Mykola Riabchuk - At the Fence of Metternich's Garden

All these arguments (or excuses) are serious enough to be examined in more detail, and I address each of them in this collection of essays that have been written mostly within the past 15 years. This time-span coincides with some very important and often dramatic changes in both Ukraine and its neighborhood. On the one side, Ukrainian civil society that had always, since perestroika, been an important political actor to be counted with, for the first time appeared not just noticeable but victorious, during and in the aftermath of the 2004 Orange revolution. It failed ultimately, but set a new level of political competition and a new agenda for years to come. On the other side, the year 2004 marked the ‘big bang’ enlargement of the EU that erected de facto a new wall at Ukraine’s western borders and deepened the feeling of abandonment and alienation. It coincided also with consolidation of an authoritarian regime in Russia and growth of a Kremlin ‘assertiveness’ that eventuated in gas, trade, and cyber wars with neighbors, military invasion of Georgia, and large-scale intervention in Ukraine.

Throughout all those years, I published many articles in periodicals, besides my primary (or parallel) academic activity. All of them were driven by two overlapping desires—to react directly to the events, developments, and problems that required, I felt, an immediate intervention; and to reach many more people than a scholarly article can ever do. Certainly, I could not avoid some academic terms and concepts, but all the time I tried to make the texts readable and comprehensive for any person with a high school diploma and not necessarily with a university degree. Here, I have selected only the articles that address Ukraine’s ‘European affair’—a painstaking but fascinating process of both its cultural and political ‘Europeanization’. The process has both domestic and international aspects, both historical and contemporary dimensions. All of them are complex and all are intricately intertwined.

The title of the book refers, ironically, to the notorious Chancellor Metternich’s quip that Asia begins presumably at the eastern fence of his garden (or, as another apocryphal version maintains, at the end of the Viennese Landstrasse). It hints at the garden of Eden—as many non-Westerners see the West, but also the Millennium-old garden of European culture and civilization that includes also specific political and social practices and institutions. It hints also at the Zbigniew Herbert’s classic book A Barbarian in the Garden (1962), and at the popular slogan of Mykola Khvylovy, one of the leaders of the short-lived Ukrainian national revival of the 1920s (the “executed Renaissance”), who called on his compatriots to develop “psychological Europe” within Ukraine and among Ukrainians.

This is not a compassionate praise for Europe in Herbert’s or Denis de Rougemont’s style but rather an argument why Ukraine, existentially, cannot afford a move into any other direction; what obstacles, outside and within, it encounters; and how ultimately to overcome them. I compiled the book as a story of both exclusion and inclusion, of walls and fences but also of a longing for freedom and quest for solidarity. I wished it to be a book on different ways of being a ‘European’—at both the collective and individual level—despite various challenges or, perhaps, thanks to them.

It consists of three parts that cover, respectively, the ‘international’ aspect of Ukraine’s ‘European affair’, the ‘domestic’ part, and, so to say, my ‘personal’ part. Most of the articles were written in either Ukrainian or English and published usually in both languages but also, occasionally, in Polish, German, or Russian. The essay “How I Became a ‘Czechoslovak’” broke records, being translated into a dozen languages including Farsi, Slovene, and Catalan, but it was rather exceptional.

I eschewed the temptation to make any substantial changes so as to look more perspicacious than I was 10 or 15 years ago, but I cut some passages to make the texts less repetitive. Also, I indicated the dates when the texts emerged and, in some cases, when the events in question occurred. All the essays are included in the collection with the permission of the original publishers. I am honored to list all of them, and express my deep gratitude to the European syndicate of cultural periodicals Eurozine, the Polish bi-monthly New Eastern Europe , the online quarterly Russkii Vopros , the quarterly Aspen Review , the web-platforms Open Democracy and Transitions Online, and last but not least, to the journal of studies in Polish Jewry Polin that commissioned a professional translation of one of my essays—the only one in this book rendered in English not by myself. The translator Marta Olynyk deserves full credit for her masterful work, as well as the editor of this volume Dr. Andrew Sorokowski. Special thanks to Dr. Andreas Umland, who encouraged me to complete this collection, to Dr. Ksenia Kiebuzinski, who perfectly guided my work at the University of Toronto library, and to Ms. Jana Oldfield, who sheltered me generously for a few months when I was suddenly locked down in Toronto during the quarantine.

Ironically, the coveted “return to Europe” acquired for me a new, unexpected meaning. It became even more desirable but also even more based on strict rules and exact procedures. There are not only accession criteria but also absorption capacity to be counted with. There is little doubt that all the postcommunist states, including my own, need some ‘quarantine’ before being fully admitted into the ‘European family’. But genuine efforts are needed on both sides to facilitate the convalescence, and to fully complete the clearance and adaptation. I wish my book to contribute a bit to this process.

Toronto, April–May 2020

Part One European Dreams

When in 1946, Konrad Adenauer stated that “Asia stands on the Elbe”, he just rephrased, consciously or unconsciously, the nineteenth-century joke of his Austrian colleague, chancellor Metternich, who used to say that the very place where Asia began was just behind the fence of his Viennese garden. For both of them, “Asia” was just another word for something hostile, barbarous and threatening the very existence of their (Western) civilization. For Metternich, implicitly, all the space east of Vienna was culturally inferior and suspicious. As many Westerners of the time, he believed that “the frontiers of civilization did not extend beyond the territorial aspirations of the more timorous Carolingian monarchs” [Judt 1990: 24].

But Adenauer hardly shared this view; in any case, he knew that there was East Germany east of the Elbe and that East Germans did not differ too much from their western compatriots, at least at that time. What he meant by “Asia standing on the Elbe” was a certain political reality brought as far as his own country by the Soviet troops and imposed on Eastern Europeans by brutal force, blackmail and political trickery. “Asia” meant for him not just another civilization—however inferior and alien it might be, as in Metternich’s view—but rather a lack of civilization, an ‘anti-civilization’ which threatened the most fundamental values of the Western world.

The Western perception of Eastern Europe, after 1946, had consisted of various combinations of both feelings, ‘Adenauer’s’ and ‘Metternich’s’. On the one hand, the Westerners recognized that to the east of the Elbe and Metternich’s garden there was also Europe, even though poorer and despised. They knew that this Europe did not accept its ‘Asian’ status voluntarily and that she tried desperately to get rid of it—by all possible means. But, on the other hand, they felt that something was wrong with this part of Europe, since she allowed herself to be swallowed up and since she had been victimized so often and heavily throughout her history. Probably, some Westerners mused, she was guilty herself; she was predisposed and, in fact, doomed to be victimized permanently because she was not European enough, she was not ‘like us’, lucky and happy, she was inferior. As under-Europe, or semi-Europe, she had equal chances to grow up to true Europeanness or to dissolve into entropic Asiaticness. She had lost the first chance that was gifted her after WWI, and now she must pay for it. There was nobody to blame except herself.