Problems of post-post-communism: Ukraine after the Orange Revolution

Abstract

Although Ukrainian democracy has made some progress since the 2004 Orange Revolution, significant problems remain. This article compares the difficulties facing post-Orange Revolution Ukraine to those encountered in East Central Europe in the early 1990s and maintains that Ukraine will have a harder time overcoming its challenges because its starting point and inheritances are different. That is, Ukrainian democracy must overcome many of the infirmities created during its initial decade of post-communism, and that these make establishing effective democratic governance in today's post-post-communist period arduous. Among the difficulties are designing effective institutions, managing the post-Orange Revolution coalition, removing entrenched corruption and weak respect for the rule of law, and coping with a less hospitable external environment. Events since the Orange Revolution bear out the argument that the events of 2004, while getting rid of a leadership with dubious democratic credentials, are merely the beginning of a process to bring a successful democratic government to Ukraine.

Keywords:

• Ukraine
• post-communism
• democratization
• Orange Revolution
• rule of law

Notes

Yushchenko, ‘Our Ukraine’.

Freedom House, ‘Public Views’. In April 2004, 55.7% of respondents thought the country was moving in the wrong direction.

Kyiv Post, 4 September 2008.

The seminal source for this idea is Levitsky and Way, ‘The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism’.

The most obvious comparison would be with the Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’ or the Kyrgyz ‘Tulip Revolution,’ but one could also apply arguments of this sort to Serbia after Milosevic.

Bunce, Subversive Institutions; King, ‘Post-Postcommunism’.

Bunce, ‘Rethinking Recent Democratization,’ 167–92.

Dahrendorf, Reflections.

The Polish case comes closer to a semi-presidential system, but even in this case the Sejm (parliament) – and the prime minister – are arguably the more important political actors.

Fish, ‘Stronger Legislatures’, 5–20.

Ibid. This scale, based upon responses by country experts, reflects whether each of the parliaments in these states have the 32 attributes (e.g. does the legislature have authority to appoint the prime minister, does it control its own internal funding, are its members immune from arrest, etc.).

Frye, ‘A Politics of Institutional Choice’, 523–52. Poland's score (13) was the highest in East-Central Europe, and it also was the country that had the greatest amount of political instability due to struggles between the presidency and the legislature. This scale measures the extent of presidential power along a set of 27 indicators (e.g. appoints ministers, appoints judges, calls elections), with a score of 0 (lacks power), 1 (has sole power), or .5 (shares that power with parliament). The maximum possible score is 27.

D'Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics, 205.

D'Anieri, ‘What Has Changed’, 82–91.

Pora (‘It's time’) and Znayu (‘I know’) were pro-democratic organizations, led primarily by university students, which had formed prior to 2004 and took the lead in organizing many of the demonstrations during the Orange Revolution.

Tymoshenko had served in the 1990s as a deputy prime minister in charge of the energy sector and was accused of overseeing corrupt deals that personally enriched her. By the end of the 1990s, however, she became a critic of the Kuchma administration and was briefly jailed. Accusations of corruption were gradually forgotten as she became a leader of the anti-Kuchma opposition.

Ukrainska pravda, 8 September 2005.

James Sherr, in Defence Express (Kyiv), 6 September 2005.

Freedom House, ‘Public Views’.

Karklins, The System Made Me Do It.

This put Ukraine lower than such notorious corrupt locales such as Yemen, Zimbabwe, and the Palestinian Authority. See www.transparency.org/publications/annual_report.

Darden, ‘Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination’, 67–71.

Diuk and Gongadze, ‘Post-Election Blues’.

Walsh, ‘Son Cashes in on Orange Revolution’.

Ryabchuk, ‘Mrs Simpson's Cherished Gun’.

Hoshovsurka, ‘How to Stop’.

Paskhaver and Verkhovodova, ‘Privatization Before and After’.

Applebaum, ‘Poison and Power’.

Wilson, ‘Virtual Politics’.

Paskhaver and Verkhovodova, ‘Privatization Before and After’.

Way, ‘Kuchma's Failed Authoritarianism’, 131–45.

As one example, see Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism.

Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past.

Sherr, ‘The School of Defeat’.

The classic sources are O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, and Przeworski, Democracy and the Market.

‘Ukrainian President Turns to a Rival’, Washington Post, 23 September 2005, A15.

Bunce, ‘Rethinking Recent Democratization’.

Smolanky and Menon, ‘Orange Revolution Turns to Rot’.

Lavelle, ‘Ukraine's “Post-Orange” Order’.

This steel mill, Ukraine's largest, was sold in 2004 to a consortium led by Kuchma's son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, for $800 million, well below that of other bidders. It was re-auctioned in October 2005, despite parliamentary opposition, and sold to Mittal Steel of the Netherlands for $4.8 billion, more than all other previous privatizations in Ukraine combined.

Sherr, ‘The School of Defeat’.

Kubicek, The European Union and Democratization.

Kuzio, ‘Is Ukraine Part of Europe's Future’.

Ibid.

Zerkalo nedlei (Kyiv), 27 August–2 September 2005.

Tocci, ‘The European Neighbourhood Policy’.

NATO leaders refused to change their positions with respect to Ukraine and Georgia in fall 2008, as many worried about complicating relations with Russia. See report, for example, by Agence France-Press, ‘Too Soon for Georgia, Ukraine to Get NATO Entry Plan’, 2 October 2008.

Regionalism is a prominent theme in many studies of Ukrainian politics, although many argued that the Orange Revolution altered some of the ‘boundaries’ of Ukrainian regional politics. For more on regionalism in Ukraine, see Kubicek, ‘Regional Polarisation in Ukraine’, 273–94, and Barrington and Herron, ‘One Ukraine or Many?’, 53–86.

This is not to say that everything in East Central Europe has been easy. One could point to the troubles forming a coalition government in the Czech Republic in 2006–2007, and the falsification of economic forecasts to help the Socialists get elected in Hungary in 2006. The point of comparison, however, is contemporary Ukraine with the initial post-communist period in East Central Europe.

The Economist, 29 May 2008.

Ryabchuk, ‘Is Ukraine a “Feckless Democracy”?’.

Carothers, ‘The End of the Transition Paradigm’, 5–21.