Development and Dystopia E-Book

Mikhail Minakov

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 510

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This book dissects—from both philosophical and empirical viewpoints—the peculiar developmental challenges, geopolitical contexts, and dystopic stalemates that post-Soviet societies face during their transition to new political and cultural orders. The principal geographical focus of the essays is Ukraine, but most of the assembled texts are also relevant and/or refer to other post-Soviet countries. Mikhail Minakov describes how former Soviet nations are trying to re-invent, for their particular circumstances, democracy and capitalism while concurrently dealing with new poverty and inequality, facing unusual degrees of freedom and responsibility for their own future, coming to terms with complicated collective memories and individual pasts. Finally, the book puts forward novel perspectives on how Western and post-communist Europe may be able to create a sustainable pan-European common space. These include a new agenda for pan-European political communication, new East-Central European regional security mechanisms, a solution for the chain of separatist-controlled populations, and anti-patronalist institutions in East European countries.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Part I: Complex Modernity and Eastern European Political Cultures

1.1. Eastern Europe Between Progress and Demodernization

The Spatial Polymorphism of Modernity

The Temporal Irregularity of Modernity

The Demodernization Processes

1.2. Systemic Corruption and the Eastern European Social Contract

1.3. The Language of Dystopia

Two Conservatisms

An Uncommon Language

The Struggle Between the State and the Country

Panicked Solutions

What Is to Be Done?

1.4. War, Peace and Applied Enlightenment

Historical, Political, and Theoretical Pretexts of Kant’s Treatise Toward Perpetual Peace

The Structure and General Content of the Treatise

Kant’s Lessons: Humanity between Perpetual Peace and Permanent Conflict

Conclusion

1.5. Post-Soviet Parliamentarism

Part II: Making Sense of Ukrainian Revolutions

2.1. Revolutionary Cycles: Dialectics of Liberation and Liberty in Ukraine

Revolution as a New Beginning

Lost and Found in Transition

Revolutionary Cycles

2.2. The Evolution of Ukrainian Oligarchy

Informal Institutions, Patronal Politics and the Mafia-State

The Soviet Roots of Ukrainian Clans

Regional Clans in the Third Republic

Conclusions

2.3. The Color Revolutions in Post-Soviet Countries

Causes of the Color Revolutions

Consequences of the Color Revolutions

Part III: Euromaidan and After

3.1. Images of the West and Russia Among Supporters and Opponents of the Euromaidan

Without Politics

Vox Populi

What Does My Name Mean to You?

Conclusions

3.2. Ukraine’s Government, Civil Society and Oligarchs after Euromaidan

State Functions: Civil Society and the Private Sector

Civil Society and the post-Maidan State

Oligarchs and Civil Society

Conclusions

3.3. Risks for Ukrainian Democracy After Euromaidan

Democratic Consolidation and the Power Vertical

The Power Vertical Rises and Unravels

The Composition of the Power Vertical

The System in Shock

A Partial Recovery

A Distorted Recovery

Mitigating Risks

Part IV: (Dys)Assembling Europe

4.1. The Impact of Russia’s Ukraine Policy on the Post-Soviet order

The Institutionalization of Conflict in Ukraine

Belarus and Kazakhstan: Concerns

The Un-Recognized post-Soviet States and Ukraine’s Crisis

Conclusions: Problematic Perspectives for the post-Soviet Space

4.2. The Novorossiya Myth from a Transnational Perspective

Transnational Perspective

A Brief History of Novorossiya

Data Analysis and Interpretation of the Novorossiyan Myth: Between Social Reality and Historical Justice

Conclusions

4.3. Dynamic Obstacles for Integration Between the European Union and Eurasian Economic Union

Regional Security Negative Dynamics

The Disintegration of the Eurasian Union

Conclusions

4.4. The Eastern European 20th Century: Lessons for Our Political Creativity

4.5. Overcoming European Extremes: In Place of a Conclusion

The EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood

Post-Soviet Europe’s Western Neighborhood

Rebuilding the European Neighborhood

Bibliography

Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my colleagues—George Grabowicz, Serhii Plokhii, Alexander Etkind, Dominique Arel, Blair Rouble, Matt Rojansky, Peter McCormick, Ivan Krastev, Yurii Senokosov, Vadim Menzhulin, Mykola Riabchuk, Timm Beichelt and many others—for many discussions that have stimulated my research and reflection.

Special thanks to my colleagues at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department of the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” and the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues at Ukrainian Catholic University. Our debates, disagreements, and consensus have largely driven my thoughts and argumentation.

This book would not have been completed without Andreas Umland, Jessica Zychowisz and Roksolana Mashkova. Their care and advice were essential in the publication of this manuscript.

The research throughout this book was generously financed by the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellowship, the Alfried Krupp Fellowship, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The funding I received provided me with opportunities to work with wonderful scholars at Krytyka Institute, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, and the Institute for European Studies at Europe-University Viadrina.

I owe the most tremendous debt to Maria Grazia Bartolini, my wife and best friend, for her constant support and inspiration.

Foreword

Written from the dual perspective of a political philosopher and social analyst, this book is a rich—in many ways, indispensable—source of conceptual information about Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the European Union, and global modernity. Its primary subject is the dirty, hybrid politics of Eastern Europe but even more so, its human substance—those traumatized, depressed and awkward but intrepid, entrepreneurial, and ultimately optimistic women and men whom Mikhail Minakov aptly calls “Post-Soviet Homo Politicus.” Relying on critical theory as summarized by Jurgen Habermas, Minakov illuminates the situation of the “double colonization,” in which the social System ceaselessly formalizes and therefore undermines the human Lifeworld, and the Lifeworld damages the System’s order, creating a chaotic cultural world that resembles “systemic corruption” to outsiders. With its knack for political traditionalism and archaic thinking, this changing world is a historical laboratory for testing demodernization schemes, but also a launching pad for exit strategies that could, and eventually will, return the situation to enlightened modernity.

In all these controversial tasks, historical memory merges with political imagination, producing their own hybrids—rationally Kantian, but also unreservedly Nietzschean—productive forces that combine experience, reason, and rebellion, and aim at elucidating subjectivity and improving humanity. “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger,” Minakov repeats with full awareness of the tragic state of affairs in Ukraine, Europe, and the world. Revenge and ressentiment are at the center stage of East European modernity: there is no way to reconcile the Kantian tradition of “Applied Enlightenment” with the corrupted reality on the ground; nothing left but embrace it with a spirit of tragedy.

Tragically, Eastern Europe spreads between Koenigsberg and Istanbul, the European Union and the Russian Federation. Always eager to engage all these external forces, from the rigid Eurobureaucrats to the hapless Russian opposition, Minakov also believes that Ukraine possesses a unique and somewhat central mission in this space. Rereading Kant after Minakov, one could formulate this mission as initiating a regional reconciliation—a perpetual peace in Eastern Europe. This is a tall order, but articulating the aim is a necessary stage toward its ultimate realization. In this book, we find an ambitious thinker in Minakov’s stature—an accomplished philosopher, but also a prophet—more than adequate to the task.

Alexander Etkind

Introduction

This book is dedicated to the study of post-Soviet humans and their varied societies as they have developed on the ruins of the Soviet Union.

The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. has provided new limitations and opportunities for the people living between the Baltic Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Some intellectuals and politicians greeted the new era as a space of freedom and self-realization (see, e.g. Gaidar 2007; Riabchuk 2000). It was expected that new generations would arise to inhabit new lands and discover unforeseen prospects. Others, like Yurii Levada, observed the emergence of a new-new Human, emerging from the subconscious of the old-new Soviet Man. He wrote that everything that had been repressed in the Soviet Man was becoming essential to the post-Soviet human: violence, distrust, readiness for aggression and fear (Levada et al. 1993: 24). Yet today, as Vladimir Sorokin has brilliantly defined, the “post-Soviet Human has disappointed much more than the Soviet Man” (Sorokin 2015).

So, what were the reasons behind these early enchantments, and more recent disappointments with the post-Soviet Human? How did late Soviet society invent democracy, capitalism and national statehood? How did our societies come to value and practice opportunities provided by new notions of freedom? Have our cultures transformed the way we initially expected them to, in the early 1990s?

I have divided my answers to these questions into four parts. The first part focuses on the political ontology of new Eastern European cultures as a definitive environment for the post-Soviet human condition. Here, I aim to show how the speeding-up of society by modernization led to yet another period of reverse development. The resulting situation could be thought of as double colonization, in which the System constantly undermines perspectives shaped by the Lifeworld, and the Lifeworld persistently damages the System’s order. This view provides an opportunity to understand the cultural world that, from the outside, merely appears to be “systemic corruption.” The long-duree cultural mechanisms enforce a state of dystopia, in which neither external nor internal impulses lead to a lasting change. This significantly limits the collective and individual political creativity of Ukrainians and their neighbors.

The deliberations in the second part of the book concentrate on Ukraine’s revolutionary experience. In the early 1990s, post-Soviet populations were practicing revolutions in the public and private spheres concurrently. We were inventing democracy for ourselves, as well as political and media pluralism, organized civil society, the idea of a republic and citizenship; at the same time we were also inventing values concerning money, entrepreneurship, new forms of intimacy and sexuality, religious life and family. So, in a way, these revolutions both competed with and reinforced one another. In Ukraine, the bravest and the most creative individuals won out over all others: oligarchs immediately privatized state assets and public institutions, consolidating the resulting wealth into their own hands. As a result, a specific polity was formed in which formal and informal institutions are principally interlinked and evolve in cycles from promises of liberty, to authoritarian tendencies, and then back again.

The recent experience of Euromaidan and subsequent war in Ukraine appears in the third part of the book. Painful and hopeful, the events that took place during the protests, their utopian ideologies, and resulting political practices are each described here almost as if through real-time reports. These details show how Ukrainians have involved themselves into the new—much more bloody and encouraging—revolutionary cycle.

In the fourth and final part, I return to the regional perspective. I show how processes in and among the post-Soviet polities have come to define a moment in which they are destroying the possibility for peace and freedom not only in Eastern Europe, but throughout the entire European space: a continent stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok. An authoritarian belt has been constructed in the East of Europe that transgresses prior post-Soviet and post-communist limits. Conservatism, personalism, patronalism, ethnonationalism and sovereignism have claimed Ankara, Budapest, Minsk, Moscow and Warsaw. Sofia, Belgrade, and Kyiv are on the verge of vetting these ideologies in the foundations of their new regimes. Six post-Soviet de facto states are experimenting with even more dangerous political ideas and models, and are ready to disseminate them across the continent. I discuss these risks, as well as opportunities for mitigating them, in this final part of the book.

I am aware of the fact that my answers are limited. Among the key limitations that I am aware of are specific interdisciplinary approaches and my geopolitical bias. I have studied post-Soviet homo politicus as both a philosopher and political analyst, and for this reason, I can hardly claim to satisfy communities of political philosophers and political scholars simultaneously. However, I have done my best to apply philosophical reflection to the new experiences of post-Soviet populations: their political, economic, and administrative creativity. I did not see any other way than to combine different disciplinary approaches in my attempt to catch the novelty of these societies and supply them with a voice.

Secondly, I have mostly viewed post-Soviet societies and Eastern Europe through the optics of a Kyivite. The post-Soviet era was predominantly studied either through West-centered, or Moscow-centric narratives. These narrative models had their own benefits, however, I find it critically important to look at post-Soviet societies and the idea of One Big Europe with a different perspective that may provide new opportunities for understanding our territories in the present paradigm. Kyiv itself is a city that offers a unique vantage for viewing Eastern and Western European processes. A loser in socio-economic development and a champion in political revolutions, Kyiv permits a scholar to experiment with freedom, subjection, anarchy, corruption and hope in polyglossia of East-West chiasm.

It took me nine years to finish this book due to the fact that I wanted to test each of its chapters. I deliberately published them individually, and listened attentively to the reactions of my readers. As a result, the published texts have been updated in accordance with those discussions, ongoing critiques, and collegial support, and only then included in the book. I hope my text will provide readers with frames to see differently and understand better the people living in post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

Part I:Complex Modernity and Eastern European Political Cultures

1.1. Eastern Europe Between Progress and Demodernization1

Contemporary humanity lives in a brave new world created by a schism from humankind’s traditional past. The temptation of becoming an autonomous and self-sufficient individuality has led generations of men and women into a new cultural situation, where time and space have changed their shapes and contents, if compared with more traditional culture. This chronotope of Modernity was re-modeled through applied human rationality, with both planned and unforeseen results. By becoming a source of normativity, individuals entered the world of desired ends and unexpected achievements.

As temptation never leads to a desired end, the promise of Modernity has also brought us into an unexpectedly complex situation. As philosophers, scholars and intellectuals of the 16-18th centuries once dreamed, the enlightenment out of darkness and the ordering of chaos have actually been conducted in quite a substantial way.2 However, in the 19th–21st centuries, the enlightenment itself turned out to be a source of social chaos, and rational order often casted an impenetrable shadow upon human lives. Human reason turned out to be simultaneously a source of anticipated liberty and omnipresent control, of unlimited human creativity, and yet, also of unprecedented violence. The rhizome of cultural Lifeworlds and the idea of human authenticity are constantly subjected to increasing risk.

Modernity was primarily based on the idea of the universality of human interest and capacity. The U-turn of modern culture occurred at the moment when novelty gained dominance over precedent. To define pre-modern culture, Zygmunt Bauman uses the metaphor of the Crystal of Tradition. This metaphor translates well the logic of society that is being reproduced in time with the same monotonous structure that existed before: repeated cultural structures based in archaic forms—as in a crystal—change at an immensely slow pace (Bauman 2006: 2). It takes ages for even a micro-change to alter this archaic structure. Yet, modernity has transformed the life of human collectives. First, the liquid structure of modern societies has melted and washed away the limits of local traditions, and substituted them with the idea of universal principles and human creativity. Modernity’s chronotope has loosened the creative potential of humans to start new beginnings in all spheres of life, including politics and economics, family and religion, science and communal life.

Looking from the second decade of the 21st century at the history of modernity, it is clear that the destruction of traditional frontiers has enabled humanity’s existence and the construction of a global humanity. Modern universal values have profoundly transformed all societies in contemporary contexts. This transformation has divided the whole of human interactions into two distinct spheres: public and private.3 Both spheres delimit specific interests and instruments. The public sphere was constructed as a domain of political freedom, marked by legitimacy of government and communication regarding the common good. The private sphere was formed into a realm of intimate, family, and religious life, combined with some elements of business and traditional forms of communion. The private-public differentiation is based on universal principles and values—a structural feature common to all contemporary societies.

Although the expected differentiation has actually become real, in addition to their desired practices, the public and private spheres remain the sites for unforeseen developments. The public sphere was affected by instrumental rationality4 in a way that it gave birth to a System, the agglomerate of unanimous forces created by the unintended consequences of rationalized collective human actions.5 Within the dominance of the System, the private sphere was often turned into a ghetto for the Lifeworld rhizome. Moreover, the very dichotomy was put under question by the intervention of the System into matters of the Lifeworld, and vice versa. This “colonization of the Lifeworld” occurs when an increasingly autonomous System intrudes into the Lifeworld and undermines individual freedom, traditional forms of life, and bio-cultural conditions of human existence.6 The history of modernity has not proven to be a linear progress or consequential transformation of public and private institutions. Although seemingly transparent and accountable, modernity is full of revelations with regard to the limits of reason and human capacities.

Vis-à-vis this general historiosophic introduction, I will discuss three interrelated issues in this chapter. The first issue is connected with the fact that, in spite of its universal aspirations, principles and norms, modernity has many forms, and thus is not that different from the fundamental diversity of traditions. In this concern, global modernity is a common name for different local, sub- and super-regional co-existing “modernity projects.” We deal not with one modernity, but with multiple modernities, each having their own specific regional distinctions.

If the first issue is connected with the spatial limits of modernity, the second issue reflects its temporal irregularity and lack of homogeneity. Different cultural areas launch their modernity projects at different times and are at different stages of modernization. This provides regional modernities with different starting points and brings local projects into political and socioeconomic competition with the already-modernized and/or yet traditional societies. This spatial-temporal complexity of modernity is also reflected in the unevenness of regional transitions from one stage of contemporary history into another. Quite often, the competition of projects leads to demodernization, a reverse development of modernized societies in the crystallization of new hybrid cultures with unpredictable results, including the mutual colonization of the Lifeworld by the System, and vice versa (Rabilotta, Rabkin and Saul 2013). Complex modernity is diverse and multiple in its temporal and spatial terms.

My third thesis derives from the application of the two above issues to post-Soviet social reality. Post-Soviet societies are living through a highly contradictory historical period. In addition to those risks, opportunities and limitations to the meaningful life of a human being in the process of social, economic and political modernization, there is a growing tendency of demodernization in Eastern Europe. This demodernization has unleashed social forces that annihilate rational politics and destroy traditional values, as well as create a human condition where neither rationality nor tradition can imbue an individual with moral orientation. For this, I will show in this third part how the post-Soviet hope for democracy and plenty became a pathway leading into a neo-traditionalist trap.

The Spatial Polymorphism of Modernity

Modernity is a common name for a process in which human societies were revealed to be under continuous cultural rationalization. The impact of reason on cultures led to the disintegration of traditional world-views, where truth, good and beauty were once the same. The history of human societies under the dominance of rational structures is thus called modernization (a becoming of modernity in the broadest possible sense).

The theories of modernization developed in the 20th century and framed modernization as mutually reinforcing processes of change in values, human identities, political and economic practices etc. Each included the following processes:

Values: the secularization of values and norms, and the use of argumentative justification for the experience of truth, love and beauty;

Human Identity: the conceptualization and practical application of the idea of rights, and the invention of individuality as a political and economic player, the institutionalization of formal education as the “industry of individuals,” and urban life as the dominant form of life;

Politics and Governance: the formation of nations, officially institutionalized elites’ rotation, and the development of centralized government with separate branches of power;

Economics: the accumulation of capital, production development, and increased labor productivity.

Summing up these theories, Jürgen Habermas described the process of “becoming-modern” in the following terms:

“Insofar as world-views have disintegrated and their traditional problems have been separated off under the perspectives of truth, normative rightness and authenticity or beauty, and can now be treated in each case as questions of knowledge, justice or taste respectively, there arises in the modern period a differentiation across the spheres of science and knowledge, of morality, and of art. Thus scientific discourse, moral and legal enquiry, artistic production and critical practice are now institutionalized within the corresponding cultural systems as the concern of experts” (Habermas 1997: 45).

In human history, the dissolution of a crystalized tradition, or the dissociation of traditional world-views, was an arduously long process. Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas and many later philosophers and historians studied how Western rationalism occurred almost simultaneously with the discovery of the New World, the destruction of Western religious unity, and the scientific revolution (Koselleck 1988; Habermas 1971; Touraine 2007). These processes were at once destructive and creative. They were destructive and painful for traditional forms of life in Europe and the Americas, as well as painfully creative for new—modern—forms of life. These traumatic events initiated a long process of preparatory modernization that in the 19th century became a dominant discourse in most of Europe and North America, evolving into a global reality in the 20th century. This image of modernity has remained constant, coinciding with a holistic understanding of humanity as a universal historical subject, and the universal meaning of reason as a source for both the whole of human history and for an autonomous human subject.

In the process of modernization, the principles, practices, models and patterns of Western modernity were stimulating the same rationalization processes in other parts of the world. The vision of the whole of humanity was fueling modernization, but nonetheless the diffusion of traditional world-views and the creation of structural transformations of modernity, such as the institutionalization of the public and private spheres, took place in a different way, with its own speed and specific correlations with modernities in other regions of the world.

Today, global modernity is depicted by the World Values Survey as a map with geographically and culturally diverse provinces that have different levels of impact on rational non-secular and individualist values of self-expression in individual and collective lives (Inglehart & Welzel 2005; World Values Survey Association 2014). This survey shows that—in the pursuit of emancipating and disseminating interest in democracy—we still have different local responses to the values and practices within modernity. It also shows how modern values have different impacts upon societies at different stages of their modernization.

Yes, modern rationality has profoundly changed the world we live in. However, while modernity has common universal ends and a common geo-historical beginning in Western Europe, it has different modernization patterns vis-à-vis human collectives of longer historical duration. Understanding the cultural complexity of modernity has let Shmuel Eisenstadt coin the specific relationship between Western and other modernities:

“Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities,

though they enjoy historical precedence” (Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3).

There have been many emerging, developing and declining local projects of modernity. In the broadest terms these include:

1) The calamitous 16th century in Western Europe involving cultures surviving new understandings of religious, scholarly, informational, political, and economic life and its organization; involvement of Latin America into early modern colonial projects;

2) The absolutist and imperial projects of the Amero-European and Eurasian 16–18th centuries;

3) The cultural realms of great revolutions in the second half of the 18th century;

4) Global empires intervening into traditional societies globally in the 19–20th centuries;

5) Latin-American indigenous modernities in the 19–20th centuries;

6) The totalitarian modernities of the USSR, China and far-eastern Marxist projects;

7) The new global cleavage of Northern and Southern modernities of the second half of the 20th—early 21st centuries and many other “projects” on a smaller scale.

These local differences unfolded across different temporal frameworks, and were produced by two major factors:

The modern projects that were developing in the worlds created by different cultures and/or civilizations: this situation predisposed different styles, speed and depth with regard to the impact of modernization on human lives;

Competition between projects of modernity has continued to profoundly impact the speed and result of transition in different contemporary societies.

The initialization of modernization occurred at different times in different cultures/civilizations. Both factors of modernization created lasting institutions and practices. These institutions and practices pre-describe the correlation between the public and private spheres, strengthen the instrumental reason and impact of the System, damage the Lifeworld during the industrial period of modernization etc. Basically, these institutions and practices were/are the limiting factors in terms of humanity entering one ideal undivided realm of modernity that would then serve as one cohesive point on the table of the “Cultural map of the world.”

The Temporal Irregularity of Modernity

The claim of universality in the age of modernity leads to a new situation in human history. It is now structured globally in terms of the private and public dichotomy, the repression of tradition’s “leftovers” into the private sphere, and the co-existence of human societies with the System as a superstructure to public institutions. This common structural makeup of modern societies provided a few optimistic expectations that there would be a common global political order with shared rules and norms. This optimism is vested, for example, in methodological grounds for such bold projects as the World Values Survey, global measurements of Human Development by the UN and/or the Freedoms in the World index by Freedom House. The structural similarity between modern societies also gave birth to the hope for sameness across societies in many other respects. If there is any lesson to be learned from the history of transitions, it should be formulated this way: structural similarity does not necessarily mean commonality in development. This dissimilarity within complex modernity is connected not only to the specificities of those traditions from which these modern projects started. Each modernizing society has gone through modernity with its own losses and gains, with its own specific features of the periods common for most modern societies. Today’s complex modernity is a result of both a cultural diversity of traditions, as well as the transitional diversity of modernities.

The framework for global modernization describes the development of post-traditional societies as a permanent change. Zygmunt Bauman proposed a summary of the transformative nature of modernity in terms of transition from a “crystallized tradition” to the state of “liquidity of producing Modernity” and then to “hyper-liquidity of the late Modernity of consumers” (Bauman 1999: 4–5). These stages provide us with possibilities for depicting complex modernity temporally, in terms of river streams (to follow Bauman’s metaphor) all flowing towards the same ocean—with each stream having its own unique channel.

Baumann’s structural evolution of modernity correlates with a model of the historical development of modernizing societies through their sources of legitimization. Alain Touraine defined this model in his book dedicated to modernity (Touraine 2007: 19ff). The text departs from more traditional viewpoints in the principle that Hegel depicted as the individual becoming a source of legitimacy. This model follows the same logic as Bauman’s: rationality is a permanent factor in social change. Thus, instead of an aggregate state, this periodization utilizes the idea of an ever-changing form that rationality gains in a modernizing society: from the external principle of legitimacy to an internal one. Accordingly, the history of complex modernity moves from the periods of external principles of legitimacy to the periods of internal principles of legitimacy. So, modernization moved through the following stages: the dominance of confessional identities; then political ones (imperial absolutism, nationalism); and then the dichotomy of socio-economic identities (socialism and capitalism). Yet the era involving the internal principle of legitimacy has already begun: in recent decades information or network society identities stream from the individual (Touraine 2007: 101ff).

Whichever modernizing society one studies, it will involve phases of development after the initial turn away from traditionalism; these usually are: rationalized rule, rationalized economic behavior, and network participation. Rationalized rule is constructed from confessional, imperial and nationalist collective identities that legitimized the rule of a minority through the application of institutionalized government, bureaucracy, codified and unified laws, police, army and educational infrastructures. Here regimes were abusing religious, ethnic or other collective principles mixing them with the instrumental rationality embodied into effective institutions such as the bureaucracy or the army. By doing this, reason was destroying traditional differences in local communal and tribal lives, establishing the same rules for all. A modernized bureaucracy and army were those “social lifts” that provided “rank-and-file members of society” with opportunities to become a part of the ruling class.

The rationalized economy has deepened the influence of modern reason through the logic of capital. Money became a major means of communication during industrialization, creating a new vocabulary of understanding, management, and social development. Social engineering has since improved institutions and undermined the nature of public rationality through the instrumentalization of rationality within the frameworks of industrial society. The dark side of modern reason has revealed itself at this time to be one of the gravest dangers for humankind.

Totalitarian projects, global wars, and ecological catastrophes testify to the fact that instrumental reason reached an unprecedented autonomy in some modernizing societies. The pessimism of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno was primarily associated with assessments of modernity in this period. Yet it was precisely these pessimist assessments that fueled a therapeutic self-criticism of the modern mind and a quest for “communicative rationality.”

Finally, the transition from industrial to information-based societies embodies a vision of the development of modernity within a more participative, democratic and ecological order. With increasingly simplified hierarchies, respected forms of diversity, and enhanced participation, modernities may lose their self-destructive inclinations.

Unlike Marxist historiosophy, with its rigid periodization, the above model supplies us with an approach able to respect regional specificities in the case of transition; both share one optimistic belief: the irreversibility of transition.

My point is that—keeping a complex spatial-temporal modernity model in mind—modernizing societies do not necessarily evolve in a consequent way through their own specific forms of absolutism, nationalism, industrialism and/or post-industrialism. In some cases, transition is reversible: a society can move from a later period of its development to a preceding one. In my opinion, this sort of demodernization begins in those situations when modern institutions destroy the Lifeworld’s resources to such a level that the System needs to abuse even more the life-assuring force of traditional forms of life; in this way, the System abuses institutions like the church, kinship or local community by re-inventing them as pervert forms of “the archaic,” utilizing “traditional names” for hybrid forms of organizations promoting instrumental rationality, loneliness of the individual, and the dominance of mass-politics.

The Demodernization Processes

Demodernization creates hybrid societies with mutual colonization of the Lifeworld and the System. Even though these deliberations sound too metaphysical, the pragmatic ratio behind them is that a theory of demodernization may help us to understand certain challenges to human life in certain instances, such as the Ukrainian, Chinese, Russian or Brazilian social contexts. Unlike more optimistic modernization theories, my approach is based on the austerity of hope which may provide more opportunities for belief in human progress, freedom, and evaluations of individual experiences of dependency and subjugation in societies that continue to evolve from one form of unfreedom to another. The gap between expected freedoms and recurring servitude gives birth to unfruitful and humiliating desperation. Today, despite several centuries of global emancipation, Rousseau’s paradox (“L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers”) remains as true as it was at the time of the enlightenment.

Although models for modern societies tend to expect predictable collective reactions to similar sets of political and/or socio-economic events, there are examples from human history in recent centuries through which modernization models appear less optimistic. Current developments in post-Soviet societies, for example, show that within a twenty-five-year timespan, these nations have emerged as different socio-economic, political and cultural “projects,” despite the fact that they each grew from approximately the same post-totalitarian context in 1991. United by the totalitarian Soviet Union, with its specific industrial modernity project, contemporary post-Soviet Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs and Estonians live in societies that within a very short historic time have gone in completely different directions with different outcomes for human development.

Furthermore, these societies show how complex the transition path can be: in many cases, development towards more political and economic liberties and towards societies with fewer survival collective values was compromised by opposing tendencies. In cases where reverse tendencies in development are dominant, and when new paradoxical modern traditions merge modern public and private institutions into one “crystal,” I term this particular form of development demodernization.

Post-Soviet demodernization takes place in societies where the Soviet industrial legacy was already ruined, but cultural, economic and political institutions in the globalizing information era did not evolve to a necessary level in order to define the social structure in place. Instead, one can witness a reversal: some Soviet and pre-Soviet forms of collective life are being restored. Among those forms is the “vertical of power” in Belarus (since 1998), Russia (since 2003), and Ukraine (2010–2014). Another example could be the quasi-feudal and neo-tribal governance techniques in Central Asian and Caucasian republics. The political creativity of the Bolsheviks in their variety of cultural, social, and economic revolutionary projects in the 1920s was summed up and utilized in the totalitarian project of Joseph Jugashvili-Stalin in the early 1930s. This unexpectedly long-lasting totalitarian project was based on the logic of industrial society.7

In spite of Soviet-Marxist metaphysics, the way in which Soviet society was structured resembles the radical industrial mind. Industrial logic unified the cultural rhizome of peoples living between Lviv and Vladivostok by linking the same forms for organizing collective life in both cities and rural areas. The two global wars, democides, genocides, Soviet industrialization and collectivization, as well as political purges, profoundly changed the human, collective and biological strata of the Lifeworld on these territories between 1922 and 1991. The public sphere was immensely oversized in Soviet society; thus, family, religion and business were either subordinated to public institutions, or radically marginalized. The structural transformation of the Soviet public sphere made it an unlimited System, while the private sphere diminished to a bare minimum. Soviet society became a radical case for industrial modernity, with some extreme forms of colonization of the Lifeworld.

The post-Soviet period started with a profound social change, led by the revolutionary aim of restoring a balanced public-private dichotomy, democratic politics, and a free market economy. For Ukraine, these revolutionary changes included both public and private revolutions. In the public sphere, it was a brave attempt to construct a democratic nation-state with responsible government. Ethnicity and civility were re-invented and employed in state-building. Simultaneously, there were religious, business, and sexual revolutions that were changing the private sphere and the everyday life of Ukrainians. Religious organizations obtained freedom and reinstated the spiritual life of men and women in Ukraine. Business and entrepreneurship were de-criminalized; private initiatives and property were legitimized. Intimate life changed its traditional and Soviet forms; the number of marriages and level of births decreased. Sexual behavior changed its rules and forms of articulation. It is apparent that the post-Soviet world was constructed in the 1990s.

These changes took place very fast, just within several years. In the transition from late-Soviet to post-Soviet societies, many people were losing their orientation within the world in which they lived. In contrast to such quick post-Soviet modernization, there was a growing reaction towards these changes within Ukraine, Russia or Kazakhstan. Winners in the private sector managed to take over the public sector as well. Systemic corruption and oligarchy created political and socio-economic conditions where human integrity and freedom came under attack once again. In the post-industrial context, post-Soviet society was too slow in developing itself into a new information society. Huge labor migrations, the mystification of politics, loss of quality in secondary and higher education, sparks of radical ethno-nationalism and neo-Sovietism, and the growth of patron-client informal networks were and remain the disturbing symptoms of demodernization. For the sake of their own interests, political institutions attempted to use religious organizations once again for political purposes.

In the context of demodernization, post-Soviet societies underwent yet another problematic structural transformation of the public sphere. Soviet institutions survived the collapse of the U.S.S.R., but in their hybrid forms (i.e. Ministry of Education, oligarchic clans, security services, nepotism etc.), they have continued to colonize both the public and private spheres, the System, and the Lifeworld. Such ongoing mutual colonization has introduced great risk to post-Soviet societies. If, in the Soviet context, those remnants of the Lifeworld provided the second half of Orwell’s doublethink and doublespeak, in addition to ideological “truth,” there always also existed a moral stance. Life under these circumstances involving doublespeak was painful because it essentially ruined the integrity of the individual: one knew what was considered to be right, but spoke (and acted) in an opposite manner. Thus, in the Soviet context at least a person had the knowledge of good and bad, even if they possessed almost no choice to act accordingly, out of fear of punishment or pervert desire of subjugation.

In the context of demodernization, a person loses the possibility of finding justifications for pain. As soon as religious feelings or the sense of kinship is employed for political purposes or for administrative gain, there is a risk that the meanings and values represented by those guardians of the Lifeworld (the church, family, and community) become sources of manipulation, as in ideology itself. The doublethink is in place, while one’s thoughts become both misleading and alienating; likewise, the doublespeak appears necessary, while words and references become equally deceiving.

There is no certainty in what is right and genuine in such a double-situation. In a way, demodernization is based on an even greater exploitation of the Lifeworld rhizome, unleashing social forces that annihilate rational politics, traditional values, and the moral condition. Due to these conditions, the rational, predictable world of Soviet industrial modernity has been replaced by a post-Soviet age defined by the terror wrought from the unpredictability of history.

In the initial years following the fall of the U.S.S.R., the uncertainty of the future was welcomed, since it opened possibilities for the most daring political and socio-economic projects in the public sphere, as well as bold endeavors in the private domain. However, reality set in and soon adjusted expectations, by substituting the freedom of enterprise with oligarchy, political freedom with authoritarianism, and spiritual quests with intrusive clericalism. The dreams of modernization in the early 1990s oddly led to the hastily demodernizing Eastern European world of the 2010s.

The initial chapters in the Constitutions of post-Soviet nations are abundant with chiasmi from the early 1990s. The same year that Russia’s parliament was shelled, its Constitution read:

“The Russian Federation — Russia is a democratic federal law-bound State with a republican form of government.” (The Constitution of the Russian Federation 1993, Article 1.1)

“Man, his rights and freedoms are the supreme value. The recognition, observance and protection of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall be the obligation of the State” (Article 2).

In the years when oligarchy replaced democracy in Ukraine, its Fundamental Law stipulated:

“Ukraine is a sovereign and independent, democratic, social, law-based state” (The Constitution of Ukraine 1996, Article 1).

“The human being, his or her life and health, honor and dignity, inviolability and security are recognized in Ukraine as the highest social value. Human rights and freedoms and their guarantees determine the essence and orientation of the activity of the State. The State is answerable to the individual for its activity. To affirm and ensure human rights and freedoms is the main duty of the State” (Article 3).

There are many other interesting examples of the early post-Soviet constitutional imagination:

“The Republic of Kazakhstan recognizes a human, his life, freedom and undeniable rights as supreme values, and acts in the interests of the citizen and society” (The Constitution of Kazakhstan 1993, Article 3).

“The individual, his rights, freedoms and guarantees to secure them are the supreme value and goal of society and the State” (The Constitution of the Republic of Belarus 1994, Article 2).

Neither two decades ago, nor today, do these “fundamental laws” correspond to reality. They simply do not contain factual statements. And yet, these statements do retain a certain illocutionary meaning. They express the aspirations of the collective in becoming modern. As a set of noble goals, described in the language of modernity, they supplied a then disintegrated social reality with the chance for what Berger and Luckmann called maintenance, that is, renovation, restoration, the bringing closer and balancing of objective and subjective realities (Berger & Luckmann 1991: 166ff).

As a matter of fact, nearly all statements across those initial post-Soviet constitutions shared a certain political imagination and set of ideas about the future that became highly characteristic of the architects of the post-Soviet state projects. Constitutional texts, directly or indirectly, expressed the post-Soviet collectives’ concern about their future:

“We, the People of the Republic of Belarus, proceeding from the responsibility for the present and future of Belarus…”

“We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation… proceeding from the responsibility for our Fatherland before the present and future generations…”

The revolutionary novelty and utopianism of the desired future constituted, properly speaking, the legitimization of post-Soviet political projects. New regimes emerged out of the dream and the promise of becoming modern societies, of rising above the ruins of the USSR. Nevertheless, twenty-five years later, this novelty has been replaced by the search for the old—the return of a past that has not been properly reflected upon. The “unburied past,” of which Alexander Etkind wrote, has come back in grotesque and ugly forms (Etkind 2013). These forms determine the life of today’s post-Soviet political systems to a much larger extent than the constitutional dreams of the early 1990s.

The concept of demodernization itself has long remained on the sidelines of modernization theory. In western sociology, the term has been used to describe a response to the processes of modernization in particular spheres or communities, such as new religious movements or youth counterculture (Hunter 1981; Berger 1973). Alain Touraine and Shmuel Eisenstadt attempted to transfer this concept to the center of social theory, but met with only modest success (Touraine 1992; Robertson 2011). John David Bone and David Fasenfest also attempted to insert the concept of demodernization into the economic analysis of late capitalism (Bone 2010; Fasenfest 2011).

Meanwhile, in the Eastern European context, the term is used ever more often, in conjunction with another round in the demodernizing stage in the development of post-Soviet societies. Valery Tishkov first used the term to describe the cultural and socio-psychological consequences of the Chechen wars for the population of Chechnya (Tishkov 2001). Grigorii Iavlinskii then used the same term to describe a tendency in the socio-economic development of Russia in the early 21st century (Iavlinskii, G. 2003). Somewhat later, Andriy Portnov wrote about demodernization in the context of Ukrainian education (Portnov 2011). Ilya Kalinin also described the same demodernization processes in Russian memory politics and official discourses on modernization, however indirectly (Kalinin 2011).

The general picture of post-Soviet demodernization became more acute in the second decade of the 21st century with the return of Vladimir Putin as the President of Russia (2012), the authoritarian tendencies in Viktor Yanukovych’s rule (at approximately the same time), and the regional consolidation of the authoritarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe and Western Eurasia, formalized by the Customs Union (after 2011).

At the height of these processes, the journal Neprikosnovennyi zapas published an article by Alexander Etkind, entitled, “Petromacho, or the Mechanisms of Demodernization in the Resource State.” By linking value judgments with the institutions that produce them, the author analyses Russian society and the state of democracy in Russia. Etkind points to the “mass distortions” in the connection between values and institutes. The deformation of values results from the predominance of strategies based in “raw material dependence,” leading to the “mass distortion of value judgments and injured the very capacity to produce such judgments” (Etkind 2013: 157ff).

The social order then is based on the exploitation of natural resources, according to Etkind, which brings into power the “security personnel,” since it is these people who are best able to secure the project of oil and gas extraction and transportation to foreign users, as well as maintain order in the country. When the population becomes the object of control by elites, it then loses any opportunity for emancipation, transforming it into the client of a corporate state. Protests against such a situation arise from the fact that elites’ power strategies aim at establishing a regime that prevents the development of human capital. That is why modernization in Russia must start anew with “educated, industrious, creative women and men sending the ridiculous, puffy petromacho to the ash heap of history, where they are to be utilized, in order to extract the resources which have soaked into their bodies and souls” (Etkind 2013: 166).

While I agree with Etkind’s overall approach and conclusions, I also believe he has not fully developed the concept of demodernization. His analysis focuses exclusively on Russian society. The patterns in post-Soviet demodernization can only be clearly viewed by comparing the ways in which elites in Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics are, not without success, trying to curtail the modernization of their societies. The common characteristics of post-Soviet demodernization should be viewed comparatively across regimes and institutes. To understand how demodernization works and how its world might be re-imagined, we have to examine our region as a whole, and thus go outside just Russian society.

I believe that the disintegration of the Soviet Union did not lead to the destruction of that special model of modernization that emerged under the influence of political and cultural projects of the 17th and 18th centuries in Eastern Europe, which were engulfed by Russia. This Eastern European model of modernization took shape in the 19th century as a stable system of practices by elites, capable of instrumentalizing economic and technological processes against socio-political emancipation. The experience of Soviet modernity only reinforced the institutes and practices of “transition,” managed by elites, by making them more sophisticated and efficient, teaching them to employ the rhetoric of freedom in order to enslave. The disintegration of the Soviet Union could have changed the model, but, in reality, only multiplied the cultural programs of “Soviet modernity”, so that the single model became multiple, inevitably leading to the cycle of crisis in modernization—demodernization.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union provided the newly independent nations with opportunities to create their own political and socio-economic projects. The momentum of 1991 led to serious reconsiderations of the Soviet project. The key element in such reconsideration was the notion of revolutionary transformation that described the differentiation between the public and the private sectors. The public sphere was to become a space for the development of formal institutes, which would guarantee political and economic freedoms. It was expected that the private sphere would become a space for diverse practices of self-realization.

The enthusiasm of the first years of independence was accompanied by a kind of “indigenization” (korenizatsiia) of the public sphere. Among the conscious decisions of the new power elites was the transition from the Marxist worldview to beliefs grounded in an ethnonationalist spirit. Democracy was to become “local,” familiar, homely. In Ukraine, the cossack tradition was renewed in official discourse. In Russia, the veche tradition was seen as historical ground for democratic deliberation; while in Belarus, the seyms were considered to be the precursor to parliamentarism.

The launch of such programs in cultural modernization bore one major risk: romantic nationalism could greatly distract from more balanced economic and political changes. In those countries where privatization outpaced the development of democratic institutions, demodernization would win out in the end.

In the 1990-s, the post-Soviet countries split into

1) those which reformed their economy and politics quickly (the Baltic countries);

2) those which reformed their economy quickly, but did not rush to institutionalize democracy (Russia, Ukraine), and;

3) those which quickly curtailed reforms (Turkmenistan, Belarus).

In a way, Estonia and Belarus represented two opposite poles of development: modernizing versus demodernizing.

In Eastern Europe, it was Belarus, not Estonia, that became an example in the formation of elite practices and political institutes enabling demodernization. The reaction of the majority of the population to the rhetoric of Belarusian nationalists manifested itself in the election of a populist leader who actively used neo-Soviet rhetoric. When Alexander Lukashenko became the President of Belarus, it seemed as if this outcome were just the whim of a post-Soviet province, to be rectified during the following election. However, Lukashenko’s political experiments soon allowed for the emergence of the “president’s administration” as a phenomenon, for the articulation of the idea of the “power vertical,” and for a strong “state ideology” to be tested in practice.

Today, the institution of the presidential administration is a hybrid of real (but unofficial) government and the parliament, which avoids formalizing the rules of its functioning. It is here that Belarusian, and later Russian and Ukrainian, elites first started to make decisions demanding immediate execution. The logic of this institution was further extended through establishment of the “power vertical,” in which formal state institutions acquired informal bonds. As a matter of fact, this entailed the return of personal relations similar to those of a sovereign and a vassal. Spreading throughout the post-Soviet capitals, the model of the “power vertical” destroyed the republican model of the separation of powers. Under informal—but effective—presidential control, judges, legislators and executive authorities acted in tune with implicitly established rules.

When new generations of politicians and officials entered into these formal and informal organizations, they did not change much. In order to minimize risk, officials in Minsk tested the creation of a document with which to formulate “state ideology.” Svetlana Parechina, the author of the handbook on Belarusian ideology, quotes the President:

“According to the President of the Republic of Belarus A.G. Lukashenko, ‘Ideology is to a state as the immune system is to a living organism.’ If the immune system weakens, any, even the most minor infection, becomes lethal. It is the same for the state; when the ideological basis of society deteriorates, its death becomes a matter of time, however strong and formidable the state appears to be on the outside” (Parechina 2005: 17).

In other words, an established regime requires the articulation of beliefs common to all. Managing beliefs became very important to insuring the stability of the un-free regimes that had emerged in post-Soviet Europe. The logic of Belarus’ development was repeated in Russia and Ukraine in one form or another, yet with some delay. Putinism, as an ideology of self-isolating sovereign authoritarianism, has overtaken all centers of power in Russia, and has been promoted abroad through networks spreading Kremlin propaganda since 2013. Meanwhile, Ukrainian “decommunization” (begun in 2015) has become a policy of ideological monopolization, with elements of both extreme right and neo-liberal beliefs.

At the same time, the results of post-Soviet market revolution led to the creation of specific economic practices that supported oligarchies, and later, authoritarian regimes. A new class based upon ownership was born in the competition to inherit Soviet industry that took place among Soviet apparatchiks, red directors, crime bosses, and emerging entrepreneurs. For this class, entrepreneurship was inseparable from capturing public positions of power and rent extraction. The incipient post-Soviet differentiation between the private and the public was curtailed by the oligarchs of the late Yeltsin period (1996–99) and the second term of Kuchma’s presidency (2000–2005). While enterprises in the extraction and primary processing of oil were the most profitable in Russia, in Ukraine, the most efficient resources resulted from the networks for transporting oil and gas into Europe. Thus, elites in Russia and Ukraine faced different tasks in the 1990s. In Russia, as Alexander Etkind has correctly observed, in order to succeed in resource extraction, there existed a need for individuals who were disciplined and, at the same time, capable of planning and implementing large-scale international and national projects. This is why the recruitment of security service staff into elites occurred. In order to solve the problem of resource administration in Ukraine, people needed to negotiate with international players and manipulate large population groups in small-scale, short-term projects. Due to these requirements, crime bosses and their skills were valued in the formation of elites.

What Russian and Ukrainian elites held in common were their skills in controlling the masses, as well as their sociopathy, that is, their unwillingness to follow formal rules in the late Soviet era. The difference between them lied in their abilities to work or not to work within the framework of vertical hierarchies. Ukrainian elites were more inclined towards horizontal communication within their own class. Russian elites were ready to submit to superior groups in order to receive their share in the distribution of resources. Thus, two models of patronalism with two different dynamics were created: Ukraine moved in cycles from one regime change to another, while Russia stagnated under the pressure of a stable power vertical.

The presence of a noisy multitude of non-government organizations is rare in post-Soviet countries. In Russia, at the time of Yeltsin’s modernization program, non-governmental organizations achieved a significant level of development. From the outset of demodernization, Russian authorities used the strategy of imitating citizen associations in order to suppress the activity of independent, democratic organizations. They also cut the sources of funding for independent NGOs. With Putin’s return in 2012, the non-governmental sector remains on the social margins of municipal movements and religious organizations, whose potential for modernization remains highly dubious.

Ukrainian civil society has turned out to be more robust and influential. However, its influence is rather peculiar—it has proven sufficient enough to oppose the establishment of extreme forms of authoritarian regimes, but is not capable of exercising consistent pressure on elites in order to complete the transition to an open access order. Differing from Russian and Belarusian societies, Ukrainians have already survived two full cycles of regime change in the revolutions of 2004 and 2014—and yet, neither of these cycles have led to any lasting democratic successes.

By the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the post-Soviet countries of Western Eurasia and Eastern Europe built societies based on personal connections between groups for which the codified laws have had different meanings. For example, private property is barely protected, and depends on one’s relations with the state authorities.

Although Ukrainian elites did not learn anything from the experience of the “color revolutions,” Russian elites managed to prepare for subsequent crises. The Euromaidan of 2013–14 could not bring about the expected democratic results, due to the fact that Putin’s involvement in the process has activated neo-Sovietist and radical ethnonationalist forces in Ukraine, considerably restricting the democratic momentum from spreading to neighboring countries. Additionally, the democratic motivations that brought about the “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine have been replaced by efforts at collective survival in the Donbas war. This war promotes a deepening of demodernization, thus speeding up the regional crisis that might otherwise introduce a new window of opportunities for the cycle of modernization in Ukraine and possibly Eastern Europe.

Russian intervention and the civil war in Ukraine have considerably lowered public support in conservative Moscow and revolutionary Ukraine for the values inherent to modernization. Post-Soviet political regimes with demodernization agendas are integrated to such a degree as to be able to effectively resist any tendency toward development for a long time to come.

Russian petromachos, Belarusian batska, and Ukrainian oligarchs all won in 2014. These groups continue to set the agenda on the territories stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. They promote the archaization of the values and practices of over 200 million people. The outcomes of the 1991 revolution in the private realm—in sexuality, in religion, and in entrepreneurship—are undergoing serious reconsideration. Eastern European societies mired in an endless transition period are losing time and some of the most critical opportunities of their lives. At the moment, the post-Soviet space is a global history laboratory for testing alternative demodernization schemes, from their theoretical elaboration to their practical implementation involving anti-modern models of socio-political structures.

1.2. Systemic Corruption and the Eastern European Social Contract

Corruption is a concept whose definition and meaning emerged with the political and legal imagination of modernity. The ability to see corruption appeared the moment that the hypothesis on the social contract was accepted, splitting the whole field of interaction between individuals and groups into two: the public and the private spheres. The violation of the boundary between the public and the private constitutes the pernicious fault-line of corruption.

The fact that corruption is related to imagination does not mean that it is unreal. On the contrary, all of contemporary social reality is an embodiment of certain imagined beliefs, based on rational and moral conclusions, or influenced by simulacra of presuppositions. According to Kant, imagination is a productive force that creates syntheses in which experience and reason are combined (Kant В: 150 ff). In the late 20th and the early 21st centuries, Benedict Anderson and his followers pointed out that imagination is inherent to political action (Anderson 1991; Bottici 2013). The behavior of contemporary humans—our language and vision, our institutions and structures of coexistence—are all shaped by the long history of modernization, i.e. of us and our imagination becoming modern, and of our break with traditional ways of life. To maintain the reality of this imagined order, we need institutions that establish the basic structures in a regime of truth describing modernity. The behavior that leads to the destruction of the basic principle of the distinction between private and public interest, as well as between private and public institutions, is maintained by dedicated institutions and organizations which guarantee that all corrupt behavior will be punished. In this way, modernity is demonstrated through the non-illusory nature and actual significance of its imaginary potential.

The culmination of modern political and legal perspectives on corruption can be viewed in the lack of definition around the term in the UN Convention Against Corruption (UN Convention 2003). Written in 2004 and ratified by 172 states, the text of this document is extremely precise: corruption appears as a general term for many very different types of behavior, all aimed at the “illicit enrichment” of a “public official.” Each particular definition of corrupt behavior (the bribing of officials in the public sector, the embezzlement of property, and the abuse of functions or influence by public officials) is based upon one simple purpose: to formulate the goals for all contemporary institutions of public authority in such a way that they, on both global and local levels, maintain all functionality in the unquestionable nature of the public-private differentiation of modernity. Thus, legal rationality is insufficient to determine the generic basis of corruption.

What leads to this situation in which the logical ideas and practices of modernity are under constant pressure from individual and cultural motivations? Institutional thinking in modernity offers two typical answers to this question, both of which underpin the intolerance of corruption and try, at the same time, to demonstrate what has been omitted by lawyers.

The first answer concerns corrupt behavior as a short-sighted, economically rational choice: for a rational economic actor, public regulations are an obstacle to the achievement of short-term goals; by bribing an official, the actor can ensure that their goals are achieved in the short term (see Mishra 2005: 2–4; Lambsdorff 2006: 5). The nature of human greed is in this case, stimulated by a range of modern institutions that render the economic actor’s activities overly complicated. For example, Johann Lambsdorff cites the bloated public sector, low quality of regulative policies, overly complex competition, poorly constructed (from the perspective of actors in the private sector) structure of the state, excessive formalism of democracy, and weakened control by anti-corruption structures as reasons for corrupt behavior (Lambsdorff 2006: 5–15). So economists see corruption as a result of the unreasonable intervention by public institutions into private activities.

The second answer is presented in Marcel Henaff’s thesis, which states that, under the impact of traditional cultures, institutions in modernity may fail and allow for corruption through the “mixing of genres” (Henaff 2014: 46). This mixing is precisely a violation of the boundary between the logic of public action, versus private motives. In fact, this is an imbalance between the two spheres, but described from a different perspective.