Nor, Professor Wynnyckyj continued, has it been forgotten what those dead died for. And here, too, there is an uncomfortable challenge for comfortably complacent citizens of the established democracies:

The concept of dignity as expressed in Maidan is distinctly different from Anglo-American individualism: dignity is a concept that can only be actualised in a relational sense. In order to have dignity, an individual must be recognised as having it by another. Thus dignity requires more than an individualistic concept of the subject — dignity is only possible within a [community] of persons: a concept close to the still underdeveloped strand of philosophy called "personalism".

. . . The person-of-Maidan . . . declares his or her individual rights, but simultaneously recognises collective responsibility (i.e. the duty to help, defend, feed, and sacrifice for others). Indeed, this unique values complex is a strange mix of western individualism with respect to rights and Slavic collectivism with respect to the need for recognition of those rights, and with respect to responsibility. This notion seems to be extraordinarily threatening to Putin. Its essence has been captured in the phrase "Revolution of Dignity" . . . and in the underlying value of Maidan — that of a demand for natural justice.

Perhaps Professor Wynnyckyj is right that the operative concept of freedom in the West today is starkly individualistic. But that was not always the case. In 19th-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville recognised that striking hybrid that Michael Novak would later dub the "communitarian individual". The founding fathers of postwar European integration —Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi — were all tutored by the modern Catholic social doctrine of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which stressed both the inalienable rights of persons and the individual's duties to the common good; Pius XI also taught what he called the "principle of subsidiarity", a theological warrant for the institutions of civil society, and a barrier against the totalitarian temptation that seems built into political modernity. True, today's EU began as a set of common economic arrangements, in the European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market. But the vision of the free society that motivated Schuman, de Gasperi and Adenauer extended beyond mutually-beneficial economic life to a reconstitution of European civilisation socially, culturally and politically. 

Thus there is a sense in which the people of Maidan have been calling both Europe and the United States to recover a richer understanding of freedom than the individual licence-to-consume or licence-to-be-entertained with which freedom is too often confused today. The lethargy with which Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin and Washington responded to the Ukrainian revolution suggests just how far that notion of freedom-as-licence has eaten away at the will of the established democracies. If we cannot imagine hundreds of thousands demonstrating in sub-zero temperatures over multiple weeks in the centres of the major cities of the West, perhaps it is because no one is going to endure such deprivations for Lady Gaga. Or MTV. Or a new BMW. Or the latest organic groceries. Or six weeks of paid holiday.

The West was given an opportunity to rebuild its crumbling intellectual and moral foundations by the example of the revolutions of 1989, when the Wall came tumbling down, not (as so many academics continue to insist) because Communism could not compete in a world of microchips, fibre-optic cables and instant communication, but because a critical mass of people demanded that their inalienable human dignity be recognised and decided to defend that dignity for themselves and for others. That was a reminder to the West of what it was about. So, too, is the Maidan revolution. That revolution's future is, obviously, unclear. But the lesson Maidan has already taught is a crucial one, which the West ignores at its peril.

It takes a certain critical mass of citizens, men and women who know their own dignity and respect the dignity of others, to sustain the political and economic institutions of the free society. Or, to put it another way, democracy and decadence cannot coexist indefinitely. The cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, courage, moderation — were on public display on Kiev's Independence Square and throughout Ukraine for months. Those are the same virtues the West must reclaim if the North Atlantic democracies are to regather themselves culturally and politically, thus finding the wherewithal to resist Vladimir Putin's attempts to reverse the verdict of 1989.