Ethnopolitics. The Basics: What an Ethnos and a Nation Are (18.10.2022)

A Ukrainian-language answer to a subscriber’s question, “why may I consider myself Ukrainian / what is an ethnos.” The expert lays out the basics of ethnopolitics: the classical primordialist approach (an ethnos as a community with objective criteria — territory, language) and the now-dominant constructivist one (a nation as a modern phenomenon and a “daily choice”; large groups such as a nation exist primarily in people’s consciousness). Nations form from the second half of the 18th century (from the French Revolution), out of ethnoses — in the 19th century; the Ukrainian nation arises through language (from Kotliarevsky’s “Eneida”). It works directly against the myth of the “artificiality” of the Ukrainian nation. A theoretical basis for the article on whether the Ukrainian nation is “artificial.”