Ireland and Ukraine

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 "e;western"e; and "e;eastern"e; Europe, including the now largely abandoned distinction between a "e;western"e; nationalism, defined as a civil nationalism, and an "e;eastern"e; 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, "e;more distant"e; nations, underlies the persistence of false generalizations about them, including assumptions like "e;that the whole of the west was advanced while the whole of the east was backward."e;