Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-01-Speech-3-030"
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"en.20041201.10.3-030"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mrs Ferrero-Waldner, the events that have been unfolding in Kiev over the last ten days are good news for democracy.
Overcoming fatalism and fear, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens are demonstrating their demand for change, with calm determination. Their movement has gradually won over large sections of their parliament, the army, the media, and even, so it would appear, the Supreme Court. That sea change has taken place because the Kuchma regime has, over the years, given rise to an increasingly broad opposition that now in fact contains differing schools of thought on the country’s future. It is worth recalling that the regime’s drift towards authoritarianism got under way when the prime minister’s name was not Yanukovich, but Yushchenko. Nevertheless, a number of European leaders, usually western, have long considered the President of Ukraine as an ally to be treated with kid gloves. As recently as last year, President Bush, for example, apparently put his trust in the incumbent regime to defend democracy in the Middle East with him, by saluting Mr Kuchma’s decision to send troops to Iraq. All of these elements should help us to water down certain democratic declarations of faith and to avoid any simplistic and Manichaean view of the reality of Ukrainian politics.
It strikes me that the great challenge now is to ensure that what is intrinsically good news for democracy is not in fact transformed into a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, by resulting if not in the partition of the country, then at least in renewed stirrings of nationalism and a resurgence of splits down ethnic lines, which would take us back to the periods of the Russian or Austro-Hungarian empires. Accordingly, I find it somewhat archaic, not to mention irresponsible, to interpret the Ukraine crisis as a tug-of-war between the West and Russia and as something of a European take on the struggle between good and evil.
In light of Ukraine’s history, such an approach may only exacerbate the split between the two main sections of the country. It does not in any way address the interests of the Ukrainian people, particularly the population from the western part of the country, which is highly reliant on the rest of the country given that cross-border trade has been in a state of collapse since Ukraine’s neighbours joined the EU. Neither does it address the interests of the EU; the more we are committed to fostering an economic dynamic in Ukraine through our mediation, the more we have everything to lose from the destabilisation of such an economically and politically fragile country and, on a broader scale, region. We should let Paul Wolfowitz retain his imperial vision of Europe; he said, and I quote, ‘the objective of a complete and free Europe will not be achieved until Ukraine has become a full Member of Europe and joined NATO’. From our point of view, we would be best advised to avoid exerting any pressure of that nature.
Once fresh elections have been held in Ukraine – this, at least, is what we hope will happen – in other words, once the entire country’s legitimate representative has been appointed completely transparently, the time will have come to start calm political dialogue with both the authorities and society itself; dialogue that would not pit new relations with the EU against the particular relations between Russia and Ukraine, but would, instead, be aimed at developing a perspective that all sections of Ukrainian society can identify with. This is yet another real-life test of our ability to implement a common foreign and security policy worthy of the name."@en1
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