Ukrainians in the 21st century: A modern-day statelessness?
It is quite a challenge to define whose national interests, language, culture, and traditions, are promoted by the modern-day Ukrainian state. Over the 18 years of its existence, the constitutional norms concerning the official status of the Ukrainian language have never been fully implemented. In many regions of this country they have been overtly ignored. Ukraine’s cultural and information space is occupied by the alien publishers, show business, and TV and radio channels.
According to the Ukrainian-wide census of 2001 67 percent of Ukrainian citizens named Ukrainian as their mother tongue, yet the entire system of mass media, culture and entertainment, as well as book printing, works in such a way as though those 67 percent of the Ukrainian population is made up of Russian-speakers. In some regions certain structures, engaged in anti-Ukrainian propaganda bordering on the verge of racism, function absolutely freely.
The state which positions itself as Ukrainian has virtually cut itself off from the problems of Ukrainians as a national community. It neglects the defense of their national and cultural rights, which are frequently abused in regards to language, culture, religious denomination, etc. Many local governments in the regions pass openly discriminatory decisions, aimed at restricting the use of Ukrainian in certain areas and in certain structures, and at the liquidation, under various pretexts, of Ukrainian-speaking mass media, Ukrainian schools, etc.
Thus, modern-day Ukraine does not function as the state of Ukrainians, who comprise the absolute majority of the population – almost 80 percent. In this respect Ukraine cannot qualify as a multinational state, and it would appear that the title nation is a minority in its own country. Indeed, the rights of the ethnic and linguistic majority in Ukraine are not protected by the state, which is nonsensical and has depreciated in quality. Paraphrasing Shevchenko, one might say that Ukrainians still have to live in “our, yet alien state.”
The state’s neglect of those functions towards its citizens has been provoking an ever deeper estrangement between the state and the nation – yet it is for the sake of these functions that all national liberation revolutions take place, and national independence is proclaimed.
This state even goes as far as to give up its right to self-defense, due to which scores of organizations, declaring their goal as the struggle against Ukraine, have a free hand to operate legally in this country. Although Viktor Yushchenko admitted the existence of a powerful “fifth column” in Ukraine, things have not gone beyond the mere statement of fact – just as usual.
The vast majority of Ukrainian citizens find it difficult to call this state their own in a socioeconomic sense, as the country’s economy is working for fantastic enrichment and prestige of several hundred clans, who own 60-70 percent of national wealth, de jure belonging to a nation of 46 million. These clans have turned Ukrainian politics into a hermetic structure, where political supply, represented by a limited circle of politicians, has been monopolized for years. Thus, when elections come Ukrainians have to permanently experience a “choiceless choice.”
The state’s formal “legal” character, the availability of electoral procedures, courts, and judges, and the endless hype about law and order in the media do nothing to promote the protection of the average Ukrainian’s rights. That is, we have a sham democracy and sham human rights: democratic institutes are available, but they do not work for the good of the broad public. Instead, they have become a system for the protection of the wealth, and special social status, of a thin layer of privileged families and clans.
Remarkably, unlike the broad Ukrainian public, the ruling elite is entitled to the protection of its rights by the state in a tough, efficient, and prompt way, without the endless red tape. It ressembles some Latin American countries, with a democratic institutional “shell” concealing totally undemocratic socio-political contents. It is a kind of a cross between a pseudo-democracy and a genuine dictatorship to champion the interests of an oligarchy, which was very aptly labeled “democratorship” by one witty Latin American writer.
The most obvious implementation of “democratorship” in Ukraine is the Verkhovna Rada, a billionaire club laying down the laws for the entire society including those strata, whose interests it does not represent, and cannot represent by definition.
Merab Mamardashvili [a Georgian Soviet philosopher, 1930-90 – Ed.] once said that “a nation is an ethnos in whose body a constitution has been at work.” Such work should result in parliamentarianism as a form of the consolidation and agreement of interests of all social strata, as well as a powerful, ramified, and efficient judicial system.
In Ukraine, the parliament has a well-deserved, extremely low level of popular trust. The same applies to the judicial branch. The peculiarities of the state apparatus, which we have described above, make total corruption absolutely natural, unavoidable, and invulnerable against any attacks – the more so that in Ukraine, such struggles are the corrupt people’s favorite entertainment and popular theme, used by the corrupt politicians to exercise their rhetoric skills.
The state, which was set up in Ukraine in 1991, immediately slipped from the hands of the Ukrainian nation. It got under the strict control of those powers who were best organized and united back then, and had been consolidated since Soviet times.
“The deceased emigration professor Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky already back in 1962 saw the cancer growing in present-day Ukraine: the Ukrainian party elite and those who began to search for, and disseminate, the modern national values. I used to call these powers the territorial and the national elites.
“The tragedy of independent Ukraine is that it was the territorial, rather than the national, elite that became the dominant force. Its representatives have kept all the habits of the traditional party bureaucracy, such as to think one thing, say another, and do yet something else. The virtual model of the Ukrainian economy remains a triangle: party bureaucrats, businessmen, and criminal structures. This is obvious since the 1970s.”
This was written by James Mace almost 10 years ago. Since then, nothing has changed. And it is the socioeconomic, political, and mental peculiarities of the origin of this specific layer of society, as well as its peculiar status, that account for its absolute incapability of thinking in the categories of national interests. It is able, at best, to rise from an individualist, predator-type to an egotistic, caste-thinking type.
Thus, we are speaking of an anti-national elite, the very dominant status of which deprives the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nation of any hopes for further development. It leaves it captive to total corruption and the half-criminal element which, in its turn, makes civilizational progress absolutely unachievable and renders Ukraine quite uncompetitive.
It has recently become a custom to justify all the shady deals at the highest echelons of power by the noble aim of uniting the Ukrainian West and East. Unscrupulous alliances, treason, the renunciation of ideological principles, sudden political U-turns – all this is accounted for by their passionate desire to consolidate Ukraine. However, just as the discord between oligarchical alignments does not in the least involve the splitting of Ukraine, so their alliances do not necessarily mean the unification of the nation.
There are certainly serious problems of disunity amongst Ukrainians, caused both by historical and modern geopolitical factors. There is the western region, which is half-jokingly nicknamed “Bandera’s Ukraine” by some political theorists, due to the peculiarities of the citizens’ sentiments and values. The process of Ukrainian nation-building is virtually complete there. Then, there is the central region (nicknamed “Petliura’s Ukraine” by those same political theorists), where the nation-building process is in full swing. Yet there is also the south-eastern region, where the process of Ukrainian nation-building is artificially slowed down, and the people in this region is subject to either Soviet/communist-style, or Russian imperial-style nation-building projects. There are also certain peculiarities which are worth mentioning.
Today, there is no essential dissent between Ukraine’s west and center, and during the Orange revolution they acted as a single geopolitical body. It is between the western/central region, on the one hand, and the east and south, on the other, that the problems do exist.
However, the east/south is not monolithic, either. The abovementioned theorists divide the region into the so-called “Makhno’s Ukraine” (Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia oblasts and a part of Slobozhanshchyna [a historical ethnic Ukrainian area comprising a part of modern eastern Ukraine and some western Russian provinces – Ed.]) and “Soviet Ukraine” (a part of Kharkiv oblast, all of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and the Crimea).
“Makhno’s Ukraine” is a fertile ground for Ukrainian nation-building, but the mixture of nouveaux-riches and oligarchs, bureaucrats and “corruptionists,” has done nothing to promote it over all 18 years of Ukraine’s independence. However, it is only active nation-building efforts in the sphere of information policy, education, culture, and national security that can bridge the gap and erase the invisible border between the regions.
The most challenging task is winning back Ukraine’s information space, completely conquered by – or, to be precise, surrendered by Kravchuk and Kuchma’s regimes to – the Russian Federation. Today, the RF is very aggressive in launching a large-scale information assault upon the Ukrainian state and actively promoting (moreover, provoking) centrifugal tendencies, dissidence, and antagonism among the regions.
