Area Studies

The question about the role area studies should play on university campuses is contested by a variety of academic forces and open for dis­cussion today. But as long as politicians and political commentators, and not only academic administrators, continue to perceive today's world in terms of the Middle East, Central Asia, or Eastern Europe, the question of the broader identity of individual nations and their histo­ries remains highly important when it comes to encounters and negoti­ations with the outside world.

Mark von Hagen began his recent article on Eurasia as an antipara­digm for the post-Soviet era with the statement that the fall of the USSR 'has provoked several crises of identity for historians of the region, as they try to relocate their subject in the broader intellectual contexts of a changing academic culture of historical writing.'³⁹ Von Hagen suggested that one way to overcome these multiple crises is to reinvent the field as Eurasian studies. He claimed for the Eurasian par­adigm most of the new research published in the West and in the region after the dissolution of the USSR. That research is characterized by a desire to move away from state- and nation-based narratives towards the history of territory. Its salient characteristics include an interest in studying the history of empires and interconnections between them, as well as the history of borderlands and diasporas.

What are the borders of the newly emerging field of Eurasian stud­ies, and should Ukraine or East Central Europe be considered part of that field? The research reviewed by von Hagen indicates quite clearly that the Eurasian 'renaissance' is largely limited to the area previously covered by specialists hired to teach Russian/Soviet history at their universities. Few historians of the former Eastern Europe are rallying to the banner of the new Eurasianism.

Many East European historians envision their countries as part of East Central Europe. That term replaced Mitteleuropa, coined during the First World War by the German strategist Friedrich Naumann to define the lands 'between Germany and Russia,' which he expected to constitute a post-war German sphere of influence. The war in fact resulted in the disintegration of the empires that had controlled those territories, creating a zone that became known as Eastern Europe. Among those who promoted the concept of Eastern Europe was the Polish historian Oscar Halecki. After emigrating to the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War, he published a book entitled The Limits and Divisions of European History (1950). There he revised and developed some of his earlier ideas on the history of Eastern Europe and suggested a new name that stressed its close relation to the West. The name he proposed was 'East Central Europe.' While politicians and the media continued to speak and write about the countries of the Soviet bloc as parts of Eastern Europe, academics were more willing to adopt the new name for the region. It was promoted mainly by histori­ans of Poland, including Halecki himself, Piotr Wandycz, and others.

KLoczowski and the concept of East Central Europe have been per­ceived as principal targets by some participants in the 'East Slavic Round Tables' organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Rus­sian Academy of Sciences in the years 2001-3. According to the orga­nizer of the round tables, Leonid Gorizontov, in Russia the main alternative to the concept of East Central Europe has been the idea of all-Russian culture, which brings together Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians not on a regional basis but on linguistic, cultural, and ulti­mately national grounds.⁴⁴ That concept was given scholarly formula­tion during the interwar period in the works of the renowned Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi, one of the founders of the original Eur­asian school. Although some participants in the round tables have crit­icized Trubetskoi's concept, others continue to support the view that Russia and Ukraine were 'reunited' in the mid-seventeenth century - an indication of the continuing belief of some Russian scholars in the primordial unity of an 'all-Russian' nation.⁴⁵ Moreover, the treatment of problems of Ukrainian history under the auspices of the Institute of Slavic Studies, within the framework established by the round tables devoted to the history and culture of the Eastern Slavs, indicates that Eurasianist ideas and concepts of all-Russian unity continue to inform present-day Russian discussions on the history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in general.

It would appear that Ukrainian historians are generally most com­fortable with a view of their country not as part of a Russian-domi­nated Eurasia but as part of East Central Europe.

In assessing the development of the national interpretation of Ukrai­nian history, it should be admitted that the introduction of the national paradigm approximately one hundred years ago had both positive and negative consequences. In Ukraine, as in other nations, the deconstruc­tion of an imperial narrative and the promotion of a national one helped change the field in qualitative terms. The advent of national historiographies in a region dominated by imperial paradigms helped shift the attention of historians and citizens alike from dynasties and states to peoples; from elites to masses; from ruling nations to sub­merged ones, thereby contributing to the development of the kind of historical vision that we share today. On the other hand, the insistence of twentieth-century Ukrainian historians on the national paradigm sidelined important elements of their subject, marginalizing the his­tory of ethnic minorities, neglecting the history of social classes and groups not central to the nation-building process, and distorting the history of regions and border areas.

The post-1991 Ukrainian historical narrative is still distant from Dra- homanov's ideal of Ukrainian history as he formulated it back in 1891. It is not fully integrated into the European historical narrative, and while it now covers all periods of the Ukrainian past, it does not always pay 'attention to the growth or decline of population, the econ­omy, mores and ideas in the community and the state, education, and the direct or indirect participation of Ukrainians of all classes and cul­tures in European history and culture.'⁴⁸ The current state of research on Ukrainian history may be explained by several factors. The years of Soviet control and the dominance of a Russocentric historiography could not but hinder attempts to imagine Ukraine in any other context than the history of the Ukrainian nation. The country's lack of sover­eignty turned statehood into an obsession for many Ukrainian histori­ans in the West, leaving little time or energy for the exploration of other avenues of the Ukrainian past. Still, there are signs that the situa­tion is changing for the better. The major positive development of the last fifteen years in the West has been what one might call the deghet- toization of Ukrainian history and the appearance of young scholars not burdened by the legacy of Cold War-era historiography. Most of the new directions in research on Ukrainian history are associated with the work done by Western scholars and the new generation of scholars in Ukraine.

The history of Ukraine should be rethought in order to overcome the limitations imposed on it by the centuries-old national paradigm. This would help integrate the Ukrainian past into the history of Eastern and Central Europe. One would like to believe that the future of Ukraine lies in the European Union, but its past should stay where it belongs, in the multiplicity of worlds created by civilizational and imperial boundaries throughout the history of the territory known today as Ukraine. There is little doubt that Ukrainian history can only benefit from being imagined outside the limits imposed on historical thinking by the national paradigm.

Probably the most promising approach to the history of Ukraine is to think of it as a civilizational and cultural borderland; a dividing line, but also a bridge between Central and Eastern Europe. That approach has been applied successfully to the history of other East European coun­tries, including Poland and Hungary. But Ukraine fits that paradigm bet­ter than any other country of the region, given its centuries-old situation as a crossroads not only between Eastern and Central Europe but also between Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Mediterranean world, and the Eurasian steppelands. In the Ukrainian historiographic tradition, the East-West approach has been associated with the work of Ivan L. Rud- nytsky and Ihor Sevcenko. Although the history of Ukraine as a multi­ethnic country and a cultural borderland has not yet been written, compared with representatives of other national historiographies, his­torians of Ukraine have a head start in that undertaking. They are uniquely positioned to study the history of their country in its full scope, whether it be the history of Polish-, Russian- or Ottoman-dominated lands and territories, at different stages in its development.