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29th November, 2004

Capitalism and Democracy in the Ukraine

Justin O'Connor wrote at 12:58

The turn of recent events made me think that I needed to add something to my last entry on Kiev (www.polis-web.net). Following the reports in The Guardian some strange twists and turns have emerged. The first reports – as I wrote previously, composed under the shadow of the Bush re-election – were asides from a little known country far away; but they grew daily from the second poll onwards. At first the line was very much about it being a continuation of the ‘velvet revolutions’ of 1989 – indeed, before that to Solidarity and maybe the ‘Prague Spring’ – through to recent events in Serbia, Georgia and – extrapolated – to forthcoming elections in Moldavia and even the central Asian republics.

Timothy Garton Ash (25 11 04) sees the choice as between ‘Europe, the west and liberal democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism and Putin’s Russia’. Europe must move beyond ‘appeasement’ (that heavily laden word) and take its responsibility as ‘a great magnet and promoter of freedom’. Europe needs to tell its great story of a ‘rolling enlargement of freedom’ over the last 60 years; the Ukraine is currently its ‘front line’. On the television the line was also Democracy and Western Europe against the establishment of a new Russian sphere of influence made up of repressive regimes along the lines of Belarus; it was a battle of youthfulness and energy, against the corruption of politicians and the financial and industrial elite close to them. The lines were also geographical – Western (old Hapsburg possessions) and Eastern (Russian since the seventeenth century) Ukraine were pitted against each other, re-enforcing the wider geopolitical fissure.

Within a day or so questions surfaced. Jonathon Steele (26 11 04) began to question the opposition candidate – Yushchenko too was a member of the ruling elite until recently. On the feature pages in G2 his charismatic ally Yulia Tymoshenko emerges as a shadowy  figure in many ways similar to Kordakovsky and Abramovich – people who got rich in the confusion (not them of course) surrounding the privatisation of state industries (in Tymoshenko’s case gas supplies) and the dismantling of the command economy. As for the opposition groups such as Pora (which Garton Ash saw as the key transmitter of the experience and aspirations of other eastern European oppositions) - youthful energy financed by the US, by Soros (Open Society Institute) and others as part of the US’s ‘encirclement’ strategy undiminished since the cold war. It was the US that was turning the situation into a geopolitical issue - Putin’s concern for stability in his ‘near abroad’ was perfectly legitimate in this region of new nations and disputed territories. Russia’s immediate border interests were at stake (and indeed the Ukraine hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet); why is the US getting involved? The task of the EU was to resist ‘American mischief’, press for a compromise, oppose Nato membership for the Ukraine whilst firming up its offer for membership of the EU. Telling the US to butt out is a sentiment shared by John Laughland (27 11 04); he also points to the bias of the media towards the opposition – anomalous voting figures exist in their fiefdoms too (and in ‘democratic’ Georgia), and their ‘spontaneous’ support is equally (in fact more efficiently) as organised and directed as the ‘bussed in’ followers of Yanukovich. And he throws in charges of anti-Semitism and ‘the dehumanisation of enemies’ which have bubbled under the surface of many reports since the crisis began.

So, no more goodies and baddies then. What to make of it? I was reading Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes just recently. I suppose I should have read it in 1994 when it came out – but then again, it makes interesting reading now. In the last section – whilst disclaiming history’s ability to prophesise - he outlines some of the challenges of the 21st century. His bits on terrorism and fundamentalism were spot on – I had to remind myself that he wrote before the 9th September – as were his thoughts on the absence of any international ordering agency, apart from the US (he seems sceptical about the EU even as it was at the height of its post-cold-war confidence). His section on capitalism and liberal democracy (written in the immediate aftermath of Fukiyama’s daft book) was interesting. Capitalism looks set to grow (with all the attendant problems this brings) but liberal democracy? Harking back to his (excellent) discussion of this in the interwar years he sees little chance that this is able to solve the problems now ranging about the world – and little chance that it will become the model for those countries outside the developed West. This does not mean that some kind of democracy will not be installed, it will just take different forms. He talks vaguely of Confucian traditions in the Far East (China by the way is his consistent blind spot – its absence from any of his thoughts on the near future rings quite oddly now) but settles on some notion of plebiscitary democracy (on the Louis Napoleon model) as a good bet.

This is not far wrong from how things are shaping up in Russia and its sphere of influence (though at least Louis Napoleon actually did get a majority of the votes). The corruption, repression and increasing sense of despondency in the Asian republics are well documented; the situation in Belarus rather frightening. Garton Ash is surely right to argue that the Ukraine situation has implications for ways in which Russia and thus the whole region of the former USSR will evolve. But to understand what is at stake we have to remember the other bit: capitalism. The conflicting sides in the Ukraine are not just reflections of distinct historical-cultural traditions – they are also about real concerns as to what ‘the west’ might bring with it. Garton Ash’s plea evokes the memory of the1989 struggles – and who would regret their participation in these, and the feelings of liberation, of writing ones own history that such events bring with them. But the other things, the shady deals, the precipitous reforms, the chaos and the carnage of the dismantling of the command economy – who would not wish to do these differently? Nowhere is this felt more so than in Russia. Gorbachev was outmanoeuvred by a drunken populist who, to secure his power base in the Russian Federation, cut loose the (former) USSR and left Russia with less territory than since Peter the Great - and a lot of loose ends and frayed edges for the everybody around to deal with. In the meantime he gave away the resources of the state to his friends, and his friends’ friends, and some others as well. Capitalism, from the perspective of the shocked core of the old state apparatus, was a freebooter – and for those who did not become freebooters (some not for want of trying) it was a source of shame, humiliation, anger and, not least, real hardship. Try telling people in Russia that capitalism will save them…

The ‘youthful energy’ of the Ukrainian opposition might be forward looking, the future represented in those fresh faces – but it is not something entirely shared by all young people and certainly not the older ones with little to gain from further integration into the global economy. We have a rock and a hard place – on the one side a corrupt political-financial-industrial elite which might be used to distribute gains downwards in something reminiscent of the old Soviet way; on the other side a business elite wanting to exploit new links to the global economy, especially closer connection to the EU – equally linked to power and patronage but promising a redistribution through economic growth and employment in a modern business economy. This last is by no means universally welcomed - for the structures that allow ‘equitable’ capitalist development (in fact, not just ‘equitable’ but efficient) are simply not present in the former eastern European countries. The EU stresses the growth of ‘civil society’ as a key aspect of this embedded capitalism, with democracy and social justice as its essential partners. The US, also strongly promoting civil society and NGOs, has a different view of what these entail – and active measures of social justice other than the rights of property, free elections and a free media do not form part of these ideals. The miners from the East all complain that if Yushchenko gets in they will loose their jobs as cheap coal will be brought in from Poland. Who would deny their, and others’, fears?

How countries like the Ukraine are to find a political system that deals with the complex problem of ‘democratic’ aspirations and the hard choices involved in creating a workable (which means compatible with some level of social justice and legitimacy) capitalist system at a time of unprecedented levels of fierce global competition is hard to say. John Laughland points to the ‘enormous dysfunctions in our own so-called democratic system’ and argues that the west’s intervention ‘as fairy godmother swooping in to save the day’ in the Ukraine is a way to salve our conscience about our own political shortcomings. Not just the US but everybody - butt out! This is surely naive or disingenuous – not just the concerned big powers nearby but the day to day transactions of commerce and culture already implicate the country in transnational connections and considerations. Butting out because our own system is not squeaky clean is ultimately useless advice for everybody concerned. Jonathon Steele is right to warn of ‘American mischief’, because this points us to the economic dimensions of the issue, which are harder to deal with than the clear political oppositions of the present crisis. Likewise, the oligarch connections of the opposition; Yulia Tymoshenko took a step into politics just as Kordakovsky sought to do (Abramovitch played safe and bought Chelsea); both can be seen as recognising the need to engage in active politics as a way of defending their economic interests, and have done so in the name of the insoluble link between capitalism and liberal democracy. In Russia Putin’s growing assertion of the power of the state was tested on the arrest of this key oligarch. Many either welcomed the arrest or felt little sympathy for someone who had siphoned off the wealth of the USSR’s natural resources. Even in the UK Brown made a windfall tax on the privatised utilities. But older and more dangerous logics are at work here; the power of the state is engaged in a zero-sum game with civil society. ‘What is an NGO’, Putin asked this summer, and he was not showing his ignorance of western acronyms; he concluded by stating that one thing was sure – ‘they would not bite the hand that fed them’, a reference to the civil society initiatives of the EC, OSI, Ford Foundation etc.

Steele says Putin’s interest is in stability not in imposing an authoritarian system on the Ukraine. This might be so – but the example of Belarus stands as real warning to what he might really prefer. His authoritarian instincts – put in parenthesis by Steele –tell him that only a top down controlled state is ultimately stable. And this is why Garton Ash is right in his view that Russia is also at stake in this crisis: ‘A Russia that sees even the Ukraine moving towards the west has a chance of itself becoming, with time, a more normal, liberal, democratic nation-state’ – at the moment it is ‘launched on a different, worse trajectory’.

No goodies and baddies but a moment of choice which should not be avoided – you have to chose in conditions not of your own choosing. Yes, let’s link capitalism with social justice in a democratic system. But this is not on offer here. It is not darkness and light but about what is understandable, attractive, safe (or less scary) for both sides. And so far the talking on both sides (on the street that is) should be a lesson against demonisation for the western media Laughland so berates. The sense of security, of protection (and protectionism) that the Yanukovich camp hold against the cold blasts of globalisation and US business ethos is not to be denied. It appears, in its way, as some form of workable social justice. But at this time such protection comes with a renunciation of the liberties of civil society which have been the air, the food and the drink of many in the former USSR for the last decade, despite the hardships. Whatever illusions 1989 brought this was surely real. Abolishing these civil liberties will in the end be in nobody’s interest. It will be disastrous for Russia; the damage done by Yeltsin cannot be undone by a return to a command state. Laughland says a few thousands on the streets of Kiev command the attention of our biased media (whereas two million anti-war protesters in London are ignored). Yes, those fresh faced optimists in orange might be a small majority, they might be clothed and bussed by organisations financed by the US but anybody who has been there knows that these somehow represent the future. They expect somehow to make it, to deal with the new situation in their country. They are not all Harvard MBAs ready to put all the miners out of work, they want to work within the freedoms gained in 1989 and they want the state to make the legal, administrative and political conditions of their actions more transparent, rational and open to redress. This is what is singularly lacking in Russia – in fact they are going backward – and why, apart from its natural resources, the Russian economy is a failure. If those on the street can keep Yushchenko – with all his ally’s interests and shady records – on the path of such a programme, rather than a freebooter’s capitalism, then the country will make some way towards dealing with those difficult issues of capitalism, democracy and social justice. The past is a dead end.

30th October, 2004

Checkin’ Kiev

Justin O'Connor wrote at 14:48

I recently wrote an article for the spring issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy titled ‘“Creative Exports”: taking the cultural industries to St Petersburg’. The article was based on a project I’ve been involved with since around 2000, and which has been financed by an EU programme designed to support economic growth and civil society in Russia and those countries formally part of the Soviet Union (NIS – newly independent states). It was called TACIS, though now it seems to have changed its name to Europe Aid. One of my points was about the idea of ‘transfer of expertise’ and how this hid a whole series of assumptions about where Russia was going, how it would get there, and the role of European ‘experts’ (we are all called this in the funding applications and often on our little badges) in getting it there. I argued that we under-estimated how resentful and defensive many in Russia were about their status as a victim of ‘globalisation’, as well as calling for a more open idea of ‘influence’ rather than ‘expertise transfer’ as a way of understanding what we were doing there.

Two weeks ago I went to the final conference of one strand of this Europe Aid programme, the Institution Building Partnership Programme (IBPP) in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. It took place in a large ‘Soviet Style’ hotel – which means it was built in the seventies or early eighties, and retains much of its brown plywood panelling, nostalgic plumbing and fixed radios in the rooms. But it’s been modernised. Entrance canopies, casinos, strip clubs, shiny bars and chrome tables, new lobby décor. It is a style that can be found in all the cities of Russia (at least that I’ve visited); it sort of thinks it’s Western but it is more like late 1980s when ‘yuppies’ learned about ‘style’. In this case it is an expression of what people think (and they are probably right) the New Rich want to see in an hotel – opulence, casino aesthetics, people ready to serve them (including the all-pervasive prostitutes) and security men. They are in fact not part of the process of global sameness but quite distinct to the former Soviet Union – my first visit to a NIS confirmed this Soviet influence which I would expect to find in Byelorussia and Moldavia, for example, but maybe not in Georgia and the ‘stans’ – though I maybe wrong. Older traditions are at work; the souvenir shops, the newspaper shops, the service, the whole operation of the place  has something distinct about it which could never be confused with ‘Western’.

The conference was made up mostly, not of ‘experts’ as you would imagine (white coats or suits), but people from Europe and their Russian and NIS partners who had found each other through many different routes around many different projects, but whose situation was rather similar. Non of the Europeans seemed to be in it for the money. Of course, people get paid, but the rates are very low compared to European consultancy rates, and the amount of work involved – through (the admin staff in Brussels would claim, necessarily) excessive, often inefficient (or at least grindingly slow) bureaucracy and the difficulties of partnership in these very different, volatile and sometimes (from a western point of view) infuriatingly opaque and confusing countries – far outweighs any direct economic benefit. Why are they in it then? Well, they might have thought they would get money, then discovered their mistake. But mostly it was a chance – which, if it didn’t pay did not cost them actual cash – to engage with those other lands, beyond the edge of ‘our Europe’; lands of fear and fascination which now, somehow, maybe needed our help.

The tone of this conference was very much about ‘building civil society’. There were some key note speeches from the programme directors (though they seemed fairly low down the pecking order, administrators rather than directors) and one from a Brussels organisation on ‘civil society’ which went nowhere near explaining what it meant. It was an amateurish affair, for reasons I will return to. Of course the big political issues were avoided, to which I will also return. But the tone of the interventions, the conversations and the workshops was one of people concerned to help. This ranged from those who were extending their own concerns – with orphans/ retarded children/ prisoners/ disabled – to the scary conditions of Russia/ NIS, to the more curious, adventurous, ‘well we’ve got some expertise here, let’s take a chance’, sort of people. Of the latter - an initiative to introduce an integrated passenger transport authority on UK lines to a town in Siberia, and, I suppose, our project on creative industries in Petersburg. To the real concern and the curiosity could be added a sense of ‘doing some good’ and a slight egoism of being valued as an ‘expert’ in a context where you were in fact a visitor from the future. It was a chance to apply what you know now – after all those mistakes, those trials and tribulations – to a (sort of) repeated situation. The stable door could be shut before the horse had bolted!

On the Russian/ NIS side there was a mix of a desire for expertise and a desire for money. It was impossible for me to avoid the sense that these partnerships – tentative at first, maybe found via the internet or a chance meeting; gradually developing through contacts and turgid application forms; made or broken on the wheel of project fuck-ups, misunderstandings, absolute meltdowns;  forged through excessive vodka drinking late into the night (with the younger ladies in bed) where thou-dost-protest too-much Brits claiming only to have the occasional social tipple tucked into the neat spirits big style – were slightly non-symmetrical. Whatever we are in it for the Russian/ NIS partners were in it for the money. I don’t mean to get their personal hands on the cash – though this happens – but because it represents a real source of income to the organisations involved. It might be a pain to administer but the pay off is big. If this sounds cynical I don’t mean it to be – it’s a reality that prospective Western partners should recognise. Personal relations can go beyond this, but ‘doing good’ and drinking vodka do not alter the imbalance of donors and receivers.

Nevertheless there was a sense of partnerships, links, common projects which was – for different reasons – very tangible. However we got into these projects, surviving them had produced a sense of contact, some understanding, some mutual exchange of experience. It’s easy to talk of globalisation and international travel but for most people outside the higher financial, managerial and professional classes, globalisation happens because it lands on their doorstep. Here they get a chance to engage with it themselves, in a way unimaginable ten years ago. Whether they do another project or not (many who had no more projects expressed some relief, but heavily outweighed by regret) some connection was made. Who knows what the consequences of this might be?

Somewhere in all this is was an overarching sense of politics and ethics. That richer countries should help poorer, to some extent; but also that these activities concerned with social and economic partnerships, which created projects not initiated by the national or local state and which involved non-governmental organisations having money from abroad, was a political step (or statement). It was building civil society, those networks of NGOs and local partnerships without which ‘democracy’ would only be an empty shell. All projects had their stories of struggles with the local bureaucracy or politicians and many were finally taken seriously because they had some money and foreign expertise. A belief in a gradual ‘cultural’ shift in the very idea and practice of governance could be felt amongst the participants.

But this sense of immanent, irresistible change - so powerful and strong even as late as 1999 when I first visited Russia, and when the collapse of the rouble brought real hardship ten years after it was suppose to be all in the past – seemed to me very much weakened. The rise of Putin is much responsible, but it is not something to do with one man alone. Putin has reasserted the power of the central state apparatus – and he has done so with the support of a wide section of the Russian population. I’m not going to go into what he has done here, but I think he has articulated a sense that Russia is no longer going to be a victim in the new world order but make its own way. And the first condition for doing that is re-asserting state power. The problem – as I see it – is that whilst many would see this as reasonable, even laudable, he is doing this at the expense of that ‘civil society’ which the EU and others has been so keen to promote. Putin is a control freak – and this sets him on a direct collision course with programmes like Europe Aid which tries to promote such a civil society by outside finance (the Open Society Institute has similar problems). Putin sees this as undue interference. From now on all those receiving EU money must be registered with the government. What this means in practice is hard to know. Some people say they’ll find a way around it like they do everything – more pain-in-the-arse bureaucracy but, well, what can you do? Others fear that the administration will now begin to lock everything up again. I don’t know, I have not the level of knowledge to judge this. My guess is that people will get around it, but the cultural shift, the shift in understanding, of the styles and techniques of governance will stop. And I believe this will be bad news for Russia.

The representatives of the programme managed to avoid most of this. Of course some of it is diplomatic; they are negotiating with the Russian government and with that of Byelorussia on these questions. But this information was dragged out of them in questions, as if it were a small technical hiccup – actually it relates to the core objectives of the programme. These core objectives – I mean the real underpinning beliefs not the anodyne ‘aims and objectives’ which are derived from these in the programme guidelines - were never spelled out; they remained unspoken ‘good things’. But they needed spelling out and examining now more than ever – then we would get some idea of the stakes involved. Instead we were given condescending presentations and flaccid deflections of the key issues. The amateurishness of the organisation relates not to the buses and the meals and the rooms – all very professional – but the organisation of thoughts and experiences. Chairs were appalling; workshop themes were non-existent; timekeeping was not enforced, even from the platform. But these things happen (though galling when these administrators pick up on the least mistake with often little allowance for local difficulties); what was most annoying was the clear difference between the passion, the care, the commitment of those in the projects and the slightly concerned bureaucratic ‘let’s get this over with so I can go back to my life in Brussels’ attitude of those on the platform. Whether they really care I don’t know – but not on this showing.

Outside (finally!!!) it was sunny and bright. Kiev was built on a series of hills overlooking the huge river Dnieper. A historic site – where Christianity first came to the Slavs; where the Vikings camped on their way down the river to Byzantium; where a copy of St. Sophia in that imperial city was built in the 11th century, making Kiev a real centre of European civilisation. Genghis Khan destroyed it, though St. Sophia survived; the magnificent mosaic of the Mother of God floating above the cathedral, surviving the Nazi occupation, even Stalin’s anti-clericalism. Another, more tacky, statue, in titanium (apparently) and built at enormous expense in the Brezhnev years, floats over the city as a whole. Mother Ukraine looks to Mother Russia, just as the statue of Bogdan Khmelnytsky points to the Russia he joined with as part of his anti-Polish liberation war in 1654. Aroused from my profound historical reflections on the organised bus tour, we found ourselves blocked by a demonstration in favour of Viktor Yunukovich, the presidential candidate favoured by the incumbent, Leonid Kuchma and President Putin, who visited the city yesterday. Red flags, lots and lots of kids, lots of women with head scarves, lots of men with flat caps; this was politics that seemed to matter. Somebody was getting them out of bed and onto buses (much older and battered than our posh Mercedes bus) on an early Saturday morning. The opposition candidate is complaining foul play – he wants to take the country closer to Europe and the US (including Nato). Putin is supporting the candidate who wants to have closer links to Russia. Putin also backs the president of Byelorussia, who nobody thinks is anything but an elected (of sorts) dictator. Putin wants his ‘near abroad’ close to him.

It’s not quite like those metal globules of the robot in Terminator II, slowly moving, finding, re-assembling…. All the messages are of Ukrainian independence, of rediscovering national roots buried by long Russian dominance. But it is part of the Russian world – at least it seems so to me as an outsider. And Putin is encouraging assertive states not disruptive civil society – because what’s civil society done for us? It weakens us in the face of assertive US neo-liberal globalisation. I was not in a position to find out what the Russian participants thought of all this. I’ve found a lot of support for Putin and a strong state, even whilst the consequences of excessive, non-sensical and corrupt bureaucracy makes their lives more and more difficult. And it is this latter which can only be strengthened by his moves – with people maybe hoping that it will at least be less corrupt like in the ‘good old days’. Let’s see.

This presidential election may seem marginal – overshadowed by the bigger one across the Atlantic – but it is part of a gradual but profound change, a re-shuffling, a ‘settling down’, which is by no means clear as to its outcome. The EU has been flattered by the rush to join its club – it seemed everyone wanted to buy into its version of democracy. Shocked by the ‘neo-con’ shift in the US something is also happening closer to home, where older ‘fault-lines’ are showing in new guises. Programmes like Europe Aid have to think about these things not brush them under the dull carpet of administrative ennui. As for Kiev, it remains still a beautiful city. In autumn the chestnut trees shine bright in the sunshine and the old 19th century residential blocks – more ornamented than austere Petersburg, lighter than Moscow’s heavy Rus – give it a feel of mittel europe and Slavic which I’ve not seen before. Let’s hope that whatever fault lines do re-surface such places get a chance to flourish and not get locked in some geo-political loop.