Now not a footnote

Within the early days of March 2022, as Russian troops had been approaching the outskirts of Kyiv, worldwide media had been targeted totally on the Ukrainian frontlines. Journalists paid little consideration to the casual assembly of EU leaders at Versailles, nor to the doc they adopted. The insipid language of the declaration differed little from previous EU statements about Ukraine, expressing not more than non-binding ‘acknowledgement’ of Ukraine’s ‘European aspirations and European choice’ and making obscure guarantees to ‘further strengthen our bonds and deepen our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path’.

However a brief phrase was added to the ritual curtseys that marked an actual breakthrough within the perennially ambiguous relations between the EU and Ukraine. ‘Ukraine’, the doc said, ‘belongs to our European family’. The formulation may appear abnormal, even trivial, however it will have been inconceivable even a number of weeks earlier. Recall that the official language of the EU had for many years been watchfully cleansed of any wording that will have hinted at Ukraine’s Europeanness and, at the least theoretically, Ukraine’s eligibility for membership. This was an actual nightmare for the EU – as a French diplomat as soon as instructed me, comparable solely to the attainable accession of Turkey.

Because of this not a single EU doc had ever referred to Ukraine as to a ‘European state’, however as an alternative employed difficult euphemisms like ‘partner country’, or ‘neighbouring country’. Ukraine had been cautiously positioned at a secure distance on psychological maps, right into a nebulous area referred to as ‘the western NIS’ (‘New Independent States’), ‘the Western CIS’ or ‘Western Eurasia’. Consequently, all Ukraine’s overtures to the EU had been met with nothing greater than a well mannered ‘acknowledgement’ of its European aspirations – a irritating catchphrase that meant one thing like ‘give me your phone number, I’ll name you later’.

The true that means of this courtesy was revealed in much less formal statements made by many EU officers. Suffice to say former Italian PM Romano Prodi’s infamous comment that Ukraine ‘has as much reason to be in the EU as New Zealand’. Or the quip by Günter Verheugen, the previous European Commissioner for Enlargement, that ‘anybody who thinks Ukraine should be taken into the EU should perhaps come along with the argument that Mexico should be taken into the US’.

For the various Ukrainians who overwhelmingly, below all governments, supported EU accession, this was a chilly bathe. Particularly those that in 2014 waved blue EU flags on the Maidan, braving police batons and snipers’ bullets, and who cherished their ‘European belonging’ as a key component of their Ukrainian identification.

Two denials

The persistent western denial of Ukraine’s Europeanness was the counterpart of the Russian denial of Ukraine’s existence. Politically, these two denials had been framed in another way and had incomparably completely different penalties – purely institutional in first case, military-genocidal within the second. Epistemologically, nonetheless, each stemmed from the identical root, one that may be outlined, after Foucault and Mentioned, and definitely after the Polish-American Slavist Ewa Thomson, as ‘imperial knowledge’ – as a system of narratives that empires develop about themselves and their colonies, to be able to strengthen and legitimise their hegemony. In each circumstances, it was Russian imperial information that knowledgeable each the Russian and the western view of Ukraine, although within the case of the latter it was supplemented with ideological-cum-ethical constraints.

Russian ‘Ukraine denial’ has a lot deeper roots and is strongly related to how Russian imperial identification is constructed – via appropriating Ukrainian (and Belarusian) historical past, territory and identification, and inserting Ukraine/Kyiv on the very centre of the imperial fable of origin. Unbiased Ukraine, by its very existence, undermines that mythology. Within the imperial-minded Russian, the notion of Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state provokes ontological insecurity and nervousness. Putin calls impartial Ukraine an ‘anti-Russia’ and defines it as an ‘existential threat’ to his nation.

In a means, he’s appropriate. Inasmuch as Ukraine’s nationwide identification is incompatible with the Russian imperial identification, it’s certainly ‘anti-Russia’. And it’s an ‘existential threat’ to Russia as an empire, though it’s also an opportunity for the emergence of Russia as a post-imperial nation – because the Polish–American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly remarked way back.

For the reason that 18^th century, western nations have uncritically accepted and normalised Russian imperial information, largely additionally accepting ‘Ukraine denial’ as a part of this. Westerners shared that ‘knowledge’ all through the Nineties and sometimes nonetheless do. However their ‘Ukraine denial’ was not pushed by ontological insecurity and nervousness. It merely mirrored Russian mythology, which completely suited the West’s ‘realist’ insurance policies in the direction of each Russia and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West accepted Ukraine’s independence as a fait accompli, buttressed by authorized norms and procedures fairly than cultural and historic arguments (so expensive, in a perverse kind, to Putin and his acolytes).

Ukraine’s declared want to ‘return to Europe’, i.e. be part of Euro-Atlantic establishments, was a special story. One could argue that this want – frequent to all japanese European nations – challenged established notions of ‘Europeanness’ and provoked ontological turmoil within the West too. However whereas Russians’ nervousness stemmed from the sense that their imperial identification was incomplete with out Ukraine, western Europeans’ nervousness stemmed from the other feeling – that their identification (and never solely wellbeing) can be threatened by an alien physique. It was fairly pure for western Europe to adapt its outdated ‘Ukraine denial’ into denial of Ukraine’s European identification and belonging.

To help this new anti-Ukrainian narrative, parts of Russian imperial information (that had by no means been correctly revised or dismissed within the West) had been revived. Maybe crucial was the narrative concerning the primordial closeness of Russia and Ukraine – of their proximity, affinity, interconnectedness and digital incapacity to exist with out one another. This argument was helpful in sensible phrases, because it justified a cynical ‘Russia-first’ coverage at the price of its former satellites, assigned tacitly to Russia’s ‘legitimate sphere of influence’, in different phrases its ‘backyard’.

The previous US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, thus defined to readers of the New York Overview of Books that Ukraine was a ‘nowhere nation’ whose language was derived from Sixteenth-century Russian. The German and French overseas ministries concluded in a joint labeled report that ‘the admission of Ukraine [to the EU] would imply the isolation of Russia’, and that ‘it is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev’. The previous French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing argued that solely ‘a part of Ukraine has a European character’, whereas the opposite half has ‘a Russian character’ and ‘cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU’. His German colleague, the previous chancellor Helmut Schmidt, assured readers that ‘as 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.’

In a latest article, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash recollects how, after the spectacular Orange Revolution in 2004, he urged the president of the European Fee, José Manuel Barroso, to say publicly that the European Union wished Ukraine someday to develop into a member. ‘If I did that,’ Barroso replied, ‘I would immediately be slapped down by two major member states [France and Germany].’ ‘There will first have to be a discussion of whether a country is European’, stated a spokeswoman for the EU’s commissioner for exterior relations, clarifying the problem in starkly candid phrases.

Unrequited love

Solely inside this context can one correctly admire the tectonic change in EU attitudes towards Ukraine, indicated by that quick phrase of the Versailles Declaration. It got here too late, nonetheless, and at too excessive a value: huge swathes of Ukrainian territory had been occupied, cities destroyed and 1000’s of residents killed. Ukrainians could have good causes for anti-western (res)sentiments: all through their historical past they’ve been betrayed and uncared for fairly than recognised and supported by westerners. However the one different has at all times been Russia, an autocratic state decided both to assimilate or bodily destroy them. Ukraine’s nationwide identification was basically incompatible with Russian imperial identification.

Ukrainian nation-builders of varied colors understood this completely and leaned to the West, despite the fact that their determined love remained unrequited. Within the West they noticed at the least an opportunity, nonetheless slight and unbelievable. Ukraine’s pro-western orientation was its modus vivendi vis-à-vis a hostile neighbour who made ‘Ukraine denial’ an imperial creed. Ukrainians turned ‘westerners by default’: they’d little alternative however to simply accept western values and discourses, despite the fact that they didn’t at all times really feel snug with them.

This may be traced again to the mid-Nineteenth century, when the poet Taras Shevchenko and fellow Ukrainophiles broke the ranks of imperial Slavophiles with the subversive concepts of federalism and republicanism. We are able to discover it within the official paperwork of the short-lived Ukrainian Nationwide Republic (1918–1920) and the programmatic articles written by its head, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, one in all which was titled ‘Our Western Orientation’. We are able to discern the identical rationales and imperatives within the pro-western positions of the Ukrainian dissidents of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, and within the predominant stance of Ukrainian politicians and the final inhabitants since independence.

It was not legendary nationalists (or ‘Nazis’, in Putin’s parlance) however the post-communist president Leonid Kravchuk and the communist-dominated parliament who rejected Ukraine’s full membership within the Russia-led Commonwealth of Unbiased States within the early ’90s and ultimately fenced off many different integration initiatives promoted by Moscow. It was one other post-communist president, Leonid Kuchma (a Russian speaker from the south-eastern metropolis of Dnipropetrovsk), who in 1998 signed a decree ‘On Reaffirming the Strategy of Ukraine’s Integration into the European Union’, and who, 5 years later, signed the regulation ‘On the Fundamentals of Ukraine’s Nationwide Safety’.

Article 6 of that regulation said, inter alia, that Ukraine ‘strives 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’. Remarkably, Kuchma’s prime minister on the time was the previous Donetsk governor Viktor Yanukovych, who as president later labored on signing an Affiliation Settlement with the EU, solely to shelve the thought after sturdy strain from Moscow (scary mass protests and, in the end, his downfall).

Opposite to the frequent western knowledge, consensus about Ukraine’s ‘European integration’ existed in Ukrainian society lengthy earlier than the ‘Euromaidan revolution’ of 2013–14, despite the fact that many individuals in Ukraine hoped (naively) to mix the westward drift with good relations with Russia. They opposed Ukraine’s membership in NATO, totally conscious of the sensitivity of that difficulty for Moscow, however didn’t anticipate the purely financial settlement with the EU to impress comparable wrath. To placate Moscow, Yanukovych adopted non-allied standing for Ukraine in 2012 and prolonged the lease of the Sevastopol naval base to Russia for one more 25 years. However to no avail: in 2014, Russian forces occupied Crimea and staged a faux ‘rebellion’ within the Donbas.

The Russian invasion didn’t considerably change Ukrainians’ predisposition towards the EU, which had at all times been constructive. But it surely radically improved their perspective in the direction of NATO – as all of the opinion polls since 2014 verify. Whereas a considerable portion of the Sovietophile inhabitants of the Crimea and the Donbas had been excluded from these surveys (and from voting within the nationwide elections), the outcomes above all mirror the radicalisation of the remaining a part of the inhabitants. Moscow brutally taught Ukrainians that non-allied standing and staying out of NATO offered them with no safety.

Shortly after Euromaidan, the Kyiv Worldwide Institute of Sociology carried out a nationwide survey asking individuals which values Ukrainians shared with Russians and which with Europeans. In each circumstances, respondents may choose three choices from a listing. It turned out that Ukrainians believed they shared the next with Russia: ‘history and traditions’ (46%), ‘culture’ (26%), ‘ethnicity’ (18%), ‘religion’ (15%) and ‘language’ (12%). However they compiled a very completely different listing of values they shared (or want to share) with the West: ‘rights and liberties’ (28%), ‘democracy’ (27%), ‘rule of law’ (14%), ‘respect for the people’ (14%) and ‘economic development’ (12%). (Remarkably, prosperity was final fairly than first on the listing). The outcomes clearly indicated that Ukrainians perceived their affinity to Russia completely by way of the previous, and their affinity to the West primarily as a objective for the longer term.

Kundera’s playbook

The Versailles Declaration of 2022 that lastly recognised Ukraine’s belonging to ‘our European family’ and opened the thorny path to its EU membership has introduced Ukrainian ‘European dreams’ nearer to actuality than ever earlier than. Nevertheless, with the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s ‘Eurasian nightmares’ additionally turned extra actual than ever. This raises the stakes of the battle enormously. The necessity to mobilise all obtainable assets, together with symbolical capital, has develop into very important.

Public opinion is one such a useful resource. Domestically, it’s simpler to use, since Ukrainians are effectively conscious of what the warfare is about and what they’re preventing for. Prior to now few years, they’ve misplaced no matter ambivalence they as soon as had in the direction of Russia, the West, or nationwide independence; they know right this moment that it is a warfare of nationwide survival. They don’t use lofty phrases like ‘freedom’, ‘dignity’ and ‘sovereignty’ to specific their emotions; it’s the enterprise of intellectuals to debate these items. Peculiar individuals favor classes resembling ‘our land’ or ‘our country’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘true’ or ‘false’. As Oleksandr Vilkul, the mayor of Kryvyi Rih (and one in all many Ukrainian politicians beforehand labelled ‘pro-Russian’) put it: ‘We were born here. The graves of our relatives are here. We have nowhere to go.’

Ukrainians don’t want many phrases to be persuaded and mobilised. However worldwide opinion is a special matter. Milan Kundera’s seminal essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, which I’ve referred to in these pages earlier than in reference to Ukraine, may also help us determine the rhetorical methods that must be employed and people who most likely mustn’t, and the results that may be achieved and the side-effects that may be prevented.

All through his essay, Kundera pursued two clear targets. First, to influence western readers that so-called ‘Central Europe’ (primarily, simply three nations from the previous Habsburg Empire that had been subjugated by the Soviets) shared a typical tradition and historical past with the West, to such a level that western Europe (i.e. Europe typically) remained not simply incomplete with out them, however ontologically insecure. Second, he wished to remind westerners of their sins in relation to ‘Central Europe’, primarily these of neglect and betrayal, above all at Yalta; to evoke guilt and empathy and to channel this into better consciousness of Central Europe and stronger help for its ‘European’, i.e. anti-Soviet aspirations.

However there was additionally a 3rd narrative that supported the opposite two. Recurrent reference to Russia and/or the Soviet Union as a darkish, ‘Asiatic’ power offered a distinction to the impeccable Europeanness of Kundera’s three chosen nations. I shall come to this.

There isn’t any clear proof that Kundera’s essay had a big influence on the western public past a slender circle of intellectuals. Some ran to the defence of the holy cow of ‘Great Russian Culture’, whereas others discerned a brave problem to discursive conventions and the Chilly Warfare. However in Jap Europe, the place the essay was printed illegally, it performed a a lot better mobilising position. It was broadly perceived as an argument for the area’s ‘European belonging’ and a passionate declare for a ‘return to Europe’, to ‘normalcy’, and for liberation from Soviet dominance.

In Ukraine, I keep in mind, we learn the textual content in Polish translation (the Ukrainian translation was much less accessible because it was printed in Canada, in a diaspora journal referred to as Dialoh). Kundera wrote off Ukraine as a case of a disappearing nation, relegating it to the footnotes. However we had no laborious emotions in opposition to him: the specter of full disappearance was fairly actual. We celebrated the essay as a manifesto of freedom, a name for emancipation, and a roadmap to the West, away from Moscow.

It was solely a lot later, within the Nineties, that the exclusivist character of Kundera’s thesis got here to the fore, when the ‘Central European’ nations used it to elbow their means into the elite golf equipment of the EU and NATO, bypassing the much less ‘Central’ and fewer ‘European’ co-prisoners from the identical Soviet camp. Because the Ukrainian thinker Volodymyr Yermolenko has since famous, ‘instead of breaking down the wall between East and West, it simply shifted it further eastwards’.

Right now, of their messaging to the West, Ukrainians make use of all of the narratives as soon as utilized by Kundera. They emphasise their ‘Europeanness’, their cultural affinity and historic interconnection. They remind the West of its faults and blunders in reference to Ukraine and Russia, its long-time appeasement of a rogue regime, its betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum and plenty of different wrongdoings, striving to awaken a responsible conscience of their addressee. They assemble Ukraine’s picture as totally dichotomous to that of demonic Russia, which they argue is a rustic of liars and killers fairly than of nice composers and writers.

After which they use one ultimate argument, which Kundera talked about solely as soon as, on the very starting of his essay, when referring to the final phrases spoken by a Hungarian broadcaster throughout the 1956 Budapest rebellion: ‘We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.’ The phrase has develop into the principle Ukrainian message: ‘We are dying for your security, your freedom, your values. We are dying for international order, principles, justice.’

However for all this rhetorical similarity, there’s a profound distinction. Ukrainians right this moment can depend on arguments that weren’t obtainable to Kundera. The Chilly Warfare order was primarily based on the Yalta agreements, which had been in flip reaffirmed by the Helsinki Accords, and whose stipulation of the inviolability of border meant, because the literary critic Przemysław Czapliński remarked, ‘inviolability of narrative’. However right this moment Ukrainians can make use of authorized arguments which can be totally on their aspect.

Cultural, historic and even ethical arguments are disputable (particularly in politics), however written guidelines and agreements are clear lower. No matter Putin could fantasise about Ukraine’s ‘artificialness’, there’s the indisputable fact of aggression in opposition to a sovereign state. There may be the blatant violation of the UN Constitution and of bilateral and multilateral paperwork; there’s a crime of warfare and an more and more apparent crime of genocide. This doesn’t make historic, cultural and different arguments redundant, however inevitably relegates them to secondary significance.

Right now’s Ukrainians could not have the identical illusions concerning the West as Kundera and his technology, however they actually have extra self-confidence, stemming from a newly acquired historic company. This was famously expressed by the Ukrainian president on the primary day of the warfare, in his response to American diplomats who provided him evacuation from Kyiv to a safer place: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’

The true tragedy of the half of ‘Central Europe’ that drifted eastwards is that it was recognised too late and at too excessive a value. Certainly, we nonetheless don’t know what the ultimate value will probably be.