Thread by @brik_t

A few more words about "surprising" unity of Ukrainians ("surprise" to many, but common knowledge for sociology folks). I will break it down in "culture", "identify", and "attitudes". I use parentheses because these concepts are debates in sociology and must be clarified... 🧵

Since early 1990, there were many studies of high level concepts like culture and values. E.g. a paper by Michael Kohn with Ukr and Pol sociologists who use terms like "social structure and personality" (essentially they use this terms very close to what we call values now).

There was a special project executed by Lviv sociologists (Chernysh and co) who compared values of Lviv and Donetsk regions. They did it for many years.

National academy of science (Golovakha and co) have been always skewed to social psychology, they measured stress and anxiety. But also more sociological concepts like trust and subjective well being

Lots of people (Vyshnyak, Bekeshkina, and now Dembitskii) studied political culture...Also don't forget about systematic studies of values from World Values Survey and European Values Survey (Shestakovskii, and a Russian sociologists Rudnev & Magun).

According to the Ukrainians have been homogeneous. In this perspective "culture" is a repository of social norms, values. Ukr from west and east , Lviv and Donetsk were quite similar. Low trust to gov, high trust to family and friends, moderate Openness and Self-Enhancement...

High Conservation and Self-transendence (Schwartz), lower "openness to new experience" but caring for others (WVS). Ukr care about their closest and value safety & survival before hedonism, trying new, innovations. Rus are similar, but they are less social, more individualists.

Political culture is also homogeneous. Dembitskii showed that supporters of Zelensky and Poroshenko were remarkably similar in their views about democracy and Russia. Our own "political compass" showed that supporters of Por and Zel were almost identical in terms of...

support of welfare policies and dislike of liberal econ policies.

So. If you conduct a lit review about high level concepts I ukr (culture, values, personally, trust, wellbeing, ideology, political culture), you will see that the country is homogeneous

But! What about identities? Ok, we know that people are social and care about safety. So what? Which language do they use to talk about it, do they feel attached to their land or nation or gov? There are two regular monitorings: academy of science and KIIS, also ad hoc studies...

Also panel data by @oonuch , also lots of anthropology and in-depth intr, and computational science (@j_a_tucker ). They show that ukr increasingly identify with Ukr nation and local stuff (dweller of a city, village, region). Western Ukr value both, local ident slightly more...

Proud to be Lviv dweller and Ukr citizens. Other parts of Ukraine -- variation is big. Some is equal, for some nat ident more important than local. All regions increasingly proud to be Ukr citizens.

Most variation is in the language behavior. Basically people agree that they are Ukrainians, but some express it in Ukr language, other express it in Rus lang, and also poeple mix it (speak one lang at home and another at university or working place)

@j_a_tucker found that Euromaidan twitter used Rus language significantly, my team found the same for Euromaidan Facebook page.

...so do so many people believe that Ukrainian is "divided nation"?? This comes from a rude emphasis on attitudes towards policies and voting preferences. Basically, Ukrainians live in different regions, and these regions have idiosyncracies. Local oligarchs, local economy...

Local media, local history, local discourses, local competition etc ... So people have local commemorative practices (people in Lviv and Kharkiv might have different songs about the second world war)...

And they have different preferences about policies (e.g. which language use in schools). They also vote for "their" politicians. Also local politicians often capitalized on this and portrait other regions as "others", bad Ukrainians...

Btw, I lived in the Netherlands for several years and I remember all this competition Utrecht vs the Hague and Rotterdam vs Amsterdam. This competition does not mean that the country is "deeply divided".

And here I want to use another sociological concept socialization.
There is a fantastic study by Leonid Peisakhin (NYU Abu Dhabi). He conducted surveys WITHIN one region (oblast) of Ukraine. The point was that part of his sample lives in former Rus Empire, another in AH empire...

He showed that people indeed had different attitudes towards Russia and west , and geopolitics. BUT he also showed that socialization matters -- it depends on family socialization and local churches. So it's not about mystical "west and east" spirit or civilizations. It's about

Narratives and discourses which people learn when they attend local church, watch local news, talk to local grandma's etc.

To conclude. For many years western scholars scratched on the surface and looked only at ATTITUDES towards policies and candidates. And they treated it as a signal of deep division, confusing rural urban divide with regional clashes and polarization with clashes of civilizations

If you look at all these things together (culture, identities, attitudes), you might see that Ukrainians are homogeneous in 2 out of 3, and occasionally polarized in the latter.
So when the war happened, Ukr focused on priorities (culture and identities).

What many in the west think is "surprising" unity is surprising only to those who never studied culture, identities, and attitudes all together in one framework . Infact it was a long and very well documented incremental path to unity, not an exponential overnight event.

Fin

Sorry for typos...sleepless nights in Kyiv