Integration and Disintegration: Europe, Ukraine, and the World

Abstract

The revolution in Ukraine and the Russian invasion that followed have transformed the world, bringing the fi eld of Slavic studies to a central position even as its scholars struggle to make sense of events. It is not so oft en that a true revolution takes place in Europe, mobilizing more than a million people, provoking counterrevolution and mass killing, and leading to a change of government. Had the free Ukrainian parliamentary and presidential elections of 2014 been the end of the story, today we might be debating whether the revolution was a bourgeois one, aiming for the rule of law, or a movement from the left , directed against an oligarchical regime. We might be considering the connection made by Ukraine’s revolutionaries between national sovereignty and European integration, the intuition that one depends on the other. Rather than dismissing the logic of dying for Europe, we might have considered the reasons why Ukrainians who risked their lives associated individual freedom with the rule of law and international norms.1 The Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea and then the support of armed separatism in Donetś k and Luhanś k oblasts ended a long moment in European and Atlantic history in which a certain order was thought to be durable and sovereignty taken for granted. By simultaneously violating the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Moscow’s actions have raised the stakes of analysis. The subject was no longer a revolution within one country but the nature of the international order. Because Russian aggression was accompanied by a boundlessly postmodern campaign of public relations, historical concepts such as fascism, antifascism, the Holocaust, the Christian conversion of the Slavs, and the Russian empire have all been lift ed from their normal settings and applied absurdly but eff ectively to this or that event of the day. Every such challenge to scholarship is also an opportunity. Propaganda might even, in an indirect way, suggest the contours of a historical change. The attempts of Russian propagandists to present the war in Ukraine as a global confl ict hint at an important starting point: that the revolution and war in Ukraine only make sense when the country’s history is placed within a