At the Fence of Metternich's Garden - Mykola Riabchuk

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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

      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

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