Kolesnyk, BogdanBogdanKolesnyk2023-04-132023-04-132023-02-20https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/107727The events known as Euromaidan or The Revolution of Dignity that unfolded between late November 2013 and February 2014 in Ukraine triggered an intense discourse about the development of Ukrainian society, the economy, and the state. While many views anticipated Western-style modernisation, there were crucial differences and disagreements. In addition, the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the armed conflict in the Eastern region of Donbass pushed social actors to calibrate and adapt their positions. The resulting intense discursive activity offered a unique opportunity to understand the political culture and identify its ordering principles. This was done as part of this dissertation by organising the discourse on socio-political development (discourse on reform) into a typology of narratives. The method involved breaking down the texts generated by public intellectuals, bloggers, and commentators into narrative elements and reconstructing them as narratives of justification based on the specific type of subjectivity that defined each narrative. As a result, eight narratives of justification were identified and compared at two points of time: 2014 to mid-2016 (taken to be the period of the formation of the new status quo) and mid-2016 to mid-2019 (taken to be the period when the new status quo was stabilised and contested). Instead of a broad social alignment hoped for at the time of the Euromaidan, an intensification of the struggle to shape a common future through political visions was observed. Moreover, the contestation was not just about the preferred political culture, but about the fundamental meaning of political culture as such. The most central issue at stake was as follows: should the political culture be a matter of choice for individuals and communities or should it be rooted into the story of origin, binding for all? A comparison between the two periods indicated increasing disagreement regarding the answer. In addition to describing the development of Ukrainian political culture after Euromaidan, another research objective was to evaluate the narratives identified in light of normative criteria derived from the basic facts about Ukrainian society as well as from the calls for change expressed at the protests. It is suggested in this dissertation that Ukraine is best understood as a heterogenous cultural contact zone. Hence, the idea of civic culture is offered as the normative reference point for evaluating the discourse as is and as an orientative guidance for what ought to be. The idea of civic culture suggests relegating the questions of a strong identity and thick values to individuals and communities. At the level of polity, civic culture is defined by the general integrative principles that enable various identities and values to co-exist, but stand above these identities and values. With this kind of normativity in mind, the narrative (which can be called republicanism) was identified as theoretically the most consistent with the idea of civic culture. The value of this inquiry lies in providing a roadmap to navigate Ukrainian political discourse: to differentiate various political positions, to ask which of them appeal to which social groups, and to trace how they evolve over time as well as to help explain political behaviour. Observed from the most general perspective, analysing how individual narratives relate to each other allows us to speak of political culture as a whole and, in this way, attempt to grasp conflicts and possibilities for improvement.enPolitikUkraineDiskursEDIS-5294narrativesPoliticsdiscoursesDiskurseNarrativedoctoral thesis