What Ukraine Can Teach Us About the Nation-state

Today, there is finally a possibility that the Russian invasion of the Donbass region will be over by the end of the year, everybody will go home, and the war will end.

On the one hand, it is sad, horrible, immoral and wrong that the West chickened out, abandoned Ukraine to its fate, betrayed the Budapest agreements, and allowed Putin to humiliate the so-called Western leaders in any way he chose.

At the same time, though, there is an enormous positive potential in the fact that Ukraine won its hopeless war against the enormously much more potent enemy on its own. While the West was too terrified of Putin to say as much as “boo” to him, Ukraine, a country without an army and with a pitifully bad economy, got over itself, created an army, stabilized the economy, and won the war.

A victory won on one’s own merits is always superior to the one achieved while others are propping one up. As the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said, a nation only exists while its members are conscious of working on a shared project of building a common future. In the age of a tottering nation-state, Ukrainians have demonstrated that a nation can not only continue to exist but even be strengthened. All that is needed to achieve this is a shared belief in the value and importance of the national project.