lead to the creation of a super-state and at least partly helps explain the Brexit logic. In Eastern Europe, the Euro-Atlantic integration of former Warsaw Pact countries led to the Russian neo-imperialist attempt to create an EU alternative, the Eurasian Economic Union. The re-emergence of ethnic violence and of militant forms of nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe were as unexpected as the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict over Crimea and Donbas could be viewed as a delayed Ukrainian war of independence that was not foreseen by the mainstream academia. Scholars continue to debate about the nature of nationalism and of nations; about definitions, typologies, the role of ethnicity and ethnic heritage, and the conditions and mechanisms of national revival. There is no general consensus about these, nor is there a unified theory of nationalism or a clear understanding of its causes or prospects. And yet the future of the European community depends on the evolution of the EU member nation-states, hence understanding nationalism would help to secure peace in its own expanding home.
This monograph explores the causes and conditions of national(ist) revivals. It does so by, first, developing a framework based on a synthesis of Eastern and Western European perspectives on nationalism; and, then, applying this framework to the case of the Cossack nationalist revivals in Russia and Ukraine.
In order to develop a framework for analyzing nationalist revivals, the monograph explores Eastern (Russian and Ukrainian), as well as Western, theoretical perspectives relating to national identity, national and ethnic communities, and nationalist movements. Soviet ethnography and Soviet ethnic engineering continue to influence both academic discourse and state policies in the Russian Federation and Ukraine with respect to post-communist nation building. Moreover, elements of Soviet and post-Soviet theoretical perspectives on nationalism can contribute much to the study of nationalist phenomena, in the West as well as in the East. Thus, the monograph not only introduces largely unknown Russian and Ukrainian (Soviet and post-Soviet) theories into the English-language literature, but it also suggests how these theories might be synthesized with Western traditions to produce a better framework for understanding nationalism. To this end, this monograph proposes a synthetic framework based on an analysis of commonalities and divergences in the Western and Eastern traditions.
Central to this framework is the concept of societal or identity security. The monograph endeavors to show the importance of societal security to an understanding of when and why nationalist movements turn violent by applying it to the case of the 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.
