Ukraine and the Disenchantment of Europe

Bo Petersson & Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke

Ukraine and the Disenchantment of Europe

History happens when we least expect it. Changes can occur over night, and though some

commentators and analysts claim they can predict future developments, we are more often taken by surprise. The protests that emerged in Kyiv in November 2013 appeared as one of those surprises, leading to political upheaval not only in Ukraine, but also within the EU and in the relations between Russia and the West. If Europe had lost some of its ‘magnetic power’ already before the Maidan protests, the political crisis that followed certainly accelerated the development. At any rate, to include Ukraine seamlessly into the European circle of norms and values proved to be far easier said than done. By way of recap, it was the rejection of the association pact with the EU by the Moscow-backed then President Viktor Yanukovich that prompted the unrest at the Maidan. In turn, this led to Yanukovich’s downfall. Further on in the chain of events there were the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the Russia-backed rebellions in the eastern parts of the country. All in all this added up to the severest crisis in the relations between Russia and the West since the Cold War.

Yanukovich’s successors in Kiev, most notably the new President Petro Poroshenko, restored the policies towards drawing nearer to the EU, albeit on behalf of a country not completely controlled by him and his government. The association pact between Ukraine and the EU was finally signed by Poroshenko in mid-September 2014. He thereby declared his intention that Ukraine be an EU Member State by the year 2020. Quite clearly, for him the EU is a promise and a perceived recipe to solve the pressing problems that Ukraine is currently engulfed by. However, support from the EU has not been consistently forthcoming. The way that the EU has responded to the crisis in Ukraine, not least the way that European leaders and EU diplomacy have appeared divided in front of Putin’s Russia, have put some serious question marks for EU’s role as a global player. Also, the internal European split in relation to Russia only emphasized what the results of the elections to the European Parliament in May 2014, when populist and Eurosceptical parties attracted remarkably high portions of the vote in several of the member states, had already indicated, namely that the EU is suffering from a political crisis. As one commentator wrote following the elections: “Along with a chronic economic crisis, Europe now has an acute political crisis. Yet the EU establishment seems bent on pursuing business as usual” (Legrain 2015). However, as was pointed out in the introductory chapter, the then Head of the European Commission, Jean Manuel Barroso, observed already in 2013 that there is no way back to the old normal.

Nowhere were the divisions about the foreign policy vector within the EU more clearly symbolized than in the appointment in 2014 of the new tandem to represent the EU at the highest level. Whereas the New High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini of Italy, was subject to public criticism, especially from Eastern Europe, for being too soft on Putin’s Russia, the new European Council President, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, certainly represented a tougher stance.

But how could the Maidan protests and the ensuing conflict over and in Ukraine so seriously affect the EU? And how come this disenchantment with Europe, as we could term the ensuing

disillusionment paraphrasing Max Weber, and all the frustration that has come to dominate the current debate about the EU and its future? In this chapter we shall discuss the recent developments in the relations between EU and Russia and what the current crisis over Ukraine can tell us about Europe as a promise, a contested ideal, a bogeyman, an anachronism, and perhaps even an illusion. Did the recent developments in fact lead to a further disenchantment with the EU as a political project? Or, can this disenchantment bring about a more straightforward approach to the EU’s potential, and to fewer illusions about Europe as such? Who in fact has the right to speak in Europe’s name – the European Council President Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel – or even Vladimir Putin?

The past is present

From an early stage on, historical comparisons have been used prolifically in connection with the crisis over Ukraine, not only by historians and social scientists but by leading politicians such as Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin as well. One way of explaining the extensive use of historical references is the obvious one that political leaders turn to past experiences when confronted with new and challenging situations, and therefore historic analogies become an important tool for making decisions in times of crisis (Neustadt & May 1988). There are several conceivable reasons for this, such as that the analogy simplifies critical reflection and makes a complex situation

comprehensible. As exemplified by Hans Mouritzen (2014), the ‘ghost’ of 1864, when Denmark lost Schleswig Holstein in a humiliating battle with Bismarck’s Germany, determined Danish foreign policy-making for several decades after the defeat. However, the risks are obvious with letting analogies of the past steer the present. In terms of warfare, the new war may be fought on premises that have already become obsolete, which in turn may lead to disastrous results in terms of losses, damage and defeat.

Do all the references to the past in connection with the Ukraine crisis then mean that visions for the European future are only gleaned through the rear mirror? Is there no new thinking, to borrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s catchphrase from the 1980s? Almost needless to say, in connection with the Ukrainian crisis it is predominantly the bogeyman specter of the past that has tended to surface in Western commentary. In Russian retorts, however, there are clear indications of the use of scripts connected to what we have referred to as Europe as a contested ideal and as an anachronism. However, what in many ways started the crisis in the first place is the fact that Europe was seen as a great promise by the protesters at the Maidan, and continues to be viewed that way by the political leaders of Ukraine, the new President Poroshenko included. So, in other words, Europe seems to be all of the above at one and the same time. It is both a promise and a contested ideal, both a

bogeyman and an anachronism but it means different things to different actors in different situations and contexts. The references to the European past in connection with the crisis over Ukraine in fact demonstrate this. Basically, we can discern four different, and dark, periods of contemporary European history that have been referred to in this context, and we shall now elaborate somewhat on them.

First, when Russia first threatened to invade Crimea, ostensibly to protect members of the Russian minority there, the situation was in Western Europe and the US compared to the way Nazi Germany justified its annexation in 1938 of the Sudetenland and how this eventually led to the Second World War (Kilgore 2014). This wording was used by among others the Speaker of the Czech Senate Milan

Stech and the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Sweden’s then Foreign Minister Carl Bildt used this analogy already at the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.) Most conspicuous is perhaps former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s comment in The Washington Post, in which he reflected over history and the recent events in his country. Admittedly, Saakashvili has his own axe to grind. He was the President of Georgia when Russia invaded, defeated and humiliated that country in the brief war of 2008 which has rightly been seen as a precursor to the current conflict with Ukraine and as the beginning of the end of the relatively harmonious US/EU-Russia relations in the post-Cold War period. Even if Saakashvili continued as President until the expiration of his second term in office in 2013, his political career and domestic popularity never quite recovered from the blow. Even so, his invoking of parallels with past events is so strong that it is worth taking note of. The scariest bogeyman of them all is brought out of its coffin:

Many in the West are talking about the need to reach some kind of compromise with Russia, an option that smacks of Munich 80 years ago. They claim to be motivated by such common strategic interests as nonproliferation and the fight against terrorism; by the same token, under the guise of needing to contain the Soviet Union and stop the spread of communism, Chamberlain reached a deal with Hitler. Now, of course, we know that all attempts to appease the Nazis led the big European powers to feed one country after another to Hitler and, ultimately, led to World War II (Saakashvili 2014).

Secondly, at the time when the Ukrainian parliament voted to downgrade the legal status of the Russian language, the internal relations between Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars developed into violence in the eastern part of Ukraine. Though the vote was immediately vetoed by the then Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov, it provided, as Tim Judah wrote, “a pretext for Putin and the pro-Russian activists in Crimea to take action”. What used to be marginal political forces “whipped up latent resentment” he claimed (Judah 2014). Here references were made to the wars in Ex-Yugoslavia, where neighbors became enemies overnight and genocide was committed while the international society stood by watching. Thus analogies and memories of the worst trauma befalling Europe after the end of the Cold War are brought to life. Just having returned from a visit to eastern Ukraine, Judah elaborated:

As men in beaten-up cars race up the country roads past towering grain silos, as groups gather to demand referendums, as people tell me that they don’t believe that war is coming and that Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, I remember the same brave talk, the same euphoria, and the same delusions before the Yugoslavs tipped their country into catastrophe in the 1990s. Ukraine is not like that Yugoslavia, although the atmosphere in the east is a horrible similar combination of resentment and disbelief (Judah 2014).

It should be kept in mind that contemporary Ukraine is divided by a historical split between the predominantly Slavic eastern part and the European-dominated west. The split was widened during the great famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s, where between 2.4 and 7 million ethnic

Ukrainians mainly in the west perished as a result of the forced collectivization of the farming sector and the forcible procurement of grain and livestock to other parts of the Soviet Union. The split was further widened a decade later when Nazi-Germany invaded the region and made the eastern part into what Timothy Snyder (2010) has labelled bloodlands. Millions of Ukrainians, mostly from the

east, died in concentration camps, in resistance movements or while serving in the Soviet army, whereas the western part remained relatively unscathed, partly because of collaboration with Nazi-Germany. This historical split is often neglected by the international community, but it feeds into the current conflict and the way it is being framed, especially by the Russian side. The recurring and seemingly greatly exaggerated Russian references to neo-Nazis and fascists in the government in Kiev should be seen against this background. Thus, there is a risk that Ukraine, like Ex-Yugoslavia, will be taken over by ‘ghosts of the past’. Again, the bogeyman is certainly there, but used for different purposes by different actors.

And thirdly, the closer the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War came, the more

apparent the comparisons between this and the Russian performance in and around Ukraine got. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as the then Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt focused their historical analogies on the events leading up to this war. Similarly, around the marking of the centenary, the historian Niall Ferguson asked while referring to developments in Ukraine if such a catastrophe could happen again. Ferguson argued that the sequence of events since the Malaysian jet MH17 was shot down during the summer of 2014 had been remarkably similar to the one that followed the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the summer of 1914. Like then, the crisis began with an act of state-sponsored terrorism. Like then, Russia sided with the troublemakers, and, finally, the request on behalf of the Dutch government for access to the site where the plane had crashed and several of its nationals had perished was reminiscent of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. And again, in essence it is the ownership of what seems an

unimportant region of Eastern Europe that is being disputed (Ferguson 2014).

The fourth historical analogy to present itself is also triggered and suggested by the downing of MH 17. In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union shot down the South Korean jet airliner KAL 007 which had happened to enter Soviet airspace. The aircraft had about 300 passengers on board, all of whom died in the crash. This represented one of the iciest moments of the Cold War, and on the rhetorical level one may get the impression that the Cold War, where Russia was ever pitted against the West, has now returned from the shadows. On the day that Crimea signed its accession treaty with the Russian Federation, Putin justified Russia’s actions using a language which certainly did away with any illusions about cordial cooperation with the United States or the West. In doing so he accused the Western countries, led by the USA, of having ‘lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact’ (Putin 2014a).

The historical analogy of the resumption of the Cold War is in our view the analogy closest at hand of them all. In retrospect, the period from the Fall of the Wall and onwards to the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, may actually represent an aberration in US/EU-Russian relations. This was a time of

relatively smooth and harmonious cooperation, and in the early 1990s the then President Boris Yeltsin was even thinking aloud about the Russian Federation joining the European Union in a not too distant future. On other generously mediated occasions, he and the US President Bill Clinton laughed together and looked highly relaxed in each other’s company. Now, that time is long gone, and Russia’s relations with the West are back at Square One of mutual suspicion.

The Russian challenge

Not that the Russian opposition to Western norms should have come as a total surprise, however. Like it was pointed out in the introductory chapter there was ever since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s first presidential term in office notable discrepancy between the understanding in the EU of the key word of democracy and Putin’s official reading of it, as manifested by that cherished expression of Putinist Russia, ’sovereign democracy’ (Petersson 2013). The latter certainly had little in common with the EU understanding of the essence of democracy, and was instead intended to give the Russian powers that be a carte blanche in furnishing at its own behest the restraints of its domestic political system without interference from abroad. In other words, Russia reserved for itself the right to decide on how to put its own house in order.

Even though the brief Russo-Georgian war in 2008 had been a major challenge to the existing post-Cold War order in Europe, the annexation of Crimea and the Russian sponsoring of the rebellion in eastern Ukraine were of a different magnitude altogether. As mentioned above, Putin justified Russia’s intervention in Crimea along the humanitarian lines of helping threatened ethnic Russians compatriots in the near abroad. He completely turned around the accusations that Russia was breaking international law. If someone was to blame it was certainly not Russia, he claimed:

Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right (Putin 2014b).

This is re-assertive Russia speaking, the very same Russia that in Russian parlance is predestined to be a great power no matter what (Petersson 2014). Russia, Putin’s argument goes, is not doing anything that the United States has not already done many times over, and it is now only acting out its right to behave like a great power. This, one might conclude, would seem to bode ill for Europe. Europe is again marginalized and sandwiched in the competition between the US and Russia, just like it was at the time of the Cold War. However, according to the version propounded by Putin, Russia is acting out of humanitarian considerations and the principles of legitimate self-defense, so it is the US that should be blamed.

The Russian President has been adamant that it was the US and the West that provoked and

triggered the crisis over Ukraine. According to Putin’s statements, it was the West that instigated the events that led to President Yanukovich’s downfall and the crisis that followed. The ouster of the Ukrainian President was an unconstitutional coup, and the armed units that acted on the Maidan had even been trained in the West, ’in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine itself too’, Putin (2014a) argued. He therefore regarded as ’ridiculous’ the idea that Yanukovich’s decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the EU was the catalyst of the crisis. No, this was something that had been prepared for a long time, and there had only been a search for a fitting pretext for carrying out subversive action, he argued. Those primarily responsible for the unrest spreading to the east and southeast parts of Ukraine were thus to be found in the West.

Like his Western colleagues, Putin used historical analogies to warn about the development, but certainly with a different twist. Alluding to the armed units that he thus claimed had been trained in the West to create internal unrest in Ukraine, and arguing that fascist and neo-Nazi forces played a prominent role in political life at the Maidan and in western Ukraine in general, he cautioned:

You have to understand that this kind of chaos is the worst possible thing for countries with a shaky economy and unstable political system. In this kind of situation you never know what kind of people events will bring to the fore. Just recall, for example, the role that [Ernst] Roehm’s storm troopers played during Hitler’s rise to power. Later, these storm troopers were liquidated, but they played their part in bringing Hitler to power. Events can take all kinds of unexpected turns (Putin 2014a).

However, in the context of the challenges formed by Russia to EU’s aspirations to lead Europe, there is definitely more to it than differing interpretations of somber events in Europe’s past and how these relate to the present. There is another theme in Putin’s (2014c) rhetoric that is of perhaps greater importance for Russia’s recommending Ukraine and other states on the EU’s eastern periphery what actions should be taken and who should be trusted to secure their prosperity and well-being. More than anything else he criticizes what he perceives to be ineptitude of the EU. The EU is depicted as a weakling, not a promise.

Thus, in his statements, Putin has used the opportunity to heap scorn on the EU for not being there when the bleeding Ukrainian economy needed it most. Only Russia, true to its great power status, had offered tangible financial support in such situations, he underlined. During the past four years, he argued in April 2014, Russia had been subsidizing Ukraine’s economy by offering reduced natural gas prices worth of 35.4 billion US dollars. Also, he added, in December 2013, Russia had granted Ukraine a loan of 3 billion US dollars. However, he remarked scornfully:

What about the European partners? Instead of offering Ukraine real support, there is talk about a declaration of intent. There are only promises that are not backed up by any real actions (Putin 2014c).

This could be Kagan (2007) talking: the EU is from Venus, not from Mars, but Russia obviously is from Mars.The statement reflects the traditional Russian disdain for weakness, and goes well together with Putin’s personal reputation of being a man of action, someone who delivers the goods (Petersson 2014). He tries to pose as the antithesis of the vacillating false friends in the EU. If only the Maidan people had realized this, the message was, the situation would have been vastly different today.

Incidentally, the argument about the EU’s actual weakness has a resemblance with an argument carried on by John J. Mearsheimer who has held the Ukraine crisis to be the West’s fault. What he points out is that the elites in the West tended to believe “that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy” (Mearsheimer 2014). However, he says, the Ukraine crisis has demonstrated that realpolitik remains relevant, and that US and European leaders “blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border” (Mearsheimer 2014). If Mearsheimer is right, this bodes ill for the attraction of the EU as we know it: exit soft power and the allure of cherished EU norms of rule of law and liberal democracy.

Moreover, however, in the Russian rhetoric the US is no doubt the malevolent puppet master, directing the moves of the EU and tacitly even striving for the carving up of Russia itself after the pattern used in the Balkans in the 1990s. In a manner very much reminiscent of the rhetoric used at the height of the Cold War the security and the very survival of Russia is argued to be at stake. Even though the US was not mentioned explicitly by Putin as he communicated with the electorate using the ‘Direct Line’ on TV in April 2014, there was no doubt what he meant:

The intention to split Russia and Ukraine, to separate what is essentially a single nation in many ways, has been an issue of international politics for centuries (…) But today we’re are living in separate countries. And, unfortunately, this policy of division, of pulling apart and weakening both parts of a single nation continues. There are enough forces in the world that are afraid of our strength, “our hugeness,” as one of our sovereigns said. So, they seek to divide us into parts, this is a well-known fact. Look at what they did with Yugoslavia: they cut it into small pieces and are now manipulating everything that can be manipulated there, which is almost anything. Apparently, someone would like to do the same with us (Putin 2014d).

In the Kremlin logic that is used to argue the necessity of Russia’s move to annex the Crimea, one prime motive for the action was indeed to stifle plans for dividing up Russia (Putin 2014d). Analogies of the near past and the breakup of Yugoslavia are here coming in handy. Kyiv/Kiev is in Russian identity discourse always argued to be the cradle of Russian nationhood, and Putin is insistent that Russia and Ukraine form part of the same nation. His ominous insistence to call the unruly eastern parts of Ukraine for ‘Novorossiya’, New Russia, should be viewed against this background (Putin 2014c). By embedding the Crimea firmly in the Russian Federation framework at least that part of the allegedly common nation would not be taken away due to the scheming action by the West. This is how this message should be understood.

When going through Putin’s statements on the Ukrainian crisis it is thus very clear that he in many ways has reverted to a Cold War pattern of rhetoric. The dichotomous world has appeared anew, and there is a return of the old contestation between Russia and the US. To the extent that it figures in the statements at all, the EU is but a weak actor that blindly follows the US lead. While the US is attributed with all bad intentions and is at least tacitly said to strive for world hegemony, the EU, to the extent that it is given status as an actor in the first place, is depicted as weak and feeble and no more than a smoke screen for US intentions. The EU hardly counts in the official discourse. It is the US that is the main actor, the setter of standards against which Russia itself is measured (Petersson and Persson 2011). From this point of view, if only represented by the EU, Europe is neither a

bogeyman, nor a promise nor an anachronistic contested ideal but instead an empty void, an illusion.

Putin as Gollum: The complexity of the European project

Summing up what the Ukraine crisis has meant for the disenchantment with Europe, we may

conclude that what followed the Maidan protest in November 2013 revealed a deeper split between Putinist Russia and the West than had been hitherto expected. It also suggested that not only the EU claims the right to speak in Europe’s name, but that Vladimir Putin in his way of addressing the

current crisis in Ukraine is doing exactly this, contesting EU’s hegemonic right to speak and indeed act on behalf of the continent.

Even if Putin’s political language and way of framing the current crisis may appear, as shown in this chapter, as rhetoric from a bygone era, it is nonetheless a language with a deep resonance, not only in Russia. As shown in this chapter, several politicians, commentators and analysts used historical reference when trying to understand the recent developments in Russia’s behavior. If the world of yesteryear still permeates Putinist politics, this is indeed also the case for politicians, analysts and commentators of the West. Talks of Putin’s ‘Sudeten option’ and European sleepwalkers moving again, like in 1914, into a world war, shows how common this kind of historicizing of the current crisis has become.

However, as stated by Henry Kissinger, “Nations learn only by experience; they ‘know’ only when it is too late to act.” And this is why statesmen “must act as if their intuition was already experience, as if their aspiration was truth” (Kissinger 1957, 329). In that sense, the past event that is invoked as a comparison often tends to legitimize quick decisions and actions – a precedent in the past, for want of anything better, becomes a weighty argument.

Where politicians may be led astray in their analyses is however that too much emphasis is put on political discourse and too little attention is paid to the contemporary and material context. The constant references to the past from political actors like Putin, Saakashvili, Bildt, Merkel and Clinton, serve to legitimize political or military actions. The analogies of warning that they use may actually be counterproductive as history is read backwards and the scene becomes set for self-fulfilling

prophecies. In other words, there is a risk that the use of the old cold war-rhetoric frames of interpretation may lead to a postwar parlance where path dependence determines the world. However, there is a crucial difference between then and now. Then, a divided Europe lay in ruins. Today - after six decades - most of the continent is more integrated than ever before. The EU-Europeans have, up to now at least, been fortunate to be able to, for more than two decades, cultivate its inner workings in a world that is no longer determined by a bipolar balance of terror, thus being able to forge its own history in a post-war context. The situation in Ukraine could in that sense mean a negative turning point in the development of the European political project.

This turning point may seem to portend bleak future prospects for peace and cooperation in Europe, but the development could paradoxically also hold a promise for the EU as well as for Europe as a whole. In the face of Russia returning to being the epitome of EU-European enemy images, forming an antithesis of EU-promoted norms of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, the EU project might actually be able to retrieve some of its previous strength of attraction, inside as well as outside the Union. It may be that the EU has lost considerable steam economically, but its role as normative power (Manners 2002) may in fact get a renaissance if Russia maintains its heavy-handed line of action against its neighbors and in international politics generally. Like it has been pointed out over and over again in political history, it is much easier to unite against something or someone than to agree on a common vision of development and fight for a common and positive vision to be achieved in concert. In this sense Russia – much like Gollum in Gandalf’s prophecy in the Lord of the Rings – may have some part to play yet for bringing about a positive development in Europe, more specifically by forging EU-Europe closer together and increasing its attraction as a promise.

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