"Halychyna in Ukraine..." Taras Voznyak, Mykola Riabchuk, Pawel Kowal, Yurko Prochasko

Galicia’s uniqueness is seen, first and foremost, in language and cultural categories, and to some extent in religion. This works well in everyday life, at the level of anecdotes and stereotypes. However, in a crisis situation it seems that more important are values, such as an independent state, a common past, freedom, independence, and of course democracy, because Ukraine – including also Galicia – is building and demanding democracy, and defines itself at the discourse level as a European democracy.

Taras Voznyak: Perhaps from the perspective of Krakow or Warsaw, Ukraine and Poland may look like similar countries with comparable territories, population and history. Yet these two countries are completely different nations and political creatures. Importantly, this difference is primarily related to the last century. Namely, a result of the political activities in 20th-century Poland, as this state and nation has become ethnically, religiously and linguistically homogeneous. One could even say that, having moved the borders three or four hundred kilometres westward after the Second World War, its start was from a completely different position than that of Ukraine. Today’s Ukraine therefore better resembles the Second Polish Republic, a state “of many peoples, many wonders”, and in a sense is now taking the same exam that Poland took during the inter-war period.
Ukraine is diverse not only linguistically or religiously, but also in regard to various traditions of political culture, depending on the region and resulting from different historical experiences. In Galicia there was an unusual situation. Citizens could participate in elections, organise themselves or establish different associations. The array of civic activities ranged from philately to conspiracy and politics. This, however, is a characteristic of only one part of Ukraine, or maybe even a part of Poland.

Today’s Ukrainian Galicia includes three oblasts. In a political and administrative meaning, Galicia is not any kind of body; it does not exist on Ukraine’s map. But it endures in the form of the tradition of parliamentarianism and self-organisation. Just like Volhynia, which at a certain time was part of the Russian Empire but also for some time belonged to the Second Polish Republic, with the tradition of democracy and elections. This is why today it is different from the Volhynia oblasts in the broader meaning: from Zhytomyr to parts of the Khmelnytskyi Oblast or others which did not go through this same inter-war learning experience. Quite different too is Carpathian Ruthenia, with its interwar Czechoslovak tradition of Bukovina. And most importantly: Central Ukraine, which, in fact, plays the most decisive role in the fate of the state. Here we can make a reference to the Cossack tradition, which offers a prototype for today’s volunteer battalions. At times this tradition led to a complete mess – similar to the Polish noble tradition – but it also established the very first elements of social self-organisation. Finally, there are the territories of the former Wild Fields. These territories of colonisation, whose history dates back to the 16th century and which were a certain kind of “Ukrainian Wild East”, including Donbas and the South, in other words the areas which are being fought over today.

Thus, Ukraine is made up of a whole range of political cultures. In addition to this, it must be said that in the last quarter-century of the country’s independence, the situation has been constantly changing. We have been witnessing a spreading of the Galician (or Austrian or Habsburg) tradition of self-organisation to the East: first to Volhynia, then Central Ukraine, and now the very same processes are noticeable in the East and the South. This is taking place in a situation where there are no military troops – the Yanukovych regime was not alone in not treating the issue of security seriously, refusing to believe in the possibility of aggression on the part of Russia, “our brothers”. The Yanukovych government effectively led the state to destruction in the broadest meaning of this word: the security services, army and state institutions as such. In the context of Ukraine, corruption can be understood very directly, in a sense derived from the Latin etymology of this word: corruption as the breaking of the state which leads to its dysfunctionality. Hence, we have corruption in traditional terms – there is bribery because the state does not function, and nor do its institutions.

In that case, what is the difference between Ukraine’s and Russia’s political culture? The difference is that in Russia the rule was always Russian: autocracy, tsarism. In Ukraine, conversely, the rule always came from the outside, which allowed for the emergence of a very peculiar behaviour of Ukrainians – different on different territories – in their relations with the government. They were either liberal, like in Czechoslovakia, or authoritarian, like in Russia. This is an attitude full of distance, a lack of trust, and at times irony. Irony which is to a certain degree similar to Czech irony, although somewhat altered by Romanticism and patriotism – like in Poland. But this ironical distance to the government is also, in a way, the beginning of democracy. We elect a president, we elect a hetman, and even on the next day we are already swapping anecdotes about him.
If in Russia support for the tsar or an absolute ruler is a tradition (one that is being followed by Putin, with an 80 to 86 percent approval rating), then in Ukraine the norm is that the president who was elected by half of the society has a completely different approval rating in a week or a month. But this is also the norm in every democratic society. The irony allows the government to be controlled, regardless of whether it is Ukrainian or foreign. That is why Ukrainians do not expect such strong support from the government as do Russians, for example. This could be seen in recent times: the state, which broke down during the Yanukovych era, deprived of an army as well as services responsible for providing it with food and weapons, showed its power, and the society managed to organise itself. For over a year now, we have been engaged in a war with the Russian Federation – here we can put forward a provocative question: Which other state has ever fought with Russia for a year and a half? And has managed? Ukraine is managing not thanks to the state that was destroyed but to a large degree thanks to its society. Had it not been for the volunteer battalions in the first days and weeks of the war in the East, then Putin, with some kind of latter-day “Commander Konev”, would probably be closer to Krakow…

This tradition of self-organisation, which can now be seen in the form of volunteer movements that gather not only military men, but also volunteers who are providing weapons and ammunition for the army, is nothing new. It originated in Galicia, where such forms of co-operation were established, such as the case of Sokół – there was a Czech, a Polish and a Ukrainian Sokół. In a way, we have been learning from our neighbours. We are using the same political technologies.

Thanks to the traditions of self-organisation we can now witness the birth of a new type of political organism, one that is different from the one that exists in Poland – which, if I may risk this statement, is a national state in the ethnic meaning. As I have mentioned, Poland was forced into homogeneity. We do not have this “obligation”, and in this sense are creating something new: a new political nation. Of course its root, carcass and foundation are the ethnic Ukrainian nation, but the political nation constitutes a different form. It poses a great challenge as we speak different languages, have different religions, and represent different mentalities and political cultures. We ourselves do not have full knowledge of what form this new political creature will take. But we live in interesting times. Many people are reacting to what is taking place in Ukraine, and seemingly the reaction of the Ukrainian society to this challenge was the right one. And we are not talking here about 1918, the Polish Legions in the First World War or the Battle of Monte Cassino – this is taking place right now.

Mykola Riabchuk: It is somewhat ironic that we are talking about Galicia at a time when war is taking place at the other end of the country. In Galicia there is no war, and probably there will not be one, because today’s Russia does not need this Galicia. Russians think that this is a completely different country, it does not belong to the Russkiy mir, and just like Poland it is inhabited by the traitors of Slavdom. Hence, there is a chance that we can survive at least in this part of Ukraine.

In the minds of many Ukrainians, Galicia constitutes the essence of Europe, and in a sense also of Ukraine and civil society. This is a region where all these phenomena are most clearly and convincingly visible. But there is also an opposite view, a more critical one, almost self-critical, as it assumes that in Galicia there was not too much Europe, nor too much civil society, and that Galician Ukrainianness was very specific, and had its flaws. Nonetheless, one must admit that Galicia is a unique region in Ukraine, the one where urban Ukrainian speaking emerged. Thus there is no other city in Ukraine outside Galicia where the Ukrainian language dominates. To a certain extent it is used in Volhynia, Chernivtsi, and even Uzhhorod, but in fact it is present only in three Galician oblasts: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil. There nobody questions it, has any doubts, while the rest of the country does not have this urban Ukrainianness expressed through the usage of the Ukrainian language. Clearly the Ukrainian language is present in Kyiv and in other places, but it is not dominant there in the informal public space. It is not proper to speak Ukrainian in public, even though half of the Kyiv population speaks this language at home. This is a very interesting phenomenon. Let me cite here the story of Serhiy Zhadan, a Ukrainian writer who comes from Kharkiv. The people there are overall tolerant to him speaking Ukrainian, yet he happens to have some other problems in regard to that. One day he went to a shop to buy some bread. He asked the seller for bread in Ukrainian, and she responded, “Oh, are you from Western Ukraine?” He then thought, “Damn, I just want to buy some bread and she is asking me where I come from?” In situations like this, instead of bread you always get such a question, which can be quite uncomfortable. And for your whole life you have to answer, “I come from Kyiv, not Galicia, and I just want to buy some bread.” Galicia is different in this regard, and that is why it makes the impression of being so unique, a bit different.

How far does this sense of Galician uniqueness and this Great Ukrainian uniqueness regarding Galicia go? This is actually a key question, as to a large degree it determines the future and the present of this country. Galician uniqueness is unquestionable, and sometimes it is a cause of pride. However, in the mid-19th century Galicians in some strange way adopted the Great Ukrainian project. In his wonderful article titled “The Construction of Nationality in Galician Rus': Icarian Flights in Almost All Directions”, John Paul Himka analyses this problem and tries to find out why in the mid-19th century Galician Ruthenians made a strange choice and supported the Little Russia project, even though they had other possibilities. They could, of course, have chosen Polonisation, but this was difficult mainly because the Polish identity project was exclusive in nature and was rejecting Ruthenians due to their religion. For pre-modern people the change in religion was a much more difficult thing than a change in language. There was also the Russian project; it was very powerful, promoted by St Petersburg, and this also did not find roots there. It was also possible to create a Ruthenian identity, but this too failed. Instead, the Galicians adopted the Little Russia project and the whole discourse that was related to it, its narrative, symbolism, not only the myth of the Kyivan Rus’, but also that of the Cossacks, that were very hostile towards the Galicians and the Uniate Church. The truth is that the Cossacks killed the followers of the Uniate Church more keenly than they did the Catholics! And yet the Galicians accepted this myth, and even accepted the names which had earlier not existed there. When by the end of the 19th century the Ukrainian theatre in Przemyśl staged “Natalka Poltavka” by Kotlarevsky, all the names in the play that were not familiar to the Ruthenian viewers in Galicia had to be changed. Hence, Natalka Poltavka was changed to Mariachka, etc. Galicians, however, have a strong sense of identity with Great Ukraine, and despite many different attempts at creating Galician separatism or some kind of autonomy, these projects have not worked out. Unfortunately – or fortunately – this a topic for a different discussion.

And what is the attitude of Great Ukraine towards Galicia? In 2006 the Razumkov Centre carried out a nationwide opinion poll in which respondents in different parts of the country were asked how they saw the inhabitants of other regions. The question was the following: “Do you think that the inhabitants of such and such a region are close to you or not? What is the degree of this proximity?” The assessments were made based on a ten-point scale. Interestingly, in all these regions, including Central Ukraine, Galicia was perceived as a very remote place and its inhabitants as “different”. This was not expressed in the negative meaning of the word, but just as different. The difference was noticeable. The question that was asked referred not only to inhabitants of other regions, but also to neighbouring countries: Poland, Belarus and Russia. In Eastern Ukraine, especially in Donbas, and in South-eastern Ukraine, Galicians were seen as those who are more remote than Russians or even Belarusians. This is quite interesting, as Belarusians are not very well known in Ukraine, and their presence there is as noticeable as it is in Poland, if not less. So why did the Ukrainians answer in this way? The reasons can be sought in the Eastern Slavonic myth, which apparently connects Belarusians with Russians and Ukrainians. This is why Belarusians are perceived as being closer and Galicians as being foreign, different, Catholic, spoilt by the West. This is why it could be expected that if this differentness is so strong, then in a crisis situation the whole of Great Ukraine will support those who are closer to it, namely the Russians. This, however, has not happened. Today, we can see that not only has Central Ukraine been fighting with Galicia, defending this All Ukrainian project, but so does a larger part of the East and South. This is an interesting paradox. In opinion polls, but also in urban folklore, it is popular to make jokes about Galicians presenting them as petty crooks, Banderites, zealots and nationalists; the negative stereotypes are very strong. And yet Great Ukraine takes their side. The question as to why this is happening seems to be the key task.

Galicia’s uniqueness is seen, first and foremost, in language and cultural categories, and to some extent in religion. This works well in everyday life, at the level of anecdotes and stereotypes. However, in a crisis situation it seems that more important are values, such as an independent state, a common past, freedom, independence, and of course democracy, because Ukraine – including also Galicia – is building and demanding democracy, and defines itself at the discourse level as a European democracy. Which is to say everything that in very general terms can be referred to as European values. And here, in my view, is the key to the issue: it has turned out that in the crisis situation all cultural and religious differences are not as important as is the community and the willingness to have a value community. Not recognising this issue was the greatest mistake of the Kremlin, Putin and the whole Russian elite. Russian propaganda has for years been advancing the idea of the Eastern Slavs as a community built on religion, mythologising the shared history and similarity of languages, as “almost the same language means there is almost the same nation”. This is a classic propaganda format: Ukrainians and Russians are almost the same nation as they apparently have common history, religion, language, etc. Of course one can have such an attitude; however, Ukrainians do not fight or engage in discussions at this level, because this is not what defines a modern nation. Ukrainians are trying to build a civic nation, and that is why they define this “almost the same nation” not by means of a language or religion but by the values it defends. In this sense, Ukrainians today are almost the same as the citizens of the European Union, since they want to support the same values. They want to build Ukraine based on European rules. So we are almost the same nation as the Germans or the Dutch, and even though we are not fully there yet, this is our direction. Not land, not blood, not language, not religion, but freedom, democracy and the rule of law. That is why Galicia has turned out to be so familiar, despite being different.

Paweł Kowal: My reflection on the topic of the impact of the myth of Galicia on what is taking place today in Ukraine will be based on three points: 1) the problem, which was brought up by Taras Woźniak, of participation and political culture; 2) the role of Galicia in Ukraine’s political culture during transformation and Galicia as a bastion of independent movements in Ukraine before 1989; and 3) the issue which I give the working title of the “train from Lviv”, which in a way I described in the article “A Tale of Three Maidans” published by “New Eastern Europe”, in which Iwona Reichardt, Maciej Wapiński and I proposed our interpretation of the Maidan phenomenon in Ukraine.

Hence, the first point: the problem of participation and maps of participation. In my view in the debate on Ukraine, it is worth including a discipline which may seem of little interest – political geography and electoral geography. Some interesting research in this regard is being undertaken by Mariusz Kowalski at the Institute of Electoral Geography at the Polish Academy of Sciences and Jacek Lubecki at the University of Arkansas. Kowalski’s research focuses on the most important Polish elections, those of 1989. In this context there are two important issues: first of all, support for the Solidarność Civic Committee, and secondly, the problem of voter turnout (not many people remember that these elections had a relatively low turnout). In modern history the vision of the 1989 elections has remained somewhat idealised. Indeed, support for Solidarity was important because the part of the elections that was free, that is elections to the Senate, was set up as “first past the post”. Hence, it was important for the final results whether Solidarity got a majority of votes in each election district, to get a senator. However, the level of support was much different in different voivodeships. It is worth pointing out that the highest support for Solidarity, at a level of 70–81 percent, was recorded in voivodeships which once belonged to Galicia. At the national level it fluctuated between 60 and 62 percent. Yet some people remember these elections as 100 percent victorious, despite the fact that the committees did not get a clear majority everywhere. Had the support been even a few percent lower, instead of 99 senators, Solidarity would have got 70 or 65. The second important thing that mattered in these elections was the turnout. Again, in the “post-Galician” voivodeships it reached around 67 to 72 percent, which was around 10 percent higher than the national average. This is all about the Polish part of the historical Galicia. Research undertaken by Professor Jacek Lubecki, however, provides us with empirical evidence that “electoral” Galicia exists and there is a relationship between the tradition of being a part of Galicia and the shape of political culture in our part of Europe. Lubecki compares Poland’s elections from 1997 and Ukraine’s elections in 1998 based on a model he developed and which was to function in both the Polish and the Ukrainian context. Together with his team, he researched support for parties with pro-national orientation – or to put it even better: those who straightforwardly opted for a system change in Poland and Ukraine. Of course it is impossible to treat all these groups with the same denominator. In Poland the 1997 elections were a breakthrough because, from the transformation perspective, they meant mobilisation. The Solidarity Election Action was fighting for the dominant position it had lost to post-communist parties to be restored after four years. It reached an agreement with the then-existing party Freedom Union and an idea was created for a common government and plan for a takeover of power. The meaning of the 1998 elections in Ukraine was somewhat different, but it can also be reduced to an attempt at making a breakthrough and takeover of power by the anti-Kuchma camp that began to emerge at that time. In the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil voivodeships in Ukraine (for this discussion let us one more time use these old names) and Nowosądeckie, Krakowskie, Rzeszowskie, Tarnowskie, Bielskie, Przemyskie, Krośnieńskie voivodeships in Poland, we can see a very similar increase in support for these parties, around 10 percent higher than the national average in both countries. The turnout in these key elections in 1997 and 1998 in Ukrainian and Polish Galicia was 10 percent higher than the national average. Let us imagine that we mark Galician voivodeships on the map of Galicia and its former territory is characterised by two elements: clear increased participation (which in my view is not limited to sole participation in the voting act, but also self-organisation of the society etc.) and support for the pro-national, anti-communist parties (of course in Poland this meant something different: these are parties which support change and remove post-communist groups from power).

And here the second issue emerges, meaning the problem of transformation. In the majority of theories on political transformation which took place in Central Europe, this process is presented as a “mixing of the old with the new”. In this context let me bring up a dispute which started to take place within the Solidarity Civic Committee and around Lech Wałęsa as early as the spring of 1989. It focused on the format of the opposition participation in the Round Table talks. The majority of activists, at that time gathered around Wałęsa, representing different groups and including such figures as Adam Michnik, Bronisław Geremek, Jacek Kuroń, and Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński, were convinced that it was necessary to take part in the talks, start the discussion. Hence, they represented a vision of the transformation typical of Central Europe, which assumed that it would take the form of mixing the old with the new. The only problem was how much of the old there should be, and for how long. Then a historical dispute emerged: Michnik wanted it to be Solidarity, with the reformist wing of the Polish United Workers’ Party, meaning the group of “young guns” that included Kwaśniewski, Miller etc., while the Kaczyński brothers, especially Jarosław, who back then was influencing the political line of Wałęsa, presented a similar project, but with the participation of the United People’s Party and the Democratic Alliance, but not the Polish United Workers’ Party. For the moment, Kaczyński’s concept won, but later, in the process of further transformation, it was Michnik’s vision that triumphed. The truth is that in fact they were quite similar to each other. Michnik’s phrase from early July 1989 “Your president, our prime minister” was not – contrary to some interpretations – a call to give power to Jaruzelski, but a quick takeover, based on the mixed model; in other words it meant recognising the General’s presidency in exchange for the takeover of the government.

In Ukraine’s case, Galicia is the bastion of new political movements. In Poland this “mixing of power” has succeeded in a sense that at the end it was the “new” that got the upper hand. Of course we can criticise the transformation project which is based on combining new forces with the old ones, but the result in Poland was not the worst. There were people such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki or Jan Olszewski who believed that there should be no compromises with the communists, but they later changed their minds, or it was circumstances that forced them to do so. Mazowiecki became the leader of the government that he had initially criticised, expressing his scepticism. In Ukraine, unfortunately, it was the old forces that won in the “transformation mix”, while Galicia with its tradition and independent movements turned out to be too weak. The political line, which in Poland was a result of large political support in the 1989 elections and which was represented by the elite elected in the elections, brought about an effect. There was enough Western democratic political culture which, to a large degree, had originated in Galicia. In Ukraine, things were converse. As a matter of fact, the people who came from the national movement and the whole mass mobilisation from Lviv, and were added to Leonid Kuchma’s camp, played no role after a few years. The new elite (I am using Lubecki’s terminology with some caution here) came, as a matter of fact, from Kuchma’s group. The same applied to other states in the region, for example in Georgia, where Mikhail Saakashvili and his group were people not from the Georgian national movement from before 1989, but dissidents to the Eduard Shevardnadze government. In Poland the situation was very different because the new elite had nothing in common with the post-communist camp, and this camp had to somehow succumb. Today, based on the example of Leszek Miller’s party, we can see an almost complete end of history of this camp. Hence, the political transformation in Ukraine’s case has not ended with success because Ukrainian Galicia turned out, in my view, to be historically too small to determine the format of the new government in Ukraine.

Let us now move to the third point, which is the most controversial. It could be reduced to the question: could a Maidan have taken place in Lviv? Somebody might say: in a way it took place there, there were tents etc. My thesis, however, is that the Maidan is not a part of Western political culture. I believe that Maidan, as a political method, does not agree with the Austro-Hungarian Galician political tradition. The Maidan should rather be written into the Ukrainian constitution as a special institution which regulates the political situation at moments when the parliament does not function and when oligarchs can no longer make deals with each other: in other words, when nothing else works. The Maidan is a political instrument which in Poland is called an assembly and was completely rooted out and replaced by democratic institutions created by the nobility. In the case of the Ukrainian Maidan, its roots are not only in the forgotten Slavic tradition of direct democracy but also in the Zaporozhian Sich, and play the role of an organ that makes final decisions: who will be the ataman and what will be the general direction of political movements. In my view, there were three such Maidans: the first one was the Granite Revolution in 1990, the second the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the third the Euromaidan. They all differ, but among their common features we can point to a surprisingly similar composition of leaders. Such a person is, for example, Yuri Lutsenko, who played an important role in all three Maidans.

The first Maidan had a strongly anti-communist flavour and took the form of a hippie-like revolution. The year 2004 was the closest to a bourgeois-type of revolution in the West, with a strong liberal democracy element. The Euromaidan was a combination of an anti-communist and nationalistic element, but the issue of dignity was important, especially in the context of corruption. Each of these Maidans had its own course and different consequences, especially the 2014 revolution, which turned into a full-dimensional revolution with, as a result, social change. To illustrate, allow me to provide an anecdote: the 2013-2014 revolution was about to take place; it was one of the first days, but already back then TV stations were showing what was happening in Kyiv. I was at my friends’ place in France, watching TV (at that time there was some renewed interest in the West in the events unfolding in Ukraine) and they asked me what I thought about it. I offered a typical answer: You know, it’s very important, such a bloodless revolution… The French looked at me and replied: there’s no such thing as a bloodless revolution in Europe. If it’s bloodless, it’s not a revolution. What they said is so European, especially in the context of the French experience. But the Euromaidan was, unfortunately, sealed with the blood of the demonstrators.

Taking into account these three revolutions, the three Maidans, we can say that the political culture that gave them their basis is not Western and should not be linked with Galicia. What is a deciding factor here is the issue of self-organisation. The “train from Lviv” which provides revolutionaries is a part of the identity of today’s Ukraine. A departure of the revolutionaries from Lviv to Kyiv is in a way a compromise among the people who would not decide to sacrifice their city – they would not tear apart the cobblestones on the Lviv Market Square, but they were ready to support the revolution in Kyiv and provided it with democratic knowhow. In this sense, the political culture of Galicia, at the level of self-organisation and the participation in social life and politics, played an important role in all three of the Maidans.

Jurko Prochasko: I like myths and I dislike them. I like them because working with myths – as Hans Blumenberg would have said: Arbeit am Mythos – is a fascinating undertaking. There is no other equally intellectually interesting activity as mediating and reflecting on myths. Especially those that not only refer to historical reconstructions (these are beautiful and in addition safe, as they refer to the past) but also contemporary ones, as they accurately show our human condition, our nostalgia which we are trying to fulfil with these myths, our dreams and fears, which we are trying to break.

On the other hand, I do not like myths as they also tell the truth. This is a paradox, as it seems that myths are a falsehood, a fabrication. However, when we take a closer look at them it turns out that they tell the truth about us and about who we are. This is because they talk about what we fear, what we desire and what we try to avoid in all possible ways, as well as because they show our strategies of talking about something, visible or invisible. In this sense I would like to consider one of the hypotheses of the myth of Galicia that is related to the Maidan and the development of civil society in Ukraine.

Jacek Purchla stressed that since 1989 no other society has produced such an intensive dynamic transformation and development of the Galician myth as have the Ukrainians. In the development of this myth, Central Europe played a very important role. For decades, many distinguished Ukrainian artists and intellectuals thought that the Galician past was our asset and that Galicia, and more broadly the territories that belonged to the Habsburg Empire (meaning also Bukovina and Carpathian Ruthenia), participated in this idea of Galicia (which was wonderfully described by Larry Wolff in his books) and should celebrate this belonging. The core of this view is the idea of participation and access to Central European civilisation as well as the idea of exclusiveness – thanks to this participation we are something different, better, more exclusive. However, in the 1990s and since 2000 this tendency has somewhat died out and become unproductive, especially when it turned out that the countries and societies that were traditionally associated with Central Europe – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic – after joining the European Union, meaning apparently the real Europe, turned their backs on the idea of Central Europe. This myth has accomplished what it was intended for and died out, like the snake’s skin which has aged and became useless. With this background the efforts of the Ukrainian intellectuals and artists to keep the vision of Ukrainian participation in the idea of Central Europe looked particularly lonely, even desperate. This was like defending a lost position, auf verlorenem Posten.

Yet something unexpected happened. I think that there are moments when we can get out of the sphere of myths and enter reality, almost in a sense of Husserlian transcendence to real myths, when we touch life outside of myths and mythologies. Nonetheless, I am convinced that such a window to reality is never open for a long time. This moment lasts for a very short period – such was the case with the last Maidan. And it does not mean that we can eradicate this myth, deconstruct it or explain it. Myths are like bacteria which become immune to antibiotics. For some time the antibiotic works, but later the bacteria mutate and it turns out that a different, stronger drug is needed. Let us look at the European intellectual history: the Enlightenment was meant to combat myths – it did not succeed. Nineteenth-century positivism wanted to combat myths, but it also failed. Later analytical philosophy came, Wittgenstein and the whole Vienna Circle – but with no effect. Deconstructivism also did not succeed. Maybe this comparison with viruses and bacteria is too negative, as it would mean that myths are some kind of illness. They should rather be seen as an element of our life, what Freud called our defence mechanisms. Without them we simply cannot live, our psyche cannot function. Similarly, we cannot imagine our historical and social beings outside the sphere of mythology.

Returning to the issue of Central Europe: there are moments when we manage to get out of the myth, but these moments never last for too long. The last Maidan, Euromaidan, was not a triumph of the Central European idea, which was absent there. I do not remember a single explicit reference to Central Europe being made in the entire Maidan discourse. This event did not feed on the myth of Central Europe, which was commonly present in the Ukrainian Galicia in recent decades. However, what the Maidan did and has been doing is to embody the Central European practice: the idea of diversity, tolerance, defence of minorities, solidarity, empathy and pluralism. These values have become the values of the Maidan, without a reference to the Central European myth. For the first time in Ukraine’s history there is a spread throughout the country’s entire territory of not only the idea, but also the practice, of pluralism, diversity and solidarity – meaning the fundamental values of Central Europe, yet without any reference to this idea.

The classically understood idea of Central Europe seems to be dead for another reason. The European Union has absorbed the old idea of Central Europe, dissolved it, without making any references to it. It could be called a theft of intellectual property. On the other hand, the reality of the European Union has proved that the idea of Central Europe was like a prosthesis, solely a point to stop on the way to real Europe. Hence, it could seem that today any talks about Central Europe in any form are not necessary. Just the opposite. It is important to make a return to its practice, which is now being implemented in Ukraine, and show the similarity between the concept of the European Union and Central Europe. What links these two is the ideas of tolerance, pluralism, solidarity and diversity. What differs is that Central Europe is not compatible with the idea of Grossmacht, a superpower. And that is why today’s events in Ukraine are Putin’s attack on the idea of Central Europe and its practice, and thus an attack on Europe, an attack on Galicia and its myth.

Translated from the Polish by Iwona Reichardt

Taras Voznyak – specialist in cultural studies and political sciences, editor-in-chief and founder of Independent Cultural Journal Ї, co-founder and Head of the Board of Directors of Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation.
Mykola Riabchuk – a Ukrainian author and essaist, as well as a founder of Krytyka magazine. His research and articles focus on topics of Ukrainian national identity, politics, and history through a postcolonial lens. From 2014, he is the chairman of the jury of The Angelus Central European Literature Award. The laureate of the 2022 Taras Shevchenko Prize, the most important Ukrainian award given for achievements in the field of culture.

Paweł Kowal – political scientist, historian, columnist, museologist. He works at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the College of Europe in Natolin, and lectures at the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw. Co-founder of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. From 2005-2009 he was a Member of the Polish Parliament, from 2006-2007 he served as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from 2009-2014 as a Member of the European Parliament and Chairman of the Delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee. Author of over a hundred academic articles, analyses, books, and selections of texts on Central European transition, the USSR, and Eastern policy, including the book “Testament Prometeusza: Źródła polityki wschodniej III Rzeczpospolitej”, published in 2019. Editor-in-Chief of “Sprawy Międzynarodowe” and “Warsaw East European Review”.

Jurko Prochasko – essayist and translator, works at the Literary Institute of Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Psychoanalysis at Ivan Franko University in Lviv, awarded with the Friedrich Gundolf Prize for his translation work.