Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna in January–February 2017. Director of the Prisma Ukraїna Program at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin, Research Fellow at Geneva University.
Throughout its recent political upheavals, Ukraine has looked to Europe as a beacon of liberal democracy. Yet Europe has been unwilling to reciprocate, as it did with other countries in the socialist bloc. This has held back not only Ukrainian development, argues Andrii Portnov.
Western Ukrainian intellectuals’ tendency to blame the Donbas for the war is based on a longstanding orientalization of the ‘Soviet’ Other. Reminiscences about erstwhile cultural diversity sit awkwardly alongside hostility to the East.
It is not only events in eastern Ukraine and the Greek crisis that will force the European Union to reinvent itself, argues Andriy Portnov, but also domestic political landscapes in Germany, the United Kingdom and France. The sum of all of these factors will force change.
