Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine. the Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867-1900

John-Paul Himka. Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine. The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867-1900. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999. 236 pp. This book is the third major study by John-Paul Himka on the history of Ukrainian Galicia in the nineteenth century. Preceded by Socialism in Galicia (1983) and Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement (1988), the present volume is devoted to the interrelations between church and nation. To a degree, its theme manifests the evolution of Himka's own scholarly interests from the history of socialism to social classes and groups to the history of national identity and religion. Worthy of note, however, is the fact that topics related to the interplay of nationalism and religion in Galician politics are not foreign to Himka, as he has discussed them in a number of earlier articles. One of the major problems that Himka encountered when working on this project was the actual absence of a well researched nineteenth-century history of the Greek Catholic church, the main institutional body with which his new book is concerned. While addressing his theoretically informed question on the relationship between religion and nationality, Himka acknowledges in the Introduction that he found himself telling a story that was virtually unknown. His problem, unfortunately, is not unique. It grows in proportion as more and more historians move to the study of the social, national, religious, and cultural identities of non-Western nations. The questions they raise reflect the current stage in the development of the historiography of the Western world, whose Rankean history has been written already. But, once one approaches the study of non-Western- including East European-history, quite a different picture emerges. Many nations of Eastern Europe simply do not have wellresearched social, diplomatic, political or even church histories. This is especially true in the case of nations that just recently acquired political independence. How do historians deal with this and other problems related to developing historiographies? It appears that, thus far, this is pretty much an individual decision. Himka made his own choice by not abandoning his initial plan to study the entanglement of religion and nation in nineteenth-century Galicia. He embarked on the project by aspiring to fill the gaps which he inherited from previous generations of historians of Ukraine and its churches. This decision affected the structure of the book and made it somewhat confusing. The book consists of two large parts with the second one comprising two subdivisions. The first part provides a background, introducing the major developments and tendencies in Galician religious and national life circa 1867, the starting point of the book. The first subdivision of the second part focuses on the actual history of the Greek Catholic church and the role which the Vatican, Austrian authorities in Vienna, Polish authorities in Galicia, and different groupings in Ruthenian society played in its history. The second subdivision of part two discusses the actual politics of the church toward different political and national parties in Ruthenian society, and their attitudes toward the church and religion in general. Himka discusses the interplay of religion and nationality within the context of two major nation-building projects which were under way in Galicia in the last third of the nineteenth century: the pan-Russian and the pan-Ukrainian. The book also sheds light on other nation-building alternatives, which were considered by Galician Ruthenians. …

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