21 Reimagining the Continent

The Ukraine Crisis, as the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the hybrid war in the Donbas became known in international media, began in late December 2013 with a group of young Ky- ivan urbanites, many of them students, camping on the Maidan (Independence Square in downtown Kyiv) to protest the refusal of the Ukrainian government to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union.

It was the largest political rally in history sparked by a foreign- policy decision, as well as a manifestation of belief in the trans­forming power of the European Union and its institutions at the very time when trust in those institutions inside the Union was at one of its lowest points. The protests led to a change of government in Kyiv and provoked Russian aggression against a West-leaning country. Thousands were killed and wounded, and millions of Ukrainian citizens were displaced as a result of the conflict. Despite the war and unprecedented pressure from Rus­sia, the new Ukrainian government signed an Association Agree­ment with the EU and embarked on a series of reforms, viewing the country’s future as linked to the family of European nations, either within the European Union or in close alliance with it.¹

The vision of Ukraine as an integral part of Europe and a fu­ture member of the European Union took off in Ukraine in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004, one of whose main slogans was “joining Europe.”The leader of the revolution, Viktor Yushchenko, declared in his inaugural address in January 2005: “Our path to the future is the one now being followed by United Europe.

The Yushchenko years became known as a period of “Euroro­manticism,” but they left some important marks on the identity of Yushchenko’s countrymen. They also put Ukraine on the mental map of Europe. Western media coverage of the Orange Rev­olution familiarized the publics of English-speaking countries with the names “Kyiv” and “Ukraine.” When the pro-European protests began in Kyiv in November 2013, Ukraine was no longer an unknown country in Eurasia. Whatever the Western public thought about Ukraine’s pro-EU aspirations, few questioned its European credentials, and many sympathized with the protest­ers’ demands for closer ties with the European Union. Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression only enhanced these attitudes.

The Ukrainian protesters’ belief in Europe as a model for re­form in their own country and the ability of the member coun­tries of the European Union to stand by Ukraine in its time of trouble surprised the Russian leadership and dramatically affected EU-Russian relations. That belief also launched a process that could lead to the political and cultural redefinition of Europe, which until recently has been delimited in the minds of most Europeans by the borders of the European Union. The role of Ukraine in this process is yet to be fully studied and explained.

The Lure of Central Europe

In February 2011, a Kyiv tourist firm called KievClub offered its clients a sweet Valentine’s Day deal. Advertised as a “romantic

weekend in the heart of Europe,” it cost only £ 660 per couple and included round-trip airfare from Luton Airport near London, accommodations in a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Kyiv, and “meet and greet parking.” Only twenty years earlier Kyiv, the city in the “heart of Europe” that British tourists were being invited to visit, had been regarded by many in the West as part of Russia, and thus not European at all.

KievClub is not the only firm luring Western clients to the capital of Ukraine by calling it the heart of Europe. The same advertising strategy is employed by Studio Kiev, which offers visa support, lodging, language courses, and medical insurance to visitors, and Kiev Apartments, which advertises on Facebook, as do many other tourist and real-estate firms in Kyiv. What do the authors of the Kyiv ads mean when they call their city the “heart” of Europe? Whether their British clients know it or not, they are referring to the geographic center of the continent (or, rather, subcontinent). Once the guests arrive, they can find tour guides who will be happy to bring them to a globe-crowned column on Kyiv’s main street that they call the midpoint of Europe.³

There was nothing absolutely new or unexpected in the efforts of Ukrainian political and cultural elites to present their country to the world as a nation at the center of Europe. This tactic had been used for decades by East European intellectuals and politi­cians whose nations were left out of the prosperous, democratic West European core. As mentioned earlier, in 1950, Oskar Hal- ecki, a Polish 6migre historian living in the United States, offered a version of the European historical and cultural map that redrew the boundaries of Central Europe so as to include Poland in its eastern subdivision.

Importantly, the term “East-Central Europe”—the coun­terpart to “West-Central Europe,” which included Germa- ny—also gained currency in Western academic discourse. In the early 1980s Milan Kundera, a Czech writer living in Paris, pub­lished an essay that not only put his country, along with Poland and Hungary, in the center of Europe but also defined it as part of the European West. Kundera’s assumptions were fully reflected in his title, “The Stolen West or the Tragedy of Central Europe.” The essay, translated in 1984 from its French original into English and published in the New York Review of Books, became one of the most influential late Cold War texts shaping the views of educated Westerners about the Soviet-occupied lands of Europe on the eve of the collapse of Soviet power in the region.⁴

Both Halecki and Kundera sought to modify an established mental map of Europe that placed Germany and areas immedi­ately south and east of it at the center of the continent.

Despite strong misgivings about German plans in the re­gion, the idea of a federal organization of Mitteleuropa soon took root among the leaders of peoples struggling against Austro- Hungarian rule. In October 1918, Thomas Masaryk created in the United States a Mid-European Democratic Union composed of representatives of twelve European nations that sought to pro­mote regional economic cooperation as an initial step toward fed­eralization. The Union did not last long, but its creation showed that Mitteleuropa was not only a German idea: its non-German inhabitants were also prepared to imagine themselves as part of a separate grouping between France and Russia.⁵

The defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany in World War I, the dis­integration of Austria-Hungary, and the diminution of the Rus­sian Empire dramatically changed the situation in the region. The elites of the newly independent countries were in search of a common new identity but wanted nothing to do with the now discredited name of Mitteleuropa. The new states of the region settled for the name “Eastern Europe,” despite its implication that this “other” Europe was less than fully civilized. An even worse alternative presented itself: Hitler’s attempt to create a German Lebensraum in the lands earlier defined as Mitteleuropa led to a disastrous world war that completely discredited the older German term.

Masaryk’s vision lived on as an ideal after Eastern Europe was overrun by the Red Army and subjected to rule from Mos­cow. East European intellectuals were now eager to distance themselves as much as possible from the communist East and associate themselves with the democratic West. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell and Moscow began the gradual withdrawal of its troops from the region, the leaders of Poland, Czechoslova­kia, and Hungary met in the Hungarian castle of V isegrad and created a Central European alliance to promote integration with their western neighbors—the European Union and NATO. By 2004, their dream had come true: all of them (Czechoslovakia now divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) had joined Western institutions, shedding the legacy of Soviet occupation and the civilizational stigma of Eastern Europe.⁶

Is it fair to say, then, that the Ukrainians are simply following in the footsteps of their western neighbors, trying to sell them­selves to the European West as a central and thus indispensable part of Europe that was forgotten, if not betrayed, by its rich western cousin? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that this was exact­ly the argument employed by some Ukrainian political leaders and intellectuals in the years following the Orange Revolution. No, in the sense that the Ukrainians are using a different map to make their case. This is not the Germanocentric map of Mit- teleuropa, even though both Naumann and Halecki regarded parts of Ukraine as components of Middle/East-Central Europe, and the practical realization of Naumann’s vision led to the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918.

Ukrainian leaders, intellectuals, and business people have something else in mind when they claim a central position for their country on the map of Europe. Their mental map can be found in atlases used in schools from Tokyo in the east to San Francisco in the west—with Kyiv, of course, somewhere in the center.

The map of Europe used by Ukrainian proponents of Euro­pean integration is a product of the Enlightenment, and it is as confusing and contradictory as the legacy of the Enlightenment itself. That era produced not only the fathers of the American Revolution but also a cohort of “enlightened despots.” The latter included Catherine II, who proclaimed that the Russian Empire, with its vast Asian possessions going all the way to the Pacific, was a European state. Although this definition was unpalatable to Europeans, Russia eventually got its way. After the partitions of Poland—a development welcomed by Voltaire, who believed that, along with Russian troops, civilization and order had finally arrived in that forsaken part of the world—few European rulers or their cartographers dared to challenge the claim. They rejected the age-old tradition beginning with Strabo, who had placed the eastern boundaries of Europe on the river Tanais, or Don, and redrew the map of Europe by moving its boundaries eastward, all the way to the Ural Mountains.

According to the Russian promoters of the change, that was where Russia proper ended and its colonies began. But the Rus­sian success was incomplete. While European geographers agreed to move their border eastward, the “map of Europe on the mind of Enlightenment,” to use Larry Wolff’s phrase, remained largely the same. Strabo’s map of Europe fitted West European self-per­ceptions much better than that of Catherine’s geographers, and it persisted in the minds of educated European elites for gener­ations to come, no matter what map they had studied in school. This disjunction of the physical, political, and cultural geographies of Europe persisted for most of the twentieth century. It is only if one thinks in Strabo’s terms that Dresden can be imagined as the geographic center of Europe, while Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia are consigned to Eastern Europe.⁸

It would be fair to say that Ukrainians treat the Enlighten­ment-era map of Europe much more seriously than their West European counterparts. They were instructed by generations of teachers that their country was located at the geographic center of Europe. It was on the territory of today’s Ukraine, near the town of Rakhiv (47⁰57'46"N, 24⁰ιι'14"E), that in 1887 Austrian geogra­phers placed the first known landmark indicating the geograph­ic center of Europe. In so doing, the Austrians were claiming European centrality for themselves. The Soviets, who took control of the area in 1945, followed suit.

The Ukrainians are now doing likewise, but the field has be­come crowded in the meantime: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus have all made similar calculations to boost their European credentials. Politics were part and parcel of all the “discoveries” of the center of Europe. The French did the calculation for Lithuania when that country was about to leave the Soviet Union, and the Russians confirmed the findings of the Belarusians at a time when Belarus had become an international outcast, counting only the Russian Federation and Venezuela as friendly nations.⁹

Politics are not solely to blame for present-day confusion with regard to establishing the center of Europe. The complex geography of Europe is also a factor. All recent attempts to “dis­cover” its geographic center have been undertaken on the basis of a map that goes all the way to the Urals, but calculations differ depending on whether islands are counted and, if so, which ones. There seems to be general agreement among geographers, what­ever their political and cultural biases, that the center of Europe is located somewhere along a line extending through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova and bisecting the continent. This line is located east of the countries that make up what is now known as Central Europe. However naive and inaccurate the definition of Kyiv as the center or heart of Europe (it lies more than 500 km northeast of Rakhiv), it is not completely arbitrary and reflects certain geographic realities that Ukrainians are now trying to turn to their political, economic, and cultural advantage.

The Shadow /Mitteleuropa

In the early 1990s, the distinguished French geographer Michel Foucher, one of the world’s leading experts on borders and fron­tiers, put forward his vision of the new Europe that had just emerged from the geopolitical turmoil caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the disintegration of the Soviet empire. In the atlas of “Middle and Eastern Europe” that he produced in 1993, Foucher proposed a concept of Middle Europe (Europe medιane) that differed from the Mitteleuropa of Friedrich Naumann or Thomas Masaryk. While reminiscent of Oskar Haleckis East-Central Europe, it also included the Bal­kans. Fouchers Middle Europe was characterized by “an inter­mediate geopolitical situation between the West and the USSR or Russia; a current state of historic transition between these two organizing centers: territorial and political legacies imposed by the East, but modernization henceforth impelled by the West.”

The region was made up largely of countries that were under communist control before 1989. Its northern part consisted more or less of those states that now define themselves as belonging to Central Europe: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia. Its southern part included the Balkans, with the sole exception of Greece. According to Foucher, the region “overflowed toward Ukraine and Belarus.” Foucher included in Middle Europe those parts of Ukraine and Belarus that belonged to Poland before 1939. Judging by some of the maps, he also included Moldova.

By 2007, fourteen years after the atlas appeared, the eastward expansion of the “West” as defined by its political, economic, and military institutions, such as the European Union and NATO, had largely swallowed up Fouchers “Middle Europe.” It certainly continues to exist as a historical concept but makes less and less sense in terms of contemporary geopolitics. Still, the area be­tween the “West,” defined in political, institutional, and military terms, and Russia has not disappeared altogether. It has simply moved east toward the countries that Foucher considered to be on the margins of Middle Europe in 1993: Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.¹⁰

This eastward geopolitical shift of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first has also brought Fouchers “Middle Europe” to the region where the continent’s center has been located since the Enlightenment-era revision of Strabo. This is also the region through which Europe’s cultural dividing line has run ever since the eleventh century, when the Christian world split into East and West. When the Roman legates excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople, who responded in kind, the church was divided, leaving the prin­ces of Kyiv on one side and the Polish, Hungarian, and German kings on the other. It soon became apparent that the differences between the two parts of the Christian world were not limited to questions of church jurisdiction, clerical celibacy, or the filioque controversy about the origins of the Holy Spirit.

The split reinforced already existing differences in relations between church and state: an autonomous if not fully indepen­dent church in the West, and a church subservient to the state in the East. These differences turned out to be crucial for the subse­quent development of social and political structures. In the West, the existence of a Roman-dominated church often independent of state power helped build autonomous institutions. In the East, the Byzantine legacy of a state-controlled church left little scope for autonomous bodies of any kind. The limited impact of the Reformation on the Orthodox world further contributed to the growth of differences in religious and political culture between the Christian East and West.

The map of Eastern and Western Christendom in Samuel Huntington’s bestselling Clash of Civilizations shows the bound­ary between them passing generally along the geographic axis of Europe, with Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary on one side of the divide and Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova on the other. Indeed, Huntington’s line runs through Ukraine, Belarus, and Romania, assigning the western parts of those countries to the sphere of Western civilization. The map allegedly indicates the eastward extent of Western Christianity ca. 1500. In reality, it more or less follows the Soviet-Polish border before 1939. But it was not the geopolitical border of interwar Europe that the cartographers had in mind as they struggled to recreate the real­ities of pre-Reformation Europe. Their main problem was that of turning the relatively broad Christian frontier, which is not easily mapped, into a clear line.

What any such line fails to reflect is the existence of struc­tures and entire regions that were neither eastern nor western or, alternatively, both eastern and western. This pertains to the Uniate Church established on the Catholic-Orthodox border in the late sixteenth century, a product of the Catholic Counter­Reformation and the Orthodox need for reform. The Uniate Church was thus Orthodox or Eastern in ritual and tradition but Western in jurisdiction and dogmas. With strong Polish support, it became the dominant church in most of Ukraine and Belarus by the mid-eighteenth century. It was wiped out by the tsars once they took possession of those lands after the partitions of Poland.¹¹

The tsars wanted to abolish a church controlled from Rome that had the potential to corrupt the Orthodox world with West­ern values, the most dangerous of which was independence of church structures from the imperial authorities. This was also the motive of Joseph Stalin: in 1946, soon after Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at Yalta to the Soviet incorporation of western Ukraine and western Belarus, Stalin oversaw the incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church of the Uniate (Greek Cath­olic) Church, which had survived in the western Ukrainian lands ruled from Vienna and then Warsaw.

What Stalin tried to achieve, apart from pursuing the goal of the tsars, was to turn the chaotic religious and civilizational fron­tier into a clearly defined and easily policed cultural and political border. He shipped hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic Poles to Poland and turned millions of Greek-Catholic Ukraini­ans and Catholic Belarusians into pro forma Orthodox. This was a dream come true for modern map makers. Finally there was a line that could be drawn not only between Eastern and Western Christianity but also between Eastern and Western civilization. Collapsing religious, national, political and other frontiers into borders turned out to be a favorite project of modernizing states and societies. Stalin was simply its most brutal and most success­ful practitioner.¹²

The borders imposed by Stalin have now been taken over and reinforced by the European Union. If in the past it was the Soviets who built walls like the one in Berlin, and Westerners who wanted to tear them down, we now see a reversed situa­tion. It is the proponents of Western values who are surrounding their world with walls, from the US-Mexico border to the strict­ly policed boundaries of the European Union. Keeping out the “barbarians” (generally associated in the public mind with such negative phenomena as illegal immigration, terrorism, and the smuggling of drugs and weapons) while admitting the products of their labor has been a basic task of the European states for decades. During the Cold War they did not have to worry about their eastern borders and could indulge in rhetoric about the free flow of people and ideas. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eastward shift of the EU borders, the rhetoric has changed: it is no longer about walls but about frontiers and neighborhoods. But the frontiers of the EU are not regarded in Brussels as open contact zones; rather, they are seen as outer defensive lines, like those of the Roman Empire.

The EU is involved beyond its borders and present in its neighborhood, but one of its reasons for being there is to pro­vide neighboring governments with incentives to help police the approaches to Fortress Europe. This was certainly an important aspect of EU policy in Ukraine, where, in return for the liberaliza­tion of the visa regime, the Ukrainian government was expected to take on the task of policing the perimeter of the European Union. With EU financial assistance and expertise, it has been reinforcing its border controls and promising to take back, pro­cess, house, and deport illegal aliens who have managed to cross its territory into the EU. The European Union provides funds to improve detention facilities and train Ukrainian policemen to respect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, but it is the task of the Ukrainian government to deal with tens of thousands of refugees and illegal immigrants from all over the world who are trying to claim their share of the European dream. The EU purgatory has effectively been moved beyond the walls of the Union to its frontier.¹³

There is certainly a danger of overdramatizing the situation by comparing Stalin’s frontier-building endeavors with those of the EU. After all, the current visa wall between Ukraine and Poland is minuscule in comparison to the one that divided them before 1991. It is enormous, however, as compared to the one that was there before 2004, the year in which the EU established itself on the borders of Ukraine. Since the fall of communism, many things have changed in the western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Stalin’s Iron Curtain was slowly giving way to the old po­litical, cultural, and economic frontier that had previously existed.

The victory of Solidarity in the Polish elections of 1989 not only triggered the implosion of the Soviet outer empire in what was then known as Eastern Europe but also sent a powerful signal across the border that did not exist before 1939—to Vilnius, the capital of the Soviet republic of Lithuania. The start of Soviet disintegration is often correctly associated with the Baltics. It is important, however, to remember that of the three Baltic coun­tries it was Lithuania, with its close traditional connections to Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, that began the process. In Decem­ber 1989, a few months after the victory of Solidarity in Poland and a few weeks after the success of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Lithuanian communists broke with Moscow, and in March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to proclaim its independence.

Ukrainians in western Ukraine, which had been part of Austria-Hungary before 1918 and part of Poland before 1939, first voted for independence in March 1991. They confirmed their choice, together with Ukrainians from the center and east of the country in December 1991, effectively putting an end to the So­viet Union. By that time, the Greek Catholic Church—the most vivid institutional embodiment of the East-West frontier—had emerged from the catacombs and renewed its activity with the help of Pope John Paul II and the reluctant “blessing” of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Moscow-controlled church in Ukraine split in two, with one of the new churches proclaiming its independence of Moscow. The Stalin-imposed cultural border crumbled, and the frontier came back into the everyday life of Ukrainian citizens. They could now travel not only to Russia but also to Poland, Hun­gary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Then came the expansion of the European Union, which shifted Fouchers Middle Europe to the east and promptly built a visa fence to separate the old Middle Europe from the new one.

The fact that the European Union came so close to Ukraine but stopped at its borders not only caused severe dislocations in the post-Soviet economics of the region but also dealt a stunning blow to the self-identification of the Ukrainian elites. Ukraine was cut off not only from Poland but also from Lithuania, with which it had had long-standing cultural and religious ties. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe had been a his­torical, cultural, and political mainstay of Ukrainian identity. As discussed earlier in this volume, the desire to join Ukraine’s Eu­ropean neighbors by means of an association agreement with the EU, which was a driving force behind the Maidan protests of 2013-14, led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the annex­ation of the Crimea.

It comes as no surprise that Russian aggression has made many Ukrainians who used to look at the West with suspicion into proponents of closer ties with the European Union. If in February 2014 36 percent of Ukrainians supported their coun­try’s joining the Russian-led Eurasian Union, that number fell to 12 percent in June 2015. The proportion of those who wanted to join the EU grew from 41 percent in February 2014 to 67 percent in June 2015. These numbers, however, reflect not only the change in the attitudes of Ukrainians but also the Ukrainian state’s loss of the Crimea and parts of the Donbas, where pro-Russian sen­timent was traditionally stronger than in other parts of Ukraine.¹⁴

The Russo-Ukrainian war forced many to start rethinking the map of Europe as it has existed for generations in the minds of Western elites and the public at large. In June 2015, only ι percent of those polled in the countries of the EU questioned Ukraine’s right to join the Union; 31 percent believed that Ukraine had the right to do so as a European country, and another 30 percent believed that membership of the EU would help Ukraine to de­fend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. Ukraine has come a long way in redefining the map of Europe in the imagination of its own citizens, but the same process seems to be beginning to the west of its borders. Both processes are far from over. Neither are they irreversible.¹⁵

It is more important than ever to acknowledge not only that Ukraine belongs to Europe but also that it occupies a central geo­political position on the continent. The region to which Ukraine belongs has functioned as Europe’s geopolitical axis since the dawn of modernity and as its religious and cultural axis ever since the great schism between Rome and Constantinople. Ukraine and its neighborhood constitute the quintessential geographic, cultural, and now geopolitical midpoint of Europe. Arguably, placing that area closer to the center of today’s geopolitical map of Europe can help the West construct a new arch of European security as much as it can help the newly emerged focal point of European geopolitics to find its place in the political, economic, and security structures of Europe.