Where Does Europe End?
Throughout its history, Ukraine has straddled the border between East and West. Now, barely a decade after breaking away from the crumbling Soviet Union, it is leaning strongly toward Europe. But Europe is wary.
Even the tiniest of the 33 parties competing in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections this past spring boasted all the ephemera of the modern American-style political campaign, from catchy logos to slick television ads. A few members of Ukraine’s burgeoning homegrown public relations elite snatched some of the business from even the dominant Russian and Western imagemakers. One 30-second television spot perfectly distilled the choices facing Ukrainians. It opened with a black-and-white animated line drawing of an old train filled with elderly people. The passengers sit tiredly in the compartments, dressed in peasant garb that hangs loosely on their sturdy frames. Their faces are gaunt. The train moves slowly, and the viewer soon sees that the tracks lead to a cliff, where the rails are mangled and broken. The scene then changes to a color animation of a modern high-speed train filled with young people enjoying themselves. The passengers--good-looking, thin, happy--are dressed in European-style clothes. The spot ends with the declaration that it is time for a new generation to take the reins of power in Ukraine.
The ad failed to win the New Generation Party a single seat in the Rada, or parliament, but it put the choices clearly: What kind of train will Ukraine be, and in which direction will it head? These are questions that Ukrainians have been trying to answer for hundreds of years. Since the 15th century, Ukrainian leaders have struggled to carve out a space for themselves between East and West, between Russia (and later the Soviet Union) to the east and a succession of other powers to the west--Lithuania, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now the European Union (EU). Ukraine’s very name means "borderland."