Ukraine

Contested Nationhood in a European Context

Ulrich Schmid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429534713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ukraine: Contested Nationhood in a European Context challenges the common view that Ukraine is a country split between a pro-European West and a pro-Russian East. The volume navigates the complicated cultural history of Ukraine and highlights the importance of regional traditions for an understanding of the current political situation. A key feature is the different politics of memory that prevail in each region, such as the Soviet past being presented as either a foreign occupation or a benign socialist project.

The pluralistic culture of Ukraine (in terms of languages, national legacies and religions) forms a nation that faces both internal and external challenges. In order to address this fully, rather than following a merely chronological order, this book examines different interpretations of Ukrainian nationhood that have been especially influential, such as the Russian tradition, the Habsburg past and the Polish connections.

Finally, the book analyses Ukraine's political and economic options for the future. Can the desired integration into EU structures overcome the concentration of investment of power in the hands of a few oligarchs and a continuing widespread culture of corruption? Will proposals to join NATO, which garnered robust support among the populace in the aftermath of the Russian aggression, materialise under the current circumstances? Is the political culture in Ukraine sufficiently functional to guarantee democratic procedures and the rule of law?

1 Where is Ukraine?

In September 2014, I boarded a bus in Košice, the 2013 European Capital of Culture, in eastern Slovakia, and travelled to Uzhhorod, the border town in Ukraine. The distance was 100 kilometres, the fare 7 Euros, and the journey time three and a half hours – including a meticulous border control check, lasting nearly an hour. The driver’s transactions of his personal business also lasted a considerable time; he mostly delivered paint and varnish at various stops during the journey, thereby supplementing his not particularly attractive wage.

The last village in the European Union, at the border between Slovakia and Ukraine, is called Vyšné Nemecké – its original name, fittingly, was ‘Oberdeutschdorf’. A border post is located there, that, with its military fortifications, recalls Soviet crossing points. The behaviour of the mostly Ukrainian bus passengers also was still determined by Soviet norms. The bus had only just driven into the customs area when a reverential silence set in. The women and men now spoke to each other only in whispers, the bus driver turned off the Slovakian pop radio station and the homogenised American English warbling fell silent. A wondrous change was also noticeable in the driver’s choice of language: while in Košice, he had barked in Russian at passengers boarding his bus that they should stow their luggage in the hold, he now spoke in correct Ukrainian with the border officials as he collected the passengers’ passports. The bus stood in the customs clearance hall for a long time, until finally all the documents had been checked and stamped. We were lucky: on our bus, there were no young Russian men of an age fit for military service. For these young men, entry into Ukraine had been banned since Spring 2014. A change in the ambience also made itself felt; the driver now tuned into a Ukrainian channel that broadcast mostly Russian hits, so-called Popsa.

From the ‘German Heights’ the road goes directly down to Uzhhorod, which already belongs to the expanded Europe of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. Just how haphazard and ephemeral the attachment to a nation state can be is clearly evident from the eventful history of this region. Until the First World War, Uzhhorod was called Ungvár and belonged to the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy forming the Habsburg Empire. In 1910, 80 per cent of the town’s inhabitants were Hungarian and barely 4 per cent were Ukrainian. The region soon fell into the grinder of the twentieth century. Following the Paris peace treaties, Uzhhorod and the attached Transcarpathia were ascribed to newly independent Czechoslovakia. The authorities did their best to turn Uzhhorod into a Czechoslovak city and built a new administrative district. Many of these buildings were erected under the influence of the so-called ‘Rondocubism’ which was meant to become the national architectural style of the young state. In the Second World War, the Red Army occupied this territory. Stalin then incorporated Transcarpathia into the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Ultimately Uzhhorod became, in 1991, the westernmost regional capital of an independent Ukraine. The town’s population ratio has been precisely inverted by comparison with 1910: today 77 per cent of the inhabitants of Uzhhorod are Ukrainian while barely 7 per cent are Hungarian.¹ Nostalgia for the dual monarchy and for Czechoslovakia is still present, though. On the riverbank promenade in Uzhhorod, a small memorial is found for the Good Soldier Švejk, with a melancholy quotation from Jaroslav Hašek’s eponymous novel: ‘And thus was our Franz Ferdinand slain.’²

Various cultures, languages, nations and states meet and clash in this contact zone. Its eventful history has left lasting traces on the political map as well. Near Uzhhorod there is virtually an intersection of four countries: here the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine are barely 50 kilometres away from one another. And it should not be forgotten that Poland and Romania had a common border in the inter-war years (Figure 1.1), running between Kolomyia, the town in eastern Galicia, and Cernăuţi (Chernivtsi), the formerly Austrian town of Czernowitz that was occupied by Romania after the First World War. In this region the cultural dynamics of European national history are quite tangible.

The European relevance of Transcarpathia can also be seen in the fact that one of the midpoints of Europe is located in this region. Varying according to the method of calculation and the geographical definition, the midpoint may lie in Lithuania, Bavaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia – or in this Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. In 1887, a memorial stone was erected in Rakhiv indicating the geodetic centre of Europe.

What holds for Transcarpathia on a local level is also true, mutatis mutandis, for the whole of Ukraine. In 1995, the US historian Mark von Hagen published an important essay with the provocative title ‘Does Ukraine Have a History?’³ He maintains that the flexibility of its borders, the permeability of its cultures and its multi-ethnic society make Ukrainian history a highly modern field of investigation that poses a challenge to the conceptual dominance of the nation state in historiography.

Figure 1.1 Ukraine in the inter-war years

Precisely because of its complicated history, Ukraine only became an object of academic research quite recently. The past of the individual Ukrainian regions used to be treated, at best, in the framework of Russian, Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian, Austrian or Hungarian national history. A notable exception here is Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of the Ukraine-Rus’ in ten volumes (1895–1933).⁴ Not until the late 1980s did Ukraine attract any attention from historians. This also has very much to do with a paradigm change in historiography: the French Annales School turned away from the classical history of events and investigated the emergence of values, mentalities and life worlds in a broader cultural context. In Germany, the history of ideas became established in the 1970s, devoted to researching the perception of social realities. Around the same time Hayden White published his influential book Metahistory, ⁵ thereby initiating a new trend that has by now become dominant in historiography. Most historians today are no longer concerned with historical events in themselves but rather with their representations in public discourse and collective memory.

Set against the backdrop of the transformed research interests found in the academic study of history, Ukraine no longer appears the exception but rather the rule. Here there are no ‘great men’ such as Napoleon, Bismarck or Stalin who, with their political biographies, seem to dominate the history of entire epochs. In Ukraine, down to the present day, quite different traditions come together that have mutually influenced each other. Understanding Ukraine thus always means taking into account the various threads of culture that attract each other, repulse each other and at key historical moments also interlace.

The dramatic events of 2014 made clear how explosive this mixture of differing historical narratives can be. Diametrically opposed interpretations of reality collided and are still colliding. The Kremlin maintains that a civil war is going on in Ukraine; after the fall of President Yanukovych, a ‘fascist junta’ supposedly seized power in Kyiv (Kiev), and in Donetsk and Luhansk, a ‘people’s militia’ was formed that is defending itself against the oppression of the new dictatorship. Conversely, according to this interpretation, the regime in Kyiv is carrying out punitive military action against its own citizens in the east of the country. At the same time Moscow insists that it is not involved as a warring party in the conflict.

Officially Russia holds a similarly stubborn view in the Crimean crisis. After a covert military invasion, Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in March 2014. President Putin talked about a ‘reunion’ of Crimea with Russia and maintained that former General Secretary Khrushchev had arbitrarily severed the peninsula from Russia when he awarded it to Ukraine in 1954. The referendum of 16 March 2014 was thus lawful and, with the alleged approval of 96 per cent of the population of Crimea, it prepared the way for joining the Russian Federation.

From the Kyiv perspective, events present themselves quite differently: Russia annexed Crimea in contravention of international law, and not only incited the war in Donbas but also orchestrated it militarily. The Ukrainian army’s course of action against the separatists in Donbas was consequently designated as an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ (ATO). In view of the impossibility of a military solution, this strategy was officially abandoned in April 2018 and replaced by a ‘Joint Forces Operation’. Kyiv also refuses to negotiate directly with the leaders of the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and accuses Moscow of waging an undeclared war against Ukraine.

However, the lines of conflict do not always run as clearly as they do in the most recent confrontations. The cultural history of Ukraine is rich in discussions of both self-images and images as perceived by others, discussions of relations to other ethnic minorities, and discussions of the imperialism of foreign powers.

In the early twenty-first century, the central question that arises in all urgency is this: can Ukraine preserve its unity as a state? The answer turns out to be either positive or negative, according to which model of interpretation is applied to the complexities of Ukrainian culture. Roughly speaking, it is possible to identify two different approaches. First, following Samuel P. Huntington,⁶ different cultural spaces may be identified in Ukraine. The dividing line would run right through the middle of the present state territory, clearly dividing Western civilisation from Orthodox civilisation. The logical consequence of this interpretation would be a demand for Ukraine to be split up, a process which would ideally be carried out following the model of Czechoslovakia in 1993.

The second approach does not emphasise rootedness in a certain cultural tradition but instead the formation of a European system of values in the whole of Ukraine. In this view, the unity of Ukraine is not founded in terms of culture or even ethnicity, but rather by means of the consensus of citizens in a civil society.

In the 1990s, Russia and Ukraine developed in a largely parallel way: the socialist economic system was replaced by a predatory capitalism in which a small and privileged elite quickly took shape, while the broader population lived close to the poverty line. In 2000, however, the two states parted ways. In Russia, President Putin set up a vertical axis of power and thus transitioned to a ‘managed democracy’. The boom years up until the financial crisis of 2008 brought fabulous growth figures for the Russian economy, and approval ratings for President Putin were correspondingly high.

In Ukraine, a similar scenario – which would certainly have served to preserve the interests of the Ukrainian power elite – failed, and the so-called Gongadze affair, in 2000, marked the turning point. Georgiy Gongadze (1969–2000) was a journalist, critical of the regime, who was murdered in unexplained circumstances. Not long after, tape recordings came to light which heavily incriminated the president at the time, Leonid Kuchma (born in 1938). The so-called ‘cassette scandal’ led to the emergence of a critical awareness in the Ukrainian public. The events of the Orange Revolution in 2004 showed even more clearly how high the readiness for political engagement had become. After Viktor Yanukovych (born in 1950) had declared himself the winner in a rigged presidential election, over 100,000 people took to the streets in Kyiv to protest against the electoral fraud. Although the demonstrators achieved their goal, in that the run-off election was repeated and Viktor Yushchenko (born in 1954) took over the presidency until 2010. In retrospect, the years of the ‘Orange’ government must, however, be counted as lost time. The former allies Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko (born in 1960) squandered a lot of energy in bouts of infighting and soon fought with each other almost to the point of bloodshed. The sad result of this internal power struggle was the legally correct selection of the vote-rigger of 2004 as President of Ukraine in 2010. Viktor Yanukovych attempted to install a regime in Ukraine that would be just as authoritarian as in Russia. One case in point was that of the so-called Titushki. On 18 May 2013, a ‘Rise Ukraine’ rally in Kyiv was attacked by thugs. One of the most wicked hooligans was Vadym Titushko, who beat up two journalists. He involuntarily rose to dubious fame, and his name became synonymous with paid hooligans in Yanukovych’s service who would attack demonstrations by the political opposition. Initially, the daily rate was about $20 but with the growing intensity of the Euromaidan demonstrations in Independence Square, the price quickly rose to $100.⁷

However, the development of Ukrainian civil society had already reached a high enough level so that a Russian scenario was no longer possible. After Yanukovych refused in November 2013 to put his signature to an EU Association Agreement that had been negotiated in detail, the Euromaidan protests began in Kyiv. For weeks on end, with temperatures below freezing, a great mass of people gathered together on Kyiv’s Independence Square, advocating a better future for the country. The demonstrations in favour of EU integration soon transformed into protests against the corrupt and nepotistic regime of President Yanukovych; and the demonstrations met an abrupt end when, on 20 February 2014, snipers fired into the crowd.

However tragic the events at the Euromaidan may have been, they also prove that the formation of a democratic and constitutional awareness in Ukraine is irreversible. Above all, the post-Soviet generation no longer defines itself in ethnic categories but rather in terms of citizenship. Thus, 89 per cent of young people in Donetsk describe themselves as ‘citizens of Ukraine’, whereas around 30 per cent of older people still perceive of themselves as ‘Soviet’.⁸

Proposals to divide Ukraine up according to a Czechoslovak model fail to take account of the complex situation of values, cultures, languages and confessions in Ukraine. There is no predetermined point for a division. In Czechoslovakia, a Czech constituent republic and a Slovak constituent republic had already been created in 1968 by the federalisation of the state. How should Ukraine be divided, though – at the former eastern border of the Second Polish Republic, or at the River Dnieper, which divides Ukraine into two halves of roughly equivalent size? What would happen to the centre of the country, which admittedly has a long Soviet and Russian past, but has also formed its own political values and standpoints in the meantime?

It is difficult to predict how the Ukraine crisis will end. It can be assumed with some certainty, though, that the answer to this question will be given not in Kyiv but in Moscow. Pres...