ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Introduction

Part One European Dreams

(1) Behind the Fence

(2) Barbecue in the European Garden

(3) Ambiguous Borderland

(4) ‘Eurasian’ Othering

(5) Metaphors of Betrayal

Part Two Maidan and Beyond

(6) Not-So-Unexpected Nation

(7) Pluralism by Default

(8) What’s Left of Orange Ukraine?

(9) The End of Post-Soviet Pragmatism?

(10) After the Crash

(11) Maidan 2.0.

(12) The Fourteenth Worst Place

(13) Dying for ‘Europe’

(14) Crying Wolf

(15) Ukraine’s Ordeal

(16) Passions over Federalization

(17) On the “Wrong” and “Right” Ukrainians

(18) Turn to the Right—and Back

Part Three Lessons of Solidarity

(19) My Polish Schism

(20) A Fortress of Rules

(21) Repossessions

(22) Eight Jews in Search of a Grandfather

(23) How I Became a ‘Czechoslovak’

(24) On Bridges and Walls

(25) An Incident

Bibliography

Introduction

As early as 1918, the prominent Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who then headed the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, published a cycle of political pamphlets under the characteristic title “On the Threshold of the New Ukraine.” There, he tried to outline the basic principles and parameters upon which the nascent Ukrainian state should be built. He covered the army, culture, and government bureaucracy, as well as the various aspects of Ukraine’s international politics, quintessentially defined in the title of one of his essays as “Our Western Orientation.”

As a professional historian, he could easily prove that, for centuries,

Ukraine had been living the same life with the West, experiencing the same ideas and borrowing cultural models and resources for its own culture building. Yet, he knew also that since the end of the 18th century Ukrainian contacts with the West “had weakened and declined under the pressure of forceful russification of Ukrainian life; and Ukrainian life and culture had been drawn into a Russian, Greater Russian, period.” As a result, “19th-century Ukraine was torn from the West, from Europe, and turned to the North, pushed forcefully into the deadlock-grip of Great Russian [imperial] culture and life. All Ukrainian life was uprooted from its natural environment, from the historically and geographically determined way of development, and thrown onto Russian soil, for destruction and pillage [Hrushevsky 1991: 141–144].

“Return to Europe,” therefore, was seen by a leading Ukrainian nation-builder as a return to the norm, a fixing of historical injustice and perversion, a healing of a developmental pathology. Such a romantic approach emerged naturally from modern Ukrainian nationalism which, from its emergence in the first half of the 19th century, had to emphasize Ukraine’s ‘otherness’ vis-à-vis Russia. This meant, in particular, that Ukrainian activists not just praised the alleged Ukrainian ‘Europeanness’ as opposed to evil Russian ‘Asianness’; they had to accept the whole set of Western liberal-democratic values as ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ for Ukrainians (yet ‘unnatural’ for Russians).

Ukrainians built their claim to ‘Europeanness’ upon medieval and early-modern rather than modern history:

The Kievan State combined a predominantly Eastern, Greek, Byzantine religious and cultural tradition with a predominantly Western social and political structure … Political Byzantinism remained totally alien to Kievan Rus … In pre-Mongol Rus, as in the medieval West—and in contrast to Byzantium and Moscow—political and ecclesiastical authority were not fused, but remained distinct, with each of the two autonomous in its own sphere. A social system characterized by contractual relations, a strong regard for the rights and the dignity of the individual, limitation of the power of the prince by a council of boyars and a popular assembly, autonomous communal city life, territorial decentralization of a quasi-federative nature—all this gave the Kiev polity a distinct libertarian imprint. And this libertarian, essentially European spirit also characterizes Ukrainian state organizations of later epochs. The Galician-Volhynian state of the 13th and 14th centuries evolved toward a feudal structure, and full-fledged feudalism, including feudal parliamentarism, may be found in the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state of the 14th through 16th centuries. The Cossack State of the 17th and 18th centuries possessed a system of estates (Staendestaat). It was not a coincidence that in the 19th century, during the epoch when Ukraine was politically assimilated to the Russian Empire, all-Russian liberalism and constitutionalism found its strongest support in the Ukrainian provinces of the Empire [Rudnytsky 1987: 8].

Another Ukrainian historian, the Byzantologist Ihor Sevcenko, has also argued that “the West’s influence on parts of Ukrainian territory began before 1349, acquired considerable intensity after 1569, and continued over the vast expanse of Ukrainian lands until 1793. When we take into account the impact of Polish elites in western Ukrainian lands and the right bank of the Dnipro, this influence can be seen to have continued until 1918 or even 1939.” He admitted, however, that “this West was, for the most part, clad in the Polish kontusz … and its principal cultural message in the decisive turning point between the 16th and 17th centuries was carried by the Polish variant of the Counter-Reformation” [Sevcenko 1996: 3–4, 6].

Sevcenko’s analysis had led him to what for many Ukrainians was an unpleasant conclusion; namely, that as soon as “neo-Byzantinism, the cultural mainstay of the tsardom of Moscow, lost out [and] the new Russian Empire began to import its culture from the West on a large scale … it was that empire that soon provided its Ukrainian dominions with Western values.” In sum, “an important general characteristic of Ukrainian cultural contacts both with the ‘East’ and with the West [was] the lack of direct access to original sources during long stretches of Ukrainian history. Ukrainians received cultural values from abroad through intermediaries … The Ukrainian secondarity [sic] carried a certain weakness with it” [Sevcenko 1996: 8].

This perhaps explains Hrushevsky’s phrase about the “deadlock grip of Great Russian culture,” into which Ukraine had been arguably pushed since the 18th century. It was not a matter of Russian culture per se, which had eventually become rather vibrant, attractive and hospitable for many Ukrainian newcomers. It was a problem of “secondarity” that became an unavoidable, inescapable fate of the stateless nation dispossessed of its upper classes. Since then and until recently, Ukraine has been ruled by a territorial rather than the national elite, and this important fact determined its subsequent (under)development. It was only in 1991 that independent Ukraine’s leaders recollected Hrushevsky’s idea of the “return to Europe,” and Hrushevsky himself returned to the national pantheon of the founding fathers of the new-old nation.

Still, the “return to Europe,” although proclaimed officially as Ukraine’s major strategic goal, was neither completed during the first decades after independence nor were any significant steps made in that direction besides political declarations and some very feeble and incoherent reforms. Some blame the West for not being interested in Ukraine’s “return;” some blame Russia for effectively obstructing its efforts; some blame the Ukrainian leadership for paying lip-service to the idea while doing nothing to accomplish it; and some blame the Ukrainian people who, by and large, have not proven to be as ‘European’ as many Ukrainian intellectuals would like them to be.

All these arguments (or excuses) are serious enough to be examined in more detail, and I address each of them in this collection of essays that have been written mostly within the past 15 years. This time-span coincides with some very important and often dramatic changes in both Ukraine and its neighborhood. On the one side, Ukrainian civil society that had always, since perestroika, been an important political actor to be counted with, for the first time appeared not just noticeable but victorious, during and in the aftermath of the 2004 Orange revolution. It failed ultimately, but set a new level of political competition and a new agenda for years to come. On the other side, the year 2004 marked the ‘big bang’ enlargement of the EU that erected de facto a new wall at Ukraine’s western borders and deepened the feeling of abandonment and alienation. It coincided also with consolidation of an authoritarian regime in Russia and growth of a Kremlin ‘assertiveness’ that eventuated in gas, trade, and cyber wars with neighbors, military invasion of Georgia, and large-scale intervention in Ukraine.

Throughout all those years, I published many articles in periodicals, besides my primary (or parallel) academic activity. All of them were driven by two overlapping desires—to react directly to the events, developments, and problems that required, I felt, an immediate intervention; and to reach many more people than a scholarly article can ever do. Certainly, I could not avoid some academic terms and concepts, but all the time I tried to make the texts readable and comprehensive for any person with a high school diploma and not necessarily with a university degree. Here, I have selected only the articles that address Ukraine’s ‘European affair’—a painstaking but fascinating process of both its cultural and political ‘Europeanization’. The process has both domestic and international aspects, both historical and contemporary dimensions. All of them are complex and all are intricately intertwined.

The title of the book refers, ironically, to the notorious Chancellor Metternich’s quip that Asia begins presumably at the eastern fence of his garden (or, as another apocryphal version maintains, at the end of the Viennese Landstrasse). It hints at the garden of Eden—as many non-Westerners see the West, but also the Millennium-old garden of European culture and civilization that includes also specific political and social practices and institutions. It hints also at the Zbigniew Herbert’s classic book A Barbarian in the Garden (1962), and at the popular slogan of Mykola Khvylovy, one of the leaders of the short-lived Ukrainian national revival of the 1920s (the “executed Renaissance”), who called on his compatriots to develop “psychological Europe” within Ukraine and among Ukrainians.

This is not a compassionate praise for Europe in Herbert’s or Denis de Rougemont’s style but rather an argument why Ukraine, existentially, cannot afford a move into any other direction; what obstacles, outside and within, it encounters; and how ultimately to overcome them. I compiled the book as a story of both exclusion and inclusion, of walls and fences but also of a longing for freedom and quest for solidarity. I wished it to be a book on different ways of being a ‘European’—at both the collective and individual level—despite various challenges or, perhaps, thanks to them.

It consists of three parts that cover, respectively, the ‘international’ aspect of Ukraine’s ‘European affair’, the ‘domestic’ part, and, so to say, my ‘personal’ part. Most of the articles were written in either Ukrainian or English and published usually in both languages but also, occasionally, in Polish, German, or Russian. The essay “How I Became a ‘Czechoslovak’” broke records, being translated into a dozen languages including Farsi, Slovene, and Catalan, but it was rather exceptional.

I eschewed the temptation to make any substantial changes so as to look more perspicacious than I was 10 or 15 years ago, but I cut some passages to make the texts less repetitive. Also, I indicated the dates when the texts emerged and, in some cases, when the events in question occurred. All the essays are included in the collection with the permission of the original publishers. I am honored to list all of them, and express my deep gratitude to the European syndicate of cultural periodicals Eurozine, the Polish bi-monthly New Eastern Europe, the online quarterly Russkii Vopros, the quarterly Aspen Review, the web-platforms Open Democracy and Transitions Online, and last but not least, to the journal of studies in Polish Jewry Polin that commissioned a professional translation of one of my essays—the only one in this book rendered in English not by myself. The translator Marta Olynyk deserves full credit for her masterful work, as well as the editor of this volume Dr. Andrew Sorokowski. Special thanks to Dr. Andreas Umland, who encouraged me to complete this collection, to Dr. Ksenia Kiebuzinski, who perfectly guided my work at the University of Toronto library, and to Ms. Jana Oldfield, who sheltered me generously for a few months when I was suddenly locked down in Toronto during the quarantine.

Ironically, the coveted “return to Europe” acquired for me a new, unexpected meaning. It became even more desirable but also even more based on strict rules and exact procedures. There are not only accession criteria but also absorption capacity to be counted with. There is little doubt that all the postcommunist states, including my own, need some ‘quarantine’ before being fully admitted into the ‘European family’. But genuine efforts are needed on both sides to facilitate the convalescence, and to fully complete the clearance and adaptation. I wish my book to contribute a bit to this process.

Toronto, April–May 2020

Part One European Dreams

(1) Behind the Fence
1.

When in 1946, Konrad Adenauer stated that “Asia stands on the Elbe”, he just rephrased, consciously or unconsciously, the nineteenth-century joke of his Austrian colleague, chancellor Metternich, who used to say that the very place where Asia began was just behind the fence of his Viennese garden. For both of them, “Asia” was just another word for something hostile, barbarous and threatening the very existence of their (Western) civilization. For Metternich, implicitly, all the space east of Vienna was culturally inferior and suspicious. As many Westerners of the time, he believed that “the frontiers of civilization did not extend beyond the territorial aspirations of the more timorous Carolingian monarchs” [Judt 1990: 24].

But Adenauer hardly shared this view; in any case, he knew that there was East Germany east of the Elbe and that East Germans did not differ too much from their western compatriots, at least at that time. What he meant by “Asia standing on the Elbe” was a certain political reality brought as far as his own country by the Soviet troops and imposed on Eastern Europeans by brutal force, blackmail and political trickery. “Asia” meant for him not just another civilization—however inferior and alien it might be, as in Metternich’s view—but rather a lack of civilization, an ‘anti-civilization’ which threatened the most fundamental values of the Western world.

The Western perception of Eastern Europe, after 1946, had consisted of various combinations of both feelings, ‘Adenauer’s’ and ‘Metternich’s’. On the one hand, the Westerners recognized that to the east of the Elbe and Metternich’s garden there was also Europe, even though poorer and despised. They knew that this Europe did not accept its ‘Asian’ status voluntarily and that she tried desperately to get rid of it—by all possible means. But, on the other hand, they felt that something was wrong with this part of Europe, since she allowed herself to be swallowed up and since she had been victimized so often and heavily throughout her history. Probably, some Westerners mused, she was guilty herself; she was predisposed and, in fact, doomed to be victimized permanently because she was not European enough, she was not ‘like us’, lucky and happy, she was inferior. As under-Europe, or semi-Europe, she had equal chances to grow up to true Europeanness or to dissolve into entropic Asiaticness. She had lost the first chance that was gifted her after WWI, and now she must pay for it. There was nobody to blame except herself.

A guilty conscience is extremely inventive. Metternich’s approach provided Westerners with a good rationale for their behind-the-fence status; it perfectly reconciled them with Munich and Yalta, with “non-interference” in Soviet “internal affairs”—whether it was the destruction of Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian independence in the early 1920s, or the invasion of Budapest and Prague in the 1950s and 1960s. This approach was reflected in Lloyd George’s remark on trading even with cannibals, as well as in Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with Russia in 1933, exactly when five to six million Ukrainians were being starved to death by Kremlin cannibals willing to trade.

This approach was expressed quintessentially in the following statement of the British Foreign Office: “The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia (sic), similar to that which had appeared in the press … We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced” [Carynnyk et al. 1988: 397]

But there is still another side of the problem. Eastern Europe is not as remote a territory as Chechnya, or Georgia, or Armenia, or Kurdistan. Its appearance had been troublesome, its complete disappearance may have been disastrous. The common enemy, threatening from the East, had united Western and Eastern Europeans much more than any common cultural heritage; “Asia”, the powerful ‘other’, to a large extent determined the common identity of the Westerners and the Easterners. Even though the Westerners knew that the ‘true’ Europe began somewhere at the Elbe and Vienna, they saw clearly that “Asia” was coming and that the not-so-true Europe, under these circumstances, should be preserved as a more preferable neighbor. Yes, after Yalta it had been ceded to Stalin, but it still could be maintained somehow as, at least, a not-so-true “Asia.”

Hence, the predominant Western attitude towards the Easterners had always been ambivalent if not ambiguous. On the one hand, many of them believed that the Easterners, to a different degree, deserved their destiny (any people, actually, have the government they deserve!); but on the other hand, many Westerners felt that the Easterners who resisted “Asia’s” advance, did deserve (to a different degree) their sympathy and support. And indeed, the Easterners had enjoyed this support—to the extent described above by the statement of the British Foreign Office: not to irritate the Soviet government and not to deteriorate the relations with them. In other words, not to mar trade with the cannibals completely.

Of course, there have always been some intellectuals in the West who perceived Eastern Europe without an Orientalizing gaze and primordialistic bias. For some of them, Central Europe has become the “idealized Europe of [their] cultural nostalgia.” They demonstrated at Soviet embassies and organized various committees to defend eastern dissidents with unpronounceable names; they signed petitions and published articles; they visited East European capitals and smuggled subversive literature; sometimes they became more native than the natives themselves; they were involved, engaged, and enchanted. Many of them enthusiastically believed that “this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches” [Judt 1990: 48], and that despite totalitarianism, or even because of it (in response to its pressure), Eastern Europe was a country of “wonderful spiritual tension” [Zagajewski 1987: 36]. This view, however plausible it might be, never spread beyond the narrow circle of specialists on the area and members of the East European diaspora.

In general, the ambiguous Western attitude toward Eastern Europe has been largely determined by geopolitics, i.e., by cold calculations and the age-old principle “charity begins at home.” It may seem reasonable and hardly blameworthy. What was reprehensible, from the Easterners’ point of view, and ultimately detrimental for the very idea of liberal democracy and for the West as its standard-bearer, was the perceived cynicism of Western politics and its penchant for double standards, both at home and elsewhere. The Easterners could not take in the Weberian notion of morality in politics as arguably determined not by motives, however nice, but by the ultimate (and achievable) results. They felt like abandoned lovers, seduced by lofty ideas and passionate words but left in the cold, with a crude “Asia” on the one side, and a restrained Realpolitik on the other.

Not so seldom, this disappointment resulted in zealous anti-Westernism, nationalism, xenophobia, isolationism, and autarky. Indeed, the question whether the Western civilization is superior to any other civilization, is not so simple, as we know nowadays from the bountiful postcolonial writing. Whatever we think on the issue, we cannot dismiss the sheer fact that Eastern Europe is a part of Europe and, moreover, a part of the modern world. And modernity, whether we like it or not, is unavoidable and inescapable, insofar as humankind has entered it. We may regret, and complain, and condemn it, but there is no way back. It is like the biblical Fall, the lost innocence, the bygone childhood. We may dislike our adult life but it is the only life to live. We may find the Western political system sometimes arrogant, sometimes hypocritical, but all other systems are worse, and all the attempts to install them, to alter modernity with some kind of pre-modern or anti-modern utopia proves funny at best, or bloody and exhausting at worst—as we could observe in too many places in the world.

Our attitude to the West should be neither extolling nor disparaging. The West represents rather relative than absolute goodness. For East Europeans, who have been sandwiched between the West and Russia, it merely means that the West is a lesser, much lesser, evil. Such a measured, ambivalent attitude might be perhaps a good response to the Western ambiguity vis-à-vis the East. There are no permanent friends in international relations but there are permanent interests. The East Europeans’ primary interest has been to survive, the Western Europeans’ interest has been the same, albeit far less topical and existential.

The East Europeans are still [1997] much closer to “Asia”; their democracies, economies, and military forces are much weaker; their escape from “Asia’s” sphere of influence still is questionable, and their independence is vulnerable in all possible terms. Hardly surprising then, that they want to remove the fence of Metternich’s garden as far to the east as possible. And hardly surprising that the Westerners do not understand this haste and nervousness. For the Westerners, “Asia’s” comeback looks neither plausible nor very daunting. They have more time to prepare themselves for any surprise, and they have more means to encounter it.

Thus, the East Europeans can really rely on their Western neighbors—but only to the extent to which their interests coincide. Sometimes they coincide significantly, sometimes not. But at no time should the Easterners rely on their Western allies completely. It is not a marriage of love, but merely of convenience. At any time, the Western attitude may suddenly change because of some higher reasons, some whimsical calculations—or misreasons and miscalculations, ultimately it does not matter. What really matters is that any moment the East Europeans may be betrayed again, and sacrificed, as it has happened not once in history.

All their advantages notwithstanding, they have neither the military nor the economic resources of Russia. And they will never be as attractive, promising, disappointing, concerning, disturbing, menacing as their Eurasian neighbor. In these terms, the Western approach towards Eastern Europe will always remain as it has always been, utilitarian and instrumental. Charity begins at home, just keep this in mind.

2.

So what can Eastern Europe offer to the West? Geopolitical stability? Yes, to a certain degree, but the major concern still is Russia, and world’s security and stability depend mostly on developments there. Of course, Eastern Europe may have assumed again the role of cordon sanitaire, if it was stable itself (the Balkans are the major yet not the only problem), and if this role (a “linchpin of the new post-Cold War Europe,” in Strobe Talbott’s words) has not shifted eastward, to Ukraine. Then, maybe Eastern Europe can attract the West economically? Hardly so. There are no important natural resources there, and there is a dearth of goods that could compete on the Western markets. And the cheap labor force from the East is probably even less needed in the West than the cheap Eastern goods. Perhaps only some problems of economic as well as political transition may draw the attention of Western specialists—as material for esoteric books, articles and Ph.D. dissertations.

Then what about the culture, the last fortress where East Europeans retreated after numerous historical blows and where they cherished their imaginary statehood, their imaginary Europeanness, their inner freedom? Indeed, they have much to offer in this field; the last decades of communism witnessed an enormous revival of various forms of cultural activity, both in the legal framework and underground. But again, it was a high culture which could hardly affect anybody except a narrow circle of intellectuals, both in the East and in the West. Of course, the favorable political conjuncture of the 1980s had largely facilitated the influx of East European books, films, and fine arts to the West. And some East European names became really fashionable—not so much, however, from their major works as from their op-ed articles and interviews featured in the major Western newspapers and magazines. In 1989–1990, when this vogue reached its climax, Tony Judt complained that “the whole subject remains in the hands of the Zivilisationsliterati, of East and West alike,” but he also quite reasonably assumed that “after all, the fashion will pass, but it will at the very least leave in paperback translations a library full of works by authors, living and dead, of whom the Western reader was hitherto ignorant” [Judt 1990: 50].

In the West, however, as elsewhere in the world, ignorance can be quite compatible with the best libraries, full of the greatest works. I have met a lot of university students in the U.S. who had never heard names like Goethe, Faust, or Gogol, so I was not surprised that only a few of them knew who was Milosz, Brodsky, or Kundera (Havel appeared a bit more recognizable but mostly as a politician rather than a playwright). But even this partial ‘success’ of the Easterners is very likely to fade in the nearest future, since the communist threat has disappeared, the evil empire presumably fell in rubble, and new celebrities from the East, like Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov, and Lukashenko, have advanced in the pages of Western newspapers. Manchester capitalism seems to be less supportive for the liberal arts in Eastern Europe than over-aged and senile communism.

Today [1997], as we can easily notice, the best filmmakers move to the West to make their fortunes; and the best East European artists follow them and paint everything, including fences and walls; and the best musicians perform usually abroad, sometimes in Carnegie Hall, more often in churches and restaurants; and the writers and scholars penetrate Western universities to teach whatever they can: one of them (Yevgeny Yevtushenko) confessed recently in The New York Times that he is neither qualified nor academically prepared to teach Pushkin but, in his words, he loves the poet and will teach the love.

Apparently, it is not just a Polish but an East European problem; the tremendous endeavor of East European intellectuals to withstand totalitarianism and to preserve inner freedom has passed out and become history. Today [1997], the region enters a new, non-heroic era when the old habits of resistance and fighting are obsolete while the new habits of mundane systemic work are not yet acquired. The combatants of the long anticommunist struggle may feel disappointed and dissatisfied; they still employ their outdated discourse (and the harped-upon Central East European myth is just a part of it), but East European societies seem to be not very interested. Some people are lured by the populists, some turn back to the familiar communists, and some simply switch off their ears and brains from any political messages. We have entered a new epoch, and new leaders, ideas, and slogans are apparently needed. And Tony Judt’s sobering criticism of the Central European mythology might be as topical nowadays as ever:

To suppose that this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches, has been part of the Western image in recent years. Yet […] in truth Central Europe, from the Battle of the White Mountain down to the present, is a region of enduring ethnic and religious intolerance, marked by bitter quarrels, murderous wars, and frequent slaughter on a scale ranging from pogrom to genocide. Western Europe was not always much better, of course, but on the whole it has been luckier, which is almost as good [Judt 1990: 48].

Milan Kundera was certainly right when describing Central Europe as “not a state” but “a culture or a fate.” “Its borders [he wrote] are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation. Central Europe therefore cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers […] but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition.”

But he was apparently wrong when explaining why this myth (this “imaginary realm”, in his words) had not been appealing to Westerners; why it was considered as “outmoded and [was] not understood.” In Kundera’s view, Western Europe itself was “in the process of losing its own cultural identity,” “it no longer perceive[d] its unity as a cultural unity”; and because of this “it perceive[d] in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it [saw] in Central Europe only Eastern Europe” [Kundera 1984: 36–37].

There is no need at this point to go deeper into the problem of European identity as based on a common religion and culture (“the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European”). The major vulnerability of Kundera’s arguments does not lie in his hypothesis that there was a moment when European identity changed and culture bowed out, giving way to the marketplace, to technical feats, to mass media and to politics. Maybe he is right, maybe not. What seems to be really questionable in his theory is an unproved assumption that, before that very moment, Eastern Europe had been perceived in Europe as its integral part. History gives little evidence for this argument. To the contrary, Shakespeare’s well-known remark from the Tempest (“Bohemia. A desert country near the sea”) could serve a good motto to the entire history of Western-Eastern relations. “A desert country near the sea” is just another term for the black hole behind the fence of Metternich’s garden.

Today, Eastern Europeans have a good chance to remove the fence to the east—somewhere to the western or eastern Ukrainian borders (this depends on many circumstances, but first and foremost on the commitment of the removers). And then, Eastern Europe may have become just a Europe, without additional qualifications and humiliating discussions about who is ‘more’ Central and ‘more’ European. Exactly, as nobody in Benelux or in Switzerland cares whether they are Western or ‘Central Western’ Europeans.

3.

Like any myth, the concept of Central Eastern Europe will not dissipate immediately. It will exist until there is Eastern Europe as a certain post-communist reality, and until unpredictable “Asia” stands on the Bug, or the Dnieper, or elsewhere eastward. As any myth, it has its own power, since it was created as a rephrasing of classical myths—those of the lost paradise and the promised land. The paradise was the Habsburg Empire and “cultural unity”, while the promised land was the EC, NATO and, again, “cultural unity” within a broader scope. In the internal sphere, this myth facilitated popular anti-Soviet and anticommunist mobilization; in the international sphere, it substantiated demands to the West for further recognition and support.

Yet, from the very beginning, this myth proved to be extremely exclusivist and, thereby, harmful; its side effect was not only the mystification of ‘central’ Easterners with overly pinkish visions of their pasts and futures, but also the establishment of a very dubious hierarchy of ‘more’ and ‘less European’ nations in Eastern Europe. Since ‘European belonging’, under peculiar political circumstances, had been far more than just a cultural/geographical notion, the detachment of some ‘Central’ European nations from Eastern Europe implicitly meant that the non-members of this privileged club did deserve less, if any, Western attention and help. In practical terms, it looked like a quarrel among the prisoners over which of them used to love freedom more and deserved to be released first.

Today [1997], as the ‘central’ Easterners elbow their way to EC and NATO and raise up their European credentials, one cannot but notice, with some regret, that they appear no less exclusivist than the Westerners as soon as they manage to jump over Metternich’s fence. And now, they come to believe that “Asia” begins somewhere to the east of Poland and to the south of Hungary, and that Macedonia, Belarus, and Armenia are but more “desert countries near the sea.” The Westerners had already paid the price for their exclusiveness, but for the Easterners, the price may be much higher.

All our talk about cultural unity is worthless as long as we neglect Albanians because they are poor, we neglect Belarusians because they are heavily Sovietized, we neglect Lusatian Sorbs because they are too small, we neglect Georgians and Armenians because these two oldest Christian nations are too far away from our gardens.

Who cares about all that? Who cares about wonderful Georgian cinema, which certainly was the best in the former Soviet Union and, perhaps, one of the most interesting in the world? Who cares about excellent Georgian theatre, painting, about the bright philosophers and translators (the first and only translation of Joyce’s Ulysses in the USSR was Georgian!). Who cares about great Georgian literature, which has at least two modern writers, Otar Chiladze and Chabua Amiredjibi, who would have honored the long list of Nobel Prize winners if anybody managed to read and translate them from their incomprehensible language … Again, the “tremendous intensity of spirit,” the “wild hunger for Europe” demonstrated by a small East European nation which never lost its cultural longing for Europe, have not been noticed anywhere, even by the closest neighbors. So how can we, “Central East Europeans”, complain about somebody’s ignorance, being equally ignorant ourselves?!

My Ukrainian friends may contend that their country, at least its westernmost part, is no less ‘Central European’ than Poland or Slovakia—but how to promote it into the privileged club of ‘true’ Central Europeans, if even Croats and Transylvanians look at the entrance as rather suspicious candidates? My friends may argue that the Central European, ‘Habsburgian’, myth is alive in Ukrainian Lviv even more than in Vienna or Prague; they may bring, among many proofs, the programmatic issue of the journal “Ї”—with Ukrainian translations of Bruno Schulz, Sacher-Masoch and Milan Kundera, and the stylish portrait of the emperor Franz Josef on the cover sheet of their coveted holy scripture. They would barely understand why the ‘true’ Europeans just laugh at it or, at best, smile condescendingly.

Sincerely, I believe we should stop this competition in symbolism and focus more on daily life and mundane issues. If we believe in ‘Europe’ as a system of values, we should promote them within, regardless of whether we are located in Central, or Eastern, or Central-Eastern Europe, or on the Pacific rim. Small is beautiful, and marginality might be an asset. It depends on how we manage to use its tricky advantages.

The process which Eastern Europe is undergoing now can be called normalization. It is interesting but hardly attractive. It promises little room for any ‘uniqueness’ and would certainly dissatisfy East European intellectuals who want their countries to be at the forefront of world attention. But the combatant consciousness must have gone, and exhibitionist complexes vanished. In the best scenario—unless ‘Asia’ returns, and new dictatorships re-emerge, and a new Bosnia flares up—Eastern Europe would be successfully marginalized and would certainly draw no more attention than Greece, Portugal, Finland, or Iceland. Is that so bad? For old combatants—probably yes, but for most people—no. Most people don’t care about the fence, whether it’s eastern, or central, or south-eastern. They care about the garden. I feel it’s a good time to roll up our sleeves and till it.

1998

(2) Barbecue in the European Garden

Back in 1994, The Atlantic Monthly featured Matthew Conneley’s and Paul Kennedy’s article ‘Must It Be the West against the Rest?’ with a provocative picture on its cover. A white middle-class American was grilling a barbecue in his backyard while hundreds of colored people of all races faced the process silently from behind the fence.

The metaphor seems to be highly topical. No contemporary discussion on the future of Europe and of the world can ignore the profound West/Rest divide that tends to become even deeper, harsher and irreconcilable. One need not be a committed Marxist to appreciate Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of ‘world-economy’ as a highly hierarchical system where the developed ‘core’ nations (the ‘West’) have historically established dominance over the ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ (the ‘Rest’), and where no ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi peripheral’ nation can get into the ‘core’ without the core nations’ support and consent.

Such a view, however discredited by the Leninist revolutionaries and anti-globalist zealots, and even more compromised by the corrupted, incompetent and repressive ‘peripheral’ regimes, is largely accepted by those intellectuals who bother to think about global problems and who reasonably loathe a world where the average European cow gets more in subsidies than an average African manages ever to earn, however hard he or she works. Yet, at the same time, the view seems to be unacceptable for the majority of the common people in the West—not only because of the discrediting and compromising factors mentioned above, and not only due to the apparent absence of any feasible solution in sight. It might be psychologically uncomfortable to recognize that the well-being of the West is largely based on the poverty of the Rest; that the so-called ‘free market’ favors the stronger player who is in position to establish (and change if necessary) the rules of the game, i.e., all sorts of self-indulgent tariffs, quotas, and subsidies; and that the popular liberal mantra of free movement of goods, services, and capital—without free movement of the labor force—is just Western hypocrisy.

Any talk on the essence of Europe and on its probable future should be placed, therefore, in a global context. It cannot be ignored—with all its profound divides and controversies. The recent paper ‘On the Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe’ prepared by the Reflection Group [2004] of prominent European intellectuals, paves a rather uneasy way between the Scylla of political expedience and the Charybdis of political correctness. The middle way seems to be simple. The paper asserts that ‘economic integration as a basis of the European peaceful order’ is not sufficient today. It requires political integration, based on common values and institutions. Such an integration can be facilitated by the common European culture. The process would be ultimately beneficial not only for Europeans but for the whole world: “If Europe acknowledges the values inherent in the rules which foster its unity, then it will hardly be able to refuse a solidarity with others defined through these rules.”

These nice words and intentions could be hardly denied, even though the next sentence reveals a possible (and rather typical) loop-hole for many Western commitments and declarations: “From this globally defined solidarity, there follows a European duty, to make a contribution in accordance with its strengths and possibilities to ensuring peace in the world and to fighting poverty” (italics are mine.—M.R.) Double standards that dramatically undermine not just Western impartiality and credibility, but Western values in general, can be easily justified by the notion of ‘strengths and possibilities’. Thus, the genocide in Chechnya, unlike in Kosovo, could be tolerated; the authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan, unlike in Belarus, could be internationally recognized; totalitarian China, unlike Cuba, should be accepted; its occupation of Tibet could be regarded with a blind eye, unlike Hussein’s invasion in Kuwait; the Russian oligarchic economy, unlike its Ukrainian twin, could be given ‘free market’ status, and so on.

The main problem, however, is that the paper, like many other European cultural projects, twists between the apparent task—to support the political integration of the EU (ostensibly represented as ‘Europe’) by a cultural and spiritual pillar, and the hidden desire—to represent this particular goal as universalistic and inclusive. ‘Fortress Europe’ is a reality, which will not be dismantled in the foreseeable future since it corresponds to how the world (world-economy) is arranged. People within the fortress will certainly benefit from political integration, and the fortress itself will be certainly more competitive and secure against internal and external challenges. And common culture and spirituality would indeed be of some help, both internally and externally. This does not mean, however, that without all these cultural and spiritual extras the solidarity within the fortress would perish, because the economy, as the Euro-idealists contend, is not able alone to keep the necessary social cohesion. It looks more likely that the barbecue in the backyard and the hungry faces behind the fence would facilitate the social cohesion and solidarity of the barbecue-makers fairy well. Of course, a good politics is desirable to make the backyard more secure; and a good culture would undoubtedly improve the internal climate and international PR.

But the whole story seems to be primarily about the barbecue in a cozy garden and throngs of aliens forcing their way in. At least, this is how the majority of outsiders would interpret the ambiguous notion of ‘European solidarity’: “This solidarity must be stronger than the universal solidarity, which human beings (should) feel for other human beings, for example when they give humanitarian aid”. Eurocentrism looms large in these words of the rapporteurs and there is probably nothing wrong with that—as long as we recognize that all peoples are equal but values are not, and as far as Europeans themselves are firmly committed to their professed values.

Whatever nice words intellectuals may say about cultural interaction along the borders, for the majority of Europeans their external borders are primarily a source of security threats rather than of cultural exchange and enrichment. The reason for this is simple: “The existence of a social security system implies that there is a defined space in which people can earn benefits … Many people express the idea that migrants are essentially coming to profit from the social security system to which they have not contributed and have no right; these people conclude therefore that they should be excluded by strongly defended clearly demarcated frontiers” [Hübner 2001: 28–29].

Three years ago [in 2004], on the eve of the “big-bang” EU enlargement, I happened to look through international newspapers that covered the forthcoming historic event. Virtually every second report resembled a war communiqué—a direct report from the frontline:

Dorohusk, Poland—The message here at this gleaming border post overlooking the thickly forest banks of the Bug River is that Poland is ready.

Inside a spotless weapon room is a rack of snub-nosed Glauberyt automatic pistols, a Polish version of the famous Uzi. There are 9-millimeter pistols, boxes of bullets, two submachine guns and night vision goggles inside green canvas kits.

Outside is a Land Rover, motorcycles and two dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods. Not seen, but also available to protect this stretch of the 327-mile border between Poland and Ukraine, are snowmobiles, a helicopter and a patrol plane (…)

“There was a belief that hordes of illegal migrants are waiting outside our borders and that our controls were inefficient,” said Jan Truszczyński, Poland’s chief European Union negotiator (The New York Times, 25 April 2004).

The sample comes from the respectable New York Times read throughout the world, and it represents rather a typical than an exceptional way of addressing the issue—here is, for comparison, a twin-article from the British Observer cooked apparently by the same recipe:

Come May Day, the edge of the edge of Europe … Here [at the little village of Horodlo] is the easternmost point of a new 2,400-mile frontier of the European Union …

Springtime is stirring in the little park in Horodlo and in the Sparrow pub, to which Darek and Monika have returned from Warsaw, hoping the frontier will mean new business. “They’re bringing in 40 extra policemen just for our little village,” says Monika, “to add to the two we have at the moment. And that’s in addition to the border guards.”

“They’ve been chasing out the Ukrainians,” says Janusz who keeps the mini-market, “because the Ukrainians bring in smuggled cigarettes to sell for two zlotys (28p), while we have to sell them for five. Now people will have to come to us for a smoke.”

The border of the new EU is both porous and harsh. Upriver, what they call the new ‘Velvet Curtain’ is being drawn, on Brussels insistence—a necklace of new guard posts manned by thousands of newly recruited armed men (Observer, 18 April 2004).

From such reporting, very few readers would ever guess that the above-mentioned “edge of the edge of Europe” is located in fact a hundred kilometers east of Europe’s geographic center, and that the eastern border of Europe is located some three thousand kilometers east of this mythical “edge of the edge”—a bit further than the western border in Portugal. But geography is not the main victim of this reporting. Who are the people who inhabit that empty space—three thousand kilometers of the ‘Wild East’? Would the reader ever imagine that the human beings on the other side of the border, behind the “edge of the edge” live quite a normal life and have many businesses besides smuggling cigarettes and challenging European Land Rovers, helicopters and snowmobiles, let alone a Polish version of the Uzi and Central East European dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods? Some of those easterners, one wouldn’t believe, build aircraft and teach students, translate European poetry and conduct symphonic orchestras, and most of them have typically one head and two eyes, and move mostly vertically on their two legs. All of them, however, are treated as underdogs, an inferior East European race of smugglers and prostitutes eager to sneak into the European garden for a free barbecue. Just try to enter any West European consulate with a Ukrainian passport and you will feel the superiority of the pettiest official who knows in advance that you are not a writer, not a scholar, not a journalist but just human trash like everybody else in this land, just one more trickster striving to blunt the officials’ vigilance and bypass the fence.

Honest journalism would certainly try to present the other side of the coin, however catchy and marketable the first, outer side might be. So far, only the Polish mass media care about balanced reporting on the ‘new neighborhood’ and, not surprisingly, it is primarily Polish politicians who treat their eastern neighbors, in most cases, honestly and coherently. They never avoid hot issues (and there are quite a few hot issues between Poland and Ukraine, many more than elsewhere in Europe). But they do not refrain from good words about the diligence of Ukrainian agricultural workers—even if they work illegally; they do not blame Ukrainian teachers in remote Polish villages for the country’s high unemployment; and they do not reduce eastern aliens to the caricature images of The New York Times—perhaps because they know that the neighborhood is not just about a chasing Ukrainians out with Polish versions of the Uzi and smart dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods:

The Ukrainian tourist is a guest who is very much awaited in Poland [Polish radio quotes a government official]. Today we have almost 2m tourists from Ukraine, tourists who come to our country above all for rest. This is a prosperous tourist, a tourist who spends relatively a lot of money in Poland. Zakopane [leading southern mountain resort] and the south of Poland today in great measure live from Ukrainian tourists. But Ukrainian tourists ever more frequently come to the Polish coast, to the Tri-City (Polish Radio 1, 30 June 2005).

As a matter of fact, serious studies reveal today [2007] that only 6% of Ukrainians express intention to emigrate, and only 13% have valid international passports—a far cry from a mass exodus from an impoverished country [Konieczna 2004: 3–5].1 Again, the poverty in Ukraine is a very relative notion (if compared with Africa or South Asia). A nominal average salary in Ukraine of $112 a month is in fact—in adjusted purchasing capacity—five times higher. In practical terms it means that an inhabitant of Kyiv, where the average salary is $400–$600 a month, can afford more or less the same standard set of goods and services as an inhabitant of Moscow, Athens, or Lisbon. Little surprise then, that the capital city, where the unemployment rate is next to zero, has become itself a powerful magnet for labor migrants, from both Ukraine and abroad (mostly from Asia). Such a ‘buffer’ apparently cushions the flow of labor-seekers to the West.

In sum, the Ukrainian immigration ‘threat’ is largely exaggerated. As a matter of fact, reliable studies prove that there are about a million, maximum two million Ukrainians working abroad, with either legal or illegal status. Nearly half of them (41–45%) work in Russia, about 18% in Poland, and about 11% in the Czech Republic. In all these cases not only geographic closeness (cf. the very limited move of Ukrainians to neighboring and visa-friendly Hungary) but also language and cultural proximity prove to be more important than higher salaries in the West. Western countries as destinations for Ukrainian Gastarbeiters lag far behind Ukraine’s immediate neighbors: about 11% of Ukrainian Gastarbeiters work in Italy, 9% in Germany, 7% in Portugal and 7% in Spain. In real numbers, this means around 100,000 workers, and certainly not more than 200,000, in each country.

Virtually all of them work hard and raise no claims to Western welfare. Most of them have no intention to stay permanently in the host country, but typically return to their families in Ukraine with earned money to invest in housing, education of children, or small business. Even those few who decide to stay permanently abroad usually get integrated in the host society, i.e., create no ethnic ghetto, exhibit no welfare parasitism, and certainly prove no susceptibility to religious fundamentalism or Al-Qaeda propaganda. Ironically, the countries where Ukrainian workers are most present, fear the ‘Ukrainian invasion’ much less than the countries where Ukrainians are virtually absent. It was primarily Poland, Portugal and Spain which tended to legalize Ukrainian illegal workers and sign agreements with the Ukrainian government to regulate the inflow, employment and return of Ukrainian, mostly seasonal, laborers.

Xenophobia is primarily a biological, not a sociological phenomenon. It comes from a basic instinct that can be controlled—or not; it can be tamed by culture and education—or released and exploited by populist ideologies and political forces. The second approach is certainly much easier to employ, so there is little surprise that the populist media and glib politicians make a scare-crow of a ‘Polish plumber’ who allegedly takes all the jobs from diligent Frenchmen, and blame the allegedly ‘too soft’ visa regime that reportedly facilitated a large-scale import of Ukrainian prostitutes to Germany in 1999–2001 (even though at the same time dozens of reputable Ukrainian professionals—scholars, journalists, businessmen—were denied visas: a clear sign that it was not a matter of ‘softness’ but, rather, of large-scale corruption, in which German officials had been apparently involved).

It is certainly not so easy to influence the dominant public discourses, but the problem should be definitely addressed and a degree of political correctness and professional responsibility should be established by joint efforts of politicians, journalists, experts, governments and, of course, public intellectuals. So far, it seems they may talk abundantly about Europe as a cultural project and about their common ideals and values, but can hardly spread their wishful thinking beyond their low-circulation books and esoteric journals. Real people who get real news and make real politics know pretty well that Europe ends at the eastern border of the EU. Further east, as the EU official document states, the so-called “European (sic) Neighborhood” begins. Mr. Frits Bolkestein, an EU commissioner, put it unequivocally: “In the east, there is a geo-political need for a buffer zone between the EU and Russia” (Financial Times, 7 March 2004). “In this context [a German scholar comments] the impending shift in the boundary of the EU squares well with an influential macro line-driving exercise, namely the lines drawn by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (1996). For this American, once the EU border has moved eastwards to include Poland there can be no reason to consider any further extension to the east. Eastern Christianity is another civilization, antagonistic to the liberal, pluralist, democratic Europe that Huntington wants passionately to defend. In short, here we have a strong macro argument for a cultural border, for the first time congruent with the political and economic border, and likely to accentuate pressures to consolidate a permanent ‘Fortress Europe’ to the west of the new border” [Hann 2001: 74].

In practical terms, ‘Fortress Europe’ means just a new iron curtain that protects the in-group against the out-group, the European haves against the non-European have-nots. Or, as a Romanian scholar ironically remarks, it is a “new wall that separates Europe from the ‘desert of the Tatars’ to its east”, since “the primordial and immediate interest of EU Europe as regards wider Europe is clear: Guard the borders east and south to prevent immigration and other unwanted flows from and through these marginal countries” [Mungiu-Pippidi 2004: 53].

Such an approach, however, is highly dubious in moral terms since it subverts the very principles the western liberal democratic world is built upon. This world, of course, is very inventive in finding convincing excuses and sophisticated ways to bypass some principles or to accommodate them to the daunting reality. But even in purely practical terms, besides the questionable commitments to elevated words and exalted ideals, the minimalist strategy aimed at containment of ‘odd neighbors’ may require ultimately even more resources than its maximalist alternative aimed at their engagement. In the modern world, where versatile security threats became globalized, firm borders tend to bring less and less help:

“Hard borders are not even very useful for combating cross-border crime. Most experts agree that improving police and security cooperation between countries is a more efficient alternative than hiring lots of border guards or buying expensive surveillance technology” [Zielonka 2004: 29]. “Extensive research shows that numbers of migrants will be limited, and that organized crime is much better fought through targeted, intelligence-led policing in the cities, not border controls and visas alone. Criminals usually have access to passports and forged documents, so new border controls will have a much bigger effect on Ukrainian traders and Belarusian peasants than on organized crime. But politics is often irrational—opportunistic politicians (like Jörg Haider) exploit potent fears of uncontrolled migration, even if these fears are unfounded” [Grabbe 2001: 42].

In sum, we should probably recognize that Europe would never become a genuinely cultural project, as Denis de Rougemont and other Kulturliterati envisaged. There is too much of Realpolitik around, too much of ‘might makes right’ and ‘charity begins at home’. There are too powerful forces and too strong temptations to make project Europe genuinely political and economic. And this is why we should still produce our low-circulation books and esoteric journals, and carry out our discussions on European culture, identity, and solidarity. We cannot complete our idealistic project but we can probably rescue it from ultimate degradation.

For Ukrainians and other East European nations who have been cynically (‘pragmatically’) excluded from Europe as a political project, culture remains the only field where they can cherish their imaginary Europeanness, and look for symbolic resources that might enhance their resistance to the dark neo-Soviet/neo-imperial forces that loom large in the East. Again and again, they should refer to Norman Davies’ encouraging dictum: “The right to be referred to as to ‘Europe’ (…) cannot be granted to just one part of the continent. Eastern Europe has never ceased to be European only because it was poor, underdeveloped, or ruled by tyrants. On the contrary, due to the fact that it was deprived of so many things, it became more European, more attached to the values that may be taken for granted by more prosperous citizens of the West” (Tygodnik Powszechny 18, 1992).

The impressive Orange Revolution in Ukraine, otherwise unexplainable, came fully in line with these perspicacious words, as well as with Adam Zagajewski’s earlier deliberations—relevant, as it appeared, not only in Central but also in Eastern Europe: “Soviet Russia has created some very strange things in our part of Europe. It has created informants, liars, censors, and bums who don’t feel like working. But at the same time, without wanting to, it has produced wonderful things in people who by the grace of God are stronger, and somehow more noble. It has aroused in them a wild hunger for truth, freedom, dignity, books, paintings … for Europe. And this is exactly how Europe exists in Central Europe—as a Europe of the imagination, of delusion, of hope, of hunger … The enormous cultural longing felt so strongly in our part of Europe is one of the paradoxical consequences of ‘Sovietization’” [1987: 21].

However critical we might be of fortress Europe and however unhappy we might feel with Wallerstein’s world-economy, we should clearly understand that no one can change these odd systems from the outside, if at all. No outsiders’ complaints would be heard inside or, if heard, taken seriously. All these complaints apriori are compromised as laments of lazy-bones, failures, or crazy leftists. Sometimes, or perhaps often, it’s true. But the West/Rest problem exists, and any attempt to cushion it or, at least, to facilitate cushioning—as our modest intellectual activities do—should be continued despite all setbacks.

2005

1 Cf. the conclusion made by the same reputable Polish sociologist: “Research reveals that there are no reasons to fear any new wave of the labour migration from Ukraine. It seems that everybody who wanted to move, has moved. In the meantime, the great majority of the citizens is absolutely not interested in any issues related to search for a job abroad. The group of travellers is rather narrow, albeit very active” (Ibid., p. 10).

(3) Ambiguous Borderland

In a recent [2005] interview for a leading Polish newspaper, a former French president and, at present, the head of the European constitutional convention, Valery Giscard d’Estaing had to answer a boring question that only importunate Poles could raise in a serious European conversation. The question was, yes, about Ukraine, specifically—about its eventual EU membership prospects.

Well, the president mused,

I feel that insistence on its membership is definitely premature. The problem requires deeper analysis. The borders of contemporary Ukraine were drawn by the Soviets in only around 1957. This causes controversies between Moscow and Kyiv. The Crimea, for instance, never historically belonged to Ukraine. A part of Ukraine has, indeed, a European character—these are the lands that had belonged to Poland and, earlier, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But the territories behind the Dnieper river and those to the south have a Russian character. Those lands cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU. Therefore, we should wait and see how things develop (Rzeczpospolita, 26–27 November 2005).

The answer is graphic and, in a way, paradigmatic. It was made not by somebody from the street, like a tabloid reader or writer, but by a prominent politician who, for decades, has influenced and still influences European politics. A deplorable mixture of ignorance, biases and malevolence says a lot on how Ukraine still is perceived in the West and what kind of ‘new neighborhood’ politics could be expected at Brussels in the nearest future.

Ignorance is the least reprehensible in Giscard d’Estaing’s statement. Ukraine’s borders were finally drawn in 1954, not 1957. The territories behind the Dnieper river, the so-called Left-Bank Ukraine, are no more Russian in character than the Right Bank, whatever this ‘Russian character’ might mean. Both of them belonged historically to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which stretched as far as the contemporary borders of the Russian Federation and Kharkiv region. And the patterns of political behavior in both these regions are not much different, as anybody can discern looking at the respective results of elections and/or opinion polls.

The most striking thing in Giscard d’Estaing’s statement is the whimsical logic that a reputable politician employs or, rather, manipulates. At the very beginning, he makes a slight but significant shift in discourse, answering actually not the question that was put. The journalist’s question was about Ukraine’s membership prospects, which were basically guaranteed by Article 49 of the EU Treaty: any European state that firmly meets the Copenhagen criteria can apply for membership. Neither Giscard d’Estaing nor any other responsible politician can deny these prospects as long as the EU Treaty is in force. He pretended, however, that the question was not about remote prospects (in principle, undeniable) but about immediate membership (ridiculous, of course, since Ukraine is indeed far away from the required criteria—but probably not further than Albania, or Bosnia & Herzegovina, let alone Kosovo). No doubt, “insistence on Ukraine’s membership is definitely premature”, as Mr. d’Estaing put it. The only problem, however, is that neither Ukrainian politicians nor the Polish journalist have ever “insisted” on Ukraine’s immediate membership or questioned its “prematurity”. They only wanted Mr. d’Estaing (and other EU officials) to confirm Article 49 and perhaps to speculate a bit on Ukraine’s long (but undeniable) way towards the required criteria.

Instead, he falsified the agenda of the discussion and represented the other side (Ukrainian and Polish) as irresponsible troublemakers, adventurers or, at best, nuisances who allegedly “insist” on something untenable at the moment and ridiculous.

Another discursive trick is made in a seemingly objective statement about “controversies” between Moscow and Kyiv, caused allegedly by the unsettled status of the Crimea. In actuality, yet, there are no controversies of the sort—in legal terms—since the status of the Crimea has been long ago settled both bilaterally (by Russian–Ukrainian agreements of 1990 and 1997) and internationally (both Russia and Ukraine, as OSCE members, recognized the inviolability of the existing borders in Europe, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum obliged the signatories, including Russia, not to challenge or question Ukraine’s sovereignty in any way). What Mr. d’Estaing probably means by “controversies” is the persistent political, economic, and military pressure from the Russian side, irresponsible statements by nationalistic Russian MPs, military men, and other hawks, and all sorts of provocations staged by Russian and pro-Russian extremists in the Crimea.

The same kind of “controversy” between Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia resulted, one may remember, in annexation of the Sudetenland and eventually of the whole Czech part of the country. The Kremlin hard-liners would certainly appreciate Giscard d’Estaing’s ‘impartiality’ as an implicit encouragement for further aggressive (or just “controversial”, as he put it) politics vis-à-vis Kyiv. His argument that the Crimea “had never historically belonged to Ukraine” may sound even more encouraging for the revanchists. But what might the implications of this sort of argumentation be? In Alsace? In Silesia? In Kosovo? In Kaliningrad? There are even more territories that “had never historically belonged to Russia”. And, by the way, the Crimea is one of them—as the native land of the Crimean Tatars, whose ancient state, the Crimean Khanate, was conquered and colonized by the Russian empire only at the end of the 18th century. One can barely find a single Crimean Tatar today who would opt for Moscow rule instead of Kyiv’s.

But what on earth have all these arguments to do with Ukraine’s EU membership prospects? The answer dwells probably at the end of Giscard d’Estaing’s argumentation. There, he speaks about a “Russian character” of the Ukrainian south-east—a vague notion that might mean either political or cultural and linguistic affinity with Russia. Whatever it means—a primordial hostility to the West, higher loyalty to Moscow than Kyiv, or just some regional peculiarities like a “French character” of the Belgian south, Swiss west or Canadian east,—Giscard d’Estaing’s verdict on Ukraine is much harder than on Belgium or Switzerland: “Those lands [i.e., Ukraine’s south east] cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU”.

In other words, they can never belong to the EU because Russia has never had any intentions to get there and would barely have them in the foreseeable future. Ukraine, with all its European aspirations and attempts to democratize the country, is simply downgraded to the level of essentially anti-Western, anti-European, authoritarian Russia. In fact, it is treated not as a sovereign state but, rather, as Russia’s client, a satellite or, perhaps, a kind of ‘Taiwan’ visa-a-vis ‘Greater China’.

And this is the essence of all the rhetorical zigs and zags demonstrated by the French politician. He, like many of his colleagues in France and elsewhere, has never believed that Ukraine does exist as a separate nation and that Ukrainians, even those who speak Russian, may have nonetheless a different identity, different aspirations, and different, not necessarily pro-Moscow, loyalty. Even though the Orange Revolution has shaken these stereotypical views, they persist in the West, having a long diplomatic, political, cultural, and academic tradition, deeply rooted in consciousness and collective sub-consciousness, in dominant discourses and multiple institutions.

Traumatic experience

Historically, Ukrainians have many reasons to be very sensitive about how they are treated and perceived by the West. Independent Ukraine proved to be the “unwanted step-child” not only of Soviet perestroika (as Martin Sieff put it) but also of the 1917 Russian revolution. Every Ukrainian student knows today from his/her historical textbook that the US established diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933, exactly when Moscow was starving to death at least five million Ukrainian peasants. And from the same textbook, they know how in the same year the British Foreign Office strove to silence any information about the man-made famine in Ukraine so as not to irritate the valuable trade partners in Moscow [Subtelny 2009: 416].

Against such a background, many Ukrainians cannot but suspect that the West still has not come to terms with Ukraine’s existence, and still tends to treat it as a legitimate zone of vaguely defined but widely applied Russian ‘interests’: “Most European governments would very happily leave Ukraine in Russia’s orbit, rather than worry about the problems of a large, backward and fissiparous country” [Barysch & Grant 2004].

Such a perception has been skillfully exploited by the post-Soviet elite to invigorate old anti-Western stereotypes in Ukrainian society, to justify the lack of a coherent, comprehensive and responsible foreign policy driven by national rather than clannish or personal interests, and to divert public attention from the real and fundamental reasons that made crypto-Soviet Ukraine incompatible with and non-admittible to the EU. The rhetorical strategy under Kuchma [1994–2004] was designed to persuade the people that we are excluded not because we are unreformed and our leaders are crooks and liars but just because we are different, we are Ukrainians, Eastern Slavs, the ‘worse’ brand of human beings.

Unfortunately, Europeans did little if anything to disperse these impressions. On the contrary, in many cases, they fueled fears and biases deeply rooted in Ukrainians’ inferiority complexes.

Perhaps the best example of blind and, alas, firmly institutionalized West European Russocentrism comes from a classified report drawn up by the German and French foreign ministries in 2000: “The admission of Ukraine would imply the isolation of Russia. It is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev. The Union should not be enlarged to the East any further …”1

To some West European EU members [an American expert comments on this whimsical logic] Ukraine is still seen as ‘semi-Russian’, a factor that reinforces the tendency to place the fate of all three eastern Slavs together … Linking the destinies of Ukraine and Russia places them both beyond ‘Europe’ … This suits Russia, which is seeking to develop a ‘strategic partnership’ with the EU but not membership. It does not suit Ukraine that seeks membership” [Kuzio 2003: 6, 14].

There are, of course, many reasons to prioritize relations with Russia as the biggest country on the continent, with rich natural resources, primarily gas and oil, the largest nuclear arsenal, and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. But the reasons why Russia is overtly favored at the expense of its neighbors are less clear. Partly it can be explained by an imperial likeness between the large European nations and Russia, embedded historically in modes of thought and behavior, in national psyche and ‘habits of the heart’. A more credible explanation, however, is a heavy dependence of Western thought and Western ideas about Russia on Russian imperial myths elaborated, by and large, in the 18th century and firmly established as the ‘scholarly truth’ and ‘common knowledge’. Ukraine unfortunately has been a central part of this historical and cultural mythmaking, its major target and victim.

In brief, the myth consists of three major narratives. The first one blurs and washes away any difference between two very different historical entities—Ruś and Russia. The linguistic similarity is successfully converted into a historical, geographical and political similarity and, eventually, sameness. By the same token, modern Romania can be identified with ancient Rome, and Britain identified with Brittany. The second narrative grants the modern name Russia, coined in the early 18th century, to medieval Muscovy and establishes mythical ties between the Moscow Tsardom and Kyivan Ruś. The fact is, however, that no idea of Moscow’s succession to the Kyiv Ruś legacy could be found in Muscovite thought until the end of the 17th century, when Left Bank Ukraine and the city of Kyiv were taken from Poland and when the Grand imperial myth began to be formed (ironically, by Ukrainian clerics hired by Peter the Great and seeking to enhance their country’s symbolic role as the cradle of the empire). And finally, the third narrative questions the very existence of the Ukrainian (and Belarusian) nations, misrepresenting them as incidental offshoots of the great Russian nation—despite the fact that these ‘offshoots’ came under full Russian control for the first time in their history only at the end of the 18th century, after the partition of Poland.

Any nation is largely built on ‘invented traditions’, and Russia is no exception to the rule. But very few nations center their identities almost thoroughly on historical myths, and very few national myths are so expansive, so militant and, alas, so broadly accepted as ‘historical truths’.

A ‘Russia first’ policy, based on these myths as well as on cynical Realpolitik, seems to be the main if not the only rationale for Western ambiguity about Ukraine and for Western reluctance to treat it as equal to any other nation on the continent, with the same rights, same chances and prospects for EU membership as Albania, Turkey or, say, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It does not mean that unreformed, stagnant, oligarchic Ukraine could and should be admitted to the EU. It means only that such a Ukraine should be rejected for that very reason articulated openly, and not because Russia might feel ‘isolated’ and perhaps ‘unhappy’, as some Western leaders equivocally suggest. “Tough love” (in Heather Grabbe’s words)—this is exactly what Ukraine needs: more ‘love’ for the nation, with clear incentives of future membership, and more ‘toughness’ for the political leaders, who should come in line with their domestic and international obligations.

So far, EU policy towards Ukraine has been nearly as ambiguous and equivocal as that of Ukraine towards the EU, although the reasons for this are different. From such a policy, probably no one can figure out whether Ukraine is barred from prospective membership simply because of its poor political and economic performance, or rather because of the nation’s assumed intrinsic inferiority and congenital Russian vassalage.

Some statements made by EU officials rather deepen the confusion than dispel it. Suffice it to mention Romano Prodi’s notorious remark that Ukraine “has as much reason to be in the EU as New Zealand” (because New Zealanders, in his words, also have a European identity). Or the no less controversial quip by Günter Verheugen 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 U.S.”2

It does not matter that neither do New Zealanders strive to join the EU, nor Mexicans for U.S. accession. And that none of them stage an ‘orange revolution’ to assert their Europeanness. In both exemplified cases, grotesque and essentially absurd arguments were set forth by respectable politicians in such a way as to stultify their potential opponents, to mock and discredit their arguments in advance, and to thereby make any further discussion impossible. In other words, the goal was not to clarify anything whatsoever but just to convert political power into discursive or, as Michel Foucault would have put it, to monopolize the discourse of ‘normality’ and push all opponents beyond that discourse, into the realm of insanity and obsession.

The double standards will probably be ingrained in EU policy vis-à-vis Ukraine, and the duplicity will not disappear, as long as the EU does not decouple Ukraine and Russia and refuses to recognize their absolutely different strategic agendas. The EU still has to decide whether “it can agree in principle to Ukraine being inside the EU while Russia remains outside” [Kuzio 2003: 30]. This cannot come easily, and Ukrainians must recognize that ‘enlargement fatigue’ is a reality in Europe. And that the timing is really bad for their country after the decision to start membership talks with Turkey and the accession of 10 new countries in 2004. For too many Europeans, as Martin Wolf put it, Ukraine and Turkey, by virtue of their size and location, are “twin nightmares” haunting the EU (Financial Times, 1 February 2005). Too many of them perceive these countries as not just too poor, too big, and too different, but as thoroughly alien, even hostile. Xenophobia is primarily a biological, not a sociological phenomenon. It comes from a basic instinct that can be controlled or not, can be tamed by culture and education, or released and exploited by populist ideologies and political forces.

Ukrainians may be surprised, even exasperated by the fact that the European Neighborhood Policy elaborated by the EU places them in one bag with North African and Middle Eastern countries, but this decision reflects the profound mode of Western thought: all these countries, including Ukraine, are perceived as not really ‘European’, and the name ‘European Neighborhood Policy’ (instead of ‘EU Neighborhood Policy’) is not just a minor political incorrectness but an essential view, a part of the Weltanschauung. In a sense, the Europeans are right: all the profound differences between East Slavonic and Middle Eastern or North African countries notwithstanding, all of them “are involved in a more or less open civil war which seems to be fed by a disagreement on the adoption of Western values” [Langer 2004]. What is common between Morocco and Belarus, Lebanon and Ukraine is that in all of them “the EU is challenged by another spiritual power”—Muslim orthodoxy in one case, Russian ‘Eurasian’/neo-Soviet imperialism in the other.

For many Ukrainians, this is a difficult truth to accept. From their point of view, the ENP rather excludes them from Europe proper than facilitates their inclusion. This not only contradicts Ukraine’s stated strategic goal of full EU membership, but also poses a challenge to Ukraine’s identity, which historically evolved under permanent threat of Russification and therefore made the nation’s alleged ‘Europeanness’ a sort of life belt, a means to legitimize and secure its cultural and political emancipation. The Europeans, who tend to ignore this sensitive issue, simply do not understand its symbolic importance. For many Ukrainians, the denial of Ukraine’s European prospects means a denial, or undermining, of their identity, an implicit attempt to throw them back into the Russian ‘Eurasian’ bag and, worse, to cynically settle relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense.

From the very beginning, ‘return to Europe’ has been seen by Ukrainian nation-builders as a return to the norm, a fixing of historical injustice and perversion, a healing of a developmental pathology. Such a romantic approach emerged naturally from modern Ukrainian nationalism which, from its very inception in the first half of the 19th century, had to emphasize Ukraine’s ‘otherness’ vis-a-vis Russia [Riabchuk 1996]. This meant, in particular, that Ukrainian activists not just praised the alleged Ukrainian ‘Europeanness’ as opposed to the demonized Russian ‘Asiaticness’; they had volens-nolens to accept the whole set of Western liberal-democratic values as presumably ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ for Ukrainians (yet allegedly ‘unnatural’ for Russians).

In a recent examination of the correlation between a strong Ukrainian national identity, and adherence to democracy, market reforms, and westernization, Stephen Shulman concluded that the crucial factor was Ukrainians’ self-image. That is, Ukrainian nationalism claims that Ukrainians historically and culturally were particularly individualistic and freedom-loving.

Elite proponents of this identity typically contrast ethnic Ukrainians and Ukraine historically and culturally with Russians in Russia, a people and a country that are perceived to have strong collectivistic and authoritarian roots. At the same time, elite proponents of this identity argue that Ukrainians have much in common culturally and historically with Europe (…) [Therefore] democracy and capitalism symbolically raise the status of ethnic Ukrainians, spread the values alleged to be associated with ethnic Ukrainian culture throughout the country, and are more likely to function effectively in a country based on perceived ethnic Ukrainian values. Further, since the main ‘Other’ of this identity, Russia, is seen as having a history and culture estranged from individualistic and freedom-based development models, rejection of non-democratic and non-capitalistic models symbolically and actually maintains the perceived cultural distance between Ukraine and Russia and thereby reinforces the Ethnic Ukrainian national identity. Finally, precisely because European and ethnic Ukrainian culture are seen as close, and Europeans are associated with democracy and capitalism, these models are likely to be favored because they symbolically and actually reinforce the cultural similarity between these two peoples and elevate the status of ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine as a core group [Shulman, 2005: 67].

The problem with this analysis, however, is that this type of identity has never dominated Ukraine—at least until recently. In a sense, it was a “minority faith,” as Andrew Wilson [1997] defined it, because it was repressed for decades by the Russian-tsarist and then Russian-Soviet state, which promoted imperial Russian/Soviet/East Slavonic identity.

Even though the correlation between language, identity and social/political attitudes disclosed by Shulman is not direct, it is statistically significant and useful for political prognosis as well as (alas) manipulation. Apparently, the highest level of national self-awareness and the strongest commitment to European integration and Western liberal-democratic values is to be found in the least Russified, western part of the country, while the lowest level of national consciousness and strongest Sovietophile, anti-Western attitudes can be found in the most Russified/Sovietized south-eastern regions.3 This creates a very strong temptation to conceptualize Ukraine simplistically in Manichean terms as a place with a ‘nationalist’ West and a ‘Sovietophile’ East.

A long way ahead

During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the West—in both national and international terms—scored a victory. In geopolitical terms, Ukraine’s further European advance might be as important as Turkey’s. In one case, the whole Muslim world would see that “Islam is compatible with secular democracy” (The Wall Street Journal, 8 February 2005). In the other case, the entire post-Soviet world, including Russia, will see that the Soviet legacy can be overcome, the post-Soviet “void of values” filled, and “disintegration of all levels of society” recovered from [Langer 2004].

The regime change that occurred in Ukraine at the end of 2004, and the EU enlargement that made Ukraine an immediate neighbor of the EU since May 2004, urged both sides to reconsider their relations in both practical and conceptual terms. The revision would not be a simple task since the ‘big-bang’ had been planned long ago, with all the adjacent policies and documents, while the Orange revolution occurred unexpectedly, at least for the Europeans, brining many more difficult questions than easy answers to the agenda.

Ukrainians may once again become the ‘unwanted step-children’ of some grand continental events, this time—of the Great East European Revolution that swept away authoritarian regimes west of Ukraine in 1989 but reached Kyiv only with a regretful 15-year delay. The new Ukrainian authorities are supposed to take a pragmatic stance vis-à-vis the EU. On the one hand, they could and probably should remain critical of the EU policy towards Ukraine, pointing out, exactly as their predecessors, its short-sightedness and duplicity. Yet on the other hand, they should accept the proposed programs and mechanisms of cooperation, however feeble and superficial, and—unlike their predecessors—make proper use of these programs, putting an end to a weird ambiguity, at least on the Ukrainian side.

In other words, they should put the ball in the EU’s court by completing all the required reforms and programs and exposing thereby the EU’s inadequate, biased and double-standard approach to Ukraine—as long as the EU denies Ukraine’s membership aspirations but accepts Turkish, Albanian, and Macedonian bids. At the moment, it seems to be the only option available for Ukrainians—to work hard, to improve the country’s image, and to press the West diplomatically with a hope that even the most reluctant Europeans will sooner or later run out of excuses for keeping a reformed and dynamic country outside.

It would take much time and even more effort from both Ukrainians and Europeans to come to terms with some simple truths and complicated reality. So far, the Ukrainian stance articulated by the President’s first aide looks quite measured and reasonable: “We agreed not to say ‘tomorrow’ while they [EU leaders] agreed not to say ‘never’.” It looks promising that the person assigned to coordinate Ukraine’s European integration began with sober self-criticism rather than anti-Brussels complaints and self-indulgence. “We have just entered the elementary school,” he reprimanded his fellow-countrymen half-jokingly, “and right away demand the university diploma!” (Ukrayinska pravda, 21 February 2005).

The best answer the Europeans can make to this stance has been unofficially (as yet) formulated by the Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski: “There is no argument not to open negotiations with Ukraine. The question is of time, of procedures, but not why or if” (United Press International, 2 February 2005). Giscard d’Estaing and his colleagues may have a different opinion, but it is up to Ukrainians to prove they are wrong.

2005

1 Quoted in “New Neighbourhood—New Association. Ukraine and the European Union at the beginning of the 21st century,” Policy Papers 6. Warsaw: Stefan Batory Foundation (March 2002): 11.

2 As reported by Varfolomeyev, O. 2002. “The EU’s Unwanted Stranger?” Transition Online. July 12.

3 Symptomatically, the geopolitical preferences of both Ukrainians and Russians in western Ukraine clearly differ from the geopolitical preferences of both Ukrainians and Russians in the east. In other words, “regional rather than ethnic affiliation determines geopolitical preferences” (Reznik, O. 2001. “Zovnishniopolitychni oriyentatsiyi naselennia,” in Vorona, V., Shulha, M. (eds.), Ukrayinske suspilstvo: desiat rokiv nezalezhnosti. Kyiv: Instytut sotsiolohiyi NANU: 243.

(4) ‘Eurasian’ Othering

The term ‘Eurasia’ has many meanings but all of them can be subsumed under two main rubrics. The first is purely geographical, referring to a formidable landmass stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and considering Europe and Asia as a single continental entity, with the former as a peninsula of the latter. The second meaning is much more versatile but in all its multi-faceted representations it refers typically to a Greater Russia, to some space dominated historically by the Russian Empire and its Soviet (and post-Soviet) reincarnation. The term is rather political, cultural, and ideological than purely geographical. It entails not only the idea of Russian political dominance, whether justified or not, whether legitimate (in terms of mission civilisatrice and/or ‘liberation’ of neighbors from somebody else) or illegitimate (in terms of imperial conquest and subjugation). It also promotes the idea of the cultural/civilizational peculiarity of the region, suggesting that it is neither Europe nor Asia but some mixture of both that represents a separate and very special ‘Eurasian’ civilization. Its essence is Russian culture—but rather imperial than national. The common imperial past and some imprints of Russian imperial culture are the only thing that draws together the nations that otherwise are worlds apart in all possible terms, like the Ukrainians and Turkmens, or the Moldovans and Chukchi, or the Belarusians and Buryats. It would be rather impossible to pack them all into one bag if there were not a common denominator—a Greater Russia.

One need not be an expert in critical discourse analysis to figure out that such a labeling is highly harmful in both political and cultural terms for all the parties involved. First, it mystifies the reality. It features the Russian/Soviet imperial legacy and post-imperial influence as the only or the main factor that determines virtually everything in today’s (under)development of post-Soviet republics. In some cases this factor is really important, in other cases many more historical and present-day variables are involved that, unfortunately, are neglected or undermined. Secondly, the ‘Eurasian’ labeling implicitly encourages Russian imperial feelings and great-power politics, endows it with some international legitimacy, and discursively resonates with the most chauvinistic, crypto-fascist tenets of today’s Russian ‘neo-Eurasianists’. And thirdly, it discursively excludes all the European nations of the former Soviet empire from Europe and effectively marginalizes pro-European forces in all these countries (including Russia itself), making them easy prey for Russian/pro-Russian profoundly anti-Western nationalists.

In other words, the term ‘Eurasia’ lacks not only precision (which is hardly achievable in any taxonomy) but also impartiality—and this is a very serious flaw in international politics, especially where it plays into the hands of a former empire that still seeks to re-establish its neocolonial dominance. Indeed, the main thing that the ‘Eurasian’ countries have in common (at least in the European realm of the former Soviet empire) is their profound internal divide between pro-Western and anti-Western forces—a divide that reflects not only opposite geopolitical orientations but also systems of values, historical narratives, and, still worse, national identities.

In this regard, Ukraine, and Moldova, and Belarus can be considered as ‘not-quite-European’. There is nothing wrong in admitting this fact—as an important factor that precludes their European integration and, probably, modernization. But labeling them ‘Eurasian’ is another matter. It means, in fact, interference in domestic ideological infighting and taking the side of ‘Eurasian’, pro-Russian, profoundly anti-European forces. It helps to shift a tough balance between rival parties in the ‘Eurasian’, anti-Western direction. No alternative to the term ‘Eurasian’ is perfect but, in most cases, the term ‘post-Soviet’ looks more precise and far more neutral than the term ‘Eurasian’.

Taking the Russian side

The power of labeling, othering, and exclusion inherent in presumably neutral geographic terms was noticed long before the classical studies by Edward Said, Larry Wolff, or Maria Todorova were published. Milan Kundera and his colleagues from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had desperately rebelled against the term ‘Eastern Europe’ as allegedly excluding them from Europe as a family of free nations and placing them implicitly into a legitimate Soviet sphere of influence. ‘Eastern Europe’ became like a stigma that signified the inferiority of the region, its primordial backwardness, lack of political freedom, civic liberties, rule of law. To escape from this dangerous, disreputable place they invented the term ‘Central East Europe’, which included primarily Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia but was embraced also in Romania, Yugoslavia, West Ukraine, and the Baltics by local dissenting intellectuals.

It was a just attempt to overcome an exclusion imposed upon them by the dominant West European discourse. But their own discourse proved to be equally exclusivist vis-à-vis other East European neighbors. Slovenians claimed they had nothing to do with the ugly ‘Balkans’ because they had always been Central European. Croatians followed suit by becoming ‘Mediterranean’. The Balts declared they were ‘Nordic’ and certainly should not belong to the post-Soviet club since they had been occupied by the Soviets (as if Georgia or Ukraine or anybody else had joined the USSR voluntarily). All this made the renowned Canadian historian John-Paul Himka quip: “What’s the new geography? Western Europe, Central Europe and … Eurasia. Europe has a West, it has a Center, but holy cow! it has no East. Foucault would have loved this geographical gaping wound.”

Today [2010], as all the non-Soviet countries of the former Communist block have been either admitted to the EU or placed on a firm track towards membership, the process of othering and discursive exclusion/inclusion has changed its forms but not its essence. ‘Eurasianism’, in this respect, can be defined in a Saidian way as an attempt to control and manipulate the so-called ‘Eurasia’, which is merely a code-word for the post-Soviet republics. Russian ‘Eurasian’ discourse is aimed primarily at dominance over and re-integration of the post-Soviet space. Western ‘Eurasian’ discourse is aimed primarily at marginalization of the post-Soviet republics, their exclusion from the European project, and placing them within the Russian sphere of influence and, presumably, responsibility.

Ignorance might be one reason for such a Western approach. Neither Ukraine, nor Georgia, nor Belarus have ever existed on the mental maps of the Europeans. All these nations have been always perceived through the lenses of Russian historical myths broadly accepted in Western media and academia as ‘scientific truths’. The imperial likeness of big Western powers has also facilitated their uncritical acceptance of Russian imperialistic views of the ‘near abroad’. The alternative views and voices of the subaltern nations have been silenced, marginalized, or discredited as ‘nationalistic’.

Yet Realpolitik and, in particular, a notorious Russia-first policy pursued by major West European countries seem to play a decisive role in the exclusion of the post-Soviet nations of Eastern Europe from ‘European’ discourses and ceding them to the Moscow-centered discourse of ‘Eurasianism’. Perhaps the clearest, even though the most cynical, example of such reasoning comes from a staff columnist of the influential Asia Times daily, one Spengler:

The West has two choices: draw a line in the sand around Ukraine, or trade it to the Russians for something more important. My proposal is simple: Russia’s help in containing nuclear proliferation and terrorism in the Middle East is of infinitely greater import to the West than the dubious self-determination of Ukraine. The West should do its best to pretend that the ‘Orange’ revolution of 2004 and 2005 never happened, and secure Russia’s assistance in the Iranian nuclear issue as well as energy security in return for an understanding of Russia’s existential requirements in the near abroad […] Russia has an existential interest in absorbing Belarus and the Western [sic] Ukraine. No one cares about Belarus. It has never had an independent national existence or a national culture; the first grammar in the Belorussian language was not printed until 1918, and little over a third of the population of Belarus speaks the language at home. Never has a territory with 10 million people had a sillier case for independence. Given that summary, it seems natural to ask why anyone should care about Ukraine. That question is controversial; for the moment, I will offer the assertion that partition is the destiny of Ukraine” (August 19, 2008).

Virtually the same ideas, even though in a subtler form, can be found in numerous Western reports on political developments in Ukraine (as well as in Belarus). Neither of them is treated as a really sovereign nation, with its own particular interests that might be different from or even opposite to those of its former colonial master: “From the Baltic to the Black Sea, Russia is faced with NATO or would-be NATO states and, as a much invaded country, gets nervous about the future. Paradoxically in this situation the best result for the people in both countries [Belarus and Ukraine], at least in the short term would seem to be a vote [in forthcoming elections] against the Western tendency” (French News, March 2006).

Even though ‘Eurasian’ rhetoric is not employed explicitly in these statements, all their major premises are based on a strong belief that Ukraine is a natural part of some primordial Russian-Eurasian space: “The West must appreciate Ukraine’s historic closeness to Russia and realize that many Ukrainians consider themselves members of the East Slavic group, composed of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians” (Religious Intelligence, 16 June 2008).

A very frivolous if not overtly ignorant treatment of historical and geographical facts is a lesser problem of this type of writing. What is really striking here is a 19th century essentialism that looms large in the quoted texts. Even though Western ‘Eurasianists’ recognize, in most cases, that Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Belarusian societies are divided in their identities and geopolitical orientations, they not only unabashedly invent a Russian/pro-Russian (‘Eurasian’) majority where it barely exists but also claim that this very group, with such an identity, is ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ while the alternative is alien and artificial, imposed by some sinister Westernizers.

Andrei Tsygankov, a U.S. professor from California, perfectly sums up the political essence of the exclusivist discourse of Western ‘Eurasianists’. He starts with an apocalyptic vision of post-Soviet space, a.k.a. ‘Eurasia’:

Violence is gradually spreading, waiting for an opportunity to erupt into a large-scale conflict. Transregional transportation routes may soon be choked due to Russia’s conflicts with Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkmenistan. The West’s attempts to secure and stabilize Eurasia after the end of the Cold War must be recognized as a failure … Eurasia has not become stable or peaceful and continues to disintegrate (RFE/RL Headlines, 29 October 2009).

The only way to preventing a “collapse in Eurasia”, he suggests candidly, is to recognize “Russia’s role in stabilizing the region”:

Once this is done in practice, and not rhetorically, many pieces of the region’s puzzle may start falling into place. Energy supplies may become more reliable; governments in politically contested areas—like Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova—may obtain a greater legitimacy; and the so-called frozen conflicts may have a better opportunity to be resolved.

And if Russia is not allowed to deliver a “greater legitimacy” to the neighboring governments, they should blame nobody but themselves: Russia will probably “dedicate itself to obstructing Western policies in Eurasia”, and “we will see more of the collapsing dynamics in the region. Ukraine and Moldova may disintegrate, as did Georgia. Central Asia and Azerbaijan are likely to be subjected to a much greater degree of instability with unpredictable consequences”.

Here, in a delicate mixture of covert blackmail and mild self-fulfilling prophecy, a Western ‘Eurasianist’ comes very close to his Russian counterparts from today’s ‘neo-Eurasianist’ movement. Mr. Dugin would definitely agree that “instead of expanding its reach further, NATO ought to learn its limitations”, and that the only way “to restore the region’s capacity to function and perform basic services for its residents” is to “curb Russophobic nationalism”. Who will compile the list of “Russophobic nationalists” is not quite clear, but the record might be pretty long, provided that even Alyaksandr Lukashenko is failing to meet the requirements of genuine Russophilism.

The ultimate goal of both Russian and Western ‘Eurasianists’, however, is clear: “there is hardly an alternative to the emergence of an economically and culturally transparent community of nations with strong ties to the former metropole”. And therefore, as Tsygankov put it, “the overall objective of the outside world should be to strengthen Russia’s confidence as a regional great power.”

There is apparently no room for the New Eastern Europe within this project—and never has been.

2010

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