Tag Archives: Ukraine

National Geographic, Crimea, and the politics of geography

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crimea-ukraine
Above: Wikipedia’s map showing Crimea as part of Ukraine.

National Geographic, the venerable and often deeply controversial flagship organization of the American field of geography, has generated a new firestorm over its decision to start mapping Crimea as part of the Russian Federation following its illegal and fraudulent annexation of the peninsula. Other options would include marking it as “disputed” or still part of Ukraine. Nat Geo’s justification was that they “map the world as it is, not as people would like it to be.”

Whether or not the de facto status of Crimea is now that it is part of Russia, that’s a cop-out. And as someone who studied the history of geography at the University of Delaware’s nationally prominent Geography Department, I’d like to point out that this cop-out also conveniently absolves National Geographic of its role in the community and the world, one which has historically been both very important and very damaging (in many cases).
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March 3, 2014 – Arsenal for Democracy 75

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AFD-logo-big-newDescription: Bill and Greg discuss discuss the Crimea crisis and Newsweek’s print resurrection. Persephone updates us on the Ley Gallardon abortion controversy in Spain.

 
March 3, 2014 – Arsenal for Democracy 75

 

 

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Crimea: What do you really think we can do about it?

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I noticed a prominent economist tweeted this the other day, reacting to the Russian occupation of Crimea: “Obama vows no tangible help Whatever happened to Democrats like Truman and Kennedy.”

This would be Truman whose Berlin Airlift occurred in a world where the U.S. was the only nuclear-armed country… and then he managed to get us stuck in Korea. And Kennedy narrowly managed to avoid getting everyone nuked over Cuba and our interference there (including his own)… but then still got us stuck in Vietnam.

So, I don’t know, maybe Obama’s handling this crisis pretty ok?

Look, this isn’t a knock against the person who tweeted that. It’s a pretty common frustration right now. I just happened to spot that particular expression of it. It’s a tense and complicated situation over there right now. There’s probably not much we can do. The U.S. isn’t omnipotent. Nor is Russia powerless before us.

Major miscalculations and underestimations following smaller disputes a century ago this year, not far from the Black Sea, brought Europe and later the United States into the devastating first world war. Let’s not repeat that. When major powers go head to head, it’s best to err on the side of doing less rather than making a catastrophic error the world will not forgive us for. And in the nuclear age, there might not be a world left anyway, after a bad call.
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Maybe it’s time to calm down a bit and not fall into The Onion’s pointed characterization: “Ukrainian-Russian Tensions Dividing U.S. Citizens Along Ignorant, Apathetic Lines”

Let slip the birds of war!

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Not a great start for efforts to bring peace on Earth in 2014.

In what some are interpreting as an ominous sign for world peace, two white doves released from the Vatican have been attacked by two larger birds.

The doves were set free as a symbol of peace from a balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square during Pope Francis’ weekly Angelus prayers, held at noon every Sunday.

But moments later, a seagull and a black crow swooped down and attacked the doves, pecking at them repeatedly, as tens of thousands of people watched on.

The crow chased down the dove and grappled with it as the white bird tried to fly away.

The Sunday prayers called for an end to violence in Kiev, with the Pope saying there was a need for dialogue between the Ukraine government and opposition.

 

Tough being caught between a crow and a seagull. Is this some weird living metaphor for Ukraine being caught between Russia and the European Union? Or perhaps the civilians caught between the Syrian regime and Syrian insurgents? The interpretive possibilities are endless.
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Ukraine’s decision point

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Protests in Ukraine, active since November, have turned increasingly violent this past week in the face of government crackdowns. As I’ve argued before on this blog, while the Ukraine/EU/Russia triangle is a highly complex and multifaceted problem, a lot of the present crisis ultimately ties back to and derives from Ukraine’s unwillingness to deal seriously with its huge divide between its ethnically Ukrainian population and its ethnically Russian population. No matter which one is in charge, the other is upset and ready to protest.

Yes ethnically Ukrainian protesters should have a right to express themselves peacefully and freely. Yes the current ethnically Russian-led government should be able to enact some major policies its base supports, assuming they don’t oppress the other side or restrict freedoms by group. But the protesters and elected officials — who are mutually antagonizing each other into ratcheting up the stakes and responses — all need to realize that the state should accommodate the interests and acknowledge the views of all its citizens, including both those who elected the ruling party and those who did not.

That means the ruling party sometimes watering down policies more than its base would like (to protect the other side from abuses) and the opposition sometimes accepting that policies will be enacted even if they don’t agree with that course (because sometimes the majority has to get its way).

There has to be a unified, national identity to make the country function and cohabitate peacefully in the long run. It can’t always be about trying to impose the will of one group on the other group or resisting the winning party’s agenda at all costs.

And in turn, however, the West needs to step up to the plate and stop hovering anxiously as if they have no role or influence. They can put pressure on Russia to stop pressuring/intimidating the Ukrainian leadership and its eastern, ethnically Russian population.

They can also reiterate to the pro-Western protesters (and the pro-Russian government for that matter) that there’s a middle ground between never getting your way and getting your way by any means necessary. To be part of the European project, those protesters can’t light the country on fire. That doesn’t fly in liberal-democratic communities. Sometimes you have to be willing to allow for differences of opinions and policy — such as whether to form trade partnerships with Russia versus with the EU — without taking to the streets and brawling with the police.

Right now, Ukraine is standing at a decision point about what kind of a country it wants to be, both politically and as a people. It’s a dangerous moment because the West is dithering and refusing to take action or speak up seriously. It’s time for a public expression of the nuances that come with liberal democracy… as well as a reminder that a unified nationalism, divorced from ethnic divides, will be necessary to make Ukraine work.

Building a nation and a true liberal democracy is tough stuff. There are no easy solutions here. Both sides are intensifying the situation and responding inappropriately (and would likely do the same if power roles were reversed). Everyone needs to step back now and figure out if this path is the one they really want to go down. There has to be something that can bring everyone together as one nation, without regard to language or ethnic differences.

For more discussion, listen to our most recent radio episode, “Arsenal for Democracy 70 – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Christie.”

AFD 70 – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Christie

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Latest Episode:
“AFD 70 – Afghanistan, Ukraine, Christie”

Greg joins Bill to talk about opium in Afghanistan, protests in Ukraine, and the Christie bridge closure scandal.

Related Links

– Atlantic: “The Looming Narco State in Afghanistan“
– The Globalist: “Ukraine: The Key to Restoring Greater Russia“
– AFD: “Deja vu in Ukraine and Thailand”
– NYT: “Dangers of Giving In to Impulse for Revenge“

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Deja vu in Thailand and Ukraine

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I think there are some pretty interesting parallels between the current wave of protests in Thailand and in Ukraine, as barricades are thrown up yet again in the capitals.

The central theme in both is a recurring cycling back and forth of two major political and economic factions under the same sets of leaders, reversed more by political upheaval than constitutionally-approved changes in government, without any sign of a permanent resolution.

In Thailand

After the 2006 military coup against the rural-backed, Red-led government, there was an uprising in 2008 by the Yellow faction and then another uprising in 2010 by the Red faction, which leads us to the current uprising (Yellow).

Commitment to democracy in Thailand is pretty low, in both the military and the urban middle class/business elites. (The latter are both generally aligned with the Yellow faction, against the Shinawatra family’s Red faction. The military and riot police tend to side with the Yellow faction but sometimes intervene against both sides.)

Then again, the Redshirt protestors in the capital’s downtown area in 2010 were basically attempting to lead an armed popular overthrow of the government and were only suppressed when the military decided to remain aligned with the Yellow-led government and cracked down. So, they’re no winners on the democratic values front either.

Now, it’s certainly not unheard of for political parties in developed democracies to have overt, semi-official, or informal party alignments based on class (middle class vs. populist poor) or geography (urban vs. rural and/or suburban), if not both. In fact, it’s probably the norm, if you look at the UK, Japan, France, the United States, etc.

But Thailand, which is still (clearly) not an established democracy, is probably taking the alignments a bit literally. That is despite the low likelihood that either side achieving total political control would result in any kind of social revolution of any serious depth.

But until they solve their political geography and class warfare problem — and until they get the military to stop intervening — Thailand isn’t going to break the endless cycle of totally unproductive but headline-grabbing popular uprisings. And for a country whose economy is heavily centered on tourism, the political situation for the last seven years has not been helpful to anyone.

Meanwhile in Ukraine…

I’m not going to comment on why Ukraine seems to capture more U.S. attention than Thailand, but it seems to. Anyway: Russian-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych recently ended efforts — initiated by his political opposition years ago and already on the skids anyway — to join the European Union, and announced plans to seek closer economic ties with Russia instead.

This triggered huge protests in the capital because the rival faction’s distaste for a foreign policy decision means it’s time to overthrow the government, again, it would seem. They are the largest protests seen since the late 2004 October Revolution.

I could well be wrong — and there are indeed a lot of dominoes falling inside his own government right now — but I suspect Yanukovych is secure in power, contrary to the excited Western reporting.

Ukraine has long been split between the pro-Russian side and the pro-European side (with high levels of animosity on both sides) and there have been plenty of protests on both sides with varying degrees of success since the USSR broke up in 1991. The pro-Russian side, largely concentrated toward the eastern end of the country, which borders the Russian Federation, is largely composed of ethnically Russian citizens, including President Yanukovych. They weren’t happy about the USSR’s collapse and fear(ed) reprisals.

The ethnic Russians fear reprisals because of the many terrible things the Russian Empire and especially the Russian-dominated Soviet central government perpetrated against the ethnic Ukrainian population, such as the Holodomor planned-starvation genocide under Stalin. The ethnic Ukrainian population is concentrated toward the western side of the country and has aligned itself with Europe, like many of the former Soviet satellites and postwar Soviet Republics (Ukraine is an interwar Soviet Republic).

So why is Yanukovych probably not going anywhere (or at least not anywhere far)? For one thing, it’s worth recalling right off the bat that while it’s true the last time we saw protests this big, in 2004, he was the one pushed to the side, the current protests exist because that uprising didn’t actually permanently get him out of the picture. If it had, he wouldn’t be in office now getting protested.

Much like the Thailand cycles discussed above, such is the rota fortunae of ex-Soviet Republic politics outside Russia: the same set of people cycling up and and down, facing Russia then Europe then back again. Lately we’ve seen the pro-Western/anti-Russian president of Georgia, who arrived in a parallel uprising in 2004, similarly finds his political fortunes fading as an opposing pro-Russian coalition rose to power. Other examples are strewn across the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics.

In Ukraine, it’s especially pronounced and more rapid. Current President (and target of protests) Viktor Yanukovych, as prime minister running for president, literally poisoned his opponent with dioxin in 2004 (see this 2006 photo of then-President Yushchenko’s face post-poison attempt), was kept out of the presidency by popular uprising, and then became prime minister again less than two years later. By early 2010 Yanukovych was elected president anyway, barely five years after the “Orange Revolution.”

But the second reason I don’t see him being flung from office is more specific to this situation: the Russians can do all sorts of things to bolster the Yanukovych government and blackmail the rest of the country into certain foreign and economic policy directions, while the EU can’t.

In contrast to the Russians, the European Union has offered very little and continues to be pretty powerless in helping the opposition. I have no idea what big plan they could suddenly float here, particularly given that Yanukovych is the democratically elected leader of Ukraine and, although repressive, isn’t just some guy who seized power and can be pressured from office. Unlike in 2004 when he tried to steal the election, he’s already in office, because he won. A lot of people don’t want him in office, but a lot of people definitely do. That’s the reality of the East/West split in Ukrainian politics and the citizenry.

Most of the EU’s offers to Ukraine are predicated upon Yanukovych first releasing political prisoners from his opposition, which isn’t going to happen by magic. Unfortunately, it’s not like they have much of a carrot or a stick to back that demand up, particularly since he never wanted a European alliance in the first place. Such demands only work when you have something the other person a) wants and b) can’t get elsewhere.

Now, as I said, I could be proven totally wrong here on the outcome of this latest round of protests, but the excitement of first-person POV camera phone shots doesn’t always translate to political reality.

And, even if Yanukovych falls from power again, he’ll probably be right back on top within 5 years. Ukraine won’t solve any of this for real until they solve their East/West Russia/Ukraine divide. The EU would probably me more useful to Ukraine if it made an effort to bridge this divide and bring everyone together so they can compete democratically and constitutionally for power, without endless recriminations and fear of sudden, repressive policy shifts one way or the other.