Ye. Bystrytsky. Theoretical Foundations of Understanding Postcommunism; Nationalism and the Legitimisation of Postcommunist Regimes;
The Socio-political Characteristics of Postcommunist Mass Media; Cultural-Political Models of Social Development. —
In book: The Political Analysis of Postcommunism. Kyiv, "Political Thought", 1995, P. 15-37; 51-66; 78-81; 126-130.
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Yevhen BYSTRYTSKY
The Political Analysis of Postcommunism
Kyiv, "Political Thought", 1995
Section 1. Chapter 1. §§1-5.
Periods of considerable social and political changes are always accompanied (preceded or crowned) by transformations in the political philosophy of society. By the latter one should understand not only such by-products of rationalization in the guise of numerous social theories and scholarly constructs but also those forms of mass experience and popular self-understanding on which are based the legitimacy of the whole bulk of collective existence, the recognition of social institutions, and expectations of certain social and political reforms and events. It is at first obvious that in the everyday practice of relationships and attitudes toward oneself, truly tectonic — latent, invisible — changes in the course of history are stored up and at certain historical junctures suddenly surface and erupt onto the political landscape as cataclysms — revolutionary transformations of society, which then have to be recorded, theoretically understood, and explained.
Initial steps toward attaining mass understanding and public discussion — attempts to create the social conditions for awakening the individual (Gorbachev-era glasnost against the background of the so-called Brezhnev "period of stagnation") — were no doubt, indicators of the social and economic crisis of the "communist project," which were only the first signs of coming profound and radical changes. The demolition of the Berlin Wall and the "wall of silence" around the little man of the "great" Soviet people resulted in the public articulation of all the latent individual and collective moods, desires, wills, and expectations which constituted the basis of the social legitimation of the previous political system, political order, and political institutions. This is why the changes that have occurred in this period in the language, public discourse, and mass media constitute a watershed and the institutional consolidation of essential transformations in society’s political sphere as a whole.
People’s awareness of their national/ethnic and cultural identity has assumed great significance in altering the system of political legitimation in the postcommunist period. Political philosophy and the practice of legitimizing postcommunist authority are indissolubly linked with unflagging attention to problems of ethnic identification, national culture, and nationalism.
Society’s "idiosyncrasy" of Soviet Bolshevik ideology and, at the same time, to the political theory of classical Marxism freed up the intellectual sphere, which was then flooded by hasty and foolish revisions of the old political textbooks on scientific communism and historical materialism, by "theoretical" quests for a "particular" ethnospecific "third road" to the future, or by the unsystematic and superficial borrowing of terms from the vocabulary of Western political philosophy like "democracy", "parliamentary system", "rule of law", "law-governed state", "civil society", etc.). All this points to the need for a radically different approach to and understanding of the postcommunist experience.
The essence of this chapter resides in the analysis of the conceptual and theoretical foundations for understanding postcommunist political realities, the ethnic and cultural factors shaping the current regimes, and a critical assessment of the verbal modes of political discourse in the postcommunist period.
Theoretical Foundations for Understanding Postcommunism
§1. The Concept of Postcommunism
Beginning with the Modern period and that of the so-called bourgeois revolutions, the awareness of historically decisive discrepancies between the conscious, i.e., rationally goal-oriented socially significant acts and actions of individuals (as "rational beings") and the unforeseen consequences of their common collective life (as "political animals") in time led to the formulation of the classical or the Modern type of socio-political theory and political philosophy in general. Its distinctive peculiarity (already laid down by the Modern period in the socio-political genesis of political science) lay in the fact that political theory, from its very inception, was designed to accomplish a dual task: first, to lay bare the rational structure, an essence or general law, of the motive forces of society and of its cataclysms and, second, to construct such a system of political knowledge and ideas (ideology), on the basis of which the collective forms of human life could acquire purposefulness and rational predictability. It is precisely in the political theory of the philosophers of that era that the motto, "knowledge is power," which dates from that time, reveals its true meaning as a total will to power in the form of a projected domination over reality based on rational control over the latter.
A system of universal, world-view certainties, of general assumptions, "foremeanings" or "prejudices" (H.G. Gadamer) arose, on the basis of which all further empirical judgments about the structure of the world as a whole and especially on the law-governed nature of social life, the factors affecting its development, and the possibility of comprehending it scientifically. We call such a system of assumptions (interpretative framework) the project of the Modern, which characterizes the possibilities of historical development in a dialectical spirit. The issue is primarily one of understanding history as progress in human self-understanding, of the idea of emancipation through progress of the Mind, science (or social action led by scientific knowledge as in Marxism), and also of the attainment by such means of maximal material and spiritual welfare.1 This ideological foundation (beginning with Spinoza, Hobbs, the Enlightenment philosophers up to and including Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spencer, and so forth) makes up the basis of political thought, the political ontology of the project of the Modern. Its collapse is experienced by the postcommunist political being as the destruction, first of all, of the ideology and theory of a rationally understandable (scientifically-planned) organization of "politics" in the broadest sense.
The period following the break-up of the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc, following the collapse of the communist system as a whole, is linked by contemporary social and political thinkers to the termination of a certain historical epoch. Both its content and the plurality of new social, geopolitical, economic, cultural and existential realities which have emerged and are emerging before our eyes, replacing the simple bipolar macropolitical concept of confrontation between two world systems — "communism" and "capitalism" — are currently the focus of political studies, ideas, and projections. The global nature of these transformations, which touch the political life of virtually the whole world and entail tangible changes in peoples’ ways of life in the former socialist countries and far beyond, gives every reason to view our time as the postcommunist era in world history.
Unlike those political scientists who treat postcommunism as a spontaneously coined and vague term applied for the sake of more convenient description of tumultuous current developments in the so-called postcommunist states, our journal endows the concepts of postcommunism and postcommunist era with universal theoretical content, promising methodological value, and great heuristic potential.
To begin with, its semantics reflect the feeling of a certain cultural epoch coming to an end, which is today universal. Beginning, if not with Nietzsche and Heidegger, then — more distinctly with Guardini, Lyotard, Derridas, Eco and other modern philosophers, this feeling was expressed in common images of the end of morality, metaphysics, ideology, of the end of new times, and in its generalized form it got fixed in the socio-humanitarian thought in the image of the universally known today "post-modern." In our opinion, historian and political scientist Francis Fukuyama resorted to a typically post-modern image of the end of history, indicating an intrinsic connection between the notions of the post-modern and postcommunism.
Unlike the post-modern, however, postcommunism has explicit enough sociopolitical content. Proceeding from the historical fact of the end of the communist system, it also points to the termination of a great all-European epoch marked by a certain political ideology and methodology of political thought, which evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concurrently with Utopian and the Enlightenment belief in the possibility of a rationally organized society based on scientific planning and total control. With the collapse of communism, whose ideology and content were oriented toward a maximal imposition of these classical foundation of West European ontology on reality, albeit through police and state coercion, torture and violence, the inadequacy of classical political thought also comes to light. The postcommunist era calls for qualitatively new, non-classical attitudes for its scientific and theoretical substantiation and potential political prognostication and management.
In terms of political theory, alongside the notion of a postcommunist era we encounter a different type of political thinking which Mikhail Gorbachev, unwilling to part with the communist epoch, traditionally dubbed "new thinking." All the subsequent events of communism’s overall debacle proved, however, that no renovation of the old political model and established patterns of political thought could bring us closer to a true picture of current political changes and transformations.
Thus, secondly, the concept of a postcommunist era does not reflect some "new" state of the "old" society, "modernized" or "renovated" according to various previously known types of scientific and political prescriptions. It reflects — and this is especially noteworthy — our time as a still obscure, theoretically unexplained epoch in world development as a whole and not just of "postcommunist" civilization. This means, for example, that the classical linear scheme of explaining the contemporary stage in postcommunist society in customary terms of historical "succession," "progress," or "regression," indicating forward or backward motion, is, to say the least, insufficient. Attempts to explain postcommunism through comparison to either the so-called period of primary capital accumulation, or to modernization similar to post-war reconstruction in Western states, always miss the target in real life. The postcommunist era requires new explanations, methodological approaches, and analytical tools. Here post-modern philosophy and post-classical social thought can be of great help. Today’s political and geopolitical map of the world seems closer to a pluralistic discourse, an interaction between different cultures and civilizations with equally worthy historical gains, which is relied upon by present-day research in the humanities, than to the classical idea of rationally realized advance by all nations toward a single perfect society.
Likewise, it is hardly possible to account for the current upsurge of nationalism, and the formation of new nation-states by mere reference to Romanticism as the classical ideology of the nineteenth century national movements. In all these instances we have to deal not merely with novelty nor with what could be called "the everyday modern," but with historically unprecedented sociopolitical phenomena.
Hence, thirdly, the concept of postcommunism implies the accumulation of special political experience, whose historical analogues — if any — are hard to find. And the experience we are going through here, in the focus of postcommunist life, is the most vital and the most indicative for contemporary political thought. Four or five years of postcommunism have vividly demonstrated that there are certain trends and certain political practice inherent in it, which, in fact, cannot yet be scientifically and theoretically interpreted because of a lack of relevant forms and standards. The first step in this direction is understanding the basic methods for analyzing the postcommunist experience.
§2. The Starting Point for a Political Philosophy of Postcommunism
Today, it is common knowledge among political theorists that, along with the epoch-making changes of 1989 and 1991, an urgent need has arisen to examine anew the fundamental premises, notions, and theories of modern political science as well as the latter’s attempts to define the nature and proper forms of political life.2 Moreover, there is every reason to argue that the problem lies not only in changing a professionally delineated social idea, political science, but also in a global change in the ideational reference points and methods of organizing present-day philosophical thought in general, which, not by accident, coincide in time with the "postcommunist revolutions" in Central and Eastern Europe. Politics, law, the state, and ethics comprise the institutions of the shared life of those we now place under philosophical scrutiny.
These discernible shifts in defining the central subject-matter of philosophical thought are of the same fundamental importance as the orientation of philosophy, beginning with the Modern period, toward the norms and ideals of rigorous cognitive style, canons, and rules in the explanation of Nature, elaborated in mathematical experimental study of natural history as well as in the field of the social sciences (Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbs). Recall that Marx and Engels undertook to develop "scientific communism" and "the materialistic (scientific) understanding of history" precisely because, in their typically Modern approach, accounts of social phenomena had to have objective certainty equal to that of the explanations of Nature provided by the natural sciences. Based on quite different premises, this century’s logical positivism cultivated this same approach in the scientific explanation of social phenomena.
The current attention to politics in the widest sense of the term (as a universal mode of organizing social life, dating as far back as the ancient polis) holds fundamental significance for philosophical thought. The transfer of politics to the center of attention in the social sciences is equal to the discovery of the volitional basis of various forms of human self-identification in the world, made by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the basis of the nineteenth century Romantic revolution in culture (the arts, music, and world view in general) and in direct relation to the national-liberation movements of the 1848 Springtime of Peoples in Europe and national awakenings. The turning of contemporary thought to political life is no less important than Husserl’s discovery of the crucial significance of everyday experience, the world of life (Lebenswelt), for the human understanding of all — notably social — phenomena, which produced offshoots in phenomenological sociology (A. Schütz, and in the 1960s and 1970s also M. Silverman, D. Phillipson, and others). The current "discovery" of politics is methodologically no less important than the formulation of the principles of the hermeneutic understanding of cultural phenomena (Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer) that proceeded from the recognition of a peculiar humanitarian method of cognition in the field of historical and philological sciences or the so-called Geisteswissenschaften or moral sciences. The postcommunist transformations of society and natural process of a broad complex of political issues coming to the forefront of intellectual life vividly demonstrate that political philosophy assumes the role of a fundamental paradigm for defining the ideational reference points for theoretical thinking in general and of social cognition, in particular.3 However, the postcommunist thematization of political life (and possibly today’s focusing of philosophical thought on political matters in general) cannot be accounted for by a simple borrowing or application of explanatory patterns elaborated by the previously mentioned precursors, to say nothing of the inertia of old habits of the simplistic interpreting of political problems in terms of the old "class analysis." The very situation of postcommunism is a visible result of those invisible socio-cultural changes in society which are difficult or practically impossible to describe using the formulae of classical sociopolitical theories.
For all the complexity of these problems, one thing remains rather obvious and beyond doubt. Postcommunist transformations point, first and foremost, to changes in the very foundation of identity and social coherence4 of political agglomerations, communities, and the nature of the political interconnection of people. The place of the monistic system of identification, universal in its criteria of affiliation (with "a single socioeconomic formation" — "socialism, real socialism, the communist camp," "fraternal multinational family of the peoples," "socialist camp," etc.) of the system of identification and the political regime, totally leveling and egalitarian in its socio-economic and legal aspects ("socialist equality of people," so-called "free" medical care, education, housing, etc., "socialist legality") has been appropriated by a new social aggregate. This can be adequately accounted for in terms of the non-Modern world view.
On the one hand, this was a collapse, the disintegration of a large system of political identification and cohesiveness (the Soviet Union, the socialist camp, the communist world view and ideology) or, in the words of Jean-François Lyotard, with the delegitimation of “great narratives of speculation and emancipation.”5 This ruining takes place side by side with the destruction of reality and, at the same time, the illusion of existence of a simple homogeneous social whole based on liberty, equality and fraternity, simplistically interpreted in Bolshevik practice. On the other hand, this was a manifestation of new political communities, which emerged on the territory of the former USSR; the newly-independent postcommunist states, whose integrity, cohesiveness, and identity, along with problems of self-identification and self-determination, also require essentially non-classical (i.e., non-Modern) methods of description and cognition, as do the definitions of their political, geopolitical and world economic relations in the changing interaction of present-day nations, cultures, and civilizations.
§3. The Inadequacy of Traditional Philosophical and Methodological Approaches
The non-Modern character of the political analysis of postcommunism does not imply only some self-sufficient terminological revolution, radical change in the traditional logic of theoretical description, or turning to some hitherto unknown methods of political studies. The postcommunist situation indicates a single but dramatic alteration in the world political map and that only a new constellation of already extant philosophico-methodological approaches can adequately describe postcommunist political experience. Due to the very manner of its "pluralistic" accumulation and existence, it cannot be reduced to a monistic universal pattern of explanation.
But such a constant gravitation toward the peculiar "methodological solipsism" of a single approach can be frequently found in current political science literature in both the East and West. Thus, the term postcommunism is often used as a simple designation of the transition period from the previous Soviet communist society (political regime) to what is assumed to be the normal democratic way of organizing society. The concept is thereby denied independent, positive meaning. Postcommunism becomes, so to speak, only a transitional amorphous designation of the road from one definite social system (communism) to some other definite social system of contemporary developed societies.
On the other hand, it is thought that postcommunism is simply an accidental mutation of communist society, an unsuccessful, subjective, and thus accidental experience of the ruin of an in principle viable, if somewhat incomplete, socioeconomic system (Alexander Zinoviev). Such views are justifiable insofar as they make it possible to critically examine the postcommunist world as a whole, i.e., to comprehend that, first, "communism" may lay claim to undoubted historical achievements and merits; second, that an ultraradical critique of its social heritage is, in many cases, of a pathological and self-destructive nature; and, third, that modern forms of the liberal-democratic social system in the so-called developed Western countries have their own rather basic social shortcomings, which render the uncritical idealization of that system dangerous both from a political and political science perspective.
In the final analysis, such an approach is not justified. The situation and understanding of postcommunism has to be accepted not simply as a designation of the transition period of post-Soviet societies. Postcommunism is the general situation (and understanding) of the transition from one epoch of political organization of social life to another, post-Modern time in the understanding of society and its political practice. Postcommunism can be understood only within the context of universal changes in political world view, which are accompanied by the delegitimation of classical political ideals and possibilities on the one hand and by the search for non-Modern explanations and cognitive methods on the other. Those, who see in the notion of postcommunism only an apt term to describe social deformations, merely attempt to critically assess the present transformations from the perspective of traditional ideas of a perfect — be it communist or (Western) democratic — society. They are guided by a characteristic Enlightenment bias: if reality fails to conform to the ideal, so much the worse for reality itself. Continuing this classical perspective of thinking in one form or another serves only to spiritually nourish resuscitated communists and a certain segment of the socialists in the postcommunist states.
The inertia of what might be called "the Modern project" is also seen in those newly minted upstart postcommunist politicians who orient themselves to the postcommunist political expediency and try to find an instant, ready-made substitute for a discredited and thus uncompetitive Marxism in some other political theory/ideology, which may differ in its content but remains typically totalitarian. Such a re-ideologization is already taking place in many postcommunist states, most notably exemplified by radical nationalist movements and parties.
The attraction of classical explanatory models has real basis. A major factor here, in addition to simple habit, is the retention of the old forms of political and economic life within the process of postcommunist social transformation. So long as whole series of ways of viewing economics, morality, law, and the world which characterized the old social forms of identification and popular self-understanding is preserved within society, a postcommunist self-determination of the new reality will continue to exist mainly because the manner in which "communism" is criticized is one which can be described as postcommunist nihilism.
Postcommunist freedom is freedom in the specific sense of being emancipated from the old in the absence of adequately defined new social ideals and regulative ideas. This is why attempts to maintain stability in the postcommunist period rely mainly on the stability of intermediary, transitory, and in general situationally accidental forms and norms of social life along with their characteristic complement of situational leaders, instant politicians, and self-consecrated political scientists as well as numerous myths, social simulacra and stereotypes, criminal business, and adventurist capital.
The so-called postcommunist revolution is essentially different from its precursors, the revolution of 1917 or the bourgeois revolutions of the more remote past. Its basic aimless drifting is usually hidden under scathing assessments of the communist past, served up by the political discourse, mass media, language, and literature of the glasnost period. But this postcommunist nihilism cannot in any sense be called radical. Meanwhile, behind the radical facade of words and slogans which constitute the backdrop of public political posturing and struggle, leaders well versed in the habits and devices of the old communist nomenklatura suddenly pop up. The taste of this postcommunist "old-new" nomenklatura for administrative and command methods of governance and management is merely augmented by the concentration of power and property in its hands, thus generating what could be called a "local quasi-totalitarianism," based on decrees and orders, the manipulation of huge amounts of state money, and on spontaneous political and economic reflexes, both domestically and in international affairs. All this creates preconditions for the reproduction under postcommunism of what seem to be time-worn methodological patterns, now at a theoretical level of understanding.
One such echo of the past has its origins in the classical voluntarism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under postcommunist ambivalence, changes in the basis of social identity result in quests for an ultimate grounding (Letztbegrundung), the function of which is assumed by "ethno-national identity." To a greater or lesser extent, orientations toward various forms of ethnic or national unity can be observed in the postcommunist period throughout East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, the symbol of which might be the figure of Yeltsin on a tank under the Russian tricolor. In Ukraine, quests for a new national identity and social cohesiveness sometimes reproduce the ideology of the classical Ukrainian integral nationalism created by Mykola Mikhnovsky and Dmytro Dontsov, which affirm its traditional ideas of power as the will of the whole nation for the clan (ethnoculturally) based self-realization of the state. A rather archaic portrait of postcommunist society is thus cast in the traditional notions of the integrity of the will of the nation, its clan (ethnic) identity, and the unity of its political action under the slogan of a single "national idea."
§4. The Postcommunist Experience: In Search of a Methodology
The current almost universal political use of the ideological store of classical voluntarism masks an extremely important transformation of nationalism under postcommunism. The self-evident peculiarity of postcommunist nationalism is that here nationalism, which has come to serve as a basis for the postcommunist identity of large human communities and a prime factor of their legitimation as independent nations on the territory of the former USSR, turned out to be "non-classical." From the start, today’s nationalism has failed to conform to its Modern philosophical origins and to the way radical nationalist movements and parties would like to interpret and have it. In the first place, national identity was perceived not from the perspective of total force on the part of the general clan will but as the free and common expression of will for self-affirmation by communities different in their ethnic or national aspirations.
The main trend of the postcommunist transformation of society, cast primarily in the idea of emancipation from totalitarianism, gave rise to a regional cultural pluralization of society. Postcommunist nationalism offered an ideological basis for the recognition of a plurality of communities identified on a cultural-regional and ethnocultural basis within the borders of one postcommunist country (in Ukraine, it is the West, the East, the South, and the Crimea), i.e., offered ideological weapons for the confrontation of many political wills (identities) for self-affirmation.
Traditional interaction of various sociocultural worlds — "forms of life" (sometimes meaning different civilizations) — was accounted for by means of a methodology which was elaborated within the framework of the cognitive and ideological quests of philosophical hermeneutics (Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, etc.). In the final analysis, the theoretical problem of interpersonal unity and collective identity, or in specific philosophical terms, reaching intersubjective understanding, according to the hermeneutic approach, has a solution, though not an "absolute" one. Confrontations of language, symbols, and various systems of values and norms are in principle resolved by this approach even if only by means of, say, mental conflicts but in the process of interpretation of "alien" values from other cultures. A basis for their possible merger may lie in the field of the senses: a peculiar international conference in an ideal palace built up of various moral meanings, theoretical methods (translation and Verstehen, understanding), intuitive-emotive methods (empathy) of mutual confrontation, and the dialectical reconciliation of various interpretations.
However, postcommunist experiences of murderous interethnic and international wars and terrible ethnic massacres (suffice it to recall ex-Yugoslavia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Chechnia) make it evident that it is no longer so much the matter of collision, or a "conflict of interpretations" (P. Ricoeur). Hidden behind the political decisions and military actions of the postcommunist period is, in the words of H.G. Wells, a real "war of the worlds" or a conflict of political ontologies. What methodological premises can be used to account for this theoretically? In what direction should one look for possible political solutions to these murderous confrontations, which find their blind inspiration in definitely non-classical nationalist concepts? They are non-classical and non-Modern because the question is one of "local narratives," local — ethnic and national — systems of identification and coherence, though even in this version, confined by the borders of one’s own "historical territory," totalitarian patterns of political thought and action are constantly reproduced. Under the circumstances, rationally argumented communication and the elaboration of traditions of open political discourse become essential to the positive evolution of the political process.
Alongside a massive socio-psychological motive for postcommunist transformations, the desire to create a life patterned on that of the developed nations of Western Europe, there is also an important motive for quests in our own Ukrainian juridical, political, ethical, and nation-making traditions. Importantly, the search is now underway for possible models, offshoots, or correlates of West European democracy (civil society and law-governed state) and norms of civilized and well-regulated social existence. That is why the tradition of West European social philosophy (from Hobbs, Burke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel to Apel, Habermas, Rawles, and others) is one significant ideological source in the situation of postcommunist ambivalence. Moreover, this tradition makes it possible to define more clearly the requisite regulative ideas of social transformations — desired perspectives of a possible way of development, and already at present to critically analyze the emergence of a postcommunist political discourse and a new communicative community with their specific features. Along with assimilation of this philosophical and ideological tradition (which formed during the historical practice of establishing the modern types of developed Western democratic societies), the political analysis of postcommunism acquires conceptual tools to research a wide range of juridical and ethical problems, such as (communicative) ethics of international and interethnic relations, interrelations of law, politics and morals, ethics of responsibility, new global ecological order, etc.
Even the first contrast of philosophico-sociological images produced by current communicative philosophy reveals, so to speak, an incomplete conformity between the political ontology it delineates (i.e., the ultimate basis of people’s political interaction — the universal rules, norms, and values on which political discourse rests) and the political reality of postcommunism. Postcommunist political discourse cannot be reduced, without seriously damaging theory, only to the surface layer of people’s political interaction, i.e., to their political relations, with their rather definite features of regularity, standardization, and communicative rationality, in general. The experience of the political game which has accompanied the process of the East European countries’ gaining independence over the past several years and the struggle of various political parties for their place in society — all these and other postcommunist political realities point to this tentative conclusion.
The point is that it is quite insufficient to understand by political relations only those communicative acts which are subject to legal and ethical norms, the norms and values of so-called "political culture." Incidentally, the topic of political culture has become rather pathologically popular with postcommunist political scientists as the least dangerous range of sentimental considerations about how "authentically" ideal politicians and statesmen should act and what they should know. But they have remained the same as ever. It is precisely their political behavior, acts, and actions, as well as their mass recognition as the powers that be by voters, that point to the existence of extrarational cultural-historical feelings, existential attitudes, collective "silent" political wills and resolve of rallying mobs, which are not argued for in political discourse but have only the quality of presuppositions.
Postcommunist literature abounds in leitmotifs of quests for cultural-historical "archetypes" of political organization of this or that nationality, people, or community, when, for example, direct historical parallels are drawn between "Tsar Boris" Godunov and "incumbent Tsar Boris" Yeltsin, or when the "principles of democracy always inherent" in Ukrainians are sought in the heroic myth of the Zaporizhian Cossacks. These perhaps naive examples (simplified by the mass media) of perception of a certain extrarationality of political life testify to the urgency of taking into account and analyzing theoretically the existential-volitional aspects of political discourse and human communication in general. In this sense, it is not only the matter of rational "a priori of communication" (K.-O. Apel) or formation of norms of discursive practice but also a peculiar "a priori of will" which can be discerned, for example, in the nationalist movements in the postcommunist states. Therefore, combining the experience of theoretical political science and philosophical analyses of the rational organization of the present-day polis with the post-Modern experience of the existential-volitional making of a pluralistic society and its most up-to-date "assembly" on new principles, thus far very little known, is a promising line of research in the political analysis of postcommunism.
The prospects for institutionalizing argumentative discourse in the postcommunist world are dependent on the level of social rationality. First of all, the issue is one of rationality of political action in all the major directions of the postcommunist transformation of society. This is why it is very important for the scholarly political analysis of the postcommunist period to maximally lay bare the "secondary" ideological accretions, neo-Romantic reproductions of old socio-political myths, numerous new illusions, political day-dreaming, primitive slogans, and ideas which just do not make sense. But it is precisely these that largely serve the postcommunist individual as substitutes for stable forms of life and world view in the critical conditions of social (and ideational) ambiguity. And this is precisely the reason that they are transformed into countless simulacra.
Postcommunist simulacra, i.e., the artificial reality generated by a mass media emancipated from state censorship, have been widely circulated by television, the press, and literary publications since the time of perestroika and glasnost. This is the ideational and existential reality people live in and are nourished by. It is practically inaccessible because there are no objective criteria for discerning truth from falsehood in it and actual reality from its interpretations imposed by television, radio, and the press. Simulacra are even more actively structuring today’s political discourse. These are charismas of apparently not the best (in both the political and human sense) first presidents of newly independent states. Among them one can also mention images of "democracy," "entrepreneurship," "privatization," "talented young economists" and "old experienced managers," "honest parliamentarians" (the list reaches practically to infinity), which create a new postcommunist political and semantic reality. The rate of their efficiency is directly dependent on the level of population’s political naïveté (a legacy from the time of the Communist Party’s Diktat), and simultaneously on the degree of popular alienation from the ruling elites. Their fanciful, fantastic nature and falsehood is demonstrated by time and the natural historical course of events. Given this, the political thought of postcommunism may be fruitful in a positive sense, provided it embraces critical analysis, is based on the recognized methodology of analytical philosophy (with its methods of clarification and explication of the language and discourse of postcommunism), and studies the new logic of myth concocted by postcommunist mass media and the mass consciousness molded by them.
Political developments in the postcommunist states and political experiences of postcommunist reforms cannot be adequately understood unless they are considered in a world context, from the broad perspective of radical socio-cultural changes, reflected in the combination of the notions of postcommunism and the postmodern. Moreover, any other approach will inevitably result in reproducing outdated theoretical concepts in a new socio-political situation, thereby giving rise to dogmatism and phantoms.
§5. How Can We Construct a Political Theory of Postcommunism?
Rejecting classical explanatory principles and schemata raises the question of the feasibility of constructing a system of political knowledge and elaborating a coherent political theory capable of generalizing the experience of postcommunist life. From this standpoint the concepts of post-classicism and the postmodern in general are called into question by considerations of systemicity, integrity, and homogeneity, and this renders dubious any attempt to resort to available methods of socio-political research and the very notion of method as a familiar way of acquiring certain knowledge, which is a fundamental principle of Modern thought.
The principal conclusion regarding the situation under postcommunism is that current political thought is intertwined with everyday social practice. And the issue here is not merely one of the extremely politicized character of mass consciousness. The point is that a theory of postcommunism can no longer, as classical socio-political thought attempted, remain separate from politics, from the practices of the struggle for and exercise of power, i.e., as a discrete, ideal system of thoughts and political abstractions. Along with postcommunist ambivalence, we face a situation where political thought works to define possible norms and establish rules of what is still to be created but only as something already established, to use the words of Lyotard. Viewed in this way, the postcommunist practice of political theory is absolutely performative, i.e., it is an exercise in the political discourse of instituting. Using all available methods, political thought analyzes possible models of social development — under the conditions of what we called postcommunist ambivalence — and by so doing it becomes enmeshed in the texture of political events.
In modern social science, the notions of performative sentence and performative act are widely used to analyze situations when speech acts perform social acts and institute certain social facts. To take an example, an utterance of a political leader about the indispensability of some social change may very often institute this change, which was observed in the Gorbachev period: his affirmation of "glasnost" was, at the same time, a sort of institutionalization of the freedom of speech and, hence, institutionalization of a different type of discourse. The idea of a performative as an act of legal and political institutionalization was developed by Derridas in his analysis of the American Declaration of Independence. By the very fact of its adoption by "representatives of the United States of America who convened at the General Congress," the Declaration "contains two simultaneous discursive modalities — description and injunction (to be guided by this document — author’s note), fact and law."6 Note that postcommunism, unlike the lasting institutionalized tradition of American democracy, is nothing other than a period of various types and forms of the institutionalization of social institutions and structures which differ in their forms and functions. But no one can be certain of their future durability.
Just as form and context, objective description and intention, positive information and the act of institutionalization are merged in performative sentences, so too does the political theory of postcommunism coincide with institutionalization — but with an institutionalization of civilized forms of socio-political life, rather than an institutionalization of "novelty" in the Modern sense, leaving a gray area for some freedom of the individual who has left behind the world of absolute political nonambiguity in the communist past.
We use the notion of institutionalization, not coming into being. Its traditional understanding as "emergence" or "coming into being" is fraught with the danger of interpreting it in the classical Hegelian-Marxist sense of a linear interconnected succession of events or as the idea of steady historical progress in the political situation of postcommunism.
The fact that discourse of institutionalization is gaining wide currency among present-day politicians determines by itself the intellectual attitude, the logic of direction or non-traditional methodology of postcommunist political thought. The latter is beginning to formulate and become aware of the specific problems stemming from the contradictions observed between what is proclaimed by postcommunist politicians (the new regime) on the one hand, and their political action and the actual results of postcommunist social transformation, on the other; between the meaning of slogans, declarations, speeches, programs, and normative documents, on the one hand, and their actual (conscious or unconscious) intent, their political will and their orientations (derived from the character of political actions), on the other.
From the total lack of understanding and failure to grasp this fact of a lack of correspondence between the laying of political plans and the real outcome of political events, and the failure to accomplish seemingly the best of ideas, flows the real hallmark of the postcommunist period as such. Thus, the involved political project to reform the USSR (the "New Union Treaty") constituted the axis of Gorbachev’s final actions.7 But beyond the tragedy of this King Lear of communism and those around him, one ought to see the birth of a new era in the mirror of which moral recriminations and value judgments in the place of real understanding bespeak, at best, political naïveté.
Characteristically, the postcommunist epoch manifests not only a striking gap between ideology and reality, social theory and practice, which can be observed in all totalitarian educational political programs of the past, especially under "communism." The political discourse of institutionalization is essentially different in that it is characteristic for this kind of discourse to display a constant practical gap between ideal political intentions and the forms (plus results) of their realization. "They wanted to the best thing possible, but it turned out just like always!" — this maxim, uttered by a well-known Russian politician, can be used as an epigraph to the postcommunist discourse of institutionalization. Its Ukrainian version, presented to the world by our former President, "We have what we have," reads like a direct statement of independence (even from those who act) from the political "logic of intentions" — concealed or unconscious political volitional motives and, respectively, outcomes of their realization unexpected by the political game players themselves — from "the logic of knowledge," allegedly well-thought out political programs, substantiated methods of Parliamentary discussions and decisions made as a result of heated debates, etc.
In all these cases of the realization of the postcommunist discourse of institutionalization, we are dealing with a permanent performative contradiction of failing to realize what is instituted by the political discourse itself in a political action. This everlasting political ambivalence and ambiguity at all levels of social life is indeed the most significant impetus to postcommunist political thought.
This is where the peculiar nature of the theoretical thrust of the political study of postcommunism takes its origin. First and foremost, it is the question of the need for continuous explanation and clarification of the political practice of postcommunist transformation.
* * *
In the transition period of postcommunist ambivalence, there are quite logical and natural ideological, philosophical, political science, sociological, socio-humanitarian quests in the social sciences for purpose and knowledge, quite like Taras Shevchenko’s expectation of "an apostle of truth and science" to arise. If the task of political thought today is not understood as pandering to the nomenklatura’s or neo-nomenklatura’s need for a “scientific” explanation to impose a new ideology of total control over society, then quite reasonable is the intellectual cliché that there is nothing better than a good theory. Theoretical studies in the field of political science should be conducted from the perspective of understanding postcommunist experience as part of a greater whole, of world sociopolitical and cultural transformations. The political independence of postcommunist nations is not merely a tardy response or a delayed reflex of history, a sort of redemption for past injustices by way of creating independent nation-states. Their independence is a logical outcome of the most recent changes in the political philosophy of society and the world as a whole. This means that the postcommunist period should be viewed not only as a period of critical uncertainty but also as a time of instituting socio-cultural forms of life. History knows similar big precedents: the idea of popular sovereignty ("social contract"), division of powers, individual freedom ("natural rights"), "civil society," and others acquired earlier (directly or indirectly), their institutionalization in political practice (constitutions, etc.) of today’s most developed nations. This is why political philosophy and other aspects of the political analysis of postcommunism make sense only as independent hic et nunc, as the comprehension of lessons of world sociopolitical thought on the basis of a nation’s proper experience of its own national-cultural identity. He who does not demand more loses all.
And in this sense we may pretend to have a certain coherent theory and simultaneously do not at all pretend to have created a final theoretical schemata or project for building postcommunist society. The main thrust of the work we submit to the reader’s attention is to theoretically examine our own experience, to build a model from it, at best to prognosticate, and in no sense to have constructed a universal theory, which always and with devilish speed (especially in the political sphere) transforms itself into a new totalitarian ideology.
Section 1. Chapter 2.
Nationalism and the Legitimation of Postcommunist Regimes
§1. Culture as a Political Phenomenon of Postcommunism
Culture as a political problem is a true historical discovery of the period of perestroika and postcommunist social transformations.
In their time, Soviet ideologists often abused the notion of culture which still remained, in fact, completely alien to people and their everyday practice. The Marxist ideological paradigm accustomed them to understanding culture as a domain and a specific creative affair of the intellectual, artistic, and power elites, as a spiritual field of "lofty" models of the "dignified life" isolated from drab routine. This is also true of the supervised cultivation of models of Ukrainian ethno-national culture (poetry, belles lettres, arts, music, and language) and, of course, the national artistic and humanitarian elite.
Today the problem of culture is virtually everybody’s at the level of the daily self-affirmation of the individual — from a Ukrainian in central Ukraine or a Russian-speaking native of eastern Ukraine who feel their difference from the western Ukrainian of Galicia who is most confident in his authenticity and in his right to be a national culture leader. Perhaps it is just these geo-cultural differences, this cultural regionalism, that are most often exploited to their own advantage in present-day politics by politicians.
During the first years of Ukraine’s independence, national culture and ethnocultural differences have taken on a far greater socio-political significance than economic issues. The slogan of national culture policy-making in the postcommunist period is being chanted along with the slogans of democratizing society, liberalizing it, and introducing market economy structures.
This is no accident. The crux of the issue is that the main active factor lending legitimacy to the political power and the transformation of the political order as a whole in Ukraine today was and remains the cultural sphere.
§2. The National Cultural Idea and the Legitimation of the Contemporary Ukrainian State
The legitimacy of power means that most of the population accept a given political regime and system as right and lawful. Legitimacy is ultimately the public recognition of the structure and institutions of power.
As long as the current political system is oriented to democratic foundations and norms for managing social life (through free elections, referenda, freedom of speech, and an independent press), problems of legitimacy will always arise. Within the framework of our national-democratic oriented political system (at least, according to social transformations theory), the idea of the national rebirth and cultural identity of Ukrainian society provides an actual foundation for legitimacy in Ukraine. Thus, it was the constant championing of national-cultural self-determination of the Ukrainian nation that distinguished the program platform of one of the most active, popular, and influential political forces of the perestroika period — Rukh. It is no coincidence that practically all the provisions pertaining to nationalist issues and the necessity to develop Ukrainian culture (see section "Culture. Language. Science"), spelled out in Rukh’s First Program, are in wide political circulation today, including the new authorities’ political glossary.
As new political systems encounter more and more problems, however, the concept of culture as the basis of national-cultural revival eventually loses its original legitimizing force. The political weakening of Rukh, with its reputation staked upon nationalist issues, which were presented as "the foundation for the existence and progress of the Ukrainian nation," is indicative of the political limitations to the concept of culture solely in terms of conservative ideals of national-cultural revival and originality.
§3. The Conservative and Democratic Content of the Idea of National Cultural Revival
Postcommunist political power in Ukraine ideologically exploits only the conservative side of the idea of national cultural revival. In the form of its political action, this side shows itself as predominantly ideational (officials' ritualistic attendance of cultural festivities, concerts, and performances) and ideological (fixed in the power structure’s rhetoric in programmatic documents) support of cultural movements and initiatives aimed at the renewal, elucidation, and interpretation of a mass of customary, traditional, and ethnographic/folkloric forms of cultural life. In this context the notion of conservatism does not mean the wholly positive conserving cultural traditions as a unique way of preserving a national treasure. It means the political conservatism in the authorities’ attitude to the cultural sphere, that is, the strengthening of the primary legitimizing function of the idea of a revived national culture, which is still inadequately developed under the truly democratic conditions. This conservatism perpetually tends towards cultural self-isolation, followed by economic and political isolation.
During perestroika, the idea of returning to the historical foundations of Ukrainian life was perceived by many as the basis for national existence, as the ultimate underpinning of Ukraine’s rights to independence (including economic independence), distinctiveness, development, and direct participation in the global affairs of humanity without intermediaries. The disintegration of the Soviet Union did not occur according to the formulae of economic determinism. The decomposition of its monolithic social structure did not follow the fault lines dividing economically self-sufficient regions. On the contrary, the division took into account national and territorial borders between cultural worlds which had arisen over the course of time. This means that the national cultural idea encompasses not simply the conservative meaning of recreating history. When developed, it is not only a basis for the geopolitical separation of a nation but holds within itself the meaning of a natural basis for the open, democratic competition of various systems of social and cultural values. If we take as an example the contemporary Western European democracies, cultural identity loses its conservative attitude with regard to reviving national cultural. National features of cultural life are viewed as something self-evident, something that exist without making special political efforts to conserve and reproduce them. As to the main basis for the legitimation of power, it is found in the political systems and power structure.
The single national democratic nature of social transformations in Ukraine, however, gives no reason to be guided by any one political interpretation of culture, be it conservative or democratic. The real contradiction in the contemporary political elite’s attitude to culture may be described as either giving priority to the conservative content of culture at the expense of limiting the democratic transformation in society, or stressing the democratic meaning of cultural identity as a formal precondition for organizing modern society and, consequently, inevitably losing the public support which was generated during the perestroika period. This may be seen, for example, in Ukraine’s legislative and executive branches. Higher echelons of legislative power tend to cultivate the conservative aspect of culture more often, whereas, in cases when executive power is confronted with the necessity to interpret the idea of national cultural independence in democratic terms (for example, because it is being treated by the prospect of losing needed economic links with the other regions of former Soviet Union), it is often disposed to stress the formal interpretation of cultural uniqueness.
§4. The Idea of "Scientific Nationalism" in Postcommunist Political Literature
In Autumn 1993 the Ministry of Education of Ukraine sent out a letter of instruction with a syllabus of a new course, scientific nationalism, to institutions of higher education. The syllabus began by expanding upon the urgent need to restore to Ukraine its scientifically understood political history — the study of Ukrainian political life, history, and political thought. But soon this indisputable thesis took a somewhat different turn. The authors of the letter maintain that "so-called general political science," which had been created "largely by the West," lacks a clearly defined research object. Rather, it was seen only as a series of "abstract theoretical claims which, at best, can be useful as a certain universal political vision thereby constituting a general part of national political science." This latter was named "scientific nationalism" as a recognized academic discipline.8
But this undoubtedly testifies to the fact that the authors of this new syllabus in Ukrainian political science did not confine themselves to a traditional approach to the study of politics, its history and present state, whereby political processes themselves become objects to be understood by the social sciences. In the syllabus introduced by the Ministry of Education, Ukrainian nationalism itself, as well as its outlook and ideology, are regarded as a science (i.e., as a scientific theory).
In other words, the authors held that Ukrainian nationalism itself can serve as a theoretical basis of political science, that it can represent by itself a particular methodology of scholarly comprehension of all possible political processes. "The Ukrainian national bias as scientific objectivity" is how the authors worded it.9
Making the idea of "scientific nationalism" public among broad circles of the national academic community implied that behind it was the most alarming theoretical confusion and muddled political thinking among Ukraine’s intellectual elite.
The crux of the issue is that "scientific nationalism" is opposed to the previously dominant ideology of "scientific communism," which was also taught doctrinally and universally in all Soviet institutions of higher education. But at the same time this new idea is equally opposed to the system of liberal-democratic values (and consequently to prevailing Western political conceptions of social development which are oriented towards universal human values) as was "scientific communism." In the context of the collapse of the communist empire, the theoretical distancing from Marxist ideology can be regarded as altogether reasonable, and the antidemocratic theme of "scientific nationalism" remained, of course, in the background. But its ideological sources can be clearly understood as turning to the classic texts of Ukrainian integral nationalism, developed in the 1920s-1930s within the general trend of militant, exclusivist nationalist authoritarianism popular in Europe at that time. The most lapidary of these sources charged in 1940 that "a nationalist fights all other false theories down to their extermination," including "Marxism, international socialism, (and)... liberalism" which were "invented by enemies in order to corrupt and weaken the nation, and then hand it over to the tender mercies of alien plunderers."10
Thus, intentionally or unintentionally, the concept of "scientific nationalism" is nothing more than a reflection of extant political efforts to define, pursue, and achieve a distinctively Ukrainian "third way" between the Scylla of Communism and the Charybdis of Western Liberalism, between the conservative values of Ukrainian life and the threat to traditional Ukrainianism from the nationally denigrating values of the modern civilization, between the lofty political objective of creating independent statehood and West European processes of the economic integration of nations on democratic principles. All these contradictions constitute real conflicts in Ukrainian political thought.
But in current political life, which is in a state of primary structuralization and incomplete ideological stratification, pursuits of an "individual" way exist, virtually, in the "creative potentiality" of the Ukrainian ruling and opposition elites. Likewise, the notion of "scientific nationalism" rashly suggested by some political scientists is, in fact, a sort of ideological mule wielded together from two antagonistic ideologies, communism and liberalism. Its theoretical fuzziness reflects the existing lack of clear vision characterizing of political movements in Ukraine today. That is why it makes sense to consider in greater detail the real meaning of the concept "scientific nationalism" in order to better understand the future.
The dissemination by state structures of a Ukrainian political science program containing the idea of "scientific nationalism" was no accident. The political basis of official propaganda of a national Weltanschaung in Ukraine — begins with a special emphasis on traditional values, a single common language and spiritual unity, and ends with the evaluation of all international developments and cultural phenomena in the world in light of the recognition and consolidation of the Ukrainian nation. Since the perestroika era the ideas and ideals of cultural separation and national self-determination have been viewed by many as identical to the general political slogan of national statehood, thereby serving as a prime factor in the wide recognition of national leaders. After the sweeping criticism of communist doctrine during the period of glasnost, that doctrine was replaced by a Ukrainian national idea that embraced all sorts of hopes for a better future, which could be built only on the basis of national and cultural unity. Its main elements were people’s perception of the distinctiveness of their collective everyday life (in the marginal social situation of the collapse of the Soviet empire), their collective political experience of being different from other national communities of the former USSR (just as these other communities, in turn, differ from one another), and their understanding of the particular features of the interpersonal relations that existed on the territory of Ukraine, together with an act of political to national unity. It was only natural that in real politics, the accomplishment of such a general visions of the Ukrainian national idea by the new leaders gave prominence to certain features of classical Ukrainian integral nationalism of the interwar period.
In order to understand the objective factors leading to the merger of the ideals of national independence with integral nationalistic ideology in current political action, it must be noted that at a period of the ideological restructuring of political life, Ukraine was and continues to be very reluctant to discard the old dilapidated foundation of the command system of administration and management. Thus, overly rash efforts to implement national ideas and values for the sake of political legitimation assume the form of direct command, unofficial administrative interference, along with the total control characteristic of a totalitarian state.
There are many examples of this, beginning with the current economic policies towards the preservation of national self-isolation at the expense of profitability. But, most striking of them, given the lack of a clear political vision of how to restructure Ukraine economically (suffice it to recall how a former Prime-Minister, who is now President, once spoke about the need to decide what kind of social system Ukraine wants to build), can be found in cultural and artistic life.
Between 1991-1994 new "commissars" from Supreme Rada (Parliament) commissions on science and culture often attempted to impose their visions of society upon academics and other intellectuals, making use of typically Bolshevik methods of accusing those who think differently of ideological national sabotage and insufficient national loyalty. Current Ukrainian politics confirms an apt remark, based on experience, by the late Professor Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytzkyj, one of the leading thinkers of the postwar Ukrainian emigration, that "Ukrainian (integral) nationalism falls under the rubric of a totalitarian movement: it strives to subject the whole life of the Ukrainian people, in all its manifestations, to its influence... The nationalist movement does not confine itself to political objectives but also demands control over the cultural process."11
These attempts to directly shape societal life and control the cultural process in postcommunist Ukraine, proceeding from an ideological system not altogether different from the old communist, one provide prerequisites for understanding what this "scientific nationalism" was all about. The new proponents of integral nationalism wanted to preserve the same old policy of total interference in people’s lives and use the same general methods which were employed by the adherents of scientific communism.
We use this latter notion without quotation marks deliberately because the Marxist vision of the historical process was oriented explicitly towards the norms and ideals of European scholarship and natural philosophy. Completing the so-called project of Enlightenment, Marxist ideology mandated total rational control over the organization of human life and a Utopia of perpetually managed social processes, which its authors believed was to rely on laws of human historical development discovered by reason. Today there are very few people who doubt that the historical experience of one-sixth of the world proved (by its own example) that it is impossible to organize a political regime on the basis of a classical theory of Enlightenment scienticism. Essentially, the concept of "scientific nationalism" is based on much the same ideals of subjecting the diversity of human life to ideological principles, "scientific" standardization, and overall control. But Marxism differs in certain basic ways from the integral nationalist notion of why it claims that its ideology is scientific.
One may be certain that the scholars who put forward the concept of "scientific nationalism" never read such authentic texts of Ukrainian integral nationalism as Dmytro Dontsov’s. Likewise, the philosophical foundation of Ukrainian nationalism represented in well-known works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Ortega-y-Gasset, has escaped their professional attention. The only thing clear is that the idea of "scientific nationalism" was made possible because of the striking coincidence of political style between old communist and new postcommunist power-holders favoring the active and violent molding of social and cultural life. But the latter are diametrically opposed to their predecessors in ideological and philosophical content.
This can be seen from a general definition of Ukrainian nationalism by any authoritative author of this ideology. In the concise work cited above, Tkachuk points out that "nationalistic ideology" is not "an artificially constructed theory (science)" but "a number of closely interrelated truths...on the basis of which develops life... and, hence, the nation’s life."12 In Dontsov, the general thesis of Ukrainian nationalism assumed central significance as the guiding idea which he propagated all his life, the idea of a basic difference of the nationalist outlook from the ideals of European Enlightenment in general and those of its successors — positivism, scientific socialism, and scientific materialism in particular. It was precisely for such scienticism that Dontsov subjects nearly all nineteenth century Ukrainophiles and Ukrainian democrats (beginning with Panteleimon Kulish and ending with Mykhailo Drahomanov and his numerous intellectual followers) to unsparing criticism, dubbing their efforts at popular education and pro-socialist orientation as "Ukrainian provincialism" (in that they lagged behind the European irrationalism fashionable during the flowering of the European fascist dictatorships). At nearly the same time, but proceeding from the opposite philosophical assumptions as E. Husserl in the first third of the twentieth century, Dontsov independently expounded upon the idea of crisis in European culture and European nations. (See: his Nationalizm, Lviv, 1926; a more refined exposition of the idea can be found in Where Should We Seek Our Historical Traditions, Lviv, 1937, both in Ukrainian). Just like Husserl, he saw the cause of such a crisis in the European world-view in the ideals of Enlightenment and scientific Reason, i.e., in its rationalism. But in contrast to the famous phenomenologist, the Ukrainian thinker came to opposite conclusions.
Dontsov argued that the crisis in Europe, which culminated in the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was a consequence of the maturation of national life worlds, that it was caused by the confrontation of national wills for self-affirmation, their struggle to win their own place in the world.
Basing himself exclusively on the latest modern philosophical tradition of his time, which called itself the philosophy of will, voluntarism, or irrationalism, Dontsov argued that the ultimate basis of human life, world view, and ideology is not rational consciousness but human will. For this reason he called his philosophy "voluntarist nationalism." Dontsov’s idea of voluntarist nationalism is not fortuitous for the Ukrainian nationalistic movement as a whole. Under the rubric of this philosophical grounding, it constituted the central conclusion of classical Ukrainian integral nationalism.
Integral nationalism, in the sense in which it was historically established in the classics of Ukrainian nationalistic thought, is a system of "voluntaristic" truths as to the life of the nation. The philosophical concept of will or volition, is merely a general form of signifying a realistic attitude to the attainment of human wishes, desires, and aspirations. It may also be a reflection of the will to live, which is contained in all human feelings and experience and, which in its sources is not subject to rationality, but is motivated by all factors of human vital activity. Thus, for the Ukrainian nation, whose state of unrealized will for nationally existential self-affirmation is almost permanent, nationalism takes on real social sense as the will for its own culture and for independent statehood. But, just as volition and feeling cannot substitute for reason, so too nationalism is not in a position to carry out the functions of scientific knowledge and political theory.
Nationalism and nationalist ideology are not and cannot be a system of views that are based on the facts of consciousness and reason. Nationalism can be based only on an extra-scientific fact of volition, on the "national will" which is not related to any previous act of reason. "This will is the major feature of a nation and the crux of nationalist ideology."13 Thus, nationalism cannot in any case be a science in its exact European sense. Our newly minted nationalists artificially invented or fantasized the concept of "scientific nationalism." Given their historical and philosophical primitivism, one might well refrain from arguing with them. But behind their idea of Ukrainian nationalist political science lurks the disorientation and real scholarly primitivism of the would-be politicians who would make (and are already making) use of such pseudo-scientific claims.
Martin Heidegger, reflecting on his own tragic experience under the domination of nationalist ideology and "German science," after the Second World War put forward the idea of the inherent "subjectivism of any nationalism" ("Letter on Humanism"). No one familiar with this great German’s life and philosophical contribution would attempt to interpret this as a vulgar denial of the national idea or national existence. He meant genuine subjectivism, i.e., the unwillingness or inability to face the realities of life which the nationally oriented consciousness acquires when it assumes the role of official ideology and scientific knowledge.
The point is that nationalism always falls prey to subjectivism, when, on the one hand it is unwilling and unable to address life as it really is, but rather rationalizes away the variegated nature of the actual national will and, on the other hand, when a certain group of people demand the imposition by force of their own nationalist world view in the guise of a rigidly rationalized "program," "methodology," or "ideology." This gives rise to a theoretical and political situation where private, partial, or one-party feelings, desires, wishes, and hopes, (i.e., one-dimensional, inadequate, deficient, incomplete, and, thus, biased visions of social life) are presented as scientifically valid and indispensable "arguments," "proofs," "explanations," "explications," as a search for "laws of social development," etc. Historically, the direction and power of human will is changeable. Its codification in the guise of an official ideological discourse or pseudoscience of politics marks the triumph of political dogmatism, and this means that society is fated to political caprice and the demise of democracy in any form.
There is only one known way of being safe from the possible consequences of subjectivism that can be bound up with the transformation of national will into a pseudoscience of politics. In the context of our discussion this is to see the national idea or nationalist world view for what it is — the nation’s will to national-cultural and national-political self-affirmation in all those regionally diversified and socially changeable forms, in which this will manifests itself in real life and political practice. This also suggests the ability to accept nationalism as an integral part of the Ukrainian political establishment, that is, as one of several established systems of views, thoughts, and slogans embraced by a certain group of people, movements, and parties, that is, within the context of democratic pluralism.
§5. The Idea of Democracy and Proto-Democracy
The sense of the culture and content of the democratic organization of society have many points in common, but they also differ greatly. While the postcommunist authorities and today’s "instant" politicians make avid use of the former, they simply ignore or are in no hurry to notice the differences.
Aristotle gave the first general and simple definition of democracy. He understood democracy as the self-government of free and equal people,14 i.e., a social procedure whereby individuals freely and jointly determine what leaders they should elect and exactly what powers they are willing to give them. On what basis do they come to such an accord in selecting their rulers? For Aristotle, this problem is not one to be pondered over. For the "first democracies" such a consensus was ensured by common tradition and ethos, i.e., generally accepted norms of life, the self-evident nature of cultural coexistence, etc.
However, for the modern forms of developed democratic systems the issue of social concord and the problem of civic consensus gain overriding importance. In other words, this is a question of on the basis of which program different, but politically equal, people can come to a social consensus. It is also a question of the legitimation of power, i.e., the free recognition of the "leadership" by the majority of citizens.15
The sense and experience of most Ukrainian citizens that they differed existentially and culturally from other great communities of the former USSR led to them to opt for Ukrainian independence in a referendum. Not least important was the awareness of their own national-cultural differences (not to be confused with ethnocultural identity), which acquired legitimizing significance by their free recognition of their own Ukrainian state and the need for it to have an independent policy as expressed in the referendum of December 1, 1991. Ukraine’s political independence, political order, and independent state can rise or fall according to whether or not it continues to recognize its own national-cultural solidarity and community. The awareness of national, cultural, or, if you like, geo-cultural community had assumed the quality of a proto-consensus necessary for Ukraine’s proto-democratic self-determination as a full-fledged political entity on the map of the modern world.
The simplest and most general concept of culture is one of a phenomenon which unites us all into a single national — and beyond this, human — world. An ethno-national community is a network of relationships, social ties, and cultural consensus which are bequeathed to us by history and cultural tradition. Dontsov provides a more accurate term in this connection: the unity of the will of Ukrainian society, the unity of its volition for self-affirmation. But — and this is for us the most important point — an ethno-national community today, in the developed European world, with its present day economic ties, personal mobility, and great variety of information impacting upon it, etc. is far from ensured by tradition. At present, an ethno-national community cannot serve as the sole basis for the democratic consensus, for which many of our current politicians hope. The cultural regionalism of Ukraine bears conclusive witness to this undeniable fact. The current stage of Ukraine’s social development gives every reason to define the situation as a proto-democratic one, as only the first step toward the realization of the idea of democracy.
In its origin, the idea of the democratic organization of society is inalienably linked with its prospects for overcoming national narrowness and interethnic conflict. The outstanding theoretician of civil society, secular ethics, and law, Immanuel Kant perceived "the general universal state as a prenatal chamber in which all elemental potentialities of the human race gradually become full-blown."16 Indeed, the idea of democracy, just like the idea of justice, even with its appeal to the free accord of equal people cannot, in principle, be limited by the slogan "democracy only for one discrete community among other communities."
By arguing the universality of the democratic idea, Kant certainly did not foresee, for example, the specifics of the "denationalization" of, say, the Germans of East Prussia, but rather saw in civil society a necessary condition for achieving interethnic peace. Likewise, the goal of politically consolidating democracy today does not supplant other urgent issues of national-cultural revival. The issue is one of its modern contextual interpretation. A developed understanding of democracy goes much deeper than the simple inarticulate unity of a given ethnic stock.
"The inarticulate unity of ethnic stock," which at perestroika rallies seemed to give democratic consent to the expression of a common national will, can no longer suffice today, when it is necessary to go further in developing our model of political behavior. It can only serve, and now serves as a basis for the "new" nomenklatura, which came to power using slogans of "culture-making" to impose its partial, imperfect, narrow, and partisan vision of social and cultural phenomena. Thus, one part of the all-Ukrainian community, heterogeneous in its cultural and ethnocultural features, is placed in opposition to others.
All theories of developed democracy maintain that it is based not simply on natural ethnic unity. The basis of democracy lies in a developed public dialog (communication) of representatives of various political orientations. Such communicative acts can in no case be limited to a blind and dumb national-cultural identity. True national identity itself is merely a developed outcome of historical connections, a result of rational argumentative communication17 among representatives of a single political nation which can be composed of various national and other subcultures.
The loudest appeals to the idea of democracy in postcommunist Ukraine can often be heard from politicians who view the social significance of their parties and movements from the "national-democratic" perspective. However, both practical abidance by that self-designation and political understanding of social goals in the notion of "national democracy" are fraught with a real threat of an "eternal coming back to the same" (Nietzsche): an incessant admiration for proto-democratic features of Ukrainian community and, hence, political narcissism and constant repetition of outdated romantic slogans taken from the period of miraculous national liberation.
In this context the critical analysis of language and modes of understanding is of great importance, for they form the semantic culture of postcommunist discourse and are consciously or unconsciously utilized by the new regime as its primary public means of self-legitimation.
Section 1. Chapter 3. §4.
§4. The Sociopolitical Characteristics of Postcommunist Mass Media
The media of mass information is that social institution through which the political discourse of postcommunism first acquires real legitimating force. This is merely the slogan of glasnost with stimulated widespread use of the term democracy to denote post-Soviet phenomena which could hardly be considered democratic. However, in determining the level of democracy in a society, mass media is actually a prime indicator, criterion, or scale of measurement.
The point is that mass media by its essence is the best indicator of a democratically organized society. Under certain ideal conditions mass media in its methods of operation is merely the concentrated expression of the idea of open public discourse, a social institution organizing interpersonal dialog, and civil consensus. Naturally, we must also bear in mind its destructive potential (possible ideological brainwashing of the population, indoctrination of ideas and views in the regime’s interest, etc.). Thus, in order to verify the idea of democracy in Ukraine and to better understand its prospects for the immediate and medium-term future, it is worth looking more closely into how the Ukrainian mass media operates.
To return to the essence of what is nowadays called the media of mass information, one can see from this designation itself that the point at issue is the modes of information distribution which serve as mediators of human communication in modern society. Traditionally, they are defined as means of conveying information flow from one person to another or from one group to another. In this case mass media are said to give information, i.e., to "form internally" our consciousness. This is only half true.
The problem is that mass media itself mediates between people and actually forms the reality in which they live. Since the sociopolitical fabric of life is woven from human relationships, mass media touches the context of life with a certain additional awareness and fashionability, i.e., it impacts upon the organization and modes of human relationships. The very fact of mass media news coverage, its choice of themes and interpretations, makes mass media a reality to be reckoned with.
Moreover, information has another important quality: it is never neutral or inert with respect to people, no matter how eloquently the opposite might be argued. In the mass media, information is always language, a speech act, even if in written form. When one speaks and fixes attention on an event or a person, by so doing, this seemingly innocent act of the mass dissemination of information generally affirms the speaker’s understanding, vision, and will to power. This is precisely what mass media is: simultaneously a means to mass affirmation of a will to power, desires, expectations, and will. Thus, mass media is perceived as a power in its own right, as the Fifth Estate. Having information at one’s disposal and controlling its dissemination is very close to having power and coercively molding other people’s consciousness and existence. This was unmentioned during the total domination of communist ideology and the Communist Party press. There was only one power, one ideology, and one self-affirming will. Such homogeneity and reductionism in informing and interpreting information produced an impression that the mass media played an educating role. It seemed to fulfill an enlightening or informational function and thus seemed not to be an instrument of total control.
The present-day changes in the former socialist countries, including Ukraine, are called postcommunist. Here we should differentiate between two meanings of the term "postcommunist mass media." First, postcommunism is perceived, quite naturally, if somewhat inaccurately, as something "after communism." But, second, to be more exact, "after communism" comes first the ruin of the communist regime and totalitarianism, i.e., the first thing which emerges is its criticism, negation, the ideological banishment of old forms of consciousness and psychology; and here mass media helps "deconstruct the model." Under so-called glasnost there was much ado about freedom of information, pluralism, etc. But, in fact, only one thing was meant — an opportunity to deconstruct the "communist model." Still, along with this laudable goal, the half-born, "new" old mass media came to be deformed by the same agency.
Martin Heidegger once aptly remarked that he who runs after will follow after. Or, to paraphrase, he who only ruins will himself be ruined. Lashing out at the "communist" or "nationalist" mind-sets as a way of institutionalizing the new mass media as a precondition of their "postcommunist" existence indicates only the persistence of totalitarian thinking, understanding, and information manipulation. It is precisely for this reason that in Ukraine numerous newspapers, magazines, radio and TV programs appeared and attempted to transform mass informing into an instrument to mentally impregnate people with new political and ideological stereotypes and, hence, to impose a framework of human relations which one or another political regime finds desirable.
Undoubtedly, this is not yet a real democratization of the mass media. All this is but a primitive ruination of the recent past and, unfortunately, ourselves, because by "postcommunism" one should understand not only a destruction of the old "model," not just a deformation of the information space and old forms of human relationships, but above all the dissemination of different views directed above all at the creation of radically new social interconnections and relationships rather than toward destroying or forming anew, violently, i.e., in a neototalitarian way, some "new model."
A new positive role of mass media, according to which it can be considered a true mass mediator among people, is quite clearly reflected by the notion of a developed community. This can be defined as the openness of civil society, i.e., as the opportunity to make public all actions of the power structures and all acts of will directed against others. In this case theoreticians of open communication (Jürgen Habermas) mention a brilliant expression of Kant who designated such a state of civil society’s openness by the term "resonant publicity." In this sense the social function of mass media is not to form some new human being, say, a "real Ukrainian" in place of the late but not lamented homo soveticus. Under such conditions the mass media remains only an instrumentality of power, a means of communication for the ruling elite; it must be transformed into real mass mediators, i.e., mediators in society, into mass media as such. Only then can it "form," i.e., create such conditions, such a common reality of life that could claim significance for all: "reds" and "pinks," "greens" and "blacks," nationalists and communists, etc. Only on this basis can a real pluralism of ideas, views, speech, and texts be established and, hence, make possible relatively equal and just conditions for the multiplicity of individual wills to power.
Under such a system of open communication a new type of discourse can also be instituted — non-partisan, civic, and civil. This is why the situation under postcommunism is really a situation of not only and not so much one of multi-party politics and, thus, of a supposedly pluralistic press. It is only one of the inception of a non-partisan and, hence, pluralist mass media. It is the beginning of the exuberant growth of the prospects for forming civil society.
Section 2. Chapter 2. §3.
§3. Cultural-Political Models of Social Development
Sociopolitical prognostication in present-day Ukraine is usually based on forecasts and considerations of an essentially economic or political nature. Economism in modeling possible paths of development naturally makes sense in the context of the practically hopeless economic collapse of the country. At the same time, the political struggle of small but numerous parties is marked today with juridical-legal accents. Therefore, the previous inter-party contests — the romanticism of the first years of national independence and cultural sovereignty — drifted to the juridical-legal side: a case in point is, first of all, the necessity of making and passing new rules of the political game under new circumstances (namely, adopting a new Constitution or the law on power proposed by President Kuchma, etc.). In other words, in the political projections — of both the present establishment and leaders of new political formations — primary attention is attached to matters of national, and particularly economic survival, and hence, to the preservation of their political status and the consolidation of their political influence. All this is in sharp contrast to the first years of independence, when the slogans chanted were of a primarily cultural and ideological nature.
However, a certain neglect of the cultural policy aspect in charting the future of Ukraine is far from an indicator of its unimportance for prognostication. Here one should not confuse a true cultural policy (we use the term to denote a true political analysis and understanding of the practical significance of national-cultural, ethno-cultural and civilization-related {general cultural} factors for a state’s political guidance) given the previous period’s slogans of national liberation, slogans which were easily transformed into authoritarian nationalistic dogmas. Such an assessment makes it possible to grasp the whole importance of culture-political thinking and practices in the postcommunist period. It is difficult to overestimate the field of cultural-political ideas, orientations, political motives, and actions for understanding the social basis of postcommunist transformations. This field is sometimes spoken of in everyday conversation as a common striving, and social upsurge (of will, volition) which is projected into the future for the purpose of creating the new and modernizing transformation of the presently available. Something similar to this can be seen from examples of the ambivalent period of Ukrainization in the 1920s, which was carried out parallel (and not by accident) to the violent process of industrialization and mass collectivization of farmers in Ukraine.
Recognition of the fundamental significance of the Protestant ethic for civilized forms of capitalist relations is now a commonplace in modern sociology and culture studies.8 So what else can we hope for in Ukraine?
Modeling Ukraine’s possible paths of development is directly dependent on answering the question of the preconditions of the all-Ukrainian cultural-political unification and the corresponding real culture policy of present or future authorities. At the same time, a choice between various political versions of such unification is also a selection of one or another model of economic modernization. Cultural choice and political and economic transformations are inseparable.
Based on the cultural-political attitude which is present in the political consciousness one can — to simplify greatly, of course — find such basic models of, if not development, then at least regular progress into the future.
The situation is quite likely to be recognized when a model of ethno-cultural political collectivity comes forward as a result of a socio-political choice, i.e., a cultural-political model of state- and nation-building based on a radical nationalist understanding of the people’s existential unity in Ukraine. If such a cultural-political orientation is chosen, its inadvertent result might well be a cultural, and hence, political distrust among various regions of Ukraine, its federalization, either official or unofficial but de facto; political conflicts, aggravation of political tensions, and confrontation. For there are essential differences in how Ukrainians from various regions of Ukraine experience their Ukrainian identity. If this does not result in civil conflict, then in a somewhat less grave version it will have to be dealt with as an unproductive situation which may persist for years. In this model, everything in Ukraine could wind up in a dead end.
In addition, this model of ethno-cultural political unity, consciously or unconsciously for its supporters, is genetically related to the traditionalist world view, i.e., conservatism in respect to cultural-value orientations and political conservatism. That is why the disposition of mind toward modernization loses for this model any specific meaning along with all other urgent issues of possible economic modernization.
If in the situation of the rapid aggravation of the socio-economic crisis and utter impoverishment of the population people happen to incline toward the social model of political unity (and it is couched in "socialist-communist terms" of economic equality, as a matter of secondary importance of national-cultural ways of life), chances that the striving for independent state existence, Ukraine’s own system of economic management, and national activism could fade away altogether.
The future of the "social" model is quite obvious. It is the establishment of a new form of Ukraine’s dependence, primarily on Russia, of stagnation and cultural-political marginalization. In such a case modernization is possible only as a replication of what is produced by others. Starting with the formation of economic relationships based on Ukraine’s own cultural specifics and ending with inventions of up-to-date industrial, social and commercial technologies — in all these extremely important domains of human activity the self-regulation of people’s lives vanishes.
The contradictory cultural-political experience of the past four years makes it essential to prefer a model of state and societal organization which presupposes a socially and politically stratified society with developed democratic institutions. This, however, does not imply a dominant role for national-cultural cosmopolitanism.
Thus, the important point is to create on the basis of the proto-democratic core of ethno-national cultural networks — a common way of life, language, customs, and traditions — a modern state-organized civil community — a political nation. Only proceeding from such a cultural-political model is it possible to mold a maximally formalized, i.e., a non-violent national political community in the judiciary openness of which all creative novelties, including economic modernization will find social legitimization.
References
Chapter 1.
1. "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimizes itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.” — Jean- François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1991), p. xxiii.
2. See: David Held, "Editor’s Introduction," Political Theory Today, ed. D. Held (Stanford, 1991), pp. 1-2.
3. See: Ottfried Höffe, Politische Gerechtigkeit: Grundlegung einer kritischen Philosophie von Recht und Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), (1.4).
4. We use the term "coherence" instead of such traditional ones as unity, integrity, or commonality in order to, first of all, avoid the possible connotations and assumptions connected with their traditional usage in contexts which express a uniquely Modern approach to solving problems that are included in the terms themselves (the possibility of obtaining a "complete," "total," "full," or "final" social quality). Secondly, because as a concept, "coherence" expresses only a certain set of elements of society in their mutual relationships, and designates the main undecided problem of the postcommunist transformation of society, the problem of sociopolitical organization.
5. J.-F. Lyotard, op. cit., pp. 37-39.
6. See: Jacques Derridas, Otobiographies (Paris, 1984), p. 29.
7. See: The Union Could Have Been Saved: A White Book of Documents and Facts on M. S. Gorbachev’s Policy to Reform and Preserve the Multinational State (Moscow, 1995), pp. 94-256, published by the Gorbachev Fund in Russian.
8. B. A. Hayevsky, F. M. Kyrylyuk, and M. I. Obushny, Conceptual Foundations of Ukrainian Political Science (Kyiv, 1993), pp. 1, 5 (in Ukrainian). The authors of these "conceptual foundations" are Kyiv Shevchenko University Professors.
9. Ibid., p. 7.
10. D. Tkachuk, Ukrainian Nationalism (Prague, 1940), p. 10 (in Ukrainian).
11. Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytzkyj, Sketches on the History of Modern Ukraine (Lviv, 1991), p. 62 (in Ukrainian).
12. D. Tkachuk, op. cit., p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 8.
14. "Political rule is the self-government of free and equal people.” — Jürgen Habermas, Demokratia. Razum. Nravstvennost’: Lektsii i Interviu (Moscow, 1992), pp. 31, 66 (in Russian).
15. See: Jürgen Habermas, “Legitimation Problems in the Modern State,” Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (London, 1976), p. 178.
16. Immanuel Kant, "The Idea of General History in the Universal-Civic Perspective," in Kant, Collected Works in Six Volumes (Moscow, 1969), vol. VI, p. 21. For the universalist — general civilizational — foundation of the idea of democracy as it is advocated for by theoreticians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see: I. Yu. Solovev, and I. Kant, Vzaimodopolnitelnost Morali i Prava, (Moscow, 1962), pp. 19-27.
17. The standard work on this issue is Jürgen Habermas, “The Problem of Legitimization in the Modern State," in: Habermas, op. cit., pp. 178-206. In this connection it should be noted that the notion of consensus in its exact definition as a special procedure of reaching general agreement in the process of public discussion is not consistent with the one referred to above as "proto-consensus" — the silent ethnocultural unity of people.
18. Nikolai Berdyaev, On Human Slavery and Freedom (Paris, 1936, in Russian). The concept of the unofficial group-censor was suggested by Anna Makolkin in her article "The Absent-Present Biographer in V.Veresaev’s Pushkin v Zhiznie," Canadian Slavonic Papers, XXXI/1, March 1989, pp. 43-56.
19. Morse Peckham, Triumph of Romanticism (Columbia, SC, 1970).
20. Ibid.
21. Northrop Frye, Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968); idem., "Myth, Fiction and Displacement," Fables of Identity (New York, 1963), pp. 21-39.
22. Bill Butler, The Myth of the Hero (London: Rider & Co., 1979).
23. Anna Makolkin, Name, Hero, Icon (Berlin — New York, 1992), pp. 21-39.
24. Literaturna Ukraina, July 14, August 17, September 12, September 26, 1991.
25. The motif of "indigenous population" is becoming an alarmingly prominent theme in the current socio-economic and political discourse in general, but it is not limited to Ukraine nor to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe. It reminds one of the eternally present fear of "the Other" and the dormant virus of intolerance.
26. Allusion to John Steinbeck’s, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which won him a Nobel Prize the following year.
27. Arthur de Gobineau, Selected Political Writings (London, 1970). His attempt to establish the original state of the "ingenuous population" and fear of contact with "the Other" would be replayed by the ideologues of fascism and later by ideologues of Marxism-Leninism.
28. Ukraina, No. 18 (September), 1991.
Chapter 2.
1. See, for example, the US General Accounting Office Report, Poland and Hungary — Economic Transition and US Assistance, May 1992, pp. 18-26, 30.
2. Duration of the phases above are influenced by the nature of the gestation prior to the final collapse of communism. The four basic types of positive/negative gestations which impact the pace of transformation are: (1) both political and economic changes are positive; (2) political changes are positive, but the economic are negative; (3) political changes are negative, but the economic are positive; and (4) both the political and economic changes are negative. (Hungary and Poland fall generally into the first category, Russia into the second category, China reflects the third group, and Romania is an example of the fourth category.)
3. See Michael Prowse, "Miracles Beyond the Free Market," Financial Times, April 26, 1993.
4. A useful compendium of Saburo Okita’s writings on this subject is contained in "Steps to the 21st Century," The Japan Times, 1993. In addition to Saburo Okita’s numerous writings, see also D. W. Nam (former Korean Prime Minister), "Korea’s Economic Take-off in Retrospect," paper presented at the Second Washington Conference of the Korean-American Association, Washington, DC, September 28-29, 1992; and N. Yonemura and H. Tsukamoto (both of MITI), "Japan’s Postwar Experience: Its Meaning and Implications for the Economic Transformation of the former Soviet Republics," March 1992.
5. As reported by KYODO, May 24, 1993. Further shocking details regarding the diversion of Western aid for illicit purposes are contained in Grigory Yavlinsky’s op-ed article "Western Aid is No Help," New York Times, July 28, 1993.
6. Based on the CIA World Fact Book of 1991, with the per capita GNP for Germany being $14,600, for Austria $14,500, for CSFR $7,700, for Hungary $5,800, and for Poland $4,200.
7. See also "Measuring Russia’s Emerging Private Sector," Intelligence Research Paper (CIA: Washington, DC), November 1992.
8. We refer the reader to the classic work, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
9. For more details on this paradox see: "Verkhovna Rada Ukrainy: Paradigmy i Paradoksy," Eksklusiv Ukrainskoi Perspektyvy, No. 1, 1995 (in Ukrainian).
10. Andrew Wilson, Valentyn Yakushyk, "Political Organizations in Ukraine," Suchasnist’, No. 5, 1992, p. 165 (in Ukrainian).
11. George Orwell, 1984 and Essays of Various Years, (Moscow, 1989), pp. 142-146 (in Russian).
12. Yevhen Holovakha, "The Peculiarities of Political Awareness: the Ambivalence of Society and Personality," Politolohichni chytannia, 1992, No. 1, p. 28 (in Ukrainian).
13. Moshe Lewin, "Society, State, and Ideology During the First Five Year Plan" Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. S. Fitzpatrick (Bloomington, 1978), p. 41.
14. A. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After Totalitarianism (New York, 1993), pp. 54, 65.
15. Demos, No. 1, October 19, 1994 (in Ukrainian and English).
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The Political Analysis of Postcommunism. Kyiv: Political Thought, 1995 (http://litopys.kiev.ua/)