If you want to understand the psyche, so to speak of what’s taking place in the Ukraine, read Kevin MacDonald’s “Competing Nationalisms in Ukraine“. What is happening there now is a good case study of MacDonald’s longstanding thesis that multiculturalism within a state eventually leads to ethnonationalist conflict:
Ukraine is a textbook case of the costs of multiculturalism, a story of competing nationalisms. Around 17% of the population, mainly in the in the East and South of Ukraine, is ethnically Russian and favors strong ties with Russia.
Now government buildings in the Crimea have been seized by Russian sympathizers…
Lending more ethnic complexity to the situation, the Tatar population in the Crimea is opposed to strong ties with Russia and opposes Crimea splitting off from Ukraine…
Within the nationalist element, there are two main groups, the Right Sector, motivated by hostility toward Russia and tracing their origins to the pro-German Ukrainians in WWII, and Svoboda, a nationalist political party that opposes teaching of the Russian language in schools and won 10.44% of the popular vote in the 2012 elections. Wikipedia notes that “Svoboda has been described as an anti-Semitic and sometimes a Neo-Nazi party by international newspapers, organizations that monitor hate speech, Jewish organizations, and political opponents…“
So we have the specter of dueling nationalisms, plus a strong dose of liberals among the anti-Yanukovych forces, all aided by a large dose of U.S. intervention…
The U.S. and the neocons favor the liberal contingent among the protestors and I assume that they will do what they can to push the nationalists aside in the new government despite their very prominent role in the coup. Obviously, the U.S., spearheaded by the neocons, favors a strong Ukrainian connection to the EU, to the detriment of Russia. But some very powerful forces have been unleashed by all this, and the end game is not predictable.
What is clear is that Ukraine is another example of age-old competing European nationalisms, for time being forced to co-exist side-by-side in a multicultural, multiethnic state.
The EU solution to all of this is to obliterate all borders, at least within Europe—a solution that is diametrically opposed to what nationalists of all stripes want. (Ever on the lookout for White people with strong ethnic/racial identities, Richard Cohen of the Washhington Post wants the U.S. to use its power to oppose all these rising European nationalisms [in Catalonia, Scotland, Belgium, the Northern League in Italy, etc.; he has no problem with Israeli and non-European nationalisms].)…
A better solution would be to break up states like Ukraine with large ethnic divisions into ethnically homogeneous societies, but to also develop a consensus that the territorial wars fueled by nationalism should be a thing of the European past.
