Ukraine, terra incognita of international relations in France?
Ukraine's foreign policy and the peculiarities of the Ukrainian mentality are little known in France. So it's not surprising that many French analysts, who last winter had already underestimated the risk of Russia launching a war of aggression against Ukraine, subsequently also underestimated the state of the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as the capacity of Ukrainian society to self-organize and resist, and the will of Ukrainians to decide their future.
As a French-speaking Ukrainian researcher and having studied in depth how the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has been perceived in France since 2014, I seek to understand the causes of this insufficient knowledge of a European country that has been independent for over thirty years, is larger than France and populated by some 41 million inhabitants).
Divergent national trajectories at the root of French ignorance about Ukraine
One explanation for France's poor understanding of Ukraine may lie in the fact that, in the 1990s, the two countries took, as it were, opposite trajectories.
During this period, Ukraine created its national currency (first the karbonavets from 1992 then the hryvnia in 1998), developed its own armed forces while retaining part of its defense industry, and experienced serious tensions with its Russian neighbor over the the fate of the Soviet Black Sea fleet and then over the question of the location to Russia of the Sevastopol naval base (Crimea).
At the same time, France has helped to establish the European currency of the euro, contributed to the creation of a European army corps and insisted on the importance of the emergence of a common European security and defense policy. In short, while Ukraine was beginning the construction of its nation-state, France, conversely, was deepening the Europeanization of its state structure.
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At this time, Ukraine devoted itself to the study of its own national history. It was in independent Ukraine that research on the elimination of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s or on the Famine-Holodomor of 1933, during which several million Ukrainians lost their lives in appalling conditions, could be finally begun, the latter subject being an absolute taboo in Soviet times. By contrast, Ukraine then remained largely an unknown land for French research, centered on the Soviet and Russian entities.
The newly acquired freedom, even accompanied by often difficult economic conditions, imposed itself as a cardinal value in the eyes of the majority of the Ukrainian population. The latter still remembered very well the repression that had continued to hit many Ukrainians right up to the end of the Soviet era, whether dissidents like Leonid Pliouchtch, interned in a psychiatric asylum, painters like Mykola Trygoub, driven to suicide in 1984, or writers such as Oles Berdnyk deported to the Urals, a list far from exhaustive. With the brief exception of the parenthesis of the Orange Revolution of 2004, this Ukrainian aspiration for freedom was completely absent from French debates and media until 2014, the year of the Revolution of Dignity.
It's true that official Russian communication, negative of Ukraine's own identity, can find some resonance with the French public by reactivating myths inherited from the Imperial and Soviet eras. This is how President Macron himself was able to evoke "brotherly peoples" on April 13 when referring to the Russian and Ukrainian nations, repeating a hackneyed slogan from Russian propaganda.
The assertion of this so-called "brotherhood" is based on an exaggerated historical and cultural proximity and on the common origin of the Russian and Ukrainian languages. It's true that Old East Slavic developed into various Slavic languages... just as Latin led to the emergence of Romance languages. In France, however, the thesis of "brotherly French, Italian and Spanish peoples" due to linguistic proximity is hardly widespread, whereas the "brotherhood of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples" seems to have penetrated certain consciences...
In addition, understanding Ukraine's particular linguistic situation requires precise historical knowledge. For example, the Ems Decree of 1876, promulgated by Russian Emperor Alexander II, aimed at ousting the Ukrainian language from the public sphere, or the "Renaissance shot down" of the 1930s - i.e., the elimination of the Ukrainian intelligentsia - are key dates in a process of russification that was only challenged by the Granit of 1991, Orange of 2004 and Dignity revolutions of 2014, which instead favored a policy of ukrainization.
The current situation of bilingualism in Ukraine contrasts with the monolingual situation in France. Indeed, while Ukrainian is the sole official language of the state, Russian continues to be practiced in everyday life by a significant part of the population, including since the start of Russian aggression, even if this may ultimately weakenen the use of Russian in the country - both because a number of Ukrainian citizens who previously were mainly speaking Russian, have started speaking Ukrainian out of solidarity with their attacked country, and also because several laws have been passed to reduce the presence of the Russian language in the Ukrainian media and cultural space.
In any case, the existence of a nation-state where the population is in fact bilingual poses a problem for a Frenchman, who associates this type of political entity with the widespread practice of a single language.
The deficiency of hexagonal research and how to remedy it
The problem is the very low number, in France, of internationalist political scientists specializing in Ukraine, practicing Ukrainian in addition to Russian and familiar with Ukrainian publications of a political nature.
After the unforeseen collapse of the USSR, French sovietologists reconverted almost exclusively into specialists in Russian politics. Their knowledge of the Russian language led them to consider only Russian-language sources - and, often, those of Russian origin. The attention of French experts and researchers has therefore been focused on the study of Russian politics, with analysis of Ukrainian politics relegated to a secondary activity.
Although a number of researchers, especially among the younger generation, are becoming increasingly interested in Ukraine, meeting a French political scientist who would be able, using Ukrainian-language sources, to grasp developments in Ukrainian foreign policy and strategic orientations and, by the same token, could advise French decision-makers in order to improve both the effectiveness of French diplomatic activity vis-à-vis Ukraine and Franco-Ukrainian relations may prove a difficult challenge to meet.
Or, due to the importance of Ukrainian in the state and academic spheres, knowledge of Russian is no longer sufficient to analyze Ukrainian politics. What credence can be given to French scientific publications on Ukraine where Ukrainian-language sources are either absent or very rare? Can we imagine studying French foreign policy exclusively from English-language sources?
It should be remembered that, in Ukraine, hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to the country's recent history and foreign policy, as well as a significant number of official documents, have been published solely in Ukrainian... and have therefore been overwhelmingly ignored by French researchers. This is why there is an urgent need, on the French side, for a pool of Ukrainian-speaking specialists in Ukrainian politics. The issue is all the more topical given that France wants to play a full part in implementing sustainable policies to support Ukraine; the presence of such experts will be necessary for an efficient dialogue with the Ukrainian authorities.
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Ukraine's recent achievement of EU candidate status can only encourage the strengthening of Franco-Ukrainian cooperation and greater French involvement in the Ukrainian state reform process. If it is possible to study Ukrainian within the Ukrainian Studies Department of INALCO in Paris, it would undoubtedly be very useful if, starting today, students enrolled in this training chose to specialize in the study of international relations and Ukrainian politics in order to become the future experts on Ukrainian issues that France needs for the decade to come.
No man is a prophet in his own country
Beyond knowledge of Ukraine, it is permissible to wonder about the perception of Russia by French specialists and officials
Last February, France was caught off guard by Russia's unleashing of a full-scale war against Ukraine. French intelligence assessments, which were put on the table of the country's top leadership, affirmed that the Russian authorities only wanted to blackmail Western leaders and did not intend to invade the neighboring country. Similar views were shared by French analytical circles. The ousting on March 31, 2022 of the Director of Military Intelligence, General Éric Videau, marked the failure of French strategic foresight on Russian intentions.
In particular, one wonders why insufficient attention was paid to warnings about the nature of the Russian political regime. The question arises as to whether France's tradition of cooperation with Russia has not prevented ruling, media and even academic circles from taking the measure of the radicalization that the Russian political regime has undergone over the last ten-fifteen years.
The question arises as to whether France's tradition of cooperation with Russia has not prevented ruling, media and even academic circles from taking the measure of the radicalization that the Russian political regime has undergone over the last ten-fifteen years.
Has France even paid attention to the warnings of its own Cassandras? Jacques Faure, former French ambassador to Ukraine, nevertheless insisted on the need to pay attention to the fact that Russia was not complying with international agreements to which it was a party such as the Budapest Memorandum, the Ukraine friendship treaty and the Kharkiv agreements.
Similarly, political scientist Nicolas Tenzer, who for years insisted on the dangerousness of the Russian political regime and stressed the need to develop a realistic French strategy vis-à-vis an unpredictable and undemocratic Russia, essentially preached in the wilderness. Indeed, he was often perceived as a radical thinker with marginal analyses. On February 24, 2022, the supposed radicalism of Nicolas Tenzer, and some other specialists close to his views, proved to be a relevant grid for analyzing Moscow's policy...
Be that as it may, the time has come to realize, somewhat belatedly, what Vladimir Putin's regime really is; to understand that realism, in this case, imposes a real open-mindedness enabling us to take the measure of the Kremlin's worldview and not lend it a largely fantasized pragmatism... and to hope that a circle of Ukrainian-speaking political scientists specializing in Ukraine's politics will soon be formed in France.
Oksana Mitrofanova, researcher in international relations, Inalco
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Oksana Mitrofanova, PhD in political science, senior researcher at the Institute of World History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev, refugee in France since early March 2022, is associate researcher at the Centre Thucydide (Pantheon-Assas University) and teacher-researcher at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.