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![]() Slawomir SierakowskiEurope Needs UkraineSome
time ago, our slightly crazy
national hero, Lech Walesa, the
Solidarity leader from the 1980s, and a man always
full of surprises,
announced that Poland and Germany
should unite into one country,
under the name “Europe.” As Freud noted,
gaffes can help us discern
intentions hidden to us. Mr. Walesa’s comments about Poland and Germany are a
vivid illustration of just how much has changed in the minds of both nations,
and of all Europeans. In 2011, Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw
Sikorski, gave a speech expressing alarm not about an
overly strong Germany, but about a Germany (Europe’s “indispensable nation,” he
said) too timid and reluctant to take responsibility for the Continent. Who, in
previous generations, could have imagined this? I bring it up to challenge Europeans to expand their
imagination again. On Nov. 28, the European Union and Ukraine will hold a
summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania. On the table is an agreement under which
Ukraine would move toward integration with the union. Many in Europe, in fact,
doubt that full integration will occur, in the face of Russia’s jealousy over
its borderlands and questions about the bare-knuckle quality of democracy in
Ukraine, where President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s
government has jailed a popular rival, the former prime
minister Yulia V. Timoshenko, on political
charges. Ironically, the country that seems the least doubtful
about the prospects for Ukrainian integration into Europe is Russia, as
revealed by the embargo that it recently slapped on Ukrainian and Moldovan
goods. It was a clumsy effort to cow those countries into favoring Russia’s
nascent customs union, but it has only served to increase Ukrainian and
Moldovan antipathy. The real skeptic about Ukraine’s chances is the West.
Brussels has pledged a mere billion euros in assistance under the proposed
agreement. In essence, the European Union is not even reimbursing Ukraine’s
travel expenses. It’s as if the European Union believed less in the chances of
democracy in Ukraine than the United States did in Iraq. The short-term costs of ratifying the agreement would
likely be high for Ukraine. Moscow’s embargo has already reduced
Ukrainian-Russian trade by 25 percent, and joining Europe’s free-trade zone
would expose Ukraine’s industries to rivalry with more competitive companies.
Brussels must prepare a plan for concrete assistance to Ukraine to pre-empt a
backlash if the agreement moves forward. If it falls through, on the other hand, Ukraine might
find itself more dependent on Russia, and would likely be followed by other
former Soviet republics — a triumph for Russia’s expanding customs union, which
is intended to politically compete with the European Union. Any sign of hesitation by the European Union may also
tempt Russia to amplify its pressure on Ukraine. Through its leased military
bases on the Crimean Sea and the activities of ethnic Russians in Ukraine,
Moscow could pursue a policy of provocation and coercion there. Indeed, the West let Georgia down in a similar way. At
the 2008 NATO summit meeting in Brussels, Western leaders could not decide
whether to admit Georgia (and Ukraine) to NATO. A quick provocation and a war
over the separatist Georgian region of South Ossetia followed. Soon, Georgia
began to distance itself from the alliance. Just last month, Ukraine, too,
abandoned its long-term efforts to join NATO. The European Union must not repeat that mistake. It
must stop thinking that there are two Ukraines, one
more Russian and only the other truly Ukrainian. Ukraine is one nation, and
even those citizens who speak Russian want an independent Ukraine and identify
themselves as Ukrainian. In a recent poll by the market research firm GfK, 45 percent of Ukrainians supported integration with
Europe, while only 15 percent favored integration with Russia. Even Ukraine’s
oligarchs support the association agreement, and they are taking in stride the
current losses in trade with Russia. But is the European Union sufficiently invested in the
social and cultural integration of Ukraine? In my country, Poland, Fulbright scholarships for the
Communist elite in the 1970s and 1980s led to the transformation of party
apparatchiks into ardent fans of the West after Communism fell in 1989. The European Union should have long ago started doing
everything possible to weave a similar network of contacts between Ukrainian
society and the European Union, through partnerships between universities,
scholars, young people, cultural institutions and, yes, political parties —
such ties are especially important for parties that are not yet democratic. It’s not too late. Thanks to Freud, we know that
lapses in speech or memory can signal thoughts hiding in our subconscious.
Boris Groys, a German cultural philosopher of Russian
heritage, has translated this notion to geopolitics, writing: “Russia is the
West’s subconscious.” Before the Vilnius meeting, the West must accept a
thought that it tries to repress: that the European Union was founded not,
first, to ensure prosperity, or even democracy (though
it wound up doing both). It was founded primarily to reverse the fatal logic of
catastrophic wars. Today, everyone remembers the West’s good-will gestures to a
defeated Germany. In my country, everyone remembers Germany’s determination,
decades later, to help Poland join the European Union. Now, Poland has become
the most active country in helping to integrate Ukraine. The historian Timothy Snyder famously used the term “bloodlands” to describe the wide swath of Eastern Europe
where some 14 million people died because of Hitler and Stalin. If the European
Union is necessary anywhere, it is there. Slawomir Sierakowski
is a sociologist, a founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and the director of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Warsaw. This article was translated by Maria Blackwood from
the Polish. |