Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: statement of arguments
- 1 National identity and foreign policy: a dialectical relationship
- 2 Polish identity 1795–1944: from romanticism to positivism to ethnonationalism
- 3 Poland after World War II: native conservatism and the return to Central Europe
- 4 Polish foreign policy in perspective: a new encounter with positivism
- 5 Russia's national identity and the accursed question: a strong state and a weak society
- 6 Russian identity and the Soviet period
- 7 Russia's foreign policy reconsidered
- 8 Ukraine: the ambivalent identity of a submerged nation, 1654–1945
- 9 Ukraine after World War II: birth pangs of a modern identity
- 10 Foreign policy as a means of nation building
- 11 Conclusion: national identity and politics in the age of the “Mass-Man”
- Index
- Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies
9 - Ukraine after World War II: birth pangs of a modern identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: statement of arguments
- 1 National identity and foreign policy: a dialectical relationship
- 2 Polish identity 1795–1944: from romanticism to positivism to ethnonationalism
- 3 Poland after World War II: native conservatism and the return to Central Europe
- 4 Polish foreign policy in perspective: a new encounter with positivism
- 5 Russia's national identity and the accursed question: a strong state and a weak society
- 6 Russian identity and the Soviet period
- 7 Russia's foreign policy reconsidered
- 8 Ukraine: the ambivalent identity of a submerged nation, 1654–1945
- 9 Ukraine after World War II: birth pangs of a modern identity
- 10 Foreign policy as a means of nation building
- 11 Conclusion: national identity and politics in the age of the “Mass-Man”
- Index
- Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies
Summary
[The] twentieth century having dragged Ukraine astray … has thrown it in the last decades back to the same crossroads of historical choice in which it found itself in the first decades of the century.
Oksana Zabuzhko, 1991I don't think that at present it is even possible to think about independence for Ukraine, because we do not have the economic, cultural or political background for such a step. It's absurd.
Yurii Pokal'chuk, early member of Rukh, 1989After World War II, Ukraine followed the psychological paradigm described by Arnold van Gennep in his book Rites of Passage. In this model, unifying peoples undergo a three-stage transformation. In the first stage of the process, a community senses what Gennep calls separation, in which it realizes that it is discontented with its traditional identity, but has not yet envisioned a clear alternative. In this stage, a group identifies itself by comparing itself with an other and noting differences. The first stage is followed by a transitional phase which Gennep refers to as liminality. In this phase, the group adopts a new identity, but has not shed its old identity entirely. Thus, the group in question may identify itself as a part of both its traditional identity and its new identity, or as a distinct subset of the traditional group. The final stage of aggregation occurs when the group has embraced a new identity, and by fully incorporating values and symbols particular to the group, completely discards its previous identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- National Identity and Foreign PolicyNationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, pp. 339 - 371Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998