PRESENTATION OF THE RESEARCH ON UKRAINIAN IDENTITY AND “NATIONALISM” AT THE FINNISH INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
On the 3rd of February, Mykola Riabchuk, the Senior Research Fellow of the Ethnopolitics Department, presented a paper on “The City and the Myth: Making Sense of the Lviv ‘Nationalist’ Image” at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki. He questioned the widespread description of Ukraine as allegedly divided for “nationalistic West” and “pro-Russian East”, and dismissed the cliché on both the formal/semantic and substantive/essential ground. His primary goal was to problematize the notion of Western Ukraine and the city of Lviv as particularly “nationalistic”, and to find out where this allegation comes from and what it means in daily practices and attitudes of the inhabitants. The speaker argued that the only difference between nationalism and patriotism is a tint of xenophobia discernible in the former and abating in the latter. Neither practical observations nor sociological data, however, confirm higher level of xenophobia in the West vis-à-vis the East or vis-à-vis the neighboring nations of Poland and Russia. On the contrary, in many regards the Westerners appear to be more open-minded and tolerant toward all kinds of ‘otherness’ than their counterparts to the East. The speaker contended that the main if not only reason for “nationalistic” image that West Ukrainians acquired in Soviet times was their protracted resistance to Sovietization/Russification and staunch rejection of Russian-speaking ‘normalcy’ dominant in all urban centers beyond the West.
