Reconceptualizations

In the pre-modern period, a person’s social position and religious adher­ence defined his or her identity. A hierarchically based society helped de­termine what individuals recognized as important to themselves and within their environments.¹¹ With the spread of the romantic ideal of au­thenticity in the nineteenth century, a small number of men and women began to perceive the need to discover their “own original way of being,” their identity, and their relationship to the wider world.¹²

An individual, however, does not define one’s own identity in isolation.

Engaged in the world of ideas, members of the East European intelli­gentsia initiated various cultural and political projects in order to uplift the masses. They started to reassess their own pasts in the context of the “les­sons” they had learned from the French Revolution, the Napoleonic inva­sion, the Decembrist revolt of 1825, the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the European revolutions of 1848, the Industrial Revolution, the unifica­tion of Italy and Germany, and the political convulsions of the early twen­tieth century. Each of these events challenged the prevailing view of the world, helped reconfigure the political identities of members of the intel­ligentsia, and provided new - if not radical - alternatives, especially the idea of popular sovereignty.

Alienated by their inferior socio-economic, political, and cultural posi­tion, members of the small Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia increasingly began to emphasize their differences with their imperial identities and their neighbours. By highlighting a nation of their own, they attempted to define their need for an emotional sense of belonging in rational, i.e., na­tional, terms. They codified the shared memories and stories from the past and cast them into a framework of a shared language, culture, tradition, geographic origin, and, most importantly, distinctiveness from others.¹⁵

These components of identity did not emerge from a primordial con­sciousness, but from the models and practices that Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), a prominent German philosopher and literary critic, and the French Revolution developed at the end of the late eighteenth century.¹⁶ The French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars transformed the idea of “‘the people’ from an [non]-ethnic agglomeration of autonomous individuals into a national community” of brothers and sisters and introduced the prospect of mass politics into the Central and East Central European environment.¹⁷

The newly formed “national” intelligentsia then challenged the unspo­ken assumptions of the traditional world and created a modern political consciousness in their societies. Unlike the nobilities of nations with long­term states (such as the Poles and Hungarians), the intelligentsia in Central and East Central Europe looked to the future rather than to bygone eras. They stressed the need to “establish a new social order” rather than to “return to a golden age in the past,” emphasizing innovation rather than renovation.¹⁸ Most importantly, they redefined the core of their political nations by including the masses, especially the peasants, and integrated them into their vision of the future as equal political partners. The people and “the rabble” no longer remained synonymous terms.

Once the intelligentsia defined their group identities, they hoped to spread their ideas to those they considered their countrymen and coun­trywomen. This initiative remained difficult to implement. Most of the non-German, non-Hungarian, and non-Russian intelligentsia did not con­trol the educational or religious institutions in their homelands and could not diffuse their ideas easily. They needed governmental tolerance, if not support, and required authorities to recognize their new identities in the public sphere. Most of the leaders of the dominant religious and govern­mental institutions in East Central Europe understood such efforts as a secular challenge to the status quo and responded negatively. As a conse­quence, the mass acceptance of these new identities became not just a cul­tural choice, but also a political one, especially when governments sought to manipulate or to control them.¹⁹