Today marks the 34th anniversary of the national referendum in which 92% of Ukrainian voters approved the declaration of independence made by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Verkhovna Rada) on 24 August 1991. To mark this date, a manifesto has just been published that was drawn up by a fairly diverse committee of co-authors, with prominent signatories including writers, activists, media people, and academics. (Apparently there was plenty of disagreement on the details, and in the end a certain tension between details and generalities is evident. There’s a venerable tradition of that sort of thing in the history of the Ukrainian People’s Republic with its four “Universals” and other declarations.)
The manifesto, entitled “Survive. Endure. Prevail!” (“Вижити, вистояти, перемогти!”), has been published by Ukraïnska Pravda and can be read in English here. It compares two concepts of Ukrainian victory — “victory at its maximum” and “minimum victory” — and calls for the latter, more attainable one to have three dimensions:
- The military dimension: strategic neutralisation of the enemy
- The political dimension: preservation of our sovereignty
- The human dimension: a successful Ukraine
Each is spelled out in ways that sound reasonable, if it were not for the fact that the world they are aiming for — a world of sovereign nation-states, each of which is a land “of opportunity, based on the rule of law and an effective system of public governance” — is an ideal that has never quite existed in reality (at least at the world scale) and that, if it has (at regional scales), is already slipping out of our hands.
That’s not to fault the authors. It’s a vision worth upholding and orienting oneself around, especially when their country is engaged in an existential struggle for survival and is aiming to corral more support from the community of developed western nations on which that survival depends. If it lacks a certain acknowledgment of how the world has changed and the difficulties it is facing, it doesn’t lack them entirely. It acknowledges a “broader global crisis” that includes “the rise of a global coalition of dictatorships, an ambivalent U.S. foreign policy, crises of democracy in multiple countries, a devaluation of international law and of the world order as a whole.” At the same time, by introducing these as part of a “crossroads between exciting opportunities for development and unprecedented threats to human existence” (my emphasis), it fails to capture the actual state of the world.
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