The Ukrainian Nation As an Object of General Misunderstanding

The article contains an analysis of the academic and popular political discourses concerning the Ukrainian nation. Its aim is to point out atypical phenomena which could constitute little-known factors destabilizing or integrating national self-representation in Ukraine. The inconsistency of these concepts occurs above all at the level of macro-social discourses. What is involved is the presence in politics of content associated with the radical right and its primordial understanding of the nation, accompanied by low support for any sort of national or civil idea among the inhabitants of Ukraine. In the academic discourse the dominant western European theories of nation clash with a specific understanding of the terminology used in Russian scholarship. On the other hand, in local discourses at the meso-social level, there are phenomena that could be integrating factors for the image of the Ukrainian nation. There, language, popular culture, and various ideas about the past intermingle. In southern Ukraine, concepts can be found in which the nation is a political category quite aside from ethnic differences or the language of communication. Soviet times introduced the state factor, which is independent of ethnicity and which was later given content (rather worse than better) by the Ukrainian state. In these cases, Ukrainianness appears as a superior principle in regards to ethnic differentiation. The political situation of Ukraine since 2014, however, does not favor the development of this model of the Ukrainian nation