[aaus-list] FW: Why Ukraine has no place in the EU - This one is for Professor Himka

[Roman Serbyn]

John-Paul,

It's all about Halychyna - your domain. Lets hear an intelligent reply!

Roman


------ Message transféré
De : Roman Senkus <r.senkus at utoronto.ca>
Date : Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:27:47 -0400
À : Recipient list suppressed: ;
Objet : Why Ukraine has no place in the EU



http://www.signandsight.com/features/1708.html

11/06/2008




Why Ukraine has no place in the EU




Ukraine likes to conjure up the magic word
"Galicia" to create an identity of European
belonging. Richard Wagner picks apart this
myth-cum-trademark in an EU bid he believes is misplaced.

Ukraine is firmly anchored in the Eurasian region
that traditionally answers to Moscow. The
cultural-historical fusion with Russia reaches
deep into the past to the
<http://www.bartleby.com/65/ki/KievanRu.html>Kievan
Rus, the original formula of the East Slavic
concept of state, as does the Byzantine-Orthodox
hold on mentality and society. The majority of
the population speaks Russian and geographically
and geo-politically speaking, the country has a
number of non-European coordinates that are
indispensable to Russia: the Black Sea, Crimea,
the Caucasus. The Ukrainian economy is tightly
bound up with its Russian counterpart, it is
reliant on Russian raw materials and energy
resources, and is organised along the same lines.
The same goes for the political structure of
post-Soviet society which, in both countries
relies on the Byzantine habitus and the survival
skills of Homo sovieticus. Oligarchic interests
and a bizarrely ad hoc party landscape define the
political climate in both Russia and Ukraine and
no end of bold "Orange" revolutionaries will be
able to change this. They have defended their
honour, but they don't hold the political reins.

A good many of the western proponents of the
Ukrainian entry into EU and Nato are governed by
imperial desires. These are either American
strategies aimed at weakening Russia, or EU
superpower fantasies. Yet it would be extremely
hazardous to over-stretch the unconsolidated EU
project. Precisely because Europe now has the
unique historic opportunity to regulate its
business, we should recall the Occidental idea at
the heart of the project. This is something that
was strongly emphasised by its founding fathers
in the fifties, politicians like
<http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/decl_en.htm>Robert
Schuman, 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcide_De_Gasperi>Alcide
de Gasperi and 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/adenauer_konrad.shtml>Konrad
Adenauer.

The Occidental idea is incorporated into cultural
and geo-political borders. And this brings us to
the perma-highlight of the Ukrainian rationale
which we have been hearing for years now, from
the likes of 
<http://ukraine.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?
obj_id=5528>Yuri 
Andrukhovych of Ivano-Frankivsk, the old
Stanislau, or Jurko Prochasko of Lviv (Lemberg).
The magic word is Galicia. Galicia as the bridge
between Kiev and Central Europe. But what is or was Galicia?

You won't find it on any maps today. It has been
replaced by Western Ukraine. The name Galicia was
a Hapsburg invention for a territory which was
annexed by the Hapsburgs after the
<http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1795poland-division.html>division
of Poland in 1772. Etymologically derived from a
malapropism of the Medieval Polish regency name
for Halych, it encompasses Western and Eastern
Galicia and the Polish-influenced centres of
Krakow and Lemberg. Like most thing that come
under the Habsburg label, Galicia has been
thoroughly mythologised from all sides. Why?
Because the Habsburg "model of success" is
invoked today as part of the Ukraine makeover
campaign. In an attempt to generate an aura of belonging.

But the truth about historical Galicia lies
elsewhere. For the most part the region was under
Polish and Jewish sway. Although Ukrainians had
demographic clout in the Eastern region, they had
almost no hand in structuring modernisation. The
Poles had urban cultural hegemony and the
semi-urban small town milieu was dominated by the
Jewish shtetl. In the provinces a de facto
division of power existed between Vienna and the Polish regional majority.

Galicia was the Easternmost province of Austria.
It was and remained on the periphery. "Half Asia"
was the name 
<http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Karl_Emil_Franzos>Karl
Emil Franzos coined for this Eastern landscape.
The population of Galicia was largely dependent
on subsidies from the centre of the empire. It
was never a thriving landscape, but as a meeting
point for cultural idiosyncrasies, it was highly
creative. To say that this impoverished region
was a breeding-ground for artists and writers is
to put a certain spin on the myth. All number of
famous names might have emerged from Galicia but
they left soon thereafter to carve out careers in
Central Europe. They were Jewish without
exception and seeped in German or Polish culture.

Karl Emil Franzos, who went on to become
<http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc29.html>Georg
B������¼chner's
publisher, was born in 1848 in Czorkow and left
at the age of 18 to study in Vienna. The writer
and "head Hapsburg nostalgist",
<http://www.geocities.com/roth_online/>Joseph
Roth, born 1894, grew up in Brody, but lived in
Vienna, Berlin and Paris from 1918 onwards. The
social psychologist and philosopher
<http://www.jmw.at/en/pr_manes_sperber.html>Manes
Sperber, was born in Zablotow in 1905, but he too
moved to Vienna with his family in 1916. The only
one who stayed was 
<http://www.brunoschulzart.org/>Bruno Schulz, who
was born in 1892 in Drohobycz and wrote in
Polish. He was killed by the Gestapo in 1942.

For the Polish, Galicia was Eastern Poland and
part of their own cultural region. With or
without a state. It was also Poland which, after
1918, made a successful territorial claim on the
region. Until 1939, until the Hitler-Stalin pact
that is, Galicia remained Polish and authors from
the region who wrote in Polish were naturally
regarded as part of Polish literature. They still
are today: <http://www.lem.pl/>Stanislaw Lem and
<http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_zagajewski_adam>Adam
Zagajewski of Lemberg, Andrzej Kusniewicz of
Sambor and 
<http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_wittlin_jozef>Jozef Wittlin.

To all intents and purposes, Galicia and Ukraine
had a separate history since the Middle Ages.
Galicia's Ukrainians were officially referred to
as Ruthenians. Through their own church, the
Unified Church, they were linked to Rome and
separated from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Under
international law, the area has only belonged to
Ukraine since the end of WWII. In other words,
the entire Central-Eastern European identity, to
which the region lays claim, is based on the
separation from Ukraine. So what possible
relevance could the Galician myth-cum-trademark have for Kiev's EU bid?

Even today's Western Ukraine is no longer the old
East Galicia. The Jews were wiped out by the
Nazis, the Poles were driven out by Stalin and
resettled elsewhere. Both of these events served
Ukrainian interests to some extent. Today's
Western Ukraine is the result of the totalitarian
land clearance project and is equipped with a
healthy dose of Ukrainian assertiveness. It is
here, in spite of the influx of immigrants from
the East who are ignorant of tradition, that most
un-Russified Ukrainians live today. And this is
the historical home of Ukrainian nationalism,
whose traditions have been cast into doubt, not
least because of Nazi collaboration. Western
Ukrainians offered themselves as auxiliary
forces, even in the extermination of the Jews.

The Ukrainian national identity is shaped in the
image of the victim. Since independence this has
concentrated on the trauma of the famine in the
early thirties, when the failure of Stalin's
forced collectivisation programme, cost millions
of lives. Ukraine declared this horrific event
genocide. It is no coincidence that the name
Holodomor so closely resembles the term Holocaust.

Lemberg's inner city might have the visual appeal
of a "miniature Vienna", but does this mean the
country belongs in the EU? When the old Austria
is vaunted across East Central Europe today, we
should not forget that all the peoples who invoke
the name were instrumental in bringing down the
Habsburg empire. Not least the Ukrainians of
Galicia, its political and cultural elite. They
blocked their own path to Europe with this act of
destruction. The construction of the Ukrainian
national state today has its real centre outside
the EU project, beyond the
<http://www.livius.org/li-ln/limes/limes.html>Limes.
This is not just something to think about, it
should also be taken into account.


*

This article 
<http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/war_joseph_roth_vielleicht_rut
hene_1.749156.html>originally
appeared in German in the Neue
Z������¼rcher Zeitung on June 3, 2008.

Born in 1952 in the Banat region of Romania,
which historically had a large German population,
Richard Wagner now lives in Berlin. His book
"<http://www.aufbau-verlag.de/index.php4?page=28&show=5302>Der
deutsche Horizont. Vom Schicksal eines guten
Landes" ("The German horizon: On the Fate of a
Good Country") was published by Aufbau in 2006.



ROMAN SENKUS / POMAH CEHbKYCb
Director, CIUS Publications Program www.utoronto.ca/cius
Managing Editor, www.encyclopediaofukraine.com

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Toronto Office
256 McCaul St., Room 302
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
M5T 1W5
Canada

tel. 416-978-8669, 416-978-6934
fax 416-978-2672  


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