Yanukovych spoke for nearly forty minutes on Ukraine’s trade relationship with Germany, his efforts to fight corruption, and his new Finnish boathouse. He paused once to mention E.U. membership. The next day he was on a flight to Beijing, where he signed investment deals worth over $4 billion.

There may have been a lot of chatter over Merkel’s cool reception of Yanukovych. Not many noticed that Yanukovych’s embrace of Europe was equally reserved. While he confirmed that Ukrainians seek E.U. membership, he also made it clear that E.U. membership was not his top concern. Ukraine will be looking Far East, not near West.

The Beijing trip sent a clear message to Berlin. Ukraine will remain open for business with Germany and Europe. But that relationship will not be exclusive. Moscow and Beijing will have an equal share. Most importantly, economic ties do not mean privileges for Europe when it comes to influencing Kyiv’s domestic affairs.

After his speech, the president was asked directly about his country’s future in the E.U. While he acknowledged an increasingly large number of Ukrianians support E.U. membership, Yanukovych also delcared his approach Euro-Pragmatist, not Euro-Romantic. “First we must build Europe in Ukraine,” he replied.

In the past, that approach suited Germany just fine. Germany hoped that a climate of economic security, combined with trade interests, could passively encourage democracy. Business has become the bottom line in Germany’s approach to East Europe.

“The East is Germany’s Middle East – that’s where they get their energy from,” said Asle Toje, author of The European Union as a Small Power. “These are experienced statesmen who are very cautious about pursuing any policy that could tilt the equilibrium in a way that would not favor German interests.”

Those interests include Germany’s economic ties with Russia, a relationship Toje says Germany is not willing to jeopardize for democratic crusading. The E.U. wed itself to the Orange Revolution in 2004. After a disappointing term led to defeat at the polls, Germany in particularly regrets backing the wrong horse.

Democratic crusading is one thing, but a modern, prosperous Ukraine where journalists continue to disappear should not be an option. Modernization and investment has long been seen as a back door to democracy. It’s the founding principle of the Eastern Partnership. This principle needs to be re-examined.

“Building Europe in Ukraine” isn’t simply a matter of replicating the Eiffel tower in Lviv, or making a leaning tower of Kyiv. You can’t have Europe without Europeans: A well-informed, well-educated citizenry with a clear investment in their society’s success. Money alone does not lead the individual to happiness, and neither is it the solution to the development of a successful society. Yanukovych has had trouble realizing that good governance can also be good for business.

In fact, Yanukovych’s domestic policies cost him political capital in Europe. One of the reasons the Berlin trip was unsuccessful was because Yanukovych can not understand why his policies toward civil society evoke such large concerns from Europe, argues Lukasz Adamski, an analyst at the Polish Institute for International Affairs.

“The German government is not naïve. They do not expect the Party of Regions to be a party of democrats. They are concerned with exerting pressure on Yanukovych so that the situation in Ukraine does not deteriorate.”

It’s no secret that Yanukovych prefers his trade made in China – with no strings attached. As Ukraine’s political ties head East with its president, Berlin’s tactic of encouraging democracy through development may become dated. European business ties may no longer be sufficient tools to reign in illiberal behavior. If Yanukovych manages to substitute Beijing for Berlin, Ukraine may find itself a Europe without Europeans.

In fact, it seems everyone is coming to terms with a Yanukovych victory, except the one person who really matters at this stage – Yulia Tymoshenko. Today Tymoshenko announced that she would challenge the election results, even though they have been deemed fair by international observers. Yanukovych told her to accept his 3 percent mandate and resign as prime minister.  As ludicrous as the proposition might seem, Yanukovych’s political advice for his opponent might hold some appeal.

Tymoshenko’s stubbornness stems, at least in part, from the difficult angle her campaign faced. As sitting Prime Minister during a recession, Yulia was forced to run as a candidate for change while maintaining her prominent role as an incumbent.

In the U.S. such a paradoxical position is standard operating procedure.  As political scientist Richard Fenno  observed, “Members of Congress run for Congress by running against congress.”

Tymoshenko’s bid essentially asked whether this principle could be applied in Ukraine. History suggested it could not. No Ukrainian president has ever been elected directly from the seat of Prime Minister, which meant Yanukovych clearly held the high ground as an opposition candidate. That the vote came down to such a narrow margin is a remarkable testiment to Tymoshenko’s well-run and well-fought campaign.

When Yanukovych takes office, Tymoshenko will likely be able to retain her position as prime minister. Her expulsion would require a vote of no confidence, which the Ukrainian parliament is too divided to make. Yet it’s clear the seat will continue to prove a double-edged sword for Tymoshenko, and it is little wonder she feels reluctance in returning to the position that handicapped her.

It would be foolish for Tymoshenko to heed Yanukovych’s advice and give up such a major position in parliament. For starters, it would destroy her constituency’s trust and discredit her opposition. But at the same time Tymoshenko needs to focus on turning her podium into a soap box. The best option for Ukraine – and Tymoshenko’s career – is if she stops being part of the problem and starts criticizing it.



Instant relevance, just add orange.

In the days following the famously narrow 2000 election between Bush and Gore, headline writers could come to only one conclusion: “Nader Loses.”

Today in Ukraine, the results were similarly inconclusive. Only one thing was certain — incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko had lost his seat, with a slim 5 percent of the vote.

Unsurprisingly, neither the former belle of the revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, nor Kuchma’s favored successor in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, managed a simple majority. This means that next month Ukrainians will head back to the polls for a second round of voting.

Yanukovych beat Yulia in the first round, by a margin of nearly 17 percent. Tymoshenko has already accused Yanukovych of “monsterous fraud, beyond even what happened in 2004.” It sounds like hearkening back to the good old days. Most independent and EU observers have cautiously pronounced the results clean.

The competition is closer than first-round results indicate. As Kyiv Post noted, as the field narrows, Tymoshenko is likely to pick up many of the so-called orange votes that went to Yuschenko and others. What might be likely to thwart her is Yushchenko himself. He’s alleged that Tymoshenko and Yanucovych are both part of a Kremlin-controlled plot. If orange voters stay home, it will mean a Yanucovych victory. Yanucovych and Yushchenko both know this – as Taras Kuzio pointed out in the Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Is Yushchenko capable of Nadering Tymoschenko from the political afterlife? Will the loser of next month’s contest take the news gracefully? Is there a significant difference between the policy decisions we can expect between the two front runners? Ukrainians will answer these questions for themselves in next month’s second round.

The trial promises to be both fascinating and politically sensitive. Israel is outraged at the exposure and poor maintenance of the historic site. Poland is defensive about the millions of dollars needed to bolster weak security and halt the sinking of gas chambers. Germany is nervously reaching for its wallet – which upsets Poles due to  their objections to German museum building in general.

The trial itself  might revise philosophical precedents from the trial of Nazi industrialists like Krupp, Flick and IG Farben. The defense in these cases argued that the firms were disinterested in racial or expansionist ideologies. They merely sought to profit during tumultuous political circumstances. The defendants were often acquitted or sentenced to time served. Part of this verdict correlated with the Morgenthau plan’s fall from popularity. All three trials, which were part of the Subsequent Nuremburg trials,  took place during or after 1947, the year Harry Truman repealed the standing order to revert the German economy to an agricultural past. To the public, the reinstatement of German industrial giants were seen as the only alternative to wholesale civilian starvation.

Defendants of the IG Farben Trial.

Will these thieves, like the German industrialists, be given a relative degree of clemency because they were acting for a profit motive rather than an ideological one? Or, as men of little economic consequence, will they face a stricter standard of anti-Semitism?

There is little doubt that the thefts constitute an anti-Semitic act. Auschwitz may have been the largest camp, but it is remembered by the public in large part because its horrors were captured by film. While there were similar signs at nearly every major camp, the sprawling letters of the Auschwitz sign captured the imaginations, and nightmares of anyone who opened a history textbook in the twenty-first century. It’s disappearance would be the partial disappearance of Auschwitz from public memory. But it doesn’t rank with manufacturing Zyklon B, or employing slave labor.

At Nuremberg, individuals were found to have international duties that transcend national laws. The breach of these duties merits extraordinary punishment. Do we have a duty to historical memory?

Read the Fall 2009 issue Online.

Thanks to everyone who helped write and create this issue. If you are interested in getting involved in the creation of our Spring issue, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly at gwd@gwu.edu.

Less happily, (at least for us) our Political Theory editor, Alejandra Barrio will be taking leave to study abroad next semester. We’ll miss you and we wish you all the best in Ecuador.

Even through a translator, Adam Michnik is an eloquent speaker. But during his speech at the Elliott School, this particular biographical point may have been his most contested. There are those who see Michnik as a man unable to give up his glory days.

During Jaruzelski’s rule, Michnik was a hero of the democratic opposition. The intellectual wunderkind of Solidarity, he founded the Worker’s Defense Committee – and by the time he was the age of the students who came to hear him speak last Friday, he had been jailed more times than he could count.

But as the revolutionaries became the founders, things got complicated.

Michnik assumed editorship of Poland’s largest daily, and used it to advocate against lustration. (“The news was lies. Prices in stores were lies. But we’re supposed to believe the KGB records are gospel?”) But he took it a step further. Citing denazification and the post-Franco regime change, he advocated destroying the records entirely.

He argued against the return of property commandeered by Communists. He even praised Jaruzelski. (“Poles ought to say a special mass, that they had a Jaruzelski and not a Ceauşescu.”) Soon he was giving joint interviews and attending the birthday parties of former Communist bigwigs.

Many in Poland began to believe Michnik was more concerned with defending collaborators and informers than democracy. He decried Lech Wałęsa’s presidency as a  first step toward tyranny. Solidarity yanked its famous trademark of his newspaper’s standard.

By the 1990s his former ally, the poet Zbignew Herbert declared him a has-been in a scathing interview:

“Now he stays in his paper citadel [Gazeta Wyborcza] surrounded by true believers of both sexes. I recently talked to a forty-year old ‘youngster’ who confided in me that he adored Michnik and would do anything for him … Thus the pattern of the charismatic leader and dedicated worshippers repeats itself.”

As it happened, I found it hard to resist conversion. For one thing, Michnikism appeals to students of American history. There was never such a revolution, Michnik reminded us several times, where the revolutionaries were not disappointed. He noted that many of the American founding fathers considered their great experiment a failure.

“Revolutions like bold colors, red, orange, green – but democracy is gray.” Michnik speaks with excitement and abandon. His rhetoric is logical and airtight, even if it doesn’t always correlate with his actions.

If Wałęsa is Poland’s General Washington, it’s easy to picture Michnik as a Slavic Thomas Paine. The man who openly criticized Washington after the war. The most loyal oppositionist.

Perhaps Michnik’s most redeeming evidence is the success of Poland’s democratization. Because of him – or despite him – Poland has had an astonishingly smooth regime change. As we talk about exporting democracy and nation building in the Middle East, it might pay to listen to Michnik. Nothing happens twice, but in reality we must not always improvise.

Edit: A link to the footage of Mr. Michnik’s speech:

http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/news/multimedia/index.cfm#michnik

The Holodomor Memorial in Kiev, known to Putin as "Someplace." (courtesy: Taras)

A month ago Prime Minister Julia Tymoshenko earmarked 5 million UAH for the construction of an American memorial to what Ukrainians claim was genocide and “perhaps the most extreme example of the use of hunger as a weapon.”  The Russian Federation officially denies Ukrainian claims that the Stalinist policies were ethnically targeted genocide. For Tymoshenko, however, the Holodomor issue epitomizes her delicate balancing act courting pro-Western and pro-Russian forces for the 2010 election.

Back then Tymoshenko publicly supporting  a memorial in Washington D.C.  seemed like good sign for Ukrainian-American relations. Tymoshenko is more popular in the Central and Eastern regions of Ukraine, where a majority of her constituency is relatively pro-Russia. Thus she has traditionally been seen as more Russian than American leaning, particularly in contrast to the (vastly unpopular) incumbent President Yushchenko.

But her allocation of funds to the U.S. memorial may indicate a cautious step away from Russia. Although Yushchenko and other Ukranian polticians have insisted their advocacy of  Holodomar remembrance isn’t meant to reproach Russia, it’s a subtle distinction – particularly as Yuschchenko has recently criticized (read: reproached) Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia. In short, Tymoshenko’s support of this issue might be an overture to the U.S., or it could be an attempt to appease the pro-West Lviv region, which is seen as a key battleground in the 2010 race.

Then came Tymoshenko’s tell. At a press conference yesterday, she laughed a little too hard at Putin’s joking description of Yuschchenko and and Saakashvili’s trip to the Holodomor Memorial in Kiev, which he described as “someplace.” (Warning: the link is in Russian with a written translation on the side, but to English speakers the tie-eating jokes just aren’t that funny.) I expect her to play up the D.C. memorial in the coming weeks to rehabilitate her image on the issue.

Commuters will bring votives and bundles of wheat to the base of the new memorial. (Taras)

Whether it’s a genuine message to Americans, or just for the benefit of voters, the White House is listening. President Obama issued a “Thinking of You” on Ukrainian Holodomar Remembrance Day (November 14th, you missed it again). Note the boldly worded final lines. They say something about reflecting on tyranny’s lasting grip on some places, and hoping that nothing like that ever happens again. In Someplace.

I’m  interested to see what the monument will look like. How do you visually encapsulate a history lesson on Holodomar to the “tourists and everyday Washingtonians” on their way to Central Station? If you have the answer, Ukraine is holding a design competition through Nov. 26.

Reagan tears into some cake

The 20-year commemoration is the most dangerous period in the formation of  Berlin Wall history, said Cold War scholar Vladislav Zubok to about a dozen GW students and professors. There is a chance, he warned, that the fall of the Wall may be too easily glossed, exaggerated or misunderstood. “Tabloidized.”

Less than three hours later, a hundred students gathered in Kogan plaza to watch a man in a Ronald Reagan mask cut into a frosted rice crispy treat shaped like Checkpoint Charlie.

But is GW guilty of Bild-ing the Wall? I don’t think so. The week had its sophisticated side. We heard from former Leipzig protesters, Central European ambassadors, and Markus Meckel, the former foreign minister of the GDR.

In a way, it makes sense that a nuanced week would finish in the same way as the complex series of events they studied ended: with Pink Floyd, simplifications, and Reagan’s voice booming “Mr. Gorbachev.” Unfortunately, the commemorations with the best attendance will always feature fireworks or cake, not lectures.

The problem with history is that it must be either packaged for mass consumption or forgotten to obscurity. And the more you study a topic, the more awful its packaging begins to seem. If you actually lived the event in question, so much the worse for you. So it was for many of the speakers heard this week.

Meckel became visibly upset as he talked about the official German commemorations. He claimed we are forgetting the courage of October, and the will of East Germans themselves.  It should have been Poland’s roundtable, not Berlin’s Wall that became the augur of ’89.

Prof. Peter Rollberg pointed to the roll of the church as a refuge for those who would doubt the regime. Zubok still seemed surprised to be talking about the Berlin Wall at all. From Moscow, he claimed what was happening in Eastern Europe was on the periphery. Gorbachev was focused on the South Caucuses, where he feared a second Russian civil war was brewing.

Are we destined to get it wrong? How can we hope to summarize such a symbolic moment as a historical event? “In 1989 a 12-foot concrete partition fell that didn’t really keep anybody in or out of anything, because they could travel via Hungary or Czeckloslovakia. Nevertheless, people made a big fuss in the West.” The Berlin Wall will present unique challenges to the writers of introductory textbooks. You can’t understand it from a paragraph and you can’t capture it on a timeline. The fall of the wall didn’t end history. It may have added a dimension.

Keep watching the blog as this talented new group makes their first strides.