BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 12 | August 17, 2022
Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Lucie Řehoříková, Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
Brno—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv
Summary
Participants discuss non-hierarchical organization practices and potential for future internal conflict in Ukrainian society. The Czech response to the influx of displaced Ukrainians is described. What is the future role of the experience these displaced persons are now having in Europe, especially children and youth? The current war as a total war for Ukraine and the future. European stability is discussed in terms of lack of opportunity. Evil as an ontological category. The theory of homo criminalis versus homo sapiens. The concept of agency and the need to understand the enemy are brought up. A new, post-Maidan Ukrainian identity is discussed in the context of historical erasure. European identity as a values-based one. The concept of civilization is debated.
Key words
Czech republic Ukraine identity European values russia’s war agency evil borders human culture
Participants
C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J — Julia Ovcharenko
L — Lucie Řehoříková
M — Mychailo Wynnyckyj
THE DIALOGUE
J: Lucie will be the one of us who is joining this dialogue from a garden, right?
L: Yes, exactly. Hi everyone!
C: It’s wonderful that you can join us, Lucie. Demyan asked me to modestly moderate this session. And Mychailo, I’m reading your book. I think it’s an extremely important book. It gives me so much information and insight, the detailed reports from the inside of the Maidan winter, of the uprising and the Revolution. Now I’m in the middle of the second part where you’re discussing how this is a revolution of the creative bourgeoisie, which is an eye-opener for me to read that. I’m very happy that I’m reading it to learn; it teaches me a lot.
M: Thank you for that. Very much appreciated.
C: And it’s very relevant today somehow. I think you published it in 2018-19.
M: I had to end it at some point, so we ended it in 2018, and then it came out at the beginning of 2019.
C: It was just before the last presidential election, I think.
M: Zelenskyy announced that he would be running on New Year’s Eve, the night of January 1, 2019. So it was about three months after I decided that I needed to finish the book. The book needed to get out rather than constantly having to update it, etc. But when it came out in Ukrainian translation, in 2021, we added a preface where I updated things a little bit because the election of Zelenskyy was, of course, very much unexpected.
There are two topics I’m working on as a sociologist at the moment. One is a continuation of what you’re reading about, as you’re calling it, the creative bourgeoisie or the creative class. I think that this is one of the stories that we have in Ukraine that is untold yet: is the divisions within society. The war is being fought by people from small towns, and it is being financed by people from the creative class and the large urban centres. This actually is likely, in fact, after the war, to create some significant internal tensions because the question will be, what did you do? “I gave, I wrote, I continued supporting the economy, I did all of these things”, but that is not something that can be compared to the sacrifice of actually fighting and being wounded and giving your life for something. So this is something that’s problematic, the class aspect of what’s going on at the moment internally.
And then the second thing that I’m looking at is the fact that during the Maidan people were organizing in these very horizontal non-hierarchical groups which we talked about last time. This is something that we continue to see at the moment, and I’m convinced that it’s not something that is just the result of protests or the result of organizing for self-defence. There’s a French sociologist by the name of Bourdieu who would have called this ‘the habitus.’ In other words, something where values become part of practices and practices become reinforced by values. And the idea of horizontal, some would call it, anarchic organization is, I think, something that is very much part of the creative-class Ukrainian habitus. What I’m working on at the moment is trying to gather some data about how Ukrainian IT companies are organized internally because what you’ll find is they are very non-hierarchical. They tend to be very much in teams. And this is obviously something that I think has a continuation in the war of independence. It’s analogous to what happened in the United States where we have a revolution that continues into a war of independence. And the result of that process is the institutionalization of new ideas, and new practices, and new values. What we’re witnessing at the moment is, potentially, a very interesting contribution that Ukrainians can make and Ukraine can make as a country to something that we call European civilization, whether that’s the correct way of putting it. Certainly it would be part of a movement beyond industrial society to a post-industrial society where we are in search of new organizational forms and values that will be constitutive of organizational forms.
C: You’re breaking some new ground there in describing this phenomenon, and how it is specifically tied to Ukraine and the Maidan and the war for independence after, and how it does contribute to a new civilization across Europe. I would be curious to see how you write about that in this phase.
J: I think many successful practices in Ukraine now, like self-organization, raising money, and being in digital communities are very much based on digitalization. A lot happened on the Maidan through Facebook connections. Now all the digital banking systems we have are functioning very fast, and they support the movement of donating. Banking institutions are responding very quickly to this social initiative and introducing new, more specialized products for communities integration. It’s hard to imagine how the old, analogue institutions could work for Ukrainians after that.
C: We’ll, before we dive more into that, Lucie, what role does the current crisis play in your professional, personal life right now?
[14:54] Ukrainians in the Czech Republic
L: I think for most people I know who are somehow linked to Ukraine or had the opportunity to live there for some time, February 24th was the breaking point when our life changed. My friends or acquaintances I know have started to shift their careers in a way. Writers started volunteering, trying to find ways to articulate things for the public, to keep on informing in a clear way, while adding history of the nation, of Ukrainians, because I would say that it had not been well articulated yet in Czech society. There are ten million Czechs, and a half million Ukrainians came into our country, what means that the infrastructure isn’t at all adjusted to such a number of people to provide dignified life for all the refugees.
I live in Brno. It has 300 000 inhabitants and over 50 000 people came. We have about 5,000 available places for children at school, and about 25,000 children who need them. And many of them are traumatized psychologically. So we are facing a really huge challenge. As you know, the Czech Republic is right now leading the European Union, we are right now trying to encourage all our European partners and to help Ukraine as much as we can in all fronts, of course. My life here as a teacher, and translator, and an editor is focused on helping Ukrainian families. For example, I have five families that I’m taking care of. Of course, we find new ways of solving particular problems, but we still need someone to share experience with us, because our society hasn’t had much experience dealing with such an influx of people. They don’t know the language and mainly, of course, it’s women and their children. So this is a very vulnerable segment of the society.
But on the other hand, I see a great potential if we can somehow help these young people, in their teenage years, to adopt into the European family much quicker than they would if they stayed in Ukraine. It is, I think, a great challenge also for Ukraine, as a country, not to forget about the refugees because I feel that many of the families here are lost in a way and wondering if they have anything to return to. I’m worried about this.
C: This touches upon what Mychailo also just predicted, the discussions that are going to happen after the victory. What did you do, where were you? Demyan, I’m always looking at you for this question because you yourself are in Kyiv. You’re in the middle of things and somehow you are motivated to get people together here to spend one or two hours not talking about today but about tomorrow. What motivates you to do that?
D: I think about today, and about tomorrow, and about after tomorrow simultaneously. And it’s all in this dialogue. And hence my question for Mychailo, how do you unite the thoughts about tomorrow and after tomorrow?
M: I think that I’ve written about this a little bit. But it’s been written in Ukrainian, so I’ll try to translate as much as I can, Demyan. The current war is for many of us in Ukraine a total war, meaning that everything that we do is involved with the war and every person in Ukraine is involved with the war in one way or another. I don’t know how it is with others, but I haven’t been under rocket attack for a few months now. So my level of concern for safety is less than it was several months ago. But when we talk about the war in Ukraine, you are always contrasting yourself with your enemy. I think that is a normal reaction. Why are we, if we are fighting this war, why are they attacking? And what makes them different from us? And in a context when language is similar, in a context when history is similar, in a context when the objective differences are minimal, you look at subjective differences. And I think one of the subjective differences which is extremely important is русский мир [russkiy mir]—the “russian world” that is being propagated by russia, is about a glorious past, about reglorifying a mythical time. Timothy Snyder writes quite a bit about this idea of the politics of eternity. It’s about rekindling a golden age. For putin it’s about rekindling the soviet union, or perhaps comparing himself to Peter I. It’s always about returning to a glorious past. And when you try to contrast yourself to that, of course, the most obvious difference is this: if they’re talking about the past, we’ll talk about the future. That has been a message that is quite, quite appealing. I’m not sure if, Lucie, you see it as much in those people who have left Ukraine.
L: Yes.
M: I’m noticing at the moment, for example, that if in March and April I was thinking in terms of two weeks in advance maximum, sometimes even less, today my planning horizon is for my family and for my job and for everything else about my life is about a month and a half, end of September. This intellectual exercise of thinking of planning about Ukraine after the victory provides you with an extension. I’m not sure if it’s not a therapeutic thing.
We are in the process of organizing a third conference at the University where I teach, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, on the future of Ukraine after the war. And that is extremely popular. Usually when you’re thinking about a third conference, you would see numbers diminishing because speakers are starting to repeat, etc. etc. Here we have quite the opposite. We started with 40 people, we now have 70 registered, and it’s growing, and we have more and more people who want to come.
L: That’s wonderful.
M: We’re deliberately not announcing it in advance for security reasons. Quite frankly, if there were a rocket attack and destroyed those 70 people who want to come, Ukraine would probably lose quite a bit in terms of its intellectual talent. But the planning is going ahead within social networks. I think that this future focus is therapeutic for us.
C: Do you recognize this tendency somehow among the people you’re meeting in Brno, Lucie?
L: I think many of them want to believe that Ukraine will really survive and defeat the demons. This is really a strong feeling, and they are ready to do anything they can. But they are right now still very vulnerable and very weak. We talked recently with Julia in Vienna about the fact that most of us are simply lacking words. There are no narratives, we simply can only somehow ask questions and meet together but we have no answers. What’s happening now is so overwhelming. I think, Mychailo, what you organized in Kyiv is great and people just want to meet and discuss their experience, and maybe together they can at least pose the correct questions. And hopefully maybe in the future find answers.
Everyone wants to live, everyone wants to live life, a dignified life. Ukraine has chosen to stay with the European family, rather than the russian, rashist one. This is certainly a great truth already. It has soaked within the soul of every person I ever met, even those who come from Eastern Ukraine. But what I think is very important now is to make Europeans, people from countries that are further to the West that don’t feel the threat as much, to make them aware that it is still here, it is even more dangerous. I see this as the main task. We just need to provide people time because they feel the horrors that they went through. Many of them just were too apathetic to even think about any future. We just need to provide dignified, safe, welcoming surroundings and work on the problem together.
[31:08] the future role of the European experience
C: This is very hard inside the European Union, but a lot of people are involved like you. This is maybe a hopelessly naive Amsterdam kind of question. But one day people will return from wherever they have landed in the European Union, they will bring that experience back to Ukraine. Will that experience somehow assist in building a new kind of society in Ukraine or is it going to enlarge the differences between people, between classes of people maybe?
L: I see the children being integrated into the Czech or European society: the values, the families, the new friends. It’s in the details of where you can cross the street, what rules you have to keep, how you see the rule of law—that’s where it really works. I think many of the people would love to choose this experience if it hadn’t been under such circumstances. I think Ukraine can enormously benefit from it because we have the most precious segment of society here — the Ukrainian children. We really should approach all matters regarding them as a kind of front. It’s our fighting front against the enemy because how we share with them our values and our experience matters. Already there will be no doubt where they want to stand and who they want to be and who they want to be friends and partners with. We just have to work on this very hard. Not pushing, just sharing, being welcoming and letting them see what Europe is like.
J: And get rid of stereotypes. This war made many people who wouldn’t otherwise have left Ukraine go to other countries, and this will expand their knowledge.
L: And understanding who they are.
J: What I see definitely in Europe, and what is not present in Ukraine, is people from different cultures. And that’s what may happen with Ukrainian society after war, come with investments for rebuilding. We will also have people from different cultures, perhaps a big wave of migration from many places abroad to Ukraine. Ukraine is unlikely to remain the same quite homogeneous nation we used to be, and we may experience a challenge of accepting this migration of new people into the society. But, if there is a significant mass of Ukrainians who have spent time in mixed societies, it might make this integration easier for many of them. For those who will come back.
M: As someone who is not an extreme, but a mild eurosceptic, I would say that, of course, there are positives that Ukrainians will come back with, from their experiences of the European Union. But I am also hearing another side to that story. I think there’s a certain level of disappointment in the expectations of what European life in the European Union is.
L: That’s also good, I think.
M: I think there’s a certain level of attraction that a personalized approach of teachers to students at school will provide. I’m involved in education, and what I’m hearing from parents is: personalization is wonderful but it’s much less demanding. European schooling, for example, demands much less in terms of knowledge, of skill knowledge, of mathematics knowledge, of history, knowledge of facts in general. Fundamental academic disciplines are less advanced, even though we have a much more personalized approach of teachers and obviously better infrastructure.
The other thing that we’re hearing is huge disappointment in technological development. I mean, as my kids like to say, it’s now become a meme that in Ukraine we do banking electronically, but in Europe they use checks. In Ukraine, you open an account, you close an account within five minutes, and you do it over the Internet. In Europe, you go to the bank. I think what Ukrainians have done and not realized is that they have leapfrogged Europe in terms of technology. Everything is on your phone: your health card, your passport, your banking, my kids’ birth certificates.
I think also there’s a certain lack of realization that there is a price to be paid for stability, and that price is lack of opportunities. I would say this five or six years ago, and people would look at me with big eyes: I see more opportunities in Ukraine than I see in Canada. People look at me and say, what are you talking about? People are moving from Ukraine to Canada because of their desire for stability. Now the price that you pay for stability is the decrease of opportunities. And the price that you pay for opportunity is a decrease in stability. That’s just the trade-off. There are people who are more entrepreneurial, and those less entrepreneurial. Those that have left this time are, in fact, more entrepreneurial. I think they are having their eyes opened to the fact that the price of stability is lack of opportunity. These people will come back, many of them, and they will be a little bit more open, eyes open as to what this dream of Europe is really about. Obviously at the moment it’s a contrast to russia and therefore it’s attractive. But once the russian threat is vanquished, I think there will be a more sober evaluation of the European Union.
I want to say one thing if you don’t mind, Chris, and Demyan, and Julia, and Lucie. I’m in the midst of writing something. As you might know, this week the headlines in Ukraine were covered in two major disappointments, the Red Cross and Amnesty International.
The International Red Cross came out and said that they were not responsible and they never stated their responsibility for the safety of POWs. And, as you know, the Olenivka prison facility was bombed this week not by Ukrainians, but by russians, and we had 50 or so former defenders of Azovstal who had surrendered, to a large extent, under the guarantees of safety provided by the Red Cross and were held in that prison facility and were killed. So the Red Cross basically did the same thing as we like to say in Ukraine: they did a Budapest Memorandum, meaning that, yes, you’re guaranteed until such time as you’re not guaranteed anymore. That’s a direct analogy. The other one is Amnesty International which came out and said that Ukrainian forces are putting civilians at risk, in other words, not accusing Ukrainians of war crimes but coming close to that. The Red Cross institution, Amnesty International—I think that there’s a continuation of disappointment among Ukrainians in these supposedly good institutions.
What I’m writing about at the moment is a contrast that might be an interesting philosophical thing for us to discuss. Ukrainians are starting to have a very clear understanding of the fact that evil as an ontological category exists. It’s not in Western culture, and I’m saying this as someone who has grown up in North America, was educated in England and knows a little bit about European culture. I think liberalism has taught us that people are basically good, except for a couple of people who need to be fixed, right? So we can fix them through the criminal justice system, we can fix them with psychology, we can fix them through schooling, we have ways of fixing them. Basically evil is just a lack of good and so all you need to do in order to make someone good is to add a little bit of good because they’re missing the good. Evil itself is not an ontological category that exists. It’s just simply a lack of goodness.
I think that this is something that is a real difference in values between us because Ukrainians have an understanding that evil is not simply a lack of goodness. Evil has a will, evil exists, evil can do things, and there are people in this world who are fundamentally evil. I talk about this because I think that there was a hope that perhaps we, the Ukrainians, were wrong. Maybe the Europeans are right in thinking that evil is just a disease, a lack of goodness, a sickness of good people. But what we’re finding is we’re stepping on the same rake over and over again. We will stop stepping on that rake eventually and we will realize that no: we were right and you were wrong. There are evil people in this world, and there is evil as an ontological category, which is not simply an aberration of goodness.
[46:32] homo criminalis versus homo sapiens
D: I can only add to this theory, about homo criminalis versus homo sapiens. I also had already some thoughts about evil as an ontological category. Furthermore, I want to understand how to win this war. And for this we need very clear understanding: what does evil mean, what does rashism mean, why rashism commits crime not only in the territory of Ukraine and why rashism is the same thing as terrorism and criminal?
C: Lucie, I’m speaking from the city and country that I think proves what Mychailo and Demyan are talking about. I think this society here has always believed that people are in essence good. We just have to fix a little bit of ego that stands between us and a glorious future. I am guessing that in your society the understanding of evil as a force of its own might be a bit better developed.
L: Maybe because of the memories of the World War II and the wars in the worst century that we could have imagined. The stories are living, in memories, you know. I agree completely with Demyan. Liberalism, pacifism, I think, in the current times is wrong. And it should be said clearly. How can we help people see evil differently? Perhaps by narrating stories, so people would be touched, telling them the stories of their brothers and sisters. Certainly evil should be defeated. I think that the European nations—this is all we’ve been hearing lately—we have been too weak, too spoiled, too economy-oriented, making all these compromises, we should have acted much more radically. But now it’s too late in many ways, and we should all feel responsible for what is happening.
J: It seems like after Europe faced the World War II, evil was impersonated by the nazis. And since the nazis were defeated, people believed that the battle was over. That the soviet union was not the same evil, that you could pull down the Iron Curtain and live in the imagination that everything is fine. One may think if evil is not on our lands, it doesn’t exist. The war in Afghanistan or in Syria are far away, so do not matter.
L: Yes.
J: “We as Western culture, we as Western Europe are not involved in evil anymore”.
D: The problem of borders.
L: It cannot really be that way anymore because the whole world is globalized, and we can see in seconds what is happening on the other parts of the planet. This is also a new challenge for civilizations. You know what I mean, right? Like seeing what’s happening in Syria, in Afghanistan, in countries of Africa, all the current crises, apart from climate ones, the economic ones. We have it on our plate every day basically. We also see the war in Ukraine, we see it online, right? This is also something completely new for humankind. It’s a completely new dimension in fighting evil or the ways of how.
J: It’s war in our smartphones, war on screens. It shows evil as it is. But this digital distance still makes us think it’s not here, it is somewhere in an unreal space. It’s hard to accept that cruelty of such a scale is happening in reality.
L: Exactly. This is so dangerous: how to differentiate what is reality and what is not? If it doesn’t touch me, I can find it even boring. If it’s too long, if it’s repeating, this is a big problem.
J: War is not a series or a movie that you can switch off.
J: Yes.
C: So how can a society like Ukraine become something new in the future? How will it be able to deal with the existence of evil?
M: Chris, before we get to that question, I want to think a little bit out loud. As I was speaking and listening to you, Julia mentioned movies, and the thing that popped into my head were the “Star Wars” films, where we had this idea of the Force. And the Force had a good side and a bad side, the dark side. But we were talking about one existing force, right, it wasn’t two. It wasn’t good existing and evil existing but rather one thing existing.
I was thinking about the things that I’ve written down when you asked Lucie about the question about the impressions of Ukrainians that have been displaced to Europe. And I wrote down the lack of agency in a stable rules-based society. I talked about the idea of opportunity in Ukraine. I’m not sure that it’s actually a question of opportunity. I think it’s a question of agency, meaning that individuals, individual actions have more possibilities, so more opportunities; and they have more opportunities to be heard and make a difference in this environment than they would in a European environment which is actually very normal because it’s more stable and more established and therefore opportunities to change things, to effect agency are smaller.
I wonder if when we’re talking about evil and good, we’re not, in fact, talking about agency. In other words, people doing things. An agency can be evil, an agency can be good. In other words, we can have a force for good or a force for evil. But we’re, in fact, talking about the same force. And the worst thing that can exist is the lack of agency. In other words, people accepting that they cannot change things. One of the things that I find very optimistic about the end of the war, when it does happen, is that we will have a very large cohort of people who will be coming back to Ukraine, who will want to change things. In other words, they will have the same thing as what we saw immediately after the protests of Maidan. Now multiply that by ten. It will be a time of agency, a time of open window, open opportunity for reform, open opportunity for transformation, and everybody will be involved. Now, will we argue at that time about what needs to be done, and is it possible we will not be very effective because we will be arguing amongst each other? That is a possibility. Some of the people who will be coming back will want to make Ukraine like Europe. Others will say, we want to make certain aspects like Europe and other aspects very different. And that may be a contribution of ours to Europe because the speed of change in Europe could be accelerated. Needs to be accelerated, in fact.
J: Ukrainians find many analogies to movies. One of the biggest is “Lord of the Rings” with calling the russian invaders the Orcs. The energy behind the character of orc is very much comparable to the behavior of the russians. But at the same time, if we dehumanize russians into this fantasy character, we also make more distance between the fairy tale and reality. About two months after the war began, there was a wave of discussion in the media: this is a good analogy, but let’s stop and name the things as they are. So russians are russians, citizens of russian federation who are responsible for their actions. And this brings us to better naming, better wording of who is committing the crimes. Then we can start analysis. Why is this happening? What brought this society to this point? How to understand the enemy? I don’t know if this way is very productive or helpful for us to defeat the enemy, but it’s an urge to understand the enemy. Who is it or what is it, and why is it acting like that?
[01:04:24] untold stories in Ukrainian history
L: Yes, exactly. I agree. And also can Ukrainian society be healed? There are so many problems that haven’t been brought up or just simply articulated, simply remembered. I don’t know whether you have, Mychailo, similar experience, but I felt that so many stories were untold because the connections to the roots were destroyed in a very sophisticated manner by the russians for so many centuries. Manipulated, destroyed, erased. So apart from all the things that are happening now, there is so much to be unraveled in Ukrainian history for the nation, for the Ukrainians.
I remember in 2015 when I was in Dnipro, there wasn’t any bookstore where you can get Ukrainian books, in Ukrainian. The east of the country was completely russian speaking. We, as people from the European delegation, chose to speak Ukrainian, to show that it’s possible also to come back to the roots of the nation. Because if you take the language from the people, we know what it does, we see examples in history. And many of the people I met from the East, and I don’t mean from the academic field or the diplomatic field, but the general public didn’t know who Kotsiubynsky was, for example, or they remembered who he was, but they never read his works. And it’s the film industry, it’s literature, it’s culture, it’s science and everything. So I think great work has been done since 2014, where the institutions were built: the Ukrainian Institute, the Ukrainian Culture Fund, the Ukraine Book Institute, and all these institutions, and the awareness, and the projects they started to do for so many Ukrainians. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, of course, has a great reputation, as does the university in Lviv. It has been a completely new world to be opened, so there is still so much work to be done within Ukraine: not only communicating to the rest of the world who the Ukrainians are, what’s the image of the country, what it wants to be.
My daughter went to the first and second grade in Ukraine in school, and what language do you think they were speaking with the girls during the breaks? russian, because they were all watching russian cartoons. So I was trying to find some Ukrainian cartoons and stories for the children to watch on YouTube, but most of them were simply in russian. If you are little and you are going to a very under-financed Ukrainian kindergarten, where most of the teachers are so underpaid and all from the old regime, it starts right there. There’s huge work to be done.
C: It’s a very convincing message, Lucie. Mychailo, in your book you described how Maidan triggered a new consciousness of what it means to be Ukrainian, of a Ukrainian identity, a national identity that is not defined by a state, or ruler, or empire. And somehow you give the impression that this was done because people were not burdened by too much knowledge of history. This was quite striking to me. It seemed like you were painting a picture of a people and a society able to redefine itself exactly because they didn’t have very deep knowledge of what went before.
M: As I said at the beginning of this conversation, Chris, my next book would have a little bit more confidence than the first one. I’m not sure that I’m completely confident in what I’m about to say. But the thing that came to me, and I actually started writing down when Lucie was talking about, was that the deliberate destruction of memory has an irony behind it. And that irony is in removing the morality that comes from being rooted in the past. Because when we talk about morality, it’s very often with a reference to a mythologized past. Losing that actually, strangely enough, fosters freedom. It fosters a kind of amoral agency. Not immoral but amoral. In other words, you’re not thinking about morality when you’re acting. There’s an analogy to what you’ve just said about identity because what I was trying to get across in the book is that traditionally in the identity literature we have two concepts of nation. One is the ethnic nation, which obviously does not apply to Ukraine because the ethnic nation means a single language, a single ethnicity, a single religion. Incidentally, the Dutch are a kind of ethnic nation, right? I guess the Germans were convinced at one point in their history that they are an ethnic nation. The French are not an ethnic nation but they are a linguistic nation. In other words, anybody that speaks French can be legitimately considered French. The Italians have this wonderful phrase: “We’ve created Italy, now all that’s left is to create Italians.” That comes from the end of the 19th century. But that worked. In other words, the Italians were created into a linguistic ethnic nation. Ukrainians never worked because of a variety of historical reasons.
The other concept, other than the ethnic nation, is the concept of a political nation. Political nation is what we see in the new world.
In the United States, for example, everybody is an immigrant. However, you pledge allegiance to the flag, congress, politics, president, etc. That results in all kinds of problems, including the fact that it is more important to be a Democrat or a Republican than it is to be an American, but we will leave the Americans to their own problems. Canada is a political nation, with multiple languages, etc., but nevertheless a single political allegiance. Australia is very similar. Ukraine, Ukrainians have always hated politics, and they’ve always distrusted their political masters. And what we see today, as a matter of fact, is this distrust for anybody that’s in government and so the only thing that’s left is a mythologized idea of the map.
It’s a territorial nation, in other words: you are a Ukrainian if you were born in this territory of Ukraine or if you recognize this territory as being something that is sanctified, holy. The worst thing you can do right now is to draw a map without Crimea. Beyond being a criminal act, it’s considered to be basically treasonous and immoral. I think we’re seeing the development of a kind of territorial identity.
I consider this to be something that is extremely novel and interesting. It gives a chance to something that is important to me and that is to the Ukrainian diaspora. Because if we have an ethnic nation, then we have problems within the country. If we have a political nation, then we’re saying that anybody that is not a citizen or does not have political allegiance to the country is not part of that community. Whereas the territorial idea is something that provides space for people who, like me, like my family, and millions of people like me who emigrated. I didn’t emigrate but my parents emigrated as children and formed a diaspora. I think we have a chance to create a new concept of identity which the world has not seen up until now, or at least I have not.
A close analogy would be Israel. However, they have their own issues because Israel is to some extent a religious identity or a state that is based on a religious identity. And yet, they have over a million Arab Israelis which is always problematic to the Israeli identity. So it’s not simple, and the Israelis have decided to move more towards the political identity concept. That’s the debate between Likud and Labor within Israel, but that again is another story, I think, not as relevant to us. I think the territorial nation is what you were pointing out in the book and I’m actually much more confident about it today. It’s something new that we’ve touched upon as Ukrainians, and I think that might be another contribution that we can make to, if you like, civilization or culture, Europe in general.
[01:17:18] concepts of Europe as part of Ukrainian identity
J: The concepts of Europe that many Ukrainians accepted as their own, as our common future, can also be a part of this national identity. I’ll try to explain, it’s a really fresh idea. In their movement from the past, from the soviet past, to a future that is still unknown, Ukrainians tried to find orientation. The simple North, North-South, and West-East dimension was easy to take as a model. If we’re not East, it should be West. The irony is that Ukrainians developed their own image of Europe, not really taking the reality of Europe. We believe in technology and really fast changes, in stability that we hope to have too, and also the values that we position inside the European values. European sentiment motivates us to defeat rashism, but sometimes we don’t really ask other Europeans, are all of us living the same values? Are they just words in the foundational documents or books? Or are they still alive in the mind of every European just as much as Ukrainians carry these values into the future? This concept of Europe that was imported into Ukraine from the West made us think that if we already believe in it, and adopt this European concept as our own, rashist evil will be defeated automatically.
This brought Ukrainians to the internal crisis. We focused on the good things, desirable things, and skipped the everyday battle that had to be waged against evil. Not enough reforms were implemented to correct our internal errors. The soviet repression system vastly remained, all the criminals, their ties inside the society, or even just ignorance.
C: When you talk about this belief Ukrainians have, I think about this faith in Europe as a continent based on values. Many Ukrainians now enter the European Union, look around, and think: is this society actually based on those values? Is it real? This is a very confusing moment because of what Mychailo mentioned earlier. The Red Cross and Amnesty International are two non-state global actors that are based on these European values. But now suddenly they are not on our side, so what do these values mean? These are the moments that you discover that we’re actually not a globalized civilization, that there are serious differences between us.
M: I think that we need a better term than civilization. We can talk about human civilization being more or less technologically advanced. But there are obviously very distinct internal differences between various types of humans, and these are about values and practices. And this is I think why we come up with this idea of habitus. So I would say one human civilization, multiple habituses. Multiple instantiations of that civilization. Also multiple levels of technological advancements. And I don’t think it’s a linear thing. So, for example, we were talking before about the level of technological advancement of Ukrainians versus Europeans, for example, in banking and in e-documents, but that certainly doesn’t mean that Ukrainians are more advanced in terms of a civilization than Europeans. What is most important to us is values and how they are instantiated in practices, and how practices are then interpreted and reinforced as values.
J: And the more technologically advanced societies impose their understanding of good life to that culture. That doesn’t immediately mean it makes them happy or that they are unhappy with their level of development. It’s just one more pressure.
D: So what do we have now? We have the problem of borders. Borders are an aspect of nations, a condition of our existence and our political concepts. It may be too early to talk about erasing borders, but at the same time, if we don’t do it in our minds, we cannot develop our ideas of the future.
[1:29:03] the nature of borders
M: Ironically, the Eastern border of Ukraine that people are dying for, is an artificial border that was hand-drawn on a map by a fellow by the name of joseph stalin. That is a very poorly known fact and is obviously not part of the Ukrainian narrative, or the russian one. We want to believe that borders somehow have always been there or are mythical, or they have a mythical quality and that they are something that is objective and permanent, etc. In fact, as we all know, borders change all the time, all you have to do is google the history of Europe on a map. Borders are not permanent and obviously borders are political, and there’s nothing objective about a border.
I think, Demyan, your question is: in the future, is it possible for us to imagine a society without borders? Of course, that’s the dream of the European Union. And I think we’re seeing that it’s a dream, and if it is to be realized, it’s going to need a significant amount of work, more than one or even two generations. Within a single political area as long as everybody speaks the same language and as long as everybody accepts that they are similar enough to not have a border, then it all makes sense, but the European Union has a border. It is called the Mediterranean Sea, and certainly not everyone from Northern Africa is welcome within the European Union. And there is an argument to be made that one of the reasons that Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed into the European Union is because they are basically of the same religion and the same skin color.
So, I don’t think this is something that we’re going to have a simple answer to. Borders are obviously subjective constructions, but human beings are subjective animals. And therefore we make decisions based on subjectivity, and sometimes we say that people on that side are different from this side. Is that objectively correct? Obviously not, because we’re all human, but the reality is that we do this, and I don’t think it’s something that’s going to disappear, certainly not in my lifetime. Mind you, I’m old. So this could be optimistic.
C: You’re so young! Demyan, I think you’re going even a step further. If I understand your question correctly, when you’re talking about borders, you are not talking only about physical borders between nation states. You’re asking this on the next level, if we want to be borderless human beings who connect across mental, social, cultural, ethnic borders with each other. How? Why do we still believe in physical borders?
D: Yes, I believe in humanity. There is only one global civilization, only one global culture, and only if we understand this, together, can we fight against homo criminalis, terrorists and rashism. We are very strong in our unity. We need self-responsibility, of course. We need to understand how to practice responsibility daily. It’s not about tomorrow, it’s about daily practice.
M: Demyan, you’re very European! That’s both a compliment and an insult because by saying that there is one global civilization and one human culture we’re going back to the beginning of this dialogue. Anybody that acts in terms of evil is just an aberration or a disease, someone that is somehow perhaps less culturally advanced or perhaps less technologically advanced. In other words, we can medicate this person, we can educate, we can psychologically help this person, we can emotionally help this person, etc. But initially people are good. Something I struggle with, but I have come to realize is that evil exists as an ontological category. And that means that not all humans are part of civilization, of a single civilization. We have multiple civilizations, we have multiple cultures. And some are fundamentally good and others represent fundamental evil because good and evil are values categories that are rooted in a particular society, a particular civilization.
We can go back to the idea of “Star Wars” and the Force. We are all part of the Force, and we simply have the dark side and the light side. But for me, one of the big issues of this war is: I don’t have an explanation for why a russian soldier rapes an infant. Why? I personally saw the results, I’ve been to Bucha. I’ve seen the mass graves. I’ve seen the bodies that were shot in the back of the head. I’ve seen this and I have no other explanation other than the fact that this is evil. These are not sick people! These are not people who can be healed psychologically, medically, whatever, educated. These are people from a different civilization. They have a different value structure, and I believe that that value structure is evil. I guess that means that I’m dehumanizing them.
D: Yes.
M: But.
D: Mychailo, evil is not culture. And the rashism and rashists are not a subculture, not another civilization. We have only one civilization, in my understanding, and we have some homo criminalis on this planet right now. Culture is about cultivation, how to cultivate, how to create. If you don’t create, if you destroy, you are not homo sapiens.
C: So, in your view, it’s one civilization of people who are basically good?
D: Yes. Evil is not about people, that’s my thoughts.
C: You’re dehumanizing evil people.
M: There’s a very good analogy. Julia at one point talked about the Second World War. After the Second World War there was a campaign to denazify. The idea behind denazification, by the way, the same thing is deputinization, is fundamentally human beings are okay, all that needs to happen is that they need to be taught that they made a mistake. Foundationally, we believe that humans are okay, humans are good. Somehow there was a deviation that happened, and we can correct the deviation by denazifying, deputinizing them.
Having lived through thirty years of post-soviet Ukraine and having now seen what I’ve seen, I don’t believe that these people can be cured. They are not sick, they’re not deviants. They’re not somehow subject to medication or education. Someone will tell me that’s very intolerant of me to say, but they are from a different civilization. And denazification actually was only possible in a generation, so we were able to change the values complex of the next generation of Germans. Not the ones that were already subjected to evil. And that means that we have multiple civilizations. That’s my thought. Sorry Demyan if I’m arguing with you, I don’t mean to be.
D: Civilization as a 19th century term, yes, from French philosophers, the term civilization versus barbarians. I cannot talk about rashism as a civilization. russians are not a civilization, that’s all.
[1:44:54] the culture of being human
J: This makes me think about the cyclical nature of what happens to humankind, as long as humankind remembers itself. All the wars on the planet have the same roots. Yes, borders between nations, races, cultures, territories make us explain events by local problems. If we scale this vision to a global level, and see that every war has a reason in evil that’s inside human nature, that means we have to learn how to be human, how to develop the culture of being human.
D: How to create something.
J: The process of creation versus the process of destruction. They are connected because we understand more about creation observing destruction. I’m afraid to say the destruction of war is needed for humankind to be developed, to be in this process of development, but it seems like we learn more through war than through peaceful life. This evil is inside the nature and defeating it crystallizes our understanding of what is the culture of good and how to act; what to practice for strengthening this side and to weaken the other side – evil.
C: We’ve come a long way today, starting out with the experience of Ukrainians arriving in the European Union, how that will change the stereotypes on both sides. How that might deliver something to Ukraine after the victory when people return. Then we slowly moved into a discussion of how this might lead to one civilization and, if so, what will be the role of evil of the homo criminalis in the society or if we will see the rise of civilization of people who are basically good, and those who are evil are basically outside of civilization.
L: I wish we could sit in my garden here and continue this discussion. I think it’s obvious that all evil probably comes from the need to surpass and defeat, to overcome, to be better than our brothers and sisters in some way. If this wasn’t such a big part of the russian national spirit, the world would be a much better place to live. We also talked today about stability and opportunities in the European Union. What I very much cherish about the European Union is seeing how we are able to take care of vulnerable people. We are able to provide them safety and opportunities that have been tested, education, health system. Nobody will fall, nobody will fall to the ground. We can really see the development of society, the level of society, we can really judge by how it can take care of the most vulnerable ones. And this is a very strong value, which Europe has built over the centuries. If the Ukrainians understand this, I’m sure they will be happy to join. Together we can develop a better civilization that focuses on humanity, which I would say is analogous to empathy and learning from each other. It’s always better to learn and share things that connect us than to observe what is different, what are the differences.
M: I have four pages of notes that I’ve written as a result of this evening, so I very much appreciate that. That’s always useful, thank you!
C: I’ll leave you with a link to a book by a Dutch writer, if anybody has any time. The Dutch title was originally “Most People Are Good.”
J: My thanks to another good, intense conversation! Looking forward for the next ones and for this community to grow.
Questions
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This dialogue touches on several ideas related to personal agency: self-responsibility, personal practice etc. The ability to exercise personal agency depends on one’s circumstances. How do you feel when you are able to exercise your agency (or act with personal responsibility)? How do you feel when you cannot? What is the relationship between agency and creativity?
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The dialogue participants compare the concept of evil as an absence of good to the idea of evil as a separate ontological category. What are the intellectual and ethical consequences of each approach? The available responses to evil?
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How does a society become something new? What changes do you think are likely to occur in Ukrainian society in the next ten-to-fifteen years? What will be their consequences?
Resources
Bourdieu, Pierre. Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Vol. 2 (1982-1983). Translated by Peter Collier. Polity, 2019.
Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Bloomsbury Publishing; Circa edition, 2020.
Wynnyckyj, Mychailo. Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity. Ukrainian voices 1. Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2019.
