Ethnic groups are products of social and political forces that unfolded at a particular time in a particular place in the past. Human groups are fluid, though from the temporal perspective of an individual’s lifetime they appear solid enough. Usually groups that are dubbed as “ethnic” persist at least for several generations. This feeds the popular perception that such groups are “forever”. During the last two centuries, or in other words, during the age of nationalism, this novel ideology has reified those human groups that have been accorded the novel rank of “nation” as the sole type of human groups that are to enjoy the unquestioned right of being the primary social unit of politics. This unit, in turn, has the right to a territory, construed as the nation’s polity or nation-state (in other words, a political unit). As a political principle, the reification of the nation proposes it as the sole source of sovereignty and the only legitimate social unit that has the right to unrestricted sovereignty on the territory of its nation-state (Gellner, 1983: 1). At the level of popular belief, especially in Europe, most members of a nation are prone to believe that theirs is very ancient - at least in excess of a millennium old - and that the nation is potentially immortal. Nationalism seriously restricted the number of human groups with a legitimate stake in politics, in practice equating it with the number of the extant polities, nowadays invariably defined as nation-states (with the singular exception of the Holy See). It does not mean that the process has eliminated other human groups of the ethnic sort. They are still around, continuously coming into being and disappearing (c.f. Magocsi, 1999). The ideology of nationalism, however, has disenfranchised them, making any political claims on their behalf illegitimate by default. The reality being messy and not succumbing to neat political and legal categorizations, there is a grey zone between groups recognized as nations and other groups with no right to their own political life. Non-national groups become nations mainly through successful warfare (for instance, the Eritreans or the Croats), through peaceful separation (for instance, the Azeris or the Slovaks), or by attaining a degree of political autonomy within the boundaries of an extant polity (for instance, the Galicians in Spain or the Welsh in Britain). What happens with groups that are not successful in this way, or simply are not interested in the national manner of participating in politics? Most are content with things as they are as long as their members are not discriminated against for the fact of being members of such groups. In this world of nation-states, discrimination often evokes reactions that have to necessarily be couched in national terms. Should a group wish to be taken seriously in the sphere of politics, it has no choice but to adopt a national rhetoric. Upstarts on the national path are seen as usurpers by the already recognized nations with their own national polities. The latter often deny the aspirations of the former, and even deny their very existence. When the usual sleight of hand is not available for political or international reasons, new groups seeking a degree of political recognition in this age of nationalism are redefined from above as “nationalities”, “proto-nations”, “pseudo-nations”, “ethnic groups”, “national or ethnic minorities”, “ethnographic, social or regional groups” (of the nations on the territory of whose polities they dwell) and so on (c.f. Bauer, 2000: 355-370; Zubov, 2009: 780-787). Alternatively, nationally construed categories are imposed from above on some groups that are not interested in expressing their interests in a national manner. This is especially the case when their non-national existence can be transformed into political capital for another (dominant and state-supported) nation. A telling example of such a group is the Russophone population of the large industrial cities in eastern Ukraine. Thus far they have defined themselves as workers, espousing an assorted selection of Soviet ideals and symbols surviving from the period before 1991; the Soviet Union was the only major state legitimizing its existence on the basis of an ideology other than nationalism, namely communism. Today, Moscow considers the Russophone workers of eastern Ukraine a Russian minority oppressed by Kyiv’s policy of Ukrainization. On the other hand, the Ukrainian government perceives them as Russified Ukrainians who should be returned to the Ukrainian nation through de-Russification. Letting them remain as they currently are does not seem to be an option, unfortunately (Zimmer, 2006: 119-134).
