COMMENTARY: Active citizens or loyal individuals: whom does Ukraine need more? (12/01/02)

COMMENTARY

Active citizens or loyal individuals: whom does Ukraine need more?

by Dr. Viktor Stepanenko
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report

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 as a whole 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 mention pride, about belonging to the citizenry of Ukraine.

According to a poll conducted in April and May within the framework of the nationwide program Monitoring Ukrainian Society by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology 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 should not overstate this rather massive "non-citizenship" 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 downward trend in the share of the Ukrainian population that now identifies itself with Ukrainian citizenship in comparison with those 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 citizen 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 people distance themselves from Ukrainian civic identity lies not only in the mass psychological frustration of socio-economic expectations regarding the 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 the 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, "étatic"), 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 a mass culture of apathy by means of indoctrination involving mass propaganda and psychological manipulation in the state-controlled media. But one can never in this way construct 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 Defense 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 regarding 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 demonstrated by comparative international sociological surveys conducted in 11 post-Communist countries (Claire Wallace, "Xenophobia in Post-Communist Europe," Glasgow, 1999), citizens of successful post-Communist democracies were usually proud of their nationality, while this was not the case in countries experiencing difficulties in their transformation, like Ukraine. These surveys obviously imply that either successes in post-Communist transformation boost national pride, that national pride is a necessary condition for such successes, or that both factors operate simultaneously.

It seems that the real challenge to political reform in Ukraine does not lie exclusively in changing the governing system from a presidential to a parliamentary republic, as was recently declared. This challenge rather, is connected with the need for a reform in the way the state interacts with its citizens. Such 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.

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