In this post, guest blogger Andrzej Nowak considers recent developments in the Ukraine and what they might be telling us about social order. –Nicholas

Events in Ukraine, especially streets fights between government forces and multitude of protesters, are still “fresh” — in statu nascendi, the time for  analysis is before us. I would like to risk a hypothesis that the Ukraine could be treated as a picture of near future. Nearly twenty years ago Wallerstein, in his apocalyptic vision, says that:

Much as I think that the next 25-50 years will be terrible ones in terms of human social relations the period of disintegration of our existing historical social system and of transition towards an uncertain alternative I also think that the next 25-50 years will be exceptionally exciting ones in the world of knowledge. The systemic crisis will force social reflection. I see the possibility of definitively ending the divorce between science and philosophy, and as I have told you I see social science as the inevitable ground of a reunited world of knowledge. We cannot know what that will produce. But I can only think, as did Wordsworth about the French Revolution in The Preludes: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very Heaven!”

When we look closer for is happening on (Euro)Maidan (in Kiev), we can risk, that this is a glimpse of the future.

This future will be apocalyptic (neo)Agustinine  world – time of cities in siege, empty spaces between them. It will be a time of neo-feudalism and return of medieval imagination. I hope Ukraine is not on path which leads to Syrian “Augustine world”, but I am quite pessimistic.

We are at the dawn of a new epoch that may well be as chaotic as that one and that may come upon us more quickly because of the way the electronic and communications revolutions, combined with a population boom, have compressed history.

Bu go back to Ukraine, I am Latourian, I suppose to show some evidence. Being an empirical metaphysist, I will give a voice to actors themselves.

First, take a look at this picture: http://news.yahoo.com/ukrainian-protesters-occupy-government-buildings-075337566.html

Or this catapult (trebuchet) used by protesters:

And at the end, look at this picture: http://i.imgur.com/xPvHEWh.jpg