Russia, Ukraine, and the Borders of Europe

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, followed by its (unofficial) intervention in Eastern Ukraine in support of separatist movements there, has reignited debate about the proper international response to attempts to change of national borders by force.  In this essay, I argue that understanding the nature of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine requires attention to the historical legacies of national border construction in the Soviet period. Utilizing a Weberian framework for analyzing three types of national borders—traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic—I argue that Leninist elites typically understood border construction in “charismatic-rational” terms: the borders of Soviet republics were designed to be “rational” in the sense of reflecting and demarcating “nations” within distinct geographic spaces, but were also understood to be historically destined to be transcended by the charismatic force of proletarian revolution. As a result of this legacy, contemporary Russian and Ukrainian state leaders now draw on competing interpretations of Soviet designations of political space in order to defend antithetical understandings of the borders of Russia, Ukraine, and “Europe” as a whole.