Ukraine's European Integration Course: Prospects and Caveats
Authors: Shmorhun Oleksandr 
Published: May 2020

In the course of the research it was proved that even signing the Association Agreement and obtaining a visa-free regime of Ukraine with the EU did not bring Ukraine closer to the status of a permanent member of the European Union and NATO. One of the main reasons for the loss of such a prospect is the glaring mismatch between the promises of bright prospects for the powerful development of this geopolitical and geo-economic union, which at one time gave the "architects" of the current EU and the reality of the unrealized grand plans of transforming the EU into a world leader. It is shown that the weak predictive potential in the assessment of the further destiny of the EU is due to the lack of proper scientific and theoretical substantiation of the basic foundations of this unprecedented geopolitical association, which is evaluated by different authors, whether as a specific federal or confederate association in which national or sovereign delegated to the supranational level. In particular, several scientific versions co-exist to provide optimal parameters for the construction and construction of the European Union. In particular, we are talking about “classically federalist”, “intergovernmental” approaches, “rational choice theory”, “liberal intergovernmental direction”, “multilevel governance”, “network management”, quasi-theory called “neo-functionalism”. In fact, all of these models in one way or another ignore the proposed by S. de Gaulle model of the EU organization on the Europe of Motherland principle in favor of the cosmopolitan global project of the United States of Europe. As a result of the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the process of non-equivalent economic division within the EU itself has actually been legalized. Despite this, , in March 2017, EU member states signed a document called Europe of Different Speeds in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Union's founding. It is substantiated that such violation of the principle of solidarity and equality declared in the programming documents in the EU's activities arose precisely due to the forced unification of the requirements for the national economies, which are not equal in their potential, inevitably, which creates discriminatory conditions for their dynamic possibilities. Such a geo-economic configuration leads to a slow development of the common economy throughout the EU. All of them naturally led to complaints of the political leaders of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands (not to mention the leaders of nationalist parties in virtually all European countries) about the anti-national orientation of the current EU policy. The conceptual conclusion is drawn: the reason for the aforementioned synchronicity of world cosmopolitanism and European transnationalism lies in the fact that due to the very complex processes of the stage of civilizational scale the world prevailed in the negative trend of global non-equivalent redistribution of goods, capital and financial resources. At the same time, the analysis points to the need to take into account that in today's globalized world for the survival of individual nation-states (especially those without superpower status) and even against the background of the growing global crisis, it is imperative that the optimum "incorporation" of political nations into more powerful regional associations. That is why irreconcilable Euroscepticism cannot be constructive now. However, as shown in the article, this integration of Ukraine will only make sense if there is a fundamental change in the existing model of a united Europe in order to maximize the functional complementarity of political and economic institutions of nation states and supranational decision-making centers at EU level.