Post-Euromaidan Ukraine E-Book

Bohdan Harasymiw

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

Seitenzahl: 537

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Ukraine is a misfit among post-communist states, being neither a respectable, stable democracy nor an autocracy. Nor does it sit well as a patronal political system, like other post-Soviet regimes, since the Euromaidan Revolution. This study examines the presidencies of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy focusing on their common tendency to subordinate the legal system and use it as a political instrument. It finds that this pattern of power struggle concentrated in the president’s office was, contrary to the theory of patronal politics, more dominant than clientelism. The second theme of this book is each president’s handling of relations—largely meaning the war—with Russia, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and culminating in the invasion of 2022, as the key challenge to the nation’s survival. One way or another, unable to reform itself or to withstand the Russian assault, post-Euromaidan Ukraine will have come to an end. "An important contribution to the literature!  There is a lot of interest in Ukraine, and the focus . . . on the past decade or so is so important.” —Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Professor of Political Science, University of Alberta

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

Previous Studies of Ukraine

Conceptual Clarification of the Political

What This Book is About

The Plan of the Book

Ukraine as a “Failed State”

A Review of the Literature

The Failed State’s Failure

The Failed State as Mission

Susan Woodward’s Critique

Post-Soviet State Failure

Ukraine through the Lens of Comparative Politics

Comparative Politics: The Leading Approaches

Transitology

The End of Transitology

Electoral or Competitive Authoritarianism

Henry Hale’s Patronalism

Informal Politics

The Presidency of Petro Poroshenko 2014-19

Appointments and Disappointments

Poroshenko’s Relations with Other Institutions

Poroshenko’s Institutional Changes

The ACAs

The DBR/SBI

The Anti-Corruption Court

The National Police

De-Oligarchization

Conclusion—Poroshenko’s Reward

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Presidency 2019-22

Zelenskyy the Messenger

Zelenskyy as Patron

Zelenskyy as Law-Maker

Relations with Other Institutions

Judicial Reform

The Prosecutor-General’s Office

The SBU, the DBR/SBI, and Intelligence

The (Ir)replaceable Interior Minister and the National Police

Curbing Informal Practices

Corruption and Anti-Corruption

Controlling Oligarchs

Conclusion

Russia’s Genocidal War of Aggression against Ukraine

Russia Intervenes in Crimea and the Donbas

Minsk Agreements and Disagreements

Poroshenko as Diplomat- and Commander-in-Chief

Volodymyr Zelenskyy—Diplomat and Defender

Putin’s War

When Will the War End?

Mearsheimer and the War

Anticipating an End to the War

Ukraine and the War

Politics Never Sleeps

Conclusion

Conclusion

On Patronal Politics in Post-2014 Ukraine

Poroshenko’s Presidency

Zelenskyy’s Presidency

On Putin’s War

War’s Impact on Ukraine

Ukraine and the World

Bibliography

Books and book chapters

Websites

Newspapers, news sites, and newsmagazines

Miscellaneous

Conference paper

Acknowledgements

I want first of all to thank Andreas Umland for warmly welcoming me into his Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS) series, offering encouragement, and improving the title of my study. I thank the three anonymous referees for their incisive assessments and valuable suggestions for improvement. I am also very grateful to several friends and colleagues for reading some or all of the manuscript and providing helpful comments. They include Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Luigi di Marzo, Brosi Nutting, Ihor Broda, Lubko Markevych, and Rob Normey. Special thanks to my wife, Elaine, for painstakingly going through the entire manuscript, prodding me to improve the way ideas are expressed in it, and raising questions that both broadened the horizons of my research as well as keeping the story on track.

Twenty years in gestation and over two years in the writing, this book would not have been possible without the guidance of a great many scholars, some of whom I have never met but have been my teachers nevertheless. They are all acknowledged in the footnotes. I am also indebted to a series of Deans of Arts at the University of Alberta who have extended to me an affiliation over many years, as well as a part-time position at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, where I have been given an opportunity to develop my ideas.

Needless to say, I alone am responsible for the book’s remaining shortcomings.

A note on transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin. I have omitted the soft sign (ь), usually rendered as an apostrophe (‘). Readers familiar with Russian and Ukrainian should be able to interpolate as necessary.

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

ACA Anti-Corruption Agency

ATO Anti-Terrorist Operation

BPP Blok Petra Poroshenka

BTG Battalion Tactical Group

CC Constitutional Court

CAR Central African Republic

CEC Central Electoral Commission

CEO Chief Executive Officer

CSO Civil Society Organization

DAI Derzhavna avtomobilna inspektsiia

DBR Derzhavne biuro rozsliduvan (see SBI)

DNR Donteska narodna Respublika

DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo

EU European Union

FSB Federalna sluzhba bezpeki

FSU Former Soviet Union

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GRU Glavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenie

HACC Higher Anti-Corruption Court (see VAKS)

HQCJ High Qualification Commission of Judges (see VKKS)

IFI International Financial Institution

IMF International Monetary Fund

KDAC Kyiv District Administrative Court

KDB Komitet derzhavnoi bezpeky

KGB Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti

KIIS Kyiv Institute of International Sociology

KORD Korpus Operatyvno-Raptovoi Dii

LNR Luhanska narodna respublika

MVS Minsterstvo vnutrishnikh sprav

NABU Natsionalne antykoruptsiine biuro

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NAZK Natsionalne ahentstvo z pytan zapobihannia koruptsii

NBU National Bank of Ukraine

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

NPU National Police of Ukraine

NUNS Nasha Ukraina—Narodna samooborona

ODIHR Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

OP Office of the President

ORDLO Otdelnye raiony Donetskoi i Luganskoi oblastei (Russian term for temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine)

PA Presidential Administration

PF Popular Front

PGO Procurator General’s Office

PGU Prosecutor General of Ukraine

PM Prime Minister

POTUS President of the United States

PR Proportional Representation

RF Russian Federation

RNBOU Rada natsionalnoi bezpeky i oborony Ukrainy

ROC Russian Orthodox Church

SAP Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor

SBI State Bureau of Investigation (see DBR)

SBU Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy

SCJ Supreme Council of Justice (see VRP)

SMD Single-Member District

SMSP Single Member, Simple Plurality

SOE State-Owned Enterprise

TCG Trilateral Contact Group

UAH Ukrainian hryvnia (currency)

UK United Kingdom

UN United Nations

UNGA United Nations General Assembly

UNSC United Nations Security Council

US United States

VAKS Vyshchyi anty-koruptsiinyi sud (see HACC)

VKKS Vyshcha kvalifikatsiina komisiia suddiv (see HQCJ)

VNSA Violent Non-State Actors

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Introduction

Generalizing about post-communist Ukraine is a risky business.1 Which means either that the country, or more exactly its political system, is a total misfit from the perspective of comparative politics or that the tools being used to analyze it are less than adequate, perhaps totally inappropriate. We took the post-Soviet political leaders of Ukraine at their word when they committed themselves to transitioning to democracy and the market and to reorienting towards Europe, but this has not been accomplished fully even after the passage of more than thirty years. There have been three so-called revolutions (in 1991, 2004, and 2013-14), yet none resulted in a fundamental transformation of the way politics is conducted, the composition of the elite, or the relationship between elites and the public. It is a situation of “change without movement, movement without change,” as so well encapsulated by Marta Dyczok.2 Whereas the Baltic states, along with the formerly communist states of East Central Europe, have successfully transitioned to democracy and mostly joined the European Union (EU), and nearly all other ex-Soviet republics have reverted to authoritarianism, Ukraine has done neither. What is the explanation for this non-conformity? At the same time, the physical existence of Ukraine as a state has been continuously threatened—never more so than in 2022—by being at the center of a geopolitical tug-of-war between its neighbor, the Russian Federation, and the United States. Is Ukraine a viable political entity? What has prevented it becoming a stable democracy, and can it survive?

This book sets out to answer these key questions using a novel approach to get at the fundamental nature of politics in post-Euromaidan Ukraine, to explain its anomalous character, and to assess its future viability. My initial impulse for offering another explanation of Ukrainian politics after 2014 was stimulated by recognizing the obvious discrepancy between what was actually happening and what had been forecast as the standard pattern by the model of patronal politics as elaborated by Henry Hale.3 According to Hale, the institutionalization of genuine democracy in Ukraine and other post-communist states is prevented by a cyclical, self-perpetuating dynamic of patron-client relations at the top of the political system. This dynamic, however, did not appear to be operating under either President Petro Poroshenko or Volodymyr Zelenskyy, since neither had come to office with a string of clients and did not seem particularly engaged in cultivating one while in office. Had patronalism taken a holiday? To answer that question requires a detailed, day-by-day scrutiny of the behavior of these two presidents’ tenure, which is undertaken here. Incorporated into this analysis also is a conception of the political as a more narrowly focused tool than any of those prevailing in the discipline. This is borrowed from Stefano Bartolini.4 My approach, which I call the politics of the law, therefore centers on executive decision-making, legal structures and actors, and the challenges of reform. It is intended not as a replacement of other currently employed approaches, but as a supplement, a reminder that a basic feature—the struggle at the apex of power over control of the law—must be taken into account in any true and full explanation of Ukrainian politics post-2014. My methodology consists of indirect observation of political actions through the day-to-day examination of Ukrainian and foreign press reporting from 2014 to 2022. In addition to the obstacles it faces on the domestic front, Ukraine’s viability has been and continues to be tested in the international realm, particularly by first the threat and then the reality of war with Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has made it a necessary part of the story of post-Euromaidan Ukraine’s survival insofar as it comprises a genuinely existential threat.

Previous Studies of Ukraine

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Ukraine became an unaccustomed object of study as a case of transition from communism to democracy. It was wonderful to see such a large contingent of scholars in the social sciences paying so much attention to Ukraine after a lifetime of neglect. Comparativists began to apply various theories and models of transition to democracy to the newly-independent country on the assumption that it truly was becoming transformed, as its leaders had declared, from a communist party-state into a Western liberal democracy. Western governments accordingly operated from the same assumption, providing material help with institution-building, public administration, financial accounting, and defence and security. But eventually it became clear that neither the Latin American, nor the Mediterranean, nor the Asian, nor the Eastern European models were being followed by the leaders of Ukraine. Transitology gave way to other paradigms: “stuck” or “hybrid” transition, electoral authoritarianism,5 competitive authoritarianism,6 patronal politics, and the primacy of informal politics. We now know a great deal about Ukraine’s post-communist politics—the literature is massive—but we still have not discovered its trajectory, if it has one.

Perhaps the fundamental problem is the implicit image of politics we carry with us locked into the concepts we employ. Political science is by and large an Anglo-American enterprise. So our terms are actually context- and time-specific, despite our belief that they are objective and timeless; applying them in a context different than the British, Western European or American one we either misinterpret what is really going on or else in effect simply make normative judgments about the things we see. It could also be that our concepts are idealized or outdated or both and do not work even in explaining the workings of contemporary Western liberal democracies; they were fashioned in the second half of the 20th century, and they take little or no account of such phenomena as the business-politics-organized crime nexus, the persistence of corruption, or the lawlessness of law enforcement. For example, Ukraine has a multitude of political parties, so-called, yet they are described as weak and neither they nor the party system correspond to the European model.7 Presumably such an alignment is necessary for the full transition to liberal democracy European-style. At the same time, however, European parties and party systems have evolved considerably beyond the classic depiction of them by Sartori in 1976, making this subject especially elusive.8 Which model, then, should Ukrainian political parties and their leaders be attempting to emulate—the twentieth-century one or the twenty-first? Perhaps the political science discipline needs a different vocabulary altogether.

Many scholars have based their analyses simply and uncritically on terms popularly bandied about quite freely by the general public and the mass media when referring to contemporary Ukrainian politics. These are terms like “oligarch,” “mafia,” “old guard,” “technocrat,” “corruption,” “parliament,” “cabinet,” “nationalists,” “Ukrainian,” “Russian,” and “revolution.” The trouble with these terms is that they are often not, strictly speaking, concepts, just as dictionary definitions should never properly be considered or used as definitions for concepts. Dictionary definitions report usage, and usage is elastic. The terms commonly used to talk and write about and discuss politics in Ukraine today are treated as being implicitly understood and thus remain undefined. They should not be used indiscriminately for scientific work, as they usually are. Concepts need to be data containers capable of capturing entities accurately and to be the building-blocks of theory or tentative explanations, assuming that theoretical explanation is the object of study. The tendency within political science attempting to present the discipline as more “scientific” would not consider using everyday terms in the analysis of politics. We all do it, but this is not social science at its best.

Some scholars of post-communist Ukraine have taken the institutional approach. They examine entities such as political parties, elections, legislatures, law courts, constitutions, bureaucracies, the force ministries, and the Armed Forces (civil-military relations). This method assumes that such structures and their dynamics are basically similar to their Western counterparts, which is at best questionable. The lack of true symmetry becomes apparent when we discover that politics in Ukraine do not behave normally. We have long accepted, for example, Maurice Duverger’s theory of the interaction between electoral and party systems: proportional representation (PR) produces a multitude of political parties by encouraging them to participate; the single-member-simple-plurality (SMSP) system diminishes the number of parties dissuading all but the two strongest from participating (or two-and-a-half, in the case of Canada). But whenever Ukraine has utilized a mixed electoral system, allowing us to see simultaneously the effects of each type on the proliferation or restriction of parties, the results have been totally the opposite: the PR ballot has produced fewer parties in the legislature, single-member-districts (SMDs) producing more of them. Even after a quarter-century, Ukraine still did not have a recognizable party system.9 Formation of coalitions and caucuses in the national assembly, the Verkhovna Rada, has likewise not followed the usual pattern in other democracies. In Ukrainian presidential elections, where the system of runoff between the top two contenders in the first round ought automatically to discourage contestants, dozens of candidates enter the fray every time despite the odds and common sense. To top it off, in 2019, they elected a TV comedian president. Countless anti-corruption drives have been launched since 1992, but without appreciable results. During the Petro Poroshenko presidency, 2014-19, new institutions to curb political corruption which are effective in other jurisdictions were established with foreign help and began operating in difficult circumstances; by 2020 his successor was allowing their dismantlement by entrenched interests.10 Then there were those three “revolutions” that failed to produce revolutionary results. If one is relying on the standard toolkit of comparative politics, it seems that practically every entity taken up as an object of study must be designated in quotation marks or the prefix “would-be” to properly capture Ukraine’s political virtuality.11

Other scholars, Taras Kuzio among them, have endeavored to combine the theoretical approaches of comparative politics with deep local knowledge of current affairs to produce more credible explanations for aspects of Ukrainian politics.12 Sometimes the theoretical is more like window-dressing so as to give the research greater credibility within the political science community. Sometimes it still comes across as good history or descriptive political science. Occasionally, recourse has even been had to concepts seemingly picked out of thin air, as with Lucan Way’s pioneering “rapacious individualism” (which recalls C. B. Macpherson’s “possessive individualism” of a now bygone era).13

A major contribution, however, to the melding of comparative politics and Ukrainian studies has been achieved by the contributors to a collective volume edited by Henry Hale and Robert Orttung.14 Focusing on the obstacles to and prospects for political reform, its authors closely examine what Ukraine has done in several key policy areas, rigorously comparing this with the experience of other countries in the same spheres. Drawing up the volume’s conclusions, the editors emphasize that a way forward requires: not assuming that institutions in Ukraine work as they do elsewhere; distinguishing between deeply embedded and contingent obstacles; concentrating reform efforts on fundamentals; and taking into account the interests of the actors.15 The “most fundamental reform challenges,” emerging from the analyses, therefore, are: the “communist legacy,” Ukraine’s identity divide, (neo)patrimonialism leading to corruption, and—until 2014—the absence of a foreign threat.16 None is considered by them as insurmountable. Also, “some of Ukraine’s problems arise from highly contingent choices that could have been made differently along the way,”17 which prompts the idea of critical turning points that could be used to explain Ukraine’s developmental path. Thus, the Hale and Orttung volume helps identify critical factors determining Ukrainian politics: choices; actual operation of institutions; actors’ interests; and fundamental (legacy, identity, corruption) as opposed to transient features of the political system. Their volume’s findings are therefore incorporated into the present study as a means of specifying the critical areas of public policy decision-making by Ukrainian presidents in the post-Euromaidan era that demand attention.

Within the past decade, of course, there also has been a recognition of the importance of the informal side of Ukrainian politics as opposed to the formal. One might even say the predominance of the informal over the formal. This is no doubt an exaggeration, but widening of one’s field of vision is a needed corrective to the conventional approach of treating Ukraine’s political institutions as though they exemplified the same basic features and embodied the same activities as their Western counterparts. Exemplary of such work is Henry Hale’s on “patronal politics,” and Jessica Allina-Pisano’s on “Potemkin politics.”18 Hale in particular has made a very important advance in the study of post-Soviet politics.19 Addressing the puzzle of why most of the USSR’s successor states have not made the “transition to democracy,” he proposes they be examined under the heading of “patronal politics.”20 By this he means their politics should be understood as based on patron-clientelism with the president as chief patron. Usually all elites cluster under the president in a single pyramid of hierarchically arranged networks. Occasionally, when the president is weakened, other networks form under potential challengers. One of these latter following an election then becomes president-patron and proceeds to restore the single pyramid. This dynamic is facilitated by having a single-executive constitution, and conversely obstructed by a dual-executive constitution (president and prime minister). Challengers will be driven by their expectations about the incumbent’s chances of duration in office, which will determine their loyalty and the likelihood of their launching rival pyramids of patron-client ties.21 Such systems are thus not static, nor are they principally engaged in “transitioning to democracy.” They are rather involved in constant, but fluctuating, struggle for power that specifically involves patronage, patron-client networks, expectations, resources, elections, and a constitutional framework. There is a cyclical pattern to these interactions—from single-pyramid and more authoritarian to competing-pyramid and more open competition and back again—linked to a country’s electoral cycle. Hale has traced these processes in all twelve of the ex-Soviet states (excluding the Baltics) as well as four statelets (Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Transnistria), sixteen in all.

There is little to disagree with in Hale’s massive and masterly study, as the processes he traces are empirically accurate. One might quibble, however, with some of the concepts and their operationalization. He justifies introducing a new term “patronalism” in place of such familiar ones as clientelism, (neo)patrimonialism, or informal politics, as being more comprehensive.22 His depiction of patron-clientelism is a one-way, top-down relationship, overlooking the important element of reciprocity emphasized in the classic works on the subject.23 The “logic of collective action” is invoked by him to explain patron-client relations as well as the emergence of expectations,24 but as mentioned in a later chapter I have reservations about such logic. “Expectations” have to be attributed to the actors concerned in this narrative, but there is no way to confirm their true existence. Hale’s study throughout deals with individuals—explicitly so in its theoretical expositions. Individuals are never treated as part of society, indeed, “society” is merely a label for the human population of a country. Hale specifically rejects using categories such as “clans” and “ethnic groups” in his analysis on the grounds that they are not unified blocs, and that interests are liable to prevail over the bonds within such entities. He seems almost to deny that bonds exist, or that they exist within society. Terms such as “machine politics” and “lame duck,” which originated in the US political system, are applied liberally in this study, as though America were the template for politics in the post-Soviet world as well. Indeed, America as a model comes to mind when the author at one point sums up on presidential ousters with the unsurprising statement that “once a single-pyramid system was initially built in a post-Soviet presidentialist polity, patronal presidents have fallen primarily as they simultaneously encountered a lame-duck syndrome and low popular support.”25

Of all sixteen entities examined, Hale finds Ukraine exceptional in not following the general pattern.26 In the first place, it experienced a brief episode of genuine (or as close as possible to) democracy (2005-10) when lame-duck President Leonid Kuchma was succeeded by Viktor Yushchenko.27 Secondly, every president since has lost office after just a single term, regardless of constitutional order, instead of as a lame duck at the end of the second term. Thus the regular cycle of re-establishing a single pyramid has been unfulfilled, contrary to Hale’s theoretical expectations. Hale seems to have difficulty accommodating the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity, which he labels “irregular,” because it does not fit the elite-driven patronal politics scheme.28 From the latter perspective, Yanukovych fell because he was too hasty in building a single-pyramid system; he was brought down by unsympathetic expectations (not by the revolution). Hale’s analysis ends in 2014, at which point he concludes:

Overall, as the logic of regime cycles would predict, Ukraine . . . was clearly experiencing political closure until the outbreak of the Euromaidan protests. . .. The logic . . . would lead us to expect this eventually to promote competing-pyramid politics in Ukraine, although it is far too early to tell as of 2014.29

Subsequent events invite further research into the Ukrainian anomaly, where there have now been three presidents in a row who have failed to build a single-pyramid system. Neither Yushchenko, nor Yanukovych, nor Petro Poroshenko was a lame duck. Poroshenko was defeated by the novice Volodymyr Zelensky who brought no network of clients or other tangible political resources with him into office. Whether one agrees wholly with Henry Hale’s analysis of post-Soviet politics or not, the case of Ukraine certainly warrants investigation—either Ukraine is a permanent misfit, or the theory of patronal politics is lacking in some important aspect. The puzzle demands exploration: what kind of political system does Ukraine have? Does patronalism hold back democracy in post-Euromaidan Ukraine? Hale’s elaborate theory provides a springboard for the present study, for confirming or disconfirming the theory, and for proposing an alternative in the latter case.

Conceptual Clarification of the Political

To avoid getting bogged down—which inevitably results from assuming that politics is everything and anything—as well as conceptual stretching,30 it is best to settle on a quite specific definition of the concept of politics to begin with. A novel such definition has been proposed and elaborated by Stefano Bartolini.31 It allows us to narrow down the political more accurately than is customarily possible, to identify the relevant actors, and to plot the dynamics of the political process more exactly. According to Bartolini, the political should be conceived of as a category of intentional action—distinct from interest, morality, and honor—which aims to secure compliance by others. In addition, political action needs to be seen not only as intentional, but also independent of goals, means, or consequences.32 Postulating that there are two fundamental conditions for political action—confinement and monopolization—each being either open or closed, he derives four types of fields of interaction: anarchic, authority, natural, and governmental. The governmental field is one where there is no opting out and a single center of command exists.33 In this conceptualization, “politics” is “understood as the production and distribution of ‘behavioural compliance,’ as opposed to the view of politics as a distribution of values, an aggregation of preferences or a solution to social dilemmas.”34

Following this reasoning, the decisions of government are obligations that act like guarantees of entitlements, of “political warranties” recognized by all.35 There is also a differentiation between activity directed at gaining a position of public authority and competing for allocation of goods and values. There is as well a stratification into: the political class, politically relevant actors, and ordinary subjects or citizens.36 The interplay amongst actors, commonly seen as a rather distasteful “struggle for power,” acquires more meaning and clarity under Bartolini’s scheme based as it is on the concept of politics as action, intention, and compliance, as well as the notion of fields of political action. It becomes understandable in terms of intent, conditions and command—rather than as a free-for-all contest. There are observable patterns to this contestation which can help to define or to characterize the political system as such, provided we focus on the elements identified for us by Bartolini’s approach. As he puts it, “the political process is characterized by actors continually fighting to confine and de-confine other actors with the aim of achieving command of limiting the process of competing instigations.”37 Therefore, “the political scientist needs to analyze the entire political process with special attention to [1] the constant dynamics of command versus competing instigations, [2] the corresponding confinement/deconfinement of actors and [3] transformations of one type of field into another. This,” he emphasizes, “is the political meaning and what is crucially at stake in the midst of the infinite number of goods, decisions and policies constantly produced and redefined by the political process.”38

By adopting this point of view it becomes immediately obvious that the conditions for political action in post-Euromaidan Ukraine have not yet been sufficiently consolidated within the governmental field: actors are not confined, nor has command been effectively monopolized. Ukraine’s is an unsettled political system. Most obviously, Kyiv since 2014 has been unable to secure compliance in Crimea and the self-declared “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk (LNR/DNR). The locus of decision-making is unclear, being contested by the president, legislature (Verkhovna Rada, or Supreme Council), and Constitutional Court, among others. Anticorruption policies implemented under Poroshenko were being challenged and dismantled by Zelenskyy. Police reform was initiated, but then aborted, with the same interior minister presiding throughout since 2014. The search for compliance, involving law, rule-making, and rule-application appears to be the key problem area. This is not to say that the dynamics of patronalism and electoral or competitive authoritarianism are of no account. But a focus on politics as search for compliance might help to complete the picture and to help us understand Ukraine’s exceptional status.

Bartolini cautions that “the ‘governmental field’ is not the ‘government’ but a constellation of specific actors who are both confined and under a monopolistic provider of compliance.”39 This warning is especially applicable to any examination of Ukrainian politics, where it seems the actors are not confined and there is no monopolization of compliance. Instead, law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-courts operate at cross-purposes. Each actor uses his institution to advance his own or his patron’s interests. Each institution is like a personal fief. The search for compliance is not always universal, but targeted. Why and how is this happening? Presidents Kuchma and Yanukovych were notorious for using the law and law-related institutions for political purposes as a personal weapon. What about Kravchuk, Yushchenko, Poroshenko, and Zelensky? Resources are essential, regardless of their type. To quote Bartolini once more, “compliance eventually results from a credible threat to enforce. There is a general tendency, therefore, for the ruler to accumulate resources that guarantee the enforcement of his compliance requests.”40 Did the one-term presidents in Ukraine fail to accumulate adequate resources which would have ensured their re-election? Where exactly does patron-clientelism fit within the store of resources, and is it decisive?

What This Book is About

Drawing upon and combining the themes outlined above—the notions of challenges and critical factors (Hale and Orttung), patronal politics (Hale), and politics as the search for compliance (Bartolini)—this book sets out to analyze the post-Euromaidan trajectory of Ukraine. It is addressed primarily to an academic audience, but general readers should find it informative as well. It focusses on leadership, choices, interests, and interactions among the principal and proximate actors as well as the general public. In particular, it examines how Poroshenko came to power and what happened thereafter. Were patronal politics at work before, during, and after his election? What were his chief political initiatives, and how did they turn out? We look at his record of: appointments; relations with the Verkhovna Rada, the oligarchs, and the electorate; and steps taken in the fields of law, the constitution, corruption, confinement of other actors, and monopolization of power. Why did he fail to be re-elected in 2019—was he abandoned by his clientele, or was he stymied by the interior minister’s use of the police? We then investigate Zelenskyy’s win and his subsequent performance in office in a parallel manner. Did he benefit from patronal politics? Did he build up a patronal network while in office? What were his interests and priorities on assuming the presidency? How and why did these change? What were his initiatives and how did they work out? What were his relationships with other actors? Why did he allow the return of the Yanukovych gang, and the dismantlement of Poroshenko’s anti-corruption measures? How did the Verkhovna Rada operate and co-operate under Zelenskyy’s single-party majority, as compared to previous administrations? Were patronal politics still in operation during his term? Was the governmental field, as Bartolini calls it, broadened or narrowed under Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan presidents? I demonstrate that Ukraine’s political system has been rendered less consolidated by a combination of choices made by the country’s political class and its citizens, all working at cross purposes, and that this rather than patronalism has basically characterized post-Euromaidan Ukrainian politics.

The book also deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and its effects on the fundamental features of the country’s politics: the Soviet-Communist legacy, national identity, and patronalism and corruption. While some consolidation around the national idea has been observed in the population, loss of control of territory cannot be counted as successful politics. How did Poroshenko cope with this challenge, and how has Zelensky coped? Have there been differences in approach, and in results? Is Ukraine now to become simply a project of Russian instead of American foreign policy? In any case, the Ukrainian political system that existed under Poroshenko and Zelenskyy, in both its domestic political configuration and dynamics, as well as its relationship with Russia, will have to be transformed.

The Plan of the Book

Chapter 1 makes a brief digression to address the question of whether Ukraine should be considered a “failed state.” In a climate where common discourse passes as analysis and false news as revealed truth, however, it is essential to dispose of this noxious canard. A close examination of the “failed state” literature reveals its own failure to deliver a satisfactory and genuinely convincing explanation for the condition of Ukrainian politics. Instead, the term is either a pejorative label, a practical recipe for either interference or non-interference by foreign policy-makers, sometimes a propaganda cudgel, but not a theoretically-relevant concept useful for analysis. For Russian trolls, it may be a hoped-for self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, Ukrainian politics may lack stability, but that is not state failure, any more than Italy’s political instability is indicative of a failed state.

In chapter 2, I review some of the foremost literature characterizing post-communist Ukraine’s political system, pointing out its strengths and limitations. This literature seems to suggest that every president puts his own stamp on the political system, so that successive interpretations require constant revision. I advocate a redefinition of politics, following Bartolini’s lead, and its application to discern the dynamics of post-Euromaidan Ukrainian politics where earlier approaches appear to fall short. This requires taking a natural history approach, which I do here: observing, examining, classifying, and hypothesizing—basically looking for instances of action directed at control and identifying who has it. The general reader may wish to skip this chapter.

Chapters 3 and 4 are the heart of the book, examining the Poroshenko and Zelenskyy presidencies in terms of the aforementioned questions, comparing them with their predecessors and delineating the patterns of politics in their respective terms of office. Putin’s war on Ukraine is the subject of chapter 5, and what it means for the viability of the Ukrainian polity. The conclusion in chapter 6 draws together the various predominant threads and summarizes the dynamic patterns within Ukrainian politics post-2014. What to expect and what not to expect next, in light of the war with Russia, is outlined from this author’s perspective.

My sources are drawn from a daily culling over the period 2014 to 2022 of the Ukrainian and foreign press, supplemented with the relevant secondary literature. Despite the critical observations made above, I am forced to make use of a great many everyday terms—such as “oligarch,” “parliamentarian,” and “political party”—in place of more accurate concepts. This is a descriptive study, looking for patterns in the empirical evidence of day-to-day politics, with only the most basic conceptual and theoretical guidance. It is interpretive, more like natural science in its primary stage of observation, classification, and clarification than like physics or economics. By its rudimentary nature it may contribute to more accurate, authentic (as opposed to abstract and superficial) knowledge of Ukrainian politics in its current manifestation and long-term path. I hope my story has some validity nonetheless.

1 I attempted this previously in Post-Communist Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2002).

2 Marta Dyczok, Ukraine: Change Without Movement, Movement Without Change (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).

3 Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

4 Stefano Bartolini, The Political (London and New York: ECPR Press and Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).

5 Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006).

6 Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7 Serhij Vasylchenko, “The Negative Consequences of Proportional Representation in Ukraine,” Demokratizatsiya 21, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 430-40; Taras Kuzio, “Impediments to the Emergence of Political Parties in Ukraine,” Politics 34, no. 4 (December 2014: 309-23.

8 Luciano Bardi, Stefano Bartolini, and Alexander Treschel, “Party Adaptation and Change and the Crisis of Democracy,” Party Politics 20, no. 2 (2014): 151-59; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

9 Kostyantyn Fedorenko, Olena Rybiy, and Andreas Umland, "The Ukrainian Party System Before and After the 2013-2014 Euromaidan," Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (June 2016): 609-30.

10 Daryna Krasnolutska and Volodymyr Verbyany, “Ukraine’s Leader is Being Broken by the System He Vowed to Crush,” Bloomberg, 16 December 2020, on the Internet at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/Ukraine-s. . ., accessed 18 December 2020.

11 Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).

12 Kuzio, “Nationalism in Ukraine: Towards A New Framework,” Politics 20, no. 2 (May 2000): 77-86; idem, “Regime Type and Politics in Ukraine under Kuchma,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38 (2005): 167-90; idem, “Nationalism, Identity and Civil Society in Ukraine: Understanding the Orange Revolution,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43 (2010): 285-96; and idem, “State-led Violence in Ukraine’s 2004 Elections and Orange Revolution,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 43 (2010): 383-95.

13 Lucan A. Way, “Rapacious Individualism and Political Competition in Ukraine, 1992-2004,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38 (2005): 191-205. Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

14 Hale and Robert W. Orttung, eds., Beyond the Euromaidan: Comparative Perspectives on Advancing Reform in Ukraine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

15 Hale and Orttung, “Conclusion: The Comparative Politics of Reform and Lessons for Ukraine,” in Beyond the Euromaidan, 267-8.

16 Ibid., 268-9.

17 Ibid., 268.

18 Hale, Patronal Politics, and Jessica Allina-Pisano, “Legitimizing Facades: Civil Society in Post-Orange Ukraine,” in Orange Revolution and Aftermath: Mobilization, Apathy, and the State in Ukraine, ed. by Paul D’Anieri (Washington, D. C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 229-53.

19 And which has been taken up by others, including the contributors to Hale and Orttung, eds., Beyond the Euromaidan, for example.

20 “Patronal politics refers to politics in societies where individuals organize their . . . pursuits around the personalized exchange of concrete rewards and punishments through chains of actual acquaintance, and not primarily around abstract, impersonal principles such as ideological belief or categorizations like economic class that include many people one has not actually met in person.” Hale, Patronal Politics, 9-10. Emphasis in the original.

21 Ibid., 34-36.

22 Ibid., 22-26.

23 Hale specifically points out that “in characterizing the relationship between patrons and clients, if anything, it [patronalism] emphasizes the power of patrons more than that of the clients. . .. This is appropriate given that the inequalities these [patronalistic] societies feature tend to favor the patrons relative to clients.” Ibid., 27.

24 Ibid., 22 and 34-36.

25 Ibid., 241.

26 Ibid., 325-50, and 370-71.

27 Ibid., 13.

28 Ibid., 234-38.

29 Ibid., 350.

30 Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (1970): 1033-53.

31 Bartolini, The Political.

32 Ibid., chap. 2. Specifically, “political action is that type of action whose aim is to achieve the obedience, the acquiescence or the acceptance of other actors.” And again, he offers what he calls “a minimal definition. Politics is the behavioral domain in which, unlike all other domains, people act with the explicit intention to achieving compliance by others.” Ibid., pp. 38 and 45.

33 Ibid., chaps. 3 and 4.

34 Ibid., ix.

35 Ibid., 119-24.

36 Ibid., 132.

37 Ibid., 135.

38 Ibid., 136. Original emphasis.

39 Ibid., 107.

40 Ibid., 74.

Ukraine as a “Failed State”

The term “failed state” has often been applied to Ukraine, even though its practical value in explaining or advancing the understanding of that country’s political development is questionable. Russian sources in particular have tended to employ it liberally. “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” writes one observer, “Russia has presented Ukraine as a sick, pseudo-state on the road to international isolation.”1 An émigré Russian academic living in New England published an illuminating book on his home province of Crimea. In it he describes post-communist Ukraine as a “failed state” unable or unwilling to defend itself and not in control of its own territory.2 Adrian Karatnycky and Alexander Motyl have defended Ukraine’s record on fighting corruption, asserting that in concentrating exclusively on that problem its critics had fallen victim to “the fictitious Russian talking point that Ukraine is a failing, if not failed, state.”3 A Ukrainian journalist, meanwhile, has warned that the depiction of Ukraine as a “failed state,” the work of Kremlin “political technologists” (specialists in PR) aimed at bringing the country again under Moscow’s control, is in danger of being fulfilled willy-nilly through the carelessness of the incoming administration of President Zelenskyy, contrary to the country’s best interests.4 It might, we now know, become a self-fulfilling prophecy, though not through Ukraine’s own doing.

Is the idea of the “failed state” capable of answering any of our basic questions about the character and development of the political system of Ukraine? Could it help to explain anything? Or does it serve merely as a label, a term of opprobrium? If there is indeed in the arsenal of political science such an entity as the “failed state” properly elaborated, then it should be distinguishable from ones that have not failed or are not failing. It should have clearly identifiable causes and consequences, it should have characteristic dynamics of internal operation, and it should be at least theoretically amenable to curative treatment—a rescue operation of sorts. A review of the literature will assist in determining whether the notion of a “failed state” is a potential aid to understanding in general and to explaining Ukraine’s predicament in particular, or whether it merely is more a term of abuse, an exercise in pigeon-holing or ostracizing in place of explaining.

A Review of the Literature

A convenient a starting-point in the massive literature is William Zartman’s edited 1995 volume on collapsed states.5 In it Zartman summarized the ultimate signposts of state collapse as including: devolution of power to the peripheries; withering of central power; malfunctioning of government; incumbents playing defensive games; and loss of the central power’s control over its own agents.6 As one of his contributors pointed out, humanitarian disaster often accompanying state collapse calls for United Nations (UN) or other international intervention.7 Ideally, “an impending collapse, . . . unless arrested and resolved at the roots, threatens not only the peace and security of the country, but . . . ultimately international order itself.”8 Thus began the movement in succeeding decades for intervention and assistance, whether by collective security bodies or individual nation-states, to help those in obvious distress even in the absence of fundamentally thought-through diagnoses of the presumed ailment. Basically, Zartman and his colleagues were pointing to the disorderly states of their time largely in Africa and prescribing action to relieve the suffering humanity.

Writing in 2004, Robert Rotberg and his associates elaborated on the failure of states as a problem for world order.9 Failure is judged by performance: states provide goods for their people, the primary one being security. Failed states are marked by violent conflict, civil wars, loss of control of territory, and criminal violence.10 “A failed state is a polity that is no longer able or willing to perform the fundamental tasks of a nation-state in the modern world.”11 In this analysis there is some ambiguity as to whether symptoms are being read as causes, but regardless the prognosis is clear: “Reducing the global incidence of state failure and collapse is essential to the peace of the world, to saving . . . territories from havoc and misery, and to combating terrorism.”12 Equally clear for Rotberg is that “once stability and confidence have . . . returned, . . . [there should be] three primary and parallel goals: jump-starting battered economies, re-introducing the rule of law, and rejuvenating civil society.”13 It was a matter of urgency. “Reducing the global incidence of state failure and collapse is essential to the peace of the world, to saving . . . territories from havoc and misery, and to combating terrorism.”14

Returning to the topic a decade later, Rotberg was less sanguine about easy answers to the problem and less clear about the nature of the problem itself.15 He therefore invented a new category. “There is a class of nation-state,” he wrote, “that deserves to be classified as odious. . .. These outlaw nations, mostly near-failed, failed, or collapsed states, attack their own peoples, show little respect for the human rights of their subjects, deny civil liberties and essential freedoms, and at least pretend to be democratic.”16 Having reviewed the nature of the behavior of the leading exemplars domestically and internationally, as well as what had and had not been done by the outside world to help matters, including the United Nations’ Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, he concluded on a rather restrained note:

The world order has still not managed to create consistent tools to curb dictators, to impose civilized methods on primitive and recalcitrant regimes, or to persuade its most odious members to embrace humanity and tread the democratic paths of tolerance and civility. Nor has the UN itself, or most of its members, ever found a voice with which to condemn and shame those who are the worst of the worst. Redress will therefore come episodically and painfully, primarily from within.17

It is not clear from this whether odiousness or failure of the state is the primary problem, and whether one causes the other, but Rotberg was right about the prognosis.

One of Rotberg’s colleagues had earlier spelled out in detail the effects of a particularly troublesome contributor to state failure, namely what later research termed Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs):

State failure usually results from the prolonged interaction of a number of powerful corrosive factors, including economic stagnation, political and ethnic factionalism, pervasive corruption, decaying national infrastructure, and environmental degradation. Typically, these factors operate over a long period of time, eroding civil institutions and undermining the authority of the state. . .. [Early on,] it is still possible for an effective leader or leadership group to reverse the process and avert full state collapse. . .. But a state’s capacity to resist failure can decline rapidly when armed militias emerge. . .. Once established, these . . . tend to compete . . . for control of territory, population, and resources—thereby subjecting the country to recurring bouts of violence and disorder. Under these circumstances, the transition from failing to failed state is usually irreversible.”18

Here again we encounter a blurring of lines between cause, concurrence, coincidence, and effect, which the contributor cited attempts to finesse by stating that the emergence of armed militias does not cause state failure but merely contributes to it.19 Along similar lines, and in an effort to clarify matters, Huseyn Aliyev, using quantitative data from 1995 to 2014 and regression analysis, finds “a weak association between civil war violence and state failure, and a much stronger, markedly vertical relationship between the presence of VNSAs and state failure.”20 His “findings suggest that although failed states are highly susceptible to armed conflict, the state failure does not occur exclusively, or predominantly, due to armed violence.”21 Thus a state can fail in the absence of civil war; the civil violence engulfs it only after it has failed. It is a different story, according to his research, Aliyev says, when VNSAs are present. “The presence of VNSAs in fragile states—even in countries unaffected by violence—emerges as particularly conducive to state failure.”22 Yet how can there be civil war without VNSAs, or how can VNSAs be present in the absence of civil war? And does association show cause and effect? For these early promoters of the “failed state” idea it was more a call to action rather than a political theory to be applied, tested, and confirmed or disconfirmed.

The Failed State’s Failure

The deficiencies of the “failed state” concept impairing its usefulness were first identified by Charles Call.23 According to him, these include: combining of disparate states under a single rubric and prescribing the same remedy—stronger institutions and more order; avoiding issues of democracy and justice; and assessing states according to Weberian ideal-type standards or those of modern Western states. As alternative categories he suggested disaggregating the concept into collapsed, war-torn, weak, and authoritarian states. In the post-9/11 context within which the concept subsequently flourished, he observed that

The rediscovery of the state has occurred in the context of the “war on terror,” as failing states are deemed dangerous for Western security interests. Its prominence derives mainly not from concern for the inability of some states to provide for their own population’s security, welfare and rights, but to deter and control threats to the populations and institutions of rich countries.24

Essentially his “argument is that the ‘failed state’ concept is largely useless and should be abandoned except insofar as it refers to wholly collapsed states—where no authority is recognisable either internally to a country’s inhabitants or externally to the international community.”25 In 2004, Call notes, the only country to which this applied was Somalia. Obviously, “imprecise concepts make for poor scholarship and bad policy.”26

Following Call, but taking a rather different tack, Branwen Gruffydd Jones has argued “that the discourse of good governance/state failure is irredeemably rooted in an imperial imagination.”27 Furthermore, she regards “the failed state discourse as a modern form of racialized thought.”28 Having reviewed the entire history of European and non-European relations history, she argues that the contemporary failed-state discourses are merely a continuation or reproduction of the same dialogue, except that races, civilizations, and tribes have been replaced by states.29 And we now also speak of modernization and development. “Since the 1990s,” she observes, “and especially following 11 September 2001, the discourse of failed states has been employed both in the legitimation of specific instances of intervention in non-Western regions, and in support of Western intervention more broadly.”30 As to the various indexes of state weakness, which appear objective and unbiased, these are nothing more than an excuse for the contemporary form of imperialism:

Indexes of governance and state failure reproduce hierarchies of international judgement which continue to position the European at the top and the African at the bottom. And, with no reference to race but grounded in the authority of empirical fact, they continue to provide a discursive basis for legitimizing Western intervention in African and other states.31

Here, as with Susan Woodward’s critique below, is an example of a perspective which sees state failure very much as primarily an ideology.

The Failed State as Mission

In spite of such reservations, scholars and policy analysts have tended to “press on regardless.” Examining data from 1946 to 1999, for example, Iqbal and Starr, building on their previous work, reported that while state failure is itself not contagious, collapsed states can transmit their various symptoms—“unrest, instability, interstate, and civil war”—to their neighbors.32 A team from the RAND Corporation in California, taking as given the “failed state” concept as well as the notion of the danger such states present, and relying on the Failed States Index to identify failed states, developed what they called a comprehensive approach to rescuing them from oblivion. These states are marked by “violence, economic breakdown, and unfit government.” In order “to emerge from failure requires,” according to these experts, “strategies to . . . bolster the well-being and industry of the population.”33 These strategies include: dismantling the instruments of violence; building effective, legitimate state security structures; distributing assistance fairly and appropriately; building an inclusive and representative political system; securing the nation’s productive assets; and providing security for foreign direct investment.34 It was not clear who or what should shoulder this massive undertaking. Dan Halvorson, on the other hand, has proposed a reconceptualization of the “failed state” problem as a product of the international system, where the condition of the subject state is not so much defined or determined internally, but rather externally by great powers.35

In due course, “governance” as a solution to the problems of “areas of limited sovereignty” (instead of “failed” or “fragile” states) has been added to the list of remedies, partly in response to critiques of the “one size fits all” solution. For instance, Thomas Risse writes that, despite its problems,

governance still provides a useful conceptual tool to study political issues and the provision of collective goods in areas of limited statehood. . . . [Essentially,] it removes the state-centric bias in the study of politics and focuses our attention on the contribution of nonstate actors as well as on nonhierarchical modes of steering.36

He concludes that “the international community should help to improve the capacity of states to enforce and implement decisions and to see to it that the preconditions of governance are enabled in areas of limited statehood.”37 A Romanian scholar has examined the part played by governance in the development of post-Soviet states, contrasting the three Baltic states and Moldova. Whereas the Baltics have employed governance to advance democracy, she finds that Moldova—due to lack of political consensus and the presence of corruption—has failed on both counts. According to her reading of the evidence, “the overall transition successes or failures can be explained through the prism of governance and the comparison between the countries in question reveal the determining quality of governance quality and its impact on countries’ internal and external conditions.”38 In other words, “the higher is the level of consensual governance, the [more] stable and rapid is the transition.”39 One may question whether cause and effect have been mis-identified or transposed, but we are reassured that “good governance represents more than an antidote for failed states and it can be advanced as a key component of regional and international security.”40

Other scholars have focused on “fragile states.” One such study compares three unstable (Afghanistan, Haiti, Democratic Republic of the Congo) with two stable (Botswana, Costa Rica) entities and considers the efficacy of intervention. The authors conclude that the entire enterprise of “development” needs re-examination and innovation.41Natasha Ezrow and Erica Frantz, meanwhile, propose moving beyond state failure by focusing not on the state but rather its specific institutions. They “suggest narrowing the scope of inquiry from the strength of the state to the strength of state institutions.”42 To this end, they identify the key features in weak states for four important types of institutions—administrative, judicial, security, and political. How these “institutions affect political stability and economic performance,” they say, will give early warning of “failure.”43Derick Brinkerhoff offers a unique perspective on the usefulness of the “failed state” phenomenon as conventionally conceived by classifying it as a “wicked problem.”44 Wicked problems are incapable of being clearly defined, consist of a multitude of causal and interdependent links, “have no clear solution,” are unique, and attempted solutions “produce unforeseen consequences.”45 This, he asserts, applies to fragile states, and should be taken into account by those implementing development policies. Such policies should be fashioned in collaboration with the given fragile state, not imposed from outside.

Armed state building is a type of intervention meant to compel better government within collapsed or failed states.46 The historical record of success for such efforts is not particularly encouraging. Out of 40 such cases between 1989 and 2012 examined by Paul Miller, only six (15 per cent) were deemed successful; in the post-Cold War period, only two (El Salvador and Costa Rica) out of 28 (7 per cent), indicating a declining rate of achievement.47 Nonetheless, the author concludes that

state building can be a just cause for concerted international efforts. It should remain a legitimate policy option for the international community, and learning to get it right should be a top priority for scholars and policymakers alike.48

Neither theoretical weaknesses in conceptualization, therefore, nor paucity of practical results, hampers the ardor of the advocates of armed state building from prescribing it for what ails the world’s “failed states.”

Hanna Woolaver, a specialist in international law, has suggested a resolution to this paradox. As she puts it, “the failed state thesis alone does not justify the imposition of international administration on failed states, nor a general right to use force against failed states.”49 In the absence of a consensus on what constitutes a failed state, intervention militarily or otherwise must of necessity be motivated by factors other than the subject state’s supposed failure. This is where the “failed state” as a danger to regional or world security makes its appearance.50 As Ingo Trauschweizer puts it, “from an international perspective, state failure poses a major threat not only to vulnerable people on the ground, but also to the world economy; . . . and to international security.”51 Hence, “great powers and nongovernmental actors within the global community have to integrate local, regional, and even global responses into coherent strategy that would allow for success in the ‘wars’ on drugs, terror, poverty, and crime. . . . [Thus] the best responses to state failure and resulting or concurrent upheavals can neither stop at installing new regimes nor be confined within national borders.”52 Interestingly enough, The Oxford Handbook of International Security does not have “failed state” either in its table of contents or index.53

In a volume of essays on weak states in the Middle East there is a notable disagreement between the editor and some of his contributors regarding the usefulness of the central concept of “failed state” and its equivalents.54 This is symptomatic of the problems associated with the concept, if it is one. The editor, Mehran Kamrava, while acknowledging that “the study of weak states . . . is a contested terrain,” nevertheless proceeds to discuss the problem using a definition that can only be described as tautological: “State weakness is a function of diminished state capacity.”55 But several of his colleagues—studying Yemen, Libya, and the region as a whole—take issue with the “failed state” literature for its lack of attention to political power, its Western biases, its simple-mindedness, and its ability to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.56 The geographical vantage-point from which state failure is being observed makes for a different perspective. It looks very different from Washington or London. A volume such as this, particularly in the divergence between the editor and his contributors, illustrates well many of the basic inadequacies of the “failed state” literature.57

The reader may want to know which states in particular are to be found under the “failed state” umbrella. There is no shortage of candidates. In the literature reviewed above, Woolaver, for instance, helpfully notes that “Somalia is often used as the paradigmatic example of the failed state in international discourse. Other States that have been routinely labeled as ‘failed’ include Sudan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Liberia, Yemen, the DRC, the Solomon Islands, Sierra Leone, and, most recently, the Central African Republic (CAR).”58 Dan Halvorson’s study on interventions in the periphery examined three cases: the 1882 British intervention in Egypt; the US intervention in South Vietnam in 1965; and the French intervention in the Ivory Coast, 2002.59 Ezrow and Frantz cite no fewer than two dozen countries as evincing at least some of the characteristics of “weak states.”60 What in the twentieth century was known as the Failed States Index has, in the more sensitive twenty-first, become the Fragile States Index.61 In 2020, the FSI rated 179 countries. In terms of fragility the top five were: Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Democratic Republic of Congo. Ukraine in 2020 was no. 93; Russia, no. 77, thus in no position to be labelling Ukraine as a “failed state,” being itself by this measure the greater failure.62

Susan Woodward’s Critique

Weak intellectual foundations of the “failed state” literature (including all its variants), as well as disastrous outcomes of policies inspired by it, form the subject of a devastating critique by Susan Woodward.63 In her estimation, the term is tautological, makes no sense, and yet it is extremely popular with policy-makers, their advisors, as well as the general public. It has become “not just a label but an ideology.”64 In view of the nonsensical nature of the resulting situation—interventions to rectify state failure have themselves failed—she explains the paradox as motivated by the historical context and the responses of global intervenors. As an academic concept it cannot be used for analysis or policy.65 She chronicles how development assistance has been deformed by the overwhelming concern for security instead of aid, and the displacement of “democracy” promotion by “governance” (i.e., making the world safe for business and the World Bank, one could say).66 Looking into the implementation of state-building as the accepted solution, Woodward concludes that the prescriptions connected with it are offered as articles of faith, thus placing state-building on a par with the “failed state” idea itself—unexamined and simply taken for granted.67 Her further research then into the growing apparatus for state-building shows that what external actors are doing when engaged in state-building is actually building their own capacities. As she says, “their primary focus . . . is to build their own capacity to do state-building. . .. State-building has become ever more institutionalized . . . for and among these intervening actors.”68

Not that there are no problems of security and development in various parts of the world needing attention from those better off in those respects. But these, Woodward stresses, involve internal, not international security. They are real, and they are operational problems. The real problems faced by “failing states” are basically sovereign consent, political will, and capacity, to none of which are securitization and militarization appropriate solutions. Unfortunately, therefore, the would-be state-building effort does not work, but it does have consequences—and these are the opposite of state-building. The “failed state” becomes, thanks to the remedies imposed, a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this impact goes unnoticed and unassessed by the intervenors.69 According to Woodward, the “external actors . . . are not aiming at state-building.”70 Summarizing her book’s arguments, “the role of the ideology of failed states . . . has resulted in serious . . . threats to these countries.”71