Ukraine Is Focusing

Global competition makes it imperative that all countries, as actual participants in the international political process, or those that claim this status, meet certain qualitative criteria. Failure to conform to them or to adequately meet external and internal challenges automatically turns a country into a lawless object of action on the part of other subjects of influence.

Ukraine is historically evolving according to models oriented toward low foreign political subjectability, and this has transformed it into an a priori noncompetitive or low-competitive polity compared to its neighbors. At present, Ukraine has a controllable sovereignty, and there is a variety of external managers trying to manipulate it by resorting to rather uncomplicated technologies.

When Ukraine was still part of the USSR, the problem of Ukrainian subjectability, competitiveness, and sovereignty was not on the agenda because the paradigm of Ukrainian existence was modeled within Union boundaries, on a considerably larger scope and relying on huge resources; the integrity of the Ukrainian SSR was guaranteed by the entire Soviet military might, particularly its nuclear potential.

In conditions of independence Ukraine’s competitiveness turned out to be considerably lower than expected in 1991, and not just on the global or continental but also the regional scale. It could have become the leader of several large regions: the Black Sea region, the Northern Caucasus, the Danube and Black Sea/Baltic Sea regions, the Carpathian Mountains, and the Balkans. It never did. As it is, Ukraine is unable to meet most international and domestic challenges. The lack of nuclear weapons; obsolete industrial technology; problems with reprivatization and management of large industrial projects; the division of society resulting from a great many factors; the destruction of the educational system and science; the devastation of agriculture and manipulations with farmland; ineffective social protection; renewed corruption; skidding governmental machine; plummeting cultural standards; the degradation of cultural and ethical values; social apathy; disillusionment with the Orange Revolution, etc. — all this is bringing Ukraine to the verge of a systemic crisis that after several decades may well be followed by a direct threat to the very existence of the Ukrainian nation.

For a while Ukraine can continue to exist based on an informal, politically balanced consensus between Russia, the EU, the US, Turkey, NATO, and several less important regional operators. However, this situation does not envisage any subjectability in the first place; Ukraine won’t stand a chance of making any important political decisions. Second, this situation will last precisely as long as the consensus between the guarantors of stability in this macroregion.

Unless it can raise its actual formal and symbolic status in the international arena, Ukraine will fall prey to one predator or another. Competitiveness, which according to Michael Porter is determined by two main criteria — the quantity and quality of available resources (human, natural, infrastructural, technological, information, and cultural) and the efficiency of the government controlling them — means nothing more than the survival of a country and its people. Noncompetitiveness means death, instant or prolonged and painful, depending on the circumstances.

The presidential election of 2004 and the subsequent change of elite are opening up vast horizons for Ukraine in terms of means and long-term strategies for effective development. After a decade of Leonid Kuchma’s presidency Ukraine found itself at a point of bifurcation, at a point where a choice had to be made; this period won’t last long, not more than ten years.

Without a doubt, this country needs new people, new ideas, and new paradigms of development. However, the near future, approximately for as long as the new president will be in office, may mark not so much the choice of a new road as preparations for making this choice; it may serve as a nutrient medium for it.

Self-awareness, self-determination, building a national identity, choice of priorities and strategies of development, modeling responses to global challenges will perhaps occur in two phases, each lasting approximately five years. First, cadre rotation based on an elite matrix modeled by the new president and his entourage; then Ukraine will determine its place in the civilized geopolitical and geoeconomic world.

Naturally, the bifurcation of 2005 is by no means a choice between a cozy, civilized European home and barbaric Eurasian despotism. In reality, it’s an altogether different choice of one’s place in international politics, a construction of one’s identity, a choice of guidelines for the state’s development.

Let us assume that this bifurcation will not affect the final civilized choice of a split Ukraine in the first phase — e.g., in the next five years- or the “multivectoral” nature of Ukraine’s geopolitics (in other words, politics without any vectors). This ambiguity concerning crucial issues sharply reduces this country’s competitiveness and is primarily rooted in the Ukrainian minimalist political culture. Therefore, it stands to reason that causal factors should undergo major changes first and consequences afterward; first and foremost, a new elite must be formed on maximalist principles, with a new system of values, priorities, and behavioral stereotypes. Only then will it be possible to seriously discuss the possibility of a responsible civilized and geopolitical choice. So far Russia and the West (the US, EU, NATO, Germany, and Poland) are trying to make this choice for Ukraine.

In this period Ukraine, figuratively speaking, must become focused, and its president and his closest associates must act as guarantors of the creative potential of this nation and its finest representatives. They must guarantee the preservation of Ukraine’s rich talent lest it sink into oblivion or be “borrowed” by other countries and cultures; so that this talent can be realized in Ukraine and in Ukrainian culture.

TOPICAL QUESTIONS FOR THE NEW REGIME

Without a doubt, the president, prime minister, and a number of other “fathers of the state” upon whose shoulders the new regime rests must ex officio broach and seek answers to the following questions concerning urgent requirements in Ukraine’s social and political life:

How should the ideals of a state ruled by law and civil society correlate with reality?

How to make this country effective and competitive?

How to overcome corruption and regional sabotage, and convince bureaucrats to work for the common good?

How to remove the new oligarchs from the new government and add their business to the system of general national interests?

What are the optimal mechanisms capable of mobilizing the elite, and where should the government be looking for new people capable of making a qualitative breakthrough?

How to restore government control in this country and make the system of adopting and implementing governmental decisions more effective?

What is the optimal form of the state administration and state system during this historic period? What results should political and administrative reforms engender?

How to straighten out the relationships between the center and the regions?

How to overcome poverty and raise the living standard?

What should be done to make people feel dignity?

How to increase the GDP and make the economy more effective?

How to attract foreign investment without scaring away actual and potential investors?

How to revive machine-building and other heavy industries?

How to preserve high-tech production and the military-industrial complex?

How to awaken business initiative in people and encourage them to work well?

How to form a stock market, stable currency, and an effective banking system?

How to sustain cultural progress? How to make people better educated?

How to secure freedom of expression, information, and other civil liberties?

How to make the army efficient?

How to minimize losses stemming from joining the global economy?

How to build relations with other countries and blocs — primarily with Russia, the US, EU, NATO, and CIS?

However, the problems facing this government must not be exhausted on such an empirical and technological level. The political leadership, especially the president, must have a clear view of the higher planes of life and metahistorical truths that have a direct bearing on their country.

Without a doubt, the format of political power inherited from Kuchma is regressive and must be reformatted. Such reformatting requires a certain conjuncture of circumstances, above all the personal qualities of the head of state, prime minister, deputy premier, speaker, and a number of other leading politicians, since their values, priorities, and stereotypes of political behavior will be automatically added to the matrix of the new model of power.

For the sake of Ukraine’s development and increasing its competitiveness, the new regime must launch several essential, political, modernizing and mobilizational processes, and take a number of responsible radical steps that may prove painful for the Ukrainian elite, the people, and the state.

The first radical process is the separation of power from property, the deoligarchization of politics, ousting oligarchs from power, and reprivatization based on the law and principles of justice.

The second radical process is the rotation of the elite, the formation of a new elite with maximalist views, predominant public rather than personal values, and nonconformist behavioral stereotypes.

The third radical process is the correction of Ukrainian political culture, the reformatting of national political consciousness in order to revive state-building values, and the maximization of the Ukrainian political discourse.

DEPRIVATIZATION OF THE STATE

From the point of view of the metaphysics of power, world history is evolving as a total process, as a disaster, an all-embracing degradation and decline of the spirit; the logic of linear progress is regarded only as a fiction stemming from profane positivistic consciousness. Countries ruled by a caste of priests relying on spiritual absolutes are being replaced by militaristic states in which might, will, and valor of the ruling stratum are paramount. These are then replaced by states ruled primarily by material, financial interests. Oligarchs, whose dominance is based on the diffusion and interpenetration of power and property will deform any type of state, in any historical epoch. Plato wrote that oligarchy is a “government resting on the valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it” and that this political system is maintained “by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.” (The Republic, 336 B.C.) Objectively, oligarchs are agents of apostasy and global degradation.

In an oligocratic system of values “solid” matter, such as property and money, has the highest ontological status. Power is not a value in itself, but rather a derivative of material interests, for it can be converted into money. Oligarchs, even if they are sympathetic, educated, and decent individuals, destroy that which is political as a particular mental concept; power and politics lose their meaning as separate values, in that they are transformed from the means of solving volitional tasks into tools of economic struggle and redistribution of property.

However, combating oligarchs and oligarchies may pose at least two threats; first, after ousting its own oligarchs, the state risks facing transnational corporations, which are a far more formidable force that this state cannot practically influence in any way (as was the case with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic). Second, people who are fighting the oligarchs often strive to acquire confiscated assets and thus risk becoming oligarchs of a new formation (as happened in Russia with the so-called St. Petersburg Chekists). Ukraine may be facing its own, third, danger: considering the high degree of interpenetration between the state and oligarchic structures, liquidating the latter may lead to anarchy and destabilize the government’s existence.

An optimal strategy of relations between the state and the oligarchs would be to rid the highest state bodies (particularly the legislative and executive branches), system-making infrastructures, political elite, and the media of dependence on oligarchic structures, their agents, protОgОs, and lobbyists; and to try to imbue oligarchic corporations with national interests.

As it is, the struggle against oligarchs in the post-Soviet countries is complicated by their having received powerful additional support in the form of international global structures (in Russia this became evident during the antioligarchic campaign against YUKOS), and by their being prepared to come out as a consolidated front against such nation-states. The global economy ignores national frontiers and often tries to destroy them. This can place countries in a very difficult situation. On the one hand, the state is not supposed to meddle in the business process (more often than not, such interference proves ineffective and only damages the economy), but on the other hand the state must monitor contacts between national and international business, including transnational corporations. Otherwise a large part of the national resources will find their way to the global economy (precisely what has been happening throughout the post-Soviet space for the past decade).

The logic of a healthy state mechanism dictates that oligarchs and oligarchies are a serious threat to the state, and that the most effective way to ward it off is not by destroying oligarchs (physically or socially as a class), but by turning them into a competitive business, without attaching any political and information strings.

Without a doubt, any economy is based on big business. However, big business and oligarchs are two essentially different phenomena; oligarchic wealth is based on a redistribution of property, using political and administrative methods, rather than pure business success. It serves the national interest to turn oligarchs into big businessmen, make them aware of the priority of the state and national interests. Thus, removing oligarchs from power but not business is crucially important today. This also requires the will of the top political leadership, reliability of the elite power structures that are close to the head of state (e.g., by this I mean an understanding with the leadership and the ranking officers of law enforcement agencies), and the presence of carriers of the state-building ideology in government-people who really care about the nation. Naturally, this country has weak resources at the moment, and it cannot act as a full-fledged entity in the struggle against the oligarchs. However, keen awareness of national interests and antioligarchic principles must become the basis of a new elite matrix, in keeping with which the new regime must carry out a rotation of the elite.

Oligarchs are people who have privatized the state. Therefore, the main political task of the new president is to revive the political aspect as a special conceptual discourse and to deprivatize the state.

The issue of deoligarchization is actually the issue of delimiting the social functions of various castes, strata, and classes. In the Middle Ages, the separation of the state from the church was a topical issue that was resolved differently in different countries and cultures. An optimum solution is coexistence and cooperation. This was known as symphonia in the Byzantine Empire, a symbiosis in which the church and the state did not merge, did not attempt to dominate, but protected each other, and defined their jurisdictions in an optimal manner. Perhaps a new kind of symphonia will emerge between the political and economic spheres, between the state and business.

THE NEW ELITE: MAXIMALISTS IN THE ELITE ROTATION SYSTEM

Any systemic transformations in Ukraine, primarily a qualitative change in government, are possible only with a thorough conceptual rotation of the elite, the coming to power of a counterelite, new people with qualities required for solving national tasks in this historic period, people who are worthy and capable of holding leading political posts.

Today’s Ukraine needs an elite that, in addition to the traditional positive attributes (education, professionalism, decency, dedication to the common cause, etc.), would be dynamic, creative, ambitious, worldly, maximalist, sufficiently selfless, with lofty cultural ideals, preferably with nonpositivistic views. Public service must change from being a sinecure into a responsible occupation, and authority must be regarded as a mission rather than a privilege.

The head of state and other top- ranking officials can be guarantors of the correct superstructure of the mechanism for recruiting such an elite. In Ukraine, forming this elite is usually complicated by the mechanism of negative selection, which restricts vertical mobility. This happens when all attractive posts are “reserved” by people with a low competitive level, mostly mediocre but highly envious individuals whose greatest “assets” are certain personal qualities (baseness, cowardice, laziness, a low level of passionarity, sycophancy) or contacts in high places.

Considering the regularities of elite rotation as described by Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, the new president ought to have replaced the stagnant elite of the Kuchma epoch with a new one that would be capable of effectively discharging its administrative functions. Even in the first phase of recruiting such an elite the main criterion of selection should be inherent personal qualities (reason, willpower, intellectual capabilities, spiritual disposition), rather than economic status or even meritorious service to the president and the nation.

Rotation of the Ukrainian elite must not be reduced to reshaping the canvas of power or redistributing the interests of various oligarchic clans and elite groups, but securing strategic priorities in the development of this country and its people. An elite is objectively in demand with a new set of elite qualities, new stereotypes of political thinking and conduct, with a renewed array of values. These kinds of people were rejected by the late Soviet and post-Soviet elite recruitment centers. President Yushchenko must formulate a new elite rotation mechanism. So far his manpower policy is a cross between a political lottery and Brownian motion.

“WHO IS WITH US?” INSTEAD OF “WHO ARE WE WITH?”

Ukraine’s main problem, the principal cause of its foreign political fiascoes lies in the fact that it is a subjectless political culture. The Ukrainian political elite is accustomed to wondering, “Who are we with?” And its members almost never ask themselves, “Who is with us?”

Ukrainian political culture formed as a minimalist one, a fact that has countless historical explanations; for example, lack of experience in terms of symphonia between the secular and religious authorities in the Middle Ages (when an Orthodox country was ruled by non- Orthodox laymen, so that Ukraine felt like a backwater province rather than a center of the world); and the absence of a nation-state in the 18th- 19th centuries and the existence of the powerful subjective Muscovite factor, when Ukraine was reduced to the status of a “southwest province.”

Bifurcation, change, or a noticeable shift in the course of national development may offer this country a unique opportunity to change its political modus vivendi, national visage, political and cultural behavioral stereotypes, and to establish new archetypes of power.

Ukrainian political thinking is antistatist, owing to the specifics of its historical genesis; here the state does not have a soteriological value [salvation as the effect of divine agency — trans.]. In other words, in the system of Ukrainian culture the state is not regarded as an “ideal community” capable of providing salvation in future life (eternity), or as a social reality blocking the way for absolute evil in this earthly world. So this kind of state has no “project,” or “mission”; it is regarded apolitically as a corporation, a factory, and the head of state as its chief executive official.

For centuries Ukrainian political culture viewed the state as an indisputable “external evil” in contrast to what existed far away, down the Dnipro rapids, some ideal social organization based on an internal, sacred Cossack truth (Holy Rus’, Zaporozhian Sich, etc.). Incidentally, it’s a shame that the slogan “For Our State!” is noticeably less popular in Ukraine than in Russia.

Russian political culture is totally different. It is based on maximalist intentions, and the state is not just a machine with which a social group dominates over and suppresses other groups; it is not simply a defender against an external aggressor or an instrument of national self- preservation. It is a “fighter against apostasy,” the “last fortress” in the struggle against “world evil.” Such an identity at first allowed for political actions on a Messianic-ecumenical, universal scale, rather than just on its home turf.

An eschatological orientation — when the main issue facing the people and the state is “What’s at the End? What cause did all those victims of historical cataclysms serve?” — is also feebly manifested in Ukrainian political culture. A country with actualized eschatological problems orients itself on absolute historical truths and suprahuman ideals, and political culture in this context imbues the people and the state with extra vitality and staunchness in the face of internal and external challenges. Here the level of competitiveness is considerably higher.

After the martyrdom of the last Orthodox emperor, Nicholas II, the place remains vacant, and it’s not a fact that the president of the Russian Federation automatically becomes the guardian in the current social realities. The Ukrainian state-building tradition is not burdened with so many old forms and stereotypes as are nations with longer and more stable histories. On the one hand, there is a lack of state-building traditions and statist thinking, but on the other, Ukraine is more flexible and open to creative solutions.

The new president of Ukraine has carte blanche; he is not bound by any commitments in a number of fundamentally important political matters; by and large, he is responsible only to history. This is particularly true of the rotation of the elite, the principles of selecting the new elite, issues relating to ideology, strategy, the state-building project, and the key tenets of Ukrainian political culture.

EXISTENTIALIST ISSUES THE NEW REGIME MUST RAISE BEFORE SOCIETY, THE ELITE, AND ITSELF

The full-fledged existence of Ukraine, and any other country, is possible only if its actual sociopolitical development is in harmony with the high-flown plans for the existence of a people’s metahistorical mission, with the transcendental motivation of the meaning of its existence. Therefore, in addition to political, economic, social, and cultural questions to which the president and his team must provide answers in their daily efforts, there are also more complex existentialist issues whose answers are linked to the ultimate choice of historical development.

Naturally, these issues are rather hypothetical and notional for Yushchenko’s Ukraine; for so long as an elite with minimalist values dominates, none of these issues will acquire any practical meaning. However, even by correctly putting them forward, the new president and regime can actualize the quest for a new national idea, a new competitive Ukrainian identity, and new format of the Ukrainian state.

We believe these principal questions can be formulated as follows:

Why does Ukraine exist? Is there any supreme providential meaning behind its existence? If so, what is it?

What role does Ukraine play in global history?

Is Ukraine part of Europe? If so, what is Europe: a continent stretching from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains; an Indo-European racial and lingual identity; a common culture based on Christianity? Or should we be discussing Western and Central Europe as a bulwark of Western Christian civilization, and Eastern Europe as the successor of Eastern Christian (post-Byzantine) civilization?

Can Eurocentrism become a true Ukrainian ideology? What does Ukraine stand to lose and gain as part of “Greater Europe”?

What’s worse for Ukraine and its geopolitical ideology: Kuchma’s multivectoral policy (i.e., without any vectors) or Yushchenko’s single European vector?

What are the modern European values propagated by Eurocentrism: material consumer standards or lofty manifestations of the human spirit?

What’s more important for Ukrainians: consumer standards or Salvation?

Is Eastern (Eastern Christian) Europe with the Orthodox countries part of Greater Europe or a separate civilized reality?

How topical for Ukraine is the spiritual and cultural legacy of the Byzantine Empire?

What place does the figure of the tsar occupy in traditional Ukrainian cultural and political consciousness? What was the problem with medieval Ukraine: the fact that it inherently rejected the idea of autocratic continuity or because it didn’t have a monarch?

Is there a basis for a subjective positioning of Ukraine? What is the historical and metaphysical footing of Ukrainian subjectability?

What identity contour is more topical for Ukraine? What is the proportion of the Ukrainian identity as a country with a mostly Indo- European, Eastern Slavic, Ukrainian population; as a country with Eastern Christian (mostly Orthodox) culture; as a country that was influenced also by Western Christian and Islamic culture throughout its long history?

What geopolitical identity is topical for modern Ukraine: “transit” (Ukraine as a bridge between the West and East, North and South), “marine” (Ukraine as the “queen of the Southern seas” and coastal territories), “borderland” (Ukraine as a central point of the Black-and-Baltic-Sea cordon sanitaire between Western Europe and Russia), “continental” (Ukraine as the heartland of the Eurasian Continent and the basis of the “great space”)? What geopolitical strategy is topical for Ukraine: Euro-Atlantic, Mid-European, Eurasian, or isolationist?

Can Ukraine become the leader or one of the leaders of a new geopolitical alliance? Can this alliance be self-sufficient and have its own views on global history or will it become another satellite of the West? Is such an alliance possible in principle?

What should be the cultural, anthropological, philosophical, historical, metaphysical, geopolitical, and geoeconomic prerequisites of the modern Ukrainian idea?

Can there be understanding in Ukrainian society based on the ideology of solidarity whose cultural and political practice combines the latest social technologies and paradigms of the development of a sacral society?

What makes Ukrainian culture unique? Is it actually unique?

What would be the optimal type of relations between Ukraine and Russia, proceeding from the latter’s historical mission as the “last fortress against world evil”?

How topical for modern and future Ukraine is the concept of Kyiv as the New Jerusalem?

* * *

The first several months of the new Yushchenko-Tymoshenko-Poroshenko regime are proof that it won’t be able to make a principled fateful or global choice; that Yushchenko’s epoch (rather the period of his presidency) is the period of fertilizing the historical soil, all the more so as the elite that came to power after the Orange Revolution is not qualitatively new compared to Kuchma’s elite.

The current historical period marks a transition to a new, heretofore unknown, Ukraine. It is a period of bifurcation, a search for a path but not its choice. The current fiasco with the EU Constitution has deconstructed the myth about the possibility and necessity of Ukraine’s membership, thus calling into question the very idea of the European choice.

In 1856, after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Foreign Minister Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov issued a circular formulating the strategy of a further mobilizational breakthrough: “Russia is focusing.” A more accurate and descriptive formula for modern Ukraine would be hard to find. Ukraine is focusing.