Ukraine before Statehood: A Blind Spot in Western European Historiography of/on Europe since 1991?

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between Ukraine and Europe in historiography. It asks whether Ukraine was a blind spot in Western European historiography on Europe since 1991. To this end, the article analyzes how general accounts of European history from the early modern period to World War I conceive of “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” and into which spatial and temporal patterns of European history they insert these lands and people before modern Ukrainian statehood. Furthermore, the article traces the characteristics and structural features of Europe used to frame Ukrainian history as “European.” It is evident that both the people and the country, situated between Poland and Lithuania, the Habsburg Empire, and Russia, are seldom portrayed as protagonists in European history. The article argues that this mirrors the regional expertise of most authors of such overall accounts, or rather, their lack of specialization in Eastern Europe. Moreover, after the “cultural turn,” histories of Europe have rarely been organized according to spatial and state categories. However, it is unlikely that the escalation of Russia’s full-scale attack will lead to a new “spatial turn” that will conceptually integrate state and nation-building processes on the territory of present-day Ukraine into European history.