Ukraine: between Europe and Eurasia

Abstract

Countries are like people: they exist in time and space. Napoleon once said that ‘Geography is destiny’, and it is true with regard to Ukraine, whose destiny is influenced by both politics and geography. Its historical fate was to be established and develop between Russia and Europe. Like a planet that has veered off its course, Ukraine is stuck in the gravitational zone of two large geopolitical stars. One of them, Russia, has strong historical and cultural ties to Ukraine, and can be described as a close relative. The other centre of attraction is the European civilization. It is located at a greater distance from Ukraine and, unlike Russia, has not always been politically consolidated. However, the cultural, social and often political gravitational pull of that geopolitical giant has been stronger. This has led to a contradiction: Ukraine is located closer to Russia, but is leaning towards Europe, although at times it has seemed unable to make up its mind. Like an iceberg that broke off from an historical mainland, Ukrainian society is gradually drifting towards Europe. Yet it regularly makes a U-turn towards Russia, due to changes on the historical stage, but then leaves it again for its whimsical European neighbour. Ukraine is torn between a good but brutal husband and a desired but cold lover. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia became establishedas an independent and powerful centre of geopolitical attraction. By the time when most European nations finished their evolution – between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ukrainian ethnos was already torn between the two: the Russian Empire and Austro-Hungary. The divide was reinforced after World War I. Ukraine as it exists now only appeared on the political map in 1939-40. These are the historical and geographical causes of differences in the identity and foreign policy targets of the residents of the western and eastern/southern regions of Ukraine. One part of the country is historically focused on the West and the European civilization, while the other part is predominantly pro-Russia because it has been connected to Russia for centuries. These ethno-cultural differences continue to influence Ukrainian policy.American political writer Samuel Huntington writes in his famous book on the clash of civilizations that ‘Ukraine is a cleft country’, that is, a countrywhere ‘large groups belong to different civilisations’. He writes: ‘Historically, western Ukrainians have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian’ (Huntington 1996: 138). This is true geographically, but the situation is much more complex and ambivalent ethno-culturally than Huntington saw it in the mid-1990s. Ukrainian society looks homogeneous in terms of formal statistics. Accordingto the 2001 census, Ukrainians constituted 77.8 per cent, the largest ethnic minority (Russians) 17.3 per cent, and all other ethnic groups made up 4.9 per cent.1 The largest minorities live in border regions. For example, Russians account for 58.3 per cent of the population in Crimea, which is an autonomous republic of Ukraine, where Tatars made up 12 per cent and ethnic Ukrainians only 24.3 per cent in 2001. In Sevastopol, 71.6 per cent were Russians. The largest group of ethnic Russians also lived at that time in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine: Luhansk (39 per cent), Donetsk (38.2 per cent), Kharkiv (25.6 per cent), Zaporizhia (24.7 per cent) and Odessa (20.7 per cent).2 The proportion of Russians in the largest cities in eastern and southern Ukraine is even larger. Inter-regional differences are even bigger in the field of language. Accordingto the 2001 census, 67.5 per cent of respondents said their native language is Ukrainian, 29.6 per cent, including 14.8 per cent of ethnic Ukrainians, said it is Russian, and 2.9 per cent named other languages. The majority of Russianspeaking people in Ukraine live in the southern and eastern regions and large cities, including the Crimea (77 per cent), Sevastopol (90.6 per cent), the Luhansk region (68.8 per cent) and the Donetsk region (74.9 per cent). Russian speakers constitute nearly half of the population in several other regions: the Kharkiv region (44.3 per cent), the Zaporizhia region (48.2 per cent) and the Odessa region (41.9 per cent).3