Citizenship and nation-building in Ukraine - Chair of Ukrainian Studies

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
The center favored Ukrainian statehood for pragmatic reasons: it was better to be a president
of a country than a governor of a province. If they wanted to rule an independent
state, however, the state’s independence had to be justified and secured. One way to do
so was by adopting citizenship law – itself a statehood legitimating mechanism. Defining
the nation by the territory of the state was further politically expedient for the center
because it allowed the center to maintain neutrality in the ideological debate on the
national question between the left and the right. The center could thus continue to cast
itself as an alternative to both “communists” and “nationalists,” and could protect itself
from being painted as “anti-Russian” by the left or as “anti-Ukrainian” by the right.
3. Possible directions for future research.
This paper began with a contention that politics of citizenship policy can be a lens into
the larger process of nation and state-building. What does this lens reveal? I would argue
that the politics of Ukrainian citizenship policy offers a clear demonstration of how civic
nationality policies may arise in the absence of civic national ideologies to inform these
policies. The evidence from the Ukrainian case also suggests an intriguing possibility that
weak and contested national identity is not necessarily an obstacle to nation-building, and
may even be conducive to civic nation-building. These insights from the Ukrainian citizenship
policy and politics also suggest several potentially fruitful directions for future research.
One such research direction can be to investigate the relationship between national
ideas and state policies on the nation. More specifically, to theorize a possibility that state
policies may cause, rather than be caused by, national ideas. As discussed above, citizenship literature
usually studies citizenship policies as a product of national ideas. Brubaker’s argument
depicts a bottom-up process: certain national self-understanding forms historically,
and then affects citizenship policies. But perhaps causal arrows should be reversed? In
Ukraine civic citizenship policy emerged in the absence of corresponding national ideology.
If a particular citizenship policy can emerge in the absence of supporting national
discourse, a possibility that citizenship policy may influence identity discourse, rather
than being influenced by it, should be considered. A possible causal chain may be as follows.
A citizenship policy that contradicts dominant identity discourses emerges. Once
the nation is legally defined a certain way, the alternative definitions are de-legitimized.
Over time, a national discourse to support the legalized definition of the nation develops
(even if such a discourse did not initially exist), while national discourses supporting alternative,
now de-legitimized, definitions of the nation weaken (even if initially they were
strong). Eventually, the new national discourse gains acceptance, and a “habit of national
self-understanding” develop. This theoretical possibility draws attention to the importance
of the legislation on the national question as a factor that can influence national
ideas in a path-dependent way. A research agenda in this regard could be to theorize how,
why, and when causal errors would point in one or another direction. Such a research
agenda also invites temporal and regional comparisons, which would integrate Ukrainian
studies into broader literatures.
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