Understanding Contemporary Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism. Olexander Hryb
Cossack nationalist revival in Russia and Ukraine. The term “security,” therefore, is used in this research in reference to the individual (e.g., Cossack individuals), the group (Cossacks/nationalist organizations), the state (e.g., the Ukrainian nation-state, the Russian Federation), the international system (the European Union/NATO security community vs. the Eurasian Economic Union) and is looked at on the different levels of analysis discussed in Chapter 3. For other conceptual uses of the term security, see the discussion by David Baldwin, “The Concepts of Security” (Baldwin 1997).
Research on Cossack nationalism not only demonstrates the utility of the proposed framework and its central concept (societal security); it also clarifies the distinction commonly drawn between “ethnic” and “civic” nations. In doing this, it provides insight, not only into nation building in the former Soviet Union; it also clarifies the similarities and differences in origin and evolution of “Eastern” and “Western” nations.
1.1. Why is There not “a” Theory of Nationalism?
The major approaches to the study of nations and national identity are represented by “modernist” and “primordial” traditions in the West, and by “socio-spherical” and “bio-spherical” traditions in the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine. However, there are similar trends in the study of nationalism generally.
In the West following the Second World War, Hugh Seton-Watson (1977) drew a distinction between “old” and “new” nations, replacing the nineteenth-century distinction between “historic” and “non-historic” nations of mostly Western and Eastern European origin respectively. In the 1960s, Miroslav Hroch (1985) defined three major periods of national revival in Europe concerning, largely, the category of “new” nations. Two major trends in the studies of nationalism developed, since then, in order to explain the origin of nations—primordialism and modernism. Clifford Geertz (1962) and later Anthony Smith (1983) argued that there were primordial or perennial elements in the history of nations that link them with their particular ethnic and religious past, while modernists like Ernest Gellner (1983), Eric Hobsbawm (1990) and Benedict Anderson (1991) insisted that nations are a purely modern phenomenon, “imagined” to a large extent with the spread of mass communication and literacy. Both trends continue their existence in the present and more or less dominate the study of nations and nationality in Europe.
In the Soviet Union, a separate school of thought developed that combined elements of both modernist and primordialist perspectives. A “Marxist-Leninist” dogma on nations and nationalism was postulated by Joseph Stalin (1947), and developed subsequently by several generations of Soviet ethnographers. Whatever the merits of this perspective, the Soviet state was committed to implementing a nationality policy that was consistent with it, and in so doing, it created a national hierarchy which continued to affect social processes, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and to this day.
Although the large amount of literature produced on nations and nationalism is said to have resulted in an “overproduction of theories,” in fact neither of the two dominant currents of thought on the subject has succeeded in producing a definitive breakthrough. Rogers Brubaker has concluded that perhaps there is no possibility of creating a valid comprehensive theory:
The search for “a” or “the” theory of nationalism—like the search for “a” or “the” solution to nationalist conflicts—is in my view misguided: for the theoretical problems associated with nationhood and nationalism, like the practical political problems, are multiform and varied, and not susceptible of resolution through a single theoretical (or practical) approach. (Brubaker 1998, 301)
Ironically, Brubaker arrived at this conclusion at the end of a collection of articles reflecting on Ernest Gellner’s philosophical heritage, and Gellner is generally credited with producing a theory of nationalism that is, as yet, unmatched. Gellner’s theory (Gellner 1983), which defines the causes of nationalism within the framework of a modernization paradigm, has been criticized for its functionalism and reductionism. Gellner believed that nations and nationalism are related to the transition from agrarian to scientific-industrial society, the latter requiring a homogeneous society based on one high culture. Single high cultures within single states that are reproduced by a centralized education system require a common language. The necessity, for a modern industrial economy, of a common language, education and high culture within the boundaries of a single political unit, was the basis for the creation of the “nation.”
For Gellner, the principle of one culture, one state is the essence of nationalism. However, he distinguished four basic forms of nationalism (1983, 1997):
1 Early Industrialism Nationalism without an ethnic catalyst within strong Dynastic states such as those based in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and London. Power-holders in these states on the Atlantic coast of Europe shared the same culture as their subjects long before the age of nationalism arrived, so when it did arrive the State and culture already constituted one unit.
2 Classical Unification (Western) Nationalism, which was the model of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, when already existing high cultures needed to acquire a political roof that would correspond to those culture states.
3 Classical Habsburg-East-and-South Nationalism, which arose when power-holders who shared a single high culture with their subjects sank into local folk and ethnically marked cultures, which might be turned into high cultures by the nationalist agitation of small groups of intelligentsia belonging to the same ethnic groups. If the efforts of intellectuals-awakeners succeeded, then such a group would create a state of its own that would reproduce a newly established or re-established high culture.
4 Diaspora Nationalism, or the nationalism of predominantly ethnically marked groups who served during the transition from Agraria to Industria as a “middle-man” between power-holders and the ruled. Being ethnically distinct from both the rulers and the ruled such historically dispersed groups as Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Parsis are good examples of Diaspora nationalism.
Gellner’s delineation of historical forms of nationalism sought also to reject at least four false theories of nationalism shared, at times, by nationalists, and at other times by scholars of nationalism, and sometimes by both. These are that nationalism is
1 Natural, self-evident and self-generating unless forcefully repressed;
2 A consequence of ideas that emerged as a result of a regrettable accident;
3 An awakening message that was intended for classes but that, by some error, was delivered to nations ( “the Wrong Address theory” favored by Marxism);
4 The re-emergence of atavistic notions of blood or territory (the “Dark Gods theory”).
Although most contemporary scholars agree that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, there is no consensus as to its causes or how it is related to processes of socio-economic modernization. Typologies of different forms of nationalism and their historical phases also vary widely. Scholars distinguish between Eastern and Western cultural and political, ethnic and civic, totalitarian and democratic, illiberal and liberal; aristocratic, bureaucratic, revolutionary, “actually existing” and even banal versions of nationalism. All of these and many other definitions use different criteria and approaches. The most important distinctions are discussed below.
Among the most “popular” distinctions of nationalism is that between Eastern and Western nationalism. After the Second World War, Hans Kohn (1944), and later John Plamenatz (1973), developed a set of criteria that defined Eastern nationalism as ethnocentric and irrational and Western nationalism as rational and liberal. Hans Kohn argued that the Renaissance and the Reformation in the West had produced a conception of nationality that related it to individual liberty and even rational cosmopolitanism. Nationalism in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia, on the other hand, emerged without the “enlightenment” of a Renaissance and Reformation and on the basis of ethnographic demands. These later nationalisms “lacked self-assurance” and their “inferiority complex was often compensated by over-emphasis and overconfidence” (Kohn 1944, 330). In a similar vein, Plamenatz characterized Western nationalism as civilized