Illuminate, without wanting to, what nobody wants to see. From a war that many already want to forget. That is the unsought-for virtue of the long article by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas on how to get out of a conflict like the one that has caused the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the unwritten phrases that describe the traps. In the midst of considerations of great common sense, rehearsing an impossible balance between different perspectives, the prestigious German thinker asks the million-dollar question: "The purpose of our arms deliveries to Ukraine is so that it 'doesn't lose' the war, or rather achieve 'victory' over Russia?
Thus posed the dilemma, the only real thing for the Ukrainians becomes invisible: if they are defeated by Putin, they will cease to exist as a nation. Subjected to a Moscow puppet government, the Ukrainian people will disappear again, perhaps forever. That is what Habermas does not put on the table, although he refers to "the painful fate of a population that, after many centuries of foreign Polish, Russian and Austrian domination, did not obtain its independence as a State until the fall of the Soviet Union" .
Ukrainians fight not to be erased from the map and from history. My colleague Mas de Xaxàs has summed it up very well: "If they resist and risk their lives it is to be what they are", because "they do not want to be part of the new Russian empire and Putin wants nothing more than to return all the land to Russia that you think belongs to you." Can we empathize with this circumstance? It depends on the place of the observer. Milan Kundera –Czech who went into exile in Paris– empathizes more than Habermas. It is not accidental.
Tusquets has published (in Catalan and Spanish) a book that includes two short essays by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being under the title A Kidnapped West. In the text written in 1983, six years before the fall of the Wall, Kundera gives several keys to understand precisely what is not on Habermas's radar (and that of many analysts and politicians who write from Berlin, Paris, Rome or Madrid). .
He does so by asking himself what a small nation is: “A small nation is one whose existence can be questioned at any moment, one that can disappear and knows it. A Frenchman, a Russian or an Englishman does not usually ask himself questions about the survival of his nation. His hymns speak only of greatness and eternity. Now, the Polish anthem begins with this verse: 'Poland has not perished yet...'” All this is best understood from Barcelona, Bilbao, Edinburgh, Dublin or Ghent.
Obviously, from the geographical and demographic point of view, neither Poland nor the Ukraine (the largest in the Old Continent, if we except Russia) are small nations, but they appear as such, because they have hardly been able to realize themselves, threatened, occupied and disfigured by imperial powers. neighbors. Habermas himself qualifies Ukraine as a “nation in the making”, being the most recent of those that lately acceded to statehood in Europe.
Kundera sees the map through the glass of his native Czechia and that helps us understand the tragic dilemma of today's Ukraine. It is a speech from 1967, before the Congress of Czech Writers. Shortly after, the Prague Spring would take place and, to end it, the Soviet invasion of 1968: "The existence of the Czech nation has never been felt as evidence, and this non-evidence is precisely one of its greatest attributes." Culture as the raison d'être of small nations, culture as a form of power against the invader, who tries to erase the difference and freeze history. Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian cultures as a form of European culture against “assimilation into a larger nation”.
Marta Rebón has explained to us that, in the 19th century, publications in Ukrainian were prohibited and it was decreed that this language “did not exist, does not exist and cannot exist”. And, in the 1930s, practically all of the Ukrainian intellectuals were eliminated.
Habermas affirms that “the necessary alternative – faced with a continuation of the war with more and more victims – is the search for tolerable compromises”. How is that to be understood from Kyiv? What compromise is possible with someone like Putin? They don't pretend to be heroes. Ukrainians just want to exist. And in doing so, they remind us of the Europe that defines us and the one that we must strengthen and broaden.
