On 11 October, Ukraine will become the latest virgin venue for Scottish football's Tartan Army. Travelling to Kiev for the first time (and flushed with recent victories) their presence may well bring stimulate more awareness of the expansive and complex country than 15 years of political turmoil and "revolutions". Ukraine sits uncomfortably in the half-knowledge of most Western Europeans, just as it sits rather uncomfortably itself with its own political and social history - what has been called the country's "unpredictable past".
Three references probably sum up the extent of Ukrainian presence in British popular conscience today. First, and still in the realm of cultural diplomacy, is the recent move of Andrei Shevhenko to Chelsea, unconsciously continuing the centuries of close interaction between Russia and its southern spiritual sister. Staying with popular culture, Ruslana's recent fur-clad success in the Eurovision song contest created a new target for Terry Wogan's emerald wit when Kyiv hosted the contest the following year. Secondly, recent domestic fuel bills in part reflect Europe's dependence on the gas supplies which run out from Russia across Ukraine's eastern border.
However, the third recent domestic echo of Ukraine's place in the world was the Orange Revolution of 2004, which saw the country rise in a student-led revolt against the evident doctoring of Presidential election results, which seemed to favour the anointed succession of Victor Yanukovich to the sombre former President Leonid Kuchma. In what to some is a cruel twist of fate, current President Yushenko - whose dioxin-poisoned face became the defining image of the revolution - has recently had to accept the nomination of his old foe from 2004, Yanukovich, as Prime Minister following his party's majority win in recent Parliamentary elections. Political cohabitation is clearly a concept which many are struggling to come to terms with.
President Yushenko has attempted to veto some of the activities of the government, only to find that he does not have the formal power, or parliamentary support to do so. There is distrust that Yanukovich's apparent proximity to Moscow, drawing from traditional support in the east of Ukraine, is supplanting the still-fledging independence of the former Soviet republic.
The Prime Minister's Party of the Regions, (viewed, a little simplistically, as the pro-Russia party), considers the President to be attempting to exercise powers that are not his to use. Recent moves reinforcing Ukrainian as the national and dominant language in the media and elsewhere make many traditionalists in the country nervous that an element of plurality, as well as national history, is being discarded on behalf of a new nationalism as Russian is diminished.
Central to Ukraine's political struggle for balance and normality are two neighbours whose relationships with the country define the internal difficulties that remain after the Orange Revolution. To the north and east lies Russia, which still maintains a substantial naval presence at Sevastopol, the traditional home of the Russian and Soviet Black Sea fleet. In the historic harbour, the inverted Scottish saltire of the Russian navy remains more prominent and numerous than the blue and gold of Ukraine. Kyiv itself is the spiritual centre of the "Rus", the orthodox community which helped define the culture of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and which lay at the heart of Tsarist devotion. St Vlodymyr - whose christening on Crimean soil in 989 brought Christianity to the Slavs, is venerated in the caves of Kyiv.
To the West lies the European Union, which crept ever closer last week with the confirmed accession of Romania, which lies over the Carpathian border. Poland and Slovakia also share borders, and Poland and Lithuania use their one time lordship of Ukraine to guarantee the country a sympathetic ear at Europe's top tables. Membership of the EU and NATO are at the core of the current power struggle at the top of Ukrainian politics. Despite the statements of intent to eventually join both blocs contained in the country's “Universal”, a Declaration of National Unity, PM Yanukovich recently presaged a visit to Brussels in September by pouring a large amount of cold water over the idea that NATO membership was appropriate for Ukraine at the moment.
That statement spurred into action the many NGOs whose foreign-funded work to "Europeanise" Ukrainian politics and economics take the place of government money, or focus, on the same aims. Bodies like the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation, see the European and Euro-Atlantic future of Ukraine as a tool to press the political and business elites of the country into undertaking the extensive political, legal and societal reform that they feel Ukraine needs and which eventual EU membership would surely require. Their identification of EU standards as key goals for domestic politics is a timely example of the "soft power" impact that EU enlargement can have on emerging democracies and transitional economies.
While the 1990s saw what one economist described as "wild capitalism" growing in Ukraine, the EU 8 (now 10) which emerged from the Soviet Union always had EU membership as a realistic prospect since their independence. That allowed financial support, technical transfer and institution building that left little room for the oligarchs and vested interests that many openly state are now at the heart of Ukrainian society. The view many have of the rule of law was described by one academic as that of something at the top of a high pole, which they could climb to with great effort, but easier pass by with a small wave and nod instead.
So Ukraine now finds itself at the back of a growing, and slowing, queue for EU entry. Recent
reforms have not yet been enough to see the prospect of eventual
accession creep into the language of EU-Ukraine joint action plans, and
there is clearly resentment in some quarters that the country is
grouped into a European Neighbourhood Policy that is stretched from the
Atlas mountains to the South Caucasus.
Many would argue that Ukrainian society and politics is manifestly culturally closer to the rest of Europe than, say, Turkey, but Ukraine's neighbour and old sparring partner across the Black Sea is several crucial, slow steps further ahead. It is an irony for the country that hosts the Livadia Palace in Yalta, home in 1945 to the birth of post-war spheres of influence in Europe, that again after 1989-1990 it has fallen just on the far side of the mainstream consciousness and concerns of the West after 1989.
Football may not be the only bridge back to popular awareness of Ukraine. There is enthusiasm in some quarters for some form of communal partnership with Scotland, between Europe's south-eastern and north-western frontiers. These might be between the parliaments of Holyrood and the "Rada", or the defence-related communities in Crimea and Moray, or drawing on shared experience between small and large neighbours and competing traditional languages. Whatever the result in the Olympic Stadium, it should be a friendly if unfamiliar face that arrives for the return leg in a year's time at the end of a long road to Hampden Park.
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Posted by: Dissertation Writing | February 20, 2010 at 02:48 AM