By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March
01, 2022
If anyone had any doubt that Ukraine has
its own national identity, the early days of the Russian invasion should
have eliminated it.
There’s been the stiff resistance of
Ukraine’s fighters, the former president giving interviews in the streets of
Kyiv in battle gear, the ordinary men and women insulting and defying Russian
soldiers, and above all, the comedian-turned-president, the now legendary
Volodymyr Zelensky, refusing to leave his capital as Russian forces bear down
on the city seeking to capture or kill him.
This is all so compelling because there is
something inherently stirring about a people defending their homeland from a
would-be imperial overlord.
The fight to save Ukraine represents a
righteous nationalism. The Ukrainians aren’t defending democracy per se or
freedom in the sense of abstract rights — although Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a
threat to both — but their land and birthright. They are struggling for
national self-determination, and even national survival.
Even in a globalized world, even when
patriotism is not nearly as strong a force as it once was, even among Eurocrats
who want to subsume Europe’s nations in an EU superstate, Ukraine’s struggle
still strikes a profound chord.
In his speech prior to the war, making
a direct appeal to the Russian people, President Zelensky spoke of his memories
of Ukraine. “No one in Russia knows the meaning of these places, these streets,
these names, these events,” he said. “These are all alien to you, unfamiliar.
This is our land, and this is our history.”
“We are not part of one whole,” he
explained. “You cannot swallow us up. We are different. But this difference is
not a reason for enmity. We want to determine our own course and build our own
history — peacefully, calmly, and honestly.”
Zelensky was speaking a nationalist’s
language of love for his people’s history, land, and traditions. As G. K.
Chesterton once wrote, “cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good;
nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best.”
Of course, Ukraine’s status as a nation is
contested by Vladimir Putin, who claims that it rightfully belongs to Russia.
His revanchist vision is often described as an aggressive nationalism, but it
is really a drive for empire. In his own lurid speech before starting the war,
Putin laid out a spurious version of history wherein Ukrainian nationhood was
an invention of the Soviet Union. He attacked “the virus of nationalist
ambitions” and claimed after the invasion began that Russian troops were only
fighting against “nationalist groups” in Ukraine.
Putin is armed with newer weapons, but
he’s acting every bit the traditional Russian imperialist. Already in the 15th
century, a crude Russian state ruled an enormous swath of territory. By the end
of the 19th century, in terms of sheer landmass, it had become one of the
largest empires ever. This empire was lost with Russia’s defeat in World I,
reconstituted by the Soviets, and lost again at the end of the Cold War. Putin
seeks to revive a version of this project and notably referred in his pre-war
speech to “the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR.”
Zelensky and the Ukrainians are fighting
for independence against this behemoth and, in so doing, giving Ukraine new
national heroes and national lore that will sustain it even if the worst comes.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once
wrote of Poland, another country constantly under threat from imperial Russia:
The virtue
of her citizens, their patriotic zeal, the particular form that national
institutions can give to their spirit, that is the only rampart always ready to
defend it, and which no army could breach. If you arrange things such that a
Pole could never become a Russian, then I can assure you that Russia will never
subjugate Poland.
The Russian tanks may roll into Kyiv, but
Russia won’t ultimately triumph over Ukrainian nationalism.
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