Of course Maidan has its local Ukrainian specificity, but at the same time events of this kind had been happening and have been happening in different countries throughout the world. Maidan as an Ukrainian political phenomenon is inscribed in the global political agenda. It has lots of similarities with the Arab Spring, with the Indignados movement in Europe, and with the Occupy movement in the US and other countries.
This similarity extends to a lot of instruments, methodologies, practices on the everyday level, framing of the movement and spreading the ideas that it had produced. All these events have much in common, which means that we are in the middle of some process. We have been observing really crucial shifts throughout the world during recent years. Maidan, both for the EU construction and for the European idea, was just the starting point, a sort of a political a priori. [...]
It’s legitimate to call Maidan a revolution, first of all in a political sense. When we refer to Marxist classics, however, and talk about revolution in an economic sense, unfortunately it didn’t work out that way. Maidan didn’t change the social and economic order, although Maidan as such was in general against oligarchy. It had a lot of potential to develop this dimension, but it’s probably the hardest dimension to overcome. [...]
If you look at Maidan, at some of its images and flags, it seemed to be a nationalist revolution. This is why the Kremlin propaganda or rather its media war has had some success throughout Europe. These nationalist images, however, were just a rhetorical wrapping, it demonstrates that people don’t have another, proper, political language to express their real views.This lack of a proper vocabulary caused people to refer back to established political symbols, like the national flag or the national anthem. The symbols which are officially guaranteed. They can rely on them to inspire them and stop them from running away in the face of mass violence.
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