Poland remained a popular destination for migrants from Ukraine for many years before February 24, 2022, the outbreak of full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine. Ukrainian communities in Polish cities, including local autochthonous Ukrainians (the Ukrainian national minority), are already well-established and well-organized, although they are very diverse. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, this article seeks to address the nexus of the diaspora and culture and explores the imaginations of “common culture” in diaspora-forming processes. We treat “culture” as diasporic imaginings of naturalized and reified representations of what is to be a Ukrainian in Poland. The essentialized notion of putative “common culture” is routinely discursivized and maintained by diasporic elites. Exploring this as an empirical phenomenon captured in the field helps reveal the internal tensions and that this imagining empowers the production of cultural differences. We argue that imagined “common culture” may actually activate “othering” of the diasporic Other and might not be as unifying a factor in diaspora-forming processes as it appears.

The Habsburg Monarchy has often been called a “Europe en miniature.” A diversity of political territories and spaces, nations and nationalities, languages, denominations, and churches was typical throughout the 19th century. This article addresses the complexity with a fresh approach. Drawing on the new history of emotion, it combines new perspectives of territories, spaces, and loyalties in order to shed fresh light on nation building processes within the empire.

How is it possible for a Rusyn nation-builder to have contributed to the historiography of Ukraine to such a significant degree that one might suspect that Paul Robert Magocsi is really a Ukrainian nation-builder? Like all social-science puzzles, this one dissolves upon closer inspection. Magocsi resembles a Ukrainian nation-builder – or perhaps even is a Ukrainian nation-builder malgré soi – precisely because he is a Rusyn nation-builder. That is so because all nation-builders are always builders of at least two nations, their own and the others.