Ukraine, a "European" State

Now it comes turn for another magic incantation, that Ukraine is a European state. Not surprisingly, the President of Germany Roman Herzog began his visit to Ukraine with it. This sentence, absolutely normal for a high-school geography course, is very dangerous politically. On one hand, speculating on the geographical "Europeanness" of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials speak glibly about the problem of the lack of Europeanness in Ukrainian popular opinion and ignore the reality that there is a new economic and psychological Berlin Wall on Ukraine's western border, the destroy of which will be much harder than it was to destruction of the marionette communist regimes in the countries of the former socialist camp.

In the final analysis, Europeanness is in essence not a matter of geography but something much deeper. If we were to accept this official Ukrainian verbiage, then no doubt Mexican officials would have nothing better to do than to sound off about their geographical proximity to the USA. And what about Kenya which is an African state, as are both Rwanda and the South African Republic? Obviously, Mongolia would insist stubbornly on its closeness to Japan. And it seems, that in Albania nobody doubts that their country is also "European."

Europeanness means above all the economy, democracy, and lack of corruption. In Ukraine, on the contrary, the Premier's European course officially declared in Davos and the participation of the President in the recent summit of the leaders of Central and Eastern Europe in Slovakia coincided with the remarkable appeal by two deputies to the Constitutional Court, casting doubt on the need for political parties, and leading to what Deputy Vadym Hetman calls the "great" Russian model. Certainly this is why Ukrainian leaders, while talking to the German President, voiced their concern that Ukrainian political parties lack influence, members, in general do not reflect public opinion, and that party lists are a violation of human rights. Obviously, Herzog agreed with them and failed to recall that only two parties have managed to organize the whole people and be extremely influential: one is taken from the history of Germany in the 1930s, the other from the history of the USSR.

A danger of this ritual Europeanness for Ukraine is also that psychologically it could play the role of policing consciousness that communism not so long ago played, for the Soviet people did not build communism; it simply waited for manna from heaven. Here you can sit without working and expect that sometime you'll immediately become "European," all because the center of Europe is somewhere just outside of Khust in Transcarpathia, and you don't have to say that all the talk about Ukraine's "Europeanness" only reflects its laziness.

The West might one day get fed up with this incomprehensible, raw "European Ukraine," and would rather deal with a Eurasian or even Asian Russia — and such a scenario is not out of the question in Russia — although Russian politicians are not so cooperative and loyal as their Ukrainian counterparts (against NATO, against bombing Iraq, and against something else). Meanwhile we have to recognize that Russian politics is more sincere, open, and thus more predictable.