Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Yushchenko keeps cultivating Europe, but what sort of EU does he think Ukraine will someday join?

ential campaign and remains so now that he is in office. He has repeated to everyone who will listen a familiar litany: Ukraine is a European country; it belongs in the European Union; it deserves attention from Brussels; its destiny is inevitably with Europe; and so on.

We never quite figured out what Yushchenko was up to with all this. Maybe he was being sly, demanding of Europe the moon and then taking what he could get. But then, maybe he was sincere, and thus a bit naive. It seemed to us that Europe has its own problems, and Ukraine should be no less careful in pledging itself to Europe than to anyone else. Besides, it was impossible to tell what the EU would even be by the time Ukraine potentially got around to joining it in a decade, at least, from now. Maybe it wouldn’t even be worth it. Things change.

Do they ever, if this weekend’s earthquake of a vote in France is any indication. That the French – the French, at the very heart of the EU project! – should massively reject the EU constitution means that much is up for grabs in the transnational body’s future. Who can say what will happen to the EU?

What the momentous event necessitates for Ukraine is a cool and self-interested approach toward its neighbors to the West. Again, if Yushchenko’s persistent bowing and scraping at the back door of the European mansion is crafty politics, more power to him – we’ve underestimated Yushchenko before. But if he really is motivated by a starry-eyed desire to join the European club, he should douse his head with cold water. What if someday there’s no club to join, or no club worth joining?

The fact is that Ukraine, famously situated on the borders of empires, is well-situated to form intelligent, self-interested relationships with various other countries. It ought to use the independence it so recently achieved to do so. Sometimes this will mean cultivating relationships with Brussels and the other capitals of the West; other times it will necessitate working closely with Russia, a country with which Ukraine is thoroughly intertwined, and will be for the foreseeable future. Still other times it will mean pairing up with other post-Soviet countries, such as its fellow GUUAM members, with whom supposedly “European” Ukraine shares deeper cultural ties than it does with, say, France or Spain.

George Washington famously warned the young American republic against “entangling alliances.” Now that even Europeans are showing signs of not being happy with the EU, Ukraine should beware of embracing such alliances, too.