INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR IN GERMANY

On February 15-16, 2024, the capital of the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the city of Mainz (Germany), hosted an international workshop on the topic “The European history(s) of Ukraine. About the value and values of the European past”. The organizers of the conference were the Institute of European History in Mainz and the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig. Both institutions are part of the non-university (public) sector of scientific researches. It includes the institutes of all major national research organizations, including the Leibniz Association. Thanks to this association, stable and sufficient funding for research work is provided.

In recent years, public opinion in Germany was dominated by the image of Ukraine as a post-Soviet, dysfunctional state with a lot of corruption. After February 24, 2022, European politicians began to emphasize that Ukraine is a “member of the European family.” Intellectuals, the media, and a large part of public activists began to distinguish Ukrainian history from the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, noting that Ukraine’s past and present was in Russia’s shadow for a long time, emphasizing Ukraine’s European perspective.

How did Ukraine become part of Europe? What is the value of the European past for social actors in Ukraine and beyond? What values do they fit into the European past?

These and other issues became the subject of discussion by the seminar participants. Among them was the Chief Researcher of the Department of Theory and History of our Institute, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Yuriy Shapoval. Together with Yulia Ostropalchenko, an employee of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University, he prepared and delivered the report “Russian history textbooks of the 2023 edition: stereotypes and new accents.”

A group of Ukrainian participants of the seminar: Yuliya Ostropalchenko, Yuriy Shapoval, Maria Kovalchuk, Tetyana Portnova