1 If nationalism sounds like a dirty word, then Ukrainian nationalism has sounded even worse. In the imaginations of many, it is associated with extreme xenophobic violence. Even those who sympathize with Ukraine are not free from this image. Michael Ignatieff, for example, an eminent Western liberal intellectual, wrote shortly after visiting independent Ukraine: “I have reasons to take Ukraine seriously indeed. But, to be honest, I’m having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of embroidered peasant shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots, nasty anti-Semites.” This stereotype is not totally groundless, and it has various roots. Indeed, xenophobic overtones can be found in one of the earliest formulations of Ukrainian identity, in an early modern Ukrainian folk song: There is nothing greater, no nothing better, than life in Ukraine! No Poles, no Jews, No Uniates either. The funny thing is that a few hundred years later Ukrainians and Poles have managed to reconcile, and Ukraine ranks among the leaders of pro-Israeli sympathizers, and Uniates — present-day Greek Catholics living mostly in western Ukraine — display the highest level of Ukrainian patriotism. The song makes no mention of Russians. At the time, in the early modern centuries, Russian ethnicity was not widely familiar to Ukrainians. And even later, when it was, for a long time it did not feature in the common inventory of Ukraine’s historical enemies. That list comprised Poles, Jews, and Crimean Tatars. Now former enemies have turned into allies, and Russians are the ones who have launched a full-scale war on Ukraine. This radical transformation in Ukrainian identity can also be illustrated by a video taken in Kyiv during the first days of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It depicts Volodymyr Zelensky and his men standing in the courtyard of the presidential office in Kyiv. They were delivering a message to Ukraine and to the world: “All of us here are protecting the independence of our country.” Of the five people there, only two — Dmytro Shmyhall, the Prime Minister, and Mykhailo Podoliak, an advisor to the preisent’s office — are ethnic Ukrainians. The other two, Zelensky and Andriy Yermak, the head of his office, are of Jewish origin, and the fifth one, David Arakhamia, is Georgian. One person missing from the photo is Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Like Zelensky and Yermak, he is also of Jewish origin. In September 2023, he was replaced by Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar. Regardless of their different ethnic origins, all of them identify as Ukrainian. In short, they represent what is known as civic nationalism. We are living in a golden age of illiberal nationalism. We see it in countries as historically and geographically diverse as Hungary, India, Brazil, and others. Ukraine, however, seems to run against this lamentable global trend. In this sense, the Ukrainian situation, for all its hardships, is a source of good news. Its rejection of tribal and exclusivist nationalism in favor of an ethnically inclusive kind, the civic nationalism for which it is now fighting, is a remarkable development in an increasingly anti-democratic world. But to what extent is the Ukrainian case unique? And does it convey any hope for the future? 
In and of itself, nationalism is neither good nor bad. It is just another “ism” that emerged in the nineteenth century. According to the twentieth-century philosopher Ernest Gellner, who thought long and hard about the nature of nationalism, “nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” Or, as the nineteenth-century Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini declared, “Every nation a state, only one state for the entire nation.” In other words, nationalism claims that a national state should be considered a constitutive norm in modern politics. And indeed it is: the main international institution today is called the United Nations, not the United Empires. Nationalism, of course, can take a wide array of forms. One of the most frequently debated questions is whether nationalism is compatible with liberalism. Hans Kohn, a German-Jewish historian and philosopher displaced to America who was one of the founders of the scholarly study of nationalism, claimed that “liberal nationalism” is not at all an oxymoron, and with other historians he documented the early alliance of national feelings with liberal principles, notably in the case of Mazzini. But he located liberal nationalism only within the Western civic traditions. Eastern Europe, in his opinion, was a domain of illiberal ethnic nationalism. The study of nationalism has advanced since Kohn’s day, and nowadays there is a consensus among historians that the dichotomy of “civic” versus “ethnic” nations is analytically inadequate. With few exceptions, ethnic nations contain within themselves numerous minorities, and civic nations are built around an ethnic core. So the correct question to ask is not whether to be a civic nation or an ethnic nation, but rather this: what are the values around which a civic nation is built? Since the very beginning, Ukrainian nationalism combined both ethnic and civic elements. Ukrainian identity is based on the Ukrainian Cossack myth. The Ukrainian national anthem claims that Ukrainians “are of Cossack kin.’’ Initially, there was nothing “national” about Cossackdom. It was a typical military organization that emerged on the frontier between the settled agrarian territories and the Eurasian steppes. The transformation of Ukrainian Cossacks into a core symbol of Ukrainian identity occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the realm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Though we are accustomed to viewing Ukrainian history in the shadow of Russia, this formulation is anachronistic: historically speaking, Poland’s impact on Ukraine started earlier and lasted longer. It began with the annexation of western Ukrainian lands by Polish kings in 1349, and was extended to almost all the Ukrainian settled territories after the emergence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, and remained strong even after the collapse of that state in 1772 –1795. On the map of early modern Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian
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