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Beyond the Euromaidan
Comparative Perspectives on Advancing Reform in Ukraine
By Henry E. Hale, Robert W. Orttung STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0010-2
CHAPTER 1
Establishing Ukraine's Fourth Republic: Reform after Revolution
PAUL D'ANIERI
The Ukrainian state is being founded anew. When Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in February 2014, the constitutional order was disrupted and in important respects the state ceased to function. In Kyiv, the state did not control the monopoly on the legitimate use of force that is the sine qua non of the modern state. The state was also redefined territorially with the seizure of Crimea and parts of the Donbas by Russia. In important respects, then, we can think of the period since early 2014 as the founding of Ukraine's "fourth republic."
It is remarkable that Ukraine can already be on its fourth republic, but such is the case, if we consider the number of times since 1991 that a new constitutional order (not merely a new constitution) was adopted. In 1991, Ukraine's first republic formed with independence from the Soviet Union. In 1996, the second was formed when a new post-Soviet constitution was finally adopted. The third began in 2004, when street protests forced a major revision of the constitutional distribution of powers between the president and prime minister. That order was undermined by Viktor Yanukovych after 2010, and the collapse of his regime brought Ukraine again to a point of fundamental discontinuity. Fear for Ukraine's future mixes with hope that the country is finally going to build a "normal" "European" state, as envisioned by the protesters who pushed Yanukovych from power, and the possibility that Ukraine would succeed seems to have so worried Russia that it has done a great deal to undermine the chances of success.
Russia's intervention has raised the stakes for reform in Ukraine. At stake now is not only whether Ukraine will have democracy, a functioning state, and a market economy, but whether it will be independent and mostly whole, or whether it will be further dismembered. Ukraine's success in reforming itself to create a prosperous democracy tied to Europe is now seen as the best and perhaps the only defense against further predation by Russia.
For more than two decades, Ukraine has staggered forward without making the reforms that are widely viewed as necessary. Many of the same problems that have existed since 1991 remain, and the fact that Ukraine is on its fourth constitutional order in twenty-five years leads us to wonder if enduring change is possible. Once again, Ukraine faces both the opportunity to remake itself and the fear that somehow old patterns will persist. Can Ukraine reform?
This book, rather than lamenting Ukraine's past performance, seeks to glean from that experience lessons that can now be applied. Reform, in this context as in others, has two overlapping meanings. The broad meaning of reform is that of coherent policy change for the better. A narrower meaning is that of the elimination of some defect in institutions, policies, or outcomes. Both meanings apply here: corruption is a defect which many people in Ukraine and outside seek to eliminate. Democracy, rule of law, and economic growth are positive goods of which people seek more.
Therefore the chapters in this book focus on two questions: Why has there not been more reform in Ukraine? And what can be done to promote or facilitate reform? We approach these questions through a two-pronged approach. On each of the six issues addressed, a chapter that focuses primarily on Ukraine is paired with a chapter that examines Ukraine in light of comparative experience. Thus the questions are approached from two distinct vantage points, one "inside" and one "outside" Ukraine. Identifying which facets of the problem are unique to Ukraine and which are not helps to identify the kinds of strategies that might help overcome the barriers to reform. Ultimately the goal is to identify pathways to positive change.
At least on the surface, the problem with reform in Ukraine is not disagreement about goals. While political infighting in Ukraine is endemic, there is a great deal of consensus on many of the country's problems and objectives. Economic growth has been slow and volatile. After twenty-two years of transition, Ukrainian GDP was still smaller in 2013 than it had been in 1991. In 2009 Ukraine experienced a drop of 15 percent in GDP, and this indicator fell nearly 7 percent in 2014. Corruption is rampant, earning Ukraine a ranking of 142 out of 175 countries on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index in 2014. Life expectancy is low, and Ukraine scores poorly on a range of quality of life, public health, and comparative happiness measures. Moreover, Ukraine is not subject to the typical left-right cleavage. The leading political parties and politicians all present themselves as pragmatists and centrists; debate over the relative roles of government and market is largely absent. Nor is there significant disagreement that Ukraine should be a democratic country. Even corruption is not a partisan issue. Consensus on these goals makes the inability to accomplish them even more puzzling.
Of course, Ukraine's politicians are divided, Russia exerts influence as a powerful and interventionist neighbor, the legacies of the Soviet Union hamper the country today both socially and economically, and internal regional divisions color politics and impede the formation of a consensus. Pointing to those obvious problems, however, does not explain the lack of reform in two important senses. First, other countries have had the same challenges — or worse — and managed to address them. Second, analytically, this large array of possible causes points to the need to identify their relative importance. Which are fundamental obstacles to reform and which are not?
Why Does Reform Fail?
The question of why reform does not occur has been asked for decades about many countries. A range of answers is available, stemming from various theoretical approaches and historical cases, and the contributors to this volume apply many of them. A central premise of this volume is that comparative experience is highly relevant for understanding the obstacles to reform in Ukraine and the potential to overcome them.
A substantial literature in the rational choice vein shows how the pursuit by rational actors of private goals undermines or blocks the achievement of widely desired reform. In this view, the determinants of macrolevel outcomes are found in microlevel incentives. Prominent among this work is Joel Hellman's (1998) concept of a "partial reform equilibrium." Hellman argues that a partially reformed economy provides enormous rent-seeking opportunities for well-placed elites, and that once reform reaches a murky land between the command economy and the market, actors who benefit from this arrangement will seek to obstruct further reform. Because these actors have profited from partial reform, they have the most resources with which to pursue their goals. Thus an equilibrium is reached in which those enriched and empowered by partial reform work to maintain it. In this volume, this kind of approach is demonstrated by Serhiy Kudelia, who argues that Ukrainian political elites benefit hugely from corruption, and therefore have a powerful incentive to keep it going, even as they initiate various "anticorruption" programs.
Another immense literature focuses on institutional design, and whereas much of the rational choice literature focuses on incentive-based barriers to reform (for example, collective action problems), the institutional design literature focuses on solutions. The common thread is the assumption that actors are rational. The goal of institutional design is to create institutions that align the private interests of actors with the public good. This literature gains weight from the presumed role of the U.S. Constitution in channeling behavior in the United States, as elaborated in the Federalist Papers and much subsequent analysis of U.S. institutions, such as rules of procedure in the Congress. Among the first orders of business in constructing postcommunist politics was the writing of new constitutions. These constitutions, as well as electoral laws and other rules, have been repeatedly altered, in Ukraine and elsewhere, in the belief that better rules would lead to better results and would constrain actors from doing things that are viewed as nondemocratic or simply corrupt. In particular, the design of legislatures and executive-legislative relations is seen as essential in determining whether disagreements are resolved peacefully or not (Ostrow 2000).
In this volume, several authors emphasize the role of formal institutions. Henry Hale, for example, focuses on the constitutional division of authority between the president and the prime minister, finding that in the patronal politics that characterize many of the postcommunist states, unified executives with strong presidential powers tend to bolster autocracy.
The institutional design approach begs the question of why institutions were designed badly in the first place. Daniel Beers asks whether institutions are best thought of as cause or effect. It may be that "bad" institutional design is not the result of poor engineering, but rather of good engineering intended to serve someone's interest. As Smith and Remington (2001, 3–4) stress, actors have multiple goals in designing institutions, and good government may not top the list. Certain institutions may serve the overall public interest poorly while privileging some actors, and those privileged actors will defend those institutions. To the extent that institutional design is the problem, resolving it is nearly always more complicated than just identifying a more optimal solution. It requires amassing sufficient power to defeat defenders of prevailing practice.
The historical institutionalist school of thought also focuses on the effects of formal and informal institutions, but has a different understanding of where institutions come from. They are not simply "designed" but rather emerge during particular historical circumstances and then endure after the circumstances that led to their creation have passed (North 1990, Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Scholars of post-Soviet Ukraine have tended to assume that the collapse of Soviet power led to a fundamental historical discontinuity, but Pauline Jones Luong, writing about Central Asia, showed how "the persistence of old formulas produced new institutions" (2002, 3), and Valerie Bunce (1999) showed how the shift from coercion to economic incentives to maintain control in the late Soviet period undermined state power. Taras Kuzio's chapter applies a similar approach, showing how the economic, industrial, and social practices that emerged in the late Soviet period contributed to the rise of the post-Soviet Party of Regions.
Several approaches to reform go beyond the focus on the state itself to examine the relationship between the state and society. The seminal work in this line of argument was Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in which Huntington traced the downfall of many new democracies to the inability of new, weak states to manage the demands placed by liberated and increasingly well organized societal actors. In a similar vein, Joel Migdal (1988) identified the problem in many African states as one of "strong societies and weak states." Several actors have applied this approach to Ukraine. Almost from the time of independence, Alexander Motyl (1993) argued that Ukraine could not build a functioning democracy unless it first constructed a functioning state. Motyl's argument was in stark contrast to prevailing thinking, which saw the state as a source of unwanted interference in society and the market. An in-depth study of institutions in Ukraine identified a wide range of deficiencies (Kuzio, Kravchuk, and D'Anieri 1999). In the present book, Maria Popova's chapter on the politicization of the judiciary touches on this view, showing how the judicial organs are often thoroughly penetrated by special interests.
A different take on state-society relations sees the shortcomings not in a weak state, but in a weak civil society, which is unable to bend the state to the needs of the mass of citizens, leaving the state controlled by a small number of self-serving elites. This view also has a rich history, emerging from Almond and Verba's classic study of The Civic Culture. Robert Putnam's (1993) work on "social capital" followed a similar line of thinking and had a significant impact on the study of democratization and on democracy promotion programs. In Ukraine, social capital and the civic culture were assumed to be moribund prior to the Orange Revolution, and then were assumed to be powerful in its aftermath. A book edited by D'Anieri (2007b) explored why civil society seemed to lose its influence in Ukraine so quickly after the Orange Revolution. In this volume, society is the focus of analysis for Shevel's study of historical memory, Lucan Way's study of regional divisions, and Kuzio's understanding of why the Party of Regions came to dominate and then collapse.
Modernization theory emerged in the 1960s as a way of explaining why some postcolonial societies changed more quickly than others, and found the answer in the durability of traditional social structures, including patterns of authority. While the theory has fallen out of favor, concepts central to it have endured. Thus the role of traditional authority structures such as clans and patrimonial networks has received extensive attention, especially in research on Central Asia but also in Ukraine. Fisun's chapter, which looks extensively at the patrimonial nature of authority, is a case in point, and similar ideas are evident in Way's discussion of clans and Hale's account of patronal presidentialism.
The issue of national identity has perhaps received more scholarly attention than any other in the study of Ukraine (Barrington and Herron 2004; Birch 2000; Darden 2008). A central question asked in this literature is whether Ukraine's regional, linguistic, and ethnic divisions impede reform. While some have seen this pluralism as a bulwark against autocracy (D'Anieri 2007a, Pop-Eleches and Robertson 2014), the prevailing (and not necessarily contradictory) view is that such pluralism undermines reform (Kubicek 1999). This argument shows up in Shevel's examination of the politics of memory and in Way's examination of regional divisions. Deep societal divisions may impede the formation of the strong state needed to implement significant reforms. This is especially true when there are active secessionist movements supported from abroad.
More recently, the success of democracy promotion in postcommunist Europe and around the world has led to a literature on the role of external support in promoting reform (Bunce and Wolchik 2006; Jacoby 2006; Levitsky and Way 2006; Beissinger 2007; Levitsky and Way 2010; Pop-Eleches 2008). This literature then expanded to include the ways that international and transnational support has been significant in the revolutions that have overthrown autocrats, first in the "colored revolutions" of the post-Soviet states and then in the Arab spring.
The European Union has been a beacon for postcommunist states pragmatically and symbolically. Pragmatically, the European Union provided access to the world's largest single market. Symbolically, membership in the EU attests to a state's "European" status, including a bundle of positive attributions, including being "modern," "Western," and democratic. It also conveys separateness from Russia and Eurasia. This beacon is sufficiently powerful that it reverses the typical relationship between nationalism and supranational organizations: whereas nationalism in many countries correlates with antipathy to strong supranationalism, nationalists in many postcommunist countries saw EU membership as strengthening national identity (Abdelal 2001).
The perceived need to embrace reform to gain EU membership helped consolidate public opinion and motivate leaders. EU financial aid eased the pain of transition and EU technical assistance facilitated successful implementation (Vachudova 2005). The important role played by the EU elsewhere in eastern Europe helps explain why so many people, both inside and outside Ukraine, placed such high hopes on the Association Agreement that was due to be signed in Vilnius in November 2013. Closer links to the EU are sometimes viewed as a panacea, and while such views are unrealistic, an EU commitment would likely bolster the political will needed to undertake painful reforms.
This brief survey of literature on reform yields two conclusions. First, Ukraine is not immune from the conceptual chaos that characterizes the broader study of economic and political development. Second, the lack of reform in Ukraine seems in many respects to be overdetermined. The literature reviewed implies that whatever one hypothesizes to limit reform, Ukraine has it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond the Euromaidan by Henry E. Hale, Robert W. Orttung. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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