Nationalism as National Solidarity
In the Putin narrative, those who support the government in Kyiv are nationalists. Today, this means that almost the country’s entire population should be classified as nationalist.
In the same breath, however, Putin argues that there is no Ukrainian nation—that Ukrainians, even though they deny this, are really Russians. The reality is that the enormous number of volunteers helping the army, those who are aiding the war effort, and those who have been politicized by the war—although they would probably call themselves patriots, not nationalists—have created a new sense of solidarity.A people who express this sense of solidarity and desire to live as an independent nation and to control their own fate belong to a type of
Living With Ambiguities 165 movement we associate with the creation of nations in the nineteenth century. This is a democratic form of nationalism fueled by the recognition of a shared culture and common language. In the nineteenth century, it challenged imperial rulers and led eventually to the creation of national states throughout Europe.
The Euromaidan was clearly like this. In the early months of protest, political parties were shunned, especially Svoboda, whose slogans were viewed as dissonantly anti-democratic and anti-European. Svoboda’s decision to organize a pro-Bandera march in early January 2014 was denounced as divisive, as putting party interests before national interests. Significantly, at this moment, the Euromaidan activists separated national liberation slogans from those suggesting ethnic exclusivity. Svoboda’s “Ukraine above all” slogan, for example, was dropped (Kulyk 2015, 5).
Russia, too, proposes its own sense of solidarity based on a shared cultural history and language. It describes this sense of identity as an allegiance to the Russkii Mir (Russian World), the Russian-language space that includes many neighboring states and sees the EU and USA as foreign imperialists who are preventing the Kremlin’s desire to expand the “Russian” space. But the Kremlin refuses to use the words conquest or imperialism in describing its desire to impose its own rule on neighboring countries.