Prominent historian, scholar, and author Timothy Snyder took the floor of the Ukraine House in Davos on the afternoon of Jan. 24 to discuss the country’s current situation with former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst.
“History is an invisible legislator. In the history of the nation, a nation always refers to the past, but its construction is a project of the future,” Snyder said.
This message could not have been any clearer. Standing at a junction of its own history – two months before the next presidential election – Ukraine and those wishing for its success could learn a great deal from Snyder’s words that circled around an important theme: the future.
The Yale professor emphasized that Ukraine’s problems are also Europe’s problems. The type of digital and information warfare Ukraine has encountered starting in 2014, and increasingly so since then, in Russia’s war and, to a lesser degree, what the United States and Europe have been facing since Moscow started to meddle with western democracies’ internal affairs.
According to Snyder, Ukraine’s conflict against Russia makes it particularly qualified in order to provide assistance to the West in its digital fight against the Kremlin. So, when speaking of learning from history but always keep one’s eyes on the future, this is exactly what Snyder meant: use your experience to look forward, never backward. That way you might inspire others and become an important figure in the international community.
Snyder also warned against two factors he deems important and that revolve too around the importance of the future: populism, and the need to fight for truth.
Populism “is the ability to do politics without talking about the future. It is about emotions in the present.”
The second, truth, “is like health: you cannot say exactly what it is, and you don’t know exactly when you’ve reached it perfectly, but if you deny it exists, then it becomes dangerous because there is no future.”
For him, the current world situation is not reassuring and will not be as long as “we get obsessed about the next election as a substitute not to think deeper, further. The fact that we still worry about each election. It is a sign that we are not out of the woods yet.”
Ukraine House Davos, which opened on Jan. 21, runs until Jan. 25, at 62 Promenade in Davos, Switzerland.
The event is organized by the Ukrainian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Horizon Capital. Its sponsors include the Temerty Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Ukrainian-Canadian billionaire James Temerty.
