The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously observed that a man cannot step into the same river twice. By this he meant that the passage of time inevitably changes both the character of the man and the composition of the river. The same might be said about Ukraine and the changing attitudes of Europe. The second government of Yulia Tymoshenko has changed since 2004. One hopes that its ministers have gained from experience, but it is also true that the world in which they now have to make decisions is dramatically different from the world that welcomed the Orange Revolution.
At the broadest level, Ukraine is no longer seen romantically as the creation of visionary idealists whose street actions rescued millions from post-Soviet serfdom and brought liberal democracy to Kyiv. Three years after the Orange Revolution Ukraine’s political leaders are seen as fractious, given to incessant political warfare, petty, and incapable of serious governance. The optimistic and sentimental view of the Maidan generation in 2005 has given way to a certain cynicism and thinly disguised frustration in Europe and the United States at the beginning of 2008.
However, it is not simply that Ukraine has changed. The United States and Europe have also changed — and not for the better. Despite the political skills of Angela Merkel and the restless energy of Nicolas Sarkozy, Europe as a whole is deeply fatigued by the very thought of its populous, impoverished, and problematic neighbors. Affordable energy supplies in Western Europe are a more pressing concern than the growth of democracy in Kyiv.
To Ukraine’s east, a confused and neo-tsarist Russia has returned to the ranks of the great powers with little in mind other than to cause trouble and draw attention to itself by vetoing any international initiative that looks vaguely progressive or modern. And across the Atlantic, in the United States, Americans are feeling sorry for themselves. The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan are not going well. Housing prices are falling through the floor. And the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the US dollar, which to the average American is the financial equivalent of being eliminated from the World Cup by a girl’s soccer team from Samoa.
In short, Ukraine has frittered away a lot of goodwill over the past three years, and the new government now faces challenges in a Euro-Atlantic world that is a lot less generous, substantially more cautious, and tending perilously towards isolationism. Many of Europe’s doors, which appeared to be open to Ukraine in 2004, have been closed and some have been nailed shut. In this austere environment the government of Yulia Tymoshenko faces important decisions.
The first, and arguably most important, task for the government is to finalize its membership in the WTO. This will require the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada to persuade the governing coalition parties and opposition parties to work together on the final legislative package. It will also require the government to demonstrate a heretofore undiscovered diplomatic sensitivity and sophistication in dealing with last- minute European concerns, which are oftentimes thinly disguised protectionism. For better or worse, the WTO is Ukraine’s gateway to global markets, international capital, and ultimately — Europe. Any further delays or internecine squabbling will allow Russia to make its case that Ukraine should be kept out of the WTO until Russia is ready to join, which could be years from now or never.
A second, and far less important, priority is for Ukraine to decide what relationship it seeks with the NATO allies. In the past, Ukrainian political leaders surpassed themselves in sending conflicting and contradictory signals to NATO, and as a result the Permanent Representatives at NATO have pretty much stopped believing anything they hear from Kyiv. Still, the question is simpler for the new government. All Ukrainian leaders, President Yushchenko, Prime Minister Tymoshenko, and former Prime Minister Yanukovych agree that sometime in the future Ukraine will have a referendum on deciding to join NATO. Happily, this coincides with the views of the European allies, who independently concluded that Ukraine will not, and cannot, be considered for membership for many years.
So the only question that remains for the Tymoshenko government to decide is what relationship with NATO would be most beneficial for Ukraine until this distant future. This decision must be taken before President Yushchenko arrives at the next NATO Summit in Bucharest on April 2. This does not give Defense Minister Yekhanurov much time to prepare his recommendations or Foreign Minister Ohryzko many weeks to clarify the new government’s objectives for perplexed officials in Western Europe.
While it would be a good thing for Ukraine to establish a formal working relationship with NATO at Bucharest in terms of improving Kyiv’s political credibility and building long-term relationships with European institutions, in the larger scheme of things what Ukraine decides or fails to decide about NATO is marginal. What really matters is whether the new government can build on the success of WTO membership to open substantive free trade negotiations with a sceptical Europe. This will require a consistency, subtlety, and single-minded determination that have not been evident in Ukraine diplomacy since...well, not recently.
The establishment of a free trading system between Ukraine and the European Union would be the first step towards a range of economic associations that might ultimately open the prospect of future integration and even membership in the European Union. Even in the short term, free trade with the European Union would have a positive and dramatic effect on Ukraine’s economic growth, modernization of its infrastructure, and access of ordinary Ukrainians to better jobs and educational opportunities.
Finally, the new government will have to address the problem of reform, which is nowhere near as easy as campaign promises may have suggested. Officials of the US government often point to what they perceive as a lack of transparency in the ownership and structure of the RosUkrEnergo Company, which acts as a middleman in the supply of energy from Central Asia to Ukraine. Even so, RosUkrEnergo is an illustration of what is wrong in Ukraine; no one claims that this company is the underlying cause of the persistent corruption of Ukrainian governments.
The fourth, and in some sense the most difficult, challenge facing the new government is avoiding the mistakes of the first Tymoshenko government. The answer to governmental corruption is not for the government to nationalize more private companies, as it threatened to do in 2005. Nor is it to send the tax police and special services after political opponents, as recently occurred in Georgia. The most difficult challenge for Ukraine will be to establish a dispassionate and fully independent judiciary impervious to both bribery and political instruction. Sadly, this is painstaking work and very dull for ambitious politicians.
In less than two years the next president of Ukraine will step into a new Europe, which will have changed the Constitution of the European Union and the entire leadership in Brussels. Perhaps Europe will be in a more hopeful mood, with its doors beginning to swing open again. Perhaps by then Ukraine will have succeeded in its reforms, and its political leaders will be celebrated as they were in 2004 and lauded once again in the editorial pages. This will depend on what gets done in the next 18 months.
Bruce P. JACKSON is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, a non- profit advocate for democratic change in the Balkans and former Soviet Union.
