German High, Kyiv Blues
December 7, 2006 – 11:54 pmI flew into Berlin after fifteen years absence. The last time I was here I was one of those tourists who bought a fake chunk of the “Berlin Wall†from a Polish trader. The amount of fake wall sold to tourists like myself must be as long as the distance from Berlin to Sicily.
Berlin has changed dramatically and, as my German colleague explained, is now one of 3 funky European cities followed by London and Amsterdam. I gave a talk on Ukraine to the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund which was similar to that given 3 days earlier in its Washington office. The talks were expanded into an opinion editorial for the Kyiv Post (http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/25603/).
My second talk was to an EU-funded conference in Halle, south of Berlin, on “Protest Movements in Europe Since the Cold Warâ€. I told stunned Germans that the Orange Revolution, which 1 in 5 Ukrainians took part in, qualifies it as the largest protest movement in Europe since the end of the Cold War. They were stunned because Germans know little about Ukraine and are nearly completely focused on Russia. This is very different to Austria which I visited in June.
Following Berlin, I briefly returned to Kyiv on my way to Riga. The German Marshall Fund had organized a one day conference on the anniversaries of the Georgian Rose and Ukrainian Orange Revolutions. A year ago there was still an anniversary event in Kyiv, even though Orange forces were still divided. This year, there was an official celebration organized by the president, but no Maidan. Yulia Tymoshenko was touring Belgium and Germany in her new capacity as head of the opposition and Viktor Yanukovych boycotted the invitation.
After a day of comparing Georgian and Ukrainian experiences since their respective revolutions it was obvious that they have radically different views. Georgians are not completely happy at domestic developments, accusing President Mikhail Saakashvili of being autocratic, while in agreement with him on foreign policy. Ukrainians are the opposite, divided over foreign policy but both sides arguing that they wish to improve Ukraine’s democratic gains from the Orange Revolution. Nobody from the Blues is accusing President Viktor Yushchenko of being autocratic, if anything the main complaints are from the Orange side that he is too weak.
The German Marshall Fund seminar is the first of two funded by the Boell Foundation. The second, to take place in early 2007, will deal with foreign policy. Nevertheless, it was impossible to completely ignore foreign policy, in particularly because the Riga NATO summit was approaching.
Ukraine’s relations with NATO were the main subject of the interviews I gave to the newspaper Den (http://www.day.kiev.ua/173185/), Radio Ukraine and Channel 5’s Zakryta Zona (Closed Zone) program. The biggest problem I outlined for the West is that they do not know what is Ukrainian foreign policy and do not know what Yanukovych and the Party of Regions stands for? After all, I told Channel 5 and Den that the Party of Regions should enter the Guinness Book of Records. They have changed their view of NATO three times in four years, from support for membership when first in government, to total hostility in opposition to now support for cooperation (but not membership) when back in government. This opportunism and in-fighting over areas of responsibility between Yanukovych-Yushchenko means that NATO does not know what to do with Ukraine?