19 The Quest for Europe

As the Orange Revolution of 2004 confirmed Ukraine’s democrat­ic credentials and focused world attention on it, Ukraine’s demo­cratically elected leaders launched a peaceful “offensive” in Brussels and other European capitals, trying to put their country on a fast track to membership in the European Union (EU).

In May 2005, Ukraine’s representative to the EU made the following comment on the EU’s recent attempts to stop Ukraine from applying for membership: “We consider that the decision to apply for EU membership is the sovereign right of any Eu­ropean state that ‘respects principles of freedom, democracy, hu­man rights, fundamental freedoms and rule of law.’ Notably, it is envisaged by Article 49 of the EU Treaty.”¹ Indeed, the EU has no right to ignore an application from a “European state.” But is Ukraine a European state? The Brussels bureaucrats had some doubts in that regard. Emma Udwin, the spokeswoman for EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, noted in January 2005 with regard to Ukraine’s prospects of membership that “implicitly, there will first have to be a discussion of whether a country is European,” implying that Ukraine’s self-identifica­tion as a European state was far from universally accepted. “The bloc,” wrote a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent reporting on Udwins comments, “has yet to decide where the borders of Europe lie.”²

The importance and urgency of that task can hardly be exag­gerated, given that in December 2004 the EU invited Turkey to begin membership talks, and by mid-2005 voters in a number of West European countries, most notably France, had defeated the draft EU constitution, which was explained as a protest against future EU enlargement.

Indeed, Europe is actually a peninsula with a very broad east­ern frontier. It is not easy to draw the line separating Europe from Asia, even where the two continents are divided by water. After all, according to Greek legends, the princess Europa, who gave her name to the peninsula, was forcibly taken to the future “European” Crete from Phoenicia (in present-day Lebanon). At least Crete is divided from the mainland by a substantial body of water, but there is nothing comparable to the Mediterranean Sea between Lisbon and Vladivostok, or, for that matter, Singa­pore. Where one draws the line dividing the Eurasian land mass depends on one’s notion of where Europe ends; hence the geo­graphic puzzle facing opponents of the eastward enlargement of the European Union. Perhaps they would prefer to deal with the concept of Christendom, which was replaced by the secular idea of Europe around the turn of the eighteenth century. By that cri­terion, Turkey would readily be denied membership on the basis of its Muslim religion and culture. It might even be possible to draw a line dividing Western and Eastern Christendom, thereby excluding not only Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the ex­tended EU on ³ January 2007, but even the Greek homeland of the European idea.

But that approach would not work with Ukraine, which Sam­uel Huntington defined in his bestselling study of modern civi­lizations as a “cleft” country divided between the Orthodox East and the European West. Back in the 1990s, Huntington seriously considered a scenario of Ukraine’s disintegration along the East­West civilizational line. Ukraine survived the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s and managed to turn its weakness into a strength, emerging as one of the most democratic and tolerant societies of the post-communist world. The name “Ukraine” means “border­land,” reflecting not only the country’s position on the civiliza­tional divide but also its historical capacity to serve as a contact zone between Eastern and Western Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For centuries, Ukraine was also divided between the Rus­sian Empire and its Central and East European rivals, the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Each of those powers promoted and advanced its own religious and civilizational project.

The history of Ukraine as a borderland reflects the long strug­gle of its inhabitants to transcend political boundaries and forge an identity that would distinguish them from their immediate neighbors to the east, west, and south. First Western Christian­ity and later the secular cultures of Europe served as important “others” against whom the Ukrainians defined themselves and their country as part of Orthodox-Byzantine civilization. Even more significant for the present discussion is that these Western cultural influences were among the major factors that helped de­fine Ukraine’s identity: through long association with them, the Ukrainians came to see themselves as part of the West, distinct from their Orthodox neighbors to the east.

How does this age-old tradition of complex and often contra­dictory relations with the Christian and European West influence Ukraine’s present-day identity, and how does it affect the attitude of Ukraine’s political and cultural elites toward the European project of the last fifty years? This essay puts the efforts of the Ukrainian leadership to join the EU into broader historical and cultural perspective, sketching the development of Ukraine’s Eu­ropean idea from the early eighteenth century to the first decade of the third millennium.

Ukraine’s past and present quest for inclusion in Europe can­not be properly understood without taking into account the other pole of Ukrainian cultural identity, that of Russia. Russia’s dom­inant role in the region has been and continues to be regarded as a potential threat to the survival of the Ukrainian language, literature, culture, and identity. This encourages Ukrainian elites to think of Europe not only as a political and economic but also a cultural counterweight to their powerful eastern neighbor. Judg­ing by the title of a book published in 2003 by the then president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma—Ukraine Is Not Russia—today’s Ukraine is at pains to define itself vis-a-vis its northern neighbor, and the importance of Europe’s role in that process can hardly be exaggerated.

**

From very early on, the lands of present-day Ukraine were con­sidered part of Europe. Medieval and early modern geographers, following their Greek and Roman predecessors, drew the eastern boundary of Europe along the Tanais River—that is, the Don, which “flows quietly” through the modern Russo-Ukrainian borderland. The eighteenth-century Russian historian Vasilii Tatishchev drew the line even farther to the east, along the Ural Mountains, which he saw as marking the division between Russia proper and its Asian colonies, including Siberia. The mountains were, of course, no match for an ocean, and Russia failed to be­come a “normal” European state with a clear distinction between the mother country and its colonies. But the notion that Europe ended at the Ural Mountains was accepted by eighteenth-century Europeans. Russia was a major actor on the European stage and thus a European state, at least in the eyes of the German-born empress Catherine II, the French encyclopedists with whom she corresponded and, indeed, the educated European elite in general.

Throughout the eighteenth century, there were probably no more enthusiastic promoters of the European identity and calling of the Russian Empire than the alumni of the Kyiv Mohyla Acad­emy in what is now Ukraine. Educated in Kyiv and in European universities such as those of Rome, Gottingen, and Konigsberg, Ukrainians in the Russian service, from Feofan Prokopovych to Oleksandr Bezborodko and Viktor Kochubei, were in the fore­front of the Europeanization of the Russian psyche. But what about their native Ukraine? By the mid-nineteenth century, which saw the first stirrings of the Ukrainian national “awaken­ing,” Ukraine was considered a cultural backwater of the Russian Empire. Its role as a bridge between Europe and Russia, played so successfully in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was relegated to the past. The capital city of St. Petersburg, which Ukrainians had helped build and populate with bureaucrats and intellectuals, including such luminaries of Russian literature as Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol), had supplanted Ukraine as Rus­sia’s window on Europe. Since then, Ukraine’s attitude to Europe has largely been determined by its attitude to Russia—still the two poles of Ukrainian collective identity and self-image.

For most of the nineteenth century, European influences were channeled to Ukraine through Russia. This allowed Russians in­tellectuals such as Vissarion Belinsky to read their own cultural situation back into the early modern era and claim that the Pere- iaslav Agreement of 1654, which placed Cossack Ukraine under a Muscovite protectorate, had opened the doors of European civ­ilization to Ukraine—a statement repeated in many Soviet-era museum exhibits in Ukraine. The fact that it had been the other way around did not bother Belinsky, who denied Ukrainians the right to develop their own literature, or his twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian admirers. In the 1830s, Hohol (Gogol) still thought of Ukraine in the all-European context, considering the history of the Cossacks more interesting than that of any of the independent nations of Europe.

Vissarion Belinsky opposed the development of a separate Ukrainian literature on the grounds that it was not European, as was, in his opinion, Russian literature, whose finest poetic achievements were the result of Russia’s historical proximity to Europe and the assimilation of European elements into Russian culture. According to Belinsky, Ukrainian literature could develop only if the Ukrainian elites eliminated European elements from their culture, leaving the “non-European” Ukrainian element at its core. He wrote in that regard:

As far as the Little Russians are concerned, it is laughable even to think that anything could now develop out of their folk poet­ry, which, by the way, is wonderful: not only can nothing develop from it, but it has stood still ever since the days of Peter the Great; one could set it in motion only if the best, noblest sector of the Little Russian population gave up the French quadrille and began dancing the trepak and hopak once again, exchanged the tailcoat and frock coat for the jerkin and the homespun mantle, shaved its head and let down its topknot—in a word, re­verted from a condition of civilization, education, and humanity (the acquisition of which Little Russia owes to its union with Russia) to its former barbarism and ignorance....⁴

Thus, in the eyes of the Russian Westernizers, Russia was Europe and Ukraine was not, and the development of a distinct Ukrainian culture was a step away from Europe and the associated ideals of progress and liberty. Indeed, Belinsky and the nineteenth­century Russian Westernizers could be considered the forefathers of the concept promoted until recently by the pro-Russian lobby in Ukraine and epitomized in the slogan “To Europe together with Russia.” If Belinsky wanted to halt the development of a distinct Ukrainian poetry, literature, and culture, the proponents of this slogan wanted Ukraine to follow in the wake of Russian foreign policy—a course that could easily lead to curtailing the revival of

the Ukrainian language, literature, and culture and threaten the development of a distinct Ukrainian identity.

On the Ukrainian side, the most prominent nineteenth­century thinker to turn the tables on Russian intellectuals in the debate on the European character of Russia and Ukraine was Mykhailo Drahomanov. In his article “The Lost Epoch: Ukraini­ans under the Muscovite Tsardom, 1654-1876,” he took issue with Russian claims that Muscovite rule over Ukraine was responsible for abolishing the old “disastrous” Cossack way of life and intro­ducing new European mores. The Muscovite tsars, he argued, did not introduce European methods of government but abso­lutism and arbitrary bureaucratic rule. Discussing the Pereiaslav Agreement and the conditions negotiated by the tsar and the Cossack officers in the spring of 1654, Drahomanov wrote: “When we compare the rights which were guaranteed to the Ukrainian Cossacks with the despotism that existed in the Muscovite tsar- dom, there is no doubt that the Cossack constitution had more in common with the free European constitutional governments of today than the Muscovite tsardom had, or than even the present Russian Empire has.”⁵

In Drahomanovs view, Europe stood for the rights of man and Russia for absolutism and arbitrary government without the consent of the governed. He believed that Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s revolt against Poland in 1648 was consonant with the ideas of freedom that were then developing in Europe. According to Drahomanov, Ukraine had good prospects of developing its own freedoms and liberties from the modest beginnings apparent in the Europe of that day. Those prospects were cut off by Muscovy, which was responsible for Ukraine’s “lost epoch” of more than two hundred years—centuries in which Ukraine could have joined Europe on its path to freedom. “No wonder,” wrote Drahomanov, “that, during the years when Ukraine was united to Muscovy, with its autocratic tsar and legal serfdom and non-existent edu­cation, Russian despotism gradually brought about the destruc­tion of Ukraine’s freedom.... A wall of tsarist and bureaucratic despotism was erected to prevent the free political ideas then current in Europe, which Ukraine had always welcomed, from penetrating.”⁶ For Drahomanov, Europe equaled freedom, and on that scale freedom-loving Ukraine was Europe (or close to it historically and mentally), while Russia was not. In fact, it was preventing Ukraine from becoming part of Europe. But if Russia was not Europe, what was it?

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Ukrainian thinkers and historians of the second half of the nine­teenth century were in no doubt about what Russia represented. In their eyes, Russia, with its authoritarianism and lack of respect for collective and individual freedoms, stood for Asia, with all the negative connotations characteristic of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse of Orientalism. Drahoma- nov’s former colleague at Kyiv University and founder of mod­ern Ukrainian historiography, Volodymyr Antonovych, shared the ideas of Polish historians, who often denied the European character of Russia. No less critical of Russia’s “Asianism” was Antonovych’s student Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the creator of the national narrative of Ukrainian history and the first head of the independent Ukrainian state in 1918. Hrushevsky believed that, when it came to national culture and character, Ukrainians were much closer to Europe than Russians.

Not unlike their European neighbors, Ukrainians had re­spect for personal dignity and established forms of life, while Russians, in his opinion, lacked those “European” characteristics and idealized some questionable characteristics of their own cul­ture. Among the latter, Hrushevsky listed “lack of human dignity in oneself and disrespect for the dignity of others; lack of taste for a good, comfortable, well-ordered life for oneself and disre­spect for the interests and needs of others in such a life and the achievements of others in that sphere; lack of will to establish an organized social and political life; a disposition to anarchism and even social and cultural destructiveness.”⁷ In an essay on “Our European Orientation” (1918), Hrushevsky underlined those elements of Ukrainian history that linked it with Western and Central Europe, establishing Ukraine’s “European” credentials and stressing the differences between its historical development and that of Russia.

After the defeat of the Ukrainian Revolution, Hrushevsky, not unlike Drahomanov before him, saw the future of Ukraine in a European federation of democratic states. After his return to Ukraine in 1924, Hrushevsky fought vigorously against the chan­neling of European cultural achievements to Ukraine through Moscow. He protested Moscow’s attempts to limit translations from European languages into the languages of the Soviet na­tionalities, reserving for Russian literature the role of “window on Europe” for the non-Russian literatures and cultures. Hrushevsky insisted on direct access to European scholarship and culture for the Ukrainian academic and cultural elites. These efforts of Hrushevsky’s echoed the struggle against Russocentrism and for a European orientation waged inside Ukraine’s communist estab­lishment by the writer and publicist Mykola Khvyliovy. Accord­ing to the Soviet constitution, the Soviet Union was not Russia writ large but a union of independent republics, and Khvyliovy and his colleagues insisted on treating it that way. They refused to orient their culture toward Russia and insisted on access to West European culture and literature, denying Moscow the role of intermediary in that intercultural dialogue.

Writing in 1926, Khvyliovy asked his readers a rhetorical ques­tion: “Is Russia an independent state?” and answered it: “It is! Well, in that case we, too, are independent.” “By which of the world literatures should we set our course?” he continued his argument.

On no account by the Russian. That is definite and uncondition­al. Our political union must not be confused with literature.... The point is that Russian literature has weighed down upon us for centuries as master of the situation, as a literature that has conditioned our psyche to play the slavish imitator. And so, to nourish our young art on it would be to impede its development. The proletariat’s ideas did not reach us through Muscovite art; on the contrary, we, as representatives of a young nation, can better apprehend these ideas, better cast them in the appropriate images. Our orientation is to Western European art, its style, its techniques.⁸

As is apparent from the quoted excerpt, Khvyliovy justified his advocacy of the dramatic turn of Ukrainian culture from Russia to Europe with reference to the two dominant Soviet discourses of the time. The first was the idea of proletarian revolution, the second that of the national-liberation struggle of “young” nations against “old” imperial ones. In that context, Europe figured as the homeland of the proletariat, while young Ukraine was bet­ter equipped to understand proletarian culture than “old” Russia. Thus Ukraine’s quest for Europe was cast in Marxist and revo­lutionary terms.

The Russian response to Khvyliovy’s argument was formulat­ed by none other than Joseph Stalin, once a promising Georgian poet and later a ruthless Soviet dictator, who easily defeated the Ukrainian Marxist writer at the game of Bolshevik dialectics. In his letter of April 1926 to the Ukrainian Politburo dealing with nationalist deviations in the Communist Party of Ukraine, Stalin specifically attacked Khvyliovy and his writings. He wrote that, in calling for the reorientation of Ukrainian culture from Rus­sia to the West, Khvyliovy was in fact turning his back on the homeland of the first proletarian revolution and allying himself with the bourgeois West. Stalin’s line of argument, which ignored Khvyliovy’s national-liberation paradigm and turned his class­based argument upside down, was adopted by party officials in Ukraine. One of them, People’s Commissar of Education Olek­sandr Shumsky, who was accused of leniency toward Khvyliovy, later attacked him, making full use of Stalin’s insistence on an orientation toward Moscow not as the capital of Russia but as the capital of the international workers’ movement. Shumsky argued that “Red Moscow has also been created by the will, effort and blood of Ukrainian workers and peasants. Moscow is the capital of our Union. Moscow is the center and brain of the proletarian cause throughout the world. This is our Moscow.”⁹

Stalin’s argument won the day and determined the fate of Ukraine’s European discourse for generations to come. Khvylio- vy shot himself in 1933 to avoid arrest. Hrushevsky was exiled to Moscow, the capital of the world revolution, and died in Rus­sia under suspicious circumstances in 1934. Khvyliovy’s reluctant critic, Oleksandr Shumsky, was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1946. The Second World War and especially the subsequent Cold War promoted the notion of a hostile bourgeois Western Europe in official Soviet discourse. That discourse presented Ukrainian national aspirations as manifestations of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, while proponents of Ukrainian national culture were portrayed as stooges of the capitalist West.

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From the 1930s on, Soviet Ukraine was effectively cut off from the West, while anything resembling a European identity of Ukrainian elites or a European orientation of Ukrainian culture was not only discredited in the state-controlled public discourse but also suppressed and persecuted in the institutions associat­ed with Ukraine’s European orientation. That was the case with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was dissolved and “reunited” with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1946 in order to break its link with Rome. Still, there were limits to what the Soviet totalitarian state could control, especially with regard to processes going on beyond its borders. Between the two world wars, significant parts of Ukraine remained outside Soviet con­trol. Galicia and Volhynia constituted parts of the Polish state, while Bukovyna was part of Romania and Transcarpathia of Czechoslovakia.

Those countries and their Ukrainian lands became known in world politics of the time as Eastern Europe—a term applied to the newly independent European states from the Balkans in the south to the Baltics in the north and from the borders of Germany in the west to those of the Soviet Union in the east. “Eastern Europe” replaced the First World War-era term Mit- teleuropa, coined by the German strategist Friedrich Naumann to denote the lands “between Germany and Russia” that he expect­ed to constitute the German sphere of influence after the war. Contrary to his expectations, the war resulted in the complete or partial disintegration of the empires that controlled those terri­tories, creating a new zone in Europe that needed a new identity and a new name.

Among those who promoted the concept of Eastern Europe, while stressing wherever possible the new region’s connections with Western Europe, was the Polish historian Oskar Halecki. He and other Polish authors advocated the inclusion in East Eu­ropean geographic space not only of Poland but also of Belarus and Ukraine. This was partly a response to the geopolitical reality of the time, as western Ukraine and western Belarus constituted parts of the interwar Polish state. It was also a tribute to the long-standing Polish historiographic tradition of referring to Poland in its pre-1772 borders when discussing it as a historical entity. Back then, before the first partition of Poland, which wiped the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth off the political map of Europe, that state had included all the Belarusian territories and all of Ukraine west of the Dnieper.

Ukrainian cultural elites in interwar Galicia also considered their land part of Europe, not because it had been ruled for cen­turies by Poland but because, for almost a century and a half, it had been part of the Habsburg Monarchy and, later, Austria- Hungary—a multiethnic conglomerate that extended from Brus­sels in the west to Venice in the south and Lviv in the east. In fact, some Ukrainian literary figures of the period believed that the interwar Polish state had cut them off from the continent and therefore promoted the slogan “back to Europe.” Political commentators and historians, however, were less convinced of the exclusively European character of their nation. In the 1920s, op­posing the general trend among social scientists and historians of the region to regard their newborn countries as part of a historical and cultural space between the Eurasian East and the European West, the Ukrainian geographer Stepan Rudnytsky and the his­torians Stepan Tomashivsky and Viacheslav Lypynsky began to treat Ukrainian history and culture as products of the country’s situation at the crossroads between East and West.

Not unlike Polish and Romanian intellectuals, the Ukrainian authors emphasized the Western (European) influences on their national culture. In so doing, they not only followed in the foot­steps of their Central European colleagues but also countered opposing claims from the Russian Eurasianists and Pan-Slavists. The interwar tradition of applying the East-West paradigm to the interpretation of Ukrainian history and culture was continued in North America in the second half of the twentieth century by such scholars as Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Omeljan Pritsak, and Ihor Sevcenko.

The Second World War brought about substantial changes in the political geography of Europe. Not only did the former Polish possessions of Galicia and Volhynia become parts of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but the formerly Czecho­slovak Transcarpathia was annexed to it as well, along with other Ukrainian lands. All of Eastern Europe ended up in the Soviet sphere of influence, including Germany’s eastern lands, adding to the Mitteleuropa once conceived by German strategists not only the lands between Germany and Russia but part of Ger­many itself. The response of the East European intellectuals who emigrated to the West after the war was to stress even more the historical and cultural links of their region with the countries of Western Europe.

In 1950, Oskar Halecki, who immigrated to the United States, published a book entitled The Limits and Divisions of European History. There he developed some of his earlier ideas on the his­tory of Eastern Europe and suggested a new name, East-Central Europe, which stressed the region’s close relation to the West. Halecki divided Europe into three parts: western, central, and eastern. He further divided Central Europe into West-Central and East-Central segments. The former term was used to denote Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, known during the inter­war period as Eastern Europe. As had been the practice before the war, Poland was treated not within its new political borders but within its historical ones, including some if not all of the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, which were considered to be part of East-Central Europe.

The term “West-Central Europe” has never gained acceptance in scholarly and political discourse, but “East-Central Europe” has become current in scholarship, if not in politics. While pol­iticians and the media continued to speak and write about the countries of the Soviet bloc as parts of Eastern Europe, academics proved more willing to adopt the new name for the region. It was promoted mainly by historians of Poland, including Halecki himself, Piotr Wandycz, and others. The University of Washing­ton Press published a multivolume series on the history of East­Central Europe, and a number of chairs in history departments of North American universities have dealt with the history of East-Central Europe. The term made its way into political dis­course in the countries of the region, especially Poland, after the velvet revolutions of 1989.

In the academic sphere, the strongest promoter of the con­cept has been the Institute of East-Central Europe in Lublin, led by Professor Jerzy Kloczowski. Over the last fifteen years the institute has held scores of conferences and published dozens of volumes dealing with the history of the region. For Polish polit­ical and academic elites, the concept helped keep alive the long tradition of treating Poland and its former Commonwealth ter­ritories of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine as parts of one region. There is certainly a connection between the role that Poland plays today in promoting Ukrainian interests in the West, including its bid for membership in the EU, and the perception of its role as a leader in the lands that once constituted the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and now, in Polish eyes at least, make up part of East-Central Europe.

In Ukraine, the idea of East-Central Europe found support among historians first and foremost. The early 1990s saw the es­tablishment of a Society of Historians of East-Central Europe chaired by Professor Natalia Yakovenko, and in 2001 a History of East- Central Europe was published in Lviv under the editor­ship of Leonid Zashkilniak. Historians and literary scholars were among the few Ukrainian intellectuals who pointed out European elements of Ukrainian culture long before the dissolution of the USSR. Research on early modern Ukrainian culture and the mul­tilingual (Ukrainian, Polish, and Latin) literature of the period could hardly avoid stressing the differences between Ukrainian and Russian culture and the closeness of the former to European literary and cultural trends. But that argument was never fully articulated in the USSR, given prevailing circumstances, nor did it make a major impact on Ukrainian political thought of the period. Soviet censorship bears only part of the responsibility for that situation.

Given the division of Europe, the rise of the United States to prominence in international affairs, and the creation of the United Nations, the postwar period was often characterized by a discourse in which the concept of Europe as Russia’s traditional “other” was replaced by a notion of the West that included not only Western Europe and North America but also such a remote and southeastern part of Western civilization as Australia. The Ukrainian dissidents of the last decades of the USSR’s existence oriented themselves not on specifically European values but on universal values and human rights promoted by Western coun­tries. One of them, the literary scholar and publicist Ivan Dziuba, writing in the 1960s, decried the lack of translations of world literature into Ukrainian. Protesting suggestions that Ukrainians “could reach the world’s intellectual life through the medium of Russian culture rather than directly,” Dziuba followed in the foot­steps of Hrushevsky and Khvyliovy, the difference being that it was not just Europe but the whole world from which Ukraine was cut off by Russia. Thie signing of the Helsinki Final Act on Securi­ty and Cooperation in Europe (1975) gave international legitimacy to the dissident movement in the USSR and the countries of the communist bloc, but, when it comes to Ukrainian political and cultural thought of the period, Europe as such remained part of the broader category of the American-led West.

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After the dissolution of the USSR, independent Ukraine found itself at the crossroads of different cultural and political trends. Should the new Ukrainian nation go west and try to join the EU, play a more active role in the Commonwealth of Independent States, or become a major actor in the region that Polish intel­lectual and political elites called East-Central Europe? Or should it, perhaps, seek to lead the group of former Soviet countries of the Black Sea region? Ukraine under President Leonid Kuch­ma eventually adopted the model of a multivector foreign policy. Finding no welcome in the West, given their corrupt political and economic practices, and not wanting too close an association with Russia and its much more powerful oil tycoons, the Ukrainian political elites were also restrained by the conflicting political and cultural sympathies of the Ukrainian population—pro-European in western Ukraine and pro-Russian in the eastern parts of the country. As a result, Ukrainian foreign policy lacked a clear ori­entation for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, unless one can consider as such repeated attempts to play Russia off against the West and vice versa in order to achieve tactical goals.

The first years of the new millennium showed quite clearly that Ukraine’s intellectual elites and some of its political leaders were growing weary of the ineffectiveness of the Kuchma regime. Its balancing act between East and West not only in terms of foreign policy but also with regard to political, economic, and social development was leaving the newly independent nation further and further behind its western neighbors, who had re­formed their political and economic systems in preparation for joining the EU. Disappointment was especially pronounced in western Ukraine, where it found expression in a revival of the cult of the “grandmotherly” Austria-Hungary, which had ruled the region prior to 1918, and in a particular kind of Galician cultural isolationism. Some of the region’s most prominent intellectuals were prepared to toy with the idea of Galicia’s leaving Ukraine and “returning” to Europe.

More a dream than a plan, and more a cultural than a political project, those ideas found their reflection and inspiration in the writings of Ukraine’s most popular novelist, Yurii Andrukhovych. Frustrated with the corruption and ineptitude of the Kuchma regime in Kyiv, Andrukhovych defined his new cultural space not within the boundaries of Ukraine as a whole, as in his writings of the early 1990s, but in Galicia, historically rooted in its Austrian past and conceived as part of a common space with countries of Central Europe—the imagined world created prior to 1989 in the writings of Milan Kundera and Czeslaw Milosz. It took the Orange Revolution to bring Andrukhovych back to his post-in­dependence belief in Ukraine as a country that was parting ways with its colonial past and setting out on the path of European integration.

What was the response of the European West to the Ukrainian elite’s post-1991 attempts to declare their country part of Europe? Although experts at the Deutsche Bank predicted that Ukraine would become the most prosperous of the former Soviet republics, the EU never took Ukraine seriously as a po­tential member. In 1993, when the Council of Europe first looked into the possibility of its eastern expansion, the only post-Soviet republics considered for future membership were the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The disastrous performance of the Ukrainian economy was certainly one of the reasons for such lack of interest in the country responsible for the disinte­gration of the once mighty Soviet Union. But Ukraine’s dispute with Russia over nuclear weapons, Russia’s claims to the Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet, and lack of international recognition of Ukraine’s borders also could not fail to influence the EU’s posi­tion on Ukraine. Meanwhile, the newly independent country was struggling to assert its independence. It did not obtain support in the international arena, as the West did not want to antagonize the wounded Russian bear lest the political situation slip from Boris Yeltsin’s control and the nuclear-armed post-Soviet states follow the example of the former Yugoslavia, with much more disastrous consequences for the whole world.

Thus the Americans made common cause with the Russians, forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal. The Poles and oth­er East Europeans, on whom Ukraine was counting to form an anti-Russian bloc, were eager to join the EU and did not want to associate themselves too closely with a potentially failed na­tion or further antagonize Russia, which was in the process of withdrawing its troops from the former Soviet-bloc countries. Thus, in the summer of 1994, Ukraine had no choice but to agree to sign a document offered to it by the EU. The Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation between the EU and Ukraine was supposed to take effect only in 1998, almost four years after its signing, and its true purpose was to help Ukraine achieve political and economic stability, not to become a member of the EU.

In 1998, at the first meeting of the Council for Coopera­tion between Ukraine and the EU, created to oversee the imple­mentation of the 1994 agreement, Ukraine requested associate membership, only to receive a polite “no.” This occurred less than a year after the EU had not only initiated negotiations on future membership with such East European countries as Poland and Lithuania, with which Ukraine had been linked culturally and historically for many centuries, but also welcomed applications from countries like Romania and Bulgaria, whose political re­gimes and economic situation were hardly better than those of Ukraine. The document offered to the Ukrainian authorities, en­titled “The Common Strategy of the EU toward Ukraine,” made no provision for future membership.

In 2004, following the largest ever expansion of the EU, which extended it to the western borders of Ukraine (with Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland gaining membership), Ukraine was offered a new document entitled “The Action Plan” and designed for countries neighboring with the EU. Brussels was thus treating Ukraine on a par with such “neighbors” as Israel and Morocco. The entire world watched the drama and triumph of the Orange Revolution in Kyiv in November and December 2004—an event inspired by Ukrainian society’s desire to part ways with Russian- sponsored authoritarianism and join the democratic family of European nations. It was then that the EU decided to open mem­bership negotiations with Turkey.

When the new Ukrainian government of President Yush­chenko approached the EU in the aftermath of the Orange Rev­olution, asking for a “clear European perspective,” or the prospect of membership, it was offered nothing more than an additional ten-point program that did not change the substance of its re­lations with the EU and held out no hope of membership even in the most distant future. As a goodwill gesture, Ukraine intro­duced visa-free entry in 2005 for citizens of the member states of the EU. For its part, the EU forced its new members to reintro­duce strict Cold War-era controls on their borders with Ukraine. This was the case, for example, in the Slovak village of Szelmenc. “A 10-foot-high wire fence means that villagers on the Ukrainian side have to travel 416 miles to buy a 30 Euro visa (a fortune in that part of the world) to meet a relative on the other side of the street,” reported the Wall Street Journal in September 2005 in an article entitled “The ‘Apartheid Wall.’” The author noted that “It’s hard to forge an ‘Alliance of Civilizations’ when Europe’s so busy putting up walls.”¹⁰

The stagnation of the Ukrainian economy in the 1990s and the corruption of the Kuchma regime were of course major rea­sons for the EU’s reluctance to consider Ukraine as a prospec­tive member. Ukraine’s failure to introduce strict controls on its borders with Russia could not but influence the EU’s decision to “fortify” its new eastern boundary. Another reason is Ukraine’s size and the concern that its admission would cost the EU too much in agricultural and infrastructure subsidies. But that is only part of the story. The Brussels bureaucrats felt most comfortable with those forces in the Kuchma administration, including for­mer Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who showed little ini­tiative concerning Ukraine’s integration into Europe and oriented themselves on Russia. As Winfried Schneider-Deters pointed out at the time, Russia remained the EU’s major concern. After all, the agreement signed in 1999 by the leaders of the EU and Russia on the development of mutual relations in the decade 2000-2010 included recognition of Russia’s leading role in creating a new system of political and economic relations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

While the old Europe welcomed the Orange Revolution and the resulting prospects for Ukraine’s democratic development, it remained uneasy about Russia’s reaction to Ukraine’s growing ties with Europe. Quite telling in that regard was the statement made in September 2005, when Viktor Yushchenko was chosen as the first recipient of the Chatham House Prize: he was given the award in part for leading the Orange Revolution in such a way that Ukraine, Russia’s largest partner, brought about no serious deterioration in Europe’s relations with Moscow.

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The EU’s reluctance to admit that Ukraine is a European state even as it opens membership negotiations with Turkey, a country predominantly non-European in geography, history, and culture, may be viewed with amusement by outside observers, but it clear­ly annoys the Ukrainian political elite. Ukraine’s claim to the Eu­ropean character of its state, based on its geography, history, and culture, was once summarized by Oleh Zarubinsky, acting chair of Ukraine’s parliamentary commission on European integration.

In September 2005, addressing a conference in Washington, D.C., he made the following statement:

I would like to remind you of one thing which is self-evident.

I can’t stop repeating it, and I won’t get tired of repeating it. That is: Ukraine is a European state. First of all, Ukraine is geograph­ically situated in Europe, and moreover, the geographic center of Europe is situated in Ukraine—in Transcarpathia, near the village of Rakhiv. The history of Ukraine is not a topic of con­versation today, but one may remember that Kyivan Rus^z was one of the most developed countries in Europe over 1,000 years ago. One of the ancient trade routes crossed the territory of Ukraine—“from the Varangians to the Greeks.” Over time our links with Europe were cut off due to historical circumstances beyond our control. Thierefore, one should admit that Ukraine has always been a European state in terms of geography, history, and culture. Now it is time Ukraine regained its place in Europe in terms of developed institutions of democracy and political system. It is high time Ukraine joined the family of well-devel­oped democratic European states.¹¹

The lukewarm reaction of the old Europe to prospective Ukrainian membership in the EU brought profound disappoint­ment and disillusionment to those activists in Ukraine who most strongly promoted President V iktor Yushchenko’s pro-European course. The feelings of that part of the Ukrainian intellectual elite were best expressed by Yurii Andrukhovych, an enthusiastic pro­moter of Ukraine’s European choice during and immediately after the Orange Revolution. By the spring of 2006, he was so disappointed with the lack of support for Ukraine’s bid for EU membership on the part of the old Europe that he vented his frustration with the state of Ukrainian-European relations at the Leipzig Book Fair, where he was awarded the Prize “For Euro­pean Understanding.”

In his Leipzig speech, delivered on 15 March 2006, An- drukhovych directed the attention of his audience to a recent statement by a senior official of the European Commission who claimed that in twenty years all the European states except those that used to be part of the USSR would be members of the EU. That statement was used by anti-European forces in Ukraine to discredit President Yushchenko’s European project. Travel restric­tions imposed on Ukrainians wishing to go to Germany and other EU countries also served to derail the efforts of the pro-European lobby in Ukraine. “Actually,” said Andrukhovych, “I am not asking for very much: I want Ukrainians to be able to travel in Europe without restrictions. If only because they, too, are Europeans.”¹²

By the autumn of 2006, Andrukhovych was even more critical of the European Union’s policy toward Ukraine. In his writings and public statements, he distinguished clearly between Europe and the EU—terms that had been used interchangeably in Ukrainian political discourse since 1991. According to Andrukhovych, they were not identical. Europe, in his mind, had no clear boundaries and extended as far eastward as European culture itself. From that perspective, Ukraine was and remains a European country. Thie European Union, on the other hand, is a conglomerate of West European powers that lost their colonies and created the EU in an effort to recover their past glory and influence by launching a joint eastward expansion. As the countries of the “new Europe” refused to take orders from the old ones, the latter lost interest in EU expansion.

Andrukhovych accused the European “neo-imperialists” of helping to bring about the de facto defeat of the pro-European forces in the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of 2006. The same elections that pushed Andrukhovych over the edge in his critique of the EU have been treated more positively by another promi­nent Ukrainian publicist and supporter of “European Ukraine,” Mykola Riabchuk. Long and painful negotiations between polit­ical blocs in the Ukrainian parliament eventually resulted in the revenge of the forces backed by Russia in the presidential election of 2004 and the return to prime-ministerial office of Yushchen­ko’s principal opponent in that election, Viktor Yanukovych. The new/old prime minister did not overtly reverse Ukraine’s course toward integration into European institutions; instead, he made common cause with Ukraine-cautious Brussels bureaucrats and labeled Yushchenko and his supporters “Euro-romantics.”

Some observers saw Yanukovych’s return as the beginning of the end of Ukraine’s pro-European policy, but Riabchuk re­mained more optimistic. He argued that the ideas of the Orange Revolution, as the embodiment of European values, were poised to gain ground in the future. Ukraine’s civilizational matrix would lead it toward Europe one way or another. Riabchuk believed that, despite the setback of the 2006 elections, Ukraine has preserved an essentially European political culture embodied in the rising power of civil society and free mass media; Europe has retained its positive image and attractiveness in the eyes of Ukrainians; and the Ukrainian oligarchs were sure to be increasingly interested in stability and the rule of law.¹³

To many in Ukraine, Riabchuk’s vision of the new Europe­an Ukraine seemed more like wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of the current situation. This applied particularly to the hopes that he pinned on the Ukrainian oligarchs. However, there were increasing signs that, if a consensus on any aspect of Ukrainian foreign policy was emerging between the Yush­chenko and Yanukovych camps, then it concerned Ukraine’s integration into European institutions. In October 2006, Ya­nukovych stated in an article in the Washington Post: “President Yushchenko and I also agree that Ukraine has made a choice for Europe and will pursue closer relations with all European and Euro-Atlantic institutions. With the European Union, we are working on an action plan of reforms under the auspices of the European Neighborhood Policy, which we hope will lead to the beginning of negotiations on an E.U.-Ukraine free-trade agreement.”¹⁴ President Yushchenko, for his part, restrained his pro-European rhetoric, countering Yanukovych’s accusations that he was a “Euro-romantic.”

If that was the position of the elites, what did Ukraine’s or­dinary citizens think about the country’s European prospects? It would appear that, despite the failure of Ukraine’s desperate attempts to secure from the EU a mere promise of future mem­bership in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, the Ukrainian population at large remained quite sympathetic to Europe and believed that its new government had a chance of achieving its goal. Even before the Orange Revolution, 40 percent of the Ukrainian population was favorably disposed to the EU, accord­ing to a poll conducted by the National Institute of Strategic Studies of Ukraine in October 2004.

A poll conducted in May 2005 by the newspaper Dzerkalo tyzhnia (Weekly Mirror) indicated that more than 66 percent of Ukrainians believed that the new government was more trusted by the EU than the Kuchma regime, and more than 56 percent of those polled believed that the new government was making real steps toward Europe. The percentage of those who thought so was much higher in western than in eastern Ukraine. Even so, sympathy for a European orientation has been making spec­tacular progress in both western and eastern Ukraine since 1991.

The whole country had been undertaking what it calls a “lev- roremont”—the renovation of apartments, offices, and entire buildings according to European standards. But the “levrore- mont” was not limited to physical reconstruction. Ukraine’s new government and society at large put enormous effort into or­ganizing the Eurovision song contest in Kyiv in the summer of 2005. According to an opinion poll conducted by the Ukrainian Oleksandr Razumkov Center in September 2005, 33.3 percent of the Ukrainian population considered itself European. Almost 85 percent of those polled considered Ukraine to be part of Europe in geographic terms and 61 percent in historical terms, but most respondents—54 and 51 percent respectively—did not believe that Ukraine was a European state in political and cultural terms, while 77 and 74 percent did not consider Ukraine to be on a par with European economic and social standards. Clearly, it was not geography, history, or even culture but the difference between the standard of living in Ukraine and the countries of the EU that presented the main obstacle to the Ukrainian population’s adoption of a full European identity.

Kyiv looked to many in Ukraine like a “normal” European capital, and the provinces interpret its economic and cultural success as a sign of belonging to Europe. Interviewed by a Radio Liberty correspondent in September 2005, a visitor from the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine ignored the question of wheth­er she had participated in the Orange Revolution and attend­ed rallies on the Maidan—Kyiv’s Independence Square—and commented instead on the European appearance of Kyiv, which greatly impressed her. Kyivans, in her opinion, were already living in Europe, something that she defined by the level of services and wages, as well as smiles on people’s faces. The provinces, she said, were lagging behind. Fifteen years earlier, a visitor from the provinces commenting on the same phenomenon of Kyiv’s higher standard of living would probably have said that Kyivans were already living under communism, or compared Ukraine’s capital to Moscow. Therefore, people in the Ukrainian provinces began using a different scale—a European one—to measure their capital’s successes and failures, as well as their own. In this con­nection, one might note the successive renaming of the square at the northern end of Khreshchatyk in downtown Kyiv. Before 1917, it was known as the Tsar’s Square; in the mid-twentieth century, it was Stalin Square; later still, it was the Square of the Leninist Young Communist League. Its current name is European Square.

Given the Mykolaiv visitor’s refusal to answer the loaded question about the Maidan and her readiness to speak about Ky­iv’s European character, it remains tempting to think about the emergence of the European idea in Ukraine as a potential key­stone in the formation of a new Ukrainian identity. That identity is oriented toward elements in Ukrainian history and culture that are consonant with the ideas of individual freedom and democra­cy; it includes all citizens of the state; and it is profoundly differ­ent from the post-1991 Russian identity, which is based not only on recognition of the Russian Federation’s geostrategic position in Eurasian space but also on the tradition of Russian statism, authoritarianism, and great-power status. President Yushchenko once formulated the Ukrainian national idea as follows: “A Euro­pean Ukraine with liberal values and human rights and liberties.”

According to a Razumkov Center poll carried out in De­cember 2006, 63 percent of Ukraine’s opinion-makers agreed that European integration could indeed become a goal unit­ing Ukrainian society and providing the basis for a new type of Ukrainian identity, but only 27 percent of Ukraine’s population shared that optimistic attitude. This represents a decrease of 10 percent since the spring of 2005, when Ukrainians believed that the Orange Revolution would bring them closer to the European Union, and the percentage of those who believed in the unifying force of the European idea and those who disagreed with them was almost equal. It would appear that Ukrainian proponents of European integration have their work cut out for them not only abroad but also at home. That work can hardly be accomplished without support from the European Union.

Ukraine is interested in Europe, but so should Europe be interested in an independent and democratic Ukraine. In theory it is, but in practice it is still checking the textbooks to find out where Europe ends and Asia begins. One hopes that it will not take too long to accomplish that task. Commenting on the Or­ange Revolution and Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the EU, Alexander Motyl argued that the isolation of Ukraine in the stra­tegic desert between democratic Europe and authoritarian Russia automatically turns any pro-democratic movement in Ukraine into a pro-European one and helps define Ukraine’s European identity first and foremost in opposition to Russia.¹⁵

It is hard to disagree, especially in light of the subsequent events of 2013-14, when V iktor Yanukovych provoked mass pro­tests and eventually lost power after caving in to Russian pressure and refusing to sign the association agreement with the EU, on which he himself had been insisting for almost a year. Surprising­ly, little of substance has changed in Ukraine since the times of Mykhailo Drahomanov, when the “awakeners” of the Ukrainian nation oriented their young national movement toward Europe and away from Russia.