The transnational civil sphere: Maintaining resilience through civility

Abstract

Can civil spheres extend beyond the nation state? This question lies behind the essay written by Jeffrey C. Alexander that reconstructs ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’. This article argues that the twenty-first century and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine teach us that freedom and democracy, but also war and trauma, are intricately entangled with both nation-bound and transnational civil spheres in wartime Europe. Uncivil events such as war and trauma can give rise to civil spheres, which remain fragile and vulnerable if not safeguarded by institutions. Ukraine's defence, resilience and solidarity, however, show that civil spheres can extend beyond the nation state – and that civil sphere theory could be at the nucleus of a contemporary sociology of international relations and transnational complexity.

‘Whoever frees himself will remain free, but whoever tries to free someone else takes him into captivity’. More than 100 years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ukrainian poet and writer Lesja Ukrainka wrote these words, which would prove to be anticipatory for the future of Ukraine and Europe until our times. Freedom was and is a core value of liberal democracy and of civil spheres – spheres of abstract solidarity ‘in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes to be culturally defined and to some degree institutionally enforced’ (Alexander, 2006: 31). Freedom and self-determination form one important foundation of building civil communities. However, the twenty-first century and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine teach us that freedom and democracy, but also war and trauma, are intricately entangled with the civil sphere in wartime Europe. As I will outline, the art of defence and self-assertion amidst a full-scale aggression lies not only in weaponized resistance against the aggressor, but also in building resilience in national and transnational civil spheres.

Can civil spheres extend beyond the nation state? This question lies behind the essay written by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2026) that reconstructs ‘The civil sphere in war and peace: From Athens to Kyiv’. In this essay, Alexander lays out the boundaries of the civil sphere and the obstacles that emerge in building transnational solidarity and trust. While the concept of the civil sphere is mainly focused on creating trust, solidarity and related institutions inside a collective – a city-state or a nation state – it is questionable whether civil spheres can exist beyond such clear boundaries of a given collective, thereby contributing to maintaining peace between the collectives. Alexander is critical of such an assumption and formulates the thesis that civil spheres remain internally fragile and externally delimited to the nation state. I would like to counter that with a different point of view and argue that violence and war can also contribute to emerging transnational civil spheres, and that in these cases, binary coding and overcoming trauma are primordial processes (Alexander, 2004). What is more: I will also show that transnational civil spheres – assuming they function at a level of minimal stability – are often brought about by these crises and include collective resilience and resistance, as we can see in the case of Ukraine and Europe amidst the Russian full-scale war since 2022.

Civil spheres are based on a discursive definition of the members of that solidarity community, hence, on inclusion and exclusion processes; and thus on a binarity of what is seen as ‘civil’, and as ‘uncivil’, as well as on regulatory institutions that maintain the civil sphere. As Alexander writes in his seminal book (2006) on the civil sphere, the formation of civil spheres is anything but linear – it is conflictual, contradictory and contingent. And it is a ‘longue durée process’ that builds upon collective experience, memory and decisions of what is considered uncivil and therefore not part of the future civil sphere. The uncivil is excluded and at the same time remains a threat: civil spheres remain fragile; securing them is an ongoing task. One way to secure civil spheres is to establish binding relationships and binding regulative institutions.

In the international realm, prospects to build transnational civil spheres have been rather limited. Institutions to safeguard transnational civility remained incomplete, weak and unsound. As institutions incorporate the consolidation of social practices and the norms, values, and intersubjective understandings integrated therein (Berger and Luckmann, 1967), international regulative institutions may only function if both the attribution of civil norms as the institution's fundament and the rejection of uncivil norms are undisputed or at least widely accepted. Until today, a transnational civil sphere, supported and secured by civil regulative institutions, could be constructed only once in recent history – in the case of the European Union. In contrast, the idea of a ‘world society’, which was popular in the early 2000s both as a theoretical concept and a normative goal in some parts of Western societies, could never be realized due to the lack of regulative institutions that would go beyond the agency networks of political, economic and cultural globalisation.

What emerged, however, was more of an illusion of the world society's transnational civil sphere in which transnational solidarity may have developed, but which was not backed up by any corresponding institutions. Meanwhile, this illusion had consequences: by being accepted as real by parts of Western societies – despite all the setbacks and questionable events – the supposed transnational civil sphere was maintained without providing the necessary institutional safeguards. Specifically, the United Nations, international economic cooperation projects, and political relations continued as if attacks contrary to international law – for example, Russia's beginning war against Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – had not repeatedly taken place. As a consequence, uncivil collective actors became encouraged by the lack of institutions. In other words, the impossibility of establishing an institutionally secured civil sphere within an international framework has given rise to those areas of uncivility that made Russia's recent war of aggression against Ukraine, in violation of international law, possible in the first place.

However, the example of Ukraine in particular also illustrates the formation and expansion of the civil sphere as a deliberate distinction from the uncivil. Ukraine has, as Alexander (2026) writes, ‘managed to sustain an independent, post-Soviet civil sphere’, but it started to establish its civil sphere not only with its state independence in 1991. Quite the contrary, collective memory in Ukraine underlines nation-building agency and thereby the building of a civil sphere in the course of history running from the foundation of the medieval Kyivan Rus, the first East-Slavic state built upon a Ukrainian noble dynasty, through to the Ukrainian dissident and independence movement during Soviet times. The idea of shared roots in Cossack culture, mnemonically conveyed, for example, in the lyrics of the national anthem, the preservation of the Ukrainian language as the titular language (even for a long time without an existing state of its own), and religious solidarity within the Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian Orthodox Church have all contributed to maintaining abstract solidarity among Ukrainians over centuries.

Despite all attempts by Russia as imperial power and hegemon in the region since the seventeenth century to Russify Ukraine in terms of language, culture, and national identity, and to erase Ukraine as an entity, these oppressive strategies instead contributed to the binary coding of the Ukrainian civil sphere. In polluting the Russian and Soviet rule of force and demanding human rights, rule of law, democracy and independence, the Ukrainian civil sphere was already constructed quite clearly as non-Russian during Soviet times and increasingly in the aftermath of the Helsinki process in 1979. Ukraine's independence movement, which repeatedly referred to Ukraine's independence prior to the Soviet occupation in 1919, was among the strongest independence movements in the Soviet Union and received further impetus both from the liberalisation phase of Glasnost’ and Perestroika, and from the Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe, a result of the Soviet government's inadequate, poor and intransparent disaster management.

Civil society associations and the independence movement ‘Ruch’ (meaning ‘Movement’) were founded, while networks within Ukraine and with other independence movements such as the Polish Solidarność were established, and all this led to the ‘Revolution of Granite’ – a two-week-long continuous protest of up to 100,000 participants on Kyiv's central square, later named the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (‘Independence Square’), which finally boosted Ukrainian state independence. The revolutions that followed later – the Orange Revolution in November 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014 – have essentially relied on the revolutionary practices, networks and civil codes that were founded in the Granite revolution. In all three large Ukrainian revolutions, external control, but also violence by and within the political system, as it could be seen in the Soviet Union and the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, were framed and codified as uncivil, and national self-determination as a civil value. In the 2004 and 2013–2014 revolutions, these codes were supplemented by democratization and Europeanization, rejecting authoritarianism in Ukraine and defining the increasingly direct influence by Russia in internal political decision-making in Ukraine as uncivil.

Since the beginning of Russia's war in 2014 and even more since the full-scale invasion in 2022, there has been the use of immense violence by Russia both in military terms and also with regard to suppression and violent rule in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. The Russian genocidal goal of erasing Ukraine became obvious in the sheer violence of war but also in the use of violent language by Russia to disparage Ukraine and Ukrainians. All this involves the pure uncivil against which Ukrainian society attempts to establish a civil sphere. Charles Tilly (1993) pointed out that European wars over centuries contributed to state-building efforts because war forces collectives to pool resources and establish a viable administration. A similar assumption can be made with regard to the civil sphere. In wartime Ukraine, solidarity, trust and cooperation within society have significantly increased. While trust in state institutions remains ambivalent – Ukrainians show a high level of trust in security institutions such as the armed forces and police, but low trust in political parties, the parliament or government bodies – there are high levels of trust in volunteers and civil society (Razumkov Centre, 2024; Vox Ukraine, 2024).

Cultural self-understanding plays a significant role in the Ukrainian civil sphere, as can be seen in the numerous cultural expressions, events, and gatherings that take place both in public spaces and cultural institutions. The Russian aggression aims at a ‘discursive cleansing’ (Finnin, 2023) of Ukraine, which means a systematic extermination of Ukrainian history and culture by targeted destruction of culture and educational institutions, historical sites, museums, by burning Ukrainian books, and prohibiting the Ukrainian language and symbols in the occupied territories. Ukrainian cultural activists contribute to documenting, reflecting and thereby, enduring war and violence (Stetsevych, 2025). The number of cultural events such as concerts, theatre performances, public readings, book fairs, and art exhibitions in cultural and public places throughout Ukraine has increased significantly since 2022, underlining a great societal demand for reflection, critical debate and community. Cultural participation of Ukrainians is high and becomes much more inclusive, and it contributes to the ongoing discourse about decommunization and decolonization. The relevance of culture and its meaning for the collective self-assurance of Ukrainian society is based on a conscious distancing from everything Russian, which has been significantly intensified through the war. In light of the physical and discursive destruction of Ukraine by Russians, Russia is perceived as uncivilized, uncultured, brutal, and thus diametrically opposed to Ukrainian (and European) values.

It should be noted that trauma is part of the Ukrainian self-understanding as well, and that trauma contributes to the civil sphere and Ukrainian collective identity. Without doubt, the ongoing war is a traumatic experience that is reflected already in the very moment when it takes place. Collective communication in and beyond Ukraine is in that case very clear about the elements of trauma (Alexander, 2004, 2012): the nature of the suffering and sacrifice, the widespread and ongoing atrocities against all Ukrainians and everything related to Ukraine, in particular against the civilian population, are just as obvious and undisputed as the attribution of Russia's responsibility for these crimes. The institutional arenas of trauma communication and processing can be found within Ukraine, but they include a wider audience outside Ukraine, via mass media, and the political, legal and scientific realms, thereby establishing a transnational sphere of solidarity and trustful cooperation. Trauma communication and processing evolve in the case of Ukraine in parallel to the traumatic events, as real-time documentation, evaluation, and political and collective action, not only in Ukraine but also including its allies. However, it should be noted that it took Ukraine much longer to gain recognition for traumatic events in the past that equally formed its collective identity. The Holodomor – the famine artificially caused by Stalin, which claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s – as well as the Soviet colonization of Ukraine, the Holocaust, and the crimes committed during World War II from which Ukraine, Poland and Belarus suffered particularly badly, all caused multiple traumata to Ukrainian society and have been shaping collective culture, memory and identity until today.

The establishment of a civil sphere, the ongoing processing of trauma, and the demarcation of both the responsibility for the trauma and thus also of the uncivility shown by Russia extend beyond Ukraine and contribute to transnational solidarity, which is eventually a preliminary stage of a transnational civil sphere. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the level of solidarity with Ukrainians – in particular from societies which are also more exposed to Russian aggression, such as the Baltics, Moldova, Finland, and Poland, but also from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Scandinavian countries – was quite high. This particular solidarity in wartime has also contributed to the development of forms of solidarity that were rather uncommon before, such as, for example, civic support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Crowd-funding campaigns like the very successful Czech citizen-based initiative ‘A Gift for Putin’, ¹ and international volunteer groups such as TacMedUkraine, ² collecting and delivering material to the Ukrainian frontlines, are examples of fighting together with empathy. Supporting Ukrainian war refugees was not only a matter of active citizens and NGOs, but was also supported and secured legally by the enforcement of the Temporary Protection Directive (TPD; Council Directive 2001/55/EC) for Ukrainian citizens by the European Union. This act created the legally secured framework for active solidarity, building trust and community, and developing a shared interpretation of the traumatic events that Ukraine has been experiencing since then. This upcoming transnational civil sphere also allowed for building broader knowledge about Ukraine, Ukrainian history, culture, independence, and traumata. In science, we see similar approaches in creating a transnational civil sphere that is based on Ukraine and Ukrainian studies as an international community of scholars, supported by project-based research funding. However, the sustainability of this particular academic civil sphere is more than questionable, as institutionalisation in terms of the foundation of durable structures – such as chairs, institutes, study programmes, publications, and the like – is lacking due to there being no systematic funding beyond short-term project logics. But in any case, networks, shared understandings, and joint discourses between Ukraine and other countries are evolving more intensely than ever before.

Ukraine is a striking example both of the building of civil spheres amidst violence, and also their great fragility. At the same time, the case of Ukraine may extend our knowledge about civil spheres beyond nation-states, as a gap between abstract solidarity and institutionalization becomes visible. That renders transnational civil spheres the more fragile and prone to external shocks, deliberate destruction, being undermined, exhaustion, and shrinking commitment. While initiating and developing a transnational civil sphere based on uncivil events and experiences seems to be a frequent practice, maintaining and sustaining such a civil sphere in terms of establishing regulative institutions remains a challenge. However, civil sphere theory could be a new starting point, both for thinking about a contemporary sociology of international relations and also for underlining the point that governance of transnational complexity cannot be done without the civil sphere. In that sense, it would be enlightening to continue thinking systematically about the civil sphere in its interplay of freedom, war, and peace, within and beyond the nation-state.