This paper conceptualizes left nationalism in Ukraine before 2014 as a case of transnational ideological recombination emerging within a semi-peripheral political context. Challenging dominant approaches that treat nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe primarily as a right-wing or ethnocentric phenomenon, the paper argues that left nationalism represents a hybrid ideological formation produced through the interaction of global ideological flows and structurally conditioned local reinterpretation.
The study asks: how do transnational ideological repertoires travel, transform, and recombine in post-socialist political spaces, and what does this reveal about the reconfiguration of political cleavages in Central and Eastern Europe? Drawing on theories of ideological diffusion, cleavage transformation, and semi-peripheral political economy, the paper situates Ukraine within broader debates on the destabilization of the classical left–right divide under conditions of globalization and dependency.
Building on scholarship on transnational circulation of political ideas, the paper conceptualizes ideological flows not as linear transfers but as processes of selective appropriation and contextual translation. In the Ukrainian case, activist networks engaged with autonomist, anti-globalist, and anti-imperial traditions circulating across Europe. However, these repertoires were reassembled within a context marked by post-socialist inequality, oligarchic capitalism, deindustrialization, and contested sovereignty. The result was not imitation but ideological recombination: a synthesis that articulated national emancipation as inseparable from social justice and democratic sovereignty.
The paper further engages with cleavage theory by arguing that left nationalism signals a restructuring of political conflict along axes that cut across the traditional left–right spectrum. In semi-peripheral contexts, socio-economic insecurity and geopolitical dependency generate pressures that destabilize inherited ideological alignments. Rather than aligning neatly with either liberal internationalism or conservative nationalism, left nationalism articulated what may be described as a “nationalism of the dominated,” framing the nation as a site of social protection and resistance to both external domination and internal oligarchic capture.
Methodologically, the paper relies on qualitative discourse analysis of activist texts, digital archives, and programmatic documents produced between 2010 and 2014. These materials are interpreted through a relational and constructivist framework that treats ideology as a dynamic field structured by interaction, contestation, and translation.
By theorizing the Ukrainian case as an instance of transnationally mediated ideological hybridization, the paper contributes to comparative research on political realignments in Central and Eastern Europe. It proposes a conceptual model for understanding how peripheral political spaces generate alternative ideological syntheses that challenge established Western typologies of nationalism and the left. In doing so, it highlights the need to rethink nationalism not as a fixed ideological category but as a contingent political articulation shaped by global flows and structural constraints.
