I was particularly pleased to read the greetings to us from Roman Szporluk, Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. I have known Roman for a good quarter of a century, first as mentor and later as a friend, and I would be untrue to myself if I failed to take up his challenge and hazard some predictions. After all, in Ukraine I have moved over from history to political science, and prediction is what the latter discipline is all about.
Hegel wrote, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only after dusk.” In other words, one can only orient oneself on the basis of what has been and is. As Europe integrates, it will face a choice between continentalism and Atlanticism. I suspect that it will choose the former and that Europe and North America will drift apart as Europe finds it can take care of itself quite nicely without Uncle Sam. I will not attempt other global predictions, but confine myself to something I know a little about, the postcommunist world. Here the challenge is integration into an already formed world system. Some former so-called people’s democracies with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic leading the way are clearly on the path to successful integration into the First World. Russia looks upon that world with suspicion, hostility, and has evolved a political-economic system that cannot be integrated into Europe even if the Kremlin so desired. All of its history indicates that Russia will most likely choose grandeur over Europe and democracy, that it will continue to seek to restore an albeit reduced bipolar world with itself as one of the poles, even at the cost of authoritarianism (or worse) and the deprivation of its people. The great question mark and challenge remains Ukraine, for as the West extends eastward and Eurasian Russia looks West, it will have to make the choice it has so long avoided under the verbal fig leaf of multiple vectors. Meanwhile, in a world where the maxim of “say one thing, think another, and do a third,” verbal declarations of the nation’s European choice remain meaningless unless they are backed up by real actions designed to make this country function politically and economically at least something like the Europe it says it is choosing. Such actions remain unlikely so long as dominance remains with those with whose interests such actions conflict (call them oligarchs, red directors, the bureaucrats that have developed a symbiotic relationship with them, and the criminal structures they turn to whenever they want to decide something “informally”). Should this continue, we will continue to have not only a shadow economy, shadow politics, but also a shadow process of integration with Russia, if only because the current system in Ukraine is compatible with Russia’s, not Europe’s. And even the best government will be unable to change this because it will lack the support of the structures with power, wealth, and influence that in the real world make politics. Whether new structures will arise that are interested in Ukraine’s evolving into a European type representative government with a market economy cannot at this writing be predicted with any certainty. It can only be prayed for.
