Ukrainian Euromaidan: The exclusion of otherness in the name of progress

Ukrainian Pravda as an agent of democratization

In what follows, I explicate my argument by discursively analyzing popular blogs on Ukrainian Pravda (UP; http://www.pravda.com.ua) – a Ukrainian political web site that has been central in providing Ukrainian society with information alternative to official news sources since 1999. It served as an important mobilization resource for protesters during the Orange Revolution in 2004 (Kyj, 2006) and has also played a crucial role in the revolution of 2013–2014. It was one of UP’s most famous journalist – Mustafa Nayem – who called Ukrainians to gather at the Maidan on November 21 (Hahenkrat, 2013). Before the protests started, UP’s audience averaged roughly 250,000–300,000 users per day; on January 24, after the major escalation in the violence, this figure reached 1.6 million (Watcher, 2014). In the context of the East–West confrontations within Ukraine, it is also important to note that the readers of UP are predominantly Ukrainian speakers: According to Olena Pritula, UP’s editor-in-chief, the readership of UP’s Ukrainian version in 2011 was 8–9 times that of the Russian version (AIN, 2011).

I analyzed all the postings of UP bloggers organized into the ‘Maidan’ group starting from 26 November – the day when the group was formed – until 21 January, which denoted the beginning of a new, murderous stage of the Maidan protest. On this day, two Maidan activists were kidnapped; one of them was later found dead. The next day, 22 January, two of the protesters died in the center of Kyiv. I intentionally focus my attention on the Maidan protest before 21 January to show how the discourse of ‘otherness’ was formed before the murderous period of the confrontation started. Despite the forceful dispersal of the protesters on 30 November, there were no deaths; therefore, at the risk of oversimplifying the picture, I will consider the period from 26 November to 21 January to have been ‘peaceful’.

Within the indicated time frame, 35 bloggers of the ‘Maidan’ group expressed their opinions in 189 postings. Some sense of their popularity and influence can be drawn from the following figures: Taken together, they received 24,066 comments and were shared on Facebook 97,782 times. Among these 35 bloggers, there were 15 journalists (43% of the opinions), 8 politicians (23%), 9 political analysts (25%), 1 lawyer (3%), 1 showman (3%) and 1 musician (3%). None of the bloggers identified himself/herself with an ultra-rightist, ultra-leftist or any extremist organization; all but one of them supported Maidan peaceful means and underlined the importance of peace in the democratic process. Only one of the bloggers did not support the Maidan, while 34 of them were active Maidan supporters. For the purpose of this research, I focused on this group and employed qualitative discourse analysis of their postings.

My analysis shows that the representation of Maidan events by UP bloggers was not totally homogeneous. However, it was possible to trace similar effects resulting from the implicit assumption of a progressive scale of development as the primary referent in the bloggers’ constructions. Rather than unifying ‘UP bloggers’ into a homogeneous object, I would like to draw attention to the similar effects of their progressive discourse that allowed them to define their relationship to the ‘other’ in hierarchical terms. It is in this sense that I use the unifying term ‘UP bloggers’ as applied to those who posted their opinions within the ‘Maidan’ blog group.

UP bloggers constructed ‘Europe’ as a mythological object devoid of any historical, cultural or economic complexities – as a symbol of progress, a finishing line of development and a moral force empowered with the right to judge. They also constructed the opponents of European integration in the hierarchical terms of the progressive imagination – as people who were not developed enough yet to understand and support the developmental potential of the European course.

To be more specific, UP bloggers saw European integration as a movement to a more advanced society: ‘a road to European standards’ (Gritsenko, 2013b) based on ‘democratic European values’ (Sokolenko, 2013). In the view of UP bloggers, these values were order, democracy and the equality of all before the law – in short, all the ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ things that inspired Maidan activists to struggle: ‘It is important today that we desire to live normally in a normal country’ (Yarmola, 2013). Signing the agreement with the EU meant ‘the guarantee of non-return’, as one of the bloggers stated (Sobolev, 2013b; emphases are mine). The words ‘movement’ and ‘road’ toward a ‘normal’ condition and the desire of ‘non-return’ to the condition of abnormality are the key words of these and similar constructions.

On the one hand, these constructions can be seen as a continuation of post-Soviet modernizing discourses that presented the West predominantly as the standard by which socialist modernity is measured (Fehérváry, 2009). For many those who supported perestroika, the West was a model of progress and modernity and ‘a symbol of rejection of the Communist past’ (Shiraev and Zubok, 2000: 27). Through referring to the West as a model of egalitarian democracy, freedom and prosperity, late Soviet and post-Soviet liberal intellectuals made their audiences believe in the promise of Western salvation: ‘Concomitant with the negation of everything Soviet came a celebration of everything having to do with the old capitalist nemesis’, observed Nancy Ries (1997: 174). In her view, popular mystification of the West and its presentation as a land of bounty had set up a form of ideological closure that made the reception of critical arguments impossible. Similar observations were made by some other scholars whose research was on post-Soviet transformations (Baysha, 2014; Buck-Morss, 2000; Shlapentokh, 1993).

On the other hand, however, both post-Soviet modernizing discourses and the constructions of UP bloggers reveal the traces of the mythological narrative of the Enlightenment, which fills all discourses of modernization, democratization and Westernization with belief in the inevitable progress of humankind. In what follows, after discussing the mythologem of progress in a global historical context, I analyze how it manifests itself in the discourse of European integration as employed by UP bloggers.

The idea of progress

Historically, the emergence of the progressive social imaginary was associated with the Reformation, the development of capitalism in the West, the formation of the bourgeoisie as a political class and the spread of Enlightenment philosophy. As Charles Taylor (1992) explains, in the course of these grand cultural transformations, historical changes acquired the meaning of moral growth and higher consciousness. As a result, the myth of the avant-garde came to life – a mythology based on the construction of oppositions: between ‘the blind’ and ‘the visionary’, ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’, ‘philistine’ and ‘unconventional’ and so forth. The implication of this vision is that ‘some are destined to move ahead of the huge advancing column’, (Taylor, 1992: 424) leading the way for the rest.

To the non-Western ‘rest’, the progressive imaginary discussed by Taylor comes with colonization. The colonizing discourses of modernization have always been formed through the opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ – the ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ West against ‘barbarian’ and ‘pre-modern’ others (Said, 2003 [1979]: 7). The values enshrined as ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ have been freedom, independence, dignity, self-discipline, responsibility, rationality and so forth – qualities indispensable for the ‘modern agent’ who is ‘free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy’, as Iris Murdoch (1971: 80) sarcastically notes.

The modern described by Murdoch comes to life with the deep transformations of Western society articulated by its philosophers. Relocating the sources of moral strength from the cosmic order to the consciousness of a rational being, they make rationality an internal property of subjective thinking. God’s existence is now only a stage in the course of unstoppable human progress, as measured by emancipation and freedom. As Taylor (1992) explains,

Adopting the stance of disengagement towards oneself … defines a new understanding of human agency and its characteristic powers. And along with this come new conceptions of the good and new locations of moral sources: an ideal of self-responsibility, with the new definitions of freedom and reason which accompany it, and the connected sense of dignity.

To come to live by this definition – as we cannot fail to do, since it penetrates and rationalizes so many of the ways and practices of modern life – is to be transformed: to the point where we see this way of being as normal, as anchored in perennial human nature in the way our physical organs are. (p. 177, author’s emphasis)

Once normalized, the ideas of Western modernity – liberated from tradition and traditional faith – established new limits of the thinkable, to put it in Michel Foucault’s terms. Everything not in line with the new ‘normal’ came to be seen as ‘abnormality’ and ‘otherness’ – something to be marginalized, silenced, excluded, subjected to correction, disciplining, modernizing and so forth. Constructed against the norm of the modern condition, abnormality or otherness is now conceived as a state of underdevelopment in need of correction. It is at this point that the progressive vision of historic development and the mechanism of normalized judgment described by Foucault converge.

Although the criticism of Enlightenment ideas has become widespread (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002 [1944]), the basic Enlightenment narrative – an inexorable movement of humankind toward a progressive common condition – still remains a dominant paradigm of thinking within the political discourses of modernization, development and democratization. The inherent logic of modernization discourses is often organized along the lines of the mythological narrative discussed above: struggle between ‘moderns’ identifying themselves with progress and ‘barbarians’ whose barbarian identity is ascribed to them by modernizers. In contrast to previous ages, however, the current dividing line runs not along civilizational, continental or state boundaries but across all kinds of borders. More often than not, these lines today separate ‘progressive’ and ‘retrograde’ forces within once unified cultural formations. What happens as a result of this cleavage is the creation of internal ‘others’ and their exclusion from deliberation on important political issues – a paradoxical development given the democratic self-identification of many contemporary modernizers.

Silencing their ‘underdeveloped’ compatriots, ‘progressive’ non-Western intellectuals often align themselves with the ‘forces of civilization’ that the West signifies for them and willingly accept the rules of the game imposed on them. As David Harvey (2005) poignantly notes, ‘Even the most draconian of IMF restructuring programmes is unlikely to go forward without a modicum of internal support from someone’ (p. 17). Harvey’s remark resonates with numerous observations of other scholars discussing the infamous role of local intellectuals in internal colonization of their societies through mythologizing Westernization and presenting it as an inevitable path to progress, prosperity and success (Baysha, 2014; Mignolo, 2001).

The basic problem with this narrative, as James Ferguson (1999) notes, is that it tells people nothing about the inherent logic of global capitalism. Its narrative is always about ‘progress, according to which the native population was moving rapidly along the avenue leading to “civilization,” later styled “Westernization” or “modernization”’ (p. 34). Ferguson (1999) argues that the discourses of ‘globalization’, ‘democratization’, ‘civil society’ and ‘economic growth’ are just contemporary invocations of the old mythological narratives of social evolution ‘that reduce a complex and differentiated global political economy to a race for economic and political “advance”’ (p. 16). Ferguson insists that it is this simple evolutionary dualism, prescribed by the mythological progressive imagination, that ruins local economies in the name of progress and a ‘normal’ modernity.

The argument of Ferguson is in line with many other scholars who reject the ‘acultural’ vision of progress, according to which modernization will end up with one homogeneous global culture (Gaonkar, 2001; Taylor, 2001). This critical judgment makes a lot of sense if applied to Ukraine’s history. Within this framework, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its colonization of peasants can be seen as an attempt to modernize the Russian Empire through the colonization and subjugation of internal ‘others’ – Ukrainian peasants who opposed the Bolshevik revolution, taking it as an evil enterprise (Viola, 1996). Gorbachev’s perestroika can also be judged as an attempt at modernization at the expense of the working class that was excluded from deliberation and robbed. The ‘bandit privatization’ of working people’s property (Castells, 2010: 188) was perpetrated under the veil of progressive discourses that signified the reforms with the meaning of achieving a ‘normal’ civilizational condition (Baysha, 2014). These normalizing discourses have been constructed by intelligentsia that traditionally ‘derived from a faith that it was in the vanguard of history’ (Pipes, 1960: 496).

My reference to postcolonial literature does not mean that I view Ukraine as an example of a postcolonial situation in the traditional meaning of colonialism – an external exploitation of territories and their populations. My interest is in internal colonization of general populations by the discourses of Westernization as constructed by local intellectuals. My focus is on discursive marginalizing, diminishing and silencing internal others by relegating them to lower points on the imagined developmental scale. Here, I draw on John Hartley’s (1999) analysis of how the knowledge class seizes and maintains power through colonizing otherness ‘within the texto-semiotic domain’ (p. 98). Hartley (1996) argues that in times of ‘virtualization of communities and deterritorialization of imperial power … the concept of internal colonialism can be extended from territorial and ethnic minorities to demographic others’ (p. 101). In my discussion of UP’s progressive discourse, I refer to Hartley’s (1999) method of analyzing internal colonization through the deconstruction of juxtapositions between wedom and theydom – self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ communities and those excluded from them. When discussing the mythological constructions of UP bloggers, I also follow Roland Barthes’ (1972) method of deconstructing mythologies, conceptualizing each as a second-order semiological system that emerges from a semiological chain that existed before it. According to Barthes, myth appears when an additional meaning is added to a sign that already exists: In this case, the meaning of a preexisting sign transforms to a mythological form.

Imagining European integration

In line with the progressive narrative discussed above, the bloggers of UP tended to discuss the agreement with the EU not in terms of its profitability or losses for Ukraine but as a means to achieve a more advanced civilizational condition – to ‘rush ahead’ (Gritsenko, 2013b), ‘never go back to Sovok [a derogative term for the Soviet Union]’ (Gritsenko, 2013d) and to achieve a state of ‘civilization’ (Shnurko-Tabakova, 2013) and ‘normality’ (Sobolev, 2013b).

What this normalizing story line obscured was that Western modernity is a social system that has been formed as a result of complex historical, social, cultural and philosophical developments within the Western world. As is well known, the transformation of European feudal societies into bourgeois liberal constitutional systems was an outcome of complex societal processes such as the separation of public and private realms, the differentiation between state and society, the growth of the public sphere, the formation of public opinion, the flourishing of the European philosophy of liberalism and the development of pre-industrial capitalistic economic relations. It is through these processes, specific to European societies of the 17th–19th centuries, that the bourgeoisie learned to critically reflect upon its role in society and came to the realization of its political rights (Habermas, 1989 [1962]). In other words, democracy in the West appeared when European societies became socially and culturally complex to an extent sufficient for the emergence of democratic forms of governance. As Robert D. Kaplan (2000) put it, ‘The lesson to draw is not that dictatorship is good and democracy bad but that democracy emerges successfully only as a capstone to other social and economic achievements’ (p. 66). Those achievements were anything but ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ – they were socially and culturally predisposed. By presenting Western modernity as an abstract norm, UP bloggers deprived the concept of its intellectual history and signified it with the mythological meaning of a universal civilizational condition.

Not only did the constructions of UP bloggers imply that Westernization is the sole possible direction of development but they also suggested the possibility of regression or ‘returns’ back into history (the return to the USSR or to ‘Dark Ages’). If taken as real, multi-dimensional social and historical phenomena existing in time and space, both the USSR and the Dark Ages can hardly be imagined to return, and I doubt that UP bloggers literally meant that. However, if taken as a mythological construction whose history has been ‘evaporated’ (Barthes, 1972: 123), each of these examples can denote nothing else but a state of non-freedom, intellectual passivity and moral degradation – the anti-modern condition, in other words. The references to Soviet times and the Dark Ages used this way – as a premonition of future developments – betray another characteristic of the mythological progressive imagination: its employment of the idea of a ‘homogeneous empty time’ of Walter Benjamin as opposed to Martin Heidegger’s ‘lived time’, which acknowledges both the past as the source of a given situation and the future as a reference point in determining a course of action. These dimensions were missing in UP blogs. Deprived of the complexities of historical contexts, whole societies were judged along the imagined progressive scale, where the modern West occupies the highest point – the point of reference, stimulus and desire.

The presentation of Europe and the whole Western world as an avant-garde of humanity that has achieved the highest level of both economic and moral development is exactly what we find in the constructions of UP bloggers. In their presentation, the EU in particular and the West in general emerged as an undeniable moral force with the right to judge, pass verdicts and impose punishment:

Victoria Nuland … is warning – in the event of a forceful dispersal of Euromaidan, the same methods will be applied not only against bureaucrats but the political leaders of the Party of Regions and also against those who have supported this regime by material means. The rhetoric of the USA has changed. The nearest days will show whether the Party of Regions has understood the word ‘sanctions’. (Leshenko, 2013)

Oligarchs and those in power can lose their unity only if there is a real threat to their capital abroad, which can be organized only by Europe and the United States. The biggest secret of Maidan-2004, which experts know and which the representatives of the orange prefer not to remember, is that the outcomes of the elections of 2004 were decided not in Ukraine. The victory of the Orange Revolution happened because of the direct pressure over power in general and the Supreme Court in particular by the USA. (Datsyuk, 2013b)

None of the authors of the blogs under my analysis questions the right of the United States and EU to intervene into the internal affairs of Ukraine. None of them evaluate this possibility from the perspective of Ukraine’s state sovereignty that could not but suffer as a result of such intrusions.

The basic technique of mythologizing the West was quite simple: Only positive features of Western life were included into the bloggers’ stories while all negative aspects were ignored. None of the bloggers ever mentioned such integral parts of Western modernity as social inequality, unemployment, indebtedness, ethnic tensions, social exclusion and so on and so forth. Their focus was always on morality, and the moral supremacy of the West was not questioned. The avant-garde mission of the protesters who aligned themselves with the progressive West was not questioned either.

The self-presentation of UP bloggers (their wedom) constructed through depicting Euromaidan in exclusively positive terms is revealing. This is how they saw themselves and their confederates: as ‘educated people’ (Gumenyuk, 2013), ‘people who stand for their dignity’ (Garan, 2013c), who were ‘very motivated, goal-seeking, smart, and responsible’ (Okara, 2013a), and who ‘present their points in a calm and tolerant manner’ (Gritsenko, 2013d). In the presentation of the bloggers, the Euromaidan was ‘not a revolt of slaves’ (Okara, 2013c) but a conscious protest of conscious citizens against the ‘feudal-oligarch’ or ‘neo-feudal’ system (Okara, 2013b) . In other words, Euromaidan was imagined as an attempt to jump out of the dark medieval ages – the premodern state of human development – to the era of the Enlightenment and the Kingdom of Ends. The social condition of the contemporary West was presented to be a norm against which those who were thought unfit could be judged. From this perspective, Euromaidan was conceived as an attempt to breach the new iron curtain that separated Ukraine from the condition of the highest modernity as represented by the West.

My analysis of the bloggers’ writings suggests that ‘Middle Ages’ was not just a convenient metaphor employed as a rhetorical device for mobilization purposes. The metaphor of medieval darkness used by the bloggers seems to reveal their inherent tendency to see the history of mankind as an inevitable triumph of enlightened modernity as signified by the West. In order to achieve this condition, one needs to topple the medieval fortress separating Ukraine from real civilization, to liberate the country from the forces of darkness and to clear the way to the radiant future of humankind. The motif of the fight between the forces of good and evil was popular among some of UP’s bloggers:

Ukraine is occupied by the Golden Horde … Today’s pogrom of the peaceful demonstration can be compared with the siege and capture of Kyiv in November-December 1240 by the Mongolian army headed by Batu Khan. At least, since that time until today, the residents of Kyiv have not had to hide behind the walls of Mikhailovsky Cathedral … (Okara, 2013d)

The main strategist of the host of heaven is at the Maidan with us! Is this a mystery? No …

For the second time in a row, Maidan starts on November 21, the day of Kyiv’s defender – the Archistratigus Michael! Right behind the walls of his Mikhailovsky Monastery, young activists and students found protection from the brutal Berkut on November 30 … And now, the holy defender of Kyiv, God’s messenger with the sword of fire, is with us! (Gritsenko, 2013с)

The Christmas Story goes on. The tyrant was killing children but could not overcome the creation of Good and its victory over the Devil. (Garan, 2014)

Situated within such mythological constructions, the agreement with the EU was seen as a magic key to a fortified gate separating the past from the future, the modern from the obsolete and the tyrannical from the enlightened forms of government.

Mythological imagination, which paints reality in black and white while ignoring all complexities, does not presuppose critical judgment. Not one blogger in my analysis offered a multi-dimensional, non-mythological discussion of the European integration rejected by Ukraine’s government, which was presented as a group of ‘bandits’ (Savanevsky, 2013), ‘criminals’ (Otkovich, 2013) or just ‘immoral’ people (Datsyuk, 2013a). This grand simplification of social and political realities, which are always much more complicated than the simple duality of ‘good vs. evil’, developed into a tendency among UP bloggers to see all opponents – not only those in power – as ‘jackals, and bootlickers of the regime’ (Garan, 2013a), ‘traitors’ (Gritsenko, 2013d) or just ‘weak and demoralized people’ (Datsyuk, 2013a). This is how UP bloggers saw underdeveloped theydom – those who opposed the Maidan.

Even the most cool-headed bloggers believed that ‘it is difficult to find adequate opponents of the Maidan’ (Gumenyuk, 2013). Because of their ‘inadequacy’, or ‘abnormality’, to put it in Foucault’s terms, the opponents of the Maidan were not seen as human beings or citizens whose opinions deserved to be taken into account: They were ‘provokers… or idiots’ (Avakov, 2013b) or ‘serfs’ (Voznyak, 2014). The latter, in the opinion of some bloggers, had ‘a chance to become Human Beings’ (Sobolev, 2013a) – they just needed to take the Maidan’s side. The human condition was defined exclusively in terms of understanding the progressive potential of European integration.

To ascribe a lower intellectual and moral status to Maidan opponents, the names of the latter were not capitalized: ‘chalenki and buzini … dzhangirovi, korchinski, pihovcheki [well-known anti-Maidan figures]’ (Garan, 2013b). Each of these names was redefined in a plural form so as to imply that they ‘should not be among respectable people’ (Garan, 2013b). Clearly, ‘respectability’ was also defined by the logic of exclusion: Even the most respectable people in the past lost their respectability if they did not support the protests:

Oleg Blokhin, a legend of soccer … An idol of millions … Made public his attitude to Euromaidan … It interferes with the football match, and he cannot show his children new-year festivities. Blokhin is indifferent to beaten students and the sharp turn from Europe … I want to express my sympathies with Blokhin – not because of the missed festivities but because he has lived such an interesting and active life, and he has not grown into a Citizen. (Gritsenko, 2013c)

The author of this blog post was not interested in the nuances of the opinion expressed by Blokhin. He was not interested in understanding Blokhin’s motives. He created the possibility of ignoring it by writing off ‘the legend of soccer’ as an underdeveloped creature that had not yet grown to the status of a citizen whose opinion should be respected.

If the most famous and respectable personalities were deprived of their citizen status just because they did not support the protesters, what should less known opponents have expected? In the writings of some UP bloggers, they were represented as nothing but ‘slaves’:

I am not talking about the split along the East-West line or between adherents and opponents of Euro-integration. I am talking about a more bitter and more essential phenomenon that is typical for all regions – the correlation between the people and the population; between citizens and slaves. (Gritsenko, 2013a)

This statement is a typical example of simplifying the complexity of Ukrainian social reality by veiling the age-old contradictions between the East, the South and the West of Ukraine whose people speak different languages, attend different churches and support different politicians (Kovalova, 2007). UP bloggers simplified these contradictions enormously, reframing them in terms of the division between those who occupied lower and higher points on the imagined scale of human moral progress.

This reframing seems to have had a strategic significance for Maidan activists: After the relegation of all non-supporters to the status of non-citizens, they could logically define the Maidan as ‘the protest of the people’:

Officers and soldiers, don’t carry out criminal orders! Don’t be ‘cannon fodder’! Your enemy is not the peaceful citizens, but the bandits and ‘titushki’ they’ve hired. Whom will you join tomorrow: the bandits or the people? (Garan, 2013d)

Revolution is a process …, which forces the powerful … to submit to the people! (Avakov, 2013a)

Soldiers with the people! (Savanevsky, 2013)

The question of why soldiers had to make a choice in favor of the protesters and not in favor of those people who did not approve the Maidan was not discussed. Such a discussion was outside the limits of the possible as it had been defined by the bloggers. By their definition, ‘the people’ were ‘the citizens’; ‘the citizens’ were those who supported the Maidan; the Maidan was a force that paved the way for a European civilization.

The progressive discourse of diminishing and exclusion: implications for democracy

If evaluated exclusively in strategic terms, the progressive discourse of exclusion, as discussed here, may serve as an effective mobilization tool. However, if judged against normative concepts of democracy such as the public sphere or from the vantage point of civil peace, this progressive mythological discourse appears problematic. Instead of consolidating society through all-inclusive discussions, UP bloggers only contributed to existing social cleavages, as demonstrated by the anti-Maidan protests that took place across the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine. This outcome looks even more paradoxical given the ostensibly democratic aspirations of the Maidan. Diminishing, marginalizing and delegitimizing ‘unworthy’ publics are activities that contradict the egalitarian democratic principles in the name of which the Maidan was organized.

There is another – even deeper – problem with the logic of exclusion that permeates progressive discourses. Who is to say that the critics, the protagonists of ostensibly ‘higher’ morality, are right? This suspicion is even stronger in the contemporary West, preoccupied with the problem of mutual understanding within complex differentiated societies where people are losing the horizons of shared meanings (Habermas, 1985; Taylor, 1992). Differentiation and polarization within contemporary societies only sharpen the problem of intolerance nourished by people’s confidence in the righteousness of their course – a phenomenon that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described in his Devils as far back as the end of the 19th century. This is how Taylor (1992) succinctly presents the essence of the problem:

The bad, the failure is now identified with some other people or group. My conscience is clear because I oppose them, but what can I do? They stand in the way of universal benevolence; they must be liquidated. This becomes particularly virulent on the extremes of the political spectrum, in a way which Dostoyevsky has explored to unparalleled depths. (p. 516)

As my analysis shows, the logic of self-proclaimed rightness nourished by progressivism and impregnated with intolerance for the ‘undeserving’ does not characterize exclusively the extremes of the political spectrum – it is also present within the ‘democratic’ discourses of those people who do not align themselves with ultra-rightist, ultra-leftist or any extremist forces.

The fact that such outstanding thinkers of modernity as Dostoyevsky, Habermas, Taylor and many others reflected on the avant-garde’s moral right to judge what is ‘progressive’ and what is not suggests that the exclusion of otherness in the name of civilization is hardly an exclusive trend within Ukraine or any other post-authoritarian milieu. Rather, it seems to be an inherent problem of all modernization and democratization discourses that are constructed in accordance with the progressive imaginary. John Hartley’s research on the French Revolution supports this proposition. Contemplating the rational model of society that is ‘quintessentially modern’, French radicals constructed the wedom of progressive audiences that ‘were understood as literate, economically active, politically responsible, internally variegated, unified and rational’. Excluded theydom consisted of both aristocracy and the poor: ‘the unemployed, destitute and lumpenproletariat’ (Hartley, 1996: 80–90). Hartley (1992) also claims that a similar logic of the exclusion of internal ‘otherness’ exists in contemporary ‘democratic’ societies where alternative regimes of truth – those incommensurable with dominant, ‘common-sense’ outlooks – are systematically colonized and excluded.

The findings of this research suggest that anti-democratic divisions into ‘us’ and ‘them’ are unavoidable until we realize the full extent of the enslaving mythological potential of the progressive narrative of the Enlightenment. The method of analysis elaborated within postcolonial studies is indispensable in this respect. The legacy of postcolonial studies teaches that ‘otherness’, however benevolently motivated, kills unlikeness, dissent, variance, critical judgment and other attributes of Western modernity that its advocates cherish so piously. It is this piousness that reveals the negative dialectics of Enlightenment: Instead of liberating, its narrative can be employed to subjugate and to restrict freedom in its own name.

As I mentioned in the introductory part of this article, the Ukrainian confrontation, like any civil conflict, can hardly be explained one-dimensionally, focusing on only one aspect. There are many other perspectives that would be indispensable to explain the dynamics of the civil unrest in Ukraine: economic, political, geopolitical, diplomatic and so on and so forth. Only holistically, by taking all possible aspects together, can we get a multi-dimensional picture of the confrontation. In doing so, however, we should not lose sight of the nuances of how political, economic and other developments are informed by hate, animosity and intolerance on the part of different groups within Ukrainian society. In this sense, this article offers a useful insight that is often neglected. It shows how the ‘progressive’ imagination of Euromaidan protesters, as represented by UP bloggers, discursively produced the internal ‘other’ as a singular monolithic subject whose ‘underdeveloped’ intellectual condition was judged against an imagined scale of human progression. Constructed as an obstacle for the progressive path of Ukraine toward the European integration, millions of those falling in the category of the ‘other’ have been excluded as ‘undeserving’ of taking part in the democratic making of contemporary Ukraine.