Ukraine’s NATO Accession Discourse

Beschreibung

Ukraine long faced obstacles to NATO integration due to internal divisions and conflict. Iryna Zhyrun analyzes how shifts in national identity among political elites shaped foreign policy. Her study links Ukraine’s NATO debate (1990s–2010s) to changing identity through discourse analysis.
For a long time, Ukraine was an outlier in NATO’s outreach efforts and enlargement process. It suffers from territorial disputes and has now a protracted armed conflict. Until recently, it could not reach a national consensus on its Euro-Atlantic integration and did not ensure majority support of its population for an accession to NATO. In 2019, the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council) voted to put the country’s aspiration to NATO membership into the Ukrainian Constitution. Iryna Zhyrun analyzes the evolving conceptualization of Ukrainian national identity in relation to Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration among the ruling political elites in Ukraine. She argues that there was a constitutive link between changes in the definition of national identity and choice of distinct policy directions. Foreign affairs became identity politics. Her argument is based on a longitudinal study of the politics and discussion of Ukraine-NATO relations during the Kuchma, Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Poroshenko presidencies. Her study connects these debates to structural changes of Ukrainian politics and other factors influencing national identity articulations during this period and applies a discourse-analytical approach to an intense two-decades-long political debate.

Autor*in

Iryna Zhyrun
Dr. Iryna Zhyrun studied Foreign Languages, Linguistics, and Political Science in Kharkiv, Moscow, and Bonn. She held visiting positions at the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia, and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Her articles and reviews have appeared in, among other outlets, Russian Politics, Nazioni e Regioni, Europe-Asia Studies, and Nations and Nationalism.

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A very well-written and comprehensive account of the transformation of post-Soviet Ukrainian identity and foreign policy. It is essential reading for students and scholars of international security, foreign policy and discourse analysis. —Senem Aydın-Düzgit, Professor of International Relations, Sabanci University, Istanbul
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A clear finding of this study is that the Ukrainian identity and project of NATO accession correlated strongly with each other over the course of the period under investigation. From the perspective of historiography, a plea to give greater weight to the connection between discourse about a country's self-description and its integration into international structures is a refreshing one. In my view, this is a great strength of this book. —Martin Aust, Professor of East European History, University of Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia
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This book dismantles the teleological reading of Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic march. Analyzing two decades of Ukrainian elite discourses on NATO, Iryna Zhyrun shows how comprador elites framed the alliance as a ‘civilizing’ cure for the post-Soviet ‘mentality,’ while anti-NATO voices failed to offer compelling alternatives. It highlights the turbulent domestic identity politics that shaped the trajectory toward the war. —Volodymyr Ishchenko, Research Fellow, Free University of Berlin
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