Top Highlights

• The model of integrated nationalism shares some of the concerns of the classic ideas of integral nationalism – the latter denoting the creation along fascist lines of a united people with a single language, culture and mythology – but it is important to stress the differences. Integrated nationalism is fundamentally oriented towards a civic model o...
• In the end, NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement. The former Warsaw Pact and Baltic states joined NATO to enhance their security, but the very act of doing so created a security dilemma for Russia that undermined the security of all.
• All of this was alien and incomprehensible to the large Russophone populations in the south-east, for whom the Soviet period was one of development and progress. It was also the time when the modern Ukrainian state was given its territorial shape by the Soviet Union, encompassing contested territories to the west and east, as well as Crimea in the ...
• Russian for the most part was not proscribed, but was rendered the language of private life. Ukrainian nationalists like to sneer that Russian is the ‘kitchen language’, not worthy of use in civic and professional life.
• The change of regime in February 2014 thus played out against the background of already intense divisions. As a recent unequivocal study puts it: ‘the culture, language, and political thinking of western Ukraine have been imposed upon the rest of Ukraine’. The goal ostensibly is the unification of the country, but in fact the objective has been to ...