Ireland and Ukraine

The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between “western” and “eastern” Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a “western” nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an “eastern” one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe’s smaller and, in west-European minds, “more distant” nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like “that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward.”

Dr. Stephen Velychenko is Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is author of: Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine (McGill-Queens UP 2022), Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine (Toronto UP 2019), Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red (Toronto UP 2016), State-Building in Revolutionary Ukraine (Toronto UP 2010), Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia (St. Martin’s Press 1993) as well as National History as Cultural Process (CIUS 1992). He edited Ukraine, the EU and Russia (Palgrave 2007), and co-edited Ireland and Ukraine (ibidem-Verlag 2022) as well as Rossia et Britannia: A special edition of Skhid/Zakhid (CIUS 2001).