Is It Possible to Preserve Statehood Without Protection of National Identity? (Some Lessons from Post-Soviet Constitutionalism Based on the Experience of Ukraine)

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced a new look at the issue of protecting national identity at the constitutional level. If within the framework of the existing integration schemes on the European continent, this problem was analysed in the projection of identity preservation on the basis of a common value base, then in the situation with the former post-Soviet states, we are dealing with several trajectories of the restoration (creation) of one’s own statehood, again, with a different axiological basis. The Baltic countries, which were under the occupation of the Soviet regime, quickly resolved the issue of restoring statehood and formed constitutional mechanisms for the protection of national identity. In most of the rest of the post-Soviet space, due to the corruption of the elites, the preservation of the pro-communist lobby and the significant influence through various channels of the Russian government, issues of national identity have been pushed to the background. In addition, components of identity such as language, culture, and religion, in the post-Soviet interpretations, received several more important components, which, perhaps not directly, nevertheless had a significant impact on the formation of the national “genocide” at the constitutional level. We mean the cleansing of the elites from the representatives of the former totalitarian regime and those who ensured its functioning, the definition of a clear geopolitical strategy, different from the desire to restore the Soviet Union in one form or another, as well as the definition of citizenship exclusively for persons for whom national state-hood is not “empty sound”. The bodies of constitutional justice should have played an important role in these complex processes; however, as a product of an imperfect political system that imitated effective political democracy in certain moments, they acted hesitantly, only sometimes defending the interests of national identity. On the basis of the analysis of the post-Soviet practice of preserving and protecting national identity in new countries, this article examines how the constitutional domain of Ukraine’s identity politics contributed to the difficulty the country has in resisting aggression from the Russian Federation, and he role played by some of Ukraine’s powerful but indecisive actors.