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Ioannis Karras, Assistant Professor of History Freiburg University and Visiting Lecturer International Hellenic University Thessaloniki, explains the value of the EU in video blog for the IWP.I want to say is a few words about why the European Union is an important institution and is important for Ukraine. And the first thing I’d say is that it embodies the rule of law, and it embodies a form of democracy as well, with lots of checks and balances; and both these things are so important because they are what makes people in society equal.
And the second thing I’d say about the European Union is that it embodies a certain conception of the values of the enlightenment. And that means, especially freedoms: freedom to believe, freedom to speak, whatever you want, whoever you are, and a certain type of tolerance of other human beings.
And finally I’d say that the European Union gives us a kind of a model of interaction between states. And that’s the model that was set for us by France and Germany in particular after the Second World War: a model of reaching out to the other, of cooperation, of sometimes even putting your national interests in the second place because there is a general sense that we have to pull through together. And that is actually the opposite of saying that one country is European and another isn’t. We become European by cooperating. Now, these are all ideals, we all know that the history of Europe has had a very large degree of opposite ideals as well. But nonetheless these are ideals that are worth fighting for. And I think that’s why the European Union is such a good idea and such an important thing.
And what does Ukraine need in order to get there? Well, there are lots of things that are needed (reforms and so on) that have to happen quickly and in time. But perhaps the most important quality is actually something else: patience. These things don’t happen overnight because we are talking about reform of a whole society and that involves building coalitions, reaching out and certain stubbornness and patience with the knowledge that it’ll take time. This is the generational work not a work of one or two years.
And finally a deep sense of understanding of the richness of Ukraine’s own tradition and what Ukraine in fact has to offer. And it has many things to offer. But I’m going to point the two of them here. The one is the tradition that was so rich in Ukraine in 17th and 18th centuries of confraternity, of brotherhood, of what we would call civil society today to use contemporary terms, organizing each other and helping each other in places like Lviv, or Kyiv or Nizhyn and many other examples of this.

The second is a tradition of cosmopolitanism, of the richness and the multifacety of Ukraine’s populations, in particular in the port cities in the South of Ukraine. So I think Ukrainians can be proud of who they are and that pride is part of what would connect them to the European Union.

To watch the video blog, please, click here.

The visit of Ioannis Karras to Ukraine was organized within IWP project “Study Visits of Foreign Experts to Kyiv to Dispel the Myths about Ukraine in the European Union.” This initiative is conducted within the “Initiative for Development of Ukrainian Think Tanks” project, implemented by International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) in cooperation with the Think Tank Fund (TTF), with the financial support of the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine (SIDA).