Tony Judt: The Problem Ukraine Poses for Europe

[Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.]

THE election crisis unfolding in Ukraine is a foretaste of the problems the European Union will confront in coming decades at its eastern edge. To be sure, what is being played out in Kiev has little to do with the West. Ukraine's democratic revolution was delayed for 13 years by former Soviet bosses who recycled themselves as nationalist politicians, "privatizing" into their own hands the assets of the Communist state. For a decade, President Leonid Kuchma has enriched his family (and debased his country) by pursuing his "Ukrainian way forward": avoiding, as he explained back in 1995, "blindly copying foreign experience." Many Ukrainians have finally had enough.

But a more democratic Ukraine would pose a conundrum for Europe. Unlike Poland or the Czech Republic, Ukraine was not a captive satellite state: it was part of the Soviet Union itself. Its ties to Russia go back a very long way: it was Ukrainian villages that Potemkin spruced up for Catherine the Great on her 1787 tour of inspection. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev were ethnic Russians from Ukraine (Russians today constitute about one-sixth of the national population, primarily in the southeast). The country's natural resources - agriculture, coal, titanium - were a vital element of the Soviet economy. While making up just 2.7 percent of the land area of the Soviet Union, Ukraine generated nearly 18 percent of its gross national product. Little wonder that President Vladimir Putin of Russia now feels no compunction about interfering in Ukrainian elections. This is not just another Central European state hoping to escape out of its history and into "Europe": this is Russia's (very) near west.

But it is also Europe's near east. Ukraine is one of Europe's "debatable lands" - a late-medieval British term for disputed English-Scottish border territories. The very word u-krajín suggests a location "at the edge." Its present boundaries owe more to modern history - to Hitler and Stalin - than to logic or nature. When Romanians or Hungarians look north across the Tisza River frontier, they see land that was theirs within living memory. Historical Poland lay athwart present-day western Ukraine. The Ukrainian city of Lviv was once Lemberg (to Germans) or Lvov (to Poles); Chernivsti was Cernovitz (to Germans) or Cernauti (to Romanians). In those earlier guises, their cosmopolitan townscapes and populations - German, Polish, Ruthenian, Hungarian, Romanian and Jewish - figured prominently in the novels and memoirs of Central European writers from Joseph Roth to Gregor von Rezzori. If Ukraine is "at the edge" today, it was also once at the center. This is no remote steppe emerging belatedly from Asiatic servitude. This is Europe.

Nevertheless, Ukraine is not part of the European Union, and it is not going to be. The life expectancy at birth of a Ukrainian male today is just 62 years (in the United States it is 74, in Sweden 78). The average monthly income is $95. The country is an important conduit for illicit drugs; a haven for international money launderers; and - like neighboring Moldova - an exporter of young women destined for involuntary servitude in the brothels of the former Yugoslavia and Western Europe.

The cost of modernizing Ukraine's economy, much less adapting its laws and institutions to European norms, is beyond estimate. Brussels is already anticipating huge difficulties in absorbing Romania - the most backward and corrupt of the present candidate members - and Romania is less than half the size of Ukraine and much better off. Vladimir Putin, of course, is firmly opposed to Ukraine joining the European Union. But even if he offered the country to them on a plate, the Europeans wouldn't take it.

Ukraine, then, is a challenge that the European Union cannot ignore but is reluctant to address....