Authors

Discussion

This paper examines Ukraine's mass and elite identity meta-narratives, their contestation, and Ukraine's foreign policy from 1994 to 2004 by utilising insights from social constructivism, post-colonial literary analysis, and cognitive foreign policy analysis. Through an analysis of Ukrainian movies, novels, government- and private-owned newspapers, as well as books authored by Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, this study investigates the historical roots of Ukraine's national identity and its pro-European choice made long before the events of 2014 and 2022. I argue that the masses' narratives of enthusiastic fatalism, disoriented irreversibility, audacious fearfulness, and marginal ambivalence overlap and contest Kuchma's narratives of irreversible past, uncertain present, European future, and pragmatic pluralism. The interplay of these narratives, in turn, shaped Ukraine's foreign policy in ways still felt today. This study challenges predominant views of Ukrainian identity as neatly divided between a pro-European Ukrainian-speaking West and a pro-Russian Russophone Southeast, as well as the centrality of "balancing" to Ukraine's foreign policy. Thus, I contribute a more nuanced understanding of Ukrainian national identity that re-centres Ukrainian perspectives amongst conversations about European and Russian interests.