It is crystal clear: Russia is waging an imperialistic, colonial and genocidal war against Ukraine. From the very beginning of the invasion, not only has Putin denied the right of Ukraine and its citizens to exist, but Russian troops have also systematically reverted to terror and war crimes ranging from attacks on Ukraine’s cultural heritage to torture, rape and mass murder. Russian rockets are currently falling on various Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv. This offensive has even hit a children’s playground and has resulted in numerous civilian deaths and casualties.
Despite this, Putin can regularly rely on understanding and even support from the West. In the first case, there are apologists who condemn the invasion but also claim that Russia was ‘provoked’ by the US and NATO, or who wish to appease the criminal and invasive party. In the second and more offensive case, there are pro-Russian sympathisers, especially from the radical and extreme-right political spectrum. Thierry Baudet, for example, is a staunch supporter of Putin. The question arises how these reactions can be explained.
Perception
Of course, diverse sentiments and interests play a role here, ranging from fear and self-interest to an aversion to the West and sincere appreciation of the Kremlin. However, the perception of Eastern Europe plays an essential and underestimated role. ‘Eastern Europe’ has no unanimous, objective definition but serves instead as a collection of diverse, derogatory stereotypes: undeveloped, corrupt, cold, grey, et cetera.
Eastern Europe is seen as a second-class, inferior Europe lying on the periphery of the ‘civilised’ West. These ideas are also manifest in the Netherlands in various questionable actions and reactions: consider, for example, the continued use of the derogatory term ‘East Block’, the rhetoric surrounding the ‘Polish hotline’ in 2012 and the Ukraine referendum in 2016, as well as the systemic exploitation of Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian employees. No wonder that many countries in the eastern part of Europe – with Ukraine in the forefront – seem doomed to be a plaything of and a buffer zone between the West and Russia.
The Cold War
It seems only natural to connect the negative perception of Eastern Europe to the Cold War, when, from a Western perspective, half of the continent disappeared ‘behind’ the Iron Curtain. However, historical research has shown that the concepts of Eastern and Western Europe and the related balance of power have a longer history.
Starting in the 17th century, Western writers and politicians began to define Eastern Europe as the ugly reflection of their own ‘cultivated’ living environment: an inhospitable, barren area inhabited by people who, by nature, were primitive and who nearly begged to be colonised.
The fact that this was far beside the truth was irrelevant. What is more, at the end of the 18th century the Russians, Prussians and Austrians used this perception as an argument to tear apart the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: a centuries-old state that included large areas of contemporary Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States. Depicting your enemy as a country without a right to exist offers a perfect excuse for an invasion, as Putin knows all too well.
Colonialism
The Dutch also perpetuated this colonial narrative. For example, in 1832 the poet Adriaan van der Hoop Jr. legitimised the violent Russian repression of a Polish rebellion by writing that Poland was ‘constantly unworthy of freedom because of its national squabbling’. In effect, Van der Hoop argued that the Poles and other Slavic peoples should simply accept their secondary role on the world’s stage.
This line of thought reached a horrific climax in the 20th century, when Hitler and Stalin killed ca. 14 million people in the ‘buffer’ that separated them. Once again, the Dutch were involved by collaborating with the Nazi’s Drang nach Osten.
Their ideology was pointedly expressed by Frans Christiaan Bursch, a prehistorian in Leiden and a member of the NSB, who participated in an archaeological SS expedition in Ukraine in 1943. The occupiers, who were dressed in tropical costumes, used local inhabitants as forced labourers while they studied a pair of so-called Germanic burial mounds within walking distance of a Jewish mass grave.
In the Dutch Nazi magazine De Waag, Bursch later wrote that the “primitive” Ukrainians had to be dominated by a “firm and just hand”: “All ‘ethical politics’ is just as out of order here as previously in our colonies.”
Bursch stated that his call was “to contiguously penetrate the Eastern European area with everything jointly available to Germans and Dutch, qualities that can only be a blessing to this area!” Eastern European lives and cultures had become worthless.
Second-class
The image of Eastern Europe as second-class and inferior is currently once again threatening the freedom of Ukraine. The West must definitively distance finally from this negative perception of Eastern Europe. Ukraine and the other countries in the eastern part of the continent do not form a colonial territory, plaything or buffer; rather, they are full-fledged, autonomous states with their own rich histories and cultures. This new perception is crucial to the West’s solidarity with Ukraine in the long run and to the democratic future of Europe as a whole.
Text: Paul Hulsenboom. This editorial was previously published in de Volkskrant. Photo: Sunset in Kyiv. Source: Maksym Diachenko via Unsplash