Ukrainian Euromaidan: The exclusion of otherness in the name of progress

Abstract

Although criticism of Enlightenment ideas has become widespread within academic circles, the basic Enlightenment narrative – an inexorable movement to a progressive condition – remains a dominant assumption within the discourses of modernization and democratization. This article analyzes how the ‘progressive’ imagination of Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine discursively produced the internal ‘other’ as a singular monolithic subject whose ‘underdeveloped’ intellectual condition was judged against an imagined scale of human progression. The argument is explicated through the discourse analysis of popular blogs on Ukrainian Pravda – a political web site that played a crucial role in organizing Maidan protests. The article analyzes 189 postings of Ukrainian Pravda bloggers starting from 26 November 2013 – the day when the bloggers’ group ‘Maidan’ was formed – until 21 January 2014, which denoted the beginning of a murderous stage of the Maidan protest.