At the Fence of Metternich's Garden

Honest journalism would certainly try to present the other side of the coin, however catchy and marketable the first, outer side might be. So far, only the Polish mass media care about balanced reporting on the ‘new neighborhood’ and, not surprisingly, it is primarily Polish politicians who treat their eastern neighbors, in most cases, honestly and coherently. They never avoid hot issues (and there are quite a few hot issues between Poland and Ukraine, many more than elsewhere in Europe). But they do not refrain from good words about the diligence of Ukrainian agricultural workers—even if they work illegally; they do not blame Ukrainian teachers in remote Polish villages for the country’s high unemployment; and they do not reduce eastern aliens to the caricature images of The New York Times—perhaps because they know that the neighborhood is not just about a chasing Ukrainians out with Polish versions of the Uzi and smart dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods:

The Ukrainian tourist is a guest who is very much awaited in Poland [Polish radio quotes a government official]. Today we have almost 2m tourists from Ukraine, tourists who come to our country above all for rest. This is a prosperous tourist, a tourist who spends relatively a lot of money in Poland. Zakopane [leading southern mountain resort] and the south of Poland today in great measure live from Ukrainian tourists. But Ukrainian tourists ever more frequently come to the Polish coast, to the Tri-City (Polish Radio 1, 30 June 2005).

As a matter of fact, serious studies reveal today [2007] that only 6% of Ukrainians express intention to emigrate, and only 13% have valid international passports—a far cry from a mass exodus from an impoverished country [Konieczna 2004: 3–5].1 Again, the poverty in Ukraine is a very relative notion (if compared with Africa or South Asia). A nominal average salary in Ukraine of $112 a month is in fact—in adjusted purchasing capacity—five times higher. In practical terms it means that an inhabitant of Kyiv, where the average salary is $400–$600 a month, can afford more or less the same standard set of goods and services as an inhabitant of Moscow, Athens, or Lisbon. Little surprise then, that the capital city, where the unemployment rate is next to zero, has become itself a powerful magnet for labor migrants, from both Ukraine and abroad (mostly from Asia). Such a ‘buffer’ apparently cushions the flow of labor-seekers to the West.

In sum, the Ukrainian immigration ‘threat’ is largely exaggerated. As a matter of fact, reliable studies prove that there are about a million, maximum two million Ukrainians working abroad, with either legal or illegal status. Nearly half of them (41–45%) work in Russia, about 18% in Poland, and about 11% in the Czech Republic. In all these cases not only geographic closeness (cf. the very limited move of Ukrainians to neighboring and visa-friendly Hungary) but also language and cultural proximity prove to be more important than higher salaries in the West. Western countries as destinations for Ukrainian Gastarbeiters lag far behind Ukraine’s immediate neighbors: about 11% of Ukrainian Gastarbeiters work in Italy, 9% in Germany, 7% in Portugal and 7% in Spain. In real numbers, this means around 100,000 workers, and certainly not more than 200,000, in each country.

Virtually all of them work hard and raise no claims to Western welfare. Most of them have no intention to stay permanently in the host country, but typically return to their families in Ukraine with earned money to invest in housing, education of children, or small business. Even those few who decide to stay permanently abroad usually get integrated in the host society, i.e., create no ethnic ghetto, exhibit no welfare parasitism, and certainly prove no susceptibility to religious fundamentalism or Al-Qaeda propaganda. Ironically, the countries where Ukrainian workers are most present, fear the ‘Ukrainian invasion’ much less than the countries where Ukrainians are virtually absent. It was primarily Poland, Portugal and Spain which tended to legalize Ukrainian illegal workers and sign agreements with the Ukrainian government to regulate the inflow, employment and return of Ukrainian, mostly seasonal, laborers.

Xenophobia is primarily a biological, not a sociological phenomenon. It comes from a basic instinct that can be controlled—or not; it can be tamed by culture and education—or released and exploited by populist ideologies and political forces. The second approach is certainly much easier to employ, so there is little surprise that the populist media and glib politicians make a scare-crow of a ‘Polish plumber’ who allegedly takes all the jobs from diligent Frenchmen, and blame the allegedly ‘too soft’ visa regime that reportedly facilitated a large-scale import of Ukrainian prostitutes to Germany in 1999–2001 (even though at the same time dozens of reputable Ukrainian professionals—scholars, journalists, businessmen—were denied visas: a clear sign that it was not a matter of ‘softness’ but, rather, of large-scale corruption, in which German officials had been apparently involved).

It is certainly not so easy to influence the dominant public discourses, but the problem should be definitely addressed and a degree of political correctness and professional responsibility should be established by joint efforts of politicians, journalists, experts, governments and, of course, public intellectuals. So far, it seems they may talk abundantly about Europe as a cultural project and about their common ideals and values, but can hardly spread their wishful thinking beyond their low-circulation books and esoteric journals. Real people who get real news and make real politics know pretty well that Europe ends at the eastern border of the EU. Further east, as the EU official document states, the so-called “European (sic) Neighborhood” begins. Mr. Frits Bolkestein, an EU commissioner, put it unequivocally: “In the east, there is a geo-political need for a buffer zone between the EU and Russia” (Financial Times, 7 March 2004). “In this context [a German scholar comments] the impending shift in the boundary of the EU squares well with an influential macro line-driving exercise, namely the lines drawn by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (1996). For this American, once the EU border has moved eastwards to include Poland there can be no reason to consider any further extension to the east. Eastern Christianity is another civilization, antagonistic to the liberal, pluralist, democratic Europe that Huntington wants passionately to defend. In short, here we have a strong macro argument for a cultural border, for the first time congruent with the political and economic border, and likely to accentuate pressures to consolidate a permanent ‘Fortress Europe’ to the west of the new border” [Hann 2001: 74].

In practical terms, ‘Fortress Europe’ means just a new iron curtain that protects the in-group against the out-group, the European haves against the non-European have-nots. Or, as a Romanian scholar ironically remarks, it is a “new wall that separates Europe from the ‘desert of the Tatars’ to its east”, since “the primordial and immediate interest of EU Europe as regards wider Europe is clear: Guard the borders east and south to prevent immigration and other unwanted flows from and through these marginal countries” [Mungiu-Pippidi 2004: 53].

Such an approach, however, is highly dubious in moral terms since it subverts the very principles the western liberal democratic world is built upon. This world, of course, is very inventive in finding convincing excuses and sophisticated ways to bypass some principles or to accommodate them to the daunting reality. But even in purely practical terms, besides the questionable commitments to elevated words and exalted ideals, the minimalist strategy aimed at containment of ‘odd neighbors’ may require ultimately even more resources than its maximalist alternative aimed at their engagement. In the modern world, where versatile security threats became globalized, firm borders tend to bring less and less help:

“Hard borders are not even very useful for combating cross-border crime. Most experts agree that improving police and security cooperation between countries is a more efficient alternative than hiring lots of border guards or buying expensive surveillance technology” [Zielonka 2004: 29]. “Extensive research shows that numbers of migrants will be limited, and that organized crime is much better fought through targeted, intelligence-led policing in the cities, not border controls and visas alone. Criminals usually have access to passports and forged documents, so new border controls will have a much bigger effect on Ukrainian traders and Belarusian peasants than on organized crime. But politics is often irrational—opportunistic politicians (like Jörg Haider) exploit potent fears of uncontrolled migration, even if these fears are unfounded” [Grabbe 2001: 42].

In sum, we should probably recognize that Europe would never become a genuinely cultural project, as Denis de Rougemont and other Kulturliterati envisaged. There is too much of Realpolitik around, too much of ‘might makes right’ and ‘charity begins at home’. There are too powerful forces and too strong temptations to make project Europe genuinely political and economic. And this is why we should still produce our low-circulation books and esoteric journals, and carry out our discussions on European culture, identity, and solidarity. We cannot complete our idealistic project but we can probably rescue it from ultimate degradation.

For Ukrainians and other East European nations who have been cynically (‘pragmatically’) excluded from Europe as a political project, culture remains the only field where they can cherish their imaginary Europeanness, and look for symbolic resources that might enhance their resistance to the dark neo-Soviet/neo-imperial forces that loom large in the East. Again and again, they should refer to Norman Davies’ encouraging dictum: “The right to be referred to as to ‘Europe’ (…) cannot be granted to just one part of the continent. Eastern Europe has never ceased to be European only because it was poor, underdeveloped, or ruled by tyrants. On the contrary, due to the fact that it was deprived of so many things, it became more European, more attached to the values that may be taken for granted by more prosperous citizens of the West” (Tygodnik Powszechny 18, 1992).

The impressive Orange Revolution in Ukraine, otherwise unexplainable, came fully in line with these perspicacious words, as well as with Adam Zagajewski’s earlier deliberations—relevant, as it appeared, not only in Central but also in Eastern Europe: “Soviet Russia has created some very strange things in our part of Europe. It has created informants, liars, censors, and bums who don’t feel like working. But at the same time, without wanting to, it has produced wonderful things in people who by the grace of God are stronger, and somehow more noble. It has aroused in them a wild hunger for truth, freedom, dignity, books, paintings … for Europe. And this is exactly how Europe exists in Central Europe—as a Europe of the imagination, of delusion, of hope, of hunger … The enormous cultural longing felt so strongly in our part of Europe is one of the paradoxical consequences of ‘Sovietization’” [1987: 21].

However critical we might be of fortress Europe and however unhappy we might feel with Wallerstein’s world-economy, we should clearly understand that no one can change these odd systems from the outside, if at all. No outsiders’ complaints would be heard inside or, if heard, taken seriously. All these complaints apriori are compromised as laments of lazy-bones, failures, or crazy leftists. Sometimes, or perhaps often, it’s true. But the West/Rest problem exists, and any attempt to cushion it or, at least, to facilitate cushioning—as our modest intellectual activities do—should be continued despite all setbacks.

2005

1 Cf. the conclusion made by the same reputable Polish sociologist: “Research reveals that there are no reasons to fear any new wave of the labour migration from Ukraine. It seems that everybody who wanted to move, has moved. In the meantime, the great majority of the citizens is absolutely not interested in any issues related to search for a job abroad. The group of travellers is rather narrow, albeit very active” (Ibid., p. 10).

(3) Ambiguous Borderland

In a recent [2005] interview for a leading Polish newspaper, a former French president and, at present, the head of the European constitutional convention, Valery Giscard d’Estaing had to answer a boring question that only importunate Poles could raise in a serious European conversation. The question was, yes, about Ukraine, specifically—about its eventual EU membership prospects.

Well, the president mused,

I feel that insistence on its membership is definitely premature. The problem requires deeper analysis. The borders of contemporary Ukraine were drawn by the Soviets in only around 1957. This causes controversies between Moscow and Kyiv. The Crimea, for instance, never historically belonged to Ukraine. A part of Ukraine has, indeed, a European character—these are the lands that had belonged to Poland and, earlier, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But the territories behind the Dnieper river and those to the south have a Russian character. Those lands cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU. Therefore, we should wait and see how things develop (Rzeczpospolita, 26–27 November 2005).

The answer is graphic and, in a way, paradigmatic. It was made not by somebody from the street, like a tabloid reader or writer, but by a prominent politician who, for decades, has influenced and still influences European politics. A deplorable mixture of ignorance, biases and malevolence says a lot on how Ukraine still is perceived in the West and what kind of ‘new neighborhood’ politics could be expected at Brussels in the nearest future.

Ignorance is the least reprehensible in Giscard d’Estaing’s statement. Ukraine’s borders were finally drawn in 1954, not 1957. The territories behind the Dnieper river, the so-called Left-Bank Ukraine, are no more Russian in character than the Right Bank, whatever this ‘Russian character’ might mean. Both of them belonged historically to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which stretched as far as the contemporary borders of the Russian Federation and Kharkiv region. And the patterns of political behavior in both these regions are not much different, as anybody can discern looking at the respective results of elections and/or opinion polls.

The most striking thing in Giscard d’Estaing’s statement is the whimsical logic that a reputable politician employs or, rather, manipulates. At the very beginning, he makes a slight but significant shift in discourse, answering actually not the question that was put. The journalist’s question was about Ukraine’s membership prospects, which were basically guaranteed by Article 49 of the EU Treaty: any European state that firmly meets the Copenhagen criteria can apply for membership. Neither Giscard d’Estaing nor any other responsible politician can deny these prospects as long as the EU Treaty is in force. He pretended, however, that the question was not about remote prospects (in principle, undeniable) but about immediate membership (ridiculous, of course, since Ukraine is indeed far away from the required criteria—but probably not further than Albania, or Bosnia & Herzegovina, let alone Kosovo). No doubt, “insistence on Ukraine’s membership is definitely premature”, as Mr. d’Estaing put it. The only problem, however, is that neither Ukrainian politicians nor the Polish journalist have ever “insisted” on Ukraine’s immediate membership or questioned its “prematurity”. They only wanted Mr. d’Estaing (and other EU officials) to confirm Article 49 and perhaps to speculate a bit on Ukraine’s long (but undeniable) way towards the required criteria.

Instead, he falsified the agenda of the discussion and represented the other side (Ukrainian and Polish) as irresponsible troublemakers, adventurers or, at best, nuisances who allegedly “insist” on something untenable at the moment and ridiculous.

Another discursive trick is made in a seemingly objective statement about “controversies” between Moscow and Kyiv, caused allegedly by the unsettled status of the Crimea. In actuality, yet, there are no controversies of the sort—in legal terms—since the status of the Crimea has been long ago settled both bilaterally (by Russian–Ukrainian agreements of 1990 and 1997) and internationally (both Russia and Ukraine, as OSCE members, recognized the inviolability of the existing borders in Europe, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum obliged the signatories, including Russia, not to challenge or question Ukraine’s sovereignty in any way). What Mr. d’Estaing probably means by “controversies” is the persistent political, economic, and military pressure from the Russian side, irresponsible statements by nationalistic Russian MPs, military men, and other hawks, and all sorts of provocations staged by Russian and pro-Russian extremists in the Crimea.

The same kind of “controversy” between Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia resulted, one may remember, in annexation of the Sudetenland and eventually of the whole Czech part of the country. The Kremlin hard-liners would certainly appreciate Giscard d’Estaing’s ‘impartiality’ as an implicit encouragement for further aggressive (or just “controversial”, as he put it) politics vis-à-vis Kyiv. His argument that the Crimea “had never historically belonged to Ukraine” may sound even more encouraging for the revanchists. But what might the implications of this sort of argumentation be? In Alsace? In Silesia? In Kosovo? In Kaliningrad? There are even more territories that “had never historically belonged to Russia”. And, by the way, the Crimea is one of them—as the native land of the Crimean Tatars, whose ancient state, the Crimean Khanate, was conquered and colonized by the Russian empire only at the end of the 18th century. One can barely find a single Crimean Tatar today who would opt for Moscow rule instead of Kyiv’s.

But what on earth have all these arguments to do with Ukraine’s EU membership prospects? The answer dwells probably at the end of Giscard d’Estaing’s argumentation. There, he speaks about a “Russian character” of the Ukrainian south-east—a vague notion that might mean either political or cultural and linguistic affinity with Russia. Whatever it means—a primordial hostility to the West, higher loyalty to Moscow than Kyiv, or just some regional peculiarities like a “French character” of the Belgian south, Swiss west or Canadian east,—Giscard d’Estaing’s verdict on Ukraine is much harder than on Belgium or Switzerland: “Those lands [i.e., Ukraine’s south east] cannot belong to the European Union as long as Russia is not admitted to the EU”.

In other words, they can never belong to the EU because Russia has never had any intentions to get there and would barely have them in the foreseeable future. Ukraine, with all its European aspirations and attempts to democratize the country, is simply downgraded to the level of essentially anti-Western, anti-European, authoritarian Russia. In fact, it is treated not as a sovereign state but, rather, as Russia’s client, a satellite or, perhaps, a kind of ‘Taiwan’ visa-a-vis ‘Greater China’.

And this is the essence of all the rhetorical zigs and zags demonstrated by the French politician. He, like many of his colleagues in France and elsewhere, has never believed that Ukraine does exist as a separate nation and that Ukrainians, even those who speak Russian, may have nonetheless a different identity, different aspirations, and different, not necessarily pro-Moscow, loyalty. Even though the Orange Revolution has shaken these stereotypical views, they persist in the West, having a long diplomatic, political, cultural, and academic tradition, deeply rooted in consciousness and collective sub-consciousness, in dominant discourses and multiple institutions.

Traumatic experience

Historically, Ukrainians have many reasons to be very sensitive about how they are treated and perceived by the West. Independent Ukraine proved to be the “unwanted step-child” not only of Soviet perestroika (as Martin Sieff put it) but also of the 1917 Russian revolution. Every Ukrainian student knows today from his/her historical textbook that the US established diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933, exactly when Moscow was starving to death at least five million Ukrainian peasants. And from the same textbook, they know how in the same year the British Foreign Office strove to silence any information about the man-made famine in Ukraine so as not to irritate the valuable trade partners in Moscow [Subtelny 2009: 416].

Against such a background, many Ukrainians cannot but suspect that the West still has not come to terms with Ukraine’s existence, and still tends to treat it as a legitimate zone of vaguely defined but widely applied Russian ‘interests’: “Most European governments would very happily leave Ukraine in Russia’s orbit, rather than worry about the problems of a large, backward and fissiparous country” [Barysch & Grant 2004].

Such a perception has been skillfully exploited by the post-Soviet elite to invigorate old anti-Western stereotypes in Ukrainian society, to justify the lack of a coherent, comprehensive and responsible foreign policy driven by national rather than clannish or personal interests, and to divert public attention from the real and fundamental reasons that made crypto-Soviet Ukraine incompatible with and non-admittible to the EU. The rhetorical strategy under Kuchma [1994–2004] was designed to persuade the people that we are excluded not because we are unreformed and our leaders are crooks and liars but just because we are different, we are Ukrainians, Eastern Slavs, the ‘worse’ brand of human beings.

Unfortunately, Europeans did little if anything to disperse these impressions. On the contrary, in many cases, they fueled fears and biases deeply rooted in Ukrainians’ inferiority complexes.

Perhaps the best example of blind and, alas, firmly institutionalized West European Russocentrism comes from a classified report drawn up by the German and French foreign ministries in 2000: “The admission of Ukraine would imply the isolation of Russia. It is sufficient to content oneself with close cooperation with Kiev. The Union should not be enlarged to the East any further …”1

To some West European EU members [an American expert comments on this whimsical logic] Ukraine is still seen as ‘semi-Russian’, a factor that reinforces the tendency to place the fate of all three eastern Slavs together … Linking the destinies of Ukraine and Russia places them both beyond ‘Europe’ … This suits Russia, which is seeking to develop a ‘strategic partnership’ with the EU but not membership. It does not suit Ukraine that seeks membership” [Kuzio 2003: 6, 14].

There are, of course, many reasons to prioritize relations with Russia as the biggest country on the continent, with rich natural resources, primarily gas and oil, the largest nuclear arsenal, and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. But the reasons why Russia is overtly favored at the expense of its neighbors are less clear. Partly it can be explained by an imperial likeness between the large European nations and Russia, embedded historically in modes of thought and behavior, in national psyche and ‘habits of the heart’. A more credible explanation, however, is a heavy dependence of Western thought and Western ideas about Russia on Russian imperial myths elaborated, by and large, in the 18th century and firmly established as the ‘scholarly truth’ and ‘common knowledge’. Ukraine unfortunately has been a central part of this historical and cultural mythmaking, its major target and victim.

In brief, the myth consists of three major narratives. The first one blurs and washes away any difference between two very different historical entities—Ruś and Russia. The linguistic similarity is successfully converted into a historical, geographical and political similarity and, eventually, sameness. By the same token, modern Romania can be identified with ancient Rome, and Britain identified with Brittany. The second narrative grants the modern name Russia, coined in the early 18th century, to medieval Muscovy and establishes mythical ties between the Moscow Tsardom and Kyivan Ruś. The fact is, however, that no idea of Moscow’s succession to the Kyiv Ruś legacy could be found in Muscovite thought until the end of the 17th century, when Left Bank Ukraine and the city of Kyiv were taken from Poland and when the Grand imperial myth began to be formed (ironically, by Ukrainian clerics hired by Peter the Great and seeking to enhance their country’s symbolic role as the cradle of the empire). And finally, the third narrative questions the very existence of the Ukrainian (and Belarusian) nations, misrepresenting them as incidental offshoots of the great Russian nation—despite the fact that these ‘offshoots’ came under full Russian control for the first time in their history only at the end of the 18th century, after the partition of Poland.