Uncompleted identity and its consequences: compensations and synergies in Ukrainian identifications

Abstract

Three survey studies, carried out in Ukraine between 2013 and 2017, investigated the regional differentiation and mutual relationships between different types of identities: local, national, transnational, and non-spatial. Theory of uncompleted national identity in Eastern, as compared to Western Ukraine, was used to account for the observed differences in the strength of national identifications within Ukraine. In the next step, two competing hypotheses were tested: (1) predicting that weaker national identities in the east of the country are compensated by stronger local, transnational, or non-spatial identities (compensation hypothesis) and (2) predicting a positive correlation between different identities, that is, overall weak identities in the east and overall strong identities in the west of the country (synergy hypothesis). The data points to synergy effects among national (Ukrainian), local, and some non-spatial identifications (family, gender, and age generation), although some nonlinear effects, suggestive of compensation, were also obtained.