“What Ukraine teaches about world history: and where it might fit in Europe’s story of itself”

In what follows I move between specific and general, the specific being the first major land war in Europe since World War II, raging fully since 2022; the general is : how does one place the Russian attack upon Ukraine in broader historical context, in terms of events of the past century?

One of the lessons, almost a cliché, from World War II, from 1945 onward, is “never again.” The war crimes of WWII, many unprecedented, should never be repeated.  A word was invented to represent the ultimate form of those crimes, that word is Genocide. The man who coined this word, lawyer Raphael Lemkin, studied in Lviv, and knew these lands and their history intimately.

Lemkin was a refugee in United States in the 1940s. Sketchy reports convinced him that a novel crime was raging across his Eastern European homeland:  German authorities were decimating nations, from the Czechs and Poles, Slovenes, Ukrainians, and Russians, but most egregiously the Jews, and had allied armies not crushed the Nazi regime, it would have erased these peoples from the earth.

Not much has been said in the west in regard to the genocide happening today in Ukraine. Somewhat exceptionally, Timothy Snyder employed the word at the outset.  But it’s a clear case.  Genocide refers to the “intent” to destroy a people “in whole or in part.”   Those words are from the ideas of Lemkin formalized in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Lemkin knew the crime went beyond killing.  German occupiers were also banning schools and books in native languages, disbanding political life, imposing starvation diets, cleansing territories ethnically with no concern for civilian deaths, wresting Slavic children from their parents and sending them to the Reich for German parents to raise.

We sense echoes of these crimes when reading of Russia’s current reign of terror in eastern Ukraine, where, as of last year occupiers have abducted some 20,000 Ukrainian children and sent them to Russian foster parents. Those unfamiliar with Lemkin may find it strange that he would consider this practice as genocidal. Some of these young people are orphans who may grow up in loving environments and pursue successful careers.  What does it matter what language they speak or culture they practice?

But Lemkin came from a world little known to Americans. Among Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, even among Germans – virtually every people east of the Rhine –national identity coheres around shared languages, cultures, and religions: precisely categories that define the peoples the Genocide Convention seeks to protect. Lemkin thought that every time a people and its culture disappeared something sacred was lost to humanity.  

Why is that word not used in relation to Ukraine? Perhaps in the current imagination the word Genocide has evolved and has become synonymous with mass killing and in western eyes there has not been enough of that in Ukraine.  On the left and far into the center of the political spectrum, attention and outrage have been focused on Gaza.  Without Gaza western opinion might be more attuned to the extent of the crime being perpetrated in Ukraine.

In any case this war seems to me a textbook case of genocide.  The question then emerges: what are the sources of this genocide, what drives it? Students of twentieth century political thought continue to derive inspiration from Hannah Arendt.  In Origins of Totalitarianism she famously pointed to the nation state when talking of the origins of the crimes of the Hitler regime.  She and many followers, especially in the realm of Habsburg studies, have focused critical attention on the nation state, which seeks to make populations homogeneous, and either forcible assimilates or expels those who will not fit. [1] 

For much of history states were organized on other principles. Monarchies and empires ruled Europe, and the continent’s center featured dozens of sovereign entities like Prussia or Bavaria that were not nation states and existed for centuries.  Nation states are thus not necessary but “contingent.”  Arendt’s skepticism came precisely from the region that concerns us, the lands between Germany and Russia.  Of the new states created in East Central Europe after WWI she wrote: 

“the nation had conquered the state, national interest had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce ‘right is what is good for the German people.’  Here the language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.” [2]

But think of what happened after WWI. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland emerged from imperial rule.  Did those states commit genocide?  No: it was Germany that committed the acts that caused Raphael Lemkin to invent this word.  And Germany did not call itself a nation state in that or any period before the year 1990; it called itself an empire.  This was true even of the Weimar Republic, whose constitution begins with the words: Das deutsche Reich ist eine Republik.

But for Arendt, empires were not the problem.  She portrayed monarchal, imperial orders as supposedly non-national, “non-nationalist” as frames for extending rights to people regardless of ethnicity or nationhood.  The problem for her were the small peoples who in the 19^th C. rose up and demanded to rule themselves, control their own fates. She calls such movements those of “tribal nationalists,” and places people like T.G. Masaryk or Edvard Benes, mainstream Czech nationalists, the people who created the Czechoslovak democratic Republic in 1918, in the company of Hitler. [3]   Like a popular and influential set of historical studies of recent decades in the west, she she idealizes the Habsburg empire. [4]  In this reading, not Habsburg imperial authorities, but the small peoples, Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, who demanded self-determination : they are the historical problem.

It’s easy to idealize the Habsburg Empire: think of the expanding rights accorded to its subjects, especially after 1867;  the fact that it advanced schooling, even in vernacular languages, and kept peace among competing interests. The Empire even permitted nationalisms to develop.  For example the Ukrainian.

But it’s a mistake to think of the Empire just in glow of fin de siècle: one should also take account of how it ended: attacking small neighbor Serbia in 1914, and then instituting regime of terror against Slavs suspected of disloyalty. This also affected Ukrainians.  Thousands were executed, suspected of disloyalty. Thus for the Czechs as early as 1915, but for all the peoples, excepting of course Hungarians and Germans, when the war ended in 1918, it was clear that the empire had to go. [5]   It ultimately was not and could not become a democracy.

Amazing is the difference in perspectives about what happened next.  For Poles or Czechs or Croats or Serbs, the end of War meant independence, which they still celebrate in national holidays, in Warsaw, on November 11, in Prague, on October 28.  Yet what for many East Europeans was independence to be cherished is for Western historians, repeating the sensitivity we get in Arendt: a founding of rule based in tribal nationalism.  They repeat disrespect for these states that dates back to the 1920s and was shared across political lines, from Stalinists to liberals and socialists. [6]  But if we are to properly tell the story of the interwar years, it behooves us to recreate the East Europeans’ perspective, that this was not that nationalism is the root of all problems.  Rather, in Europe, most remarkably between the Rhine River and Russia, nationalism has meant national self-determination, in other words, democracy, and the story begins not in 1918 but in 1848, with the most amazing event in European history.

For the first, and perhaps last time, the continent was on the same page in a progressive and positive sense. From Paris to Naples and eastward to Budapest and Bucharest and Lviv, popular uprisings upset monarchs and demanded popular self-rule, that is, nationalism.  The real problem in 1848 – and later in 1918 was not “tribal nationalism” but imperialism.  In central Europe that meant German imperialism: the policies of a German Reich, the entity that generated the creating of that word genocide.

So to return to what I have said, in Europe at least the cases of genocide are not so much nation states committing this crime of crimes, as Arendt might suggest. The culprit instead is empires that have confused their identities: they seek to be empires and nation states at the same time.  On the European land mass there are two such entities historically: the German Reich that I have mentioned, but also the Russian empire.  So my argument, my view is that it’s not nationalism as such that was the problem that generated genocide: the problem was an empire, treating a vast and complex area, as if it were a nation state.

So let us look first at the German case. here the genocidal policies occurred in the context of WWII and the policies carried out in Eastern Europe, and things like  the Generalplanost, which promised to eliminate over 75 percent of Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians. The German empire, called Grossdeutsches Reich, was doing in an unprecedentedly radical way what a nation state does, that is, making people and territory homogeneous, and it was doing so in a practically boundless manner – as and like an empire.  In the end, Eastern Europe, places like Kyiv and Lviv, were meant to become as German as Berlin or Frankfurt.

No measure was considered too radical to achieve this goal, and what justified all this violence was a very old idea: The Reich was holy. The story of a German empire seeking to reduce diversity, trying to make imperial space homogenous like a nation state, had a very deep history, going back many generations.  Here Arendt has a more helpful idea in another chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism: there have been many empires in world history, but she uses a special word to signify the special problem that was contained in the German and Russian empires: she calls them continental empires.  Germany and Russia were European empires that had possession not overseas, like British or French or Spanish or Portuguese, but close to home.  Those “blue water” empires have been subject to of devastating, certainly justified criticism, but their colonial possessions that were far away, and the subject peoples were recognized and meant to remain foreign. That meant that when those peoples demanded national self-determination they could be let go without endangering the British or French core.

The process is called de-colonization. From 1918, but especially after 1945, France or Britain could shed these colonial possessions, beginning in S. America and then Africa, Asia, without feeling that they were giving up parts of themselves. Britain could let Kenya or Bahamas go and Britain remained fully intact.  However, Germany could not divest itself of imperial possessions in the same way, for deep historical reasons.  Unlike Britain or France, its empire formed not from the 18^th century, but much earlier: arguably from the year 800, but certainly from 962, with the crowning of Otto the great.  This empire came to be called Holy Roman Empire in the 12^th century, and then Holy Roman Empire of the German nation in the 15^th century.  It was like all empires in theory universal, and did not know or respect borders, and included – from today’s perspective –  lots of non-German territory:  N. Italy, Slovenia, Burgundy, all the Czech lands, much of Denmark and the Netherlands, W. Poland, Luxemburg, and all of today’s Germany in the heartlands. [7]

Therefore in the middle of the 19^th Century, during the “springtime of peoples,” when German liberals demanded their own national self-determination, in an early stage of German democracy, and set about creating modern Germany (after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806), they could not conceive of surrendering such places as Prague, or Strassburg, much of Denmark or (what is today) Slovenia, let alone the “German city” of Trieste, because they had belonged to the Holy Roman empire of the German nation for centuries, and this was the only German state that existed.  It shaped their imaginations. Thus, in the making Germany (and other European states) more important than “imagined communities” were imaginations shaped by centuries of previous history, setting parameters on what people thought and people did. To speak with Marx: humans imagine their nations, but they do so not just as they please.  They think and act within structures – cultural and legal – inherited from earlier times, times that are often very distant.

Germans acknowledged that there were heartlands, around Munich or Frankfurt, but who was to say where that core territory ended? Their ideas of what Germany was were inherited from the deep past.  The policy in the present of all German states after 1848 was assimilation.  Czechs, or Poles, or Italians or Alsatians were fated to become German.  Because of international pressures, the German state that first emerged in 1871, the confused mélange of nation state and Reich, was much smaller than most Germans imagined Germany should be.  Bismarck’s Reich state left one in three Germans out.

If we fast-forward to 1933, the odd thing in that year was that when Hitler went about making his supposed third German Reich, a lot of ordinary Germans thought what he was doing was natural and reasonable.  He said Danzig and Prague were German, and even socialists did not have the vocabulary to object.  No one employing the basic old ideas of what Germany was, ideas supposedly going back 1000 years could say he was wrong.  A young Friedrich Engels said that even Burgundy and Netherlands would belong to a future Germany [8]   

But please note: the problem was not nationalism as such: it was an imperialism that claimed there was no difference between empire and nation, and that empire, in German Reich, was the natural and necessary frame for the nation” in fact necessary and holy for History. What many Germans who supported that agenda did not know about Hitler is that he had a racial world view that would make the Reich much larger than the old Holy Empire, and that he would employ policies few could imagine, not just assimilation but Völkermord, the murder of peoples, what Raphael Lemkin called ludobójstwo and then genocide. 

Speaking of this project and how it played out in Eastern Europe.  Recall what the major event in Hitler’s revolution was called: the massive assault upon the Soviet Union in 1941was called Operation Barbarossa.  As fascists German National Socialists were indeed revolutionaries; they knew about Germany’s deep past but went beyond it, “unlocking the gate that leads from the familiar to the unexpected, releasing history to move ahead to a new and unpredictable stage.” [9]   For the Nazis Friedrich Barbarossa, emperor from 1150s to 1190s was an early revolutionary who had extended Reich to the east, in what he called Holy and Roman and of course empire.  But now they would take that old empire and extend it even further, following Barbarossa’s footsteps.  They used the symbolism of Rome: see the SA banners at Nuremberg for instance, made to resemble those of Roman legionaries, topped with eagles, or the Kongresshalle, constructed to replicate the structure of the Coliseum, with colonnades and archways, or the Field of Mars (Märzfeld), a parade ground likewise made on Roman models.

Now we arrive at the story of Russia. Russia is the other modern European state that stands in this kind of tradition. It was called at one time the Third Rome, ignoring of course Charlemagne or the Holy Roman Empire, thus a Rome after the fall of the eastern Roman empire. Like the German empire, it formed over many centuries, and like Germany Russia grew from an original heartland.  If Germany expanded from central German places like Frankfurt and Cologne, the Russian imperium came from Moscow and then extended outward over land, into vast spaces, so that when the national age arrived in the 19^th Certainty, no one could say with certainty where the core Russian areas ended and something else began.  That is, no one could say where Russia ended and non-Russian space in the empire began. [10] 

People have compared Ukraine’s predicament today to the predicament of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s (bringing up the ghost of the Munich conference) and there is indeed a similarity.  Germany claimed that the Czech lands, called historically Bohemia, were ancient German territory dating back many centuries.  Prague appeared as the center of Germany, right between Vienna and Berlin; it was the seat of the oldest German university. Bohemia as central to Germany was an argument German liberals , even German socialists, had trouble resisting. 

Russia makes similar claims upon Ukraine of course: that it’s always been part of Russia, that Russia is unthinkable without it.  Even Russia’s liberals fall for this argument, and they do so even when it is made by today’s version of Hitler.

So what did the Czechs have to say against proponents of this kind of history, claiming, accurately as it happened, that their land, Bohemia, had once belonged to a German state?  With what right did they claim independence? They – František Palacký, T.G. Masaryk – said that more important than a history of kings and emperors was the history of the Czech people.  The Czech people were in Bohemia [ Čechy ] before the kings, and to some extent the kings were responsible to the people.  Here mythology and actual history combined. In fact when first Czech king emerged in 12^th C. there was no modern Czech nation. Still, ideas of Czech sovereignty in the Czech lands were not a complete distortion; they were an interpretation based in facts. There may have been no modern Czech nation in the 12^th century, but there had been some consent, to the rule of Czech dukes and then kings by their vassals, local lords; and the consent was given by vassals who were ethnically Czech.  

The more important practical thing of course was that by the 19^th century, when the day of democracy dawned Bohemia’s territory was majority Czech and the result of any elections there would usher in a form of Czech sovereignty.  But still beneath that had to be history.  The Czechs were a very old nation, mentioned in very old documents. People spoke of Bohemia and of Czechs in the 12^th century, at the latest (Cosmos [11]), and somehow Czechia, which we in English call Bohemia, belongs on the map of Europe because it had been there from the constitution of European regions after the fall of Rome.  

How does Ukraine compare? What is remarkable about the Ukrainian story is that it aligns with what I have said in important ways, but it also diverges from this general East European pattern.  What is that pattern?  Poles, Serbs, Romanians, Slovenes all argued like the Czechs.  We have rights because we have always been here, we are like original owners, “we” came as a tribe.  Our leaders selected dukes and kings but it is our land.  Such arguments are not necessarily anti-democratic. Francis Fukuyama has written:

National identity is malleable, and it can be shaped to reflect liberal aspirations and to instill a sense of community and purpose among a broad public. [12] 

Some sense of nationhood, of communal fate – of a people joined in history and culture and perhaps language – exists in any stable democracy. For historical reasons the sense of nationhood in Eastern Europe was anti-imperial, and that meant that it focused on what empires tried to destroy, nationhood, the sense of the identity and community of sometimes small peoples. When individuals in Central and Eastern Europe, tired of monarchy, demanded self-government in 1848, they automatically assumed that the peoples who would govern themselves were nations: Czechs, Slovenes, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Magyars.  What Hannah Arendt called tribal nationalists were also democrats.  In fact: all the democrats in the Habsburg empire were some version of tribal nationalists, even the German Socialists.

Ukraine is similar but also different in an interesting way.  Here too was a national movement claiming rights to national self-determination, based on a sense of common identity deriving from culture and language, and the deep history of Ukrainians in particular territory.  But the Ukrainian national story in modern times is also a bit different from the rest of Eastern Europe.  In August 2022 President Zelensky said not: we are an ancient nation, but we are a new nation.  I am not sure what he intended, but it seems that with those words he broke with region, and its history

As you know, Eastern Europe is a place heavy with history, history seems or has been made to seem fate, destiny.  The nation has always existed therefore it must continue.  People have to die for Poland now because people died for Poland in the past, every generation has to live up to legacy created centuries earlier.  But Zelensky was saying the nation was new, recently emerged.  So what was new?

Nation is at base always a group of people with a sense of a common purpose; seeking a common place in history: past and future.  In the case of a new Ukraine the nation are people coming together to fight tyranny, not by orders of any government or national movement or ideology or leader.  A leader existed but did not cause people to organize, in 2004 or 2013 or early 2022.  Despite its inadequacies the Ukrainian state is infinitely preferable to what is offered by Russia.  All nations are defined against something: Ukraine, the new nation, is defined against tyranny that comes from Russia.

Where does this story fit into well-known narratives about nationalism? Ukrainians’ acts of massive resistance, this fulfilling of the will to live in freedom; to self-constitute : that is what has ultimately made a nation. A nation is not just an imagined community, it is people acting together, and aware they are doing so.

Where in history do we seek parallels for what has been happening in Ukraine, since 2022 very visibly, but really since 2014 and even earlier, dating back to orange, and asphalt, and other revolutions? Can a nation be new in Eastern Europe: or anywhere in Europe? It seems that the map of nations in Europe, as I said, was established long ago. Perhaps one has to leave Europe for parallels to Ukraine in the last generation. How about North America in 1776?  The thirteen colonies?  The language spoken there happened to be English but that was not important as the imperial power people opposed was also English speaking.  The issue was not language and culture, the pattern we know from Central and Eastern Europe, and the colonists had no history of common statehood, or really common anything.  Statehood had resided in each colony.  History was not destiny, history was safely in the past. And it remained there: even now, Americans rarely refer to the heritage before 1776 as a source of purpose and identity.

From the 1770s representatives collaborated from all thirteen colonies because they felt they were being oppressed.  They had little effective say in affairs that concerned them, and so they became willing to stake lives for what they called liberty. Freedom.  Phyllis Wheatley, an African American poet, part of the new American nation, lived in Boston in the 1770s and wrote as follows: “In every breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression. “

Thus the nation was not defined by culture or history but by common desire to live in freedom.  My wife and I happened to be at Bunker Hill in June, 250 years to day after battle that Americans lost; mostly average people who felt that their affairs should not be directed by people far away. Historians have a word for this kind of nation: civic nation, one that comes together over concern for defending common political rights, in distinction to an ethnic nation which exists as a what Arendt called tribal principle: united in language and blood and culture.

But Ukraine suggests that there is no strict separation. [13]  Fukuyama has said that Ukrainian nationhood mixes elements of western (malleable, civic) with eastern (cultural) nationalism while forming the political community which is essential to liberal order in a nation state.  Every modern nation is about self-definition: self-determination, power and rule and supposed freedom of the people.  What is special about Eastern Europe is that for generations outside forces tried to crush not just the fact but the very idea of their existence.  The designation Poland for example was supposed to cease to exist after the final partition [rozbior] of 1795: it was to be forgotten forever. [14]   

So if East Europeans seem obsessed with ethnicity, it’s because without their unique cultures, essential to humanity – the underlying belief which drove Lemkin to formulate his vision of the new crime of genocide – they and their causes for freedom and self-government simply vanished from history.  In East European revolutions for popular sovereignty, the first stage was a struggle for self-definition, challenging world opinion with a radical claim: “we the people” (words from the US Constitution)—Czechs, Hungarians, Croats or Slovenes—exist. For Czechs or Hungarians that struggle grew from the 1820s, for other peoples slightly later. 

Here West Europe was very different.  Because no one denied the existence of France in 1789, French patriots said they were simply claiming the rights to self-government that all humans possessed; their nationalism thus appeared universal. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, before such rights could be asserted, patriots had to claim they wanted what all nations should possess: secure existence. 

But beyond this distinction, nationhood in the west and in Eastern Europe is both civic and ethnic—universal and particular—in differing mixtures at the same time.  In and beyond Europe liberal nation-states guarantee civic rights but also insist upon linguistic-cultural integration, each tendency strengthening to the degree it is denied. In our day some do argue for an ethnic Ukraine, but – it seems to me – the main cause in the revolution is not language or culture.  If you ask what people are fighting for it is to defy tyranny. Ukraine’s national struggle is thus about political and civic rights with language or history being secondary. 

What the future holds is uncertain, but it’s interesting that as in the French or American revolutions, the Ukrainians’ view of the nation—its story—is more focused on the present and future than on the past, and perhaps that is a hallmark of nationalism that is more political and civic than ethnic. Maybe a balance exists in all nationalisms between looking to past and looking to future, and when the former overwhelms the latter, as is the case in today’s US, it becomes something aggressive, perhaps even irrational. [15]  We can never recreate the past, and trying to do so forces living in a lie, and lies can ultimately be upheld only through violence.

As everywhere else in Europe, it’s the type of national revolution Ukrainians are prosecuting that shapes their nationhood. For what Zelensky called Ukraine the new nation, language and culture have a place, but they are not primary, and also not exclusionary.  Much of the territory of the new nation speaks Russian, military units are at least bilingual, because Ukraine is a huge and diverse space with lots of regional differentiation in culture.  In any case it’s amazing and for historians to see a so-called civic nation, that is, where nationhood is primarily about rights of a community envisioned toward the future, emerge in the middle of Eastern Europe!

Conclusions

1. Remarkable in both Russia and Germany is that imperial ideology is in fact nationalistic, promoting Russian and German ethnicity, but justifies itself in non-national terms.  Russia says it fights Nazism and for some special civilization (that no one can really define [16] ) while Nazi Germany said it was fighting for Europe and western civilization against “Asia.”  But today’s Russia and the Germany of then are more imperial twins or mirror images than opponents.  Keep in mind the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, which today’s Russia still defends, keep in mind Molotov’s 1940 visit to Berlin proposing a division of Eurasia between Germany and Russia.

Both argue in supposedly non-national terms but in fact make foreign nationals into their primary victims.  For Nazis those were Poles and after 1941 Russians and Ukrainians, but above all Jews; for Russian imperialists of today, the victims are above all Ukrainians.

2. To return to Ukraine and its revolution and how to place it in world history. We read of the late eighteenth century as an Age of Democratic Revolutions, [17] of certain ideas of self-government circling globe, from the US to Europe and then South America. Was there really such an age? Elsewhere, east of the Rhine, Russia, Prussia, Austria, not to mention Ottoman territory, that time was a protracted age of absolutism.  And now?   Enemies of democracy have more self-confidence than they have had for generations.  

So again perhaps Ukraine’s revolution reminds us of the American Revolution of 250 years ago.  They both culminated at a time hostile to democracy.  When democracy persists it’s a nagging alternative that autocracies cannot ignore, and use their resources to reduce and eliminate if possible. The American example was in everyone’s mind in 1848 Europe, and was not Ukraine’s democracy the deepest cause of the Russian invasion in 2022?  Ukraine was a constant reminder that post-Soviet people did not need to live in a state that crushed their liberties and rights; this democracy’s flaws could not outweigh that recognition.  And does not today’s Ukraine shame the undemocratic political right and left in Europe, whether they admit it or not?

3.  A final remark about method, about memory, and about nations.  President Zelensky has called it a “new nation” but of course Ukraine also has lots of history.  What do we do with it?  How do we deal with negative episodes and persons?  One cannot simply ignore or censor, “cancel” them, and still arrive at a sense of identity that is useful for the present.

Anderson called nations imagined communities, but that is misleading, because it suggests we are free to imagine nations just as we want. In fact we cannot imagine the past, imagine a nation just as we like. In the words “imagined community” we have the misleading sense that the nation is potentially a fiction, a concoction put together by random groups of individuals.  In fact we don’t imagine our communities in full freedom; we imagine in terms of what we have inherited. That is why I wrote of shaped imaginations.  

The imperial tradition had shaped the way Germans thought about their past.  But Germans rarely asked whether that past had to be their future.  The problem was not the past: but that Germans of modern times had not asked how that past was itself a creation of human beings, and did not have to be.  Careful scholarship shows that the idea of a holy empire was a creation of a few scribes working in the office of the emperor I mentioned, Friedrich Barbarossa, and did not have to be. [18]  The holy empire was not destiny or necessity but the very evident creation of these officials.

This formula was no longer understood critically but taken for granted, as supposedly necessary, and Germans much later failed to think of the future as free human beings. They had stumbled into their future as captives of a contingent and unnecessary past.  Even the lauded German historical profession fell victim to lazy history writing, making happenstance seem destiny.  Even liberals, let the memory of what had emerged many centuries earlier in a haphazard way dictate their future, making them in a sense unfree.  The German empire was more empire than Republic, in fact its character as empire undid its possibilities as republic. [19]

We cannot fabricate events in the past as they suit us; we cannot ignore problematic events and persons; but we can build upon traditions and institutions that we recognize as pointing to a future that we desire.  What Germans did after WWII was discover that they had other resources than empire: that past of their recent ancestors was not necessary, and they took active inspiration from other traditions, for example for example democratic figures from 1920s, or people who opposed Nazism, from left to right.  They did not manufacture or imagine a past, but chose elements that were useful for the future.

The Catholic Church did something similar in the 1960s in the Jewish question.  It rejected virtually everything that Christian writers had written about Jews since the first century, and based church’s new understanding upon one letter of St. Paul, Paul’s letter to the Romans.  The Jesuit John Courtney Murray likened the process to pruning a plant, cutting of dead or unwanted twigs or branches, and letting grow what if fruitful: the growing end of tradition. [20] So the modern German nation, a democracy was not  “invented” or imagined: Instead it has been interpreted and made useful, like anything we have received from people who came before us.

Now a few final words on Ukraine in European history from the perspective of Central and Western Europe and indeed the United States.  Sometimes one’s view of one’s nation comes from what others think of it, from outsiders.  A great American historian of Ukraine David Frick once forgot a book on a dinner table at a pub, I took it home, and returned it later.  It turned out to be a precious book of essays, printed in Prague in 1806 by the Czech philologist J. Dobrovsky, an outsider who knew a lot about Ukraine from various old sources.  He wrote about its people as follows:

“We are dealing with a brave, enterprising, cheerful, even reckless, but straight and plain-thinking people… people experienced in all the crafts necessary for human life…They know how to plant the field, sow, reap, bake bread, prepare meat of all kinds, brew beer, make meth, brew and brandy. There is no one among them, regardless of age, sex or status, who does not try to surpass his companion in drinking, and in all of Christendom there is certainly no one who knows how to live without sorrow for the next day better than they do.”

Dobrovsky’s word of status demands attention, because it challenges what we read in standard academic works, where early modern nationhood in Eastern Europe is said to involve the nobility and urban elites, leaving out the mostly illiterate peasantry as people without rights or history.  Yet in this passage Ukrainians are a nation. No question.  They are advancing into modern nationhood like other Europeans, consisting of all classes, united in mentality, preferring, again in Dobrovský’s words “the ardors of a restless, uneasy life to a soft slavery. ” Ukrainians loved independence and fathers taught sons to die for it.

“The Cossacks of the Ukraine were a quiet people,” Dobrovský went on, preferring peace to conflict: “they responded to the insolence of the Polish nobility and clergy only by quietly taking flight.”   Now we are coming back to the subject I started with.  When they saw that outsiders desired their extinction [Untergang], they seized – and is it any wonder – the saber to avert an unbearable yoke, and strengthened themselves more and more in the taste for independence.” [21]   So we with Lemkin once more: what Dobrovský saw the Ukrainians having done historically in 1806 was organizing effectively to oppose Untergang, demise of a people: genocide.

Here we have a tradition that does not need much pruning or interpretation, the continuity seems evident.  Weapons of our day, and the weapons of their day defend the same thing, this taste Ukrainians had gained for independence.  Today’s Ukrainians are not the Cossacks of long ago, still, in both cases past and present have flowed through interceding generations, through ideas and values one hands to the next.  But the task is never complete; as Dobrovský knew, nations have fallen by the wayside, so have democracies.

What historians will one day write is that Ukrainians for the last three years is making sure that destiny of extinction that their ancestors resisted does not happen to them.  Why wait: they can begin writing it now.