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Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics. 2015. Vol. 12. N 3. P 69-85.
FROM PRESENCE TO BELONGING: EVENTFUL IDENTITY OF EUROMAIDAN
O.M. ZHURAVLEV
Oleg M. Zhuravlev — researcher in Public sociology laboratory (PS Lab), Centre for Independent social researches, MA in Sociology (European University in Saint-Petersburg, Russia), PhD student (European University Institute, Florence, Italy).
E-mail: [email protected]
Address: office 301, 87 Ligovsky Ave, St Petersburg, 191040, Russian Federation
Abstract
Mass protest events may often lead to various societal transformations, including structural changes and emergence of new identities, subjectivities and social relations. The concept of “eventful protests” suggests that the sheer act of mobilization may create and empower a new collective identity. At the same time, in many cases such mass events lead to the intensifying of preexisting political stereotypes and social cleavages and thus fail to be truly transformative. We assumed that the Ukranian mass protest event of November 2013-February 2014 dubbed “Euromaidan” consecutively first weakened and then enforced the ethno-cultural and political split between Western and Eastern Ukranian citizens. To test the hypothesis narrative analysis was implemented. 144 semi-structured interviews were analyzed to establish the narrative perception of Euromaidan participants. The results indicate that while “Euromaidan” initially succeeded at creating a new civic identity that united the protesters, this identity failed to spread beyond the event. Narrative analysis shows that the same rhetoric and framing that represented the initial push for civic unity and inclusivity, when intensified, transformed into a tool of promoting exclusivity, dehumanization and harmful stereotypes. They also suggest that the same structural elements that contribute to the occurrence of mass political protest (authoritarian rule, stereotype-filled discourse, lack of representation) also limits the transformative capabilities of such events.
Keywords: collective behavior, political protest, national identity.
Protests and identities in Ukraine
Mass protests and national identity formation have been considered as interrelated processes in Ukraine during last decades (see, for instance, Arel,
2005). Popular uprisings both nonviolent and violent are especially interesting cases because they intensify national identification. However, as any revolutionary situations they also tend to split a society dividing it into adherents
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and opponents of radical changes. Moreover, in Ukrainian society, which is characterized by ethno-cultural and linguistic differences between Western and Eastern parts, such splits usually overlap with regional cleavages that hinder national identity consolidation. Both “Orange Revolution” and Euro-maidan, on the one hand, consolidated national identity, and, on the other hand, led to reinforcement of regional cleavages. Interestingly, many researchers see identity unification and overcoming these cleavages to be the purpose of popular mass protests. They believe that consolidated national identity is the necessary condition of social changes and democratization. Indeed, just after the “Orange revolution” occurred political scientist Dominique Arel argued that the main goal of Ukraine as a democratic state was the extension of the emerged political nation to the East and South of the country whereby local people from these regions could feel their belonging to Ukraine (Arel, 2005).
Euromaidan showed the relevance of the same problem for the Ukrainian society. Indeed, it was accompanied by engagement of new, previously apolitical citizens from various parts of Ukraine (and especially from the Central part of the country) into new, “pro-Western”, and “nationalist” political consensus (Katchanovski, 2014). However, Euromaidan grew into a new civil conflict. This conflict that was accompanied by the Russian military invasion split local populations in various cities and reinforced mutual stereotypes based on contrasting collective identities.
In this article we analyze the way Euromaidan both succeeded and failed
to extend the protest beyond the protesters themselves. We will consider this problem through the lens of theories of “transformative events” and “eventful protests” that analyze protest collective identities as one of the mechanisms of social changes.
Protest events and eventful protests
Over the last two decades theories of protest events/eventful protests have become an important explanatory tool in social movement studies. The central claim of the eventful approach to contentious politics is that the event itself should be analyzed as independent factor of socio-political dynamics. The researchers who argue that the event is an explanans, not only an explanandum, claim that events themselves produce new subjectivities, solidarities and resources through intensifying social interaction in action and, therefore, can influence social structures. One of the most influential sociological theories of protest events is William Sewell’s concept of “transformative events”. Doug McAdam and Sewell define transformative events as “turning points in structural change, concentrated moments of political and cultural creativity when the logic of historical development is reconfigured by human action but by no means abolished” (McAdam & Sewell, 2001). In his definition of political events Sewell tries to link collective experience of rupture in daily life with structural transformations (Sewell, 1996). The relations between an experience of abruptness and a transformation of social structures are at the central of our consideration. In what follows we
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will describe the most important arguments of the different theories of protest events focusing on the problem of relations between experiential and structural dimensions of eventfulness.
Two sides of eventfulness: experience of rupture and structural change
There are two different aspects of eventfulness of protests. The first one sees an event as a specific type of collective experience within which new identities and relations are forged. Donatella della Porta in her analysis of “eventful protests” claims that involvement in an abrupt collective action transforms subjectivities and reshapes social relations within the very occurrence of mobilization (della Porta, 2014). The second aspect of eventfulness of protests is its structural effect. William Sewell analyzes both aspects of eventful temporality. On the one hand, he argues that the event “certainly raises the emotional intensity of life” and therefore intensifies collective action and public debates. The author underlines generic character of protest mobilizations that generate new cultural meanings, collective identities and social relations. For example, in his brilliant study of French Revolution Sewell shows that civic national identity emerged during and immediately after the taking of the Bastille. The new understanding of a nation was the result of innovative interpretation of violent attack on Bastille as popular uprising. This interpretation was the product of intensified public debates and collective emotions. At the same time Sewell claims that structural changes in different realms of society
should coincide for structural transformation to occur. Sewell argues that “a revolution is not just a forceful act that expresses the will of the people <...> Only when it became clear that the taking of the Bastille had forced the king to yield effective power to the National Assembly could the acts of Parisian people be viewed as a revolution in this new sense. The epoch-making cultural change — the invention of a new and enduring political category — could therefore only take place in tandem with practical changes in institutional and military power relations” (Sewell, 1996). Thus, a historical event is the result of a coincidence of different disruptive events in different social realms which is accomplished by significant institutional changes.
The two aspects of eventfulness can be interrelated: a rupture in daily life can produce an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and joy that can mobilize collective action, initiate public debates, and intensify collective emotions. In turn, mobilized human action can reinforce a condition of uncertainty, synchronize various social struggles, articulate new cultural meanings, and bring about a social change (Bourdieu, 1988). However, as Adam Moore argues, these two dimensions of eventfulness are different. Moreover, they can constitute contrast definitions of what event is: “events stand apart from this ordinary background of life. This way of conceptualizing events stands in clear contrast with Sewell and Sahlins, who base their distinction upon analytically defined outcomes — structural transformations — rather than social experience and narration, where I think they can be more properly grounded (Moore, 2011). In this work we link the
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two aspects of eventfulness of protests and raise the following question: under what conditions the experience of rupture can become a factor of social and political change? Our hypothesis is that collective identities and cultural meanings that emerge within protests can brings about a structural change if they extent beyond events as temporally and spatially limited happenings and influence dominant identities and social relations. We will focus on consideration of eventful identities’ impact of “symbolic structures” that are “legitimate principles of vision and division of social world”. These principles constitute common sense of agents from various social groups (Bourdieu, 1991).
Eventful identity and transformation of symbolic structures
By “eventful identity” we will mean a collective identity that is produced within and by an experience of collective action and shared by participants and bystanders of a protest event. Such an identity is different from what is usually meant by the term “social identity”. On the one hand, “collective identity concerns cognitions shared by members of a group”, while “social identity concerns the socially constructed cognitions of an individual about his membership in one or more groups” (Klandermans, 2014). On the other hands, eventful collective identity is immanent to collective action itself, while social identity is more stable and rooted in social roles. Indeed, as David Snow argues, social identities are used to place people in the social space while collective identities “are constituted by a shared sense of ‘we-
ness’ and ‘collective agency’” (Snow, 2001).
Francesca Polletta and James Jasper argue movements themselves can create collective identities: “Some movements seem to attract participants even in the absence of prior identities and networks. “Moral shocks” produced, for example, by a photograph of a tortured animal or the disaster at Three Mile Island can mobilize people who do not know each other or the organizers <...> political activity itself provides that kind of solidarity (Jasper & Polletta, 2001). However, eventful collective identities can influence social identities. An “eventful protest”, i.e., a protest that is characterized by an experience of a rupture in daily life can become a “transformative event”, i.e., an event that changes social structures if an eventful collective identity shared by protesters can transform their and other people’s social identities, i.e., their perception of social groups and of relations between them.
Thus, a collective identity itself is twofold. On the one hand, it is based on a common experience of togetherness and collective action. On the other hand, collective identity is symbolic resource that can define and redefine relations between social groups. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, “political subversion presupposes cognitive subversion, a conversion of the vision of the world” within which collective identity construction plays the central role: “political action . aims to make or unmake groups, and <...> to transform the social world in accordance with their interests” (Bourdieu, 1991). But what is needed to make an experience of togetherness a new and transformative collective identity? Bourdieu
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claims that the protest event which is always a result of a crisis of social reproduction can lead to significant social change only if protesters who want transformation obtain “the critical discourse” (ibid.). However, Bourdieu argues, it usually does not happen, because “the propulsive force of heretical criticism is met by the resistant force of orthodoxy. Dominated individuals <...> cannot constitute themselves as a separate group <...> unless they question the [dominant] categories of perception of the social order <...> Dominated individuals are less likely to bring about a symbolic revolution - which is the condition for the reappropriation of the social identity of which their acceptance of dominant taxonomies has deprived them - when the subversive force and critical competence <. > is relatively slight” (ibid.).
The same issue is in the center of the research of Adam Moore, who shows that a political event can reproduce rather than change social structures if collective identities that are articulated within this event are constructed in the lines of existing borders between social groups and are defined by the dominant public discourses. Analyzing the violent clashes between Bosnian and Croatian football fans in the Bosnian city of Motsar in 2007, Moore argues that a disruptive event blocked the articulation of a perception of social world that would be alternative to the dominant ethnocentric discourse and therefore contributed to reproduction rather than transformation of social structures. “As an instance of ethnic violence — rather than mere hooliganism — the events served as warning for those who sought to carve out alterna-
tive ways of coexisting and identifying themselves” the author claims.
Moore argues that although social scientists often presuppose that social structures reproduce themselves in the normal course of daily life, while disruptive events tend to change structures, we should recognize that often social reproduction requires “maintenance work”, while abrupt events can be a mechanism of this work. In his research the author argues that “since the end of the war, ethnicity has remained the chief framework through which social life is organized and interpreted in the city <...> but cracks in the facade were beginning to show, opening up space <. > for people to consider the possibility of alternative forms of social identification and association” (ibid.). However, the two days of unexpected violence in the city that were followed by the work of interpretation of this violence in terms of ethnical cleavages, contributed to reassertion of the ethnocentric discourse: “emplotted into this narrative framework, the violent events in Mostar were specters of ethnic conflict past and future, proof that attempts to return to a multiethnic way of living that existed before the war would be futile, or possibly even dangerous” (ibid.).
Finally Moore concludes that political events if do not articulate discourses and identities alternative to the dominant ones contribute to reproduction of social structures rather to social change (ibid.). In this article we will analyze the eventful collective identity that emerged within Euromaidan movement. We will explore some internal contradictions of this identity and will show it was both inclusive and exclusive one. Finally we will demonstrate how it
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influenced the dominant social identities in Ukraine and discourses that articulate them.
Study
The sample. Within the collective research project of PS Lab we collected 78 interviews with the participants of Euromaidan rallies and camps in Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv and 66 interviews with the participants of Anti-maidan rallies, marches and camps in Kharkiv, Odessa, Sevastopol, Simferopol and Kerch’. Among bystanders of Euromaidan we interviewed 44 men and 35 women who were from 17 to 53 years old. Among Antimaidan proponents we interviewed 43 men and 23 women who were from 15 to 65 years old. All interviews were collected in summer 2014. We chose those respondents who were not politically active before the protests. Usually we found the accounts in Facebook and Vkon -takte that fitted our criteria of being a “newcomer”, or “first-timer”. This criteria helps to grasp the effect of the event. In this article we will mostly focus on the interviews with Euromaidan activists. However, we will exemplify some arguments by the analysis of some interviews with Antimaidan activists.
Method. We took semi-structured interviews that consisted of several blocks: biographical one; experience of participation in public sphere, activism and politics; political and ideological preferences; experience in Euromaidan/ Antimaidan; opinions on the general situation in the country. In this article that deals with the problem of eventful collective identities and their development after and beyond the event we will mostly analyze the answers to the
three blocks of questions. The first block of questions concerns eventful collective identities: “What were the most important things for you in Maidan?”, “What did you feel when you came to Maidan”, “Who are people who come to Maidan?” etc. The second block of questions concerns national identities: “Do you feel and consider yourself as Ukrainian?”, “What does it mean for you to be a Ukrainian?” etc. The third block of questions concerns social identities especially regional, linguistic and ethno-cultural ones: “Could you describe the sides that are present in the conflict in Donbas and in other Eastern and Southern areas?”, “Do you see any differences between people from different regions in Ukraine?”, “Do you see any difference between Ukrainians and Russians and between Ukrainian and Russian societies?”
In this article we will focus on the analysis of narratives which, as Francesca Polletta argues, represent the important source of eventful identity construction and on analysis of frames and classifications that usually express social identities. As Polletta argues, “narrative’s temporally configurative capacity equips it to integrate past, present, and future events and to align individual and collective identities during periods of change. These features distinguish narratives from frames, which are said to contribute to identity-formation through taxonomic atemporal and discursive processes of analogy and differences (Polletta, 1998). We will mostly analyze the stories of “becoming the Ukrainian in the Euromaidan” and the discourses and rhetoric that objectify various parts of Ukrainian society. In other words, we will compare the narratives of “becoming
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Ukrainians” within the event and discourses that express perception of cultural, regional, political etc. differences between citizens of Ukraine.
Results
The event of Euromaidan
Our central argument is that Euromaidan was perceived as a unique and authentic event that created new collective identity which — the respondents themselves believed — has overcome the “superficial” stereotypical divisions between West and East, Russian and Ukrainian language. At the same time, the eventfulness of this identity together with the lack of any ideological or political idea behind it facilitated the transformation of this identity from an inclusive to an exclusive one. The ambiguity of the Euromaidan event was that its abruptness reinforced its transformative capacity by empowerment of thousands of the participants but, at the same time, the lack of certain political and ideological agendas that made this event so “organic” and disruptive limited its transformative effect. The Euromaidan movement failed to propose a political and ideological alternative to nationalism and neoliberal reforms and did not initiate a long-term social change. In what follows we will consider how the “eventful” identity emerged within the experience of “Euromaidan” and its subsequent transformation.
Collective identity of the protest
The Euromaidan mobilization produced strong feeling of unity, association and solidarity. Although the respondents framed this identity in
terms of belonging to the nation they emphasized that their patriotism emerged within Euromaidan manifestations, not before:
“I’ve never thought, I’ve never been a patriot, I’ve never thought about Ukraine in such a manner. I’ve never valued all these things. Some events happen and influence us. At some point I just started to love my homeland. I really do not know why and which moment was a turning point. Now I understand that it was one moment, one instant” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev).
In the respondents’ narratives the event was perceived as one that ceased and overcame the regional cleavages and linguistic stereotypes. The activists insisted that Maidan united Ukrainians regardless their language and region:
“This understanding emerged just in the course of Maidan. After2004 Donetsk and Luhansk seemed to be one part of Ukraine while L’viv seemed to be another one <...> [But in Euromaidan] I met people from Donetsk and Luhansk more frequently than people from L’viv. You could see that Ukraine became truly united. If previously we were really disintegrated, now we are united, we are a single people” (M., female, 17 years old, Kiev).
In their narratives the respondents talked about unification of the society within Euromaidan mobilization as if it was a done deal:
“Q.: What was the most important thing in Maidan for you personally?
A.: Unity, the unity of all the people from all the regions. You know, previously, the East spoke. like “you are ban-derites”. but this [Euromaidan] united everyone. These were not ‘kharkivchane’ (Kharkiv dwellers) anymore. They were Ukrainian and Ukrainian (G., male, 28 years old, Kharkiv)”.
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The Euromaidan collective identity was characterized by political and ideological uncertainty and even apathy. The informants referred to various criteria of belonging to the imagined community of “Ukrainians” in the interviews. Different people referred to different criteria in interviews: to
citizenship, civilization, ethnicity, language etc. However, these features were not those that defined shared, common aspects of collective identity. Neither political demands nor social issues were determinative for the identity. On the contrary, the respondents stressed the political and ideological indifference when described their collective self:
“My worldview changed dramatically. Someone would call it active citizenship, someone would call it patriotism another one would call it nationalism. Every person has his own interpretation. Some people think that I’m a nationalist if I love Ukraine. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a patriot, maybe it is active citizenship. But for sure I love Ukraine” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev).
Rejection of stereotypes did not lead to an articulation of an alternative political idea of national identity. Rather, the new eventful identity was characterized by uncertainty and negativity. As a result, any positive characteristics of the new national identity were very abstract. As a young student from Kiev told us:
“It was the feeling of unity. It was the wave of civil national... Not national, but precisely civil national., because there were no divisions in Maidan, right? Nigoyan was Armenian, for example <.> The concept of ‘Ukrainian’. was at that time equal to the concept of ‘a man’. A man with a sense of dignity” (S., female, 22 years old, Kiev).
Protesters demonstrated self-organization and mutual help that allowed them not only to resist the state but also to assert their independence from “official” “leaders” of Euromaidan. But they also demonstrated their inability to frame and articulate what was the specificity of the movement in political or ideological terms. On the contrary, the atmosphere of ineffability made the event and its identity so mobilizing:
“Ukrainian symbolism became so important for us <.> Ukrainian became associated with, how to say, I don’t know how to express it, it is what we called the revolution of dignity. It is impossible to express this feeling that you are Ukrainian. It is the feeling of incommunicable community” (S., female, 22 years old, Kiev).
This feeling of abruptness made people committed to the movement because they felt the event of Euromaidan changed their personalities. One of our respondents supported Antimaidan but then became involved in Euromaidan. He himself explains this transformation not in terms of political or ideological or even “geo-political” differences between the two camps but in terms of “energy” and atmosphere. He also notices that Euromaidan was more self-organized than Antimaidan that was, he believes, initiated by Putin. However, he does not articulate the difference between grassroots and from the top-down movements in political terms. Instead, he exploits highly emotional and even esoteric terms:
“My friends always tell me about Maidan. the Earth feels the energy of meanness and the energy of love, friendship, mutual help. I cannot say that there are no such feelings among the insurgencies (opolchentsy), but it was from the
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top-down. It was initiated by mean people. <...> one should be a hard-hearted, a man without soul, to ignore this difference. That is why I know now for sure who is right and who is not” (N., male, 35 years old, Luhansk and Kiev).
Moreover, when speaking about politics in Ukraine and Euro-integration he claims that “it doesn’t matter for me either Europe or Eurasia . the most important thing for Ukrainians is a good salary, peace...”
However, when describing the eventful experience of Maidan he rejects any ideological preferences or social demands behind it:
“Q. Do you think Euromaidan could include some political or social demands, like salaries.?
Many friends who were in Maidan... they say that they did not think about death, because they fought for their friends. And at this moment you don’t think about salaries, about social benefits... Maidan was more spiritual (vysokodykhovnyi)” (N., male, 35 years old, Luhansk and Kiev).
The eventful identity demonstrates the self-referential character of the event. One could argue that the new understanding of who Ukrainian is defined the nation as imagined community of the Euromaidan movement participants and supporters:
“Ukrainian is the person who came to the revolution, who supported it, who at least was interested in it” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev).
From uniqueness to exclusiveness
What characterized the new collective identity was not a political idea of a nation but the discourse of authenticity that articulated this identity.
Whatever respondents meant by “Ukrainians” they used the metaphor of authenticity when talking about who was Ukrainian and who was not: “If a person is not able to love Ukraine truly he will not able to become a Ukrainian” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev). Since national belonging was articulated in terms of “true Ukrainians” while to be a Ukrainian meant to support the movement, if someone was against or did not support the Maidan movement or Antiterroristic operation she could be blamed as “not a true Ukrainian” or even “not Ukrainian”. The discourse of authenticity was inclusive because it aimed at overcoming exclusive stereotypes diving people into two parts: Western, Ukrainian-speaking people and Eastern, Russian-speaking people. At the same time, this identity turned out to be exclusive after Antimaidan emerged because the discourse of authenticity allowed blaming anyone for not being a “true Ukrainian” and because lack of political articulation of this identity made it vulnerable to pressure of the old, stereotypical discourses of nationalism.
Analysis of discourses of the self and classifications of “us” and “them” in contrast to the narratives of becoming (the Ukrainian) shows the exclusive character of the new identity. A young girl, Maidan activist from Kiev who was a secondary school student tells the story how Euromaidan had united the nation: “Maidan was an experience of unity... we became one people..2-3 years ago we could never think that the city of Dnepropetrovsk will be so active... now there is no discrimination of people from Luhansk or Donetsk”. She insisted that people from the Eastern part, from Donetsk and Luhansk were the most
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active part of the Anti-terroristic operation and that is why she disagreed that there was a civil war: “The national guard and the soldiers of the ATO are mostly the dwellers of Donetsk and Luhansk. How can you imagine that they would shoot and kill people from their own cities? I don’t believe in that. That’s not true”. She claims that if Maidan united all the Ukrainians and if the separatists are against Maidan, it cannot be that Ukrainians support terrorists. Thus, it cannot be that the ATO is against Donetsk and Luhansk.
However, if we look at classifications she use to distinguish between different agents of the conflicts we will see that she then says that those who are against ATO are not “true” Ukrainians: “A person who claims he wants to live in Russia is not a Ukrainian anymore, automatically. That’s why I don’t think that it is a fratricidal war”. She then says: “Some of my friends say that Luhansk deserves to be destroyed completely. This community is different from the rest of Ukraine. But at the same time it does not mean that we are ready to give them the Luhansk Region... Whatever the majority of people live in Luhansk are like there are some people who are Ukrainians and who really want to live in Ukraine. I believe that it is heroism, because you know it is very easy to fly the Ukrainian flag in Maidan and cry ‘for Ukraine!’ because the majority of people do the same in Maidan. But those who flew the Ukrainian flag in Donetsk or in Luhansk they were heroes because all the people who lived there were really aggressive towards such gestures” (M., female, 17 years old, Kiev). We see that she now says the opposite thing: people from the Eastern Part are not “the same people”, but “different
from the rest of Ukraine” and they are not in favor of Maidan and ATO but strongly against it.
Another respondent claims that “a Ukrainian is a person who really loves Ukraine . but it is stupid to be within Ukraine and to claim that you want to be a part of another state. It would be great if all who want to live in Russia would go there and Ukraine would become as it is because only those who really love Ukraine would live here” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev). Here we see the reference to the authentic Ukrainians and authentic Ukraine which is “as it is”. He also distinguishes between those, who “love Ukraine” and those “who want to live in Russia”. What is important is not only that those who “want to live in Russia” are not “true Ukrainians”, but also that those who are not “true Ukrainians”, for instance, those who support Antimaidan can be blamed as those “who want to live in Russia”. Later he says: “People who live in the Eastern part are different from people from the Central Ukraine. Their level of intelligence is lower that’s why it’s hard to communicate with them. These people don’t understand what you try to tell them. They are just stupid people” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev). Then he justifies repressions towards separatists because they are not true Ukrainians: “After three months those who were separatists. if they were really Ukrainians they would have really understood where they lived, in what city, and they would have changed the position. Those who did not change those are also terrorists. People who support terrorists. It’s not an argument that they are just ordinary people, no, they do not deserve mercy” (Y., male, 24 years old, Kiev). “Not true Ukrainians” here are
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blamed as “stupid people from the East”, “those who want to live in Russia” or even as “Russians”. These stereotypes that emerged in the course of the unfolding conflict were not in contradiction with the inclusive discourse of authenticity. On the contrary, this “anti-stereotypical” discourse turned out to be a mechanism of de-humanization and exclusion.
Thus, the rhetoric of authenticity serves as a mechanism of exclusion, dividing Ukrainians into “true” and “not true” one. In the last part of the article, we will show how the discourse of authenticity although initially antistereotypical then facilitates a re-emergence of the stereotypes. Such an analysis of stereotypes will allow us to explore how eventful collective identity influenced social identities that are structured by and structure composition of and relations between social groups which differences are articulated in ethno-cultural, linguistic and regional terms. In the last part we will analyze not only interviews with activists of Euromaidan but also some interviews we took with the supporters of Antimaidan. Analyzing the categories which move from the Euro-maidan participants’ discourses to the Antimaidan participants’ ones will allow us to explore their role in the escalation of the conflict because such clichй are the instruments of mutual stereotypization and mutual hate. In other words, we will analyze the stereotypes that serve as the instrument of construction of social identities. In what follows we will exemplify our argument by the analysis of two stereotypical categories: “Russians” and “separatists”.
Social stereotypes and social identities
Although, as we pointed out above, Euromaidan proponents equated their opponents with separatists, despite media clichй Antimaidan was not initially “Pro-Russian”. There was a fraction of Russian nationalists who supported imperialistic politics of the Russian state but it was not dominant and failed to impose Russian identity on all participants. Some of Anti-maidan’s supporters tried to reassert Ukrainian national identity: “Why does Russia come and help us? Should Russian troops, soldiers come and help you when you are sitting in your bed and crying or just flying the Russian flag? It should not be going in such a way” (T., male, 23 years old, Odessa).
Some of them who felt they were excluded from the national identity started conceiving themselves as Russians. This identity transformation made Russian nationalists and Russian imperialistic ideology much stronger: “We always have perceived ourselves as Ukrainians. Previously we went to Russia and told them: don’t confuse this, we were not Russians we were Ukrainians! But after the 2nd of May we don’t want to be Ukrainians anymore. Now we feel more Russian” (N., female, 61 years old, Odessa). They were blamed as “Russians” and they interiorized this stigma but in a subversive way developing an ‘imperial’ identity. Thus, the so-called “Russian world” was not only a result of Kremlin politics but also a result of Maidan itself.
A young teacher from Donetsk who initially supported Antimaidan but then became a Euromaidan activist,
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identifies himself with both Russians and Ukrainians: “Ukrainians are
Russians too, we defeated the Nazis, we have imagination, it is impossible to win a victory over us. Now you can see how our army, our Ukrainian army ... if it was the American army they would have died in a week. But our people they are gathering, they buy weapons, this is a popular movement (N., male, 35 years old, Luhansk and Kiev). He claims, that he is “not ready to die for Ukrainian culture”, because “every culture and every language, the Russian, the English, the Ukrainian ... is beautiful”. However, the analysis of his facebook posts that were written after the interview show that his collective identity was transformed dramatically and became much more stereotypical. He stopped identifying himself with the multicultural region and started framing the conflict in terms of “Ukrainians”, “patriots” who struggle against “Russians”: “I suppose these ideas were imposed by Russia but I’m writing my post in Ukraine”. The transformation of meaning of the category “separatists” demonstrates the transformation of the meaning of social identities that, in turn, is caused by evolution of the eventful collective identity from inclusive to exclusive one.
If in the interview he means by ‘separatists’ those who are involved in the insurgence military units, then in Facebook he terms the whole region, Donbas (with which he previously identified himself) “separatists”. He stigmatizes the whole region as populated by unintelligent and unpatriotic persons: “These separatists are so stupid! They lay their children open to the attack... and then claim that we kill them. Did you try to take your children from
the military zone, you, stupid idiot? Enjoy your DNR, idiot, only you are guilty of all these things. People who have the intellect left the region and went to some more safe places. But you, stupid idiot, you will live in the place you ‘deserve’ to live. I don’t care about what you say like ‘you kill us’” (N., male, 35 years old, Luhansk and Kiev).
The many interviews with Anti-maidan movement participants show that they conceived the category of “separatists” as stigma that excluded them from the national identity against their will: “You know if we start flying Ukrainian flags we are Ukrainians too, and we have the right to express our opinion. We are not separatists, not old sovki” (T., male, 23 years old, Odessa).
This respondent uses the term “separatist” in pair with the term “sovok” (the stereotype that is used to blame those who are represented as people from Soviet era, not intelligent and modern enough etc.). Another respondent says: “I’m Ukrainian, my mother is Ukrainian, my father is Ukrainian, my grandfather was Polish. And I am Ukrainian. You see what the situation is? If you don’t cry . now the segregation is happening... if you don’t cry ’Glory to Ukraine!’ or if you don’t reply ‘Glory to heroes!’, you are a separatist, you don’t love your country because you are not a patriot” (A., male, 30 years old, Kharkiv).
Thus the discourse of authenticity failed to construct the new long-term identity. On the contrary it facilitated the re-emergence of stereotypes inherited from the old Ukrainian nationalism to which Maidan supporters deliberatively opposed their new “eventful” identity. Being internalized as a stigma by the participants of Antimaidan these
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stereotypes contributed to the escalation of the civil military conflict.
Discussion
In this article we showed that Euromaidan although mobilized many people from various regions at the same time reinforced identity conflicts. We do not argue that the protest failed to unite and integrate the society. It contributed to a formation of a civic nationalism and civic identity. Moreover, protesters deliberatively wanted to overcome ethno-cultural and linguistic stereotypes that hindered a universal civic identity construction. However, the discourse they opposed to these stereotypes was the rhetoric of authenticity that, paradoxically, reinforced stereotypization after the authentic moment passed. Thus, the “eventful protest” did not become a “transformative event”.
Indeed, although Euromaidan integrated many citizens from the Eastern part into the new nationalistic identity, it failed to change the very dominant symbolic structure that opposes Ukrainian patriots to people who live in Eastern regions, especially in Donbass, who are sympathetic to Russia and speak Russian language, and who are unintelligent. The cause of this failure lies in the fact that protesters did not managed to extend the eventful identity beyond the event itself. Moreover, the very eventfulness of the protest contributed to this failure as it created the cherished the illusion that the society had already unified by the very happening of the event.
However, the discourse of authenticity as well as the experience of eventfulness cannot alone explain a stereo-
typization of initially inclusive identity. Certainly the emergence of war and transforming of some parts of Antimaidan into the separatist movement were the major source of mutual hate and consequently mutual stereo-typization. At the same time apart from these extraordinary military occurrences, there were some structural conditions that hindered expansion of inclusive protest identity beyond the protest itself. In what follows we will briefly indicate some structural conditions that hindered spreading the new identity to the whole society.
Ukrainian society as well as many other post-communist societies have been considered as depoliticized (Howard, 2003; Zhuravlev, 2014). The stigmatization of both conventional and contentious politics together with the rejection of any ideological languages led to the fact that when politicize people invent anti-political politics within which they do not only struggle against the state but tend to keep distance from politics as a realm and set of institutions. The origin of this politics of anti-politics could be found in the anti-communist movements that were the result of sudden politicization of apolitical citizens of soviet and communist countries.
What we called politics of authenticity is the part of such an anti-political politics. Indeed, as Donatella della Porta argues in her book on anti-communist movements in 1989, anti-political attitudes “corresponded to the building of authentic relations between the person and the universe <...> [The anti-political] discourse substituted categories of left and right with moral categories of right and wrong, lie or truth ... ‘politics outside politics’ is eth-
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ical and existential” (della Porta, 2014). To analyze this inertia of depoliticization in more detail we shall consider the one important feature of anti-political politics, or politics of authenticity that is the lack of political representation within the protest movements.
William Sewell in his research on the event of French Revolution shows that the new civic identity could not spread to / constitute the French society without the mechanism of political representation. The author claims that the new national identity constituted the “new ultimate source of power -whether as members of the sovereign people, as its soldiers, its representatives, or the objects of its wrath” (Sewell, 1996). Indeed political representation creates both an infrastructure of legitimate institutions of constituent power and the space of public debates that can articulate and spread the new political understanding of the nation. Both were absent in Euromaidan. The activists were committed to radical change, but at the same time the majority of the respondents said that they did not want to take part in any long-term social movements or political parties (Zhuravlev, 2014). The activists opposed the principle of self-organization to the state politics. The indifference toward representation gave Yatsenuk, Klitchko and Tygnibok as well as Poroshenko opportunity to impose their candidacy. As a result the lack of representational mechanisms and institutions blocked public discussions within which new cultural meanings and discourses of identities construction could be invented and institutionalized. On the contrary, the old discourses were reinforced.
William Sewell’s theory of transformative events is based on the analysis of the protests within which protesters’ disagreement with the dominant order was articulated in the public discourse alternative to the dominant one: “The two powers based their claims on sharply contradictory ideologies. The monarch claimed to rule by the grace of God <...> The National Assembly claimed its authority by popular sovereignty <. > These two ideologies not only envisaged different kinds of states, but were based on divergent cosmologies” (Sewell, 1996). However in our case the dominant discourse of “two Ukraines” was the only language of identity construction. This language was rejected by Euromaidan activists but was not substituted with an alternative one. As a result it was reemerged during the military conflict.
It should be noted that we agree with the researchers who reject the superficial and propagandistic (as in the case of Taras Kuzio’s works) statements asserting existence of two or more ‘Ukraines’ with different political cultures, languages and identities. In the article based on focus-groups and interviews with school teachers and schoolchildren in different ‘Eastern’ Ukrainian cities, Peter Rodgers concludes that although the respondents “expressed a clear understanding of the regional differences across Ukraine <...> regionalism in Ukraine is a far more complex phenomenon than a simple, dichotomous “west versus east” divide” (Rodgers, 2006). Indeed, collective identities have been uncertain and vague in Ukraine during the whole period of independence (Portnov, 2010). The uncertainty of national identities has been the result of sym-
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bolic politics of the Ukrainian state. The elites tried to exploit nationalistic movements and, at the same time, to prevent civil conflicts between the regions in order to preserve national independence that guaranteed their monopoly of power over military and economic resources (Portnov, 2010).
Our argument is that there is interrelation between uncertainty of national and regional identities and imposition of stereotypical divisions that assert an existence of “two Ukraines” in media and political discourse although these two are usually perceived as opposite variations of a national identity. The media-stereotypes that divide Ukraine in linguistic, regional etc. parts were real not only because they represented the ‘objective reality’ but because they were used in construction of collective identities. The imposition of these stereotypes could either lead to naturalization of the stereotypical divisions or to their perception as superficial and false. However, in the latter case people also used these categories, not alternative ones to construct their identities, although they put them as stereotypes in opposition to which they expressed themselves. Many Ukrainians believed that these media-stereotypes were both too superficial to be taken for gospel and real enough to be taken for granted. In other words, in pre-Euromaidan Ukraine the dominant political agents imposed the categories of self-perception that prevented any alternative identity formation, but this imposition was not based on naturalization of superficial divisions. Bour-dieu claimed that “social order owes some measure of its permanence to the
fact that it imposes schemes of classification which, being adjusted to objective classifications, produce a form of recognition of this order, the kind implied by the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of its foundations” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 217). In the case of Ukraine, alternatively, there was recognition of the arbitrariness of its foundations; however, this knowledge of arbitrariness did not lead to a creation of alternative discourses of identities articulation.
Thus, we could see that depoliticization, rejection of political representation together with vagueness, but, at the same time stereotypical character of the discourse that articulates national and regional collective identities constitute the set of conditions that facilitate ‘transformative events’ emergence, but, at the same time, limit their transformative capacity. Indeed authoritarian and depoliticized context that hinders routine political participation of citizens in politics and public sphere leads to emergence of disruptive political protests. At the same time the culture of depoliticization that leads to the rejection of political representation hinders institutionalization of these protests in institutions of constituent power. As a result the old elites capture the state power. The superficiality and vagueness of national and regional identities facilitate the emergence of new inclusive eventful identities. At the same time the stereotypical language together with the lack of the public ideological discussions that could articulate alternative discourses of identification lead to the re-emergence of the exclusive nationalistic rhetoric.
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От присутствия к принадлежности: событийная идентичность Евромайдана
Журавлев Олег Михайлович
Исследователь в лаборатории публичной социологии (PS Lab), Центр независимых социологических исследований; магистр социологии; аспирант (European University
Institute, Флоренция, Италия)
Контакты: [email protected]
Резюме
Акции социального протеста часто приводят к изменению общества. В частности, они приводят к структурным изменениям и появлению новых коллективных и социальных идентичностей. Для описания этих изменений была предложена концепция «eventful protests». Согласно этой концепции, отдельный акт коллективного поведения может усиливать уже существующие или приводить к формированию новых коллективных идентичностей, усиливать эмоции и подчеркивать различие в политических взглядах участников. Мы предположили, что массовые протесты на Украине, которые прошли в ноябре 2013 - феврале 2014 г., сначала ослабили, а затем усилили этнокультурный и политический раскол между жителями Западной и Восточной Украины. Для проверки этой гипотезы было проведено 144 неформализованных интервью со сторонниками и противниками Евромайдана. Для анализа этих интервью был использован нарративный анализ. Результаты исследования показали, что первоначально политический протест способствовал формированию общей коллективной идентичности, объединяющей жителей Западной и Восточной Украины. Однако эта идентичность оказалась неопределенной: в ее основе не лежали определенные политические предпочтения, способные объединить участников протеста на долгое время и привести к структурным изменениям в обществе. Как следствие, постепенно эта идентичность была вытеснена более традиционной этнокультурной идентичностью, которая усилила раскол между жителями Западной и Восточной Украины, способствовала взаимной стереотипизации и сделала отношения между ними более враждебными. Эти результаты говорят о том, что существуют факторы (например, неопределенность коллективной идентичности и существование стереотипов), которые ограничивают возможности политического протеста по трансформации общества.
Ключевые слова: коллективное поведение, политический протест, национальная иден-
тичность.
