Abstract
The article argues that policymakers often make use of historical narratives in order to underpin their foreign policy agenda. It duly explores how the structure of such a narrative is realized linguistically and illustrates this point by exploring a recent shift in Ukrainian foreign policy discourse. It is argued that in order to justify its pro-EU foreign policy agenda, the Ukrainian political leadership has promoted the understanding that Ukrainians have historical experiences that are similar to Europeans and different from Russians, and that this justifies Ukraine’s aspirations to distance itself from Russia and become an EU member.
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Notes
In analyzing historical narratives in Ukrainian foreign policy discourse, I relied on Polkinghorne’s (1995) work on narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. Polkinghorne argues that the researcher’s analysis of qualitative data first presupposes an identification of themes (and their relationships) that are often inductively derived from the collected data and then the presentation of his or her research report in the form of a coherent narrative that would be plausible for the reader. In other words, in the first step the researcher moves from narratives to common elements and in the subsequent step synthesizes the analyzed data by moving from common elements to narratives. For a broader overview of interpretative research methods, see Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea’s work (2012, 2014).
Some scholars distinguish between a narrative and a story. For them, a narrative is a succession of events, while a story is a chronological sequence of events and the description of characters (see Shenhav 2015, p. 19). I do not make such a distinction.
All translations from Ukrainian into English are by myself.
Moreover, the historical narratives (particularly that of the Soviet Union) and consequently the foreign policy promoted by the Ukrainian political leadership during Poroshenko’s presidency were contested by some domestic political and societal actors. See, for example, Klymenko (2017) on the discussion of de-communization laws by political parties in the Ukrainian parliament and Shevel (2016) on public perception of the removal of monuments dedicated to Communist leaders and the renaming of streets and other toponymical locations in Ukraine.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Mykola Makhortykh, Marco Siddi, Jelena Subotić, Oleksii Polegkyi and the two anonymous reviewers for giving me excellent suggestions on how to improve this article.
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Klymenko, L. The role of historical narratives in Ukraine’s policy toward the EU and Russia. Int Polit 57, 973–989 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00231-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00231-x