In a lengthy and very smart article for Foreign Policy Michael Weiss tries to dissect exactly what the Ukrainian opposition is demonstrating for.

The marriage of nationalism with supranational bureaucracy is a strange sight for most Americans to behold. Who rallies for an idea such as “Europe,” much less one embodied by an institution that from these shores seems to function like a giant, overweening Department of Motor Vehicles spanning two dozen countries?
… Ukraine is now entering its third week of protests in thermometer-shattering cold, and risking a nasty state crackdown, all because President Viktor Yanukovych put the kibosh on an association agreement that would have given Ukraine greater trade opportunities with the European Union. That this is an event both intelligible and singular for a former Soviet satellite that lies on the fault line between East and West was best captured by Timothy Snyder, that great historian of fault-line nations (and fault-line national tragedies), in a short essay in the New York Review of Books: “Would anyone anywhere in the world be willing to take a truncheon in the head for the sake of a trade agreement with the United States?” Implicit in the question is an acknowledgement that for the countries of the former Soviet Union, identity is shaped as much by what one does not aspire to be as by what one does.
… Ukrainians, after all, aren’t just protesting for an easier flow of goods with Brussels — they’re protesting against the hegemonic protectionism of Moscow, which wants (and may have already forced) Kiev to join its own shabby, shadow syndicate, the Customs Union, in exchange for cut-rate oil and gas and an end to a Kremlin-imposed “customs terror” that has seen Ukrainian imports halted at the Russian border since last summer. Through his stock-in-trade of bribery, blackmail, and threats, President Vladimir Putin has prompted this present state of civic unrest in a neighboring country, which he described as “not really a state” at the NATO Bucharest Summit in 2008.

Thus a key element in the appeal to Ukrainians of a closer connection to an EU is as a means of rejecting the soviet past and a neo-Muscovite future. And let’s be clear how useful the EU has been in this respect.

I’ve had a few people asking me how I can reconcile my euroskepticism with my support for the Ukrainian protests, so (immodestly) I’ll just quote what I wrote back in 2009 in the course of an article on Latvia:

The integration of large swaths of Eastern Europe into the wider European economy and, ultimately, the EU is something that even Euroskeptics concede has been a triumph: a fusion of enlightened self-interest, generosity, and strategic vision that has done much to smooth the path away from Soviet rule and Communist ways. Initial flows of capital lured to the region by the collapse of Communism were, as the 1990s progressed, supplemented by waves of investment attracted by the reassuring spectacle of former Soviet satellites rediscovering the pains and pleasures of the free market. The transformation was further accelerated by the prospect of eventual EU membership as a final guarantee that they would not slip back. This was the way it worked in Hungary, Poland, and other former Warsaw Pact nations, and this was the way it eventually worked for the three Baltic states, the first former Soviet republics to apply for, and be accepted into, EU membership….

The EU means very different things to Europeans of East and West. Appropriately enough, Weiss quotes Estonia’s indomitable and erudite president Ilves:

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the cyber-savvy and Twitter-proficient president of Estonia, is one of the most outspoken proponents of the E.U…. I asked him why Europe mattered for Tallinn a decade ago. “There was very strong civilizational element of ‘return,’” Ilves replied. “Return after 50 years of occupations, deportations, deceit and corruption. We spent, after all, some 800 years in a German Kulturraum. The Hanseatic League, our architecture, Lutheranism, literacy, Kleinbürgerlichkeit [bourgeois mass culture], Rechtsstaat, a.k.a. the rule of law. The Soviets destroyed it all. So the narrative, if you will, was getting back to where we all had been anyway, where the Soviet period was like a Crazy Eddie’s commercial in the middle of a Mozart Concerto.”

That represents something of a sugarcoating of the indigenous Baltic experience within that Kulturraum, but the underlying point stands.

Back to Weiss:

A fear of succumbing to the undertow of neo-USSR designs is part of the story, there are more practical matters also driving the Euromaidan protests. Igor Pomerantsev, a Ukrainian intellectual and radio host, told me that young Ukrainians — many of whom don’t speak Russian but do speak English as a second language — aren’t out in force for some mythical concept of a United States of Europe, nor are they in the dark about the shortcomings of the treaties of Rome, Lisbon, or Maastricht, which have ungirded the E.U. They’re out in force because they demand the basic political concomitants of economic integration — the rights and privileges that people in liberal democracies take for granted. “Closeness with the E.U. gives better chances to get Schengen visas in future, opens future possibilities to study in European colleges, gives a hope to get legal jobs in the West. Most Ukrainians know that citizens of the E.U. have higher living standards, live longer, have better flats and medical treatment,” Pomerantsev emailed me.

And then there’s Belarus…

Read the whole thing.