aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] ACTIVE CITIZENS OR LOYAL INDIVIDUALS -- WHOM DOES UKRAINE NEEDMORE?

[Taras Kuzio <t.kuzio@utoronto.ca>]

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
________________________________________________________
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report
Vol. 4, No. 34, 10 September 2002



ACTIVE CITIZENS OR LOYAL INDIVIDUALS -- WHOM DOES UKRAINE NEED MORE?


Viktor Stepanenko 

Last month, Ukraine entered the 12th year of its independence, but as
a state and society, it still faces a dramatic challenge that is not
usually discussed in official propaganda outlets. The point is that
people living in Ukraine, including ethnic Ukrainians, still do not
feel that the state is their own and, as a result, they en masse do
not consider themselves to be citizens of the country called Ukraine.
Formally, of course, they are citizens and hold Ukrainian passports.
According to surveys, however, there is no dominant popular feeling,
nothing to say about pride, of belonging to the citizenry of Ukraine.
    According to a poll conducted within the framework of the
nationwide program Monitoring Ukrainian Society by the National
Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology in April and May
among a representative sample of 1,800 respondents, only 41 percent
of respondents considered themselves to be "citizens of Ukraine."
Almost the same proportion of respondents identified themselves as
inhabitants of their localities and regions. And nearly 13 percent of
respondents, who belonged primarily to older generations and lived
predominantly in eastern parts of the country, still considered
themselves to be "citizens of the USSR."
    Perhaps, one would not dramatize this rather massive
"noncitizenship" of the Ukrainian population mainly because of the
short historical period in the formation of a new political entity:
the Ukrainian nation. But two aspects of this poll should be given
serious attention.
    First, there is a trend toward steadily diminishing the share
of Ukrainian population that now identifies itself with Ukrainian
citizenship in comparison with whose who considered themselves
Ukrainian citizens at the beginning of the 1990s.
    Second, as an analysis of the survey has shown, respondents
understood their citizenship as mostly a formal attachment to the
country where they are physically living rather than a stance of
active social and political engagement in Ukrainian society. The
survey revealed that only 9 percent of the respondents who identified
themselves as "citizens" believed in their ability to protect their
own rights against the state. (For comparison, 11 percent of the
respondents who identified themselves as "representatives of their
ethnic group" and 12.5 percent of those who identified themselves as
"people of the world" said they believe in that ability.) In other
words, the dominant type of Ukrainian citizens is that of a
politically inert individual who is reluctant to resort to actions of
protest against any possible unjust decisions by the authorities.
    This makes one believe that the reason why people distance
themselves from Ukrainian civic identity lies not only in the mass
psychological frustration of socioeconomic expectations regarding
prospects of the Ukrainian state in the early 1990s. There are clear
signs of the alienation of the Ukrainian population from the state.
Why is this the case?
    The Ukrainian state, or more accurately, the political
circles representing the state machinery, in its relations with
people, actively reproduces the logic of its communist predecessor,
which used to dictate and instruct "from above." The result of this
activity is the formation of a "state-centered" (or, to use a French
term, "etatic"), rather than civic, identity, i.e., an individual
identity that is shaped and controlled by the state.
    It is possible to form the identity of an inert individual
and to induce mass culture of apathy by means of indoctrination
involving mass propaganda and psychological manipulation in the
state-controlled media. But one can never construct in such a way a
civic Ukrainian identity implying people's social engagement and
political participation. The vital issues of Ukraine's
"unfinished revolution" (Taras Kuzio, "Ukraine. The Unfinished
Revolution," in "European Security Study" 16, London, Institute for
European Defence and Security Studies, 1992), such as an undeveloped
civil society and the lack of social cohesion and solidarity, can
also be explained by this distorted interaction between the state and
its citizenry.
    Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I used to say when someone
was recommended to him as a patriot of Austria, that "he may be a
patriot of Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot of
me." Today's dilemma of Ukrainian citizenship may be reflected in
the following paraphrase of the emperor's saying: Does a future
Ukrainian democracy need careerists loyal to the authorities or
active citizens who are capable of promoting changes and reforms in
Ukrainian society?
    As testified by comparative international sociological
surveys conducted in 11 postcommunist countries (Claire Wallace,
"Xenophobia in Post-Communist Europe," Glasgow 1999), citizens of
successful postcommunist democracies were usually proud of their
nationality, while this was not the case in countries experiencing
difficulties in their transformation, like Ukraine. Those surveys
obviously imply that either successes in postcommunist transformation
boost national pride or that national pride is a necessary condition
for such successes or that both factors are operational
simultaneously.
    It seems that the real challenge to political reform in
Ukraine does not lie exclusively in the change of the governing
system from a presidential to a parliamentary republic, as was
recently declared. This challenge is rather connected with the need
for a reform in the way the state interacts with its citizens. Such a
reform would have to switch the state machinery from the
propagandistic and predominantly command style of its current
public-relations policies to a much more cooperative and partner-like
model.
 Dr. Viktor Stepanenko is a senior
research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine, and the director of the Center for Public Policy
Development.