Ethnic Tensions and State Strategies: Understanding the Survival of the Ukrainian State

Abstract

Ukraine is divided by linguistic and regional cleavages, which manifest themselves in regional polarization in national elections. These divisions have led to constant questioning of the viability of the Ukrainian state, and predictions of violence and civil war. Yet secessionist movements have made few inroads, and violence has been non-existent. The state has survived, and this may hold lessons for other cases. Because the ‘minority’ group in Ukraine is actually quite large, it has immense influence in the state without resort to regional autonomy or secession. In keeping with classical liberal theory, the balance of power between Ukraine's regions and ethnic groups has ensured that neither side dominates. This does not make for rapid reform, but it has created a stable state.

Notes

1. Financial Times, 29 Nov. 2004; Radio Mayak, Moscow, 29 Nov. 2004, translated in BBC Monitoring Service, 29 Nov. 2004.

2. Dominique Arel, ‘The “Orange Revolution”: Analysis and Implication of the 2004 Presidential Elections in Ukraine’, Stasiuk–Cambridge Lecture on Contemporary Ukraine, Cambridge University, 25 Feb. 2005; and Lowell Barrington, ‘Are “Interaction Effects” More Important Than the “Regional Effect”? Reexamining Region, Ethnicity, and Language in Ukraine’, paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, 23–25 March 2006.

3. Washington Post, 25 Jan. 1994.

4. For predictions of Ukraine's collapse, see among others ‘Ukraine: The Birth and Possible Death of a Country’, The Economist, 7 May 1994; Eugene B. Rumer, ‘Letter from Eurasia: Will Ukraine Return to Russia’, Foreign Policy, No.96 (Fall 1994), pp.129–44; P. Klebnikov, ‘Tinderbox’, Forbes, 9 Sept. 1996; and F. Stephen Larabee, ‘Ukraine: Europe's Next Crises?’, Arms Control Today, Vol.24, No.6 (1994), pp.14–19.

5. Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.196.

6. For other efforts to answer this question, see Alfred Stepan, ‘Ukraine: Improbable Democratic “Nation-State” but Possible Democratic “State-Nation”’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol.24, No.4 (2005), pp.279–308; and Craig Weller, ‘Mass Attitudes and Ethnic Conflict in Ukraine’, in Taras Kuzio and Paul D'Anieri (eds.), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building in Ukraine (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp.71–102.

7. On the development (and underdevelopment) of the Ukrainian state, see Taras Kuzio, Robert Kravchuk and Paul D'Anieri (eds.), State and Institution Building in Ukraine (New York: St. Martin's, 1999).

8. Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1993), especially Ch. 5.

9. Ibid., p.127.

10. Ibid., p.128.

11. See Roman Solchanyk, Ukraine and Russia: The Post-Soviet Transition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp.163–4.

12. Lowell Barrington and Erik Herron, ‘One Ukraine Or Many? Regionalism in Ukraine and its Political Consequences’, Nationalities Papers, Vol.32, No.1 (2004), pp.53–86; Lowell W. Barrington, ‘Region, Language, and Nationality: Rethinking Support in Ukraine for Maintaining Distance From Russia’, in Kuzio and D'Anieri (eds.), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building, pp.131–46.

13. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, p.131; see also pp.135–6. See Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and The National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chaps. 1–3; Juan J. Linz, ‘State and Nation-building’, European Review, Vol.1, No.4 (1993), p.356; and Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.41.

14. Alexander J. Motyl, ‘After Empire: Competing Discourses and Interstate Conflict in Post-Imperial Eastern Europe’, in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (eds.), Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State Building (London: Routledge, 1998), p.19; Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, p.106 (original emphasis).

15. For a detailed analysis and evaluation of Ukraine's nationalizing policies, see the various chapters in Kuzio and D'Anieri (eds.), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building. For an alternative view see also T. Kuzio, ‘Nationalising States or Nation Building: A Review of the Theoretical Literature and Empirical Evidence’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol.7, Part 2 (April 2001), pp.135–54.

16. Jack Snyder makes the connection between ethnic politics and Huntington's hypothesis explicit in his ‘Reconstructing Politics amidst the Wreckage of Empire’, in B.R. Rubin and J. Snyder (eds.), Post-Soviet Political Order, pp.1–13; see also Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).

17. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, p.136.

18. Ibid., p.137.

19. Solchanyk, Ukraine and Russia, Ch.8.

20. See Andrew Wilson, Ukraine's Orange Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

21. See Paul D'Anieri, Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian–Russian Relations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), Ch.5. The economic dimension of the issue is also discussed in Janusz Bugajski, ‘Ethnic Relations and Regional Problems in Independent Ukraine’, in Sharon L. Wolchik and Voldoymyr Zviglyanich (eds.), Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp.165–82.

22. For a discussion of the concept of ‘nationalizing’ policies, see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, Ch.3. These policies and the reactions to them are chronicled in Andrew Wilson, ‘The Growing Challenge to Kyiv from the Donbas’, RFE/RL Research Report, Vol.2, No.33 (20 Aug. 1993); Dominique Arel, ‘Language Politics in Ukraine: Towards One or Two State Languages’, Nationalities Papers, Vol.23, No.3 (1995), pp.597–622; and Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), Chs.1 and 6, pp.3–16 and 129–62.

23. See Andrew Fesiak, ‘Nation Building in the Ukrainian Military’, and Jan G. Jaanmat, ‘Identity Construction and Education: The History of Ukraine in Soviet and Post-Soviet Textbooks’, in Kuzio and D'Anieri (eds.), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building, pp.147–70 and 171–90, respectively.

24. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

25. Arel, ‘Language Politics in Ukraine’; and Chinn and Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority, Ch.6, pp.129–62.

26. ‘Universal Natsional'noi Yednosti’, website of the president of Ukraine, <http://www.president.gov.ua/done_img/files/universal0308.html>., accessed 15 Aug. 2006. The ‘Universal’, as it is widely known, was essentially a joint statement by leaders of various political parties agreeing on an agenda for the parliament elected in 2006 and the government subsequently chosen. It overcame a three-month deadlock in efforts to form a coalition, but did not appear to bind the parties in any meaningful way. The term ‘universal’ refers back to the use of Universals in the independent Ukrainian state in 1917–18. Four out of five parliamentary factions signed the Universal; the Tymoshenko bloc refused to sign it.

27. Ukrainian Central Election Commission, at <http://www.cvk.gov.ua/pls/vnd2006/W6P001>.

28. See Wilson, ‘The Growing Challenge’; Arel, ‘Language Politics in Ukraine’; and Chinn and Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority, pp.129–62.

29. On this question, see Paul D'Anieri, ‘Introduction: Debating the Assumptions of State-Led Nation Building in Ukraine’, in Kuzio and D'Anieri (eds.), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building, pp.1–8.

30. Press Office of the President of Ukraine, ‘President Yushchenko Accepts Crimea Challenge’, 20 Sept. 2006 at http://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/data/1_10440.html; accessed 8 Feb. 2007.

31. Chinn and Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority, p.155.

32. The case that the development of the Ukrainian language and national consciousness is indeed important for the future of the Ukrainian state is made in Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building (London: Routledge, 1998).

33. Yanukovych and his supporter engaged in a wide array of fraudulent practices, such as coercion and bribery of voters, and multiple voting, as well as falsification of the actual vote count. These are discussed in considerable detail in Andrew Wilson, Ukraine's Orange Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

34. This point is developed at length in Paul D'Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2006), Ch.5.

35. These data are from ‘Members of Parliament Surprised Each Other and Voters’, Ukrainian Centre for Independent Political Research, 15 July 1998.

36. See Solchanyk, Ukraine and Russia, Chs.8–9.

37. See Jose Casanova, ‘Ethno-Linguistic and Religious Pluralism and Democratic Construction in Ukraine’, in Rubin and Snyder (eds.), Post-Soviet Political Order, pp.81–103.

38. Gurr, Minorities at Risk, p.322.

39. The key work in an enormous literature is Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul D'anieri

Paul D'Anieri is Associate Dean for the Humanities and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian–Russian Relations (1999) and, with Robert Kravchuk and Taras Kuzio, Politics and Society in Ukraine (1999). His latest book is Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design (2007).