Viewing the Twentieth Century through the Prism of Ukraine: Reflections on the Heuristic Potential of Ukrainian History

Ukrainian history has a paradigmatic quality of its own, capable of shedding light on currents and trends that have played a key role in various events but whose importance was usually not clearly recognized. This quality derives from its essential "bordeland" nature, upon which I focus in this essay. Most Western scholars have seen borderlands as simple geographical peripheries, failing to grasp their heuristic potential. Above all, Western scholars did not realize that these territories underwent experiences that speak not only of their countries’ own historical developments but also of the relationship between European history and world history. In fact, Western Europe did and does have a number of such borderlands and they did and still play a key role in its history and politics, as recent referendums indicate: Ireland, first and foremost, but also Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque country, and the Rhine valley, to whose centrality the selection of Strasbourg as the seat of the European Parliament and Council still bears witness. And we know that by studying the past, the list could easily be expanded, for example, to include Sicily, Provence, or the territories now divided between Belgium and the Low Countries. Even more importantly, during its expansion in the world, which marked the past five centuries and began to ebb a century or so ago, Western Europe encountered many such territories and multiplied them by imposing their own presence on local societies. In 1915 Arnold Toynbee, later the author of what was, perhaps, the first attempt at “global history” and whose reading of the East-West encounter was significantly influenced by Lewis Namier extended Namier’s European Middle East to the original one in his study of the Armenian atrocities. He thus pointed to the possibility of looking at world history through the prism of European borderlands, and vice versa, thereby indicating a way to include in one general picture the great,“long” twentieth-century sites where linguistic, cultural, and religious “mixing and un-mixing” intersected with state-building efforts in Anatolia, the Crimea, and the North Caucasus, as well as in Central Asia, North Africa, and the British Raj. The usefulness of the Ukrainian prism, therefore, is not confined to European history.