739 Samuel Huntington says Eastern Ukraine belongs to Orthodox Civilization & Russian Zone

Samuel Huntington says Eastern Ukraine belongs to Orthodox Civilization
& Russian Zone

Newsletter published on 10 February 2015

This material is at http://mailstar.net/Huntington-Ukraine-cleft.rtf

(1) Samuel Huntington says Eastern Ukraine belongs to Orthodox
Civilization & Russian Zone
(2) Samuel Huntington on Ukraine as Cleft between Catholic West &
Orthodox East

(1) Samuel Huntington says Eastern Ukraine belongs to Orthodox
Civilization & Russian Zone
- by Peter Myers, February 10, 2015

Obama, pushed by McCain and the Neocons, seems to be about to militarily
intevene to try to stop eastern Ukraine from seceding and joining Russia.

They are forgetting the lessons of Samuel Huntington on cleft countries
- ie countries torn between two or more civilizations.

Yugoslavia was cleft between three - Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic. The
US and Western Europe helped split it into the three zones.

Huntington said that Ukraine was cleft between the Catholic West and the
Orthodox East. He thought that it might survive that way, but US and
German leaders stoked the Maidan rebellion which wanted to win the whole
of Ukraine for the West.

The eastern provinces would not have it, and US leaders are now trying
to stop them from joining the Russian zone.

Their minds are on Brzezinsky's chessboard, rather than Huntington's
cultural realism.

Poles, squeezed between Germany and Russia - enemies which have invaded
them - have a characteristic animosity to both. Brzezinsky seems
motivated by that Polish animosity to Russia.

It's clear now that the Cold War did not end in 1991. The Russian block
stopped fighting, believing in a higher union of East and West,
Gorbachev being an advocate of One World. But the US block kept on
fighting, picking off one Soviet ally after another (Milosevic, Saddam,
Gaddafi, Libya).

The Russian people now realize that they were conned; with their backs
to the wall, they have drawn a line in Ukraine and said "No More".
Obama, McCain and the Neocons don't like their plans being thwarted.

It's a dangerous showdown between nuclear powers. But Western leaders
would stop their anti-Russia campaign if they took Samuel Huntington's
advice on board.

With similar realism, Moldova has split into a pro-West western part and
a pro-Russia eastern part (Transnistria).

(2) Samuel Huntington on Ukraine as Cleft between Catholic West &
Orthodox East

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Samuel P. Huntington

Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996

{p. 138} Ukraine is divided between the Uniate nationalist
Ukrainian-speaking west and the Orthodox Russian-speaking east.

In a cleft country major groups from two or more civilizations say, in
effect, ‘We are different peoples and belong in different places.’ The
forces of repulsion drive them apart and they gravitate toward
civilizational magnets in other societies.

{p. 158} The most compelling and pervasive answer to these questions is
provided by the great historical line that has existed for centuries
separating Western Christian peoples from Muslim and Orthodox peoples.
This line dates back to the division of the Roman Empire in the fourth
century and to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth
century. It has been in roughly its current place for at least five
hundreds years. Beginning in the north, it runs along what are now the
borders between Finland and Russia and the Baltic states (Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania) and Russia, through western Belarus, through Ukraine
separating the Uniate west from the Orthodox east, through Romania
between Transylvania with its Catholic Hungarian population and the rest
of the country, and through the former Yugoslavia along the border
separating Slovenia and Croatia from the other republics. It is the
cultural border of Europe, and in the post-Cold War world it is also the
political and economic border of Europe and the West.

The civilizational paradigm thus provides a clear-cut and compelling
answer to the question confronting West Europeans: Where does Europe
end? Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy
begin.

{p. 163} The successor to the tsarist and communist empires is a
civilizational bloc, paralleling in many respects that of the West in
Europe. At the core, Russia, the equivalent of France and Germany, is
closely linked to an inner circle including the two predominantly Slavic
Orthodox republics of Belarus and Moldova, Kazakhstan, 40 percent of
whose population is Russian, and Armenia, historically a close ally of
Russia, In the mid-1990s all these countries had pro-Russian governments
which had generally come to power through elections. Close but more
tenuous relations exist between Russia and Georgia

{p. 164} (overwhelming Orthodox) and Ukraine (in large part Orthodox;
but both of which also have strong sense of national identity and past
independence. …

Overall Russia is creating a bloc with a Orthodox heartland under its
leadership and a surrounding buffer of relatively weak Islamic states
which it will in varying degrees dominate and from which it will attempt
to exclude the influence of other powers. Russia also expects the world
to accept and to approve this system. [...]

{p. 165} Apart from Russia the most populous and most important former
Soviet republic is Ukraine. At various times in history Ukraine has been
independent. Yet during most of the modern era it has been part of a
political entity governed from Moscow. The decisive event occurred in
1654 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Cossack leader of an uprising against
Polish rule, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar in return for help
against the Poles. From then until 1991, except for a briefly
independent republic between 1917 and 1920, what is now Ukraine was
controlled politically from Moscow. Ukraine, however, is a cleft country
with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the
West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centuries.
  At times in the past, western Ukraine was part of Poland, Lithuania,
and the Austro-Hungarian empire. A large portion of its population have
been adherents of the Uniate Church which practices Orthodox rites but
acknowledges

{p. 166} the authority of the Pope. Historically, western Ukrainians
have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their
outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been
overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian. In the
early 1990s Russians made up 22 percent and native Russian speakers 31
percent of the total Ukrainian population. A majority of the elementary
and secondary school students were taught in Russian. The Crimea is
overwhelmingly Russian and was part of the Russian Federation until
1954, when Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine ostensibly in
recognition of Khmelnytsky's decision 300 years earlier.

The differences between eastern and western Ukraine are manifest in the
attitudes of their peoples. In late 1992, for instance, one-third of the
Russians in western Ukraine as compared with only 10 percent in Kiev
said they suffered from anti-Russian animosity. The east-west split was
dramatically evident in the July 1994 presidential elections. The
incumbent, Leonid Kravchuk, who despite working closely with Russia’s
leaders identified himself as a nationalist, carried the thirteen
provinces of the western Ukraine with majorities ranging up to over 90
percent. His opponent, Leonid Kuchma, who took Ukrainian speech lessons
during the campaign, carried the thirteen eastern provinces by
comparable majorities. Kuchma won with 52 percent of the vote. In
effect, a slim majority of the Ukrainian public in 1994 confirmed
Khmelnytsky’s choice in 1654. The election, as one American expert
observed, ‘reflected, even crystallized, the split between Europeanized
Slavs in western Ukraine and the Russo-Slav vision of what Ukraine
should be. It’s not ethnic polarization so much as different cultures.

{p. 167} As a result of this division, the relations between Ukraine and
Russia could develop in one of three ways. In the early 1990s,
critically important issues existed between the two countries concerning
nuclear weapons, Crimea, the rights of Russians in Ukraine, the Black
Sea fleet, and economic relations. Many people thought armed conflict
was likely, which led some Western analysts to argue that the West
should support Ukraine’s having a nuclear arsenal to deter Russian
aggression.

If civilization is what counts, however, violence between Ukrainians and
Russians is unlikely. These are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples
who had close relationships for centuries and between whom intermarriage
is common. Despite highly contentious issues and the pressure of extreme
nationalists on both sides, the leaders of both countries worked hard
and largely succesfully to moderate these disputes. The election of an
explicitly Russian-oriented president in Ukraine in mid-1994 further
reduced the probability of exacerbated conflict between the two countries.

A second and somewhat more likely possibility is that Ukraine could
split along its fault line into two separate entities, the eastern of
which would merge with Russia. The issue of secession first came up with
respect to Crimea. The Crimean public, which is 70 percent Russian,
substantially supported Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union in
a referendum in December 1991. In May 1992 the Crimean parliament also
voted to declare independence from Ukraine and then, under Ukrainian
pressure, rescinded that vote. The Russian parliament, however, voted to
cancel the 1954 cession of Crimea to Ukraine. In January 1994 Crimeans
elected a president who had campaigned on a platform of ‘unity with
Russia.’ This stimulated some people to raise the question: ‘Will Crimea
Be the Next Nagorno-Karabakh or Abkhazia?’ The answer was a resounding
‘No!’ as the new Crimean president backed away from his commitment to
hold a referendum on independence and instead negotiated with the Kiev
government. In may 1994 the situation heated up again when the Crimean
parliament voted to restore the 1992 constitution which made it
virtually independent of Ukraine. Once again, however, the restraint of
Russian and Ukrainian leaders prevented this issue from generating
violence, and the election two months later of the pro-Russian Kuchma as
Ukrainian president undermined the Crimean thrust for secession.

The Election did, however, raise the possibility of the western part of
the country seceding from a Ukraine that was drawing closer and closer
to Russia. Some Russians might welcome this. As one Russian general put
it, ‘Ukraine or rather Eastern Ukraine will come back in five, ten or
fifteen years. Western Ukraine can go to hell!‘ Such a rump Uniate and
Western-oriented Ukraine, however, would only be viable if it had strong
and effective Western support. Such support is, in turn, likely to be
forthcoming only if relations betweeen

{p. 168} the West and Russia deteriated seriously and came to resemble
those of the Cold War.

The third and more likely scenario is that Ukraine will remain united,
remain cleft, remain independent, and generally cooperate closely with
Russia. Once the transition questions concerning nuclear weapons and
military forces are resolved, the most serious longer term issues will
be economic, the resolution of which will be facilitated by a partially
shared culture and close personal ties. The Russian-Ukrainian
relationship is to eastern Europe, John Morrison has pointed out, what
the Franco-German relationship is to western Europe. Just as the latter
provides the core of the European Union, the former is the core
essential to unity in the Orthodox world.

{p. 242} [...] a consequence of the end of the Cold War and the need for
a redefinition of the balance between Russia and the West and agreement
by both sides on their basic equality and their respective spheres of
influence. In practice this would mean:

1. Russian acceptance of the expansion of the European Union and NATO to
include the Western Christian states of Central and Eastern Europe, and
Western commitment not to expand NATO further, unless Ukraine splits
into two countries;

2. a partnership treaty between Russia and NATO pledging nonaggression …

3. Western recognition of Russia as primarily responsible for the
maintenance of security among Orthodox countries and in areas where
Orthodoxy predominantes  …

4. Western acknowledgment of the security problems, actual and
potential, which Russia faces from Muslim peoples to its south and
willingness to revise the CFE treaty and to be favorably disposed toward
other steps Russia might need to take to deal with such threats.

5. agreement between Russia and the West to cooperate as equals in
dealing with issues, such as Bosnia, involving both Western and Orthodox
interests.

If an arrangement emerges along these or similar lines, neither Russia
nor the West is likely to pose any longer-term security challenge to the
other.