[aaus-list] Time to Extend Hand to Ukraine

[ajmotyl at andromeda.rutgers.edu]

>From The Atlantic Council website, www.acus.org


Time to Extend Hand to Ukraine
Alexander Motyl | September 24, 2008
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has staked his and his country’s
future on Ukraine’s integration into Euroatlantic institutions, even going
so far as to say, at an Atlantic Council luncheon on September 23, that
Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity can be
preserved only with “international guarantees.” Although there may be some
hyperbole in that remark—an independent Ukraine is here to stay, after
all, with or without international guarantees—Yushchenko is right to imply
 that a sovereign Ukraine could be Finlandized or that its territorial
integrity could be threatened were the United States and Europe to permit
Putin’s Russia to extend its bear hug to Ukraine’s gas pipelines or the
Crimea.

Yushchenko’s domestic political skills and commitment to radical reform
may leave much to be desired, but his international instincts have always
been on the mark. He has, since becoming president, consistently tried to
move Ukraine closer to the United States and Europe while maintaining good
relations with Russia. In reality, all Ukrainian presidents have since
1991 pursued a “two-vector” foreign policy aimed at balancing between East
and West—with Leonid Kravchuk leaning toward the West, Leonid Kuchma
leaning toward Russia, and Yushchenko leaning back toward the West. Such a
policy of asymmetric balancing makes perfect sense for Ukraine and should
in principle be palatable to both Russia and the West—but only if all
three sides are genuinely committed to independence, sovereignty, and
territorial integrity.

Ukraine certainly is, and Russia was as well, at least under President
Yeltsin. With Putin’s assumption of power in 2000 and his subsequent
transformation of Yeltsin’s very imperfect democracy into an increasingly
authoritarian, and possibly fascistoid, state, Russian elites have
progressively rejected democracy both at home and abroad as a threat to
their rule and simultaneously embraced neo-imperialism and
hyper-nationalism as a prop of their legitimacy. These two complementary
trends were part and parcel of Putin’s authoritarian project—as indeed
they are of any authoritarian project—but both received a massive fillip
from the colored revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, which an
authoritarian Moscow correctly interpreted as threats to its internal
system of rule and its external zone of influence.

While Ukraine’s commitment to independence, sovereignty, and territorial
integrity is as unsurprising as Russia’s revisionist attitude thereto,
“old Europe’s” extreme reluctance to side with Ukraine is surprising. As
Yushchenko and many other Ukrainians never fail to emphasize, Ukraine
shares Europe’s values, while Russia does not. Since the European Union
and NATO actually define themselves above all in terms of democratic
values, their interest in integrating Ukraine should be a no-brainer. That
doesn’t mean immediate membership for Ukraine in either institution, but
it does mean telling Ukraine, in no uncertain terms, that it will be able
to join both if and when it meets all membership criteria. If Brussels
really believed in European values, soft power, and the like, it should be
able to state, unflinchingly and immediately, that “Ukraine is European
and, once rich and fully democratic, deserves to be within the EU.”

Of course, if Brussels—or, more specifically, such states as Italy,
Germany, and France—don’t really believe in democracy, then indifference
to Ukraine’s European aspirations makes more sense. But just a tad. After
all, if old Europe’s ruling elites are primarily interested in hard power
and geopolitics, then they should be even more interested in getting
Ukraine on their side. As Zbigniew Brzezinski has often pointed out, an
independent Ukraine is the best guarantee of Russia’s non-emergence as an
empire and, I might add, of the Cold War’s non-revival. That admonition
may have seemed like a bit of hypothetical reasoning in the past, but the
Russo-Georgian War of 2008 has surely demonstrated that Putin’s Russia is
ready to reassert itself in the former Soviet imperial space and, thus, to
threaten Europe’s geopolitical interests.

The good news is that the global economic crisis and the fall-out from the
Georgian invasion have refocused Moscow’s attention on Russia’s domestic
problems. That gives Ukraine time to get its house in order and accelerate
its efforts to join Euroatlantic structures. That also gives Europe time
to come to its senses and extend a hand to Ukraine. The bad news is that
Ukraine’s squabbling political elites—and Yushchenko, alas, belongs to
them—seem ill-equipped to do anything but squabble. And old Europe seems
ill-prepared to do anything but kowtow to an authoritarian Russia. Not
coincidentally, perhaps, the Munich Agreement that made appeasement so
notorious a concept took place exactly 70 years ago, in September 1938.