The Wood and the Trees

The response of the British media to the momentous and historic events in Ukraine that have unfolded during the past week has been mixed, to say the least. While the BBC has done a reasonably good job of informing its listeners and viewers about what has taken place, the amount of coverage has varied: the World Service has given priority to reports on the crisis, but the domestic stations and channels have tended to sideline them in favour of stories about reality TV and the home secretary's failed love affair. What has been even more depressing is the preponderance in the "quality" papers of columns like those of Peter Unwin in the Independent, Ian Traynor and Jonathan Steele in the Guardian, and Simon Jenkins in the Times, which make one wonder if the snobbish, appeasing, xenophobic "anything-for-a-quiet-life" atmosphere of 1930s Britain ever really went away - and, of course, there has been the omnipresent John Laughland to reinforce one's consciousness of the political and cultural philistinism that is the dominant characteristic of a small but influential section of the British establishment.

So it's encouraging to read the comments of British journalist, Eastern Europe specialist and political analyst Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian. Ash takes the above-mentioned columnists to task, and exposes the devious, convoluted lines of their arguments: for example, he writes, Jenkins uses the perfectly justified assertion that "Putin obliterated his opponents in Russia's last presidential election without a peep from the west" not in order to criticize Putin's election-rigging, but as a reason for the West not to criticize election-rigging in the Ukraine - "a plague on both their houses":

Behind all these contorted reservations, we hear an inner voice which says, in effect, "Why won't all these bloody, semi-barbarian, east Europeans leave us alone, to go on living happily ever after in our right, tight, little west European (or merely British) paradise?" And, quite often, "Why are those bloody Americans stirring them up to disturb us?" For this is not a simple left-right divide. It's a divide between, on the one side, central and east Europeans inside the EU, together with Americans of left and right, and, on the other, west Europeans of both left and right. Not all west Europeans, to be sure. In fact, the EU has spoken out remarkably clearly on the election fraud, through its Dutch presidency and Spanish foreign minister. But many west Europeans.

And Ash has some questions for the "Reluctant West Europeans":

1. Can't you see the wood for the trees?

You point out some bad trees, but here's the shape of the wood: An election was stolen. Most of the orange revolutionaries want their country to enjoy more of the freedoms, rights and opportunities that we in western Europe enjoy, rather than being tied back closer to an increasingly authoritarian Russia. Wouldn't that be a good thing, for them and for us?

2. Do you think Ukrainians don't deserve democracy?

Please examine your attitude and see if it doesn't reflect some deep-seated prejudices of west Europeans towards the continent's other half, typecast for centuries as distant, exotic, mysterious, dark etc. A good test is to substitute, say, "Spaniards" or "French" for "Ukrainians" in any statement, and see how it reads.

3. Are you reluctant to support the orange movement just because the Americans do?

Put thus starkly, most people would say no. But some of the west European unease undoubtedly comes from the fact that American pro-democracy organisations have actively supported the Ukrainian opposition, and Washington does have a geostrategic agenda involving the expansion of Nato, military bases across central Asia etc. Yet the knee-jerk leftist or Euro-Gaullist reaction - "if the Americans are for it there must be something wrong with it" - is silly. Please consider the Ukrainian case on its own merits, not through an American or anti-American prism.

4. Why is Russia entitled to a sphere of influence, including Ukraine, if the United States is not entitled to a sphere of influence, including Nicaragua?

The truth is, neither Moscow nor Washington is entitled to such a sphere. There are hard realities of economic, military and political power with which the smaller, weaker neighbours of great powers have to deal. In the case of Ukraine, this is further complicated by the cultural and ethnic identification of many eastern Ukrainians with Russia. But these are constraints with which Ukraine must deal itself, as a sovereign state. The country of Yalta (a town in the Ukrainian Crimea) should not be subjected to a new Yalta.

5. Would you rather have George Bush or Vladimir Putin?

Preferably neither. Given the choice between Bush and Putin, I choose Marilyn Monroe. But it's incredible that so many west Europeans, including Chancellor Schröder of Germany, seem to prefer as their partner an ex-KGB officer currently reimposing authoritarian rule in Russia over a man who, for all his faults, has just been re-elected in a free and fair election in one of the world's great democracies.

6. If you don't like the Americans taking the lead in Ukraine, why don't we?

To some extent we already are. At the negotiating tables in Kiev yesterday, there was Javier Solana from Brussels, the Polish and Lithuanian presidents, and a senior Russian official, but not, so far as I know, any senior American. And that's right. This is a version of our European model of peaceful revolution, with the aim of rejoining Europe, not America. Now it's up to us to support it, with all the peaceful means at our disposal. These include saying that, in our interest as well as theirs, a democratic Ukraine deserves a place in the European Union. Agreed?

Let's hope that this long overdue column will at least inspire some debate in the Guardian and elsewhere in the British media over the coming days. It's time that figures like Laughland, Steele, Jenkins and others were made accountable for their published views. With the spread of Internet communication, those views can have an influence on what is happening in Ukraine - they are not merely an internal British affair, but have international resonance and significance.