Max Trecker: Who owns Ukraine’s Wealth? The Ukrainian National Movement and Imaginations of a Country of Plenty

Like no other country in Europe, Ukraine served as a projection surface for economic ideas in the modern era. What all these ideas had in common was that they attested to Ukraine's – in theory – great potential, provided that the space was only reshaped in the right way. I argue that Western and Russian notions of prosperity in economic thought and action cannot do without recourse to Ukraine. In this context, various ideas and imaginations were projected onto Ukraine by different actors from Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the USA. The Ukrainian independence movement actively drew on these imaginations to advance its political project. Especially in times of subjectively (and objectively) great geopolitical tensions, Ukraine became particularly interesting as a projection surface for economic imaginations.

Max Trecker, born in 1989 in Strausberg, studied history and economics at LMU Munich and CEU Budapest. His dissertation on the coordination of East-South economic relations in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was published by Routledge in 2020 as Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War. His most recent book, Neue Unternehmer braucht das Land: Die Genese des ostdeutschen Mittelstands nach der Wiedervereinigung, on the birth of a new entrepreneurial class in East Germany after 1989, came out in 2022. He works as postdoctoral researcher at the economics department of Georg-August-University Göttingen.