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’
