Elements of a theory of Ukrainian ethno‐national identities

Despite winning independence in 1991, Ukraine remains an amorphous society with a weak sense of national identity. One possible explanation is ‘late’ nation‐creation, but in this article emphasis is laid on a continuing plurality of identity projects and the legacy of the ‘failed’ identity‐building projects of the past. Ukraine’s most important distinguishing feature – the existence of a substantial middle ground between Ukrainian and Russian identities – has considerable capacity to resist the logic of consolidating statehood.     

“Lwów Saved Us”: Roma Survival in Lemberg 1941–44

The ritualized memory of genocide has been a cornerstone of Roma political mobilization during at least the last three decades. A uniqueness paradigm has been developing for some time, applying a memorial discourse inspired by the Jewish Holocaust model. While paralleling each other in time, the mass murders of Jews and Roma during the Second World War differed on several points. In the General Government of the Occupied Polish Territories and the territories occupied by Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa, the persecution of Roma took place largely in local initiatives. Consequently, the Nazi policies varied considerably, leading to territories in which Roma were annihilated and those in which about half of the Roma population survived. Considerable differences could also appear within the same administrative unit. In Distrikt Galizien, the southeastern-most district of the General Government, Roma were persecuted violently in the countryside, while the district capital of Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv) saw a different course of events. The picture that appears from the available documents also diverges from survivor testimonies and general accounts of the persecution of Roma as being similar and parallel to that of Jews. Roma were present in Lemberg throughout the Nazi occupation and the authorities were aware of their whereabouts. Roma were not confined to the ghetto, but many, along with Poles and Ukrainians, remained within the territory of the ghetto, parts of which had constituted areas of Roma settlement in Lemberg since the mid nineteenth century. Several Roma also lived in wagons in various locations in 1942–43, as well as in quarters close to the town’s centre. Altogether, several hundred Roma lived in Lemberg, and their treatment by the local courts was different from that of Jews, bearing more similarity to the way in which Polish and Ukrainian cases were handled.     

Ivane Tarkhnishvili (Ivan Tarchanoff) and His Links With Poland

According to some sources, Professor Ivan Tarchanoff (Ivane Tarkhanishvili) died in Saint Petersburg in 1908. In fact, he died in Poland in his house in Nawojowa Góra, a suburb of Krzeszowice, not far from Kraków. A student and later assistant of Tarchanoff in Saint Petersburg, Napoleon Cybulski, was then professor of physiology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and its rector and deputy rector. It is hardly known that Tarchanoff spent the last three years of his life mainly in Galicia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, near Kraków, he built himself a house and it was in Galicia (in Kraków and Lemberg [Polish Lwów, today Lviv]) that he worked on some of his last papers. The strong link between Tarchanoff and Polish physiology is not sufficiently well known and deserves to be recognized.     

Contestation and negotiation: regionalism and the politics of school textbooks in Ukraine's eastern borderlands

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to explore the (re)construction of identities in three regions adjacent to the Russian–Ukrainian border. The article analyses the areas' historical and political development and argues that placing such areas within a mega‐region term such as ‘eastern Ukraine’ fails to recognise important differences between them. Content analysis of regional history textbooks reveals that the ‘official’ state historical narrative found in school history textbooks is heavily negotiated, with regional elites in each area ‘picking and choosing’ which parts of the ‘official’ state narrative to accept and which parts to reject. In this way, the article demonstrates how the notions of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are highly debated topics in the Ukrainian classroom as the central and local state elites are both part of the dynamic process of (re)definition of national identities.     

Is the classic diaspora transnational and hybrid? The case of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress

Scholars studying migration processes through the transnational prism have expanded the concept of ‘diaspora’ with a new meaning as a transnational, hybrid identity and condition, which has displaced the classical interpretation constructed around ethnicity and territory. By analyzing the activities of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which represents the organised Ukrainian community in Canada, an old‐type diaspora, this paper argues that transnationality and hybridity have always been the inner attributes of diaspora identity and experience and stresses the importance of an essential characteristic of diaspora: the conscious effort to maintain a distinctive collective identity. Only if a community succeeds in maintaining its collective identity throughout multigenerational change can it qualify as a diaspora. These two dimensions – the self‐consciousness of diaspora as a distinctive group and the survival of its distinctive identity through multigenerational change – set diasporas apart from transnational communities.     

National indeterminacies at the periphery of the Habsburg Monarchy: Nationalisms versus multi‐ethnic identities in Fiume/Rijeka and Trieste, 1848–1867

In the 1848–1867 period, the Habsburg Monarchy was shaken by the first waves of nationalism. Yet in the case of the Habsburg port cities of Fiume/Rijeka and Trieste, contended by several different opponents, Italian and Croatian nationalisms had to face centuries‐long traditions of municipal autonomy. In both cities, municipalism and attachment to the House of Habsburg were particularly strong and were coupled with local urban identities that defied national forms of identifications, insofar as they were ethnically and linguistically hybrid. Nationalist activists sought to exploit ethnic and linguistic elements as markers of defined national identities, yet without widespread success. The final demise of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 has been generally taken as proof of the cogency of nationalist discourse, especially the Italian, in the region. However, the northern Adriatic rim points to the forcefulness of Habsburg multinationalism and the existence of ethnic hybridity, which provided effective bulwarks against nationalisms for decades.     

North Africa's Spain: peripheral national identities and the nation‐state as neo‐empire

When ethno‐cultural heterogeneity exists and thrives within a nation‐state, social tension and ethno‐nationalist sentiments are not considered surprising. Yet in many nation‐states, various native‐born communities have diverse and potentially contradictory national identities without the desire for self‐determination. In this paper, I explore the circumstances in which ethno‐culturally distinct, peripheral communities may develop variants of the dominant national identity – ensuring that they remain excluded from the national narrative – yet remain part of the nation‐state. To do so, I conduct a comparative analysis of the native‐born Muslim communities in Spain's two North African exclaves. I find that most Muslims are Spanish citizens yet understandings of ‘Spanish‐ness’ appear to vary between the exclaves. I use these findings to propose further steps for refining current conceptualisations of the nation‐state, in an effort to better understand cases in which variations in the dominant national identity exist, but without ethno‐nationalist sentiments.     

The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

Identifying Scotland and Wales: types of Scottish and Welsh national identities

Abstract. How are national identities and the ‘imagined communities’ ( Anderson 1991 ) upon which they are based linked? This article demonstrates that Q‐methodology, which allows each participant to express his or her own ‘personal nationalism’ ( Cohen 1996 ) while simultaneously highlighting how these individual assessments aggregate into coherent, shared types of national identity, provides a means of empirically assessing the linkage between the micro‐ and macro‐components of national identity. When applied to the cases of Scotland and Wales, the six types of national identity – three each in Scotland and Wales – highlight distinctions that reflect, as well as challenge, the ubiquitous academic division between civic and ethnic national identities. They also illuminate the differing natures of contemporary Scotland and Wales, with particular emphasis on the observation that the Welsh imagined community appears to be fundamentally more contested than the more easily forged Scottish imagined community.     

Sub‐state national identities among minority groups in Britain: a comparative analysis of 2011 census data

Using data from a new question in the 2011 UK census, national identities across minority ethno‐religious groups in England, Wales and Scotland are compared. The findings not only substantiate earlier work showing high levels of British identification among minority groups but also demonstrate that this does not extend to sub‐state national identities. The extent of sub‐state national identification varies between different minorities, but the nature of this variation also depends on the specific (sub‐state) national context. The findings may be understood in relation to key biographical ‘markers’ of national identity. These markers help explain variations in sub‐state national identities to a much greater extent than British identity, but their effect also varies across the different nations. The analysis demonstrates the importance of examining sub‐state as well as state (British) identities and heeding differences in the ways in which these identities might be conceived and asserted across national borders within the same state.     

Contesting Putin's nation‐building: the ‘Muslim other’ and the challenge of the Russian ethno‐cultural alternative

This article explains the crystallisation of a new Russian national discourse, shaped by a challenge posed to Putin's statist non‐ethnic national model by a popularly formed ethno‐cultural alternative, constructed through negation of the ‘Muslim other’. The article describes this new and previously overlooked phenomenon of Russian nationalism and explicates the social mechanism behind its formation. The article concludes that when rampant corruption exists, generating a breakdown of legal order, the ‘other’ is defined through behaviour that deviates from accepted local norms, while the contrasting normative ‘general public’ is defined as ‘Russian’. Such group definitions mean that the current process of Russian grass‐roots exclusive national consolidation is based predominantly on culturally based behavioural codes, rather than on mere ethnic or religious affiliation, as is widely believed. Additionally, a conceptual landmark discourse shift from the question of Russia's mere plausibility as a nation‐state to a focus on its ongoing definition is demonstrated.     

Land,Life and Labour: Indo‐Fijian Claims to Citizenship in a Changing Fiji

Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recently proposed ‘Unity Bill’, which would grant amnesty to some of those responsible for the 2000 coup. These reforms are all part of an effort to ensure the ‘paramountcy’ of indigenous Fijians as well as to limit Indo‐Fijian participation in Fijian national politics. In this paper, I employ Greenhouse's concept of ‘empirical citizenship’ to analyse Indo‐Fijian responses to their political marginalisation in Fiji. After considering how national identities and sentiments of belonging are expressed in Indo‐Fijian discourse through the symbolic inter‐connection of the land and the Indo‐Fijian body, I argue that even if Indo‐Fijians are openly willing to recognize indigenous Fijian supremacy in national politics and the project of nation‐making, assertions of their right to live and labour on Fijian land constitute claims to ‘citizenship’ that are highly contestable in Fiji's current political climate.     

The bi‐national idea in Israel/Palestine: past and present

Abstract. This article reviews four different advocacies of bi‐nationalism in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Despite the differences in their context, content and style, let alone in motivations and implications, the four advocacies – the ‘old school’ and the ‘new school’ of Jewish bi‐nationalism, contemporary Palestinian bi‐nationalism, and bi‐nationalist advocacy that comes from outside observers – present certain similarities which reduce their chances of becoming a mainstream option: (a) in all cases bi‐nationalism is not the most desirable option; (b) they all gained momentum on both sides in periods of instability – due to transformations in the power relations between them or when the conflict reaches a point where the violence seems to become unbearable; (c) all these bi‐nationalisms present a rather uneasy mixture of moralistic arguments and pragmatic ones; (d) in all cases the people who embrace the bi‐national model are intellectuals. This gives their recommendations a touch of ‘ivory tower’ overrationalisation, further reducing thier public appeal.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

Time‐bubbles of nationalism: dynamics of solidarity ritual in lived time

The growth of modern nationalism can be attributed to structural causes, especially the growth of the strong bureaucratic state that penetrates society, creating cultural uniformity and national identity. But structurally based nationalism need not be very intense, or constant; even when institutionalised in periodic formal rituals, it can be routine, low in emotion – even boring. We need to explain sudden upsurges in popular nationalism, but also their persistence and fading in medium‐length periods of time. Nationalist surges are connected with geopolitical rises and falls in the power‐prestige of states: strong and expanding states absorb smaller particularistic identities into a prestigious whole; weaker and defeated states suffer delegitimation of the dominant nationality and fragment in sudden upsurges of localising nationalities. Passing from macro‐patterns to micro‐sociological mechanisms, conflict producing solidarity is a key mechanism: dramatic events focus widespread attention and assemble crowds into spontaneous ‘natural rituals’ – mass‐participation interaction rituals, as distinct from formal rituals. Evidence from public assemblies and the display of national symbols following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) shows an intense period of three months, then gradual return to normal internal divisions by around six months. Spontaneous rituals of national solidarity are produced not only by external conflict but by internal uprisings, where an emotional upsurge of national identity is used to legitimate insurgent crowds and discredit regimes. Although participants experience momentary feelings of historic shifts, conflict‐mobilised national solidarity lives in a 3–6‐month time‐bubble, and needs to institutionalise its successes rapidly to have long‐term effects.     

National identity,devolution and secession in Canada,Britain and Spain*

ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it examines whether devolution fosters the rise of dual identities – regional and national. Second, it considers whether devolution encourages secession or, on the contrary, it stands as a successful strategy in accommodating intra‐state national diversity. The article is divided into three parts. First it examines the changing attitudes towards Quebec's demands for recognition adopted by the Canadian government from the 1960s to the present. It starts by analysing the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1960s and the efforts of the Canadian government to accommodate its demands within the federation. It then moves on to consider the radically new conception of Canadian unity and identity embraced by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and its immediate impact upon Quebec. The paper argues that Trudeau's ‘nation‐building’ strategy represented a retreat from the pro‐accommodation policies set in place to respond to the findings of the 1963 Royal Commission on Biculturalism & Bilingualism (known as the B&B Commission). Trudeau's definition of Canada as a bilingual and multicultural nation whose ten provinces should receive equal treatment alienated a significant number of Quebeckers. After Trudeau, various attempts were made to accommodate Quebec's demand to be recognised as a ‘distinct society’– Meech Lake Accord, Charlottetown Agreement. Their failure strengthened Quebec separatists, who obtained 49.4 per cent of the vote in the 1995 Referendum. Hence, initial attempts to accommodate Quebec in the 1960s were replaced by a recurrent confrontation between Canada's and Quebec's separate nation‐building strategies. Second, the article explores whether devolution fosters the emergence of dual identities – regional and national – within a single nation‐state. At this point, recent data on regional and national identity in Canada are presented and compared with data measuring similar variables in Spain and Britain. The three modern liberal democracies considered here include territorially circumscribed national minorities – nations without states ( Guibernau 1999 ) – endowed with a strong sense of identity based upon the belief in a common ethnic origin and a sense of shared ethnohistory – Quebec, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. Third, the article examines whether devolution feeds separatism by assessing support levels for current devolution arrangements in Canada, Spain and Britain. The article concludes by examining the reasons which might contribute to replacing separatist demands with a desire for greater devolution.     

Resurrection: a tale of two anthems sung by Serbs

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a comparative study of two key contenders for Serbian anthem‐hood, the royalist song ‘God of Justice’ and the pan‐Slavic hymn, ‘Hey Slavs’. Drawing on the theorising of nation and representation, as developed by Benedict Anderson, Michael Billig and others, the purpose of the study is to compare the self‐images these songs present to those they enjoin in unison, and to consider the role of those images and the identities they suggest in national/ist ideologies. Neither of the songs discussed in this paper was originally intended to be a national song. Both are in this sense ‘accidental anthems’. The paper will discuss the history of the accidents which have at various times given, and deprived, these songs of anthem status, in Serbia. ‘God of Justice’, originally a song in a patriotic stage play of the 1870s (commissioned to legitimise a young prince's accession to the Serbian throne), was the national song and later the official national anthem of the Principality of (later Kingdom of) Serbia from 1872 to 1919 and then, in a changed form, part of the national anthem of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1919 till 1941. It was resurrected in 2006, in a changed – republican – form to become the national anthem of the Republic of Serbia. The pan‐Slavic ‘Hey Slavs’, written in 1842, emerged, a century later, first as a national song of the Communist‐led resistance movement in Yugoslavia in 1942 and then became an unofficial national anthem of the Communist‐ruled Yugoslav federation; it survived the violent disintegration of that federation in 1991 to serve (once again unofficially) as an anthem of the rump Yugoslavia from 1992 to 2006. Why have these particular songs been chosen for the purpose of representing the Serbian nation to itself and to the world? How has each succeeded and failed in that task? The essay concludes with some speculation on these questions.     

Erotic Attachment,Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman‐as‐nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867–1914

Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada's normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian‐ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman‐as‐nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already‐constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co‐constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman‐as‐nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon's embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada's role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture's constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada's hetero‐erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture's role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co‐constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities.     

An unlikely alliance: the 1907 Ukrainian–Jewish electoral coalition

This paper contextualises a political alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish national activists in Austrian Galicia during the 1907 parliamentary elections, Austria's first elections with universal manhood suffrage. This alliance represented a milestone in the making of a new paradigm of Ukrainian–Jewish relations. Ironically, the Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, portrayed elsewhere as staunch enemies, were uniquely able to overcome the profound social, religious, political, and cultural barriers separating the two communities. Ukrainian nationalists recognised the potential of a nationalised Jewish community to undermine Polish hegemony in Galicia, while some Zionists saw the potential to elect Jewish parliamentary representatives in rural Ukrainian districts where Poles and Jews competed for the districts' second mandate. The alliance mobilised the Ukrainian and Jewish electorate around shared slogans and goals. It was a qualified success, leading to a more powerful national Ukrainian faction as well as the first Zionist faction in any European parliament. Although the two sides failed to repeat the alliance in the subsequent elections in 1911, the coalition sparked a new sense of history for both communities. It created a pro‐Ukrainian discourse in Jewish politics, and a pro‐Zionist one in Ukrainian politics. The alliance also exposes Zionism as a response to the European‐wide nationalist revivalism rather than a reaction to rampant turn‐of‐the‐century racial anti‐Semitism.     

Ethno‐religious ‘unmixing’ of ‘Turkey’: 6–7 September riots as a case in Turkish nationalism*

Abstract. This article examines the structural and ideological factors that paved the way for the eruption of violence against non‐Muslims in Turkey on 6 September 1955. I argue that the conventional explanations that treat this instance of collective violence either as spontaneous rioting caused by over‐excited masses or as a government conspiracy that eventually got out of control are insufficient in that they fail to answer how and why so many people participated in these riots when we know that nothing on this scale ever took place in the history of the republic. In order to adequately understand the dynamics behind these riots one first needs to situate them in the broader historical context of the emergence, development and crystallisation of Turkish nationalism and national identity that marked the non‐Muslim citizens of the republic as the ‘others’ and potential enemies of the real Turkish nation. This historical analysis constitutes the first part of the article. Since ethno‐national riots do not always occur whenever there are conflicting identities, one also needs to explain the processes through which ethno‐national identities become radicalized and polarized. Thus, in the second part of the article, I focus on the economic, political and social conditions of the post‐single‐party era (post‐1950) that helped to radicalise the sentiments of the growing urban populace against the non‐Muslim ‘others’. I argue that it was the socio‐economic, ideological and political transformations of the Democrat Party era that made it possible for ethnic entrepreneurs and state provocateurs to mobilise the masses against a fictitious enemy.