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

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE zenship policies have advanced hypotheses about factors that drive citizenship policies in modern states. Following Rogers Brubaker’s seminal study of French and German citizenship policies, conventional wisdom today attributes variation in rules governing admittance to citizenship to national identity. 8 Or, to use Brubaker’s term, to historically-formed and deeply-rooted “habits of national self-understanding” 9 that are “prior to and independent of the [modern] state.” 10 According to Brubaker, in modern states these habits of national self-understanding are the main source of citizenship laws, and the factor explaining cross-national divergence. 11 If we try to apply Brubaker’s theory to the Ukrainian case, however, we will immediately run into problem. Brubaker’s argument implies that each modern state has one historically-formed national identity (a particular “habit of national self-understanding”). This assumption is however an empirical matter. A “dominant habit of national selfunderstanding” may form historically in some states but not in others. In states such as Ukraine, that emerge suddenly from the rubble of multinational empires, there may be no dominant habit of national self-understanding. Indeed, virtually all studies of the post- Soviet Ukraine make a point that the past rule of territories of today’s Ukraine by different empires and states, and resulting cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity across today’s Ukraine, has prevented the emergence of a cohesive national identity at either the elite or the societal level. Instead of one dominant “habit of national selfunderstanding,” competing “images” of the nation and myths of national origin and civilization are propagated by different political forces and find resonance with different segments of the society. In the absence of the dominant national identity in Ukraine, where can the sources of Ukrainian citizenship policy located? Analysis of the politics of Ukrainian citizenship policy to which I will now turn will show how Ukraine’s citizenship policy was in a large measure shaped by the politics of national identity, but not in the manner Brubaker’s theory posits. As we are about to see, citizenship policy in Ukraine was shaped by the ideological struggle between the left and the right who tried – but failed – to have the citizenship law reflect their conceptions of national identity. Territorial definition of the nation contained in the Ukrainian citizenship law was a compromise, and not a reflection of any existing national idea, as Brubaker’s theory posits. Put differently, the definition of the official nation by the territory of the state resulted from the failure of the political forces who embraced competing conceptions of nationhood to reflect their preferred 8. Brubaker 1992. 9. Brubaker 1992, 187. 10. Brubaker 1992, 132. 11. Brubaker in particular argued that historically-formed civic and territorial understanding of the nation in France led to an inclusive citizenship law in modern time, while historically ethnic understanding of the nation in Germany led to an exclusive citizenship law. 4
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE conception in the law. The definition of the official nation by the territory of the state can thus be described as “civic nation by default” (rather than by design). Let us examine the evidence on which these conclusions are based, and consider what this evidence reveals about the larger process of state and nation-building in Ukraine. The Ukrainian right and the citizenship question. The national question in the post-Soviet Ukraine has been contested intellectually and politically between the right and the left who embrace mutually exclusive myths of national origin and conflicting objectives for the future of the Ukrainian statehood. Until its split in 1999, Rukh was the main political force on the right. The view of the right on the state and the nation is close to a traditional ideal of a modern nation-state. Proponents of this view see today’s Ukraine as the state of the Ukrainian nation in the same way that Poland is the state of the Polish nation or Germany the state of the German nation. The right emphasizes the historicity of Ukraine’s statehood by tracing its political lineage from the Kievan Rus, to the Cossack republic of the 17 th century, and the brief period of independent statehood in 1917-1921. At the heart of the right’s view on the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian state is the emphasis on Ukraine’s and Ukrainians’ distinctiveness, first and foremost from Russia and the Russians. Russia is presented as the main “other” against which Ukrainian identity is defined, an occupying empire (tsarist and later Soviet) from which Ukraine’s independence was finally regained in 1991. For the mainstream right, Ukraine is a democratic political community where the rights of national minorities are upheld, but where the “the core” of the Ukrainian political nation is the Ukrainian ethnos. This view was elaborated by Rukh’s program already in the late Soviet period. Specifically, Rukh concluded that, “the national question in Ukraine is about the development of the Ukrainian nation, ethnic groups and national minorities, their integration into a common social fabric (socium) of the republic the core of which are the people that gave the name to their nation-state.” 12 For the right, the answer to the question “who belongs to the Ukrainian nation” was thus rather straightforward. If Ukraine is conceived as a democratic multinational state, all residents of Ukraine can be considered belonging to the political Ukrainian nation, while ethnic Ukrainians outside Ukraine, by virtue of their membership in the ethnic Ukrainian nation that is the “core” if the state, must also be included in the defi- 12. Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy za Perebudovy 1989, 18. 5
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