Four principles characterize the life of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States: Ukrainian patriotism, American loyalty, liberal democracy and religion. While all four can be reconciled, there are tensions among them that, if pushed to their limits, produce contradictions. They comprise six opposing pairs: if you arrange them as the points of a square, you will be able to draw six lines among them.
The first opposing pair of principles is obvious. Is Ukrainian patriotism consistent with our duty of loyalty as American citizens? To harmonize them, we may cast our American commitment as civic and political, and our Ukrainian affiliation as cultural and religious. But some say that American identity is a complex of cultural traditions too. Conservative analyst R. R. Reno argues that being American is more than holding a set of political ideas, for “America is a community of memory and habit of mind.” (First Things, May 2017, p. 65.)
Today, it is true, a double or multiple cultural identity has become commonplace. But what if our Ukrainian affiliation is not just cultural, but political? Can it be harmonized with our civic devotion to America? It all depends on how we define American and Ukrainian interests. If the United States has an interest in the economic, military and political domination of the world, then our civic loyalty may clash with our commitment to a truly independent Ukraine. But if we take the American ideal of universal political freedom and democracy at face value, then these loyalties reinforce each other.
A second opposing pair of principles represents a problem that arose in the 1930s. Is Ukrainian nationalism compatible with religion? Nationalism with a capital “N” – that is, an integral nationalist ideology claiming supremacy over all other commitments – is inconsistent with any recognizable form of Christianity. But “Christian nationalism” respects the rights of other peoples and nations to the sovereignty we desire for ourselves.
Related to this is a third and unexpected source of possible tension. Is there a conflict between Ukrainians’ religious commitments and their loyalty to the United States? Until a few years ago, such a question was almost unthinkable. But recent conflicts between the Catholic Church and the federal government over marriage and “life issues” have raised it. There is no question of disloyalty, but civil disobedience may become necessary.
The fourth pair of principles, by contrast, does not really conflict. Our American loyalty is not likely to clash with our support for liberal democracy. This is not only because the U.S. was founded upon liberal democratic principles. It is also because even American conservatism, to which some Ukrainian Americans subscribe, is “liberal” in the original sense of the word. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it, “…modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.” (“After Virtue,” 2nd ed. 1984, p. 222.)
The fifth pair may come as a surprise. Could it be that liberal democracy conflicts with religion? The European liberalism of many of our forebears co-existed with a religious worldview – uneasily, to be sure, given its sharply anti-clerical bent. The problem is that liberalism is a product of an Enlightenment philosophy that sought to replace a Christian morality with one based on reason. If MacIntyre is correct, that attempt ultimately failed. The result is our present predicament, where we cannot form a consensus on fundamental issues of life and death. Until recently, it is true, American liberal democracy could function without a built-in moral foundation because religion fulfilled that need. But when we exclude religion from public life, we find ourselves without resources for moral and ethical decision-making. In that sense, liberal democracy does not so much clash with religion as contest its moral authority – although it can offer none in its place. The danger is that the state, grasping for an ethical framework, may seize upon the ideology of the moment, no matter how fatuous – especially if it is backed by money and influence.
The latest stage of liberal democracy, it seems, is neo-liberalism, which favors a global “free” market. The result is globalization – the dissolution of legal, political, cultural and moral barriers to commerce – including those raised by religion. Christianity is not alone, after all, in teaching self-restraint and discouraging heedless consumption. Thoughtful diaspora leaders may not wish to encourage a Ukraine where churches are once again turned into nightclubs or cinemas, and monasteries into luxury condominiums – owned by American conglomerates rather than by the state – or where the traditional family farm dissolves in multinational corporate agribusiness.
If liberal democracy in its globalist incarnation clashes with our religious values, it also collides with our nationalism. This forms the sixth and final pair of opposing principles. Like religion, nationalism resists globalism and the neo-liberalism that engenders it. “In our dissolving era,” writes Reno, “Christianity in the West needs to lean in the direction of renewing national sovereignty rather than encouraging a globalized, post-national future.” But that future starts here. “The post-national age,” he predicts, “will be the American age.” Ukrainians in the homeland, understandably desperate to distance themselves from Russia, cannot take seriously the prospect of Ukraine being colonized by a Western power. But we should know better. Reno warns that “post-national, American-led globalization represents a realistic vision of the future… And it will be an empire.” (R.R. Reno, “A Dissolving Age,” First Things, March 2017, pp. 26, 27, 30.)
Recent events signal a reaction. Writing of the “global revolt against elites,” Mark Blyth claims that “The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun.” (“Global Trumpism,” Foreign Affairs, November 15, 2016.) In Reno’s view, the significant divide is no longer between freedom and statism, but between nationalism and globalism (“The Public Square,” First Things, April 2017, p. 5.) Can we embrace both?