The Book “Politics” of the First UPR Minister of International Affairs Oleksandr Shulhyn in the Intellectual History of the Ukrainian Statehood

Abstract

The historical context outlines O. Shulhyn as a key figure of the Ukrainian statehood established in the first quarter of the 20th century. A prominent social and political actor, the first UPR Minister of International Affairs, he took a proactive stance in establishing the concept of Ukraine’s political sovereignty in the international arena. In this regard, his book “Politics (State-Building of Ukraine and International Affairs). Articles. Documents. Speeches” requires special attention. It became the first system work in the intellectual history of the Ukrainian singularity to have substantiated the right of Ukraine for its governmental establishment not through poetic prophecy, metaphors, or historical, philological, pedagogical, and legal arguments (conceptualized in such a way in the Ukrainian political writings at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries) but through assertion of proven facts that Ukraine had already existed in the international arena as a fully independent state. According to O. Shulhyn, the constant substantiation of Ukraine’s subjectivity must become the imperative of its foreign policy: Ukraine can and must consider the interest of other global powers and their blocs, however without losing its sovereignty, while subordinating its policy to the interests of other parties. It is also important to mention that O. Shulhyn was among the first Ukrainian social and political writers and thinkers to have analyzed Bolshevism as a genuinely Russian political and ideological tool for “constructing” a new empire, accentuating that centralist traditions of Muscovy totally coordinated with the spirit of Bolshevist totalitarianism. O. Shulhyn’s concept, which proclaims the establishment of independent national states in the territory of the former Russian Empire the only way to set political balance in the Eastern European space, is gaining special meaning in the context of the new war initiated by Russia against Ukraine in 2014.