State and legal mechanisms in the formation of the ethnic identity of ukrainians (17th to Early 20th Century)

Unlike Eastern Ukraine, the territorial belonging of Western Ukrainian lands was determined by contractual agreements between European states. Reforms in Austria, and later in Austria-Hungary, as opposed to Russia, were based on the principles of Enlightenment ideology and values such as freedom, human rights, constitutionalism, and parliamentarism. In the medium-term perspective, this led to the Western Ukrainian community developing a sense of national consciousness, political organization, and the values of European civilization by the end of the 19th century. In this article, based on a comparative analysis of the historical experience of the Ukrainian community within two empires – the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian – the evolution of the process of national identity is examined. The study was conducted using general methods of scientific knowledge, in particular, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, abstraction, specification, and formalization. During the study, the author analyzed the peculiarities of the state and legal mechanisms for forming the ethnic identity of Ukrainians in the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. The prerequisites of Ukrainians’ ethnic self-identification are considered. The author analyses the historical and cultural foundations of establishing the Ukrainian nation with the modern state-building process.