

Marxists — including Lenin, who that day was in what now is Poland — were scandalized. Marx had preached that the proletariat has no fatherland, only a transnational class loyalty to proletarians everywhere. "In 1918," wrote Louis Fischer, Lenin's best biographer, "patriotism and nationalism, born of the 'subjectivism' Lenin so disliked, were ideological crimes in Soviet Russia."

These are history-shaping virtues in Ukraine today. Because the nation-state is the necessary framework for durable political liberty, nationalism is a necessary, although insufficient, impulse-sustaining liberty. Marx predicted the end of nationalism. Economic forces, he said, determine political, cultural and psychological realities. So capitalism, with its borders-leaping cosmopolitanism, would dilute to the point of disappearance all emotional attachments to nations. Ukraine's ferment is an emphatic refutation of Marxism.

The political elites who cobbled together the European Union hoped that the pooling of national sovereignties would extinguish the nationalism that, they think, ruined Europe's 20th century. They considered the resulting "democracy deficit" — the transfer of national parliaments' prerogatives to Brussels bureaucrats — a price well worth paying for tranquility.


Ukraine's unseated president, Viktor Yanukovych, resisted the popular desire for constitutionally limited government, and for a national existence more independent of Russian President Vladimir Putin's presence. Yanukovych wanted to trade Ukraine's aspirations for Putin's billions.


Ukraine, whose population (46 million) and size are approximately those of Spain, is a potential economic power. Russia remains what the Soviet Union was, a Third World country with First World military technologies. Its hunter-gatherer economy is based on extraction industries (oil, gas, minerals).

Putin's contempt for Barack Obama is palpable. Russia's robust support of Bashar al-Assad is one reason Assad has, according to the Obama administration's director of intelligence, "strengthened" his position in the period since Obama said Assad should "step aside." Russia has been less than helpful regarding U.S. attempts to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program. Where, exactly, has Obama's much advertised but never defined "reset" of relations with Russia been fruitful?


As a military or diplomatic power, "Europe" remains more a geographical than a political term. Still, the pull of European political culture has not lost its power. And if Europe's historical amnesia is not complete, it should hear echoes of 1848 and 1989 in the voices of Ukrainians today.

So, this is perhaps the final episode of the Cold War. Does America's unusually loquacious 44th president remember how the words of the 40th — "Tear down this wall!" — helped to win it?

George Will's email address is

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