The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine and its Lessons for Nationalism Studies

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This text brings into analytical focus the workings of whiteness within the politics regarding Ukrainian refugees in two neighboring countries, Austria and Czechia. This comparison aims to contextualize various racial hierarchies in which Ukrainian refugees are embedded, and to connect public discourses translated by mass media and critically accepted by scholars and experts with the personal experience of refugees and those recruited to help them in reception centers. We follow the layering and conversion of racial hierarchies through examining three interrelated realms of public policy: (1) the conflation of illiberal and liberal populisms concerning the Russian invasion and the subsequent refugee movements in the discursive practices of leading politicians and those responsible for refugee politics; (2) the intersectionality of gender, class, and race as a locus of control over Ukrainian women, who comprise the majority of those fleeing the country; and (3) elaborating an extreme case of forging whiteness, within the overt and covert racist practices concerning Ukrainian Romani refugees. To conclude, we discuss possible directions for future research that apply critical whiteness studies for understanding how racial hierarchies design public politics concerning refugees, and what can be done to minimize the injustices determined by whiteness.
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The Ukrainian Refugee “Crisis” and the (Re)production of Whiteness in Austrian and Czech Public Politics

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Ukraine's national identity was born out of historical events which impacted the regions in Ukraine differently. In western and central parts of Ukraine, the people tend to be more pro-Western, while in the eastern and southern parts of the country, the people are more pro-Russian. This difference emerged from two approaches to the Ukrainian identity. The pro-Western part of the country believes that they were a separate nation from the Russians and should break ties with Russia. The pro-Russian part believes that the Ukrainians and the Russians are the same nation or two brotherhood nations that should stand together against outside threats.
This paper will analyze which key historical events were the roots of the Ukrainian national identity and where the differences between the regional approaches are laying. This difference between pro-Western and pro-Russian attitudes influenced the Ukrainian political landscape from its independence until 2014. After the Revolution of Dignity, the occupation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas, the political situation started to change towards more pro-Western policies. The invasion in 2022 could be the final nail in the coffin of the Ukrainian-Russian brotherhood, and it might erase the last difference between the two parts of Ukraine.
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Turning Ukrainians into a separate nation

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While nationalism theorists have mostly rejected primordialism, politicians and the wider public typically have a primordialist and essentialist understanding of national history. On the eve of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin invoked several primordialist tropes so as to justify military action, which is unsurprising in a politician. Yet Western scholars criticizing Putin's historical narratives in newspaper editorials or in scholarly talks posted to YouTube only rarely suggest modernist or social constructivist historical narratives. Several posit counter-primordialisms instead. Primordialism, then, enjoys more support than is widely realized, even among scholars who ought to be familiar with its problems. Meanwhile modernist theorists of nationalism, however popular among nationalism theorists, require more vigorous promotion in academic circles.
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Popular and Scholarly Primordialism: The Politics of Ukrainian History during Russia's 2022 Invasion of Ukraine

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In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust (קאַטאַסטראָפע <italic>Katastrofe</italic> in Yiddish) endows the continent’s societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide’s main victims – Jews – exist no longer in Europe as a community with their specific Yiddish language and culture. Due to the twin-like closeness between Yiddish and German, prior to the war, Yiddish speakers ensured a world-wide popularity for the German language. After 1945, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors and Jewish poets exorcised and reinvented the then-murderers’ language of German, so that poetry could be written in it again. In reciprocation, Germany and Europe – shockingly and quite incomprehensibly – abandoned their duty to preserve and cultivate Yiddish language and culture as a necessary “inoculation” against another genocide. Forgetting about this duty imperils Europe and its inhabitants; the danger now is sadly exemplified by Russia’s ongoing genocidal-scale war on Ukraine. Not a single Yiddish library exists in today’s Europe, which is an indictment in itself.
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Languages and Morality in Postwar Europe: The German and Austrian Abandonment of Yiddish

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Research on the political aspect of the recognition of the Armenian genocide has mostly focused on the realpolitik and its impact in terms of legislation and relations between political actors. A new dimension in research regarding the Armenian genocide occurred by presenting legal performativity within memory laws in France and Germany. Here, I build on the understanding that performative analysis may help us uncover the deeper circumstances of the recognition of the Armenian genocide, going beyond the classical dichotomy—recognition/nonrecognition. The case of the Czech Republic revealed the problem in the division of executive power regarding foreign policy between the government and the president. Furthermore, the analysis revealed the parliamentary instruments legitimizing the recognition of the Armenian genocide.
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Legal Performativity: Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the Czech Republic

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Since the entry of the far-right party VOX into the Spanish government administrations in 2018, Spain's political scene has gone through a deep transformation. The disparity in opinions among the different parties concerning migration seems to tear the country's democratic foundation apart. This paper is a study of the language and discursive strategies used by VOX's leader, Santiago Abascal, articulating the party's populist propaganda for a united country to “make Spain great again.” The analysis was grounded on the theoretical underpinnings of <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_jnmlp-2022-0005_ref_052">Wodak's (2001)</xref> discursive strategies and <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_jnmlp-2022-0005_ref_017">Van Dijk's (1993)</xref> “<italic>Us” vs. “Them”</italic> framework. The data were based on Abascal's closing political campaign speech during the Madridlenian elections, which was televised in May 2021. The 30-minute video recording was transcribed, annotated, coded, and analyzed. The findings suggest a pattern of discursive practices aimed at diminishing other political parties and their representatives, vilify immigrants, and impugn government measures that were against VOX's authoritarian conservatism and nationalism. There was a predominant use of predication strategies to positively present VOX while denigrating its political rivals. Referential/nomination strategies were also used to divide the society between in-groups and out-groups. Strongly embedded in these strategies were perlocutionary acts used to incite hate toward the out-groups and evoke fear and anxiety toward the in-group, strategically employed as tools to gain votes in the elections.
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The Dangerous Discourse of “Us” vs. “Them:” Spain's VOX Discursive Practices

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This paper analyzes how studies of a language and the language itself can be used as symbolic instruments to construct or support a differential ideological identity. The analyses of these studies have allowed us to undertake a sort of “archaeology” of the process of Basque ethnogenesis. All the authors instrumentalized philological studies as a way of expressing and claiming their ethnic identity, building their arguments on the basis of previous works (the “archaeological” layer being immediately underneath) at the same time that they reformulated them in order to better suit their specific conception of Basque identity as well as their particular sociopolitical interests. As if we were looking at a stratigraphic cut of an uninterrupted human settlement, the research unravels the existence of a narrative thread that, stratum upon stratum (that is, author upon author) connects the Basque chroniclers of the 16th to 18th centuries with the romantic <italic>fuerista</italic> writers of the 19th century, as well as Sabino de Arana-Goiri, the founder of the contemporary Basque Nationalist Party.
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The Basque Language (Euskera) As an Ideological Instrument in the Historical Construction of Basque Ethnic Identity

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Volume 17 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023) Special Issue: Reconsidering “Post-Socialist Cities” in East Central and South East Europe

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Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics

 Journal of Nationalism, Memory &amp; Language Politics is a peer-reviewed journal published by De Gruyter on behalf of the Charles University.  It is committed to exploring divergent scholarly opinions, research and theories of current international academic experts, and is a forum for discussion and hopes to encourage free-thinking and debate among academics, young researchers and professionals over issues of importance to the politics of identity and memory as well as the political dimensions of language policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. The journal is indexed with and included in Google Scholar, EBSCO, CEEOL and SCOPUS.  We encourage research articles that employ qualitative or quantitative methodologies as well as empirical historical analyses regarding, but not limited to, the following issues:    Trends in nationalist development, whether historical or contemporary  Policies regarding national and international institutions of memory as well as investigations into the creation and/or dissemination of cultural memory  The implementation and political repercussions of language policies in various regional and global contexts  The formation, cohesion and perseverance of national or regional identity along with the relationships between minority and majority populations  The role ethnicity plays in nationalism and national identity  How the issue of victimhood contributes to national or regional self-perception  Priority is given to issues pertaining to the 20th and 21st century political developments   While our focus is on empirical articles, our scope remains open to exceptional theoretical works (especially if they incorporate empirical research), book reviews and translations.  Rejection Rate:   70%   Articles must adhere to the journal’s editorial policy and formal guidelines (including author-date Chicago Style). All manuscripts must undergo a double-blind peer review in line with the journal standards. Typically, decisions will be made and applicants will be notified within four months of submission. Accepted articles are not subject to any article processing charges (APC) and are published free of charge for the authors.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 