Rethinking Ukrainian History by Ivan L. Rudnytsky

The side effect of these policies is that they also come to blur the boundaries between the EU’s Self and the Others. This led to the formulation of the European Neighbourhood Policy, followed by the Eastern Partnership in 2009, which are policies that come as a substitution to enlargement, to reduce the risks of full exclusion. After the EU’s wide enlargement in 2004, Ukraine has become a direct neighbour (among others) of the community. Ukraine as the EU’s and Russia’s ‘little Self’īefore addressing Ukraine’s own subjectivity and how it has built its identity in relation to its two big neighbours – the EU and Russia – it is worth observing how Ukraine has been framed by them. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has indeed enshrined its future always more strongly towards the West, and the launch of the Russian invasion in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 could well be a determining stepping stone in this journey. This indeterminacy comes from the fact that the liminal actor is in a phase of transition, one that is from a Soviet, unfree, undemocratic past towards a free, democratic, European future from a Ukrainian perspective. Liminality refers to a state of ambiguity, of falling in-between existing categories, of being partly-Self partly-Other, “neither here nor there”. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has found itself in a difficult structural position, in-between two cores, in a state that could be described as one of liminality.

As many ‘post-Soviet’ states, it has been perceived through the prism of corruption and uncomplete statehood, a marginal actor on the borderlands of Europe, but also of its former Russian imperial ‘master’ (if we use the postcolonial vocabulary).

The Ukrainian diplomat Olexander Sherba has described Ukraine as a state that has often been rather unknown and undervalued from an outsider’s eye. “We feel like a part of Europe, but may look like a part of Russia.

Rethinking Ukrainian History by Ivan L. Rudnytsky