The situation in Ukraine is exceptional
“The situation in Ukraine is exceptional – to enter the accession process in times of such a dramatic war – this is a very unusual situation within the European integration process, unparalleled to anything what we've seen before”
Interview with Andreas Umland
Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and also an Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He holds a PhD in Politics from Cambridge, a DrPhil in History and Diploma in Politology from the Free University of Berlin, an MPhil in Russian Studies from Oxford, and an AM in Political Science from Stanford. He was, among others, a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, as well as a guest lecturer at various universities, including Ural State University, St. Antony’s College Oxford, Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, the Catholic University of Eichstätt, and the University of Jena. He is also the editor of the ibidem Press book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” and “Ukrainian Voices”.
His areas of expertise include Russian and Ukrainian domestic politics, foreign affairs, and nationalism, as well as Eurasianism, comparative fascism, East European geopolitics, German Ostpolitik, post-Soviet higher education, and Ukraine’s decentralization. Umland is a member of, among others, the boards of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (COMFAS), and Boris Nemtsov Academic Center for the Study of Russia at Charles University in Prague. His publications can be accessed via: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7916-4646
O. Kandyuk: Keeping in mind the possibility of new bigger enlargement. In your opinion, how can EU strike a balance between deepening internal integration and basically expanding eastward? Would it be anyhow possible?
A. Umland: It will be a challenge for the European Union, but there's no other way out than finding a balance and changing the modus in which the European Union is functioning. Moreover, this reform would have been necessary anyway, even without further eastward enlargement and an inclusion of Ukraine, Moldova and perhaps also at some point Georgia into the European Union. The EU’s current way of decision-making is outdated. We see that most vividly at the example of Hungary's behaviour in the European Union, which uses its veto powers to hinder or, at least, prolong crucial decision-making processes.
There has been, during the last three decades, already a deepening of the integration, and specification of different cooperation and coordination formats. We have this already with the Eurozone, or with the Schengen zone. Now, we will need something similar for certain foreign political decisions where not everybody takes part and where a coalition of the willing, as in the case of the Schengen zone or of the Eurozone, is going forward without all EU member states fully involved. And then these other members or even non-EU countries (as Norway’s participation in the Schengen regime) can themselves decide whether they want to be part of it or not.
Ukraine and Moldova are now candidates. The negotiations towards the accessions are starting soon and there will have to be some parallel internal reform either by signing a new treaty or by specifying new rules within the current Lisbon Treaty. Hopefully, both processes will move forward quickly.
O. Kandyuk: You mentioned that the structure of the EU is not well-suited for confronting anti-democratic tendencies within the bloc. What specific reforms would you propose to strengthen the EU’s institutional resilience? What concrete institutional changes could enhance the EU’s ability to tackle these challenges?
A. Umland: A number of policy changes would have first to happen. That means fighting disinformation and creating certain safeguards against foreign adversarial influence from non-democratic countries or other actors that are obvious enemies of the European Union and of the European integration process. What we see now, for instance, is this alliance between the Alternative for Germany and Elon Musk.
The Alternative for Germany may gain up to a fourth of the vote in the upcoming German parliamentary elections. This party wants Germany to leave the European Union and the Eurozone and to have instead cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union, with the Shanghai Treaty Organization. As Europeans and citizens of the European Union, we will have to introduce policy changes in order to counteract that. The European Union cannot simply stand by and watch how anti-European actors, whether inside the EU or outside of it, are trying to destroy it.
Institutionally, the most spoken of topic here is, of course, the move away from a consensus-based voting towards qualified majority voting to make the European Union faster, more effective, and more resolute in its domestic and foreign behavior. That is an old topic that has been already there for decades. It is a complicated matter because, for some of these rules to change, one would need the very consensus that needs to be overcome, or even have to sign a new Treaty on European Union.
Some of the countries that want to keep their veto power within the European Union will not vote for new rules or even a new treaty – a “catch-22” situation. For now, the way to go forward is to try to apply the current rules as set out in the valid treaties and move towards an interpretation that would allow for majority-based and not consensus-based decision-making.
These are not new topics. They have just become now especially salient with the Russian attack on Ukraine and also with the general attack of anti-European and anti-democratic actors on the European integration project.
O. Kandyuk: Since you mentioned the Alternative for Germany, how would you assess this current joint voting of Christian Democrats with AfD? Recently, it was a castaway party in the German political system, but could it be the precedent of cooperation with anti-systemic forces within German political environment?
A. Umland: I'm less worried about it than many others. It doesn't look very good, and it's also perhaps morally reprehensible. But I don't think it is signaling a major change in German domestic affairs. It may be actually a self-goal by the Christian Democrats in electoral terms, and we will see what the effects of this voting on migration will be for the elections on 23rd February.
I'm less pessimistic than others about this joint voting of the center-right with the radical right, because the CDU/CSU are themselves internally is under pressure to keep their distance to the far right, to the Alternative for Germany. The joint centre and radical right vote in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, has encountered a lot of criticism not only from experts, politicians, intellectuals, and foreign partners of Germany, but also from within the Christian Democratic Union. There have been even cases of prominent members of the party leaving the party in reaction to that. For instance, the prominent German TV journalist Michel Friedman, who is of Jewish origin and who is well known in Germany, has demonstratively left the Christian Democratic Union. This indicates that Friedrich Merz’s strategy is a risky path for his party to go. There is, to be sure, a faction within the Christian Democrats that is open to cooperation with the far right. But there's also a large faction within the CDU/CSU that is against such cooperation. Therefore I'm less scared by this one-time incident than others.
O. Kandyuk: Do you believe that anti-European sentiments in some EU member states, such as Hungary and Slovakia, could escalate into a crisis similar to Brexit? Especially gave the rising same tensions in Western Europe. How can such a scenario be prevented?
A. Umland: Yes, I fear that there could be an escalation of negative tendencies. For instance, we will now have probably a new government in Austria led by the far right. Then we will have three countries in Central Europe, Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria, ruled by parties that have a strange relationship towards the European project and basically reject the European Union in its current shape. That is a dangerous development, and one can only point to the results that Brexit brought for Great Britain. There was also the idea that Great Britain, which is a larger country than Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria, can do somehow without European integration, without the European Union. There was this illusion that there is an alternative future for Great Britain outside the European project.
Yet, once Brexit had happened, there came a fast the recognition that the leave vote was based on a lot of disinformation and lies. It ended with a bizarre self-goal for the British people who got out of the European Union and then suffered heavily from Brexit. Now, the UK is in this absurd situation that you have a growing majority of British citizens being in favor of Great Britain's membership in the European Union. Yet, the UK is outside the European Union and not able to quickly re-enter the European Union as that would be a rather embarrassing admission of failure. Meanwhile, the British people continue suffering from Brexit – the UK’s industry, academia, and science have been heavily hit by Brexit. This odd development is the result of a massive disinformation campaign. One hopes that citizens in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and other countries will take the British example to their heart and not make the same mistake.
O. Kandyuk: Going further in this context. What are your thoughts on further centralization of the EU? Could the creation of a supranational body with expanded powers be a solution, or would it pose a threat to the sovereignty of member states?
A. Umland: I'm one of those who think that eventually we will have to create something like the United States of Europe, i.e. a federal European Union. There are others who think this is not useful. Yet, I think the dynamics both within Europe and also in the world will be driving the European Union towards stronger integration, and eventually passing at some point the threshold towards a state-like entity that would be more than a mere confederation and also more than a sui generis project as it is now. The EU would then be more similar to the United States of America. I think – we will be getting there, whether we like it or not.
The dynamics of international competition and conflict will be driving us in this direction. It is better to acknowledge this pressure from outside and from inside the European Union, to lead it resolutely, and to go ahead with it rather than resist it. Within Europe, there is also integration on the social level happening. Europeans are getting closer together with every decade.
We are now, in everyday life, more integrated with each other than we were 50 years ago when we still had nation states with national communities. Our populations are increasingly intermixing. People move from one EU country to another, and we have more and more European identity, for instance, in the party realm. We have all-European party families that are becoming more and more integrated.
What I see now as the path ahead is to strengthen the European Parliament, to switch towards majority-based voting in the Council of the European Union, and to move towards a federal model of European integration.
O. Kandyuk: In this context, how do you assess the prospects of introducing a mechanism for expelling countries from the EU for systematic violations of democratic standards? How realistic is this in the near future?
A. Umland: The problem here is similar to that of the adoption of a new treaty that would be taking care of the new challenges we have now. The very countries that would be threatened then by punitive measures or even by exclusions would have to agree to such a change of the rules. It's a “catch-22” situation.
More and more people now realize is that we have constructed a European Union that is not made for the challenges that Europe is currently facing, and that is assuming too much goodwill towards the European project in the national states – among the political and intellectual elites of the member countries. It turns out that even in countries that profit heavily from the European Union like Hungary and Slovakia, you have paradoxically anti-Europeans sentiments that are not acknowledging the benefits that the European project is bringing for these countries. What is needed today is legal finesse and political skill to try to use the currently valid rules to use as much as possible the institutions and instruments that we have to prevent unconstructive behavior by certain governments and also to punish them as far as that is possible within the current institutional and legal framework.
That is a considerable challenge. But we have gotten ourselves in this odd situation and now we have to deal with it somehow. Perhaps, there will later a window of opportunity to change the rules, namely to adopt a new Treaty on European Union and then to build in it safeguards preventing the European project from being subverted from inside.
O. Kandyuk: How do you explain such political behavior in countries like Hungary and Slovakia? Many experts believe that one of the key issues is the lack of communication from the European Union and its bureaucratic structures. As a result, a significant part of the population simply does not understand what is actually happening within the EU. What are your thoughts on this?
A. Umland: What is coming to the forefront here are pathological historical legacies that have not been dealt with. If I look, for instance, on today's Slovakia, I cannot help but remembering the 1990s, under Meciar, when Slovakia was not quite on a European and pro-Western path and only relatively lately joined the movement towards European integration when it saw that other countries were going this way and that Slovakia was staying behind. There may have been then something not properly dealt with in Slovakia with these nationalist isolationist tendencies that are now again dominating in parts of the political elite in Slovakia.
Hungary also perhaps has certain historical traumas, and maybe going as far back as the First World War, which have not been reflected upon sufficiently. Hungary has recently switched from being a forerunner of European integration of East-Central Europe in the 1990s to now a country that is sabotaging the European project and Western alliance.
Austria too has a history of not coming to terms with its Nazi past. Hitler, one should remember, was an Austrian. While we had in West Germany intense memory policies focused on Nazism, something like that has not happened apparently to a sufficient degree in Austria.
I am from East Germany and see today that the popularity of the Alternative for Germany, an anti-European or at least anti-EU party, is actually an expression of the problems that we always had in East Germany with our political culture. There is an absence of something similar to what happened to West Germany after the 1968 student revolution and following liberalization of society (and not just polity) of West Germany. We also did not have successful memory policies in the last 30 years. As a result, East Germans are less critical towards extreme right-wing tendencies than West Germans.
These pathological historical legacies are now coming to the fore – an issue largely ignored on the European level. There has been a too forward-looking, too positive, too optimistic approach towards European integration and not enough precaution against possible subversive tendencies within the European Union.
Therefore, no sufficient safeguards have been built into the existing EU treaties. Whether the European Union can really do that much with better communication, I'm not sure. It should certainly do more. Better communication policies vis-à-vis radical forms of populism are difficult to implement. Their addressees are, like the best I know in the East German society, are mainly talking in terms of emotions. To counter these emotions in an effective way is not so easy with simply a new communication strategy. We certainly need more communication from the EU, but we need above all more pro-European solidarity within problematic countries such as Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, and others.
O. Kandyuk: Speaking about Germany: how do you assess Germany's role in the processes of European integration and its policy towards Eastern Europe, particularly in the context of current geopolitical challenges?
A. Umland: The role has changed in the last three years, especially in terms of so-called Ostpolitik (Eastern policy). Until 2022, Germany was one of those countries that thought that trade relations with Russia can somehow influence Russian domestic and foreign policies.
The slogan then was “Wandel durch Handel” - change through trade, or “Annäherung durch Verflechtung” - rapprochement through interconnectedness. These strategies have manifestly failed with regard to Russia. There's now an acknowledgement of that, or let's say an increasing or start of acknowledgement of that in Germany.
The new main problem in Germany is simple fear. German “angst” with regard to Russia. That is why Germany is currently not as active and forward-leaning as other countries in Europe would be hoping. Perhaps this will change with a new government that will emerge in March-May this year.
Concerning the European project, Germany has been always rather in favour of stronger integration. It has been a pro-unionist country within the European Union and less sceptical towards European integration than other EU member states. I think it will remain so, and there has been in general a tendency in Germany to try to transfer as much as possible international political decision-making towards the European or transatlantic level.
Germany prefers not to directly take a lead within the European Union or within NATO, but rather to strengthen organisations like the European Union and NATO, so that these organisations will have more power to lead the community of Western nations, and that will remain as the domineering approach. We'll see what will come out of the new government. Maybe there will be also, at least for as long as Macron is still in power in France, a new cooperation between France and Germany, which is currently not functioning well. We may have a chance to reach modifications within the European Union, if France and Germany take together the lead again.
O. Kandyuk: Speaking a bit more about Ukraine, you have written about the EU’s past misunderstandings of Ukraine and overestimation of Russia. How has this perception changed in recent years, and what mistakes does the West still make in assessing the situation?
A. Umland: I know best the discussion in Germany though I'm also following the Swedish discussion or debates in Central Eastern Europe. The mistakes that we still make in Germany are that we're still discussing too much the Russian narratives to justify the war in Ukraine without realizing that it has always been the case that expansionist powers, aggressive states have for their annexations or genocidal actions provided some sort of explanation. Thus, we're still discussing the NATO expansion narrative and without realizing that this is simply an apologetic narrative spread by Russia.
Nazi Germany had certain narratives for justifying its expansionist policies. On 1st of September 1939, Hitler said that we were simply returning fire against Poland. That is how World War II started from the German point of view. When we attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, we simply wanted to protect Europe from Bolshevism. Isn't that a good aim?
Expansionist powers have always some sort of story to tell, and we're still discussing these stories in Germany. We're also discussing too much Ukrainian domestic affairs. We are critically debating it without realizing that, of course, most countries that have become victims to wars of expansion and annihilation were not domestically perfect. To return again to the start of World War II, the Poland that Germany attacked on 1st of September 1939 was not a proper liberal democracy. It had its own nationalist, authoritarian, even some anti-Semitic and imperialistic tendencies, which cannot, of course, somehow justify the German attack on Poland.
The third mistake that we still make is that we endlessly discuss the many mistakes that Ukraine and its allies and friends made before 2014, before the start of the war, and before the escalation of the war in 2022, without realizing that it has been historically, of course, always the case that countries which became victims of annexation, expansion, aggression, and genocide have made mistakes before they became these victims.
Poland, to return to the previous example, made a lot of foreign political mistakes in the 1930s, and also the allies of Poland, i. e. Great Britain and France, made huge political mistakes in the 1930s. The Soviet Union made perhaps the biggest mistakes, as it turned out, on 22nd of June 1941, in its behavior towards Nazi Germany. And this is just one example. One could list many similar examples for most other wars where the victim mad big mistakes before it became attacked.
In many German discussions about the reasons for the war, and how to deal with and interpret the war, Russian narratives are taken seriously, namely that Ukrainian domestic affairs are somehow related to Russia's aggression, or that the mistakes that Ukraine and its allies have made before the war are somehow responsible for the war to have happened.
O. Kandyuk: Okay, continue to speaking about Ukraine. You know Ukraine pretty well. How do you assess Ukraine’s progress in meeting EU criteria since obtaining candidate status in 2022? And what domestic factors could be the biggest obstacles to Ukraine's path to EU membership in the coming years?
A. Umland: The situation in Ukraine is exceptional – to implement European integration and the association agreement that is already signed and ratified. And now to enter the accession process in times of such a dramatic war – this is a very unusual situation within the European integration process, unparalleled to anything what we've seen before. Against the background of this particular context, since 2014 already, and not only since 2022, the progress is overall impressive.
It's not as much as I would hope for. And there are problems, and also new pathologies emerging, often connected to the war, that are becoming problems for the European integration process. For instance, there is a certain unification and centralization in the media sphere for instance, with the creation of the “telemarathon” and the state financing of it. These are new developments related to the war, which are now being also criticized by the European Union.
But if you look on the whole picture concerning the adaptation of legislation, for instance, to fight corruption and the general introduction of EU norms, the record is rather impressive. Today, there are still problems in Ukraine concerning corruption, political centralization, and problems in the media and other spheres. Still the main challenges are now on the EU side that is dragging its feet and is not going fast enough with finishing the screening process, and starting the accession process with negotiations and opening of chapters.
To be sure, Ukraine has to change deeply until EU enlargement happens, but it's several years away anyway. The accession process should now start for good and should not be delayed by the European Union.
O. Kandyuk: You previously discussed the possibility of Ukraine obtaining the status of a "Major Non-NATO Ally". How do you assess the prospects of this option today, and what advantages and disadvantages might it have for Ukraine?
A. Umland: In fact, Ukraine has now something similar to the major non-NATO allied status of the United States. If you look at the substance of the cooperation, it's largely already in line with this particular status, although it has not been, to my knowledge, formulated in this way. The question that arises is whether Kyiv could get from Washington a treaty similar to that, for instance, that the US has with South Korea, a mutual aid pact with a strong military component, de facto a defence alliance between Ukraine and the United States. I don't see that happening in the near future. I also don't see NATO membership happening in the near future.
As a result, Ukraine has to now fish for other alliances, and try to bind itself as closely as possible to an ad hoc coalition of the willing. The role of the United States, I see in this, especially under the Trump administration, is to provide a reassurance of those countries in NATO that are ready to more closely cooperate with Ukraine and to become involved in one way or another in the war – though not yet, maybe, with troops on the ground in Ukraine. If East Central European and Scandinavian countries are ready to go forward in their cooperation with Ukraine, maybe based on the model of the recently upgraded British-Ukrainian cooperation, these non-nuclear countries inside NATO will need a reassurance from the United States that Article 5 remains valid for them. That could give them the freedom to become more active, perhaps not yet with boots on the ground in Ukraine, but in other ways, while they are assured of their own security. I know that this is, especially for the Baltic countries, i.e. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and for Poland, an especially urgent question. Once these countries are reassured by the U.S. that Article 5 is valid for them, they can become more forward-leaning.
That is the only role that I currently see for the United States. I would wish, of course, for more, for a mutual aid pact based on the South Korean-U.S. treaty from 1953, or a NATO membership for Ukraine. But I don't think that is realistic. What is realistic now is a coalition of the willing in Europe that is ready to go for stronger military cooperation with Ukraine, under the condition that the U.S. would reassure these countries of its security guarantees within NATO.
O. Kandyuk: Well, I have only one question left. Speaking about scenarios: in 2017 you outlined 6 probable scenarios of Ukraine’s future, but it was 5 years before full scale war. What have been changed since then? What 3-4 options can you give on Ukraine’s future within (or outside) the EU?
A. Umland: What has positively developed since then is that the EU has come forward with its offer of candidacy and future membership. The Union has not just provided a membership perspective, but actually the candidate status. Hopefully, there will soon be the start of the accession negotiations. That is, I think, geopolitically the major change that has happened so far.
What I have been wrong about back then, in this article for The Brown Journal on World Affairs, about the six futures of Ukraine is the “Intermarium” concept that I was then discussing, and that was based on the idea that the East-Central European countries are all post-colonial countries (with the partial exception of Serbia) that these countries would cooperate more closely together.
What we now have, however, are prominent outliers from this idea, namely Hungary and Slovakia, that are lacking solidarity with Ukraine, that are not within this common fate of post-colonial countries in East-Central Europe which has been become labelled “Intermarium”, the countries between the seas. What is meant with this term is not so much the countries between the seas, between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, but rather countries that have a post-colonial identity and that therefore would be naturally inclined to cooperate closely with each other. Yet, that is not happening with regard to Hungary and Slovakia currently. Instead, we have is a somewhat unexpected and very positive cooperation between the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain on the one side and Ukraine on the other. With the partial exception of Finland, that is something that you would not immediately expect.
What is the interest of Norway, Great Britain or Denmark in Ukraine? These countries are far away from Ukraine. That they are so much forward leaning in helping Ukraine is not historically, to me at least, obvious. Thus, I didn't predict that back then. I also didn't expect Hungary to become as bad as it is today and that now also Slovakia is turning in this direction. There I've been clearly wrong.
“Intermarium” is thus not relevant. What we now have is rather a northern cooperation from Poland to Britain via Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. There are also question mark countries like Romania, the Czech Republic and perhaps in the future again Slovakia. This is now a different geography than what I discussed in this article which is now outdated, and was back then simply a speculation on the basis of what I saw then as possible futures of Ukraine.
O. Kandyuk: But what about scenarios? What could be the current options of the development of Ukraine on the way to join the EU?
A. Umland: The accession will happen at some point. The problem here is that eventually some security arrangement would have to be found for Ukraine before it enters the European Union, because the European Union in its Lisbon Treaty provides rather far-reaching security guarantees that, if you take them literally, are actually more concrete than Article 5 of the Washington Treaty of NATO. This is, above all, the Article 42.7 in the Treaty on European Union that provides far-reaching security guarantees to the member states.
The problem is that the European Union is not designed to actually fulfil these guarantees, at least not in its current state. My current worry is: How can Ukraine receive security guarantees from elsewhere, from a coalition of the willing, the United States, or/and NATO, that would take care of this issue? I can't foresee for now that, even if the accession process goes fast and the chapters in the negotiations are closed, the European Union can take it upon itself to make Ukraine a full member unless the European Union becomes a potent military and security actor. If the European Union can actually fulfil the guarantees that it provides with its Article 42, then this is not a problem. But for that, the European Union would have to change in principle.
That is less likely than the security situation of Ukraine changing somehow. But how this will happen is so far not fully predictable. NATO membership is problematic. Under Trump, I fear, there may not be a mutual aid pact, i.e. military alliance, between Ukraine and the United States. Perhaps, the most realistic option is now a coalition of the willing that is able to take care of the security issue. Obviously, the war will have to end until the negotiations for the accession are completed, and Ukraine enters the EU.