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The misplaced shock that Putin would act as so many past leaders acted, that he would try to take what he wants just because he can, reflects liberalisms long work remaking not just what we believe to be moral but what we believe to be normal. At its best and sometimes at its worst, liberalism makes the past into a truly foreign land, and that can turn those who still inhabit it into anachronisms in their own time. But liberals deceive themselves when they believe that that happens only to liberalisms enemies. It also happens to liberalisms would-be friends.

You can see this clearly in Ukraine in Histories and Stories, a collection edited by Volodymyr Yermolenko. Theres a particular poignancy in reading this book now, as it was released in 2019, in the interregnum between Russias annexation of Crimea and its current invasion of Ukraine. This is the recent past, but it, too, feels foreign.

In this collection of essays, written by Ukrainian intellectuals, Ukraine is not a darling of the West; it is a country that aspires to be part of the West and struggles against the indifference and even contempt of those it admires. Throughout the book, the Wests ignorance of Ukraine is a theme, with author after author recalling futile efforts to try to interest Europeans in their experience and history and possibilities. We, Ukrainians, are in love with Europe, Europe is in love with Russia, while Russia hates both us and Europe, the novelist Yuri Andrukhovych writes.

The authors see Ukraine as a nation trapped painfully in a state of becoming, neither truly modern nor confidently traditionalist. Andrij Bondar, a Ukrainian essayist, offers a tragicomic list of what Ukraine lacks, including trust in institutions, the culture of comic books, the Protestant work ethic and Calvados or any other apple spirits. But there is also much it has, including a generally highly tolerant society, the ability to consolidate and unite efforts to attain acommon goal, elements of democracy and a talent for enduring hardship. Today it is clear that these were the things that mattered.

The authors also see that Europe is not all that it claimed to be. For us, citizens of Ukraine, Europe still looks like the Europe of the late 20th century, while it has become absolutely different today, writes Vakhtang Kebuladze, a Ukrainian philosopher. Iunderstand this, of course, and it hurts when Isee the actions of Putins European right-wing and left-wing friends. Icertainly do not like this Europe.

Prophetically, Kebuladze saw that Western renewal might lie in attending to the experience of those struggling toward liberalism, not those comfortably ensconced in it. Europeans could look at themselves through the eyes of those citizens of Ukraine who came to Maidan for the sake of the European future of their country, those who are dying in the east of our country while protecting it from Russian invasion and those who are slowly dying in Russian prisons sent there on trumped-up charges, he writes. Will you then perhaps like yourselves? Or will you see away to overcome something that you do not like?

The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment, that making the future more just than the past is a mission as grand as any offered by antiquity.

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Opinion | The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means - The New York Times