In the early days of March 2022, as Russian troops were approaching the outskirts of Kyiv, international media were focused primarily on the Ukrainian frontlines. Journalists paid little attention to the informal meeting of EU leaders at Versailles, nor to the document they adopted. The insipid language of the declaration differed little from past EU statements about Ukraine, expressing no more than non-binding \u2018acknowledgement\u2019 of Ukraine\u2019s \u2018European aspirations and European choice\u2019 and making vague promises to \u2018further strengthen our bonds and deepen our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path\u2019.<\/p>\n
But a short phrase was added to the ritual curtseys that marked a real breakthrough in the perennially ambiguous relations between the EU and Ukraine. \u2018Ukraine\u2019, the document stated, \u2018belongs to our European family\u2019. The formulation might seem ordinary, even trivial, but it would have been inconceivable even a few weeks earlier. Recall that the official language of the EU had for decades been watchfully cleansed of any wording that may have hinted at Ukraine\u2019s Europeanness and, at least theoretically, Ukraine\u2019s eligibility for membership. This was a real nightmare for the EU \u2013 as a French diplomat once told me, comparable only to the possible accession of Turkey.<\/p>\n
This is why not a single EU document had ever referred to Ukraine as to a \u2018European state\u2019, but instead employed tricky euphemisms like \u2018partner country\u2019, or \u2018neighbouring country\u2019. Ukraine had been cautiously placed at a safe distance on mental maps, into a nebulous space called \u2018the western NIS\u2019 (\u2018New Independent States\u2019), \u2018the Western CIS\u2019 or \u2018Western Eurasia\u2019. Consequently, all Ukraine\u2019s overtures to the EU had been met with nothing more than a polite \u2018acknowledgement\u2019 of its European aspirations \u2013 a frustrating catchphrase that meant something like \u2018give me your phone number, I\u2019ll call you later\u2019.<\/p>\n
The real meaning of this courtesy was revealed in less formal statements made by many EU officials. Suffice to mention former Italian PM Romano Prodi\u2019s notorious remark<\/a> that Ukraine \u2018has as much reason to be in the EU as New Zealand\u2019. Or the quip<\/a> by G\u00fcnter Verheugen, the former European Commissioner for Enlargement, that \u2018anybody who thinks Ukraine should be taken into the EU should perhaps come along with the argument that Mexico should be taken into the US\u2019.<\/p>\n For the many Ukrainians who overwhelmingly, under all governments, supported EU accession, this was a cold shower. Especially those who in 2014 waved blue EU flags on the Maidan, braving police batons and snipers\u2019 bullets, and who cherished their \u2018European belonging\u2019 as a key element of their Ukrainian identity.<\/p>\n 2 February 2023. Image: European Commission (Dati Bendo) \/ Source: Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The persistent western denial of Ukraine\u2019s Europeanness was the counterpart of the Russian denial of Ukraine\u2019s existence. Politically, these two denials were framed differently and had incomparably different consequences\u00a0\u2013 purely institutional in first case, military-genocidal in the second. Epistemologically, however, both stemmed from the same root, one that can be defined, after Foucault and Said, and certainly after the Polish-American Slavist Ewa Thomson, as \u2018imperial knowledge<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 as a system of narratives that empires develop about themselves and their colonies, in order to strengthen and legitimise their hegemony. In both cases, it was Russian<\/em> imperial knowledge that informed both the Russian and<\/em> the western view of Ukraine, though in the case of the latter it was supplemented with ideological-cum-ethical constraints.<\/p>\n Russian \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 has much deeper roots and is strongly connected to how Russian imperial identity is constructed \u2013 through appropriating Ukrainian (and Belarusian) history, territory and identity, and placing Ukraine\/Kyiv at the very centre of the imperial myth of origin. Independent Ukraine, by its very existence, undermines that mythology. In the imperial-minded Russian, the notion of Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state provokes ontological insecurity and anxiety. Putin calls independent Ukraine an \u2018anti-Russia\u2019 and defines it as an \u2018existential threat\u2019 to his country.<\/p>\n In a way, he is correct. Inasmuch as Ukraine\u2019s national identity is incompatible with the Russian imperial identity, it is indeed \u2018anti-Russia\u2019. And it is an \u2018existential threat\u2019 to Russia as an empire, although it is also a chance for the emergence of Russia as a post-imperial nation \u2013 as the Polish\u2013American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly remarked long ago.<\/p>\n Since the 18th<\/sup> century, western nations have uncritically accepted and normalised Russian imperial knowledge, largely also accepting \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 as part of this. Westerners shared that \u2018knowledge\u2019 throughout the 1990s and often still do. But their \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 was not driven by ontological insecurity and anxiety. It simply mirrored Russian mythology, which perfectly suited the West\u2019s \u2018realist\u2019 policies towards both Russia and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West accepted Ukraine\u2019s independence as a fait accompli<\/em>, buttressed by legal norms and procedures rather than cultural and historical arguments (so dear, in a perverse form, to Putin and his acolytes).<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s declared desire to \u2018return to Europe\u2019, i.e. join Euro-Atlantic institutions, was a different story. One may argue that this desire \u2013 common to all eastern European nations \u2013 challenged established notions of \u2018Europeanness\u2019 and provoked ontological turmoil in the West too. But while Russians\u2019 anxiety stemmed from the sense that their imperial identity was incomplete without Ukraine, western Europeans\u2019 anxiety stemmed from the opposite feeling \u2013 that their identity (and not only wellbeing) would be threatened by an alien body. It was quite natural for western Europe to adapt its old \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 into denial of Ukraine\u2019s European identity and belonging.<\/p>\n To support this new anti-Ukrainian narrative, elements of Russian imperial knowledge (that had never been properly revised or dismissed in the West) were revived. Perhaps the most important was the narrative about the primordial closeness of Russia and Ukraine \u2013 of their proximity, affinity, interconnectedness and virtual inability to exist without each other. This argument was beneficial in practical terms, since it justified a cynical \u2018Russia-first\u2019 policy at the cost of its former satellites, assigned tacitly to Russia\u2019s \u2018legitimate sphere of influence\u2019, in other words its \u2018backyard\u2019.<\/p>\n The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, thus explained<\/a> to readers of the New York Review of Books<\/em> that Ukraine was a \u2018nowhere nation\u2019 whose language was derived from 16th-century Russian. The German and French foreign ministries concluded in a joint classified report that \u2018the admission of Ukraine [to the EU] would imply the isolation of Russia\u2019, and that \u2018it is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev\u2019. The former French president Valery Giscard d\u2019Estaing argued<\/a> that only \u2018a part of Ukraine has a European character\u2019, while the other part has \u2018a Russian character\u2019 and \u2018cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU\u2019. His German colleague, the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, assured readers<\/a> that \u2018as late as 1990, nobody in the West doubted that Ukraine had for centuries belonged to Russia. Since then, Ukraine has become an independent state, but it is not a nation-state.\u2019<\/p>\n In a recent article<\/a>, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash recollects how, after the spectacular Orange Revolution in 2004, he urged the president of the European Commission, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso, to say publicly that the European Union wished Ukraine one day to become a member. \u2018If I did that,\u2019 Barroso replied, \u2018I would immediately be slapped down by two major member states [France and Germany].\u2019 \u2018There will first have to be a discussion of whether a country is European\u2019, said a spokeswoman for the EU\u2019s commissioner for external relations, clarifying the issue in starkly candid terms.<\/p>\n Only within this context can one properly appreciate the tectonic change in EU attitudes toward Ukraine, indicated by that short phrase of the Versailles Declaration. It came too late, however, and at too high a price: vast swathes of Ukrainian territory were occupied, cities destroyed and thousands of citizens killed. Ukrainians may have good reasons for anti-western (res)sentiments: throughout their history they have been betrayed and neglected rather than recognised and supported by westerners. But the only alternative has always been Russia, an autocratic state determined either to assimilate or physically destroy them. Ukraine\u2019s national identity was fundamentally incompatible with Russian imperial identity.<\/p>\n Ukrainian nation-builders of various colours understood this perfectly and leaned to the West, even though their desperate love remained unrequited. In the West they saw at least a chance, however slight and improbable. Ukraine\u2019s pro-western orientation was its modus vivendi<\/em> vis-\u00e0-vis a hostile neighbour who made \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 an imperial creed. Ukrainians became \u2018westerners by default\u2019: they had little choice but to accept western values and discourses, even though they did not always feel comfortable with them.<\/p>\n This can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when the poet Taras Shevchenko and fellow Ukrainophiles broke the ranks of imperial Slavophiles with the subversive ideas of federalism and republicanism. We can find it in the official documents of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic (1918\u20131920) and the programmatic articles written by its head, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of which was titled \u2018Our Western Orientation\u2019. We can discern the same rationales and imperatives in the pro-western positions of the Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s and \u201970s, and in the predominant stance of Ukrainian politicians and the general population since independence.<\/p>\n It was not mythical nationalists (or \u2018Nazis\u2019, in Putin\u2019s parlance) but the post-communist president Leonid Kravchuk and the communist-dominated parliament who rejected Ukraine\u2019s full membership in the Russia-led Commonwealth of Independent States in the early \u201990s and eventually fenced off many other integration initiatives promoted by Moscow. It was another post-communist president, Leonid Kuchma (a Russian speaker from the south-eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk), who in 1998 signed a decree \u2018On Reaffirming the Strategy of Ukraine\u2019s Integration into the European Union\u2019, and who, five years later, signed the law \u2018On the Fundamentals of Ukraine\u2019s National Security\u2019.<\/p>\n Article 6 of that law stated, inter alia, that Ukraine \u2018strives for integration into the European political, economic and legal space with the goal of membership in the European Union, as well as into the Euro-Atlantic security space with the goal of membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation\u2019. Remarkably, Kuchma\u2019s prime minister at the time was the former Donetsk governor Viktor Yanukovych, who as president later worked on signing an Association Agreement with the EU, only to shelve the idea after strong pressure from Moscow (provoking mass protests and, ultimately, his downfall).<\/p>\n Contrary to the common western wisdom, consensus about Ukraine\u2019s \u2018European integration\u2019 existed in Ukrainian society long before the \u2018Euromaidan revolution\u2019 of 2013\u201314, even though many people in Ukraine hoped (naively) to combine the westward drift with good relations with Russia. They opposed Ukraine\u2019s membership in NATO, fully aware of the sensitivity of that issue for Moscow, but did not expect the purely economic agreement with the EU to provoke similar wrath. To placate Moscow, Yanukovych adopted non-allied status for Ukraine in 2012 and extended the rent of the Sevastopol naval base to Russia for another 25 years. But to no avail: in 2014, Russian forces occupied Crimea and staged a fake \u2018rebellion\u2019 in the Donbas.<\/p>\n The Russian invasion did not significantly change Ukrainians\u2019 predisposition toward the EU, which had always been positive. But it radically improved their attitude towards NATO \u2013 as all the opinion polls since 2014 confirm. While a substantial portion of the Sovietophile population of the Crimea and the Donbas were excluded from these surveys (and from voting in the national elections), the results above all reflect the radicalisation of the remaining part of the population. Moscow brutally taught Ukrainians that non-allied status and staying out of NATO provided them with no security.<\/p>\n Shortly after Euromaidan, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology carried out a nationwide survey<\/a> asking people which values Ukrainians shared with Russians and which with Europeans. In both cases, respondents could pick three options from a list. It turned out that Ukrainians believed they shared the following with Russia: \u2018history and traditions\u2019 (46%), \u2018culture\u2019 (26%), \u2018ethnicity\u2019 (18%), \u2018religion\u2019 (15%) and \u2018language\u2019 (12%). But they compiled a completely different list of values they shared (or would like to share) with the West: \u2018rights and liberties\u2019 (28%), \u2018democracy\u2019 (27%), \u2018rule of law\u2019 (14%), \u2018respect for the people\u2019 (14%) and \u2018economic development\u2019 (12%). (Remarkably, prosperity was last rather than first on the list). The results clearly indicated that Ukrainians perceived their affinity to Russia exclusively in terms of the past, and their affinity to the West primarily as a goal for the future.<\/p>\n The Versailles Declaration of 2022 that finally recognised Ukraine\u2019s belonging to \u2018our European family\u2019 and opened the thorny path to its EU membership has brought Ukrainian \u2018European dreams\u2019 closer to reality than ever before. However, with the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukraine\u2019s \u2018Eurasian nightmares\u2019 also became more real than ever. This raises the stakes of the struggle enormously. The need to mobilise all available resources, including symbolical capital, has become vital.<\/p>\n Public opinion is one such a resource. Domestically, it is easier to exploit, since Ukrainians are well aware of what the war is about and what they are fighting for. In the past few years, they have lost whatever ambivalence they once had towards Russia, the West, or national independence; they know today that this is a war of national survival. They do not use lofty words like \u2018freedom\u2019, \u2018dignity\u2019 and \u2018sovereignty\u2019 to express their feelings; it is the business of intellectuals to discuss these things. Ordinary people prefer categories such as \u2018our land\u2019 or \u2018our country\u2019, \u2018right\u2019 or \u2018wrong\u2019, \u2018true\u2019 or \u2018false\u2019. As Oleksandr Vilkul, the mayor of Kryvyi Rih (and one of many Ukrainian politicians previously labelled \u2018pro-Russian\u2019) put it<\/a>: \u2018We were born here. The graves of our relatives are here. We have nowhere to go.\u2019<\/p>\n Ukrainians do not need many words to be persuaded and mobilised. But international opinion is a different matter. Milan Kundera\u2019s seminal essay<\/a> \u2018The Tragedy of Central Europe\u2019, which I have referred to in these pages before<\/a> in connection with Ukraine,\u00a0can help us identify the rhetorical strategies that should be employed and those that probably should not, and the effects that can be achieved and the side-effects that can be avoided.<\/p>\n Throughout his essay, Kundera pursued two clear goals. First, to persuade western readers that so-called \u2018Central Europe\u2019 (essentially, just three nations from the former Habsburg Empire that were subjugated by the Soviets) shared a common culture and history with the West, to such a degree that western Europe (i.e. Europe in general) remained not just incomplete without them, but ontologically insecure. Second, he wanted to remind westerners of their sins in relation to \u2018Central Europe\u2019, primarily those of neglect and betrayal, above all at Yalta; to evoke guilt and empathy and to channel this into greater awareness of Central Europe and stronger support for its \u2018European\u2019, i.e. anti-Soviet aspirations.<\/p>\n But there was also a third narrative that supported the other two. Recurrent reference to Russia and\/or the Soviet Union as a dark, \u2018Asiatic\u2019 force provided a contrast to the impeccable Europeanness of Kundera\u2019s three chosen nations. I shall come to this.<\/p>\n There is no clear proof that Kundera\u2019s essay had a significant impact on the western public beyond a narrow circle of intellectuals. Some ran to the defence of the holy cow of \u2018Great Russian Culture\u2019, while others discerned a courageous challenge to discursive conventions and the Cold War. But in Eastern Europe, where the essay was published illegally, it played a much greater mobilising role. It was broadly perceived as an argument for the region\u2019s \u2018European belonging\u2019 and a passionate claim for a \u2018return to Europe\u2019, to \u2018normalcy\u2019, and for liberation from Soviet dominance.<\/p>\n In Ukraine, I remember, we read the text in Polish translation (the Ukrainian translation was less accessible since it was published in Canada, in a diaspora journal called Dialoh<\/em>). Kundera wrote off Ukraine as a case of a disappearing nation, relegating it to the footnotes. But we had no hard feelings against him: the threat of complete disappearance was quite real. We celebrated the essay as a manifesto of freedom, a call for emancipation, and a roadmap to the West, away from Moscow.<\/p>\n It was only much later, in the 1990s, that the exclusivist character of Kundera\u2019s thesis came to the fore, when the \u2018Central European\u2019 nations used it to elbow their way into the elite clubs of the EU and NATO, bypassing the less \u2018Central\u2019 and less \u2018European\u2019 co-prisoners from the same Soviet camp. As the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has since noted<\/a>, \u2018instead of breaking down the wall between East and West, it simply shifted it further eastwards\u2019.<\/p>\n Today, in their messaging to the West, Ukrainians employ all the narratives once used by Kundera. They emphasise their \u2018Europeanness\u2019, their cultural affinity and historical interconnection. They remind the West of its faults and blunders in connection with Ukraine and Russia, its long-time appeasement of a rogue regime, its betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum and many other wrongdoings, striving to awaken a guilty conscience in their addressee. They construct Ukraine\u2019s image as thoroughly dichotomous to that of demonic Russia, which they argue is a country of liars and killers rather than of great composers and writers.<\/p>\n And then they use one final argument, which Kundera mentioned only once, at the very beginning of his essay, when referring to the last words spoken by a Hungarian broadcaster during the 1956 Budapest uprising: \u2018We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.\u2019 The phrase has become the main Ukrainian message: \u2018We are dying for your security, your freedom, your values. We are dying for international order, principles, justice.\u2019<\/p>\n But for all this rhetorical similarity, there is a profound difference. Ukrainians today can rely on arguments that were not available to Kundera. The Cold War order was based on the Yalta agreements, which were in turn reaffirmed by the Helsinki Accords, and whose stipulation of the inviolability of border meant, as the literary critic Przemys\u0142aw Czapli\u0144ski remarked<\/a>, \u2018inviolability of narrative\u2019. But today Ukrainians can employ legal arguments that are fully on their side.<\/p>\n Cultural, historical and even moral arguments are disputable (especially in politics), but written rules and agreements are clear cut. Whatever Putin may fantasise about Ukraine\u2019s \u2018artificialness\u2019, there is the undeniable fact of aggression against a sovereign state. There is the blatant violation of the UN Charter and of bilateral and multilateral documents; there is a crime of war and an increasingly obvious crime of genocide. This does not make historical, cultural and other arguments redundant, but inevitably relegates them to secondary importance.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Ukrainians may not have the same illusions about the West as Kundera and his generation, but they certainly have more self-confidence, stemming from a newly acquired historical agency. This was famously expressed by the Ukrainian president on the first day of the war, in his response to American diplomats who offered him evacuation from Kyiv to a safer place: \u2018I need ammunition, not a ride.\u2019<\/p>\n The real tragedy of the half of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 that drifted eastwards is that it was recognised too late and at too high a price. Indeed, we still don\u2019t know what the final price will be.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/P060090-945948-1024x682.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTwo denials<\/h2>\n
Unrequited love<\/h2>\n
Kundera\u2019s playbook<\/h2>\n
![Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nTwo denials<\/h2>\nThe persistent western denial of Ukraine\u2019s Europeanness was the counterpart of the Russian denial of Ukraine\u2019s existence. Politically, these two denials were framed differently and had incomparably different consequences\u00a0\u2013 purely institutional in first case, military-genocidal in the second. Epistemologically, however, both stemmed from the same root, one that can be defined, after Foucault and Said, and certainly after the Polish-American Slavist Ewa Thomson, as \u2018imperial knowledge<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 as a system of narratives that empires develop about themselves and their colonies, in order to strengthen and legitimise their hegemony. In both cases, it was Russian<\/em> imperial knowledge that informed both the Russian and<\/em> the western view of Ukraine, though in the case of the latter it was supplemented with ideological-cum-ethical constraints.<\/p>\nRussian \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 has much deeper roots and is strongly connected to how Russian imperial identity is constructed \u2013 through appropriating Ukrainian (and Belarusian) history, territory and identity, and placing Ukraine\/Kyiv at the very centre of the imperial myth of origin. Independent Ukraine, by its very existence, undermines that mythology. In the imperial-minded Russian, the notion of Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state provokes ontological insecurity and anxiety. Putin calls independent Ukraine an \u2018anti-Russia\u2019 and defines it as an \u2018existential threat\u2019 to his country.<\/p>\nIn a way, he is correct. Inasmuch as Ukraine\u2019s national identity is incompatible with the Russian imperial identity, it is indeed \u2018anti-Russia\u2019. And it is an \u2018existential threat\u2019 to Russia as an empire, although it is also a chance for the emergence of Russia as a post-imperial nation \u2013 as the Polish\u2013American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly remarked long ago.<\/p>\nSince the 18th<\/sup> century, western nations have uncritically accepted and normalised Russian imperial knowledge, largely also accepting \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 as part of this. Westerners shared that \u2018knowledge\u2019 throughout the 1990s and often still do. But their \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 was not driven by ontological insecurity and anxiety. It simply mirrored Russian mythology, which perfectly suited the West\u2019s \u2018realist\u2019 policies towards both Russia and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West accepted Ukraine\u2019s independence as a fait accompli<\/em>, buttressed by legal norms and procedures rather than cultural and historical arguments (so dear, in a perverse form, to Putin and his acolytes).<\/p>\nUkraine\u2019s declared desire to \u2018return to Europe\u2019, i.e. join Euro-Atlantic institutions, was a different story. One may argue that this desire \u2013 common to all eastern European nations \u2013 challenged established notions of \u2018Europeanness\u2019 and provoked ontological turmoil in the West too. But while Russians\u2019 anxiety stemmed from the sense that their imperial identity was incomplete without Ukraine, western Europeans\u2019 anxiety stemmed from the opposite feeling \u2013 that their identity (and not only wellbeing) would be threatened by an alien body. It was quite natural for western Europe to adapt its old \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 into denial of Ukraine\u2019s European identity and belonging.<\/p>\nTo support this new anti-Ukrainian narrative, elements of Russian imperial knowledge (that had never been properly revised or dismissed in the West) were revived. Perhaps the most important was the narrative about the primordial closeness of Russia and Ukraine \u2013 of their proximity, affinity, interconnectedness and virtual inability to exist without each other. This argument was beneficial in practical terms, since it justified a cynical \u2018Russia-first\u2019 policy at the cost of its former satellites, assigned tacitly to Russia\u2019s \u2018legitimate sphere of influence\u2019, in other words its \u2018backyard\u2019.<\/p>\nThe former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, thus explained<\/a> to readers of the New York Review of Books<\/em> that Ukraine was a \u2018nowhere nation\u2019 whose language was derived from 16th-century Russian. The German and French foreign ministries concluded in a joint classified report that \u2018the admission of Ukraine [to the EU] would imply the isolation of Russia\u2019, and that \u2018it is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev\u2019. The former French president Valery Giscard d\u2019Estaing argued<\/a> that only \u2018a part of Ukraine has a European character\u2019, while the other part has \u2018a Russian character\u2019 and \u2018cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU\u2019. His German colleague, the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, assured readers<\/a> that \u2018as late as 1990, nobody in the West doubted that Ukraine had for centuries belonged to Russia. Since then, Ukraine has become an independent state, but it is not a nation-state.\u2019<\/p>\nIn a recent article<\/a>, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash recollects how, after the spectacular Orange Revolution in 2004, he urged the president of the European Commission, Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso, to say publicly that the European Union wished Ukraine one day to become a member. \u2018If I did that,\u2019 Barroso replied, \u2018I would immediately be slapped down by two major member states [France and Germany].\u2019 \u2018There will first have to be a discussion of whether a country is European\u2019, said a spokeswoman for the EU\u2019s commissioner for external relations, clarifying the issue in starkly candid terms.<\/p>\nUnrequited love<\/h2>\nOnly within this context can one properly appreciate the tectonic change in EU attitudes toward Ukraine, indicated by that short phrase of the Versailles Declaration. It came too late, however, and at too high a price: vast swathes of Ukrainian territory were occupied, cities destroyed and thousands of citizens killed. Ukrainians may have good reasons for anti-western (res)sentiments: throughout their history they have been betrayed and neglected rather than recognised and supported by westerners. But the only alternative has always been Russia, an autocratic state determined either to assimilate or physically destroy them. Ukraine\u2019s national identity was fundamentally incompatible with Russian imperial identity.<\/p>\nUkrainian nation-builders of various colours understood this perfectly and leaned to the West, even though their desperate love remained unrequited. In the West they saw at least a chance, however slight and improbable. Ukraine\u2019s pro-western orientation was its modus vivendi<\/em> vis-\u00e0-vis a hostile neighbour who made \u2018Ukraine denial\u2019 an imperial creed. Ukrainians became \u2018westerners by default\u2019: they had little choice but to accept western values and discourses, even though they did not always feel comfortable with them.<\/p>\nThis can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when the poet Taras Shevchenko and fellow Ukrainophiles broke the ranks of imperial Slavophiles with the subversive ideas of federalism and republicanism. We can find it in the official documents of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic (1918\u20131920) and the programmatic articles written by its head, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one of which was titled \u2018Our Western Orientation\u2019. We can discern the same rationales and imperatives in the pro-western positions of the Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s and \u201970s, and in the predominant stance of Ukrainian politicians and the general population since independence.<\/p>\nIt was not mythical nationalists (or \u2018Nazis\u2019, in Putin\u2019s parlance) but the post-communist president Leonid Kravchuk and the communist-dominated parliament who rejected Ukraine\u2019s full membership in the Russia-led Commonwealth of Independent States in the early \u201990s and eventually fenced off many other integration initiatives promoted by Moscow. It was another post-communist president, Leonid Kuchma (a Russian speaker from the south-eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk), who in 1998 signed a decree \u2018On Reaffirming the Strategy of Ukraine\u2019s Integration into the European Union\u2019, and who, five years later, signed the law \u2018On the Fundamentals of Ukraine\u2019s National Security\u2019.<\/p>\nArticle 6 of that law stated, inter alia, that Ukraine \u2018strives for integration into the European political, economic and legal space with the goal of membership in the European Union, as well as into the Euro-Atlantic security space with the goal of membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation\u2019. Remarkably, Kuchma\u2019s prime minister at the time was the former Donetsk governor Viktor Yanukovych, who as president later worked on signing an Association Agreement with the EU, only to shelve the idea after strong pressure from Moscow (provoking mass protests and, ultimately, his downfall).<\/p>\nContrary to the common western wisdom, consensus about Ukraine\u2019s \u2018European integration\u2019 existed in Ukrainian society long before the \u2018Euromaidan revolution\u2019 of 2013\u201314, even though many people in Ukraine hoped (naively) to combine the westward drift with good relations with Russia. They opposed Ukraine\u2019s membership in NATO, fully aware of the sensitivity of that issue for Moscow, but did not expect the purely economic agreement with the EU to provoke similar wrath. To placate Moscow, Yanukovych adopted non-allied status for Ukraine in 2012 and extended the rent of the Sevastopol naval base to Russia for another 25 years. But to no avail: in 2014, Russian forces occupied Crimea and staged a fake \u2018rebellion\u2019 in the Donbas.<\/p>\nThe Russian invasion did not significantly change Ukrainians\u2019 predisposition toward the EU, which had always been positive. But it radically improved their attitude towards NATO \u2013 as all the opinion polls since 2014 confirm. While a substantial portion of the Sovietophile population of the Crimea and the Donbas were excluded from these surveys (and from voting in the national elections), the results above all reflect the radicalisation of the remaining part of the population. Moscow brutally taught Ukrainians that non-allied status and staying out of NATO provided them with no security.<\/p>\nShortly after Euromaidan, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology carried out a nationwide survey<\/a> asking people which values Ukrainians shared with Russians and which with Europeans. In both cases, respondents could pick three options from a list. It turned out that Ukrainians believed they shared the following with Russia: \u2018history and traditions\u2019 (46%), \u2018culture\u2019 (26%), \u2018ethnicity\u2019 (18%), \u2018religion\u2019 (15%) and \u2018language\u2019 (12%). But they compiled a completely different list of values they shared (or would like to share) with the West: \u2018rights and liberties\u2019 (28%), \u2018democracy\u2019 (27%), \u2018rule of law\u2019 (14%), \u2018respect for the people\u2019 (14%) and \u2018economic development\u2019 (12%). (Remarkably, prosperity was last rather than first on the list). The results clearly indicated that Ukrainians perceived their affinity to Russia exclusively in terms of the past, and their affinity to the West primarily as a goal for the future.<\/p>\nKundera\u2019s playbook<\/h2>\nThe Versailles Declaration of 2022 that finally recognised Ukraine\u2019s belonging to \u2018our European family\u2019 and opened the thorny path to its EU membership has brought Ukrainian \u2018European dreams\u2019 closer to reality than ever before. However, with the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukraine\u2019s \u2018Eurasian nightmares\u2019 also became more real than ever. This raises the stakes of the struggle enormously. The need to mobilise all available resources, including symbolical capital, has become vital.<\/p>\nPublic opinion is one such a resource. Domestically, it is easier to exploit, since Ukrainians are well aware of what the war is about and what they are fighting for. In the past few years, they have lost whatever ambivalence they once had towards Russia, the West, or national independence; they know today that this is a war of national survival. They do not use lofty words like \u2018freedom\u2019, \u2018dignity\u2019 and \u2018sovereignty\u2019 to express their feelings; it is the business of intellectuals to discuss these things. Ordinary people prefer categories such as \u2018our land\u2019 or \u2018our country\u2019, \u2018right\u2019 or \u2018wrong\u2019, \u2018true\u2019 or \u2018false\u2019. As Oleksandr Vilkul, the mayor of Kryvyi Rih (and one of many Ukrainian politicians previously labelled \u2018pro-Russian\u2019) put it<\/a>: \u2018We were born here. The graves of our relatives are here. We have nowhere to go.\u2019<\/p>\nUkrainians do not need many words to be persuaded and mobilised. But international opinion is a different matter. Milan Kundera\u2019s seminal essay<\/a> \u2018The Tragedy of Central Europe\u2019, which I have referred to in these pages before<\/a> in connection with Ukraine,\u00a0can help us identify the rhetorical strategies that should be employed and those that probably should not, and the effects that can be achieved and the side-effects that can be avoided.<\/p>\nThroughout his essay, Kundera pursued two clear goals. First, to persuade western readers that so-called \u2018Central Europe\u2019 (essentially, just three nations from the former Habsburg Empire that were subjugated by the Soviets) shared a common culture and history with the West, to such a degree that western Europe (i.e. Europe in general) remained not just incomplete without them, but ontologically insecure. Second, he wanted to remind westerners of their sins in relation to \u2018Central Europe\u2019, primarily those of neglect and betrayal, above all at Yalta; to evoke guilt and empathy and to channel this into greater awareness of Central Europe and stronger support for its \u2018European\u2019, i.e. anti-Soviet aspirations.<\/p>\nBut there was also a third narrative that supported the other two. Recurrent reference to Russia and\/or the Soviet Union as a dark, \u2018Asiatic\u2019 force provided a contrast to the impeccable Europeanness of Kundera\u2019s three chosen nations. I shall come to this.<\/p>\nThere is no clear proof that Kundera\u2019s essay had a significant impact on the western public beyond a narrow circle of intellectuals. Some ran to the defence of the holy cow of \u2018Great Russian Culture\u2019, while others discerned a courageous challenge to discursive conventions and the Cold War. But in Eastern Europe, where the essay was published illegally, it played a much greater mobilising role. It was broadly perceived as an argument for the region\u2019s \u2018European belonging\u2019 and a passionate claim for a \u2018return to Europe\u2019, to \u2018normalcy\u2019, and for liberation from Soviet dominance.<\/p>\nIn Ukraine, I remember, we read the text in Polish translation (the Ukrainian translation was less accessible since it was published in Canada, in a diaspora journal called Dialoh<\/em>). Kundera wrote off Ukraine as a case of a disappearing nation, relegating it to the footnotes. But we had no hard feelings against him: the threat of complete disappearance was quite real. We celebrated the essay as a manifesto of freedom, a call for emancipation, and a roadmap to the West, away from Moscow.<\/p>\nIt was only much later, in the 1990s, that the exclusivist character of Kundera\u2019s thesis came to the fore, when the \u2018Central European\u2019 nations used it to elbow their way into the elite clubs of the EU and NATO, bypassing the less \u2018Central\u2019 and less \u2018European\u2019 co-prisoners from the same Soviet camp. As the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has since noted<\/a>, \u2018instead of breaking down the wall between East and West, it simply shifted it further eastwards\u2019.<\/p>\nToday, in their messaging to the West, Ukrainians employ all the narratives once used by Kundera. They emphasise their \u2018Europeanness\u2019, their cultural affinity and historical interconnection. They remind the West of its faults and blunders in connection with Ukraine and Russia, its long-time appeasement of a rogue regime, its betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum and many other wrongdoings, striving to awaken a guilty conscience in their addressee. They construct Ukraine\u2019s image as thoroughly dichotomous to that of demonic Russia, which they argue is a country of liars and killers rather than of great composers and writers.<\/p>\nAnd then they use one final argument, which Kundera mentioned only once, at the very beginning of his essay, when referring to the last words spoken by a Hungarian broadcaster during the 1956 Budapest uprising: \u2018We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.\u2019 The phrase has become the main Ukrainian message: \u2018We are dying for your security, your freedom, your values. We are dying for international order, principles, justice.\u2019<\/p>\nBut for all this rhetorical similarity, there is a profound difference. Ukrainians today can rely on arguments that were not available to Kundera. The Cold War order was based on the Yalta agreements, which were in turn reaffirmed by the Helsinki Accords, and whose stipulation of the inviolability of border meant, as the literary critic Przemys\u0142aw Czapli\u0144ski remarked<\/a>, \u2018inviolability of narrative\u2019. But today Ukrainians can employ legal arguments that are fully on their side.<\/p>\nCultural, historical and even moral arguments are disputable (especially in politics), but written rules and agreements are clear cut. Whatever Putin may fantasise about Ukraine\u2019s \u2018artificialness\u2019, there is the undeniable fact of aggression against a sovereign state. There is the blatant violation of the UN Charter and of bilateral and multilateral documents; there is a crime of war and an increasingly obvious crime of genocide. This does not make historical, cultural and other arguments redundant, but inevitably relegates them to secondary importance.<\/p>\nToday\u2019s Ukrainians may not have the same illusions about the West as Kundera and his generation, but they certainly have more self-confidence, stemming from a newly acquired historical agency. This was famously expressed by the Ukrainian president on the first day of the war, in his response to American diplomats who offered him evacuation from Kyiv to a safer place: \u2018I need ammunition, not a ride.\u2019<\/p>\nThe real tragedy of the half of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 that drifted eastwards is that it was recognised too late and at too high a price. Indeed, we still don\u2019t know what the final price will be.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n[ad_2]\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] In the early days of March 2022, as Russian troops were approaching the outskirts of Kyiv, international media were focused primarily on the Ukrainian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":220788,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220787"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330520,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220787\/revisions\/330520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:P060090-945948.jpg\"){kind=link}