Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History

The contributors to this volume show that the themes of empire, colony, and national liberation movements can be addressed in a European continental as much as in Asian, Latin American, or African contexts. There is a further benefit from a within-Europe comparison: It calls into question the tendency to assume fundamental differences between western and eastern Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a western nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an eastern one, defined as ethnic. It also answers the question whether intra-European comparison of this kind is possible, in a context where post-Soviet scholarship is often invisible in Anglo-American scholarship. As Norman Davies reminds us, low public awareness of Europe’s smaller and, in west-European minds, more distant nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward.