What do foreigners want to know about Ukraine?
One may be skeptical about political life in Ukraine, or one may sincerely believe in the future changes that our top leaders keep promising. Yet an analysis of Ukraine’s current sore problems allows one to look again at oneself from aside and make some conclusions.
That there are no questions without answers is amply proved by the English-language publication Ukraine in Europe: Questions and Answers. The book’s authors Prof. Oleksii Haran, Petro Burkovsky, and Volodymyr Dubrovsky attempted to analyze some aspects of Ukraine’s sociopolitical life, in which foreign journalists show interest, such as: Is Ukraine facing a split?
What will change in Ukraine after the elections? What policies will the new president pursue? This publication, prepared by the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s School of Political Analysis with the assistance of the International Renaissance Foundation and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, has already been launched in Munich, Cologne, and Berlin. It is now the turn of Ukrainian audiences, and in early February the book will be launched in London under the auspices of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Prof. Haran said at the launching ceremony at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy that the idea to publish this kind of “manual” emerged long ago. The point is that foreigners often request Ukrainian experts – political scientists, sociologists, and politicians – to give answers to such “eternal” Ukrainian questions as language, independence, NATO membership, “Kuchmagate,” the triumph of the Orange Revolution, the failures of the Orange governments, etc.
“As time went by, we evolved a system of argumentation, and, not to lose it and bring all the arguments together, we decided to publish a book which will contain concise answers to the standard set of questions about Ukraine,” says Prof. Haran. He claims that looking at things from the historical perspective allows Ukrainians to feel proud. “We are used to taking a skeptical view of this country’s political life, but in reality, if you look at it through the eyes of foreign experts, you will see a lot of democratic achievements,” the professor adds, “including Ukraine’s evolutionary path to independence and absence of interethnic conflicts.”
The author recalls that in 1994 the CIA forecast the possibility of Ukraine’s disintegration, but things went in a democratic way. On the whole, the book contains answers to the acute questions of today’s Ukraine, which provoke heated debates in society, such as, for example, the alleged discrimination of the Russian language. The authors maintain that, in reality, one can prove that he or she is right just by citing bare facts, without resorting to acrimonious disputes. Statistical facts will say that two-thirds of the newspapers are published in the “discriminated” Russian, not Ukrainian, language, and 50 percent of children study Russian at schools, although this is not compulsory.
The book also contains a forecast about the future political life in Ukraine. As Prof. Haran pointed out at the launching ceremony, in spite of radicalism, Ukrainian politicians are not “suicides.” The past five years have proved that all political forces and politicians are able to make concrete, if last-minute, deals. Having reached and looked into the abyss, the state’s helmsmen are displaying unheard-of cohesion. The forecast also suggests that, no matter who comes to power in Ukraine, they will have to carry out evolutionary, rather than radical, reforms and will also keep Ukraine’s “geopolitical drift” towards Western European organizations intact.
