Subjects who will be Citizens

Timoth Garton Ash writes about the Ukranian 'revolution' in the Guardian:

These are the so-called ordinary people who, by their spontaneous reaction on that Monday, November 22, made history. First it was the Kievans, taking ownership of their own city. Then it was the outsiders. All the well-funded campaign for the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko; all the carefully prepared student activists of the resistance movement Pora ("It's time"); all the western support for NGOs, exit polls and the like; all the international election monitors; all the telephone calls from Washington or Brussels - none of them would have prevailed over President Kuchma's vicious regime with its manipulated media, Russian advisers and electoral fraud were it not for the Svyatoslavs and Vasils, the Elenas and Vovas, coming on to the streets of Kiev in such numbers that they changed everything. So much is still obscure, corrupt and inauthentic in Ukrainian politics, but at the very heart of this change is something very authentic: human beings hoping to take control of their own destiny. Mere objects of history who become, however briefly, active subjects. Subjects who will be citizens.

Read the whole thing. Beautifully written and touching. This bit is also compelling:

Probably for the first time in Ukrainian history, the democratic and the national aspirations are marching together. In places such as Bosnia, East Timor or Iraq, western occupiers talk implausibly of "nation-building". Here you see how nations are built, in the solidarity of chanting crowds and the brandishing of new symbols. "I feel more Ukrainian now than I did three weeks ago," says a young man of Russian origin. There, in a single sentence, is the essence of true nation-building. In this still largely Russian-speaking country, just 42% of those asked in a nationwide survey this February identified themselves as "above all" citizens of Ukraine. (An amazing 13% answered "Soviet citizen".) One of the survey's designers bet me that next February it will be 50% or more.