Back From the USA

Flying back to Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day from my beloved America, I could not avoid musing over the similarities and differences of both countries. Why does Ukrainian democracy not work more effectively? Then I recall a round table where I was once asked whether what we have in the West is really democracy. I had to admit labeling what we have there democracy is imprecise. I went back to how in the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville visited America to find out how one could possibly reconcile equality and liberty, for, after all, if we are all equal, we are all simply equally helpless before the Leviathan state. He found the answer in the American penchant to create institutions independent of government but capable of defending their interests against each other and against the government itself, thus playing the role powerful feudal lords once did in limiting the power of Europe’s absolutist kings. It is really more exact to call this representative self-government, the unequal representation of unequal interests and groups composed of juridically equal citizens. It is not always perfectly democratic or even fair, but it responds to the forces that exist in society, which explains its adaptability and demonstrated success. I cannot idealize my native land: it also has its own corruption that surfaces from time to time, shadow economy (people who do not want to pay taxes, estimated at about 10%), and crime, as every society this side of the Pearly Gates inevitably will. This might just be what Churchill had in mind when he called democracy the worst possible form of government, except for all the others that had ever been tried.

The point is not that politicians in America or the West are better or worse than each other. Just as sadists will sometimes want to become policemen or prison guards, narcissists, who want to get power in order to feather their own nests, will try their hands at politics. The problem is how to deal with it, more precisely, how society as whole controls it. America has the world’s most developed lobbying and ethics legislation, the roots of which go back to the Lobbying Act of 1946, clearly stating what both public official and those trying to influence him/her can or cannot legitimately accept or do. This became politically possible only because there was an organized public able to assert their interest in clean government. The question is not constitutions or laws: Ukraine has a perfectly good constitution and every opportunity to make the needed laws. The question is whether forces can develop in society able to make government do the right thing. This is why the West supports primarily non-governmental organizations in this country as building a civil society and should continue to do so. The highly imperfect system of representative government is capable of working only when there is something out there other than atomized individuals to represent, and once they develop it will be their problem just what they want represented.