Presentations by Streams

The topic presented in the title is usually discussed in the realm of international relations. Wars are destroying nations; they can also make them stronger. Nowadays there are few nations that can be built or rebuilt. And more often than not nations rise out of ethnicity. In the case of Ukraine Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014 is not at the end but at the beginning of nation-building in Ukraine. A nation-building process which is not based on ethnic nationalism but on civic nationalism, the idea of building up a modern democratic and multicultural society. As Serhii Plokhy wrote it in his book the ”Gates of Europe” (2015, 345): “Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine's difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries.” As a matter of fact, nation-building in Ukraine is a process which has started already after the declaration of independence in 1991 and has been reinforced by the two Maidan movements of 2004 and 2013/14. But Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 on can certainly be considered as a major factor and catalyst of nation-building in Ukraine. This is part of a powerful discourse which can also be observed in survey data confirming the growth of national pride and civil Ukrainian identity. On the other hand, the war was also a catalyst for qualitative changes in the political regime in Ukraine, the modernization of political actors and, most importantly, the reduction of the influence of financial and industrial groups (oligarchs), the destruction of political and economic monopolies in the country. In combination with the rapid development of civil society, the change of political identities, the stabilizing role of the EU, also caused rapid institutional changes in the entire political system of Ukraine. The Europeanization process should also be mentioned here: it was an articulated choice of the orientation of nation-building ending the geopolitical ambivalence of Ukraine. The panel aims to examine such aspects as well as other indicators of nation-building. It looks at this process also in a temporal perspective allowing to assess the changes after 2013 and in 2022 on the levels of collective identity, language, political culture, attitudes towards Russia and EU and political institutions.