Can Europe’s velvet revolution claim another prize? When Ukrainian demonstrators on the frozen streets of Kiev place flowers in the perforated metal shields of their country’s riot police, they are sending us two desperate yet dignified messages: “We want to join Europe” and “We want to do this in a European way”. Peacefully, that is, supplanting the old Jacobin-Bolshevik model of violent regime change with Europe’s new model of velvet revolution — as in Prague and Berlin in 1989, as in Serbia’s toppling of Milosevic, as in Georgia, where exactly one year ago the people’s president marched into Parliament bearing a long-stemmed rose.
The learning chain of Europe’s velvet revolutions is fascinatingly direct. One of the most active groups in Ukraine’s democratic opposition is called Pora. Pora means “It’s time”, which is exactly what the crowds chanted on Wenceslas Square in Prague in November 1989. The student activists of Pora received personal tutorials in nonviolent resistance from Serbian students of the Otpor (“resistance”) group who were in the vanguard of toppling Milosevic. Those same Serbs also helped the Georgian vanguard movement Kmara (“enough is enough”).
The tricks on the other side are familiar too. Most important of all is the grotesque abuse of state television to favor the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. (State television stations are today’s Bastilles.) Then heavy-handed interventions from Moscow, including two visits by the Russian president and former KGB-officer Vladimir Putin. Intimidation. Censorship. Lies. Dirty tricks, including a novel variant in which Yanukovich supporters were apparently given multiple voter registration cards so they could “vote early and vote often” in several different constituencies. The Ukrainian opposition refers to them ironically as “free voters”. Miners from the Donbass region are reportedly being bussed in to sort out these pansy urban liberals. (Something very similar happened to keep Ceausescu’s successors in power in Romania.) Then there are the incredible turnout figures, as in East European dictatorships of old, including one marvelous return of more than 100 percent.
Who says Europe is boring? Yet until Tuesday, many West Europeans probably did not even know that there was a presidential election going on in Ukraine. We were all focused on that other crucial presidential election, in the US. And, shamingly, Americans probably have done more to support the democratic opposition in Ukraine, and to shine a spotlight on electoral malpractices, than West Europeans have. Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have been more actively engaged, understanding how much is at stake.
What’s at stake is not just the future of Ukraine: Whether it turns to Europe, the West and liberal democracy, or back to authoritarianism and Putin’s Russia. It’s also the future of Russia itself, and therewith of the whole of Eurasia. A Russia that wins back Ukraine, as well as Belarus, will again be an imperial Russia, as Putin wishes. A Russia that sees even Ukraine moving toward Europe and the West, has a chance of itself becoming, with time, a more normal, liberal, democratic nation-state. But at the moment, under Putin, Russia is launched on a different, worse trajectory, and Western leaders have been united in their pusillanimity toward it. We have all been appeasers there.
Of course, there’s a global power play involved, too. Georgia, under its new government, has become a closer partner of the United States. Ukraine under Yushchenko might do the same. But above all, it will be turned toward Europe. These days, the most fervent pro-Europeans are to be found at the edges of Europe, and none more so than westward-looking Ukrainians. It’s the European Union they hope one day to join, not the United States of America.
In the short term, there’s a limit to what we can do. It should, however, be our unambiguous position that peaceful civil disobedience is a legitimate, even a necessary response to electoral fraud. And that the use of military or police force to deny people the right to peaceful protest is something we do not accept in 21st-century Europe.
