or not. The question of Ukrainian nationbuilding deserves the attention it draws from social scientists. Described as “the West of the East or the East of the West,” and straddling the faultline between Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania, Ukraine was partitioned among empires, and stood at the crossroads of various religious and cultural in uences.1 In today’s Ukraine we perceive ethnic and linguistic diversity, a poor match to modern national ideals where “state borders conŽ ne linguistic communities, and the languages of speech, politics, and worship are one and the same.”2 In Ernest Gellner’s terms, it is not at all obvious that the Ukrainian political and the national units are “congruent.”3 Attempts to make the nation match the state are called “nationbuilding,” although this term is extremely broad. In historical terms, attempts to build nations have ranged from wartime ethnic cleansing to peacetime textbook editing. Nation-building in independent Ukraine has received a good deal of attention in the past decade, with scholars evaluating the results as mixed. Studies of popular opinion question loyalties to the new state, while analyses of nation-building policies characterize them as vague and