On national identity

On December 9, the Verkhovna Rada deliberated a very important issue, namely “National Identity in Ukraine in Conditions of Globalization Challenges: Problems and Ways to Preservation.” A number of respected public figures took part in the hearings, among them The Day‘s good old friend and regular contributor Mykola Zhulynsky. Below is his slightly abridged presentation.

Our politicians are too busy lashing out at each other, trying to convince our society that their concept of the National Idea is the only correct one. Meanwhile, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka understood this idea and conveyed its literary concept as a problem of choice one makes with one’s heart; as a moral freedom, as the energy of love for one’s people, as being always prepared to sacrifice one’s life to implement the national ideal.

The Ukrainian people’s spirit is weakened, damaged by the daily struggle to survive, by their disgusted disillusionment in our political leadership with its regular hot air sessions and campaign speeches. The Ukrainian people hasn’t learned to trust its political leaders because they have never bothered to cultivate such confidence, being too busy privatizing the political domain and commercializing their authority. Without such confidence the people will never acquire national dignity, because faith and confidence are the fertile soil for the growth of the national spirit and national character. Nikolai Gogol wrote that the true national character is in the very spirit of the people.

Such concepts as the people’s spirit and the soul of the people that are foundational for the philosophy of national identity were first formulated by the 18th-century German philosopher and natural historian Johann Gottfried von Herder. What causes the special features of the people’s spirit (Volksgeist)? According to Herder, every human is shaped as a personality under the influenced of two worlds – nature and spirit, both being present in the mother tongue, psychology, and human values. Language comes first because it serves to organize and unite these two worlds through, and owing to, culture. Another German scholar, Wilhelm von Humboldt, defined language as “the spirit of the nation.”

Culturally organized, the people’s spirit acquires the shape of nation-state (Hegel) and is a manifestation of an institutional form of this people’s freedom. Hegel was the one to substantiate statehood as a form of cultural integrity.

He stressed that a people that failed to get organized as a state would remain a people without its history. [Here in Ukraine] we got organized as a state, we are not denied our history, even if we don’t know all of it, but we then found ourselves on a threshold of what was a clear and present danger for our effort to preserve this nation-state; that danger was our own cultural and moral degradation, social disintegration, and social conflicts.

We are witness to Ukrainian society being hazardously quickly dehumanized while contracting immorality, lack-of-culture bacilli, when people want to get rich at all costs, when boasting one’s wealth, as well as concealing it if achieved using unlawful means, acting the tough, ruthless way, resorting to acts of violence, cynically showing one’s riches for all to see and envy, serves to destroy the fundamental nation values. Doubtlessly, every effort should be made to form a society that Ivan Franko described as a whole cultural organism. Back in 1905, he urged the Ukrainian intelligentsia to use all that huge ethnic mass of the Ukrainian people to shape the Ukrainian nation as a whole cultural organism capable of living a cultural and political life of its own.

Franko described it as an extremely important tactical mission. We are faced with it now. This mission has become even more important after we won our national independence, because we are witness to the process of obliteration of our national image, destruction of our national values and identity, and adjusting them to Pan-Russian standards. Other values, ideals, concepts, cultural codes and samples — especially the language — are being actively proliferated. All of this put together is what forms the concept of national identity. Forms, doesn’t it? What about the national-identity-forming parameters we receive from our Ukrainian political leadership? Is there a system, network, or authority capable of determining our own national identity?

Europe spent some 50 years building a single cultural groundwork, going about it step by step but purposefully, determined to produce what Robert Schumann, the ideologue of European integration, formulated as a special kind of cultural rapprochement within a single information and symbolic cultural space. [Against this backdrop] all we can do is tentatively proclaim our right o the Ukrainian cultural information space, a field that has literally been plowed all over by the Russian media, Russian and American pop cultures, including their movies.

Sad but true: our Ukrainian political leadership has proved unable to protect the national cultural-information space, thus failing to actively and systematically form our national identity, preserve, protect, and develop our national ideals and values.

It is time to realize that forming national identity is a process experienced by every modern country, because it secures democratic social progress. Therefore, this process can be upheld only with the state, civil society’s institutions, and the national elite combining their efforts.

Globalization is having its unifying effect in Ukraine, at a time when we still have to travel a long road to accomplish the national identity process. Instead, we should step up the process of shaping a supranational European identity on the groundwork of our national identity that would be able to evolve harmoniously in the European cultural sphere.

Ukraine, being a sovereign state, faces a serious modernization challenge focusing on the transformation of Ukrainian national identity in conditions of globalization. Considering that the integration and globalization process is actively affecting national economies and, above all, the social and humanitarian sphere, there is the urgent need to shape up a policy aimed at Ukraine’s humanitarian progress. The reason is that over the past decade a number of international business entities — transnational corporations, international government organizations and NGOs, along with entities with a status that placed them over and above governments (CIS, EU, NATO, etc.) have shown an increasing degree of influence on the national-identity-shaping process, by replacing domestic cultural, ideological, language, self-identification, and other values.

In terms of economics, Ukraine has to make every effort to quickly fill the intellectual output gap in its national production schedule. Here innovative proposals should be considered and [eventually] determined as dominant economic progress models. As for priorities in the social-humanitarian sector, the emphasis should be placed on efforts aimed at revealing, on the broadest possible range, of every individual talent, with an eye to such potential of the entire society. Here every individual should be provided with favorable conditions in which someone’s — including the nation’s — intellect, cultural and spiritual talents could be put to good use. First and foremost, the state must come up with a policy offering every communal member a range of opportunities, considering that every individual is part of the nation’s resources in terms of education, science, culture, profession/occupation, promoting a healthy lifestyle, harmony between man and the environment, upholding family life and childbirth.

Apparently, implementing a solid humanitarian development policy is impossible without forming a democratic consolidated society, without reaching the highest level of civil rights and liberties, without asserting human and national honor and dignity. Everything will depend on Ukraine’s political leadership and their ability to provide equal access to these basic civil rights and liberties, and act as a coordinator capable of keeping under control various social entities, shaping up a legal framework that would help develop a society that would be accepted by every communal member.

It is important to work out integrated mechanisms, social standards, behavioral models, and values of tolerance and social consolidation as the groundwork for transforming national identity in the context of European integration. Every communal member and entire society should become aware of the need of and develop the skill for working out understanding and mutually tolerant and respectful cooperation, while preserving one’s own cultural, ethnic, language, and religious distinctions. The state must bear this in mind when securing progress and best implementation of the nation’s cultural potential while maintaining contact with other diversified national cultures, promoting intercultural contacts, so Ukraine can take its rightful place in the European and world cultural realms. Progress here will show the rate at which Ukraine will turn into a natural component of the European social and cultural environment, by joining the cultural and religious process being underway in the United Europe.

Generating a contemporary model of Ukraine’s humanitarian progress must become a top priority task for our state, because the experience of Central and Eastern European countries shows that their integration into the European political, economic, education, cultural projects has produced positive results and is proof of their quick progress. Therefore, our state must work out and activate mechanisms aimed at designing national identity, in order to unite various ethnic and social groups as a whole, as what Ivan Franko described as a “whole cultural organism capable of living a cultural and political life of its own.” Information and communications make up a vitally important component and effective mechanism of the social and humanitarian realm, because our media and other communications means are responsible for proliferating various kinds of identity — ethnic, religious, gender, professional, etc.

To this end the humanities are playing an increasingly important role. They must be actively enlisted in solving a task that is important for the state: formation of the modern Ukrainian identity, strengthening interethnic peace, public solidarity, and social unity. The formation of a modern model of a competitive nation, based on a quick growth of the intellectual and cultural potential of society and scientific and technological innovations, can be made more dynamic only by systematically placing emphasis on the national priorities of humanitarian development.

At the same time, Ukraine has to solve the extremely complicated problem of political consolidation and homogenization of society, without which it is hard to expect to find its own way of national development, establishment of a Ukrainian political nation, assertion of the modernizing character of the Ukrainian national idea, creation of a joint cultural-symbolic space, and formation of the European identity on a par with the Ukrainian one.

Unity and political consolidation of society are one of the priority tasks of the state; without solving it Ukraine’s full-fledged integration into the European and world processes, the system of interaction and coexistence remains problematic. Therefore, it is necessary to start by building a national home for all Ukrainian citizens, creating a nation-state. This task was set by Franko in 1905 in his “Open Letter to the Galician Ukrainian Youth.” He wrote that winning Ukrainian independence meant “shifting our national structure in all its integrity.”

We have achieved independence and are asserting it, but we still have to form a whole social organism from the great ethnic mass of the Ukrainian people, a Ukrainian national with its own system of values and priorities, language, mythology, consciousness, and symbolism. And so the formation of the Ukrainian identity is the highest priority for all of us, our government, civic institutions, and the national elite. In this context there is no way to bypass the issue of nationalism in its European sense and interpretation based on national consciousness, national sentiments, and above all, on an aspiration for freedom and state self-realization of the nation.

The British expert on the creation and development of nations Anthony D. Smith wrote in his book National Identity: “I shall define nationalism as an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation.’”

This scholar believes that nationalism is a cultural doctrine that serves above all to achieve the unity and identity of a nation. Nationalism, therefore, can be regarded not only as a kind of political ideology, but also as a cultural doctrine, as a “form of culture,” whereas the nation can be regarded as a type of identity whose significance and priority are caused by this form of culture.

The formation of national identity as a collective phenomenon is aimed primarily at creating unity, social solidarity, and consolidating the people. Without this unity and accord the state will not last long. More than 2,000 years ago the famous philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca quoted the brave Marcus Agrippa in one of his letters included in the Epistulae morales ad Lucilium as saying that small countries grow when living in accord and even the greatest powers are ruined by discord.